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An essay is presented which discusses the relationship between the theft of paper, the use of paper as a food wrapper for cheese and London, England's book industry from 1750 through 1799. An overview of the theft of paper from London printers and booksellers and its sale to cheese shops is provided.

This article explores narratives of documentary destruction and salvaging during France's Liberation, a moment of uncertain sovereignty over institutions and their material traces. As archival functionaries and government officials sought to uncover and process the paper trail of Vichy and the Occupation, they also confronted urgent questions about administrative continuity as well as legal and moral responsibility. Control over the mass of bureaucratic paper produced between 1940 and 1944, this article suggests, functioned as a critical site of contestation and as a source of legitimacy during the transfer of power. The experience of the war and its aftermath also led France's archivists to discover the practical and symbolic importance of the contemporary administrative document, transforming their pro- fessional practices and institutionalizing a new category of historical time. The relationship between state authority and the archive, often regarded as mutually constitutive, emerges in this account as inherently unstable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrates reflections on the origins, construction and preservation of German-Jewish memory after 1945. Archives as an institution; Unified Berlin Republic's search for identity and legitimacy and Germany's growing confrontation with multiculturalism intensifying obsession with comprehending and re-appropriating a missing Jewish past.

This paper examines the temporal politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that despite the emphasis on digital real-time coverage and epidemiological forecasting, the pandemic has been understood as a historical event, even as it has been unfolding. The paper considers the implications of this ambiguous temporality, suggesting that COVID-19 has made visible a new heterotemporality, wherein real time, history, and the future intermesh. The paper concludes by focusing on Hong Kong, a former British colony and Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China since 1997, showing how the pandemic has become an uncanny rendering of the city's uncertain future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Letters to the editor were published in the thousands during the 1770s and 1780s, shaping a forum that constituted an eighteenth-century information network. Such letters serve as a powerful touchstone for ideas that circulated among the French reading public, shedding new light on the cultural history of the Enlightenment. Drawing on world history and digital history approaches, this article analyzes a subset of letters that were exchanged and reprinted among provincial papers (affiches) throughout France. By visualizing the exchange of such reprinted letters as a network, it becomes clear that provincial readers did not read their local papers in isolation but instead were connected to a larger community that often included published missives from the surrounding généralité and the capital. The content of such letters communicated an optimism about the possibility of ameliorating daily life through incremental, practical changes, fostering a notion of a practical Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Mechanic has been a pioneering leader in the social and behavioral sciences of health, health services, and health and mental health policy for more than fifty years. One of David's most distinctive qualities has been his vision in identifying trends and defining new research areas and perspectives in health care policy. His early work on how methods of physician payment by capitation and fee-for-service in England and the United States affected physicians' responses to patients and patient care addressed present challenges and many ongoing studies of payment mechanisms. His papers on rationing of health care established a framework for examining alternative allocation mechanisms and just decision making. Influential papers dealt with risk selection, policy challenges in managed care, reducing racial disparities, trust relationships between patients, doctors, and the public and health institutions, and the predicaments of health reform. Focusing on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, David explored its opportunities and challenges especially in providing comprehensive and effective behavioral health services. A hallmark of his work has been his redirecting our attention to the most severely ill and those in greatest need. Less visible is the leadership and institution building endeavors and the many honors David has received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the values that informed the actions of two polities in seventeenth-century Bengal, the Nadia Raj and the Malla dynasty, through a close analysis of their temple inscriptions—a form of royal laudation or praśasti. Focusing on this inscriptional record of each polity, the paper is divided into three sections. The first section analyzes the language of the inscriptions in order to examine the ways in which each polity crafts a political language. The second section addresses how each set of inscriptional records speaks to each polity's political culture. Finally, the third section discusses questions of patronage and reception in order to draw connections in each polity between its public language and its public settings. The paper concludes with some thoughts on what it meant for a polity to speak publicly in seventeenth-century Bengal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses the cult of Assunta Pallotta, an Italian Catholic nun who died in a north China village in 1905, to critique the existing literature on missionary medicine in China. She was recognized as holy because of the fragrance that accompanied her death, and later the incorrupt state of her body, and her relics were promoted as a source of healing by the Catholic mission hospital, absorbed into local folk medicine, and are still in use today. By focusing on Catholics, not Protestants, and women, not men, the paper suggests similarities between European and Chinese traditional religious and medical cultures and argues that instead of seeing a transfer of European biomedicine to China, we need to think of a single globalized process in which concepts of science and religion, China and the West were framed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1933 and 1934, the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway Company and the government of the newly formed nation-state, Manchukuo, sponsored a Manchuria pavilion on the Japanese exhibition grounds of Chicago's A Century of Progress World Exposition. Though small, this pavilion bore immense political weight. Opening a year after the Japanese Kwantung Army declared the formation of the new state in Northeast Asia and just three months after the Japanese delegation announced Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations, the Manchuria exhibit demonstrates how Japanese military and corporate interests attempted to sway international public opinion on the cultural world stage. This paper examines the ways in which the Manchuria displays functioned during this crucial diplomatic moment and how the visually dazzling American exhibit, the Golden Temple of Jehol, upset Japanese claims of dominance in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the role of language in nationalist attempts at decolonization. In the case of the Philippines, American colonial education imposed English as the sole medium of instruction. Native students were required to suppress their vernacular languages so that the classroom became the site for a kind of linguistic war, or better yet, the war of translation. Nationalists have routinely denounced the continued use of English as a morbid symptom of colonial mentality. Yet, such a view was deeply tied to the colonial notion of the sheer instrumentality of language and the notion that translation was a means for the speaker to dominate language as such. However, other practices of translation existed based not on domination but