Historic monuments were one of the vehicles of modern nation building in the nineteenth century. Their role could turn out to be even more exposed in an ethnically mixed territory of central and central-eastern Europe. For the turn of the twentieth-century Polish inhabitants of the capital of the Austrian crown land of Galicia, urban secular historic architecture proved to be such a key tool. The Old Town of Lviv, in itself witness of a centuries-old multi-ethnic and multi-cultural tradition, became the basis for a modern nation-building project, in which local and regional Polish character administrative bodies and social institutions were involved. The project relied on the strengthening of national identity among Lviv's inhabitants by means of securing the ‘Polish character’ of the Old Town, which amounted to reinventing it anew.

This article deals with marriage as mobilized by the Ethiopian Empire as part of its consolidation processes after 1941. It particularly concentrates on post-liberation anxiety and how the Ethiopian Empire envisioned tackling this disquiet by reforming marriage. Within the context of (re)building the empire, policies, laws, and discourses around monogamous marriage instilled normative ideas to produce the imperial subjects — procreative and productive — that a modernizing empire required. Sex was articulated within the confines of a heterosexual union, not only as a legitimate act but also as a responsibility of couples who were accountable for the consolidation of the empire. Sexual relations out of marriage were condemned as a source of degeneracy and the ensuing danger that confronted the empire. New laws were introduced to legislate sex to tackle the unease the empire felt about non-normative sex and associated pleasure(s). What started out as a battle against the Italian legacy continued more forcefully in the 1950s and 1960s with the rise of ‘new problems’ that educated young women and men posed. The article relies on a range of sources such as policy, legal, religious, and travel documents; newspapers; and novels, as well as self-help books produced between the 1940s and 1960s.

This article uses Czechoslovakia as an example of the process of transition following the end of the First World War and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. It analyzes the military context of the transition itself, showing how difficult, violent, and prolonged a process it was, in contrast to the traditional assumption of a quickly emergent successor state built on the ethnic-based enthusiasm of its Czech-speaking population. In the second part, it goes on to analyze the memory of the transition and the position it came to hold in the overall narrative of this period of the interwar years, with specific attention given to the way Czech-speaking veterans of Austro-Hungarian service tried to retell the story of the transition, and why their proposed narratives ill-fitted the official discourse of the war as the “national struggle for independence” of Czechoslovakia.

Yod-coalescence involving alveolar consonants before Late Modern English /uː/ from earlier /iu > juː/ is still variable and diffusing in Present-day English. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives both (/tj dj/) and (/ʧ ʤ/) British English pronunciations for tune (/tjuːn/, /tʃuːn/), mature (/mǝˈtjʊǝ/, /mǝˈʧʊǝ/), duke (/djuːk/, /dʒuːk/) and endure (/ᵻnˈdjʊə/, /ɛnˈdjʊə/, /ᵻnˈdʒʊə/, /ɛnˈdʒʊə/, /ᵻnˈdjɔː/, /ɛnˈdjɔː/, /ᵻnˈdʒɔː/, /ɛnˈdʒɔː/). Extensive variability in yod-coalescence and yod-dropping is not recent in origin, and we can already detect relevant patterns in the eighteenth century from the evidence of a range of pronouncing dictionaries. Beal (1996, 1999) notes a tendency for northern English and Scottish authors to be more conservative with regard to yod-coalescence. She concludes that we require ‘a comprehensive survey of the many pronouncing dictionaries and other works on pronunciation’ (1996: 379) to gain more insight into the historical variation patterns underlying Present-day English.

This article presents some results from such a ‘comprehensive survey’: the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP). Transcriptions of all relevant words located are compared across a range of eighteenth-century sources in order to determine the chronology of yod-coalescence and yod-dropping as well as internal (e.g. stress, phoneme type, presence of a following /r/) and external (e.g. prescriptive, geographical, social) motivations for these developments.

Hypnosis used sound and musico-dramatic methods to effect previously unanticipated kinds of changes in body and psyche, showing a ‘sonic turn’ in this new kind of medicine. For Franz Anton Mesmer, musical techniques and instruments were essential elements of his theory and practice, not merely adjuncts, as previous research has tended to assume. The musical structures of the Classical style provided Mesmer with patterns for artificially inducing and regulating his patients’ crises, whose periodicity medicine previously considered fixed and unchangeable. Mesmer executed these therapeutic strategies using the recently invented glass harmonica. From the Marquis de Puységur to Jean-Martin Charcot, Mesmer's successors turned their attention to somnambulism and catalepsy, sleep-like states often induced by the sound of a tam-tam, an Asian gong new to Western music. The contrast between harmonica and tam-tam reflects the passage in musical techniques from modulating dramatic crises to obliterating consciousness itself. Even considered as suggestion, hypnosis followed processes of intensification and dramatization characteristic of Classical and Romantic music.

During the Cold War, cities were seen as likely targets of modern total warfare and systems of civil defence were created to protect cities and their inhabitants. Yet existing civil defence histories have focused little on the specifically urban aspect, and urban historians likewise have paid civil defence little attention. Using Aarhus, Denmark, as a case-study, this article examines civil defence through planning, practices and materiality in a specific urban landscape. By analysing how civil defence was organized, performed and built in Denmark, the article sheds light on the mutual imbrication of urban planning, geography and materiality and local civil defence. I argue that through biopolitics, local civil defence authorities imagineered an idealized survivalist community of city dwellers who would pull together to protect and save their city and that this contributed to taming an incomprehensible, global, nuclear catastrophe into a manageable, localized, urban calamity.

