This article combines book history and urban history to examine the spread of the print trade and facilities for reading in Scotland by the 1820s, using a Scotland-wide trade directory as its main source. The article demonstrates how support for reading, including printers, bookshops and venues for reading, extended far and wide within the Scottish urban hierarchy – from the largest cities to the smallest towns and villages. Variations between different types of towns are discussed, and local case studies provide further insights. The article provides fresh perspectives on Scottish urbanization, through its snapshot view of Scotland’s towns in the mid-1820s.

This article presents the results of archaeological research of the post-Second World War mass grave site of Jama pod Macesnovo gorico in Slovenia. The surroundings of the killing site and the mass grave have been the subject of various investigations, including the exhumation of human remains in 2022. In addition to the human remains of approximately 3450 individuals, the results of metal detector surveys, and the excavation of the grave itself have yielded thousands of artefacts associated with the victims and perpetrators, shedding light on the events of the post-Second World War period and mass murder of opponents of the communist-oriented national liberation movement and new Yugoslavian regime. The study represents the results of the most extensive exhumation of war victims’ remains in Slovenia and demonstrates the significant role of archaeology in the reconstruction of historically poorly documented events in modern conflicts.

This article concerns the economy of one of the few fortified settlements of the Late Bronze Age–Early Iron Age on the northern coast of the Black Sea, the Uch-Bash settlement, and its satellite settlement, Sakharna Holovka, in the Inkerman Valley in south-western Crimea. Archaeological excavations from the 1950s onwards have yielded much information on the cultivation of plants from the settlement, including charred grains and their impressions on pottery, tools for harvesting and processing the crops, storage containers, and other objects. Data were also obtained on the crops that were grown in the Inkerman Valley. Together, this evidence shows that the production of cereals was a major aspect of its economy at the turn of the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.

Audiences for science in the media live and operate, as agents who endow science with social and cultural meanings, in an intermedial world. Following cultural tracers through time and across media, and attending to a key actors’ category, intermediality, historians of the public culture of science can access the social dimension of the mediation of science. Adopting an intermedial approach allows us to attune the historiography of the public culture of science to the evolution of science communication scholarship over the past three decades, and understand the role of audiences in the production of cultural meanings about science.

Nationalist historiography portrays interwar protest in South Asia as predominantly Gandhian, non-militaristic, and non-violent. This portrayal is at odds with the experience of other parts of the world, which were shaped by a “violent peace” in the form of small wars, armed insurgencies, the mobilization of paramilitaries, and the increased prominence of the army in the public sphere in a context of the mass demobilization of military personnel. This article asks how South Asia’s interwar labour movement was shaped by a world marked by the experience of World War I and its aftermath. Through a study of labour “volunteer movements” or paramilitaries and military-related claims-making by labour leaders on the colonial state, it argues that “militarization” was an important aspect of labour politics in interwar South Asia. Volunteer movements were a widespread form of mobilization deployed by labouring populations. Labouring communities with historical connections to military service made claims on the colonial state’s patronage during industrial conflict by appealing to their past military service or official status as “martial races”. While this article studies these phenomena among Bombay’s textile and Dalit workers, it references analogous processes that occurred elsewhere on the subcontinent. Using a unique source base of the speeches and writings of labour leaders, publications of volunteer movements, workers’ court depositions, Marathi-language memoirs, strike enquiry committees, and newspaper material, it unearths a world of militaristic ideas and action seldom explored in the context of interwar South Asian labour.

The founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is often interpreted as a top-down transmission of Bolshevik ideology. This article challenges that view by asking: how did individuals with divergent ideological backgrounds – anarchists, socialists, and Bolsheviks – coalesce into a centralized political organization? Rather than emphasizing ideological convergence, it foregrounds the role of interpersonal networks and organizational capacity in early party-building. Focusing on the activist network around the Zhejiang Provincial First Normal School in Hangzhou (Hangzhou First Normal School, HFNS), the article reveals how provincial actors with prior organizing experience helped translate competing doctrines into coordinated revolutionary practice. HFNS-affiliated figures brought anarchist-socialist traditions to Shanghai, played key roles in the Weekly Review editorial board, and built ties with both Chinese and Russian Marxists. Drawing on archival materials from police records, newspapers, and personal writings, the article reconstructs HFNS’s cross-regional impact and strategic contributions to the early CCP organization. It argues that the CCP’s foundation was less a product of ideological clarity than of social trust and regional mobilization. By centering the HFNS network, the article contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to provincialize CCP origins and foreground the hybrid, contested nature of revolutionary subjectivity in modern China.

Edward MacDowell held a liminal position in the late nineteenth century, well-known and active in Europe but also championed as a leading figure of US musical identity. In the first concert of his 1887 American Festival, conductor Frank Van der Stucken programmed MacDowell’s Hamlet, positioning MacDowell and his composition as important components of American music. However, MacDowell’s symphonic poem holds layers of cultural meaning in its various associations with European artistic, dramatic and musical figures.

MacDowell composed Hamlet. Ophelia. Zwei Gedichte für grosses Orchester in Frankfurt in 1884, shortly after he and his wife returned from their honeymoon in London, a city imbued with cultural Wagnerism. The style and motivic material of MacDowell’s symphonic poem are reminiscent of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, suggesting an aesthetic and thematic connection. Furthermore, MacDowell dedicated his composition to the famous Shakespearean actors, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, indicating their impact on his work.

These rich cultural layers of MacDowell’s Hamlet implicate issues of national identity and aesthetic value, issues that clarify the competing positions of the composer: as a nuanced cosmopolitan composer exhibiting English, French and Germanic elements in his work; as a US composer valorized to promote national identity; and as a proponent of aesthetic value transcending national origin. This article explores each cultural layer of MacDowell’s Hamlet and Ophelia to position the symphonic poem as a microcosm of the rich cultural landscape of the United States at the close of the nineteenth century.

During the Fascist period, the extractive industry played an important role in Italy’s economic and political landscape, and sulphur was considered the autarkic mineral par excellence. This article reveals how the rhetoric surrounding the vigorous extraction of sulphur in Sicily was part of a larger project of reconstruction and reorganisation, which involved the division of land, reclamation efforts, military operations and colonisation. Drawing on examples of visual and written narratives from public reports, essays, illustrated magazines and exhibitions of the time, the article demonstrates that extraction was both the actual site of resource extraction and the Fascist extractive logic of consensus. The use of specific discourses and definitions enabled and justified the portrayal of humans and lands as extractable resources, creating images and imaginaries that normalised exploitation and transformation, and the regime’s extractive force.

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 a world grappling with escalating agrochemical pollution, this article explores the potential for shifting from a security-centric approach to a human rights-based approach to safeguard health, the environment, and biodiversity. By engaging with European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence related to environmental protection and climate change, the article critically assesses how to address state (in)action regarding pollutants such as pesticides through human rights litigation. In its analysis, the article highlights climate change litigation as a catalyst for change to assert states’ threefold obligations to respect, protect, and realize human rights. It concludes that the legal approaches developed in climate litigation – with regard to both procedural and substantive aspects – provide a strong basis for addressing the human rights impacts of agrochemical harm.

Online platforms have adopted business models enabling the proliferation of hate speech. In some extreme cases, platforms are being investigated for employing algorithms that amplify criminal hate speech such as incitement to genocide. Legislators have developed binding legal frameworks clarifying the human rights due diligence and liability regimes of these platforms to identify and prevent hate speech. Some of the key legal instruments at the European Union level include the Digital Services Act, the proposed Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and the Artificial Intelligence Act. However, these legal frameworks fail to clarify the remedial responsibilities of online platforms to redress people harmed by criminal hate speech caused or contributed to by the platforms. This article addresses this legal vacuum by proposing a comprehensive remedial responsibilities framework for online platforms which caused or contributed to criminal hate speech based on the general corporate human rights responsibilities framework.

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.