This introduction presents the main topics and analytical concerns of the contributions to this Special Issue about ethnicity and migration in coalfield history in a global perspective. From the nineteenth century the development of industrial and transport technologies required the supply of coal-based energy in every part of the world. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century globalization, including colonialism, would not have been possible without coal. Coalmining operations were launched in all world regions, and to enable exploitation mine operators had to find, mobilize, and direct workers to the mining sites. This quest for labour triggered a series of migration processes (both from nearby and far away) and resulted in a broad array of labour relations (both free and unfree). This introduction points to the variety of constellations analysed in the different contributions to this Special Issue. These cover cases from Africa (Nigeria, Zimbabwe), Asia (China, Japan), the Americas (USA, Brazil), Turkey, the Soviet Union, and western Europe (France, Germany), and a broad range of topics, from segregation, forced labour, and subcontracting to labour struggles, discrimination, ethnic paternalism, and sport.

Sport, and football in particular, is described in socio-political discourse as an effective way to integrate immigrants. This thesis will be tested by means of a case study examining Polish migration to the mining areas of the Ruhr from the 1870s. It will be shown that, up until World War I, the sport participated in by Polish miners served, in contrast, as a means of nationalization, ethnicizing, and as an aid to furthering Polish ethnic identity. Only during the Weimar Republic were football clubs in the Ruhr actually used as a vehicle for integration and assimilation for males among the Polish minority. After World War II, memories of these footballers from among the Polish minority were either repressed or reduced to folklore. Based on this historical case study, sport appears in principle to be ambivalent between its ability to form “we” groups and the building of bridges between nationalities.

This article provides a general background to the case studies in this Special Issue by highlighting some general themes in the history of migration to coalfields worldwide. All over the world, mining companies have struggled with labour shortages and had to find ways to recruit sufficient numbers of mineworkers. The solutions adopted ranged from the involvement of part-time peasant miners, organized mediation by labour contractors, and systems of forced labour, to state regulation of national and international migration. The importance of these kinds of “intervening institution” in mobilizing labour for the coalmines is illustrated by examples from different parts of the world. Efforts to find new workers for the mines often resulted in the recruitment of ethnic groups of a lower social status, not only because they were rural and unskilled, but also because they were considered inferior from a cultural or ethnic viewpoint. In this respect there was a huge difference from the migration and settlement of skilled miners, like those from Britain and other countries. Ethnic differences were often closely related to differences in skill and social status. Although there are many instances of inter-ethnic solidarity and cooperation, depending on the time-frame and circumstances, these differences could have a profound effect on social relations in mining communities.

This article examines the writing of a little-known, but prolific interwar immigrant eastern European Parisian Yiddish writer, Aron Beckerman, to demonstrate how Yiddish journalism played a pivotal role in defining Paris as a simultaneously French and Jewish space to immigrant Jews living in the city. Engaging urban historical theory on the communal-building effect that public space can have, this article argues that within Beckerman's writings on Paris – its history and specific places within the city – we see a Paris emerge that details a universalist republican identity, which, when read through a Jewish lens, leads simultaneously to a particular immigrant, Yiddish-speaking, leftist Jewish understanding of what it meant to be ‘French’.

In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin described Paris as ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’, the hub of cultural transformations precipitated by the rise of industrial capitalism. For good reasons, Jewish historians have followed suit in identifying Paris as the focal point for studies of political, social, cultural, demographic and economic change in France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, native French Jewish religious and cultural administrative structures, implemented during Napoleon I's reign and further entrenched by reforms in the Third Republic, are centred in Paris. These conditions have rendered an abundance of source material documenting the rest of the country from the centre, a phenomenon that places even more weight on the capital as a locus for national processes that occur in its image.

This case-study of Jewish activism in Strasbourg and Nice, interwar urban locales situated along the frontiers with National Socialist Germany and fascist Italy, respectively, examines critical facets of Jewish advocacy during the refugee crisis of the 1930s. It focuses on how urban spaces engendered dense thickets of community activism unlike that which took place in Paris. Whereas friction and ineffectiveness characterized aid efforts in Paris, these cities offer alternative views on the nature of the refugee crisis in France and the ways that Jews overcame obstacles to help asylum-seekers. It advances much-needed discourse on the complexity of French Jewish experiences during the interwar years and highlights the city as both location and a conduit for diverse activist strategies. Although circumstances varied in Strasbourg and Nice, Jews in these two borderland cities followed similar patterns of engaging urban civil society to build flexible networks that addressed the plight of refugees from multiple angles.

This article looks at how and why Bonfire Night celebrations became more peaceful in the later nineteenth century in some smaller Kent towns and what this process reveals about local civic cultures and identities. The drive towards respectability is seen both in the changing business relationships between participants, spectators and local tradesmen and in the evolving role of satire within processions. The ‘social energy’ visible at these events was channelled such that earlier class and other vertical conflicts within these towns were superseded by horizontal rivalries without, as they competed against each other (an important local variant of civic boosterism) to build free public libraries, for example. Moreover, more peaceful ‘Fifths’ and better reading facilities were linked, since both formed part of the much-altered prevailing civic cultures in these towns – their comprehensive, continuous, identity-driven efforts to present themselves in the best possible light against their rivals.

“I don't think there was ever a field of law which developed as explosively and dramatically as environmental law,” David Sive, a pioneering environmental lawyer, declared in a 1982 interview. “It was the great romance.” Along with new state and federal regulatory agencies and more than a dozen major environmental statutes passed in the 1970s, fledgling public interest environmental law firms emerged as a major force in national politics. The most prominent organizations, founded between 1967 and 1971, included the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. Public Advocates and the Center for Law in the Public Interest, two California-based firms founded during these same years, also initiated key litigation. These small but powerful legal organizations—all predominantly funded by the Ford Foundation—quickly achieved landmark victories that helped to define the early successes of modern environmentalism. They delayed the Alaskan pipeline for more than 3 years, defeated a Disney resort proposed for the Sierra Nevada mountains, and helped push the pesticide DDT off the market in the United States. The organizations also foiled myriad plans for highways, airports, and power plants and pressed agencies to implement new environmental laws in the 1970s.

The lives of the commanders and officers associated with the British naval searches for the lost John Franklin northwest passage expedition in the 1850s are well-known through their own writings or those of later biographers. The post-Arctic careers of ordinary crew members, on the other hand, are barely known at all. Following digital searches of nineteenth and early-twentieth century British newspapers, we have compiled a list of some notices, obituaries, and reminiscences that shed light on the later years of the ‘Old Arctics’.

President Barrack Obama became, in September 2015, the first US president to travel north of the Arctic Circle. Having started his Alaskan itinerary in Anchorage, attending and speaking at a conference involving Secretary of State John Kerry and invited guests, the president travelled north to the small town of Kotzebue, a community of some 3000 people with the majority of inhabitants identifying as native American. Delivered to an audience in the local high school numbering around 1000, the 41st US president placed his visit within a longer presidential tradition of northern visitation: