This article critically re-assesses Conor Cruise O'Brien's attitude to Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1977. It argues that O'Brien's most significant contribution to public life was the ability to deconstruct many aspects of Irish nationalism, specifically his rejection of the Irish state's irredentist claim over Northern Ireland. In doing so, it contends that O'Brien was one of the most important, and outspoken, champions of so-called ‘revisionist nationalism’ of his generation. The article examines three themes in relation to O'Brien's attitude to Northern Ireland: his attack on the Irish state's anti-partitionism; his rejection of Irish republican terrorism; and his support for the ‘principle of consent’ argument. The article illustrates that O'Brien was criticised in nationalist circles and accused of committing political heresy. Indeed, his willingness to challenge the attitude of most mainstream Irish politicians on Northern Ireland invariably left him an isolated figure, even among his own Labour Party comrades. Writing in his Memoir, O'Brien neatly summed up the difficult position in which he found himself: ‘I was altogether out of tune with my colleagues over Northern Ireland’.

“The Contradictions of Reform” analyses the complications of reform of legislation regulating punishment for women convicted of infanticide in Connecticut between 1790 and 1860, within the context of broader social, cultural, and legal understandings of the crime within the US. These changes are investigated through a close reading of petitions for clemency to Connecticut's General Assembly in which women convicted of the crime petitioned the state legislature seeking reduced sentences. The article argues that although the nineteenth century opened with legislation that promised death to all women convicted of infanticide, in practice courts and juries never imposed the penalty. Instead, juries proved reluctant to convict and/or death sentences were not imposed, even if juries found women guilty. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Connecticut Assembly reformed existing infanticide law in response to a number of social debates about the merits of the death penalty, particularly for women. The article argues, however, that these reforms counter-intuitively resulted in less favorable outcomes for those convicted of the crime, as they found themselves facing lengthy prison sentences. Such an outcome was unlikely in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The article, therefore, demonstrates, the “contradictions of reform.”

This contribution discusses the early years of Italian immigration in the uplands of southern Brazil, known as the Serra Gaucha (1875–1915). Tracing back early agrarian practices and deforestation techniques of the early settlement years, we investigate the consolidation of this human group in the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. In addition, analysing the development of both wood logging and winemaking industries in the region, the essay frames the identitarian construction of this social group, looking at the intersection between cultural traditions from the homeland, socioeconomic drives and local environmental factors. This analysis builds upon primary sources from both Brazilian and Italian institutions, local newspapers, and scholarly publications on environmental history, as well as Brazilian and Italian migration history.

The growth in Catholic pilgrimage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is widely acknowledged, but little attention has been paid to how and why many of the mass pilgrimages of the era began. This article will assess the contribution made by the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom to the growth of Catholic pilgrimage. After the Guild’s foundation in 1887, its leadership revived or restored pilgrimages to pre- and post-Reformation sites, and coordinated the movement of thousands of pilgrims across the country. This article offers an examination of how and why Guild leaders chose particular locations in the context of Marian Revivalism, papal interest in the English martyrs, defence of the Catholic faith, and late-nineteenth century medievalism. It argues that the Guild was pivotal in establishing some of England’s most famous post-Reformation pilgrimages. In doing so, it situates the work of the Guild in late nineteenth and early twentieth century religiosity, and demonstrates the pivotal nature of its work in establishing, developing, organising, and promoting some of the most important post-Reformation Catholic pilgrimages in Britain.

This article deals with the impact that Italian migrants, both individually and as a community, had on the rural and urban environment of Kerch, in Eastern Crimea (Russian Empire), during the1820s and 1920s. Occupying a strategic position in the Black Sea for Russia's geopolitics and for the whole European commercial system, this territory's transformation was activated by Russia's imperial re-visioning of the Crimea and by spontaneous foreign immigration. Within this context, the Italian community's contribution to the transformation of the local environment had an important economic impact, relevant also on a wider scale. Some of these changes would have a long-lasting effect but none of them would ever be officially recognised. The aim of this article is to shed light on these processes.

Ego-documents let us hear the voices of those who have been little heard in historiography. Such documents, especially when narrative in nature, provide insight into historical events and periods by illustrating how individuals—in correspondence with their own (in)actions, (in)decisions, and (mis)convictions as well as emotions, fears, aspirations, and frustrations—experienced and perceived these historical phenomena from a contemporary personal viewpoint. Since the revival of narrative historiography in the 1980s, partly in response to the Annales school, such documents have been increasingly recognized and employed as important historical sources. Nonetheless, the terminology for designating the generic nature and encompassing the diversity of such sources, as well as the methodology for historicizing them, remain under debate.

As I write this essay, the forty-fourth US President Barack Obama's autobiography titled A Promised Land is the best-selling book in Germany, in both the German and the English editions. This is his second autobiographical work, following Dreams from My Father in 1995. Given Obama's prominent place in our modern political culture, this is hardly surprising, but today's publishers seem to have no specific criteria for deciding whose life and career are worthy of an autobiography. Any moderately successful individual from any walk of life can publish an autobiography today. The popularity of the genre is certainly related to the extreme glorification of individual and personal success in modern society, but it also shapes how we view premodern self-narratives: as a window into an intellectual's individuality and Bildung. This essay questions this convention and explores the opportunities that self-narratives embedded in literary and narrative sources present to historians of 15th-century Iran and Central Asia. I will argue that autobiographies and self-narratives are much more than tools for refashioning the self in the early modern period. They open a window to a much wider network of weak ties and acquaintances, a closer scrutiny of which may allow us to reconstruct transregional networks, understand the connectedness of these intellectual networks, and delineate their collective identities in the early modern period. In my discussion I will focus on a selection of 15th-century texts, most prominently the self-narratives of the Timurid intellectual Saʾin al-Dīn Turka (d. 1432).