The essays that follow aim to capture aspects of the unique style of R.J. Morris, aspects which taken together represent the formidable legacy that he leaves to the global world of urban history.

This article was presented as the Presidential Address at the North American Conference on British Studies in Baltimore in November 2023.

This article compares late Imperial Russia (1850-1917) and its successor states — post-revolutionary independent Ukraine (1918-1919) and early Soviet Russia and the USSR (1918-1923) — focusing on the conception and implementation of state policy toward the Jews. It argues that Russian Imperial, Ukrainian nationalist and Soviet socialist policies treated the Jews essentially as a distinct ethno-confessional or ethnic collective entitled to state protection and group rights, thus anticipating (in Imperial Russia) and de-facto realizing (in independent Ukraine and Soviet Russia) the rights of minorities stipulated in the 1919 Paris Peace Treaty and implemented by the Versailles system in interwar Europe. The article shows how by establishing and maintaining separate Jewish institutions (sophisticated state apparatuses staffed by qualified, dedicated Jewish bureaucrats), the states developed and even promoted a collective Jewish identity and collective Jewish rights, starting with state protection and official recognition of Judaism and the Jewish way of life in the late Russian empire, to state-sponsored Jewish national and cultural autonomy in the Ukrainian National Republic, to official recognition as a Soviet nationality, and territorial and semi-political autonomy in the USSR.

This article reflects on a little-told story of musical and cultural censorship: the Mexican government's 1996 destruction of the Foro Abierto, a 2,000-seater auditorium in the heart of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. The Foro Abierto was the home of an anarchist theatre group called CLETA, and was an important venue for a number of genre-crossing musicians. This venue was destroyed by the police just before CLETA was to inaugurate it as part of the rebel Zapatista movement. Several days later, a musician from CLETA was assassinated. Responding to the material turn in music studies, this article combines ethnographic and archival research to explore articulations between rubble and censorship. The venue's destruction disempowered and disarticulated CLETA, to the extent that an unsettling silence emerged about this act on the site of the venue itself. Equally, constructive responses to the complexities of censorship may also emerge from acts of material and ideational de-structuration.

This essay responds to Brack et al., ‘Plague and the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad (1258)? A reevaluation of the sources’, which is a critique of our 2021 essay in this journal, ‘Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)’. We argue that Brack and colleagues have misunderstood our investigation as an attempt to pinpoint the exact timing of the outbreak of plague connected with the Mongol siege of Baghdad, and so believe that an altered timeframe invalidates our suggestion that plague was involved. Taking this opportunity to revisit the state of plague historiography in western Asia, we address four issues: (1) why Mongol historiography has, until recently, avoided the question of plague’s late mediaeval resurgence within the Mongol Empire and why the ‘new genetics’ of plague now makes the question unavoidable; (2) why reconstruction of the biological processes of ‘focalisation’ is now the most urgent question in plague historiography since it constitutes what we call the prodromal stage of the Black Death pandemic; (3) how a newly informed biological perspective on disease history can allow a more sensitive reading of past observers’ reports of epidemics; and finally, (4) what a plausible scenario might look like for plague’s presence in western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean region in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries as an emerging zoonotic disease with occasional epizootic and human outbreaks, before the more catastrophic outbreaks of the 1340s commonly referred to as ‘the Black Death’.

In this article, we present an exploration of the social meaning and functions of marketplace sounds – including language, yelling and hailing – in two adjacent, yet very different sites in Copenhagen, Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads. We argue that the marketplace soundscapes played central functions as means of constructing customer-oriented semiotic spaces while negotiating territories and branding and selling products. Language by way of dialectal speech, yelling, street cries, cursing and swearing was an integral part of such processes. The two sites, by virtue of their physical placement in close proximity to each other, reinforced the contrasts between them, hence, co-constructing contrasting sonic territories – a concept which we employ and develop as part of the analysis. Central to our argument is that a sensory approach, including the sound of language, to a semiotic description of the urban marketplace requires a historical contextualization of the marketplace and its functions in the urban space, as well as of the life and culture of the marketplace vendors themselves; that is, the case in point, the female vendors from Amager and Skovshoved.

Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895 and in the Second World War was geographically central in Japan’s wartime possessions and strategically important, with military airfields, ports, and a copper mine. Its sixteen prisoner-of-war camps included four labour camps. Taiwan was also the first place to which senior officers and colonial officials were dispersed after the Allied surrenders in Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. Forty-five doctors from the British, Australian, Dutch and American forces were identified who spent at least part of their captivity on Taiwan. This article uses their personal accounts, official documents and secondary sources to describe them and their work. Although the oldest had experience in the First World War and some had practised in the region, others were young, recently-qualified generalists. Most were transferred between several camps, with one consequence that few contemporaneous medical records survive. Doctors shared the risks and hardships of all prisoners: they lost weight and had the same nutritional disorders, infections and infestations as their patients. Two died. They became significant, scrutinised figures in the camps. Their patients valued their work and understood that they lacked resources for fully effective medical practice.

Bob (or R.J.) Morris was probably best known in academic circles for his histories of class and specifically the British middle class. This essay traces his thinking about class in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain from an early study of class consciousness to his later attempts to rework ideas about social structure and culture in a post-Weberian direction. A feature of this intellectual trajectory was the increasing importance of the city and urban place in the account of class formation, most evident in his work on Leeds. In the process, Bob carved out a distinctive type of urban social history which has proved highly influential in historical studies of social structure not only in Britain but in Europe and beyond.

At a time of increasing environmental changes and geopolitical tensions, the need for collaboration in the Arctic is greater than ever. Top-down initiatives such as the Arctic Council have contributed to important increased collaboration and science diplomacy. Similarly, bottom-up initiatives have also played a major role in establishing diplomacy among researchers with spin-offs at government levels. We track the rise of science diplomacy achieved by INTERACT. In 2021, this was a network of 90 research stations in 18 countries (including all Arctic nations). It aims to improve the wellness of Indigenous Peoples, other Arctic residents and the global community by facilitating environmental monitoring and research. It supports scientists from around the world and facilitates environmental monitoring for more than 150 international/global networks. INTERACT contributed to science diplomacy until spring 2022 when the invasion of Ukraine by Russia completely changed its pan-Arctic networking over a couple of months. This decrease in INTERACT science diplomacy was due entirely to external constraints related to the current geopolitical circumstances and poses a new reality for INTERACT and its important contributions to environmental monitoring and research in a region where changes have global implications.