This article examines debates over the requisitioning of real estate by the US Army during the decade after the end of World War II. Requisitioning quickly emerged as one of the most contentious issues in the relationship between German civilians and the American occupation. American policy changed several times as the physical presence of the occupiers shrank during the postwar period then expanded again after the outbreak of the Korean War. I show that requisitioning became a key site of contestation during the early years of the Federal Republic. The right to assert authority over real property served as a visible reminder of the persistent limits of German sovereignty. By pushing back against American requisitioning policy, Germans articulated an increasingly assertive claim to sovereign rights.

Recently, a large number of vocabulary tests have been made available to language teachers, testers, and researchers. Unfortunately, most of them have been launched with inadequate validation evidence. The field of language testing has become increasingly more rigorous in the area of test validation, but developers of vocabulary tests have generally not given validation sufficient attention in the past. This paper argues for more rigorous and systematic procedures for test development, starting from a more precise specification of the test's purpose, intended testees and educational context, the particular aspects of vocabulary knowledge which are being measured, and the way in which the test scores should be interpreted. It also calls for greater assessment literacy among vocabulary test developers, and greater support for the end users of the tests, for instance, with the provision of detailed users' manuals. Overall, the authors present what they feel are the minimum requirements for vocabulary test development and validation. They argue that the field should self-police itself more rigorously to ensure that these requirements are met or exceeded, and made explicit for those using vocabulary tests.

The relevant historiography has largely overlooked the role of Karl Haushofer as a cultural-political actor in National Socialist-Fascist relations. From 1924 to 1944, the German geopolitician dealt extensively with Italy, with an eye to both its geopolitical role in Europe and to the political system of Benito Mussolini's regime. On behalf of Rudolf Hess, he began visiting Italy during the 1930s, aiming to overcome ideological and political misunderstandings between Rome and Berlin. He established a network of contacts with Italian scholars and politicians, passed information back to the so-called deputy Führer, and attempted to influence official German policy toward Italy. He eventually promoted the development of an Italian geopolitics, and, in so doing, achieved one of the most significant cultural-political transfers from National Socialist Germany to fascist Italy. This article analyzes the contacts between Haushofer and Italy, both his political activities and his geopolitical theories. It is a case study of a history of contradictions: a man committed to Pan-Germanist culture and to the defense of German minorities abroad, Haushofer also attempted to improve relations between Berlin and Rome. Moreover, he considered the Axis from a geopolitical point of view—as a realization of the European imperial idea—and from a trilateral perspective, i.e., he viewed Japan not only as an ally, but also as a cultural and political model. The reconstruction of Haushofer's relations with Italy is, therefore, an opportunity to rethink the antinomies, as well as the global dimension, of the National Socialist-Fascist alliance.

Power in the workplace is almost always conceptualized in terms of the line-management hierarchy. Managers are said to sit at the “top” of the pyramid, whilst shop-floor workers are located at the “bottom.” The language that we use to describe the social organization of the workplace is saturated with words that assign people to ranks within hierarchies. Scholarly analysis of the sociology of the workplace takes the pyramidality of power as a given. This article, by contrast, argues that it is more useful to see power in the workplace as a dynamic but horizontal matrix within which the distribution of power is continually in flux. If we are to understand the workplace experiences of any specific social group, it is necessary to reconstruct the position of that group relative to the overall system of power relations within the matrix, and not just to individual kinds of power relationship. To demonstrate the point, this article explores the case study of female workers in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. Between 1945 and 1948, the experiences of women on the shop floor in East Germany were shaped by wider trends in the distribution of power. These included the transfer of power from German nationals to Soviet occupiers, the devolution of power from the center to the periphery and from the manager's office to workers on the shop floor, and the shift of relative power from wage earners to black marketeers. To make sense of the contradictory experiences of female workers, we must situate them in the context of wider shifts in, and conflicts over, the distribution of power within a matrix.

In interwar Germany, internationalism and nationalism coexisted in a public sphere that often transcended national borders. This seeming contradiction helps explain the mindset of an era, which simultaneously recognized interconnectedness while privileging national identity. Historians’ interest in internationalism has primarily focused on liberal and cooperative actors and on some selected examples demonstrating the dark sides of internationalism. Fewer historians, however, have analyzed the ambiguities and contradictions of liberal internationalism and the perseverance of the national as a frame of reference in internationalist discourses. Ernst Jäckh, best known as the founder of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, perhaps best represented this collision of values while simultaneously being one of the biggest proponents of such a view. Jäckh's internationalism permeated all his endeavors and served the goal of reintegrating Germany in the international community.

In belle époque France, criminal juries were criticized as too tolerant of crime and too lenient to effectively punish criminals. While the French institution of the jury was under attack by magistrates and other elites, mixed sex juries provided an alternative model. Jury reformers advocated the introduction of mixed-sex criminal juries in France in order to render better verdicts and reduce crime, especially in the areas of infanticide and abortion. The French National Assembly debates over proposed legislation, however, stalled over political concerns with women's truncated citizenship rights. Historical analysis of the types of arguments deployed in this jury reform debate (including archival documents, parliamentary records, and press sources) reveals that reform proponents argued that gender difference-especially in terms of morality and psychology-justified women's admission to juries, particularly in cases of infanticide and abortion. The operation of an unofficial “women's jury” (jury féminin) between 1905 and 1910 in Paris demonstrated women's judicial decision-making capacity. Analysis of this citizens' jury documents the development of a feminist critique of the legal treatment of domestic violence, reproductive freedom, and marriage law publicized in the early twentieth century. This research contribution posits grounds for the re-periodization of feminist legal history as viewed through this case study of women's claims to jury service in Third Republic France.

This article builds on ethnomethodological, conversation analytic research on object transfers: how participants hand over objects to one another. By analyzing video recordings of mundane (cars) and institutional interactions (laboratories), we focus on situations where an object is central to and talked about in the joint course of action. We focus on different organizations of object transfer and show that one embodied move is decisive, either a sequentially implicative ‘give’ or an arm extension designed as a stand-alone ‘take’. We examine the interrelationship between the organization of the object transfer and the broader course of action (e.g. request or offer sequence), which is either overlapping or intersecting. We demonstrate that by making the decisive move, either the participant initially holding the object or her recipient critically influences the progression and trajectory of the activity, and displays agency. (Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, multimodal interactions, objects in interaction, object transfers, agency)*