Public art is fundamental in the shaping of a city’s identity: in the city of Bologna’s case, this identity is inextricably tied to the Resistance. The presence or absence of women in monumental commemorations, then, becomes a way to either include or exclude them from this shared identity. By centring its analysis on the monuments dedicated to the Resistance’s fallen erected since 1945, this article will utilise the case study of Irma Bandiera to analyse women’s presence within the commemorative topography of the city. Through the study of two monuments, the Monumento Ossario ai Caduti Partigiani and the Memoriale alle 128 partigiane cadute, this article will also highlight the role of the local community in the creation of a shared and representative identity.

In the United States, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the reforming institutions of the horse-drawn-carriage trade prescribed descriptive geometry to their workshops in order to modernize the drawing process for modern carriages. This injunction, institutionally supported by the builder’s national association, professional newspapers, and education, was part of a wider movement to organize production at a time when the carriage trade was booming. In order to facilitate the circulation of theoretical knowledge within workshops that were reluctant to mathematize their environment, two trade journals translated, in the space of a few years, and on three occasions (once by one journal and twice by the other), the same French treatise on descriptive geometry written by a Parisian carriage woodworker. This paper highlights the process of creation of a mathematical translation in a professional environment. It emphasizes the significant role of the industrial and technical context that influenced the choice of translators, the writing style, and the speed with which a translation was produced and published. In the case of mathematical content that did not belong to the common culture of the trade, international circulation allowed for the direct transfer of knowledge from one national industry to another, without relying on academic sources as intermediaries.

While the impact of the two world wars and other inter-state conflicts on the history of humanitarianism has been a major area of research for some time now, comparatively little work has been done on the question of how internal wars impacted on the ways in which transnational actors and institutions approached the issue of offering relief to populations caught up in armed conflicts. Through seven articles and a thematic introduction, this collection covers conflicts that occurred in the years 1917–1949 when Europe experienced a remarkable spike in civil war violence, from Russia to Spain, and from Ireland to Greece. Collectively, these articles offer a fresh analysis of the connections between civil wars and the evolution of modern humanitarianism during Europe’s mid-twentieth-century crisis, highlighting transnational connections between humanitarian practices and actors across several conflicts.

We examine the construction of a pan-European economic space from the perspective of the activities of the Liaison Committee of the International Chamber of Commerce with the Chambers of Commerce of the Socialist Countries. We make three important contributions. First, we show that the Cold War does not mark the end of economic exchanges between Eastern and Western Europe but is part of a longer history in which Eastern Europe was an economic periphery of Western Europe. Second, we emphasise that some Eastern European actors from Czechoslovakia and Hungary used the Committee to develop their contacts with the West and gain some independence vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Western European businessmen also sought to expand their sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, to the detriment of their American competitors. Third, we highlight the complex relationship between states and business in both blocs and the porosity between ‘political’ and ‘economic’ issues during the Cold War.

Four-wheeled, 25–50 horsepower tractors imported to China from other socialist countries in the 1950s were a symbol of modernity and a source of problems. They were introduced to North China to increase multiple cropping. No significant increase in multiple cropping occurred in that region. The cost of tractor services far outweighed what could be earned with the labour they displaced in the 1950s and early 1960s. However, the government remained committed to them, even as it promoted cheaper five horsepower two-wheeled tractors. Greater use of four-wheeled tractors was sustained by the rapid downgrading of the hitherto privileged role of the tractor driver, alongside an ad hoc system of tacit subsidies. These changes meant deviation from the original vision for tractors. The dire fate of draught livestock during the era of rural collectivisation was an important reason for persevering with four-wheeled tractors even as the country turned away from Soviet development models.

The Third Reich established a new financial order in Central Europe. This article examines one aspect of these changes, namely the evolution of banking law. After the seizure of power in 1933, Nazi officials weaponized financial and legal institutions to support the rearmament campaign. They initially worked through the Credit Supervisory Office, a regulatory agency created in 1934, to enforce a standardized model of regulation. Driven by more than a desire for self-sufficiency (autarky) and expropriative control, the authorities devised a system of economic governance that perpetuated the conflict and continually supported German financial interests. The politicization and dismantling of the regulatory office, officially dissolved in 1944, reflected the evolving priorities of the Nazi regime. By reinterpreting existing laws and working with a willing state bureaucracy, officials were able to use regulation as a tool for redesigning the banking systems of Germany and the annexed territories.

This article maps out the challenges of public global health communication in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by providing an overview of the shifting media of health communication from the post-Second World War era to the present. The article explores the communication of science in real-time or live media of film, television, video and digital social media during three emerging infectious-disease (EID) outbreaks to place COVID-19 health communication in historical perspective. Examination of the transition from centralized, top-down communications to distributed, many-to-many, mobile communication illuminates challenges to expertise, authority and control of health narratives and imagery. Through theories of intermediality, the article explores the central function of gaps in communication networks. The article considers three cases of crisis communications amid EIDs: the influenza outbreak of 1957, HIV/AIDS around 1990 and COVID-19 in the early 2020s, and the challenges posed by scientific uncertainty under these circumstances of live, intermedial health communication. The article concludes that ‘liveness’ in intermedial health communications may have an inherently destabilizing effect on scientific authority.

This article explores the notion of colour at the crossroads of humoral medicine and chymistry in late Renaissance Europe. First, it considers the broader context of the traditional analogy between the transmutation of the stone and the formation of humours in medieval alchemy. By highlighting colours as visual markers of material change, alchemical texts drew analogies and metaphors from Galenic medicine to describe the gradual transformation of bodies and their corresponding chromatic change during transmutation. As argued in this paper, such views shifted with the emergence of Paracelsian medicine. This ‘new’ chymical philosophy downplayed the humoral conception of colours in favour of the chymical ‘principles’ and ‘seminal powers’ obtained by distillation. In examining the views of Petrus Severinus, Joseph Du Chesne, and Daniel Sennert, this article aims to appraise their reception of the medical and alchemical tradition on colours, as well as their contribution to a novel yet epistemically ambivalent understanding of colour and sensory properties in the early seventeenth century.