The outbreak of the American Revolution thrust would-be revolutionaries into a paradoxical relationship with the law. As they overthrew colonial governments from New Hampshire to Georgia during the summer and fall of 1775, leaders of the resistance to Great Britain found themselves in the awkward position of having to justify rebellion against British authority while still professing to be law-abiding Britons. The revolutionaries’ mandate to govern rested on protecting rights to property and representation that many colonists believed had been violated by agents of the Empire, but the practicalities of war demanded extra-legal measures. The popular governments that replaced colonial administrations had to find a way to balance upholding many of the laws of the old regime while simultaneously organizing an armed insurrection against it. Much of this burden fell on revolutionary committees at the town and local level. As the Continental Congress and provincial elites vacillated between rebellion and reconciliation and struggled to assert control over the fast-growing revolutionary coalition, ad hoc governments comprised of ordinary citizens took on the tasks of governing their regions and organizing for armed struggle. For much of 1775 and early 1776, these popular regimes precariously balanced the need for extra-legal expediencies with the need to maintain at least a semblance of law to maintain their legitimacy.

This paper develops a parallel between prudence and population ethics. I argue that developing a standard guiding the evaluation of the comparative prudential value of different lives is challenging because it shares a similarity with population ethics: In both contexts, we assess the comparative value of populations of person-stages/people, which may vary in number and level of well-being. Based on this analogy, I show that Arrhenius’ fifth impossibility theorem can be applied to prudence. I develop and compare five possible escape routes: Critical-Level Views, Totalism, Limited Aggregation, Nebel’s Lexical Threshold View and what I call the Negative Lexicality View.

During World War II, German occupation obstructed foreign tourism to Amsterdam. The local tourist association VVV did not, however, cease its promotional activities. On the contrary; as a public–private association largely financed by the Amsterdam municipality and the local Chamber of Commerce, the VVV functioned as an institutional nexus between the German-controlled municipal authorities, local entrepreneurs in the city’s tourist industry, tourists and local citizens. This article argues that the VVV played a significant role in promoting the return to ‘normalcy’ and an acceptance of aspects of a new normal in the Dutch capital. In a wide variety of initiatives, it encouraged domestic tourists and local inhabitants – largely ignoring the gradual exclusion of Jews – to continue a public life of amusement, cultural enrichment and identification with local and national heritage.

Ireland’s historical coordinates are shifting, prompting a re-examination of national narratives and of the assumptions and anxieties that have kept them in place. Increasingly, stories that disturb rather than coalesce with grand narratives are the focus of historical study, revealing the structural violence used to maintain societal order. This article argues that tending to bigger questions about power and smaller ones about human experience creates space for new and diverse histories. It explores the dynamics that shaped the grand narratives central to Irish history and proposes the idea of imagined and lived encounters as a way of thinking about differentiation, the relational nature of power and its impact on experience and everyday life. An analysis of the concept of respectability is used to probe how power functions. The article concludes with a consideration of the historical archive broadly defined, highlighting the benefits of embracing the ‘unreliable’ witness, listening and accounting for silences, touching the material, and considering imagination as a force constantly at play in the encounters that shape history. The acceptance of this dynamic instability in historical research creates possibilities for new voices and perspectives to emerge.

The 1984 Helsinki Festival introduced Finnish and international audiences to contemporary Soviet composers via what was perhaps the largest repertory of contemporary Soviet music in the West up to that point. The week of concerts did not include any premieres, but several works by Schnittke, Gubaidulina, and Denisov that were performed during the festival were recent compositions that had received only a few performances at that point. And yet, the week was also a compromise, prominently featuring Khrennikov and other conservative composers. This article discusses the context and processes that led to the festival’s realisation and its relation to changes in the Soviet musical world at the time. In the past, Soviet authorities often torpedoed attempts to perform nonconformist works in the West and almost never allowed composers to travel. In Helsinki, Schnittke, Gubaidulina, and several other composers were allowed to attend.

This article investigates the ways children begin spelling from the start of grade 1 to the end of grade 2 in France. It presents the results of a longitudinal study with 676 children faced to the complexity of French orthography and asked to write words and sentences. The corpus was analysed with regard to phonogrammic and morphogrammic principles at work in the French orthography.

Based on the literature and the specific features of the French writing system, we hypothesized that both skill types would develop as early as Grade 1 of elementary school, with lexical spelling skills developing more rapidly. The findings suggest that the development of the phonogrammic, lexical morphogrammic, and grammatical skills of pupils may take into account different variables: consistency, frequency, syntactic context within which words are used, words that can feature different morphograms or not.

This article examines the Dublin House of Industry in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Established in 1773, the House of Industry was part of an effort to launch a nationwide system of workhouses and something like a poor law system for Ireland. By the 1790s however, there was a shift from the paternalistic governance of the founders of the house to a new way of managing the relief of the poor within the institution. During this decade, there emerged a new board of governors who adopted a supposed ‘scientific’ approach to philanthropy. Influenced by the ideas of such workhouse reformers as Count Rumford in Munich, the new governors attempted to enact a sweeping series of changes to transform life in the workhouse along ‘oeconomical’ lines. It argues that these transformations reflected broader patterns of social change in the capital, as well as shifts in attitudes to poor relief more generally.

This article takes a usage-based Construction Morphology perspective to examine the polysemy of the locative prefixoid up in complex words such as upstairs, upland, upheaval and uproot. Drawing on a relational structure model of morphosemantics, it is argued that the prefixoid systematically approximates the functions of different syntactic categories in different complex words: up functions like a preposition (upstairs), adjective (upland), adverb (upheaval) and verb (uproot). These constructions consequently require bases of specific syntactic categories and differ in the ways in which the prefixoid semantically relates to the second element. These subschemas are investigated in detail using corpus data from the BNC, collostructional analysis and various productivity measures to analyze the selectional restrictions of the open slot of the constructions as well as the semantics of the complex words. This approach elegantly solves the question of category change and the difficulties in identifying the syntactic category of the base in complex words with locative prefixoids, providing an alternative to the righthand head rule.

Examining the systemic exploitation of mentally ill individuals, this study focuses on the practices of the British colonial administration in Kabba Province, Northern Nigeria (1900–1947). This research investigates how colonial authorities employed biopolitical strategies to categorise, control, and exploit this vulnerable population for labour, prioritising colonial economic and administrative interests. The study utilises a qualitative methodology, primarily analysing archival documents from the National Archives of Nigeria (NAK), Kaduna, and Arewa House Archives (AHA), to uncover the forced labour system’s practices and rationalisations. Crucially, it incorporates oral sources from direct descendants of ethno-medical practitioners, former colonial staff, traditional chiefs, and learned community members. This oral history component provides vital intergenerational knowledge, contextualising archival findings and offering perspectives often absent from official records, ensuring a nuanced understanding of pre-colonial mental health practices and colonial-era lived experiences. Secondary literature on colonial biopower, mental health history, and regional history provides a comparative framework. Findings indicate the colonial administration systematically repurposed traditional care and established new mechanisms to identify, isolate, and compel mentally ill individuals into various forms of forced labour for infrastructure and economic extraction. In conclusion, this research significantly contributes to scholarship on vulnerable populations during colonialism, illuminating the intricate link between mental illness, labour, and power in colonial Nigeria, and informing contemporary debates on mental health, human rights, and historical justice.