The objective of this study is to analyze the debate surrounding the transformation of the Bank of Brazil into a central bank in 1923. The article seeks to answer the question: What was the role of a central bank for Brazilian policymakers at that time? Unlike other Latin American countries that established their central banks during this period, Brazil’s institution was not the result of any foreign mission. While central banks in other countries were primarily concerned with maintaining the gold standard, in Brazil, the main impetus for establishing a central bank was the need to address cash shortages and expand credit, rather than focusing on monetary discipline. Advocates for the creation of a central bank in Brazil were inspired by the model of Germany’s Reichsbank, and part of their theoretical influence came from the German Historical School. Other references cited in the debates included the works of Keynes and Cassel, and the participants of the debate made parallels with other sciences, such as comparing the central bank to elements of mechanical physics. Beyond controlling the money supply, the central bank was seen as an element for the economic development of the country, and there was an emphasis on the bank’s private management.

The women who have participated in memory-building projects in Colombia have shaped the formation of collective memory in important ways in official and informal projects. They have emphasized and highlighted their gendered experiences of the Colombian conflict and gained valuable experience working with and inside organizations. These experiences have provided women with a sense of feminist empowerment. The case of Medellín is particularly interesting because the city’s women have been engaged in constructing collective memory for decades, long before the ratification of the 2016 Peace Accord. As such, these women had a valuable skill set that they were able to employ in collaboration with the official transitional justice mechanisms supported by the state after 2016. The experience of having their voices recognized and acknowledged has raised the feminist consciousness of the women of Medellín involved with these projects. The Medellín case is somewhat distinct from other Latin American cases of women peace and human rights activists because Colombian women have had several decades to learn the importance of including and even centering their intersectional gendered perspectives. The women of Medellín are not unique among Latin American women, but they have had a significant head start.

This article examines the ways in which sexual and reproductive health themes appear in the Birmingham Black Oral History Project. As a community Black oral history project, it did not set out to collect memories of sexual or reproductive health. Despite that, the collection offers rich insights into the underexplored place of sexual and reproductive health within Black British histories. The article argues that archived oral history interviews should be “reused” as part of that historiographical exploration. It analyses the ways in which dominant interest in questions of “illegitimacy”—interest that had colonial roots—led to memories of sex education, courtship, and access to abortion in mid-twentieth-century Jamaica. Through a case study analysis of one interviewee—Carlton Duncan, father to the first “Black test tube twins”—the article concludes by arguing that being attentive to interviewee composure makes more visible the availability of narratives and cultural discourses through which interviewees could narrate or shape their sexual and reproductive health histories. As a whole, the article offers a new lens on postcolonial British history by analyzing the racist stereotyping that endured across the postwar period, especially in relation to Black sexuality and fertility.

Este ensayo revisa las siguientes películas:

La conquista de las ruinas. Dir. Eduardo Gómez. Prod. Ariel Soto, Facundo Escudero Salinas y Nicolás Munzel Camaño. Bolivia, 2020. 88 mins. Disponible en Boliviacine.com.

Algo quema. Dir. Mauricio Alfredo Ovando. Prod. Juan Álvarez Durán. Bolivia, 2018. 77 mins. Disponible en Boliviacine.com.

La bala no mata. Dir. Gabriela Paz. Prod. Catalina Razzini Zambrana. Bolivia, 2012. 57 mins. Disponible en Boliviacine.com.

My Bolivia, Remembering What I Never Knew. Dir. Rick Tejada-Flores. Prod. Rick Tejada-Flores. United States, 2017. 56 mins. Disponible en DVD.

A Primeira República (1889–1930) é considerada um divisor de águas da história cultural brasileira graças ao modernismo. No entanto, muito do que foi escrito sobre o período deriva diretamente das concepções nacionalistas dos modernistas, que estabeleceram o paradigma da identidade nacional que ainda hoje é válido, o que leva à desconsideração dos trabalhos da geração que lhes é anterior. O objetivo deste artigo é problematizar emergência de um campo artístico autônomo no Brasil a partir de uma análise das tomadas de posição dos atores da época frente ao par “nacionalismo” e “cosmopolitismo”. O argumento central é que esse período marca o começo da ascensão de um regime artístico moderno no Brasil, que tem como base a ideia de autonomização de campo profissional, que se realiza em um espaço artístico e literário nacional secundário dentro do espaço mundial. Assim, para se autonomizar e proclamar sua liberdade estética, as artes no Brasil devem se libertar não somente da dominação política, mas também da dominação internacional.

This study addresses how AI-generated images of war are changing the making of memory. Instead of asking how AI-generated images affect individual recall, we focus on how they communicate specific representations, recognising that such portrayals can cultivate particular assumptions and beliefs. Drawing on memory of the multitude, visual social semiotics, and cultivation/desensitisation theories, we analyse how visual generative AI mediates the representation of the Russia-Ukraine war. Our corpus includes 200 images of the Russia-Ukraine war generated from 23 prompts across proprietary and open-source visual generative AI systems. The findings indicate that visual generative AI tends to present a sanitised view of the war. Critical aspects, such as death, injury, and suffering of children and refugees are often excluded. Furthermore, a disproportional focus on urban areas misrepresents the full scope of the war. Visual generative AI, we argue, introduces a new dimension to memory making in that it blends documentation with speculative fiction by synthesising the multitude embedded within the visual memory of war archives, historical biases, representational limitations, and commercial risk aversion. By foregrounding the socio-technical and discursive dimensions of synthetic war content, this study contributes to an interdisciplinary dialogue on collective memory at the intersection of visual communication studies, media studies, and memory studies by providing empirical insights into how generative AI mediates the visual representation of war through human-archival-mechanistic entanglements.

We study the effects of immigration on natives’ marriage, fertility, and family formation across U.S. cities between 1910 and 1930. Using a shift-share design, we find that natives living in cities that received more immigrants were more likely to marry, have children, and leave the parental house earlier. Our evidence suggests that immigration increased native men’s employment, thereby raising the supply of native “marriageable men.” We consider alternative channels—such as compositional changes among the natives, sex ratios, natives’ cultural reactions, and economic competition faced by native women. We conclude that none of them, alone, can explain our results.