play seen in the classroom and the streets. Popular practices of translation undercut colonial and nationalist ideas about language, providing us with an alternative understanding of translation in democratizing expression in a postcolonial context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary concerns about the difficulties faced by the Japanese economy following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 soon appeared to be unfounded as the economy recovered relatively quickly. This paper suggests that despite its limited impact on Japan's longer-term economic trajectory this disaster can tell us a great deal about the ways in which individuals, organizations, and officialdom respond to a devastating event, and help us better understand the process of transition from immediate relief to longer-term recovery, not just in Japan, but more broadly. It analyzes the impact of the disaster on market transactions, showing that the scale and nature of market disruption went far beyond direct physical destruction; that the collective and individual responses of government, producers, traders, and consumers had the potential to make matters worse, rather than better; and that the existence of integrated markets spread the effects of the disaster across the Japanese archipelago. It also suggests that reestablishing market stability following the crisis was one of the keys to longer-term recovery, and that further research will help us understand the causal factors in that process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Religious conversions by Dalits in colonial India have largely been examined as mass movements to Christianity, with an implicit focus on men. However, why did Dalit women convert? Were they just guided by their men, family, and community? This paper explores the interrelationship between caste and gender in Dalit conversions afresh through the use of popular print culture, vernacular missionary literature, writings of Hindu publicists and caste ideologues, cartoons, and police reports from colonial north India. It particularly looks at the two sites of clothing and romance to mark representations of mass and individual conversions to Christianity and Islam. Through them, it reads conversions by Dalit women as acts that embodied a language of intimate rights, and were accounts of resistant materialities. These simultaneously produced deep anxieties and everyday violence among ideologues of the Arya Samaj and other such groups, where there was both an erasure and a representational heightening of Dalit female desire. However, they also provide one with avenues to recover in part Dalit women's aspirations in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A cursory examination of the Thai press reveals two things: A history of censorship, at times violently repressive, and sensational content centered on crime news. Reporters, editors, and publishers have been threatened, intimidated, and murdered in an effort to control the print media while front pages are filled with stories of violent crime and gory photographs. This paper explores both these forms of violence, censorship and crime news, to understand the relationship between the two. It argues that the prevalence of the latter—sensationalism—has resulted in part from the former, a historical process of increasingly murderous repression. So while the form and content of the print media in Thailand, as elsewhere, follow the financial imperatives of the market and reflect trends in current events, they do so within a framework of legal, professional, and informal relationships established over time with seemingly unrelated institutions, including the police. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The magical girl, a popular genre of Japanese television animation, has provided female ideals for young girls since the 1960s. Three waves in the genre history are outlined, with a focus on how female hero figures reflect the shifting ideas of gender roles in society. It is argued that the genre developed in close connection to the culture of shōjo (female adolescence) as an antithesis to adulthood, in which women are expected to undertake domestic duties. The paper then incorporates contexts for male-oriented fan culture of shōjo and anime aesthetics that emerged in the 1980s. The recent tendencies for gender bending and genre crossing raise critical questions about the spread of the magical girl trope as cute power. It is concluded that the magical girl genre encompasses contesting values of gender, and thus the genre's empowerment fantasy has developed symbiotically with traditional gender norms in society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Is a circumcision, for example, an exterior mark? Is it an archive? Let me begin at the beginning. My left eyebrow has a scar. It is jagged, and usually the droop of the eyebrow hides it from view. I see it sometimes when I look in the mirror. When I see it, I am reminded instantly of my father. He was sitting, reading a newspaper, on the lawn of our Lahore house. It was near to 6:00 p.m.—late evening to dusk. I had recently conquered the art of biking and I was eager to show him how well I rode. I kept going past him on the bike, but he was engrossed in the paper. Finally I decided that to really get his attention, I would need to go really, really fast. I went a ways, and began to pedal furiously. Right as I gathered full speed and came up to him, I looked at him to see if he was watching me. He wasn't. That split second, however, was enough for me to lose control of the bike, which swerved radically to the left, and I went face-first into a column of bricks. He looked up as I stumbled up, my eye covered in blood. I have no memory of this, except for when I “see” my scar. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article critically examines the assumptions and processes involved in identifying historically distinctive plant identities by their Latin botanical names. By following late-colonial efforts to identify a medicinal herb mentioned in some versions of the Ramayana, this paper argues for a historicist analysis of the process of “retro-botanizing.” In so doing, it also distinguishes between two different forms of “tradition,” the “factualized” and “embedded.” Finally, it blurs the allegedly watertight distinction between historical and mythic pasts. Instead of trying to distinguish these pasts ontologically, I argue that it is more productive to see specific pasts in relation to the sorts of futures they produce, that is, their respective historicities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A Creole social group or estate, primarily the offspring of Russian men and Native women, was established in Alaska by the 1821 Russian-American Company charter. The Creoles enjoyed special rights and privileges in Russian America until the United States took over the jurisdiction of Alaska from Russia in the 1867 Treaty of Cession. Creoles then lost their privileged status and were positioned at the bottom of the American socioeconomic ladder. Many Creoles then began to deny their Native heritage and identify as Russians in attempts to avoid discrimination. Under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, anyone with one quarter Native blood quantum could participate. Most descendants of Creoles met this requirement and enrolled, angering many Natives who had not identified as Russians. This paper examines the history of the Creoles on Kodiak Island through the eyes of the author, a descendant of Creoles, Natives, and Russians of the Russian America era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the experiences of prostitutes in New Orleans, Louisiana during the U.S. Reconstruction era in the nineteenth century. It references the book "Black Reconstruction in America" by W. E. B. Du Bois. According to the author, the experiences of the Creole, black, and white prostitutes detailed in this paper illustrate Du Bois' arguments about the importance of class in Reconstruction and its potential to unite people across racial differences. Details on the role of violence in the experiences of prostitutes Celestine Antoine, Lizzie Johnson, and Laura Smith are presented. It is suggested that some of the most radical social changes of the Reconstruction era may have occurred at the margins of society.

