This article examines how issues related to World War I were remembered and represented during the Single Party Era of the Turkish Republic (1923–1945), focusing on the political elite’s narrative strategies. The study situates the persistence of a positive perception of Unionism in contemporary Turkey within the historical remembrance shaped by the early Republic’s identity politics. Drawing on newspaper analyses from the 1930s and 1940s, the article reveals how narratives surrounding prominent Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) figures — such as Talat, Enver, and Cemal — evolved. Initially, the Kemalist regime distanced itself from the CUP by framing World War I (also referred to “the War” in this article) as the product of a few Unionist leaders’ recklessness while celebrating the War of Independence as the foundation of a new, victorious Turkish identity. However, by the 1930s, publications began to reinterpret and partially rehabilitate the CUP leaders’ reputations, emphasizing their dedication to state interests and leadership qualities.

In this article, I propose an account of episodic memory and episodic future-directed imagination for which I invent the term, ‘embodied constructivism’. Embodied constructivism, I claim, is a more sophisticated, enactivist version of Augustine of Hippo’s constructivist account of memory and expectation on which rest his epistemic claims concerning how God is known and remembered. However, embodied constructivism avoids metaphysical issues facing Augustine’s account by drawing on cutting-edge theories in philosophy of memory, studies in experimental psychology, and recent findings in cognitive neuroscience. Embodied constructivism is a synthesis of two contemporary theories of memory: an embodied theory of memory generation – specifically, autopoietic enactivism – with a constructivist model – specifically, simulationism. As embodied constructivism asserts, mentally travelling to the past to relive it in episodic memory and mentally travelling to the future to pre-live it in future-directed imagination are co-functional processes. In addition to preserving Augustine’s epistemic claims concerning how God is remembered and known, a further upshot of embodied constructivism is that it illustrates the importance of philosophy of science to theology in its reliance on a scientifically rigorous model of memory in defence of epistemological theology.

The history of work is marred by the fact that the meaning of “labour” or “work” changed with the arrival of modern society, making it difficult to draw comparisons across time. There has been a shift from understanding work as any activity that may secure continued living and well-being, to seeing it as paid, full-time, specialized employment. This transformation has obscured the work of some groups in society (notably women but also others) and work in the form of multiple employments (which often means multiple labour relations). The methods and sources presented in this Special Theme offer valuable tools for historians seeking to address and navigate these issues.

This paper examines the history of the ‘lower cavity’ of the gastrointestinal tract, a distinctive anatomical feature in Greco-Roman medicine that described a second stomach-like organ in the large intestine. It traces how a bipartite model of the digestive system emerged in fourth-century bce Greek medical and philosophical thought and persisted in the works of influential figures such as Galen, Vesalius, and Glisson, despite shifts in terminology, anatomical observations, and physiological theories. The study demonstrates that this understanding arose primarily from three complementary factors: a specific terminology that paired the stomach with a lower cavity, systematic animal dissections that revealed pronounced caeca in certain species, and emerging physiological theories that required separate bodily receptacles for digested food and residues. Through this case study, the paper illuminates how premodern anatomical knowledge was articulated by a constant negotiation between animal bodies, human bodies, and past textual authorities, facilitating the surprising longevity of ideas like the ‘lower cavity’ in the gastrointestinal tract.

This article takes up a philosophical examination of the Latter-day Saint theological conception of the eternal significance of sex. I first argue that the straightforward way of interpreting the theological claims about the eternal significance of sex appear to be incoherent. The main worry has to do with certain commitments Latter-day Saints take up with respect to the nature of disembodied spirits. Disembodied spirits don’t have bodies. As such they lack the characteristic features of embodied things. And sex is as bodily a feature as any we confront in the course of our lives. I will argue that these conceptual obstacles can be overcome by attending to distinctive aspects of the Latter-day Saint conception of divine creation. Doing so offers an interesting alternative way of conceptualizing the essences of premortal (disembodied) spirits. In particular, it motivates explicating their essences in terms of what Plantinga calls world-indexed properties. With the explication in hand, I show that not only are charges of incoherence avoided, but the new perspective gives a unified account of a variety of apparently disparate aspects of Latter-day Saint theology.

In reaction to revolutionary upheaval in the 1790s and 1800s, the British parliament at home and colonial legislatures in the Americas passed their first statutory provisions to govern migration and aliens as such. As this paper argues, in their sustained and varied uses, these “alien acts” were much more than about border and migration controls. In a period of fundamental restructuring of imperial rule and of social statuses within the colonies, they increasingly turned into flexible tools of imperial governance. Taking the British Caribbean in the 1820s and 1830s as a case, the paper examines how alien legislation was reused, and reinvented, in two crucial arenas of imperial reconfiguration: the push for political equality by free people of color and the abolition of the slave trade. By their emphasis on sweeping executive power, various actors on the ground but also in the metropole regarded alien acts as an appropriate legal tool to respond to, to avert or subvert what they regarded as challenges or legal complexities of the age of emancipation. In this way, the alien acts also became a central factor in the reconfiguration of British subjecthood—with far-reaching consequences that their creators and users could never fully anticipate or control.

