This article examines the intersection of alchemical satire and linguistic critique in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, situating it within the context of the inkhorn controversy – a debate over linguistic excess and neologisms in Elizabethan England. Alchemical language, long characterized by its mystique and opacity, was a frequent target of satire, with writers like Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson critiquing its inflated rhetoric as much as its failed transmutations. Yet such alchemical appearances in literature often signal anxieties over the use of language itself. In this article, I argue that early modern alchemical satire functioned as a mode of literary-linguistic critique. A key trope in these satires is inflation: just as alchemists relied on ‘puffing’ bellows in their experiments, their language and the ‘inkhorn terms’ of linguistic innovators were also mocked as similarly ‘puffed up’. Tracing these connections from Geoffrey Chaucer’s conman alchemist to Thomas Sprat’s complaint about the ‘swellings of style’, this article demonstrates how alchemical and linguistic satire were mutually reinforcing, forming a precursor to early seventeenth-century scientific discourse, and later calls for linguistic clarity over rhetorical excess.

In this paper I examine what I call an Afrogothic aesthetic inherited from Black occult traditions, the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude movement. I argue that it is useful to read Afrogothicism through the lens of Black spirituality and the blues instead of the legacy of slavery through which it has generally been studied, as this evokes Richard Hurd’s argument of Gothicism partaking of the “terrible sublime.” Ultimately, I argue that the avant-garde American poetry movements of the 1950s develop out of this Afrogothic poetic aesthetic that begins with Black poets and novelists.

Kenya's first post-colonial government, under Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta, came to power in December 1963 having adopted emergency powers and security legislation that had been used in the colonial suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. Kenyan nationalists opposed this authoritarian and often draconian legislation in the 1950s for its abuses of human rights and excesses of state powers. This article explains how Kenya's nationalists came to accept and adopt this legislation, illiberal emergency powers becoming a key element in the protection of the fragile bureaucratic-executive state after 1963. An account is given of how colonial security officers used emergency powers in the counterinsurgency against the Mau Mau. In the decolonization process, the continuing activities of Mau Mau's Kenya Land and Freedom Army, the shifta secessionist movement in the Northern Frontier District, and political opposition from within the Kenya African National Union (KANU) party threatened Kenyan stability. To combat these challenges, colonial officers and nationalists alike agreed to retain colonial security laws, especially the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance. The legacies of colonial law therefore remain prominent in Kenya's security legislation and have been used as recently as 2023 to deal with perceived threats to the bureaucratic-executive state.

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), founded in Paris in 1946 by a group of antifascist lawyers, has long been dismissed as a Soviet front organization. Yet, this characterization overlooks its complex and multifaceted history. This paper reassesses IADL’s first thirty years, exploring its origins, internal debates, and cross-border engagement. Drawing on archival records, this article argues that—despite a period of Communist influence—the IADL contributed to international legal and political discourse by advancing an original approach defined here as radical legal internationalism. Through this framework, IADL lawyers questioned Cold War ideological boundaries and brought into dialogue Communist, progressive, New Left, decolonial, and liberal rights traditions. The article also uncovers the IADL’s significant role in promoting international law and human rights through trial observation, UN advocacy, and missions of inquiry. In challenging the dominant account of the Left’s delayed and uneasy embrace of human rights, this article calls for a broader understanding of Cold War-era legal internationalism and highlights an alternative tradition of legal activism.

Viewing the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) City Survey map of Charlotte, North Carolina, as a proxy for Depression-era redlining practices, this article explores relationships between the map’s differently graded areas and demographic and housing change from 1940 through 1960. Archival research indicates that the HOLC map’s delineation of differently graded areas reflected an established pattern of redlining in the city, a pattern subsequently reinforced by the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) underwriting activities. Using an ordinary least squares (OLS) model and hotspot analysis, we find that areas given a D-grade became relatively more populated by African-American households and households paying higher rents for housing of decreased quality, and that there was more spatial clustering of these characteristics in D-graded areas over time. Using postwar FHA Charlotte housing market analyses, we interpret our findings as indicating that the neighborhood biases of lenders, as recorded by the HOLC maps, contributed to increasing differences between neighborhoods in this period, foreshadowing the relationships that other studies have detected between HOLC map boundaries and modern-day socioeconomic and environmental disparities.

