In the early 1960s, when a majority of African countries were gaining independence, the training of personnel capable of implementing nation-building projects became imperative for new African governments, even though higher education opportunities on the continent remained scarce. In a context of competition with the former colonial powers and the USSR, the United States decided to set up scholarship programs for the training of postcolonial African elites. Through the analysis of one of these programs, the African Scholarship Program of American Universities (ASPAU), this article will show that in addition to the Cold War motivations of the US government, pan-African connections and university initiatives were essential in laying the groundwork for the project of educating Africans in the United States. It also highlights the too often overlooked role played by African leaders and academics in the concrete realization, reappropriation, and questioning of overseas training projects.

The genetic modification of pigs as a source of transplantable organs is one of several possible solutions to the chronic organ shortage. This paper describes existing ethical tensions in xenotransplantation (XTx) that argue against pursuing it. Recommendations for lifelong infectious disease surveillance and notification of close contacts of recipients are in tension with the rights of human research subjects. Parental/guardian consent for pediatric xenograft recipients is in tension with a child’s right to an open future. Individual consent to transplant is in tension with public health threats that include zoonotic diseases. XTx amplifies concerns about justice in organ transplantation and could exacerbate existing inequities. The prevention of infectious disease in source animals is in tension with the best practices of animal care and animal welfare, requiring isolation, ethologically inappropriate housing, and invasive reproductive procedures that would severely impact the well-being of intelligent social creatures like pigs.

The so-called aggressively non-D-linked construction (ANDC) involving wh-the-hell phrases like what the hell is of empirical and theoretical interest due to its complex morphosyntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties. This paper focuses on the construction in general as well as in ellipsis phenomena. We first explore its grammatical properties on the basis of attested corpus data and show that the construction can occur more widely in elliptical constructions than suggested by previous literature. We then suggest that the licensing conditions of the ANDC in ellipsis are not solely syntax-based but due to tight interactions among a variety of grammatical components such as morphosyntax, semantics, and discourse/pragmatics. We also argue that the authentic uses of the construction favor a Direct Interpretation (DI) approach that can account for its uses in a variety of environments.

This article explores the role of place-based identity politics in constructions of the Russian nation by nongovernmental actors in the cities of Kazan and Ekaterinburg. Departing from more established approaches to the study of nation building concerned with elite strategies and actions, it contributes to an emerging line of inquiry focused on the agency of mesolevel actors. Drawing on interviews and analysis of public communications, the article demonstrates that actors such as museums, activist groups, and religious institutions creatively employ mainstream discursive practices present also in state narratives to anchor the nation in local symbols. At the same time, they position themselves in locally specific identity cleavages concerning city, regional, and ethnonational minority identities. The findings show that the imbrication of local identity politics in their narratives can problematize nation building by exposing contradictions in federal discourses or troubling the association of nation and state. Emphasizing the importance of locally situated processes of constructing the nation in conjunction with other scales of belonging, the article argues that nation building in Russia is complicated by mesolevel practices of identity making that can simultaneously support and subvert it.

The article explores the relationship between Orthodox religiosity and voting in Russia in 2011–2018. Using the theoretical framework of desecularization from above, which claims that church structures play a key role in the religious renaissance policy, we argue that the rise of the political influence of the ROC (Russian Orthodox Church) may be explained by its capacity for dissemination of traditional values that ultimately results in votes for United Russia and President Vladimir Putin in national elections. This study reveals the emergence of a new area on Russia’s political map—the belt – into Belt, which combines higher levels of Orthodox religiosity and pro-Kremlin voting in national elections. Using multiple empirical strategies we construct an index of religiosity on the regional level and identify the Orthodox Belt regions, test the relationship between Orthodox religiosity and voting in the national elections in 2011–2018, and test the differences in value orientations and electoral support between the Orthodox Belt regions and other ones. Finally, two model regions of the Orthodox Belt—Tambov and Lipetsk—are explored. We conclude that non-Orthodox Belt regions in Russia with higher Orthodox religiosity, conservatism, and loyalty are an emerging trend in Russian political geography.

