Our essay aims to offer a biography of Elena Sengal (1911–1962), an Italian citizen of Ethiopian origin, whose life offers important elements to better understand both Fascist and postwar Italy. Elena was born into an Italo-Ethiopian family and became an Italian citizen after the naturalisation of her father, Sengal Workneh, a former Italian colonial subject and a lecturer in Amharic and Tigrinya at the Istituto Orientale in Naples. She grew up in Naples where she graduated and later held a teaching position, following in her father’s footsteps. When in 1939 her partner, Guido Cucci, fell in Ethiopia fighting the Ethiopian resistance, Elena found herself alone with a newborn child and struggled to make a living. Her life did not improve with the end of Fascism. Indeed, in postwar Italy it became so unbearable that she relocated to Ethiopia. However, racism and exclusion accompanied her life in the East African country too. This biography is based on archival materials as well as a body of personal letters of Elena Sengal, kindly made available by her granddaughter Maria Elena Cucci.

The article analyses the project to move the Argentinian capital from Buenos Aires to Viedma, a small city located in the south, in 1986. The project enlightens the period as a juncture of both technical and political transitions. In technical terms, the proposal had a hybrid nature, articulating developmentalist planning perspectives with innovative objectives for the time. In political terms, the proposal reflected the contradictions of the period, in which re-foundational illusions and severe economic and political limitations were articulated. Crossing the technical and political dimensions, the initiative is suggestive of the role given to technicians within the democratic transition.

In recent years, the digitisation of historical data containing cause-of-death information has significantly increased. However, these data show considerable variations in diagnostic practices and nosology over time and place. Examining vague historical causes of death, often denoting symptoms rather than specific diseases, is a particular challenge. Infantile convulsions are an example of a common yet problematic cause of death. To improve our understanding of infantile convulsions, we propose an innovative mixed-methods, comparative approach. This study combines qualitative analyses of historical medical thinking on infantile convulsions with quantitative analyses of individual-level death records from four European cities: Amsterdam, Hermoupolis, Maastricht, and Rostock, covering different periods between 1800 and 1955. Our findings reveal that infant deaths attributed to convulsions encompass a multitude of causes from different disease categories. Significant differences emerged in the patterns of convulsions across time, age groups, and locations, even within the same country. The decline in convulsions mortality seems to be more related to the introduction of uniform registration regulations and systems, and advancements in medical knowledge than to the decline in overall infant mortality. This study’s outcome serves as a cautionary note that challenges the prevailing attitude towards convulsions and emphasises the complexity of interpreting deaths from convulsions. These were highly dependent on historical context, especially local medical culture and the variable accuracy of cause-of-death registration. These findings have implications for studies on infant mortality even when the main interest of such studies is not convulsions mortality.

This study concerns prehistoric amber networks in north-eastern Iberia, emphasizing its distinct exchange dynamics compared to other regions of the Iberian Peninsula. Baltic amber dominated assemblages in this area from the Late Neolithic to the Bronze Age, contrasting with the prevalence of Sicilian amber in southern Iberia, or Cretaceous Iberian amber in the northern region. The findings underscore the region’s connection to southern France, with the Pyrenees serving as a cultural conduit, unlike the river Ebro, which acted as a boundary. Here the authors present the results of a Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR) analysis of twenty-one amber beads, primarily from collective burials. Eighteen were made of Baltic succinite. Baltic amber may have begun to arrive as early as 3634–3363 cal bc, and continued to be used until the Late Bronze Age. Exceptions included a unique spacer-bead made of gum and two bolus pigments misidentified as amber. The results highlight Iberia’s regional diversity in raw material sourcing and exchange, reflecting distinct sociocultural dynamics and challenging linear narratives of Iberian prehistory.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, British civil engineers strove to enhance their status and assert the identity of their developing profession. Alongside associational and visual cultures, one means of achieving a sense of community was through the formation of a shared literary culture. As a profession notorious for what Torrens described as ‘papyrophobia’, it is perhaps surprising that many engineers, in this period, read widely and wrote extensively. John Smeaton (1724–92), for example, valued good authorship and experimented widely with literary form. James Brindley (1716–72), his contemporary, wrote sparingly, but nevertheless generated a literary strategy in support of his projects. Other engineers, such as John Phillips (fl. 1785–1813), made use of their engineering background and of engineering literature to create alternative careers. By exploring how mid- to late eighteenth-century engineers wrote, in order to persuade and to educate others as well as to publicize, record and defend their professional decisions, this paper will show how their reputations were dependent on literary constructions as much as on physical ones.

The work presents an approach to the meaning(s) of dignity in the constitutional field that focuses, first and foremost, on answering the question: what is dignity? Four ways of characterising the notion are described, relying, where relevant, on the input obtained beyond the legal field – especially in that of philosophy. Although each of them accounts for a different kind of human property, an important commonality among them is stressed, which provides a pathway to understand the place of dignity as a constitutional end within a material approach to constitutions.

This article brings together different strands of literature to explore how time operates in international law as a technique of inclusion and exclusion. The question of reparations for enduring colonial and ecological injustices provides a useful entry point to examine, at a more granular level, the temporal foundations of the field and their distributive outcomes. Concepts of restitution, compensation, satisfaction as well as the doctrine of causation in the law of state responsibility, encode a specific understanding of time. This understanding, I argue, is embedded in a modernist worldview characterised by linear, abstract and universal notions of time. Calls for reparatory justice for colonial and climate wrongs attempt to defy and interrupt law’s forward motion by binding together interconnected (though unequal) pasts, presents and futures. In examining how international law reacts to those claims, and manages the conflict between law’s temporal abstractions and the concrete tempos of those seeking redress, this article reinvigorates the conversation on the politics of time in international law.

As Poland began to expand towards the east in the 1340s, a large-scale settlement initiative commenced on the former Polish-Ruthenian borderland in the Carpathians. This initiative, along with integration of German and Polish colonists, resulted over time in the emergence of a Polish cultural group known as Forest Germans (in Polish Głuchoniemcy). In 1871-1989 Polish-German conflict led to the relevant ethnonym and choronym being removed from both Polish academic and popular discourse. As a result, no systematic geographical research into the location and borders of their settlement region was carried out. All we have are its dispersed, imprecise geographical descriptions from the period between the second half of the 17th century and the first half of the 20th century. Despite the erasure of this term from discourses and obstruction of the process of self-determination by the local population as Forest Germans at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries primarily for political reasons, the existence of a community which can potentially be identified today as Forest Germans at the former Polish-Ruthenian border is a fact. This article outlines the problems, challenges as well as the very process of delimiting Forest Germany, along with a general outline of its boundaries.