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This paper starts from the premise that social space, the state space, is a socially productive territory characterized, among other things, by hierarchical social, economic and political relations. This hierarchical dimension of space comes to the fore when researching the urban marginalization of Roma people in Romania. The mechanisms of exclusion employed by the state against Roma groups are situated in a wide range of other policies, among which uneven territorial development ranks chief. As such, this paper seeks to analyse the junction between these processes. It asks the question: how did the process of urban planning reinforce the urban marginalization of Roma people during socialism in Baia Mare? In order to address this question, I mobilize the results of two years of archival research in the city of Baia Mare, coupled with the discursive analysis of this archival material. I perform a diachronic analysis of how Roma people were targeted by state practices of urban marginalization, such as stigmatization, criminalization and repression. I show how the policies of systematisation of Baia Mare shaped the territory of a particular neighbourhood – Hatvan, attempting to manage and control the Roma population there. Throughout the 1960s, Hatvan was considered a focal point for crime. This led to a large-scale plan to completely transform the area through evictions, demolitions and the displacement of Roma people. The result was a place that was seen as clean, ordered and lawful social space, which became what is currently known as the Vasile Alecsandri neighbourhood. However, this space continues to this day to be one of social marginalisation, economic deprivation and institutionalised racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the potential of the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex for studying the history of Methodism in Bolton (aka 'Worktown') during the middle third of the twentieth century, with particular reference to the years 1937–40 and 1960, demonstrating its value for recording the lived experience of Methodism. An appendix contains three key documents, two of them relating to the work of the Victoria Hall in the Bolton Mission circuit, which was much lauded by Mass Observation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the coverage of the Gezi Park protests by two major Western newspapers—The New York Times and The Guardian—through the lens of media framing, rhetoric, and collective memory. We argue that these digital archives frame Turkey's Gezi Park protests as a challenge to an authoritarian government by promoting the themes of unrest as a conflict of ideologies, oppression of citizens, and the park as a site of memory. In a concluding section, we focus on the significance of digital archives as repositories of collective memory and the role of media framing in shaping these reconstructions of events in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed contentious public debates in Poland, as in other Eastern European countries, concerning the public uses of the Communist Secret Service files and the ensuing politics of history and memory of the state socialist past. The key terms of these debates are articulated mainly by the liberal and conservative elites, within an abstractly conceived national history/memory framework that does not address the conflicts across class lines, or recognize the “estranged” of the new Poland, who remember the recent past “positively.” Departing from the national history/memory framework, this paper calls for another kind of history: one that is minor as it is global. Drawing on a file compiled by the Polish Communist Secret Service on a certain self‐identified socialist from Turkey, who migrated to Poland in the late 1980s, I attempt to provide a parallel history to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I read the file not only for what we can gather from it, but also for what we cannot know from what is positively presented by it. Concentrating on the fragmented, minor, inconclusive story of this politically engaged working man, I call for the use of Communist Secret Service archives to produce a global history of socialisms and of the Cold War that traces the lives and movements across the Second and Third Worlds. In so doing, I gesture to what Karol Modzelewski has suggested in a different but related context as “loyalty to the strangers/the unknown ones” (lojalność wobec nieznajomych). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at a set of documents produced in the early 1950s in the Gold Coast to establish land boundaries in a region and to contribute to the crystallization of customary law for future reference and use. The material is placed in a longer historical flow and seen as one of the results of transformations in the metropole, in the colony, and in their relationship over the first decades of the century, and as a significant landmark collection that has been used in land transactions ever since. The analysis pleads for treating the archives in an ethnographic and not just in an extractive manner (Stoler, 2002, 2009), suggesting that the making, the form, the authors' stances and the use of the documents can be useful supplementary tools in making sense of the already heavily edited representations of the past that we have access to. The focus on this particular archival material contributes to the discussions about the pitfalls of basing land management on, as Sally Falk Moore would put it, "customary" law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the former Soviet bloc, numerous countries have made available the archives of their communist-era secret police, often in connection with the practice of "lustration" aimed at cleansing the body politic of former secret police collaborators. Because the "truth" value of what is in these archives is often problematic, they are best viewed as sources of data about the organization that created them. This article provides some ideas toward illustrating what an ethnographic approach to the archives might consist of. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mere appearance of a foreign word does not necessarily mark the birth of a loanword, which requires documented usage by the speech community. Relatively little research has been dedicated so far to the "prenatal" stage that would investigate the tentative infiltration of foreign-derived words. Nyet, a borrowing from Russian, is taken as a case in point. Although its first recorded instance in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED3) is dated to 1928, it had been increasingly recognized in English for several decades. This article focuses on textual attestations for nyet discovered in a range of digital resources, including British and American newspaper archives, and discusses their usefulness as potential antedatings for OED3's entry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Website history can be considered an emerging discipline at the intersection between media history and Internet history. In this discipline, the individual website is regarded as the unifying entity of the historical analysis rather than the Internet or the Web. Writing the history of a website involves using many sources and methods similar to those used in writing the history of any other media type. But one document type requires special attention: the archived website. This is so because the problems involved in finding, collecting and preserving the website are different from those characterizing the archiving of other types of traces of human activity, including other media types. The primary problem is that the actual act of finding, collecting and preserving changes the website that was on the live web in a number of ways, thus creating a unique version of it and not simply a copy. The present article sets out, first, to discuss to what extent the archived website can be considered a new type of historical document and how its characteristics affect the task of the website historian who must later use it; second, the article discusses and attempts to formulate some methodological principles, rules and recommendations for a future critical textual philology of the website. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]