Republican Shanghai was a renowned art capital. This article is based on a large-scale digital mapping project of the residential locations of 1,349 Shanghai artists. We analysed the transformative spatial distribution patterns of artists in relation to the city's social and urban conditions, and developed an artists’ habitation approach to elucidating the issues of Republican-period Shanghai urban and art history from the perspective of Chinese cosmopolitanism. We mapped areas of high artist concentration and identified a higher percentage of artists residing in the concessions (compared with the Shanghai general population) and the incremental convergence of art clusters in the concessions. We argue that the concessions provided a favourable environment for cultural diversity and the ungovernable, elite spirit of the literati tradition. The mainstream Shanghai art practices, known as haipai, were modern, as they were rooted in the urban modernity of the concessions and embodied Chinese cosmopolitanism.

For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality recasts American feminism as a global story and reclaims the fight for economic justice and social democracy as a majority tradition of women's politics. This rejoinder by the author of For the Many is the concluding essay in a review dossier on the book. Cobble discusses the book's origins and its contributions to global history, women's history, and political history. She engages with comments and queries from dossier reviewers, a diverse group of historians of Latin America, South Asia, Africa, and Europe. Topics include, among others, the unfinished struggle to revalue care and social reproduction, the influence of India on US feminism, Black internationalism and full-rights feminism, varieties of socialism, rethinking Cold War frameworks, and feminist perspectives on eugenics, race, and sexuality.

Dorothy Cobble's magnificent, sweeping saga of the 100 plus year struggle for “full rights feminism” introduces us to myriad activists who sought common ground in the expansion of civil, political, economic and social rights as the key for raising the standard for working women, and by extension for all of humanity. However, as Cobble notes, some full-rights activists did not measure up to the potential of this feminism. The juxtaposition of the activism of Black full-rights feminists helps expose this fault line of unexamined deep-seated racism, ethnocentrism, and stereotypical thinking that undermined the potential of full-rights feminism. Questions of economic and political democracy shaped the organizing efforts of Black full-rights feminists against disfranchisement, lynching, discrimination in housing, education and employment, and exclusion and segregation from public accommodations. In their transnational work, they supported policies and practices structured by Cold War imperatives, American racism and imperialism, and tensions between democracy and incipient autocracy in the emerging African nations. Cobble's book demonstrates the crucial ways that Black activists working together and with white allies pushed for the expansive promise of full-rights feminism, encompassing both political and economic rights and race and gender justice.

As a result of the new approach to municipal food supply adopted in European cities, the market hall first appeared in China in the foreign concessions in Shanghai in the late nineteenth century. While some municipal governments across China had stimulated an increase in the number of market halls constructed from the beginning of the early twentieth century, the introduction of market halls did not achieve the effects that the authorities expected. Although market hall reforms in Suzhou, Hangzhou and Chengdu were different in detail, they were similar inasmuch as market halls did not become a regular feature of the daily life of the three cities. However, municipal governments continued to promote the market hall reforms despite their limited achievements and resistance from the public. The main purpose of Chinese municipal governments to promote market halls was not to solve practical problems, but to establish the market hall as a symbol of modernity. While the concessions in Shanghai managed by the westerners had already initiated a form of modernity, other Chinese cities responded by exhibiting a particular appreciation of the myth of modernity, and Chinese cities underwent as swift a process of modernization as the foreign concessions.

Histories of feminism in the past three decades have focused on the debate between equal rights and separate spheres, but have been less attentive to the many strands of socialist feminisms, which sought to build bridges between the women's movement and other social movements for freedom, equality and justice. Dorothy Sue Cobble addresses this gap, exploring the lives and works of social democratic women activists in relation to the equal rights versus separate rights debate. Reflecting the “global turn”, Cobble explores many transnational connections. Picking up on these two themes – socialist feminism and global networks – I focus on the South Asian case.