This article examines the divergent historical views espoused by Russian and Ukrainian societies and their representatives on topics such as the 1932-1933 famine, Stalinism, and the post-World War II Soviet Union. We draw on an original online survey, conducted simultaneously in January 2021 in Ukraine and Russia, to provide an in-depth analysis of views on history in Ukraine and Russia before the 2022 invasion. In Russia, we illustrate how little contestation there is of official narratives. This may signal the existence of an integrated mnemonic community after a decade of state-curated historical narratives, but it might also imply that Russian society is disengaged from history. In pre-2022 Ukraine, meanwhile, we identify persistent fragmentation in the ways in which society perceives history, largely centered along the country’s linguistic divide. However, a central finding is that Russian-speakers in Ukraine differ in their historical views from Russian citizens on key dimensions such as the memory of Stalin and the Holodomor. These results speak to the evolving and politicized nature of societal memory and provide an important baseline for interpreting potential mnemonic shifts that accompanied the full-scale war launched against Ukraine by Russia in February 2022.

This article rethinks ‘the global’ by analysing the emergence and growth of the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), an informal platform of multilateral counterterrorism co-operation which has been instrumental in the making of post-9/11 global security law and governance. It problematises and empirically analyses how global scale is enacted through the socio-material practices of translation and assemblage that have been deployed in the construction, maintenance and extension of the GCTF governance network. Drawing from interviews with policy experts and GCTF members, and from participant-observation in GCTF and UN events, the article contributes to the theme of the Special Issue and wider legal debates about the spatiotemporal dynamics of global law and governance by critically analysing how global scale is fabricated in practice and unpacking the politics of GCTF’s global scale-making processes. Focusing on specific techniques and norm-creation processes of the GCTF, like watch-listing toolkits and ‘good-practice’ documents on foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs) and countering violent extremism (CVE), the article analyses how translation, problematisation and enrolment practices have assembled the GCTF as an ‘apolitical’ global security governance body. Our approach opens novel possibilities for socio-legal research on the politics of scale-making and critiquing global security power in action through empirical attention to its assemblage practices.

Recent scholarship on conservative constitutionalism in the United States focuses near-exclusively on the development of originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation. Before conservatives turned to originalism to counter the perceived threats of an activist judiciary in the 1980s, however, this article demonstrates that conservatives employed a very different interpretive philosophy to counter a very different perceived threat. To do so, this article reconstructs the history of a conservative legal movement that predated “the” conservative legal movement. Indeed, this article uncovers how conservatives employed natural law philosophy to respond to the elite legal academy’s seemingly morally foundationless positivism during the Cold War. The network of natural lawyers that sustained this earlier movement was deeply indebted to the Natural Law Institute (NLI), an academic initiative of the University of Notre Dame established in 1947. By framing the founding fathers’ natural law philosophy as a bulwark of individual liberty against the encroachments of legal realists, World War II-era totalitarians, and Cold War communists, the NLI created what the political scientist Amanda Hollis-Brusky has termed a “political epistemic network.” In concluding, this article suggests that recovering the history of the NLI’s epistemic network reveals the importance of natural law to the making of conservative constitutionalism during the Cold War.

This special issue stems from the 2022 Association for the Study of Modern Italy conference, reflecting on key turning points in modern Italian history through the lens of ‘small histories’. Drawing on contemporary international historiography and the contributions in the present volume, this introduction discusses how microhistorical, biographical and related approaches may challenge or refine dominant interpretations in that they abstract from ‘grand narratives’ to instead highlight dynamics and actors that may appear to be on the margins of major historical processes. The studies in this special issue engage in particular with the intersections of identity, space and memory. Themes such as Fascism, the reshaping of Italian identity through cultural policies and the creation of a collective memory, colonialism and postcolonialism, migration and evolving gender roles are explored in diverse contexts from interwar South Tyrol through to contemporary Palermo. Together, these ‘small histories’ demonstrate the methodological and interpretative richness of focused studies in tracing Italy’s transformation across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They challenge binaries such as centre–periphery and local–global, while shedding new light on the relation between individual experiences and the creation of shared spaces, memories and identities.

