Environmental information from place-names has largely been overlooked by geoarchaeologists and fluvial geomorphologists in analyses of the depositional histories of rivers and floodplains. Here, new flood chronologies for the rivers Teme, Severn, and Wye are presented, modelled from stable river sections excavated at Broadwas, Buildwas, and Rotherwas. These are connected by the Old English term *wæsse, interpreted as ‘land by a meandering river which floods and drains quickly’. The results reveal that, in all three places, flooding during the early medieval period occurred more frequently between AD 350–700 than between AD 700–1100, but that over time each river's flooding regime became more complex including high magnitude single events. In the sampled locations, the fluvial dynamics of localized flood events had much in common, and almost certainly differed in nature from other sections of their rivers, refining our understanding of the precise nature of flooding which their names sought to communicate. This study shows how the toponymic record can be helpful in the long-term reconstruction of historic river activity and for our understanding of past human perceptions of riverine environments.

We examine the constellation of factors – lexical, aspectual, temporal and conversational – that give rise to evidential implications from assertions. We target intensional and inferential meanings associated with a certain class of present-tense state sentences: those containing a temporal adverb headed by by, e.g. The American traveling public is pretty mature by now. We ask why present-tense sentences containing by temporal adverbs (BTAs) are improved by, and sometimes appear to require, an epistemic modal, e.g. They ??(must) live in a mansion by now. Key to our analysis is the idea that BTA sentences require the onset of a resultant state described by the complement of by now to overlap some unspecified time that precedes the time described by the adverb. The indefiniteness of the unspecified time described by BTAs leads interpreters to pragmatically construe present-tense BTA reports as conjectures, guesses or suppositions. We show how our analysis can be extended to incorporate the contribution of epistemic modals. Adopting insights from von Fintel & Gillies (2010) and Mandelkern (2016), we hypothesize the manner in which the BTA change schema is instantiated in intensional contexts and discuss the relationship between intensional and evidential contexts. We see the merging of aspectual and epistemic features in BTA sentences, and in particular present-tense sentences, as the result of a semantic reconciliation procedure: the use of an epistemic modal in a BTA predication evokes an observation or act of reasoning, prior to speech time, which permits the speaker to make her assertion, and this inference trigger is identified with the ‘onset event’ in the BTA schema.

Few political transformations have attacked social inequalities more thoroughly than the 1959 Cuban Revolution. As the survey data in this article show, however, sixty years on, structural inequalities are returning that echo the prerevolutionary socioethnic hierarchies. While official Cuban statistics are mute about social differences along racial lines, the authors were able to conduct a unique, nationwide survey with more than one thousand respondents that shows the contrary. Amid depressed wages in the state-run economy, access to hard currency has become key. However, racialized migration patterns of the past make for highly unequal access to family remittances, and the gradual opening of private business disfavors Afro- Cubans, due to their lack of access to prerevolutionary property and startup capital. Despite the political continuity of Communist Party rule, a restructuring of Cuban society with a profound racial bias is turning back one of the proudest achievements of the revolution.

Despite the recent surge of scholarship on the role that civic organizations play in armed conflicts and postconflict settings, there is little consensus on how they interact with armed nonstate actors. This article examines how disparate armed nonstate actors can co-opt and manage preexisting civic organizations, and even create new ones, to embed themselves in civilian communities and perform governance functions while simultaneously advancing their ideological agendas. Employing a comparative historical analysis between two armed nonstate units in Colombia, one from a Marxist insurgent group and the other from a counterinsurgent paramilitary organization, the study demonstrates that regardless of their different ideological motivations, regional settings, and repertoires of violence, these actors could navigate formal processes related to legal economies, electoral contests, and bureaucratic-administrative institutions, and informal processes tied to illicit rackets and territorial and population control, more efficiently through their skilled management of local civic organizations.

