Many Germans defended local time well beyond 1893, when Germany adopted a time standard bearing on the life of the entire nation. Yet the defining feature of Germany's temporal landscape was its multilayered nature, with North and South adopting different temporal regimes and undergoing different experiences. Focusing on the spread of (railway-induced) standard time and the responses it provoked, this article offers an investigation of German time culture in the nineteenth century. Out of curiosity and because their lives depended on it, Germans took an interest in obtaining the right time from the frequently contradictory horological landscapes they inhabited. Yet their shared curiosity did not breed conformity. The inspectors of the station clocks concerned with accuracy and synchronicity; the townsfolk in southern Germany who fast-forwarded their favorite public clock in order to get to the station in time; the Prussian scientists and villagers who opposed railway time becoming public time—they all, in their own way, contributed to putting time back in its place.

The theories and evidence about relationships between democracy and social spending in Latin America are highly contested. A recent study shows that collective protest by organized labor effectively increases social security and welfare spending, whereas mass protest does not have comparable effects on human capital spending in Latin American democracies. This article reexamines the analysis and demonstrates that organized labor alone cannot sway democratic governments. Labor strikes require the synchronizing effect of mass protest to obtain government concessions. Only through concurrent episodes of mass protest can organized labor overcome the numerical disadvantage of pressing democratic government for social welfare spending. In understanding the relationship between labor protests and social welfare spending through the lens of insider-outsider dichotomy, it is critical to consider the synchronizing effect of mass protests. The findings remain robust with alternative measures of democracy and various model specifications.

The discussion of the hand-made and hand-written cookbook of Ruth Bratu, who was evacuated from Prague in a Kindertransport in 1939, leads to a wide-ranging exploration of what we expect and what we can know about the cookbook. It discusses its recipes as well as Ruth Bratu's use of the cookbook's pages for handwritten notes about the 1941/42 political gatherings of exiles of the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party in the Czechoslovak Republic in London. Above all, it is a reflection on Alltagsgeschichte, the use of a single document as a vehicle of historical interpretation, and not least the sensory recognition that this cookbook evoked for the author.

Yair Mintzker's book on Jew Süss raises a series of provocative questions about German history and history itself, which this forum aims to address. Specifically, it presents four reflections on Mintzker's book that cover the following range of topics: Jay Howard Geller situates Mintzker's work within the historiography on Jewish biographies and antisemitic trials; Sarah Maza explores whether Mintzker pursues the venerable task of getting to the “truth” of who Joseph Oppeinhemer was, despite his claims to the contrary; Jesse Spohnholz considers Mintzker's book as a model of microhistory; and my essay takes a broader approach by confronting the central issue of self-interest in history.

By retracing the history of the Protestant journal Eckart, this article examines a theological forum in which supporters and opponents of the Nazi movement came into direct contact. Specifically, the article evaluates political ambiguities among religious authors, who had openly rejected Nazism from the 1920s onward but would feel compelled by theological considerations to remain loyal to the regime after 1933. Analyzing contemporary discussions of the Protestant Two Kingdoms Doctrine, for example, puts historiographical distinctions between “resistance” and “collaboration” into question. This study shows that Protestant intellectuals were able to voice a limited degree of public criticism until World War II. Their criticism, however, was often so imbued with nationalism and ideals of loyalty that it effectively helped stabilize the Nazi regime. In Eckart, even critics engaged deeply with völkisch and anti-Semitic ideology. Finally, this article also shows how these authors perpetuated nationalist ideas in West Germany after 1945.

Climate change has rapidly expanded as a key topic of research across disciplines, but it has remained virtually untouched in nationalism studies. Climate change is a boundless, uncontainable phenomenon that ignores class, geographic, and ethnonational boundaries. As such, it can hardly be comprehended within the limits of a nationalist world vision. This article reassesses this intuition by focusing on the situational and adaptive plasticity of nationalism, characterized by its notorious Janus-faced adaptability. I first identify and address a methodological stumbling block that precludes scholars in some areas of the humanities and social sciences—specifically nationalism studies—from conceptualizing and grappling with this unfolding reality. Second, I advance a typology that can work as a conceptual grid for studying similar problems that emerge at the intersection of environmental politics, climate change, and nationalism studies. I suggest two ways in which the nation and national narratives have been and are being mobilized to make sense of, contrast, reject, and incorporate new life-changing trends. I identify these, respectively, under the umbrella terms resource nationalism and green nationalism. I conclude by emphasizing the continuing relevance of nationalism in plans for ongoing global energy transitions.

