This section sets out the key aims, argument, and methodology of the book, concluding with a comprehensive chapter summary.

Although several scholars have expanded their selection criteria when editing anthologies of Latinx literature, they rarely include writings by colonial Creoles. Focusing on Francisco de Florencia (1620–1695), this chapter argues that his 1694 provincial chronicle of the Jesuits in New Spain deserves to be studied with other colonial texts that have been described as “symbolic precursors” to Latinx writings. Unlike other Spanish explorers and missionaries who traveled to the Spanish Borderlands, Florencia was born there; his hometown was Saint Augustine, he lived most of his life in Mexico City, and he spent almost a decade in southern Europe representing his religious province. Florencia’s frontier crossings offer early modern examples of border crossings, themes that emerge in the ways he deals with transnational experiences and influences, questions of belonging, and a sense of space. Even though sacred (or ecclesiastical) history is often overlooked in studies of Latinx literature, an analysis of the ways in which Florencia engages with earlier Spanish accounts of the Jesuit missions in La Florida is a unique window onto Creole identities in the early modern Spanish world.

The twenty-first century is a digital century, and the use of digital media and data-analyzing technology has become widespread and even trendy in the humanities. What does this mean for the legacy of the Holocaust? What are the advantages and challenges of digitalization in the context of Holocaust archives, for example with online access to videos of survivor testimony? Are there new strategies for representing or analyzing the Holocaust that draw on the techniques of digital humanities? This chapter explores the uses (and abuses) of digital technologies for both analyzing the history of the Holocaust and presenting that history to a public audience. It also considers the question of the post-survivor future, for example holograms of survivors, and what this says about “authenticity” and authority.

Even in the worst conditions, Jews needed to hear music, read books, attend lectures, watch actors perform, and participate in a myriad of cultural activities in order to connect to prewar values and memories. This chapter highlights the extraordinary cultural production of Jews in situations from cramped, dangerous ghettos, to the worst possible extremes, concentration and extermination camps. Jews stressed how much cultural activity helped them retain their psychological integrity and resist Nazi attempts to dehumanize them.

This chapter introduces the extraordinary range of archival materials and archives used by Holocaust scholars. It chronicles the efforts of prewar organizations to preserve Jewish papers and artifacts, and the clandestine efforts in ghettos and even in camps to document the unfolding genocide. This is followed by accounts of postwar retrieval efforts, often delayed for decades, and documentation efforts with multiple legal, historical, memorial, and welfare goals in mind. Some lacked a fixed home and dissolved, others followed their organizers to new homes. A fierce battle developed over German government, military, and industrial records and over postwar civilian search records. Since the 1980s, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined Yad Vashem as a central collection point for Holocaust material. Finally, the chapter turns to what constitutes a valuable artifact and to the impact of digitization on the Holocaust archive.

Setting sail from Gujarat across the western Indian Ocean, Chapter 2 disembarks on Mauritius, an island of sugar plantations located between South Asia, Africa, and Australia. At the heart of the chapter is Bel Ombre, a sugar plantation owned by a Gujarati merchant from the port city of Rander and the site of his residence in the late nineteenth century. In Gujarat, old merchant homes erase the wider oceanic context of plantation capitalism, slavery, and indentured labor. An emphasis on family itineraries displaces economic profits and proscribed intimacies. To track these points of contact in the late nineteenth century, the chapter analyzes colonial records of plantation ownership in the notarial records in autopsies, letters of helps, and other documents from the Protector of Immigrations records in the Mauritius National Archive in order to understand the broader context of racial capitalism that shaped life in Gujarat’s ports. The chapter argues that plantations – paradigmatic sites of colonial capital – were intimately connected to Gujarat’s havelis. In doing so it provides a critical understanding of family and belonging beyond the endogamous merchant family.

The study of Ottoman rural history presents challenges in terms of both the sources available and the themes that are common to the entire empire. Researchers are particularly dependent on government administrative sources, and must make an effort to complement these with local court archives, foreign consular correspondence, and provincial chronicles if available. The principal themes these sources evoke are ultimately usually linked to revenue extraction, whether by state officials or by local notables acting on behalf of the state, making the history of Ottoman ruralism indissociable from the discussion of power relations and economic production. The main particularity of Ottoman rural history is the prominent role of pastoral nomadism and the resulting importance of tribal forms of social organization.

This chapter reviews how gender and sexuality in early modern Ottoman society have been studied and analyzed in Ottoman historiography. Recent historical studies on Ottoman society and the everyday experiences of women and men reveal that individual experiences differ according not only to gender but also to class, age, ethnicity, and religion on a temporal and geographical basis. This chapter focuses on how scholars working on the archival sources made women, men, and children from different corners of the empire visible by mobilizing a “history from below” approach and utilizing sources creatively and comparatively to explore gender hierarchies, power relations, and sexual manifestations. It also discusses the representation of these hierarchies and relations as reflected in literary and narrative sources to reveal the diversity of gendered and erotic encounters and experiences. A closer reading of sources aims to provide a multifaceted representation of women from different classes, ethnicities, and religions, but also opens new questions on what constituted womanhood and manhood in various places and periods of the Ottoman Empire.

The introduction presents the main arguments and topics discussed throughout the book. It also sketches some critical characteristics of early modern Spanish officials and the global Spanish Empire. Furthermore, it discusses the book’s methodological and theoretical approaches, particularly the challenges of writing a global history from the margins.

Chapter 1 presents an overview of the psychosocial literature on personal narratives, in general, and in connection to genocide and war, in particular. We begin with the concept of societies’ master narratives, emphasizing their long-term impacts on people’s personal narratives of genocide and war. We then look at the main characteristics and uses of personal narratives in psychosocial research. From there, we briefly present and discuss archives of personal narratives of survivors of gross human rights’ violations and their use in different truth commissions, followed by usages of personal narratives in research of genocide and war in different places in the world. Our focus in this chapter is mainly (though not exclusively) on the contexts of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian/Arab–Jewish conflicts.

The introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of how plebeian consumption shaped global and local interactions in nineteenth-century Colombia, challenging conventional historical narratives and offering new insights into the dynamics of global capitalism and popular citizenship. It does so by providing insight into the existing historiography and its limitations and by highlighting the need to challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate the perception of Latin America and its consumers as passive participants in global transformations. The introduction also explores the methodological challenges of writing histories of consumption “from below” and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing from cultural history and anthropology to analyze popular consumption practices. After a historical exploration of Colombia’s place within the global nineteenth century, the introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book’s chapters.

This chapter investigates the many faces of cultural production in the Merovingian kingdoms. As this is supposed to be a period of decay, it is crucial to understand the full range of evidence, including the manuscript and associated palaeographical evidence, libraries, the evidence for lay literacy and bureaucratic culture, and the visual and artistic practices that facilitated communication and display. Through these, we can determine that the Merovingian world had its vibrancy and creativity but also that changes in tastes, resources, and organisation meant that much direct evidence has been demonstrably lost.