‘Wisdom it was I loved and searched for her from my youth. I resolved to have her as my companion. I fell in love with her beauty ….’

At the funeral mass for Margaret MacCurtain, her grandnephew, Michael, read the first reading from the Book of Wisdom, a moving and appropriate text with which to begin a celebration of Margaret's life. The words carried an added significance as Michael's reading emphasised that wisdom was represented in the biblical verse as female.

Northern Brazil experienced consequential socio-economic and legal transformation by the mid-eighteenth century in the context of imperial reforms. If the region relied for decades on the enslavement of Indigenous Americans, the Portuguese crown banned the practiced in 1755. To develop a plantation economy, the monarchy created a trading company responsible for shipping unprecedented number of enslaved Africans. This article discusses ruptures and continuities on the enslavement of Indigenous Americans. It focuses on one city, São Luís, and makes extensive use of Catholic sources (baptisms and marriages), notarial records, and legal cases. The article analyzes the connection between mechanisms that allowed the resilience of slavery (or forms that resembled slavery) and attempts to claim and preserve freedom or autonomy, in this case the strategic use of the índio status. The article develops two of those mechanisms: social dependencies created within the households and the use of socio-racial classifications by the colonial society. I make two interconnected arguments. First, I propose a bottom-up process of Indigenous slavery abolition. Indigenous workers were savvy litigants and they fought for their place as mobile wage laborers within the city. Second, in that moment of socio-economic and legal transformations, slaveholders developed vernacular practices stressing black maternal origins to slaves.

This article examines the work and trajectory of ʿAbd al-Salam al-Diyuri, a Moroccan engineer educated in Egypt who became a nationalist writer, editor, and publisher during the last decade of the French Protectorate (1912–56). One of only a few Moroccan engineers trained in Arabic during this period, al-Diyuri developed a vision of modernization rooted in the popularization of technical knowledge that distinguished him from colonial engineers as well as nationalist elites. French experts exercised an epistemic dominance over the practice of engineering under the protectorate as well as after Morocco's independence. In this context, al-Diyuri's arguments traced the contours of an alternative future for the country—one that tied decolonization to the cultivation of technical competencies among the public at large. This article follows the path of a nationalist engineer and intellectual whose work both embodied and attempted to move beyond a contradiction between the democratization of knowledge and the demands of development.

Scholars are still unsure why American cities passed cross-dressing bans over the closing decades of the nineteenth century. By the 1960s, cities in every region of the United States had cross-dressing regulations, from major metropolitan centers to small cities and towns. They were used to criminalize gender non-conformity in many forms - for feminists, countercultural hippies, cross-dressers (or “transvestites”), and people we would now consider transgender. Starting in the late 1960s, however, criminal defendants began to topple cross-dressing bans.

The story of their success invites a re-assessment of the contemporary LGBT movement’s legal history. This article argues that a trans legal movement developed separately but in tandem with constitutional claims on behalf of gays and lesbians. In some cases, gender outlaws attempted to defend the right to cross-dress without asking courts to understand or adjudicate their gender. These efforts met with mixed success: courts began to recognize their constitutional rights, but litigation also limited which gender outlaws could qualify as trans legal subjects. Examining their legal strategies offers a window into the messy process of translating gender non-conforming experiences and subjectivities into something that courts could understand. Transgender had to be analytically separated from gay and lesbian in life and law before it could be reattached as a distinct minority group.

In this special issue of Modern Italy, four early-career scholars examine how the study of objects and images rooted in Fascist imperialist history enables a sustained interrogation of Italy's colonial imaginary. Their articles explore the diverse possibilities offered by the study of visual and material culture for scholars of imperialism, as it is precisely this realm of visual and material culture that emerges as a site of negotiation in which different individuals and constituencies contended with the regime's ideology.

I want to begin by thanking the editors of Law and History Review for hosting this rich exchange on Vice Patrol, as well as Marie-Amélie George, Yvonne Pitts, and Steven Maynard for their generous and generative comments. Engaging so deeply and so rigorously with another scholar's project, connecting it to one's own research and even to one's own life experience, is an act of remarkable collegiality, and I am grateful for their time and reflections.

A joke appearing in the folds of a Cairo-based newspaper published in Italian in 1895 must have fallen flat with Port Said's inhabitants. But the irony was not amiss. The jest suggested that the town, whose toponym could be translated to “happy port” given the Arabic meaning of saʿīd, ought to be renamed “unhappy” due to the sad state of its public services. Readers may have smiled mirthlessly in agreement with the author, who claimed the Egyptian government treated the city “as if it were less than a village.” Many were under the impression that Cairo wanted to scrap this “unhappy happy port” from the rest of Egypt. Continuing the wordplay, British journalist George Warrington Steevens wrote in 1898 that Port Said “would be wonderful if it were not unhappy,” stuck as it was between its riotous past and its doubtfully industrious future. Puns based on Port Said's name must have circulated for a while. Already in 1875, a French author had ironically remarked that this town's auspicious name seemed quite unjustified.

Following some of the themes of the original ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’ and others that were not as prominent, this article considers progress since 1992 and highlights opportunities for the further development of Irish early modern women's and gender history. It considers aspects of the life cycle of women and men, especially birth, youth and marriage; the economic roles of women, especially when it came to work and property; and the importance of movement to and from Ireland in both personal biographies and wider contexts. It also reflects on some of the ways in which understandings of early modern politics and of religion and belief for the period c.1550–1720 have been transformed by consideration of the role of women. While the ‘Agenda’ noted the potential of buildings and spaces, there has been a new emphasis on ‘things’ as remnants of lives and labour, expressions of cultural norms and tools in the construction of gender, selfhood and social status. Very early on, the ‘Agenda’ strongly stated that ‘the history of women is also the history of men’, and this article also notes the green shoots of the history of masculinity in early modern Ireland.

This article investigates how the Ethiopian war was represented by Epoca – the most prolific Italian weekly news magazine for illustrated reportage in postwar Italy – during the last phase of Italian colonialism (1950–60). The analysis focuses specifically on two photographic commemorations published on the twentieth (1955) and twenty-fifth anniversary (1960). The aim of this contribution is to examine these iconotexts in order to display how the interplay between images and words transmitted a selective and codified memory whose path mainly moved from nostalgia to pride while remaining characterised by a complete rejection of the feeling of shame. This representation was not even questioned by the references to those elements that will be considered, in the long-term, as evidence of the brutality of this colonial enterprise: those signals appear not to have been removed, but rather silenced and not truly comprehended, preventing the sense of shame from taking root in Epoca until 1995.