For some sixty years, the dominant narrative of the financial crisis of 1931 and Great Depression has been one of failure of central banks to cooperate and act as lenders of last resort. This historical narrative has become dominant and led to a marginalization of understanding the Great Depression as a result of an inherent instability of capitalism. Rather than arguing that one or the other of these narratives is true, in this article I examine how contemporary actors made retrospective sense of the European financial crisis of 1931 and how they used that history to shape lessons for uncertain futures. My approach is based on the concepts of sensemaking and narrative emplotment under radical uncertainty. The article shows that most contemporaneous actors were positive in their assessment of central banks and that they focused mostly on short-term capital flows and the interconnectedness of the financial system as well as structural issues going back to the Versailles Treaty in making sense of the crisis.

Who has been considered human by the humanities? Along with its emancipatory potential, the humanities have historically also been related to imperial states whose military conquests have implicated the dehumanization of other peoples. Many times, the humanities have offered foundational narratives sustaining imperial projects. This essay takes a constructivist epistemology to explore the concept of humanism, and how it has emerged and changed in different contexts, beginning with the Roman idea of humanitas that focused on civilization to legitimize domination. A critique of colonial Christian humanism reveals how it was used to justify violence against those defined as non or less human, be they women, Africans, or indigenous people. The historical exclusion of many groups from educational institutions and knowledge production shows how the humanities have perpetuated hierarchies of power that, ironically, dehumanized. Movements such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which sought to reform the humanities, continued to favor a Eurocentric culture. This essay advocates for an intercultural approach to the humanities, one that frees itself from imperialism and promotes inclusive dialogues among peoples. This effort must go beyond overcoming Eurocentrism. It must also overcome anthropocentrism to incorporate a more respectful relationship with Nature, recognizing the cultural practices of indigenous peoples, who have maintained a more conscious and harmonious link with beyond human lifeways.

The close relationship between the “Shiji jie” (Exposition of Historical Records) chapter of the Yi Zhoushu (Remaining Zhou Documents) and the “Wangzheng” (Portents of Destruction) chapter of the Han Feizi has long been recognized, but prior to this, the precise nature of the connection has been unexplored. This article presents a comparative study structured around an annotated translation of these two texts. The “Shiji jie” describes how King Mu of Zhou fell asleep and dreamed of a set of instructions for how to avoid the mistakes made by other dynasties and states that led to their decline and fall. This “mirror for princes” text is thought to have inspired Han Fei to create his own version, which has traditionally been read as a series of abstract warnings, describing situations which could lead to disaster for the monarch. This article argues that what Han Fei was actually doing was presenting a series of riddles for the reader to guess, each of which alludes to a specific historical event. The “Wangzheng” thus reframes the “Shiji jie” in terms of both style and content, creating a new literary work.

Nearly half a century ago, Allison Blakely produced Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought. The landmark text explored Black people’s lives and experiences in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union and how non-Black people in those spaces received them and conceptualized blackness from the seventeenth century to the 1980s. Since its publication, many of the Black characters and historical episodes adorning Russia and the Negro have become the terrains or mainstays of scholarly debates about Black life and experiences and ideas of blackness in Slavic, eastern, southeastern, and central European, as well as Eurasian societies.1 Roughly two decades later, others took up the mantel.

In 1987, LeAnn Fields acquired Lynda Hart‘s Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. By the time Fields retired in 2024, she had built a list of more than 280 books in the field of theatre and performance studies at the University of Michigan Press. Hart’s Making a Spectacle is a foundational and still radical book of critical essays on gender, the body, and spectatorship, topics that continue to chart and reverberate among the many intellectual commitments of our field. Like nearly all the books that Fields acquired for University of Michigan Press, Making a Spectacle drew from and responded to another interdisciplinary field of study, women’s studies, as it simultaneously broke new ground in theatre and performance studies. In this special section, thirteen authors discuss the ways in which Fields encouraged the development of their work and our field. These author accounts are followed by an interview with Fields by Jill Dolan, in which Fields describes how her work as an acquisitions editor began and how it changed, how she navigated the press boards and changes in technology and staffing, and how, from her perspective, our field fosters a unique sense of community. The author accounts and interview offer an invaluable collection of personal histories that trace the development of our field over the past four decades to our vibrant present.

We examine the arguments made by Onitiu and colleagues concerning the need to adopt a “backward-walking logic” to manage the risks arising from the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) adapted for a medical purpose. We examine what lessons can be learned from existing multi-use technologies and applied to specialized LLMs, notwithstanding their novelty, and explore the appropriate respective roles of device providers and regulators within the ecosystem of technological oversight.

Counterexamples to Lagrangian Poincaré recurrence were recently found in dimensions greater than six by Broćić and Shelukhin. We construct counterexamples in dimension four using almost toric fibrations.

