While LGBTQIA+ identities are already mostly invisible in the Italian education system, the current anti-gender policies proposed by right-wing and far-right politicians risk further hindering an inclusive education. However, recent Italian graphic novels pave the way for a multifaceted representation of the LGBTQIA+ community and an alternative form of education. For instance, Nicoz Balboa’s Play with Fire (2020) and Alec Trenta’s Barba (2022) are two autofictional graphic novels that depict the authors’ discovery of their trans identity and their experiences in the cis-heteronormative society. The article argues that the two works by Balboa and Trenta are not just examples of autofiction but also constitute an archive of memory and activism. First, the article traces the damaging effects of a lack of education around LGBTQIA+ themes. Then, it explores how Balboa and Trenta understand their lives by reading LGBTQIA+ stories and histories. Crucially, the article investigates how both authors become a point of reference themselves by representing their own bodies and including explanations about gender and sexuality topics. Documenting the way Balboa and Trenta build a counter-educational space in their graphic novels and chart a literary queer and trans genealogy, the article ultimately suggests that their works are a form of activist practice.

In the decades that followed the American Civil War, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians across the Northern United States embarked on a massive centrally coordinated church-building program. Just as capitalists and politicians poured resources into the American West and South to consolidate and cohere the newly reunited nation under a single economic and political order, these Northern Protestants also hoped to bind the republic’s sections with a homogenous faith by bankrolling a continental network of church edifices across the country.

This article explores the role of the postbellum Protestant church-building endeavor in the broader process of national consolidation. It argues that the movement was nationally consolidative in three ways. Firstly, by pooling and re-distributing capital from wealthier congregations to their needier counterparts, the church-building organizations themselves brought greater uniformity and unity to the process of Protestant expansion in the United States. Secondly, the movement was compelled by a powerful religio-political philosophy of church-building the author terms “republican ecclesiology,” which endowed the Protestant edifice with a key infrastructural role in national reunification as a stabilizing bastion of piety and patriotism, especially in the American West. Finally, church-building advocates believed that the cross-continental financial networks forged between benefactors and beneficiaries consolidated the nation spiritually by creating a more united body of Protestant believers all invested – emotionally as well as financially – in their compatriots’ salvations.

Alchemists in early modern England frequently described their vessels as religious spaces, drawing analogies between Christian belief and the alchemical magnum opus. Such analogies offered clues as to what an alchemist should expect to experience during their experimentation, helping to guide their work if read correctly. During the great religious turbulence during the Reformation, however, these visual and symbolic descriptors became unstable, being transmuted and transfigured according to the religious currents of the time. Thus, whilst such descriptors provided coded instructions for how such vessels should function and what visual tokens an alchemist could expect to see occurring within them, such analogies between vessels and religious spaces simultaneously demonstrate the many nuanced ways in which alchemists reacted and responded to Reformed theology. Focusing on two sites in particular, Christ’s sepulchre and the tabernacle, this article draws on contemporary tracts, treatises and poems to argue that figurative and metaphorical descriptions drawing upon Christian sites can offer fresh insight into the relationship between alchemy and religion in this period.

In 1959 and 1960, Cameroonian women nationalists visited the People’s Republic of China. These members of the Union démocratique des femmes camerounaises (UDEFEC) practiced what I term a “diplomacy of intimacy,” which highlighted the effects of colonialism on their bodies, fertility, and intimate relationships to create a shared affective experience of anticolonial solidarity with their Chinese counterparts. Expanding the definition of “diplomat” to reflect how diplomacy functioned in the decolonizing world reveals that women played a much larger role than previously understood. These women diplomats remained largely invisible to the Western powers and to the postcolonial Cameroonian government, but Chinese sources provide a valuable vantage point on their diplomacy. By drawing on sources from Cameroon, China, France, and the UK, I demonstrate that during decolonization African nationalist women represented their parties on the world stage, exercising far more diplomatic power than appears in histories of decolonization focused on the West.

This article explores a new generation of Caribbean writers in the early twenty-first century who wrestle with self-representations, when the model-minority myth and strategies such as wealth accumulation and property acquisition became the only forms of resistance to urban displacement possible, once the equity structures that were hard won by the civil rights movement were dismantled. Specifically, I explore the affordance of the romance novel genre in Olga Dies Dreaming (2022) and Neruda on the Park (2022) to discuss this dilemma between confrontational struggle and assimilation. Ultimately, this article illustrates a shift in Latinx literature toward historically commercial genres that have become key cultural spaces to discuss pressing contemporary political themes.

