This article deals with the impact that Italian migrants, both individually and as a community, had on the rural and urban environment of Kerch, in Eastern Crimea (Russian Empire), during the1820s and 1920s. Occupying a strategic position in the Black Sea for Russia's geopolitics and for the whole European commercial system, this territory's transformation was activated by Russia's imperial re-visioning of the Crimea and by spontaneous foreign immigration. Within this context, the Italian community's contribution to the transformation of the local environment had an important economic impact, relevant also on a wider scale. Some of these changes would have a long-lasting effect but none of them would ever be officially recognised. The aim of this article is to shed light on these processes.

Gienapp's critical move is to shift our attention from semantics to ontology. What is the Constitution? How was it conceived to exist in 1787, and how has that conception changed over time? These questions must be squarely addressed, he insists, before asking what the Constitution means. Does this whole text-focused enterprise rest on a mistake? Drawing on a wealth of primary sources and modern scholarship, Gienapp makes a strong and interesting case that it does. Boiled down, his main argument is that the founders were predominantly natural lawyers, and thus conceived of law quite differently than most originalists typically do.

Christine Desan's Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism provides an authoritative answer to a fundamental question about medieval English money that has puzzled a few scholars, but that has been largely ignored by most: were medieval payments normally weighed or counted? The same question can be expressed differently as: were payments made by weight or by tale at face value; or again, was the value of money determined by its intrinsic content or by royal decree? But why might this curious distinction between counting payments and weighing them matter?

The handling of infanticide in late medieval France offers modern audiences an underappreciated paradox: on the one hand infant murder was deplored as grave sin and crime, on the other hand, it was a pardonable offence, even the infanticidal singlemother who had killed to conceal her sin could obtain royal grace. This is far more than the usual story of law differing from practice. Christian ideology of mercy and forgiveness for sin played a central role in shaping the regulation of illegitimate births as well as abortions, stillbirths, and infanticide. Church and secular authorities alike sought to prevent as well as punish the death of infants, but they also created and implemented systems of justice with the explicit purpose of providing mercy to the repentant murderer, even an infanticide.

Debates over constitutional originalism almost always center on meaning. Questions are typically focused, concentrated on the meaning of particular constitutional clauses at the moment of their inception: the Commerce Clause in 1787, the Second Amendment in 1791, or the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Given the prevalence of these investigations, theoretical and methodological debates over how to recover original constitutional meaning are concentrated on either the kind of meaning that should be targeted—original public meaning, original intended meaning, or original legal meaning—or how that meaning can be recovered—through conventional legal reasoning, corpus linguistics, or thick reconstruction of historical context. Regardless, virtually all originalist theories of meaning uncritically presuppose the nature of the object possessing that meaning: they take as given what the Constitution itself is and, by implication, what it has always been. Although it might not be clear what the Constitution originally meant, it is straightforward what the original Constitution originally was. It just is the Constitution.

On October 2, 2020, a newborn infant girl was discovered in the trash in an airport bathroom in Doha, Qatar. There was a rush to secure the infant's life, which was successful. There was a rush, also, to find the infant's mother, an effort that involved subjecting several women to intrusive physical examinations to determine if they had recently given birth, leading, eventually, to international outcry.

This article examines the lessons that Pierre Boulez learned about sound from Antonin Artaud, suggesting that Boulez's ideas about musical writing (écriture) took shape as the composer imagined and appropriated forms of non-European expression. Boulez sometimes acknowledged the influence of ‘extra-European’ sounds in his music, but also insisted that music should not be a ‘simple ethnographic reconstruction’. Artaud, who explicitly ‘reconstructed’ the ethnographic other in a 1947 radio broadcast, will become my foil to show how Boulez's philosophy of writing hinged on an East–West dualism. I follow Boulez to South America with the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault to suggest that he took cues from Afro-Bahian Candomblé when he wrote Le Marteau sans maître. The conclusion reflects on the lessons that Boulez and Artaud might teach us about sound; namely, that recent musicological claims on behalf of the ontology of sound have modernist origins.

Scholars of nationalism knew about the role of memory and forgetting in nation building long before the contemporary boom of memory studies. Still, they can learn a lot from this relatively new research field. This article offers an overview of the literature on the politics of memory, focusing on different patterns of dealing with a dark past of genocides, civil wars, and political repressions, on the one hand, and on the observations derived from the recent so-called “memory wars” in Europe, on the other. Both issues elucidate a persistent role of nationalism in the contemporary world.

The increased visibility of same-sex relationships and the call for same-sex marriages have been particular challenges to the traditional marriage system in Africa in the contemporary period. While some critics have argued, erroneously, that same-sex relationships were completely unknown to the African continent until the advent of Western modernity, others have suggested that the practices speak to a greater malaise confronting African societies. Nigeria is not an exception in this case. In light of these trends, this article examines the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, which was promulgated by the Nigerian government in 2014 and has since led to infractions upon the human rights of citizens in same-sex relationships. The article examines these developments around same-sex relationships in the context of wider social and economic challenges to the traditional marriage institution in Nigeria.