The founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is often interpreted as a top-down transmission of Bolshevik ideology. This article challenges that view by asking: how did individuals with divergent ideological backgrounds – anarchists, socialists, and Bolsheviks – coalesce into a centralized political organization? Rather than emphasizing ideological convergence, it foregrounds the role of interpersonal networks and organizational capacity in early party-building. Focusing on the activist network around the Zhejiang Provincial First Normal School in Hangzhou (Hangzhou First Normal School, HFNS), the article reveals how provincial actors with prior organizing experience helped translate competing doctrines into coordinated revolutionary practice. HFNS-affiliated figures brought anarchist-socialist traditions to Shanghai, played key roles in the Weekly Review editorial board, and built ties with both Chinese and Russian Marxists. Drawing on archival materials from police records, newspapers, and personal writings, the article reconstructs HFNS’s cross-regional impact and strategic contributions to the early CCP organization. It argues that the CCP’s foundation was less a product of ideological clarity than of social trust and regional mobilization. By centering the HFNS network, the article contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to provincialize CCP origins and foreground the hybrid, contested nature of revolutionary subjectivity in modern China.

Edward MacDowell held a liminal position in the late nineteenth century, well-known and active in Europe but also championed as a leading figure of US musical identity. In the first concert of his 1887 American Festival, conductor Frank Van der Stucken programmed MacDowell’s Hamlet, positioning MacDowell and his composition as important components of American music. However, MacDowell’s symphonic poem holds layers of cultural meaning in its various associations with European artistic, dramatic and musical figures.

MacDowell composed Hamlet. Ophelia. Zwei Gedichte für grosses Orchester in Frankfurt in 1884, shortly after he and his wife returned from their honeymoon in London, a city imbued with cultural Wagnerism. The style and motivic material of MacDowell’s symphonic poem are reminiscent of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, suggesting an aesthetic and thematic connection. Furthermore, MacDowell dedicated his composition to the famous Shakespearean actors, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, indicating their impact on his work.

These rich cultural layers of MacDowell’s Hamlet implicate issues of national identity and aesthetic value, issues that clarify the competing positions of the composer: as a nuanced cosmopolitan composer exhibiting English, French and Germanic elements in his work; as a US composer valorized to promote national identity; and as a proponent of aesthetic value transcending national origin. This article explores each cultural layer of MacDowell’s Hamlet and Ophelia to position the symphonic poem as a microcosm of the rich cultural landscape of the United States at the close of the nineteenth century.

During the Fascist period, the extractive industry played an important role in Italy’s economic and political landscape, and sulphur was considered the autarkic mineral par excellence. This article reveals how the rhetoric surrounding the vigorous extraction of sulphur in Sicily was part of a larger project of reconstruction and reorganisation, which involved the division of land, reclamation efforts, military operations and colonisation. Drawing on examples of visual and written narratives from public reports, essays, illustrated magazines and exhibitions of the time, the article demonstrates that extraction was both the actual site of resource extraction and the Fascist extractive logic of consensus. The use of specific discourses and definitions enabled and justified the portrayal of humans and lands as extractable resources, creating images and imaginaries that normalised exploitation and transformation, and the regime’s extractive force.

Public art is fundamental in the shaping of a city’s identity: in the city of Bologna’s case, this identity is inextricably tied to the Resistance. The presence or absence of women in monumental commemorations, then, becomes a way to either include or exclude them from this shared identity. By centring its analysis on the monuments dedicated to the Resistance’s fallen erected since 1945, this article will utilise the case study of Irma Bandiera to analyse women’s presence within the commemorative topography of the city. Through the study of two monuments, the Monumento Ossario ai Caduti Partigiani and the Memoriale alle 128 partigiane cadute, this article will also highlight the role of the local community in the creation of a shared and representative identity.

In a world grappling with escalating agrochemical pollution, this article explores the potential for shifting from a security-centric approach to a human rights-based approach to safeguard health, the environment, and biodiversity. By engaging with European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence related to environmental protection and climate change, the article critically assesses how to address state (in)action regarding pollutants such as pesticides through human rights litigation. In its analysis, the article highlights climate change litigation as a catalyst for change to assert states’ threefold obligations to respect, protect, and realize human rights. It concludes that the legal approaches developed in climate litigation – with regard to both procedural and substantive aspects – provide a strong basis for addressing the human rights impacts of agrochemical harm.

