Neither the historiographical focus on sovereignty nor the concept of sovereignty is new. What is new is the stress on it as a negotiated concept, as a field for claims, and as a gray zone between the public and the private, the state and the individual. This new approach locates sovereignty not only with the sovereign, but also with the people over whom the sovereign rules; more precisely, it locates it in a field of force betwixt and between the two. Sovereignty is less a thing to be measured than it is a dynamic to be followed, a question to be asked, even a rhetorical device. Focusing on different kinds of actors, from colonial profiteers to NGO officials, this new lens allows one to see sovereign power from above as only one locus of sovereignty. Another is the individual. For her, protracted negotiations and staking of claims often define the general contours and limits of sovereignty.

The article analyzes Allied attempts to try German war criminals after the First World War and the ensuing Leipzig trials. Historians of international law commonly describe these as the first (failed) attempt to break principles of national sovereignty by implementing principles of international humanitarian law, which were later realized at Nuremberg and The Hague. The article brackets the question of the Leipzig trials’ alleged success or failure by situating them not so much within the long-term history of international justice but, rather, within the political and intellectual culture of Weimar Germany. The article shows how the German government tried to use its limited domestic sovereignty in order to enhance its international sovereignty. By asking how German sovereignty was contested, negotiated, and reaffirmed, the article historicizes the Leipzig trials and also addresses the more general question of which conditions facilitate international war crimes trials. Drawing on the literature on transitional justice, this article suggests that contestations over German domestic and international sovereignty after the Versailles Treaty offer a more productive frame to understand the trials than measuring success according to international humanitarian law.

Medical acculturation forms a crucial part of the process of migration, and equally, the influx of migrants can shape how medical structures develop in receiving societies – nowhere is that more evident than in the American metropolis. In the late nineteenth century, few ethnic groups caused such sustained bio-hazard concerns as the Irish in America. Poverty and the sheer numbers migrating in the post-Famine (1852-) era, caused the immigrant Irish body to be pathologised, or described in medical terms, to a much greater degree and for longer than their Anglo-Saxon or German counterparts. With a particular focus on Irishwomen’s use of maternity services in New York and Boston, this article aims to elucidate the potential of medical records to flesh out the understandings of how immigrants navigated healthcare. By adopting a case study approach to hospital records in tandem with other data sources, it shows what is being lost through restrictive data protection legislation. It discusses how Irishness was politicised in the contexts of immigration, the social history of medicine and medicalisation.