This article examines how issues related to World War I were remembered and represented during the Single Party Era of the Turkish Republic (1923–1945), focusing on the political elite’s narrative strategies. The study situates the persistence of a positive perception of Unionism in contemporary Turkey within the historical remembrance shaped by the early Republic’s identity politics. Drawing on newspaper analyses from the 1930s and 1940s, the article reveals how narratives surrounding prominent Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) figures — such as Talat, Enver, and Cemal — evolved. Initially, the Kemalist regime distanced itself from the CUP by framing World War I (also referred to “the War” in this article) as the product of a few Unionist leaders’ recklessness while celebrating the War of Independence as the foundation of a new, victorious Turkish identity. However, by the 1930s, publications began to reinterpret and partially rehabilitate the CUP leaders’ reputations, emphasizing their dedication to state interests and leadership qualities.

The founding figures, advocates and engineers of the early Space Age are frequently hailed as ‘fathers’, ‘forebears’, ‘prophets’, ‘pioneers’, ‘visionaries’ and ‘heroes’, employing hagiographic, gendered and indiscriminate tropes that lack analytical value. Inspired by persona and celebrity studies, this introduction proposes an alternative approach to comprehend the historical significance and historiographical prominence attributed to global ‘rocket stars’ Qian Xuesen (1911–2009) in China, Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) in Sri Lanka, Vikram Sarabhai (1919–71) in India, Sigmund Jähn (1937–2019) in East Germany, Ulf Merbold (1941–) in West Germany and Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez (1942–) in Cuba covered in this special issue. Replacing ‘great-men’ hagiography with a theoretically grounded focus on celebrification processes and the making of national patriarchs from without – from person to persona – enhances nuance and reduces cliché in understanding the role technocelebrities played in the production of outer space as a key phantasmagoria of the twentieth century. As these six space personas operated and starred in geographical contexts distinct and distant from the spaceflight superpowers, the special issue advances the notion of a global Space Age as an alternative to the conventional bipolar Cold War variant and offers a foundation for its budding historicization.

The history of work is marred by the fact that the meaning of “labour” or “work” changed with the arrival of modern society, making it difficult to draw comparisons across time. There has been a shift from understanding work as any activity that may secure continued living and well-being, to seeing it as paid, full-time, specialized employment. This transformation has obscured the work of some groups in society (notably women but also others) and work in the form of multiple employments (which often means multiple labour relations). The methods and sources presented in this Special Theme offer valuable tools for historians seeking to address and navigate these issues.

This paper examines the history of the ‘lower cavity’ of the gastrointestinal tract, a distinctive anatomical feature in Greco-Roman medicine that described a second stomach-like organ in the large intestine. It traces how a bipartite model of the digestive system emerged in fourth-century bce Greek medical and philosophical thought and persisted in the works of influential figures such as Galen, Vesalius, and Glisson, despite shifts in terminology, anatomical observations, and physiological theories. The study demonstrates that this understanding arose primarily from three complementary factors: a specific terminology that paired the stomach with a lower cavity, systematic animal dissections that revealed pronounced caeca in certain species, and emerging physiological theories that required separate bodily receptacles for digested food and residues. Through this case study, the paper illuminates how premodern anatomical knowledge was articulated by a constant negotiation between animal bodies, human bodies, and past textual authorities, facilitating the surprising longevity of ideas like the ‘lower cavity’ in the gastrointestinal tract.

In reaction to revolutionary upheaval in the 1790s and 1800s, the British parliament at home and colonial legislatures in the Americas passed their first statutory provisions to govern migration and aliens as such. As this paper argues, in their sustained and varied uses, these “alien acts” were much more than about border and migration controls. In a period of fundamental restructuring of imperial rule and of social statuses within the colonies, they increasingly turned into flexible tools of imperial governance. Taking the British Caribbean in the 1820s and 1830s as a case, the paper examines how alien legislation was reused, and reinvented, in two crucial arenas of imperial reconfiguration: the push for political equality by free people of color and the abolition of the slave trade. By their emphasis on sweeping executive power, various actors on the ground but also in the metropole regarded alien acts as an appropriate legal tool to respond to, to avert or subvert what they regarded as challenges or legal complexities of the age of emancipation. In this way, the alien acts also became a central factor in the reconfiguration of British subjecthood—with far-reaching consequences that their creators and users could never fully anticipate or control.

