This article offers the first detailed history of the children's playground in Britain in the early twentieth century. Despite being a common feature of towns and cities, the playground has rarely been examined by historians. In response, the article charts how changing conceptions of childhood, alternative visions of the city, technological innovation and shifting ideas about health and exercise shaped both the imagined function and material form of the playground ideal. Making visible the historical assumptions hidden in playground swings and slides helps to contextualize both existing scholarship on the mid-twentieth-century adventure playground and present-day efforts to create more equitable urban environments.

The discovery of low stone tables at Magdala and a few other sites in the Galilee and Golan allows us to examine, for the first time, this liturgical piece of furniture used by several communities in the late Second Temple period and the first centuries of the Common Era. This article defines the purpose of these stone tables based on analysis of the archaeological finds and examination of the literary sources associated with the Torah-reading ceremony conducted in the synagogues of ancient Palestine. The reading of the Torah throughout this long period was conducted standing with the open Torah scroll held in raised hands. Our study demonstrates that this table was not intended to be used for reading the Torah, but rather functioned as a low stand upon which the scroll was placed before the Torah-reading ceremony, during the breaks between the readers, and after completion of the ceremony.

The sociodemographic typology of sign languages classifies them based on the characteristics and configurations of their users. When considering homesign and sign languages in rural areas, this typology needs further refinement. Here, I present new concepts to enable this. The study is based on fieldwork with twelve deaf people in Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea, and review of studies worldwide. Sign language communities can be mapped as sign networks. Using this mapping, I propose a new typological category for languages with one central deaf user and many fluent hearing signers: nucleated network sign language. I use sign base analysis to determine lexical consistency between unconnected deaf signers in Western Highlands. The high level of consistency among largely unconnected deaf people is explained by a regional sign network connecting deaf and hearing signers. This research emphasises the role of both deaf and hearing signers in sign language emergence and maintenance. (Sign languages, social networks, sign networks, typology, homesign, rural sign languages, Papua New Guinea)*

On 23 July 2018, when the villagers gathered around the porch to wrap up the day with a good chat, one of the five auxiliary dams of the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy hydropower dam in Attapeu province, the southeastern state of Laos, collapsed. Four days before the collapse, reports of cracks and subsidence started to come through. It should have been enough to prompt evacuation warning issuance by the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy Power Co. Ltd (PNPC), a consortium of South Korean companies SK Engineering and Construction (SK E&C) and Korea Western Power Company (KOWEPO), Thailand-based RATCH Group, and Lao Holding State Enterprise (LHSE). PNPC has a Concession Agreement with the Laos government ‘to plan, design, finance, construct, own, operate and maintain’ the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy hydropower dam. The warning was issued, but it came too late.

After Cage and Tudor visited Japan in 1962, the term ‘Cage Shock’ circulated widely among the Japanese public. My interviews with Japanese composers suggest that the term ‘Cage Shock’ oversimplifies the reception of Cage's debut in Japan. Composer Yūji Takahashi stated that Cage would have met Japanese audiences well prepared for his visit by musical trends present in Japan as early as the late 1940s. Building on the statement that the Japanese avant-garde was thriving before Cage visited Japan in 1962, this article aims to deconstruct the term ‘Cage Shock’ by restoring the complexity of the reception of Cage in Japan and by analysing the reasons why critics adopted the term ‘Cage Shock’. I argue that ‘Cage Shock’ has functioned more as a media buzzword that sensationalizes the story of Cage's impact on Japan than as an objective description of Japanese reaction to Cage.

In Qin and Han times, the establishment of a complex legal system that applied to every member of the empire brought about an unprecedented transformation of the husband–wife relationship, changing it from a bond largely determined by custom, ritual, and family concerns to one regulated by law. Laws recorded in the Zhangjiashan bamboo legal texts reveal that women's legal status in Qin and Han times was far higher and allowed for greater autonomy than previously imagined. Their increased legal standing may be traced to reduced household size, a policy set to counteract the mounting death toll and social chaos that followed Qin expansion and the transition from Qin to Han rule. I analyze exemplary cases to demonstrate how the small family system in conjunction with a legal order that empowered women as household heads created a new space for widows and wives to exercise their autonomy.

Much of our knowledge of women and warfare in medieval China comes from biographical/narrative genres of a retrospective nature. This article shifts the focus to an underutilized corpus: imperial documents conferring titles and rewards on women who commanded troops. I examine how the court described these women when it came to honor them, or even when it sought their support through real-time negotiation. In these cases, the recognition of women's achievements was conditioned not only by deep cultural/literary traditions but also by immediate political/military goals of the regime. As a result of the concrete political need to engage with female commanders, medieval Chinese courts deployed different approaches to eulogize them. My investigation shows that closer dialogue between gender studies and official document studies will lead to a more dynamic picture of how a patriarchal regime actually functioned in premodern China.

Jelena Subotić’s book is an important contribution to memory studies scholarship because it shows how the mechanism of memory appropriation connects state-led remembrance practices with the processes of national identity formation. Through the comparative analysis of Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, Subotić argues that Holocaust remembrance in these states is less about remembering the Holocaust – or acknowledging the states’ own responsibilities for the forced displacement and mass killing of the Jewish population on their territories – and more about the political use of the memory of the Holocaust in the context of the postcommunist transition and national identity insecurities. Yellow Star, Red Star, and particularly its chapters on Serbia and Croatia, nicely complement the existing literature – such as the work of Keith Brown, Siniša Malešević, Vjekoslav Perica, Dejan Jović, Emil Kerenji, Vjeran Pavlaković, Jelena Đureinović, Tamara Banjeglav, and Ana Ljubojević, among others – analyzing linkages between nationalism and state-sponsored memorialization practices in the post-Yugoslav states.

In Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine, Ned Dobos highlights several negative consequences the preparation for war has for individuals and states. But he misses what I consider perhaps the most significant consequence of military mobilization for states, especially democracies: how war and the preparation for it affect deliberative politics. While many argue that all states, including democracies, require strong militaries—and there is some evidence that long wars can build democracies and states—I focus on the other effects of militarization and war on democratic states. War and militarism are antipodal to democracy and undermine it. Their normative bases are conflicting—democracy takes force off the table, whereas force is legitimate in war. Thus, while militarism and militarization can sometimes yield liberalization and the expansion of civil rights, they are arguably more likely to undermine democratic norms and practices.