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This paper explores the experiences of Jewish right-wing underground members who were imprisoned in detention camps in Eritrea, Sudan, and Kenya during the British Mandate rule over Palestine from October 1944 to July 1948. These 459 detainees endured harsh conditions and isolation, after being exiled without trial and denied the ability to appeal to a court. Their primary means of communication with the outside world was by correspondence. An extensive collection of letters penned by these detainees to their loved ones and to national and international institutions is housed in Israeli archives, particularly within the Jabotinsky Institute. Additionally, original newspapers and a comprehensive book compiled during their time in the camp are among the preserved materials. Remarkably, these ego documents have seen limited use in academic research. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive depiction of the isolated microcosm of culture, education, struggle, and resilience cultivated by these young Jewish men despite their uncertain condition and lack of control over their fate. This analysis relies on letters composed in real-time, subject to military censorship as well as self-restraint, to avoid causing distress to their families. These letters constitute a valuable historical resource that sheds light on a lesser-known case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mamae of Mangaia was a nineteenth-century pastor of the London Missionary Society, and a tribal historian whose significant collection of oral traditions forms the foundations of present day knowledge of pre-Christian Mangaian society, as disseminated through the scholarship of the missionary-ethnographer, William Wyatt Gill, and Māori anthropologist, Te Rangihīroa (Peter Buck). Amongst Mamae's many literary works is a collection of letters that forms the basis of this paper. Letters bring us closer to a writer's personality and to their experience of a particular social and cultural world. Mamae's letters relate incidents from his early life prior to Christianity and his service as a pastor, community leader and spokesperson, tribal historian and planter. By also drawing on other contemporary sources a more complete portrait can be painted of Mamae as a leader and scholar who helped sustain the ancestral knowledge underpinning Mangaia's society as it faced the challenges of the colonial era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reveals how love and marriage were interpreted, negotiated and maintained by a young couple during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), by analyzing 200 love letters. It first introduces the letter authors, their experiences of being 'sent-down' to work at separate state-owned farms, and the comrade-style love they developed by following the Mao-era injunction to prioritize revolutionary politics over personal matters. It then shows how class struggle politics and associated political thought movements inhibited youth dating and romance. Many young adults had to choose between personal matters and political revolution, which led to the paradoxical existence of expressions of 'self-restraint' and 'self-indulgence' in sexual affairs. After China's universities reopened in 1970, the couple pursued tertiary education and put their romance on hold. This period was accompanied by a weakening tie between 'personal matters' (love) and political revolution and a rising tension between personal matters and personal development (education and career). With China's abandonment of the 'send-down' policy in 1978, the couple returned to Harbin, the capital city of Heilongjiang province in northeast China. They married after a decade of separation and correspondence about their tumultuous experiences. Analyzing their letters demonstrates the impact of Mao-era policies, ideas and practices in shaping love and family formation processes for the sent-down generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among highly-educated Ottomans letter-writing was not simply a means of practical communication but an art in itself and a significant aspect of Ottoman literary culture. Collections of exemplary letters from the seventeenth century survive in considerable numbers, but they have been neglected as literary and historical sources due largely to the complexity of their rhymed, rhetorical prose and to a modern belief that they were mostly empty bombast. This article, based on a composite collection of letters by the six most eminent writers of the 1620s, examines the nature of this kind of prose, known as inşa (construction, creative composition), and the purposes behind such letters. It assesses how contemporaries evaluated such writing and why it was admired; how rhetorical prose might contribute to the maintenance of friendships; and how petitions in the form of literary letters helped create essential patron-client relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces Hegel's conceptualisation of "the spirit and the letter", from the period of his early theological writings to that of the Science of Logic, with particular reference to his correspondence. This dialectic, for Hegel, concerns the realisation of the truth or "spirit" of something from the specificity and fixity of its particular details -- its "letter". It also concerns, then, the freedom to interpret the spirit of something in spite of the apparent authority of any supposed original meanings or authorial intentions. We find him using the phrase in a variety of contexts, with reference to politics, Biblical hermeneutics, textual criticism, the history of philosophy and education. While originally derived from St Paul's dictum -- "the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life" (2 Cor 3:6) -- Hegel's early invocations of "the spirit and the letter" are inspired by Fichte, who sought to distinguish the spirit from the letter of Kant's philosophy. However, while Fichte conceives of the "spirit" as an "aesthetic sense" with which to take creative liberties with the letter, the later Hegel finds that it is only by tarrying with the contradictions of the dead letter that the spirit might be brought to life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores references in the correspondence of the Royal African Company to the giving of enslaved African children – especially boys – to Company officials, investors, and others in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. It argues that this practice supported the fashion in art and society for the display of such children and allowed those invested in the slave trade to display their power within it through a distinctly gendered and age-based form of enslavement. These children's passage to Europe is an understudied aspect of the Atlantic slave trade and one which is central to the story of the African and African-descended community in Britain. At the same time, the sending of enslaved Africans to the metropole shaped ideas about race, adulthood, and authority within the empire via the domination of non-white children at the hands of men connected to the slave trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samuel Rutherford's letters draw on biblical imagery and idiomatic metaphors, including contemporary discourses of illness and medicine, to diagnose and promote the spiritual and physical health of individual believers and the Scottish Kirk. This essay examines how Rutherford used language to care for his correspondents enacting a form of literary cure through the letter as a communication technology. Interrogating Rutherford's use of language theologically, politically, and practically to negotiate God's providential care for his people, the traumatic splintering of the church and state in England and Scotland, and caregiving within covenanting communities, reveals how his epistolary practice expands knowledge of the church's historical provision of care, and the intersection of religious and medical caregiving in early modern Scotland. Rutherford's lexical and metaphorical creativity, rendering complex theological concepts emotionally intelligible and rhetorically effective, ensured his letters provided comfort to covenanted godly communities and underwrote their posthumous publication as a devotional and literary classic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on a current project: to publish a selection of letters between the artist Louise Bourgeois and her husband, art historian Robert Goldwater. A detailed account is provided of an archival object of study, describing a corpus of letters in quantitative and material terms, as well as reporting on the various personal circumstances and historical events to which they refer. The essay also examines specific passages from letters by Bourgeois addressed to her husband, and from letters by Goldwater to Bourgeois. These letters, for the most part hitherto unpublished, offer an unprecedented glimpse into the inner workings of a marriage, which Louise Bourgeois, despite the self-constructed autobiographical nature of her work, kept mostly aside and private. Arguing that a publication of the Bourgeois–Goldwater correspondence enriches the scholarship on Louise Bourgeois and provides new research leads, this essay also instigates a subjective approach to the edition of Bourgeois's and Goldwater's letters as a work in progress, reflecting on the technical and ethical challenges it creates. The essay poses a wider interrogation of the possibilities and difficulties of archival research and the recasting of archival documents into published pieces of writing [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]