Do labor unions still motivate their members to participate in politics, or have social and economic changes undermined their political importance? This question is important to revisit, as globalization and economic reform have weakened many popular sector organizations in Latin America, reducing some to mere patronage machines. This article examines the case of the teachers’ union in Bogotá, Colombia to assess whether and how labor unions are able to promote the political activation of their members. Employing a multimethod research design that begins with a quantitative analysis of a survey of Colombian teachers, this study finds that union affiliation is associated with higher levels of motivation to vote. It then uses evidence from interviews to show how union advocacy and internal elections for leadership positions shape political behavior, contributing to civic engagement. This research engages with broader debates about democratic quality and political representation in contemporary Latin America.

Aging is the subject of various studies by the scientific community and monitoring by responsible institutions. The intensity of aging and the proportion of age groups among various communities differ due to different socio-economic conditions and characteristics. This article researches the impact of the war in Croatia 1991–1995 and postwar living conditions on the divergence of population aging in the ethnically heterogeneous Banija region. The first postwar census in 2001 recorded a population decline of 44.9% compared to the 1991 census. We analyze the effects of the war on changes in ethnic and age structure, as well as their interrelations. The quantitative and qualitative magnitude of these demographic changes in the inter-census period had a decisive influence on the correlation of age and ethnic structure. The article examines whether the relative share of Serbs or Croats in the total population of a settlement affects the average age of the settlement. The results confirmed that the Serbs are older than the Croats, and are in the phase of the most advanced demographic age. These changes raise the question of the demographic future and the biological viability of the Serbs, who were the majority in the region before the war.

In 1975, the world-famous novelist Yaşar Kemal (1923–2015) undertook a series of journalistic interviews with street children in Istanbul. The series, entitled “Children Are Human” (Çocuklar İnsandır), reflects the author's rebellious attitude as well as the revolutionary spirit of hope in the 1970s in Turkey. Kemal's ethnographic fieldwork with street children criticized the demotion of children to a less-than-human status when present among adults. He approached children's rights from a human rights angle, stressing the humanity of children and that children's rights are human rights. The methodological contribution of this research to the history of children and youth is its engagement with ethnography as historical source. His research provided children the opportunity to express their political subjectivities and their understanding of the major political questions of the time, specifically those of social justice, (in)equality, poverty, and ethnic violence encountered in their everyday interactions with politics in the country. Yaşar Kemal's fieldwork notes and transcribed interviews also bring to light immense injustices within an intersectional framework of age, class, ethnicity, and gender. The author emphasizes that children's political agency and their political protest is deeply rooted in their subordination and misery, but also in their dreams and hopes. Situating Yaşar Kemal's “Children Are Human” in the context of the 1970s in Turkey, I hope to contribute to childhood studies with regard to the political agency of children as well as to the history of public intellectuals and newspapers in Turkey and to progressive representations of urban marginalization.

Prioritarianism is a variant of utilitarianism. It differs from utilitarianism in that benefiting individuals matters more the worse off these individuals are. On this view, there are two standard ways of handling risky prospects: Ex-Post Prioritarianism adjusts for prioritizing the worse off in final outcomes and then values prospects by the expectation of the sum total of those adjusted values, whereas Ex-Ante Prioritarianism adjusts for prioritizing the worse off on each individual's expectation and then values prospects by the sum total of those adjusted expectations. A standard objection to Ex-Post Prioritarianism is that it violates Ex-Ante Pareto, that is, it prescribes choices that worsen the expectations for everyone. In this article, I argue that Ex-Ante Prioritarianism suffers from much the same problem: it violates a sequential version of Ex-Ante Pareto, that is, it prescribes sequences of choices that worsen the expectations for everyone.

John Lewis's civil rights activism in the 1960s often obscures the fact that he won elective office as a racially moderate politician. Scholars have long noted the efficacy of using deracialized, or racially transcendent, campaign strategies to get elected, despite normative concerns. These strategies were critical to electing Black governors, senators, and even President Obama. However, in the age of Black Lives Matter, some have questioned the continued usefulness of the strategy. Using Rep. Lewis's life as a guide, I examine the ways that some Black politicians continue to use deracialization, even in this racially charged social and political moment, and I explain how younger cohorts of Black politicians challenge this approach. Ultimately, I argue that while deracialization is a contested strategy, its efficacy has not diminished. Rather, Black politicians have expanded the boundaries of what constitutes racially transcendent politics to include consensus issues like voting rights, which while highly racialized, are not likely to induce an erosion of support among non-Black Democratic voters.

In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the logistical challenges and difficulties encountered by those responsible for the collection, preservation and safe transport of specimens from the field to the museum or laboratory. This article builds on this trend by looking beyond apparent successes to consider the practices and practicalities of shipboard travel and maritime and coastal collecting activities. The discussion focuses on the example of William Henry Harvey, who travelled to Australia in pursuit of cryptogams – non-flowering plants like mosses, lichens and algae – in 1853. In his private correspondence to family and friends, Harvey offered insights into the challenges and obstacles faced by all collectors in the period. His experiences were fundamentally shaped by the material culture, embodied knowledge and physical constraints he encountered on the way. On one level, shipboard and onshore collecting activities were facilitated by the connections forged by new technologies and Britain's global empire. But they also depended on specific contexts and relied on local agents and actors, as well as on the physical and technical facilities (and limitations) of those doing the collecting. The examples of Harvey and others shed light on the real, ‘lived’ experiences of individual collectors, the difficulties and challenges they encountered in amassing their collections, and the networks of people on which they relied.

The political history of medieval China is written primarily on the basis of official records produced at centers of political power by victors in the preceding trans-dynastic war. With the help of alternative sources, one can hope to challenge the triumphalist and teleological narrative imbedded in these records. In this article, I use documents preserved in the Dunhuang “library cave” to uncover a failed attempt to establish a regional state with imperial pretensions in Dunhuang immediately after the fall of the Tang. This kind of political regionalism seen in Dunhuang is also found in several other post-Tang states in Sichuan and Guangdong. My investigation of their similarities exposes the teleological nature of the conventional framework of “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms,” and demands that we rethink the political history of China after the fall of the Tang.

In 1722, Daniel Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year – a supposed account of the ‘great plague’ of 1665. It is commonly thought to be one of his most incisive pieces of ‘realist’ fiction. And, in our moment, one of his most prescient. The purpose of this paper is to revisit Defoe's Journal in order to stimulate reflection on our present experience of living through the ‘plague year’ of 2020. There is much, as we shall see, about governance during a plague that is resonant – but much also about ‘hearts melted into tears’, about suffering, how it is felt and how it is perceived. The purpose of the Journal, according to Defoe at least, was to inform ‘those who come after’, so that they might be better prepared, so that they would not make the same mistakes. We will see.

Police verification of domestic servants has become standard practice in many cities in contemporary India. However, the regularization of work, which brings domestic servants under protective labour laws, is still a work in progress. Examining a long timespan, this article shows how policing of the servant, through practices of identification and verification, came to be institutionalized. It looks at the history of registration within the larger mechanism of regulation that emerged for domestic servants in the late eighteenth century. However, the establishment of control over servants was not linear in its subsequent development; registration as a tool of control took on different meanings within the changing ecosystem of legal provisions. In the late eighteenth century, it was discussed as being directly embedded in the logic of master–servant regulation, a template that was borrowed from English law. In the late nineteenth century, it was increasingly seen as a proxy for formal means of regulation, although this viewpoint was not universally accepted. Charting this history of changing structures of inclusion and exclusion within the law, the article argues that overt policing of servants is a manifestation of the colonial legacy, in which the identity of the servant is fused with potential criminality.