The informal sector challenges economic growth and hinders the abatement of income disparities in developing countries. This study argues that a weak and poorly governed welfare state can cause the informal sector to increase when individuals use it as an exit option from an unsatisfying welfare system. The article explores how the welfare state’s benefit structure and citizens’ trust in institutions to deliver public goods affect the likelihood of informality. A logistic hierarchical model, based on cross-sectional survey data from Latin America and the Caribbean and descriptive panel data from Brazil, is used to test the hypothesis. Findings reveal that social policy discontent, low trust, an elitist distribution of welfare benefits, and dysfunctional institutions increase the likelihood of being informally employed. However, workers with greater agency—the better-educated—seem notably less likely to informalize when social policy benefits are targeted toward their own socioeconomic group.

Once upon a time, pluralist (Dahl 1961) and modernization theories (Lipset 1959) described liberal democracy as a political regime that tended to exclude violence, insurgency, and corruption. A few decades later, Francis Fukuyama (1992) argued that in the long run, liberal democracy would triumph over other political alternatives, and about the same time Samuel Huntington (1991) revealed a massive wave of democratization (or redemocratization) in different parts of the world.

Conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) have emerged as an important social welfare innovation across the Global South in the last two decades. That poor mothers are typically the primary recipients of the grants renders easy, but not necessarily correct, the notion that CCTs empower women. This article assesses the relationship between the world’s largest CCT, Brazil’s Bolsa Família, and women’s empowerment. To systematize and interpret existing research, including our own, it puts forth a three-part framework that examines the program’s effects on economic independence, physical health, and psychosocial well-being. Findings suggest that women experience some improved status along all three dimensions, but that improvements are far from universal. A core conclusion is that the broader institutional context in which the Bolsa Família is embedded—that is, ancillary services in health and social assistance—is crucial for conditioning the degree of empowerment obtained.

Among the most prominent prehistoric features in the boreal forests of northern Sweden are trapping pits or pitfalls used for hunting elk and/or reindeer. Even if often ascribed to the Viking Age and its trade in furs and other animal products, the chronology of these features has long been a matter of debate. In this article, a database of 370 dated radiocarbon samples from excavated pitfalls has been compiled and analysed using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) modelling to create the most elaborate chronology of Swedish trapping pit systems so far. The analysis shows that the most intensive period of construction of trapping pits was in the centuries before the Viking period. This challenges previous interpretations of Viking Age resource exploitation but is in line with several other recently published studies concerned with resource exploitation, non-agrarian production, and trade connecting northern Scandinavia with inter-regional trade networks.

Never originated as a temporal adverb expressing universal quantification over time (‘Type 1’, e.g. he’s never been to Paris). As Lucas & Willis (2012) report, it has developed non-quantificational meanings equivalent to didn’t, starting with the ‘Type 2’ use which depicts an event that could have occurred in a specific ‘window of opportunity’ (e.g. she waited but he never arrived). Subsequently, a non-standard ‘Type 3’ use developed, where never can be used with other predicates (e.g. I never won that competition yesterday). To what extent does variation in the use of never in present-day English reflect the proposed historical development of the form? This study addresses this question by integrating syntactic theory into a quantitative variationist approach, analysing never vs. didn’t in Type 2 and Type 3 contexts using speech corpora from three Northern British communities. The results show how syntactic–semantic constraints on never in Type 2 contexts persist in its newer, Type 3 uses, e.g. it is used at higher rates in achievement predicates. While Type 2 contexts are associated with the expression of counter-expectation, never has become pragmatically strengthened in its Type 3 use, where it is often used to contradict a previously-expressed proposition.