Labor heroes are an important phenomenon in the history of socialist China, but they have received only little attention in Western scholarship. This article investigates the labor heroes of the Yan'an period as the pivot in the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) attempt at reconceptualizing society, establishing new social relations and creating a socialist subjectivity. It reveals the new symbolic order constructed in the official media, primarily Jiefang Ribao (Liberation Daily), and highlights the relation between labor heroes (as representatives of the “masses”), intellectuals, and Mao Zedong in the construction of new hierarchies. In particular, it shows how the CCP chose work as the fundament of socialist society and the core of a new concept of “collective heroism”; how the stage of the first labor hero assembly was used to orchestrate Mao Zedong as a charismatic leader; and how labor heroes and writers, through direct encounter, redefined their respective place in society.

Urban history and urban cartography are closely linked. The analysis of spatial relationships through cartography enables a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of studied phenomena, and thus can be a valuable support to urban historians. In this context, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cadastres represent a fertile ground for experimentation in the quantitative analysis of urban space. The explicit relationships between the descriptive data of the cadastral registers and cadastral maps facilitate the computerization of this historical source and the construction of the spatial database. This article illustrates the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and geostatistical methods applied to urban historical studies, focusing on the analysis of socio-economic information retrieved from the Pio-Gregorian cadastre of Rome, from 1818 to 1824.

The article considers where and how the silk industry was located in the urban space of Lyons. It also explores how the changing nature of silk production and manufacture influenced the institutional arrangements and physical character of the city. Several sub-periods are considered between the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century, each with different spatial logics largely defined by changes in the governance of the trade. This study offers new insights into how a dominant industrial activity reorganized the spaces of a major city and how the resulting social structure affected its spatial pattern. In so doing, space is accorded a more central role in understanding urban development, while recognizing that social, economic and political forces also modify this materiality. Historical Geographical Information Systems (HGIS) facilitate greater precision in terms of urban locations and thereby utilize written qualitative and quantitative sources more effectively.

This article brings together two Geographical Information Systems (GIS) datasets – building-level land-use data from the 1852–54 Perris Fire Insurance Atlas, and geocoded home addresses from the 1854 city directory – to explore how desirable and undesirable conditions of the built environment accounted for new dynamics of residential separation in mid-nineteenth-century New York. Using spatial analysis, it shows how early forms of residential separation were driven by the desire of elites to create secluded residential neighbourhoods. Further, although stark contrasts delineated the extremes of wealth and poverty, the city's dominant landscape was defined by in-between conditions and subtle variations in built environment and residential distance.

Listening to music found a new context during the early nineteenth century, in the shape of large, closed institutions set up to house and treat the insane. In response to social reform as well as a growing problem of mental health, lunatic asylums for paupers were set up across Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Replacing the previous practices of restraint and containment, a system of ‘moral management’ dominated the new asylums. Patients’ lives were kept busy and ordered, with careful attention given to their employment, their diet and their recreational activities. Music played an important part in establishing the routine of the new institutions. Formal dances offered a social occasion and a controlled environment within which the two sexes could meet. Both dances and concerts were used as a reward for patient behaviour, encouraging the kind of self-control which was seen as crucial to recovery and rehabilitation. Musical events acted as a diversion from the grim realities of institutional life and played an important role in allowing patients to engage with religious observance. Musical experience could be active or passive; patients might engage by dancing or making music of their own, and their music might be symptomatic of illness or wellbeing. Using documents including formal records, patient notes and newspaper reports, it is possible to investigate some of the ways in which listening to music played a therapeutic role, and the place of musical experience in the lives of asylum patients.

This paper looks at the journey of eleven counsellors in marital counselling centres in French-speaking Belgium, from the creation of the centres in 1953, to the 1970s, when contraception became legal, and abortion became a public issue. At the time of Humanae Vitae, groups of volunteers, working within Catholic organisations where counselling took place, began to structure their activity around Carl Rogers’s ethics of client-centred therapy, placing their religious ideology in a secondary position to focus on the problems experienced by the couples and women they were receiving in the centres. These were often challenges they were experiencing themselves in their own lives. The reiteration of the Catholic orthodox view on contraception through Humanae Vitae marked a gap between the counsellors and the Church. This contribution questions the identity-related tension of Catholics working in conjugal counselling centres and the type of commitments they made to both the conjugal centres and the Church in a moment where family planning was debated both in the Church and politically.