The French legislative election of April 23, 1848, was one of the first examples of a ritual that has become central to modern democracy: the consecration by a population of a new political order to replace a fallen regime. The newspaper press played a major but little-studied role in ensuring that the election was held relatively smoothly and that the results were generally accepted by the population. This case study, based on the press of Lyon, France's second largest city, shows, however, the role of the press in 1848 was very different from what it had been in 1830. Despite many years of preparation, the republican opposition journalists of 1848 were resoundingly disavowed by the voters, whereas papers representing the conservative parties and the democratic-socialist movement were more successful in promoting their candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusing on the case of southern Xinjiang in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The argument focuses on one aspect of this identity system, the popular historical tradition, arguing that its deployment through both manuscript technology and regional shrine pilgrimage contributed to the maintenance of Xinjiang's settled Turki identity group before the construction of the “Uyghur” identity. In the absence of a national history, separate histories of local heroes were linked together through custom anthology production and networked travel to shrines, yielding a modular historical tradition that accommodated local interests in regional narratives. Central to the operation of this system were community authorship in the manuscript tradition, the creation of a new genre for local history, and the publicly recorded circulation of pilgrims who heard performances of historical texts. This constellation of phenomena underpinned an alternative type of imagined community: a reasonably homogeneous, regional, writing-facilitated identity system flourishing in a nonmodern context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to explain how, given Japan's “nuclear allergy” following World War II, a small coastal town not far from Hiroshima volunteered to host a nuclear power plant in the early 1980s. Where standard explanations of contentious nuclear power siting decisions have focused on the regional power utilities and the central government, this paper instead examines the importance of historical change and civil society at a local level. Using a microhistorical approach based on interviews and archival materials, and framing our discussion with a popular Japanese television show known as Hatoko's Sea, we illustrate the agency of municipal actors in the decision-making process. In this way, we highlight the significance of long-term economic transformations, demographic decline, and vertical social networks in local invitations to controversial facilities. These perspectives are particularly important in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima crisis, as the outside world seeks to understand how and why Japan embraced atomic energy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