Exhibition trophies have become invisible to most people reading about and looking at images of the great world’s fairs. This is not surprising; trophies have fallen out of our awareness because they, and the criticisms they provoked, have received surprisingly little scholarly attention. This article reveals not only this largely overlooked form, but also just how much cultural work they were doing and why so many people found them disturbing. Exhibition trophies became a solution to the nineteenth-century design problem of representing progress, imperial power, extractive superabundance, control of the natural world, and industrial capacity. Nineteenth-century exhibitors and collectors made trophies out of a wide array of commodities, animals, raw materials, manufactured goods, weapons, and “primitive” objects. But by carrying with them ancient connotations of high-minded victory and violence, exhibition trophies also inspired criticisms that got to the heart of modern forms of conquest. Divisive in the middle of the nineteenth century, trophies were ubiquitous by the turn of the twentieth. Meanwhile a new, rival way of displaying imperial power emerged that challenged ethnographic trophies in particular: the new science of anthropology. This article begins to recover this lost form and its implications—from disquiet to the acceptance of abundance (even overabundance) as a collective goal.

Ethno-religious nationalism has been an integral part of the Georgian identity since the country regained independence. Since the early 2000s, Georgia has had a constitutionally enshrined pro-European foreign policy, which has been reflected in a strong identification with Europe, its culture, and values. Survey data show that Georgians prefer European and Christian ethnic outgroups to Asian and Muslim ones. These factors could have explained the rise of the far right in Georgia, had Georgia experienced a wave of refugees comparable to EU states in mid-2010s. However, only few people fled from the Syrian civil war to Georgia. Nevertheless, in and around 2016, various far-right groups with a strong anti-liberal ideology appeared in the Georgian public sphere. In 2017, a far-right rally was organized, demanding that the rights of Turkish, Iranian, and Arab business owners and citizens be restricted in Georgia. This was accompanied by violent incidents involving physical abuse and property damage of non-white foreigners. The sudden rise of the far-right political organizations in Georgia gives rise to various questions: Do the far-right ideas have grassroots origins, or was the activation of the far right a top-down process? Which domestic and external factors could have contributed to these developments?

The global political order that emerged from 1919 inscribed Jews into two distinct legal roles under the League of Nations system: a model national minority in the new nation-states of Eastern Europe, and a virtual national majority in British Mandatory Palestine. Despite extensive scholarship on each of these stories, we know precious little about how they interacted in the interwar Jewish political imagination. In this article I track several key East European Zionist intellectuals through the period between World War I and the aftermath of World War II as they attempted to imagine a new geometry of transnational nationhood via international law. This account of their pursuit of national self-determination beyond sovereignty reveals the promise and limits of interwar Jewish worldmaking and provides an index of the changing meaning of nationhood itself in the interwar period.

Despite growing interest in African varieties of French, few attempts have been made to examine them from a variationist perspective. This contribution aims to use phonetic variation as a vantage point for exploring language ideologies surrounding the use of French in postcolonial contexts. The study focuses on the French variety spoken in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and draws on a bilingual Lingala–French dataset elicited from L1 Lingala speakers. The sample reflects a key social distinction in Kinshasa: that between long-term urban residents and recent rural migrants. Are there multiple phonetic varieties of Kinshasa French? To what extent do their forms merely reflect variation in Lingala? The study finds that the most focused variety of Kinshasa French is strongly associated with urban women and is approximated to varying degrees by rural migrants, particularly women. In addition to features with likely origins in either rural or urban Lingala, Kinshasa French exhibits hypercorrect forms and features that may mirror variation trends in Parisian French.