Online platforms have adopted business models enabling the proliferation of hate speech. In some extreme cases, platforms are being investigated for employing algorithms that amplify criminal hate speech such as incitement to genocide. Legislators have developed binding legal frameworks clarifying the human rights due diligence and liability regimes of these platforms to identify and prevent hate speech. Some of the key legal instruments at the European Union level include the Digital Services Act, the proposed Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and the Artificial Intelligence Act. However, these legal frameworks fail to clarify the remedial responsibilities of online platforms to redress people harmed by criminal hate speech caused or contributed to by the platforms. This article addresses this legal vacuum by proposing a comprehensive remedial responsibilities framework for online platforms which caused or contributed to criminal hate speech based on the general corporate human rights responsibilities framework.

This article maps out the challenges of public global health communication in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by providing an overview of the shifting media of health communication from the post-Second World War era to the present. The article explores the communication of science in real-time or live media of film, television, video and digital social media during three emerging infectious-disease (EID) outbreaks to place COVID-19 health communication in historical perspective. Examination of the transition from centralized, top-down communications to distributed, many-to-many, mobile communication illuminates challenges to expertise, authority and control of health narratives and imagery. Through theories of intermediality, the article explores the central function of gaps in communication networks. The article considers three cases of crisis communications amid EIDs: the influenza outbreak of 1957, HIV/AIDS around 1990 and COVID-19 in the early 2020s, and the challenges posed by scientific uncertainty under these circumstances of live, intermedial health communication. The article concludes that ‘liveness’ in intermedial health communications may have an inherently destabilizing effect on scientific authority.

In 1967, the World Meteorological Organisation and the International Council of Scientific Unions launched the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP), which lasted until 1982. The primary goals of the programme were international cooperation in global atmospheric observation to improve weather forecasting and to study climatic changes. This article examines the development phase of GARP from approximately 1961 to 1967, focusing on the US meteorologists Jule Charney and Thomas Malone and the Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin, who contributed to its organization. It shows a variety of relationships between science and politics, beginning with President John F. Kennedy’s call for scientific cooperation to ease international political tensions, followed by the diverse efforts of Charney, Malone, Bolin and others to help secure political support, and finally the protracted negotiations within the International Council of Scientific Unions to shape and organize the Global Atmospheric Research Program.

This study considers why public abattoirs of the Republican era failed to function effectively and were unpopular with contemporaneous Chinese people. In the early twentieth century, Chinese officials began to rely on biomedical parameters to define safe food, a critical step in the modernization of social control strategies. Tianjin was among the first Chinese cities to launch government-run slaughterhouses that combined safety inspection with monopolized animal slaughtering. However, how such slaughterhouses operated has received little academic attention. The municipal authorities introduced a series of laws covering slaughterhouses’ construction and operations to ensure meat safety. However, Tianjin’s public slaughterhouses failed to uphold their new duties toward public health and even became menaces to urban sanitation. City officials lacked the ethics of modern public servants, and the slaughterhouses provided them new opportunities for rent-seeking practices. The collection of slaughter tax superseded meat safety inspection as the municipality’s primary concern, which undermined the effectiveness of food hygiene regulation. Therefore, city residents regarded the public slaughterhouses as predatory tax collectors. Taking Tianjin as an example, this article demonstrates the gap between the modernization of governmental agencies modeled on Western countries and the persistence of traditional, exploitive governing practices in Republican China.

This article concerns opportunities for improving systems for processing public finds through digital technology and citizen science, taking England, Estonia, and Finland as case studies. These three countries have differing legislation, but all face a significant growth in hobby metal detecting and consequent increase in archaeological finds being reported, which places pressure on existing resources for recording them. While archaeologists in the different countries all value public finds as items that add to public collections, provide information about sites at risk, and can advance research, their priorities vary. This has an impact on approaches to processing finds, but offers the chance to embrace digital technology and involve the public. This article shows how digital technology and public involvement in archaeology have already facilitated change in all three countries and highlights further opportunities these might provide, given a growing desire to democratize archaeology and share public finds data as widely as possible.