India's Northeast frontier is at the margins of three study areas: South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. This paper attempts a history of mapping in its broader sense as a cultural universal over a relatively long period. It is not a history of cartography, but focuses on the interface between cartography and cosmography, which were, in turn, shaped by imperial power and geographical knowledge. This approach offers a high-altitude view of this Asian borderland as the imperial frontier of both the Mughals and the British, and the national fringe of Republican India. The authors argue that imperial geographical discourses invested the colonial Northeast (British Assam) with a new kind of territorial identity. Surveyors and mapmakers objectified the geo-body of this borderland in a spatial fix and visualized it as a Northeast-on-the-map. Cartographic territoriality naturalized traditional frontiers into colonial borderlands, which, in turn, forged national boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article provides information on the paper concerning the history of diplomacy in medieval and early modern Europe. It has been noted that diplomacy contributed to the development of multiple other discourses that structured in the country during the medieval and early modern periods. The history brought out a consciousness of diplomatic agency to develop on other areas of cultural and political practice in the country. Furthermore, several investigations and studies have been established beyond the national histories that continue to dominate most treatments of premodernity.

The article pays a tribute to sociologist Daniel Roche. Daniel’s thesis challenged conventional modes of studying history. Having taught history at a lycée in Châlons-sur-Marne, Daniel appreciated the importance of presenting material clearly, without obfuscating jargon and pretentious discourses on method. He also had developed a healthy appetite for archival research, because the papers of the academy of Châlons were exceptionally rich. His concept of a mixed elite, empowered by new wealth but deeply rooted in the traditional order of society.

This paper has three basic aims. One is to suggest that an inevitable consequence of Western Europe's self-constitution as the subject of a history made at the expense of "the rest of people" lies in a spatial and chromatic representation of oppression as a territory in the discourses of Europe's historical others. Two is to show how oppression, construed as a spatiochromatic territory, aspires to an insidious foundationalist essence of those discourses. Three is to examine how the exceptionalist uses people make of their location in the said territory can be generative, albeit innocuously, of various processes of exclusion. The exploration will navigate various global contexts where some of history's most gripping narratives of oppression have been transformed into volatile and quasi-sacrosanct imaginaries of self-definition.

This paper outlines an approach to historical narratives that replaces the atomism of actor and event with a model that stresses the integration of event, narrative, and historical practice. The notion of contact as an event is addressed in the context of the Northwest Coast. A Heiltsuk English narrative dealing with contact is analyzed in the light of Heiltsuk cultural data. The analysis centers on Jakobson's distinction between metaphor and metonymy and leads to the conclusion that for the Heiltsuk, contact with Europeans resulted in the acquisition of a linear historicity. Finally, notions of temporality are examined with respect to historical practice and North American Indian cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports that the 2003 David H. Pinkney Prize has been awarded to Ronald Schechter for the French history book "Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715-1815." Other literature awards related to French history; Call for papers.

Announces the decision of the editors of French Historical Studies to issue a call for papers for a special issue of the journal 'Interdisciplinary Perspectives on French Literature and History.' Responses of the forum to an increased interest in recent years among historians and literary scholars; Guidelines for submission.