The development of low vowels in the history of English is one which shows continuous movement, usually upwards along earlier back and later front trajectories. In addition, low vowels have been subject to lengthening processes which have compensated for the loss of earlier instances of long low vowels. Shifts along a horizontal axis, from low front to low back, can also be discerned throughout the history of English. The present study begins by examining the situation in late eighteenth-century English, using the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database and the works of various prescriptivist writers, to determine the outset for later developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also scrutinises realisations of low vowels in these varieties in order to offer a possible chronology for the overall development of low vowels in the past two centuries.

This article explores some aspects of the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision on Nevsun Resources v Araya in the light of its exposition on the act of state doctrine and application of core human rights as an integral aspect of international customary law and common law. It examines the Nevsun decision in the context of recent statutory developments in France and the Netherlands, the promised law reform in the European Union, and the proposed business and human rights treaty. I argue that it is high time to abandon the doctrinal fossil that human rights obligations do not apply to corporate governance and operations. It is hoped that COVID-19 contexts, and a post-pandemic world, will expeditiously result in the willing adoption of a treaty on business and human rights.

This essay explores how the term ‘girl,’ or 少女 (sonyŏ), in 1930s colonial Korean society simultaneously created and resisted homogeneity. We analyze the different contexts and cultural forces that shaped the term ‘girl’ in colonial Korea in order to illustrate some phases of the relationships that historical girls of colonial Korea had with their nation and state, the nation, that is, to which they thought they belonged at births and the state for which they were mobilized while they were systematically otherized. In our examination, we scrutinize the ways in which the subjectivities of colonial girls were ideologically forged through educational and institutional interventions and cultural interpellation. The first section discusses the concept of the girl in colonial Korea. The second part analyzes the various ideological functions that school textbooks played in gender-specific inculcation of colonial state ideals. We then read the ways The Chosŏn Ilbo (Chosŏn Daily) used the term the ‘girl’ in the 1930s, the period when the conceptual distinction between children and adults was further solidified, and the call on children was gender-specific in public. We finally elucidate the colonial processes of which girls of colonial Korea became part, albeit unknowingly.

The early twentieth century witnessed some of the worst mining disasters the UK has ever seen. Towns and cities leapt to the aid of bereaved families, raising tens of thousands of pounds in aid. Yet, while the effects of disaster funds on the locality in which they were administered have been the focus of scholarly work, little attention has been given to how these funds were created in constituencies outside of the disaster zone. The Barry Urban District Council (UDC) responded to the call for help after the Senghenydd (1913) and Gresford (1934) disasters, opening relief funds to aid the affected. The funds blurred the line between charity and local government, with the Barry UDC reliant on functions of civic society to aid its philanthropic turn. Their reaction offers insights into the charitable role of UDCs, reflecting on how they used these opportunities to further civic activity.

This study aims to understand the emotional labour and relationship building in connection to the expected mining industry in Greenland. Greenland mining is often portrayed as something that could create an economic basis for national independence which makes politicians curious about what a potential “partnership” could make possible. Envisioning future relationships (in debates about mining in Greenland) also set the framework for reinterpretation and redefinition of the past, to give meaning to promised new development; hence, this kind of future-making tends to be contested. The analysis centres around stories of what could be (if Greenland really was a place of mining), and the theoretical framework makes use of Ahmed’s and Wetherell’s interpretations of affective economies. Thus the study discusses emotional labour with a special focus on partnership, emotions and filtration, while visiting affective scenes and sites related to the mining of Greenland’s minerals. Greenland’s current position as a state in formation, while still reconciling with experiences from the past, affects relationship building, the openness to flirtation, and sometimes creates conflicts and hieratical structures between the potential partners to be.

Recent research has suggested that two linguistic processes are displacing Cockney: the emergence of Multicultural London English (MLE) in inner London and dialect levelling (e.g. Kerswill & Williams 2005). This study investigates firstly whether Cockney phonetic features have ‘moved East’ to Essex (Fox 2015), and secondly the features’ indexicality in relation to place and identity. Fifty-four participants from Debden, an outpost of the Cockney Diaspora, completed a sociolinguistic interview. Vowel measurements were made from a wordlist and passage, and quantitative attitudinal and qualitative data were extracted from a questionnaire and interviews. Overall, changes in identity as a result of social change exceeded linguistic changes, and linguistic labels were not interpreted uniformly across the community. Whilst Cockney variants were largely maintained in young speakers, they were transposed onto an ‘Essex’ accent. Furthermore, some young women but no young men considered themselves Cockney, likely due to the matrifocal nature of Cockney. (Cockney, phonetic variation and change, dialect levelling, identity, indexicality, gender)

This article accomplishes two things. First, it explores and defends Kierkegaard's distinctive solution to the Problem of Total Devotion, a problem which has been helpfully identified by Robert Adams. Second, it extends that solution by advancing an interpretation of the command to do all things to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31) according to which we are being commanded to intentionally make every one of our actions such that it simultaneously counts as a divine action: in other words, to act intentionally in all things such that it is God who acts through us.

In recent decades a large amount of scholarship has been devoted to the task of explaining the ways in which European powers claimed possession of indigenous people's territories across the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This research has emphasised the role of the law in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. But more work is required to establish the precise roles that the law played in the claiming of land and to measure its importance relative to other factors. In this paper I consider one British colony, South Australia, in order to investigate the changes that occurred in the roles that the law performed over time in the claiming of the indigenous people's lands, and to assess the importance of these relative to the roles played by historical, moral, political, psychological and material factors. I conclude that in this instance at least the role that the law played in the claiming of possession was rather different than that suggested by numerous studies of the claiming of possession as well as much less significant.