This article assesses the relationship between the first four bishops of the English Mission in Korea, Japanese colonial rule and the Korean independence movement from 1905 to 1945. It is proposed that the bishops attempted to walk a precarious tightrope between the demands of the colonial government, bent on assimilating Korea, including the Churches, and the ardent aspirations of Koreans, including Christians, who sought to resist colonial rule. The authors conclude that this was a complicated policy which they did not always pull off but one which can be judged as successful overall.

Scholars, beginning with Hippolyte Delehaye, have long claimed a distinction between eastern and western customs of relic veneration in late antiquity: westerners left martyrial corpses intact and did not translate them, using contact relics instead, while easterners readily moved and divided these relics. They base this distinction on two papal letters from Pope Hormisdas’s legates and from Gregory the Great that distinguish between Roman and Greek customs of relics veneration. Yet scholars have almost totally neglected one piece of late antique evidence highly instructive for this topic: a letter from Eusebios of Thessaloniki, a contemporary of Gregory the Great, responding to a request from the emperor Maurice to send a corporeal relic of the Thessalonian martyr Demetrios. I argue that Eusebios’s letter demonstrates that the distinction between Roman and Greek customs of relic veneration proposed by the papal letters does not hold in late sixth-/early seventh-century Thessaloniki; furthermore, rather than giving evidence for sweeping, regional patterns, these letters all offer reflections on local, municipal customs of relic veneration in Rome and Thessaloniki in response to local imperial customs in Constantinople.

This introduction to a special issue of BJHS concerned with intermedial approaches to the history of the public culture of science (those that pay attention to the forms of different science media and how they relate to each other) also stands as an argument for such approaches. It amplifies a trend within humanities and social-science approaches to its subject of studying the interactions between science, media and publics as complex historical phenomena – in comparison with evaluative research approaches that seek to make science communication more effective. It argues for the virtues of going beyond most existing scholarship in the field by considering many media together. Drawing on the work of media studies scholars Irina Rajewsky and Klaus Bruhn Jensen, it introduces working definitions of intermediality. It then explores historically the genealogies of intermediality, which emerges as an entanglement of changing disciplines, technological change and media practice. Two brief sections take the example of museum display in this intermedial context with the aim of showing first that museum practice was already intermedial before it was considered to be ‘one of the media’. It then concludes by showing how, and in what circumstances, the mediatization of museums came to seem necessary.

This article presents a print history of the International African Service Bureau journal International African Opinion and its little-known editor Ras T. Makonnen. In doing so, it makes the case for a reassessment of how we think about anti-colonial movements in interwar Britain. It argues that Pan-Africanism can be viewed as a loose network of anti-colonial activists, where political ideas were fluid and often in competition with one another, yet still operated harmoniously under the wider banner of Pan-Africanism. By analysing the place of print in this competition it demonstrates the role of the history of print within wider histories of empire and anti-colonialism, as well as functions as an engagement with Black British history and histories of Black internationalism.

Worldbuilding is a concept that has been used to describe the creation of immersive landscapes in fiction and games and is deeply resonant with archaeological knowledge construction. This article argues for worldbuilding in archaeology as a creative intervention that encourages an exploration of archaeological data throughout the process of creation, interpretation and dissemination to generate past worlds, shaped through community storytelling. Through the examples of Çatalhöyük in Second Life, Other Eyes and the Avebury Papers projects, I explore a playful practice that closely interrogates reuse of archaeological data and encourages lateral thinking amongst students and other archaeological storytellers.

The dragons of early modern German alchemy are inheritors of a unique cultural blend of folklore, religious custom and natural philosophy that is unrivalled in Western Europe. Whether inspired by the artwork of the Lutheran Reformation, like Stefan Michelspacher’s ‘Anfang. Exaltation’, or informed by the legends of dragon’s hoards, such as the shapes suggested by Anna Maria Zieglerin for the philosophers’ stone, serpentine monsters found within alchemical works possess more than their figurative chemical meanings. This article explores the range of cultural connotations these dragons held that served to expound their alchemical significance to an early modern German audience, as well as the ways in which alchemy brought these monsters to life through chemistry.

The domination and exploitation inherent to colonialism entailed casting Africans as violators of European standards, expectations, and even aspirations. This article identifies messaging which permeated the everyday experiences of African wage earners by locating the ways in which employers embedded their understanding of Africans as potential violators into the employment relationship. It examines the records of the Tribunal de Première Instance in Dakar, Senegal, during the decades of high colonialism to reveal the nature of that dynamic, exploring implicit expectations among employers regarding their employees, particularly related to allegations of theft or abandonment of work brought against workers. Analysis of such cases particularly highlights domestic workers, who were overwhelmingly male. The interactions and claims in the justice records reveal clear constructions of violation within the attitudes and actions of non-African employers in colonial Dakar and present the court as a venue for perpetuating that rhetoric.