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).

Veronica L., a woman with an intellectual disability, died of starvation in 1961 while the recipient of a Disabled Person's Maintenance Allowance (D.P.M.A.) from the Dublin Health Authority. Her death occured after a prolonged period of deficient care, a neglect that was exacerbated by flaws in statutory welfare. During the preceding decade the state intervened in disability provision to an unprecedented degree through the expansion of institutional care and social welfare reform. Yet, these services remained characterised by a chronic pressure on resources and a reluctance to intervene in potentially neglectful family situations, which allowed cases of failing care to go unaddressed. Drawing on contemporary documents, in particular the depositions collected for the coroner's court inquest into Veronica's death, this article offers an insight into the exigencies underlying the later life of one woman with an intellectual disability. In doing so, it explores the way in which this singular case provides a distinctive avenue for better understanding the experiences of the intellectually disabled more broadly, including the nature of community care and the operation of statutory welfare during the mid twentieth century.

Gienapp's critical move is to shift our attention from semantics to ontology. What is the Constitution? How was it conceived to exist in 1787, and how has that conception changed over time? These questions must be squarely addressed, he insists, before asking what the Constitution means. Does this whole text-focused enterprise rest on a mistake? Drawing on a wealth of primary sources and modern scholarship, Gienapp makes a strong and interesting case that it does. Boiled down, his main argument is that the founders were predominantly natural lawyers, and thus conceived of law quite differently than most originalists typically do.

This article concerns the place of late Ottoman Jews in Palestine on the eve of the 1948 War. It focuses on Israel Ben-Zeʾev (Wolfensohn), a Jerusalem-born educator and Nahda intellectual who led a movement of self-identified “native” Jews, including both “Old Yishuv” Ashkenazim and Sephardim, to combat their marginalization by the Zionist institutions. I examine his lifetime struggle to advance the study of Arabic and “Arab Jews” (yahud ʿarab) under early Islam by creating institutions of knowledge production and educational programs modeled on those he knew from his early academic career in Cairo. It was in the context of these struggles that demands for separate political representation for native Jews and for a specialized field of Arab Jewish studies coalesced as part of a broader project of a shared Arab-Jewish cultural modernization. They culminated in 1948, when Ben-Zeʾev finally realized his Arabic library project, ironically using looted Palestinian books, only to see its destruction four years later by Zionist leaders and Hebrew University professors.