The article analyses the Jewish militias that were established in Galicia during the fall of the Habsburg empire in 1918 and the creation of new nation-states. As public order collapsed and the region descended into violence, Jews throughout Galicia took up arms to protect and organize their communities and to take an active part in the transformation of the region. They mirrored the efforts of their non-Jewish neighbors, creating paramilitary forces that aimed to fill the vacuum left behind by the disintegrating imperial state. The militias were more than a means of self-defense. They actively participated in the establishment of the new states’ monopoly on violence but did so on their own terms—integration was only possible through separation. At the same time, the militias served a decidedly internal, Jewish purpose by replacing traditional leaderships and imposing discipline in the community, at times through universal conscription.

Exhibition trophies have become invisible to most people reading about and looking at images of the great world’s fairs. This is not surprising; trophies have fallen out of our awareness because they, and the criticisms they provoked, have received surprisingly little scholarly attention. This article reveals not only this largely overlooked form, but also just how much cultural work they were doing and why so many people found them disturbing. Exhibition trophies became a solution to the nineteenth-century design problem of representing progress, imperial power, extractive superabundance, control of the natural world, and industrial capacity. Nineteenth-century exhibitors and collectors made trophies out of a wide array of commodities, animals, raw materials, manufactured goods, weapons, and “primitive” objects. But by carrying with them ancient connotations of high-minded victory and violence, exhibition trophies also inspired criticisms that got to the heart of modern forms of conquest. Divisive in the middle of the nineteenth century, trophies were ubiquitous by the turn of the twentieth. Meanwhile a new, rival way of displaying imperial power emerged that challenged ethnographic trophies in particular: the new science of anthropology. This article begins to recover this lost form and its implications—from disquiet to the acceptance of abundance (even overabundance) as a collective goal.

Although the social democrats fundamentally opposed the political order of the German Empire, they participated in parliament from the beginning. The party not only sat on the parliamentary benches, but its representatives also proved to be committed parliamentarians. Using a combination of parliamentary, party, and movement sources, this article shows that social democrats’ parliamentary participation followed two lines of reasoning. First, the party admitted that parliamentary participation served publicity purposes. In fact, social democrats took the Reichstag stage to present their political project to the masses. Second, the party was less willing to admit that parliament fitted perfectly into the associational tradition of working-class culture. Orderly and fair debate had been the norm of social democratic activism long before the party was founded. It is precisely this last aspect that provides an important and previously overlooked explanation for the social democrats’ surprising devotion to a political system they so deeply detested.

This article develops the problem of divine domination. Classical theism describes God as essentially all-powerful, sovereign, personal, omnipresent, and a se. If such a being exists, then he dominates humans in virtue of his essential properties. Since dominative relationships are unjust, the divine-human relationship is unjust. I reject solutions to this problem that appeal to humanity’s childlikeness or divine goodness, justice, or greatness. I conclude by gesturing towards what a solution to the problem might require.

Ethno-religious nationalism has been an integral part of the Georgian identity since the country regained independence. Since the early 2000s, Georgia has had a constitutionally enshrined pro-European foreign policy, which has been reflected in a strong identification with Europe, its culture, and values. Survey data show that Georgians prefer European and Christian ethnic outgroups to Asian and Muslim ones. These factors could have explained the rise of the far right in Georgia, had Georgia experienced a wave of refugees comparable to EU states in mid-2010s. However, only few people fled from the Syrian civil war to Georgia. Nevertheless, in and around 2016, various far-right groups with a strong anti-liberal ideology appeared in the Georgian public sphere. In 2017, a far-right rally was organized, demanding that the rights of Turkish, Iranian, and Arab business owners and citizens be restricted in Georgia. This was accompanied by violent incidents involving physical abuse and property damage of non-white foreigners. The sudden rise of the far-right political organizations in Georgia gives rise to various questions: Do the far-right ideas have grassroots origins, or was the activation of the far right a top-down process? Which domestic and external factors could have contributed to these developments?

This special issue stems from the 2022 Association for the Study of Modern Italy conference, reflecting on key turning points in modern Italian history through the lens of ‘small histories’. Drawing on contemporary international historiography and the contributions in the present volume, this introduction discusses how microhistorical, biographical and related approaches may challenge or refine dominant interpretations in that they abstract from ‘grand narratives’ to instead highlight dynamics and actors that may appear to be on the margins of major historical processes. The studies in this special issue engage in particular with the intersections of identity, space and memory. Themes such as Fascism, the reshaping of Italian identity through cultural policies and the creation of a collective memory, colonialism and postcolonialism, migration and evolving gender roles are explored in diverse contexts from interwar South Tyrol through to contemporary Palermo. Together, these ‘small histories’ demonstrate the methodological and interpretative richness of focused studies in tracing Italy’s transformation across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They challenge binaries such as centre–periphery and local–global, while shedding new light on the relation between individual experiences and the creation of shared spaces, memories and identities.