This article analyzes historical claims about the Quyllurit’i pilgrimage (Cuzco, Peru). First, it discusses its relationship to Inka rituals and the Tupac Amaru rebellion. It shows that the way the rebellion affected the Ocongate church in 1782 was crucial for the later inscription of 1783 as the year of the pilgrimage’s miracle. It then analyzes how the conflicts between the Ocongate merchants and the hacienda Lauramarca over the commercialization of colono alpaca wool in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are related to the creation of the first written account of the pilgrimage’s origins. This account was written in 1932, using the local archive shaped by the Great Rebellion, but without any evidence of anything that happened in 1783 in what is now the Quyllurit’i shrine. As the pilgrimage expanded beyond Ocongate, scholars who studied the pilgrimage in the 1970s used this first account to hypothesize its relationship to the Great Rebellion within tropes of indigenous cultural authenticity, continuity, and resistance.

In total, 75,000 to 250,000 Asian civilians died building the Thailand-Burma Death Railway under Japanese military orders during the Second World War. Among these were women whose experiences remain overlooked or marginalized in histories about the Death Railway. This microhistory of the Kudo Butai war crimes trial draws on recent scholarship on the relational and structural aspects of victimization and agency to study the sexual abuse and broader experiences of women on the railway. It focuses on the experiences, strategic acts, and survival choices of the following women who appear in trial records: the nineteen-year-old orphan sexually tortured to death, “Siamese lady friends” of some defendants, and the Chinese dresser’s wife who helped POWs. By identifying the relational and structural conditions contributing to sexual violence on the railway, this study demonstrates that the overwhelming experience of women under Japanese military occupation was one of the widespread vulnerability to sexual violence.

Often overshadowed by the GI Bill, the National Youth Administration (NYA) supervised the first federal need-based financial aid program in the United States. Tracing the origin of federal aid back to the era of the NYA reveals that the rationale for need-based assistance rests closer to the core of the American policymaking tradition. This article contributes to previous histories of the NYA by demonstrating how its decentralized implementation empowered local college officials who jeopardized the program’s needs-based intent. Meanwhile, this localized administration also facilitated the NYA’s unusual and relatively successful support for Black college students.

Pole-and-thatch structures built directly on the ground surface were likely common in antiquity in the Maya area as residences, kitchens, workshops, storehouses, and for other uses, although the actual wooden architecture normally decays and often leaves no mounded remains. Various estimates are made to account for these “invisible sites” in population estimates based on mound or plazuela groups. Wooden building posts and associated artifacts preserved in mangrove peat below the sea floor in Punta Ycacos Lagoon, southern Belize provide an opportunity to address population size, material wealth, and household activities at “invisible sites.” The distribution of wooden building posts and artifacts at the Ch’ok Ayin underwater site indicates it was a residential household group with several pole-and-thatch buildings around a plaza. The householders focused on salt production, with artifactual evidence of brine enrichment and brine boiling, in addition to other supporting activities, and participated in Late Classic marketplace trade for goods from varying distances. Holocene sea-level rise that flooded low-lying coastal areas also obscured ancient Maya sites, making them “invisible” in the modern landscape.

This article investigates the intellectual and cultural history of homeownership in the United States. Focused on the work of the economist Richard T. Ely, it argues that this history should move beyond Ely’s intellectual influence on the real-estate industry in the 1910s and 1920s to incorporate his critique of laissez-faire economics, his ideas about “social property,” and his visions of managed hierarchy, all of which originated in the late nineteenth century. The essay tracks Ely’s connections to Progressives like John Dewey—with their visions of a coming social self to displace possessive individualism—and his influence on Herbert Hoover’s 1931 National Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership—which prefigured the New Deal’s housing policy. Following Ely’s work reveals how homeownership institutionalized what Dewey called “social values,” but did so by naturalizing a persistent rhetoric of autonomy and individualism that relied on divisions of race, class, and gender for its power.

This article investigates female voting behavior in the 2016 US presidential election through the lens of tall poppy syndrome, a theory suggesting that those in less prominent or celebrated roles sometimes seek to undermine individuals who pursue or attain extraordinary public success. Using data from the ANES, VOTER, and CCES surveys and controlling for alternative explanations, I find that women outside the workforce were more likely to vote against Hillary Clinton, indicating that their voting behavior may have been driven by tall poppy syndrome rather than solely by social conservatism. These findings highlight an underexplored factor in voting behavior, suggest widening avenues of partisan polarization, and point to the unique challenges that are faced by women who seek elected office.