This article uses local history approaches to reconstruct the early lives of the Soong sisters at Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia at the beginning of the twentieth century. The sisters' experiences as Chinese overseas students were situated in the histories of American South and of Asian Americans. By examining the sisters' transition to Wesleyan, their everyday lives on campus, and their occasional off-campus encounters with Maconites, the article argues that the “Southernness” of Wesleyan and Macon distinguished the sisters' experiences from other Chinese overseas students that are more familiar to Chinese historians. Because of the relative absence of Chinese residents in this small Southern town, the girls were rarely categorized with Chinese laborers and hardly felt the strong anti-Chinese sentiments that were experienced by students who went to Western states and large cities. Similarly, the slow adoption of new utilitarian courses at this elite Southern female college also meant the sisters were neither trained as qualified homemakers nor as career women like many other American-educated Chinese women in their generation. They were taught to become housewives that played important, unpaid social roles – a path that they would later follow.

This article narrates the history of Belgian Sinology both before and since the birth of Sinology (1814) and of Belgium (1830). The overview also embraces a broader group of scholars by including Sinologists who were from Belgium but did not necessarily work there. The first part of the article focuses on Sinological practices by the early missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second part covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries until the Open-Door Policy of the 1970s. This part combines a broad chronological perspective with the history of individual persons and institutions. It includes topics such as the development of oriental studies and studies of religion, the teaching of Chinese language for commercial reasons, and the establishment of Chinese and Oriental institutes within and outside the universities.

Since their adoption, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights have become crucial to intensify actions to protect human rights in the context of business conduct. Numerous countries, including Poland, have adopted National Action Plans (NAPs). Taking into account the years that have passed, it is worth assessing the implementation of their goals. Guidelines for the preparation of NAPs on business and human rights of the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights (UNWG) are helpful in assessing the Polish NAPs. This Development in the Field piece concludes that every NAP should begin with an assessment that would help identify areas where there is a need to implement necessary policies. Such an assessment could be used to compare the initial stage with future achievements. It should rely on clear milestones mentioned in NAPs, and on key performance indicators to assess effectiveness while also relying on inclusive decision-making processes. Unfortunately, this was not the case with the two Polish NAPs.

In the wake of the Aladura (prayer people) religious movement of the late 1920s, a site of childbirth that relied primarily on faith healing emerged in Nigeria under the Christ Apostolic Church (CAC). This practice of faith-based delivery remained informal until 1959 when it evolved into a permanent structure with a professional guild of midwives, codified practices, and trained personnel. This article explores the advent of CAC's faith-based maternity practice, notably its faith home midwifery school, and how the faith home transformed its identity from the informal realms of religious healing to a recognized religious entity that offered primary maternity care based on the principles of faith healing. By examining the professionalization of Aladura faith homes, I highlight questions of legitimacy allocation in postcolonial Africa and how CAC navigated this process by courting legitimacy from state-backed institutions and sociocultural frameworks.

This paper investigates the properties of a particle, lǝ, in Yixing Chinese that invariably denotes telic reading, obligatorily fronts definite and bare NP objects to the topic position, and imposes past event reading in most situations. It is argued that lǝ is a functional item bearing a quantity feature in the sense of Borer (2005b) and is hence responsible for telicity. Following Partee et al. (1987), Partee (1990), Filip (1997) and Borer (2005b), we propose that lǝ functions as a verbal quantifier, and more specifically, as a verbal universal quantifier, which needs to bind a variable in its quantificational domain. The fronting of definite and bare NPs is compatible with this variable-binding requirement because a trace, and hence a variable, is left as a result of the movement. It is further argued, following the analysis in Lin (2000, 2003, 2007), that lǝ bears a perfective feature. When there is no specific reference time, speech time is taken as default reference time, resulting in the past event reading. lǝ, therefore, bears both an inner aspectual feature and an outer aspectual feature. This paper exhibits how telic items can behave differently across languages and shows the possibility of bundling two temporal features (inner and outer aspectual features) on a single functional item.

Universalism, as a historical category, played an important ideological role in forging political solidarities beyond national boundaries in the modern period. The paper traces this idea in modern Asia through the sartorial styles of two intellectuals, Okakura Kakuzō and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Clothing as a medium of inquiry offers a unique scholarly perspective to articulate the role of universalism vis-à-vis nationalism in colonial India and modern Japan. Since dress politics existed in Eastern and Western societies, it allows us to study lived experiences through a transregional dialog. Both men recognized clothing as an effective political lexicon to fashion the self and creatively include others within the ideological space. Due to their early exposure to various cultures, the clothing style adopted by Okakura and Gandhi was founded on notions of plurality and belonging to multiple places and people. Their positionality enabled them to establish a dialog with both national and imperial politics and dress in a style that was self-made and world-aware. The paper uses their photographs and writings from a period that engendered the practice of universalism and challenged the narratives of nationalism.

This article examines the entangled logics of corporal and carceral punishments of mercenary soldiers in eighteenth-century Denmark. Beginning with the story of a single man and his unfortunate trajectory through a sequence of punitive measures before his death as a prison workhouse inmate, the article looks at how punishments of soldiers communicated in multiple ways and were used to a variety of ends that were both typical and atypical within eighteenth-century society. It argues that soldiers experienced a breadth of both corporal and carceral punishments that were, in many cases, designed to limit otherness while communicating exemplarity along a fine-tuned spectrum of pain. The clearest example of this was running the gauntlet; a harrowing physical ordeal meted out by the offender's fellow soldiers. Turning to the carceral experiences often initiated by this ritual, it then examines how former mercenaries experienced convict labour differently from other occupational groups based on several factors. Their gender and occupational belonging meant they were funnelled towards specific penal institutions. Yet, their status as migrants and potential military labour meant they would often exit these institutions in specific ways. Whereas civilians often endured dishonouring punishments, ex-military convicts experienced punishments designed to inflict great pain without rendering them unfit for later military labour.

This historiographical article will argue that the March on Rome (October–November 1922) was the end point of a serious and at that point unique insurrectionary project, which followed three intense years of Fascist violence (where the state had rarely if ever taken on the Fascists, and had often colluded passively or actively with them). It was accompanied by violence and constant threats of further violence, in Rome and across Italy. It was in no way a bluff – but also stood as a warning to all those who still imagined that Fascism could be opposed, on the streets, in parliament, or at the ballot box. The violence hit bystanders, but was also targeted at the private homes of communists, socialists and hated liberals, and at centres of urban resistance in Rome itself. This article will look in detail at the ways historians have understood the March on Rome, and systematically removed the violence from that event, ignored the March itself and played down the role of the squadristi. It will also look at the powerful role of a ‘what if’ counter-factual which has dominated most accounts of the March on Rome to date, with some recent exceptions.