This article examines African American intellectual Louise Thompson Patterson’s 1932 journey to the Soviet Union as a lens through which to explore the complexities of transnational racial identity across ideological borders. It argues that Patterson’s experiences reveal both her political commitments and the contradictions of Soviet internationalism for Black women seeking alternatives to racial capitalism and gender oppression. Rather than viewing her engagement as naïve or disillusioned, the article situates it within a historically rooted, politically intentional search for liberation. The paper further contends that Soviet reactions to Patterson’s identity illuminate a rigid understanding of blackness, complicating claims of anti-racism and revealing internal hierarchies. By analyzing Patterson’s unpublished writings alongside broader historical currents, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of Black women’s transnational activism, the racial politics of the USSR, and the ongoing challenges of forging solidarity across different conceptions of race and justice.

Excommunication – being summarily cut off from the sacraments of the Catholic Church – was the logical, if extreme, expression of Ultramontanism, and of the paternal metaphor enshrined at its heart. It was the ultimate weapon in the Church’s battle with critics who sought to undercut or challenge its chosen role as privileged mediator between the state apparatus and the people, whether this came in the form of open rebellion against said state, or in the demand for individual intellectual freedom, or both. Studying the infamous cases of nineteenth-century excommunicates, Joseph Guibord and Louis Riel (together with their predecessors, the ill–fated Patriotes) yields important insights into the nature of excommunication, both when it “worked” (from the perspective of those who imposed it) and, just as crucially, when it did not.

This contribution explores the non-aligned era labor migration of Yugoslav men to postcolonial Zambia. Based on oral history and archival research conducted in Lusaka and Belgrade, it seeks to provide a gendered account of Yugoslavs negotiating their role as white Europeans in a postcolonial milieu and the ways in which Zambian colleagues understood Yugoslavs to have positioned themselves. Drawing upon contemporary social anthropological research from post-Yugoslav space, I argue that two modes of masculinities were in simultaneous operation and can help to make sense of the tensions inherent in the role of Yugoslav male workers in Zambia. An adventuring young Yugoslav man (frajer) might have driven fast, drunk heavily, and boasted about sexual conquests, but according to the motif of the “father,” the same person would also understand himself as a provider, whose responsible, serious, and protective characteristics would be used in assisting Zambians to develop as industrial workers.

The years immediately following the issue of Magna Carta and the death of John were of fundamental importance in determining the trajectory of the nascent common law legal system. Although the existence of the Bench had functionally been permanently established under chapter seventeen of Magna Carta, the central royal court faced an uncertain future under conciliar rule and in the aftermath of extensive civil conflict. The extensive extant records of the common law fines made to initiate actions in the Bench as recorded the Fine Rolls offer a window into the roles played by the court in relation to litigants, within the wider structure of royal governance, and in relation to a rapidly evolving legal system. An analysis of these sources can therefore both illuminate the early workings of the common law legal procedures and characterize the demand for royal justice that survived the First Barons’ War before continuing to grow across the thirteenth century. What emerges is a picture of a judicial system at the onset of a period of rapid development and widespread demand that would come to lay the foundation for the massive expansion of royal justice that was to follow throughout the reign of Henry III and beyond.

Biological and physical retrospective dosimetry for ionizing radiation exposure is a rapidly growing field, and several methods for performing biological and physical retrospective dosimetry have been developed to provide absorbed dose estimates for individuals after occupational, accidental, intentional, and incidental exposures to ionizing radiation. In large-scale radiological/nuclear incidents, multiple retrospective dosimetry laboratories from several countries may be involved in providing timely dose estimates for effective medical management of several thousand exposed individuals. In such scenarios, the harmonization of methods among participating laboratories is crucial for consistency in data analysis, dose estimation, and medical decision-making. In this regard, ISO documents ensure that these practices are standardized globally across the laboratories by providing quality assurance and quality control documentation that guide laboratories in maintaining high-quality performance for consistency. With the intent of bringing standardization and harmonization of biological and physical retrospective dosimetry methodologies across national and international laboratories, the ISO working group 18 (WG18) was established under ISO/TC85/SC2 (Technical Committee 85, Subcommittee 2-Radiation Protection) in 1999. This manuscript summarizes some of the past, current, and future activities of WG18 on biological and physical retrospective dosimetry.

In this work, we introduce the type and typeset invariants for equicontinuous group actions on Cantor sets; that is, for generalized odometers. These invariants are collections of equivalence classes of asymptotic Steinitz numbers associated to the action. We show the type is an invariant of the return equivalence class of the action. We introduce the notion of commensurable typesets and show that two actions which are return equivalent have commensurable typesets. Examples are given to illustrate the properties of the type and typeset invariants. The type and typeset invariants are used to define homeomorphism invariants for solenoidal manifolds.