Abstract Earthquakes are among the most destructive natural disasters; however, accurately predicting when an earthquake will strike remains elusive. Consequently, the statistical analysis of historical earthquake records becomes invaluable for forecasting future seismic events. In pre-modern Vietnam, from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries, chronicles such as The Abridged Chronicles of Việt , The Complete Annals of Đại Việt , The Imperially Ordered Outlines and Essentials of the Comprehensive Mirror of the History of Việt , and The Veritable Records of the Great South recorded seventy-three earthquakes. This article provides an overview of earthquake records in historical sources, recounts notable earthquakes, and compares these accounts with seismic data. Additionally, it examines the perceptions of pre-modern Vietnamese people, as documented by royal historiographers, regarding the origins and causes of earthquakes, along with the measures taken in response to these natural disasters.

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, François Jarrige, Thomas Le Roux, Corinne Marache, and Julien Vincent, La nature en révolution: Une histoire environnementale de la France, 1780–1870 (vol. 1). Paris: La Découverte, 2025. ISBN: 978-2-348-08438-6. 313 pp. 24€ Simon Porcher, La fin de l'eau? Paris: Fayard, 2024. ISBN : 978-2-213-72718-9. 298 pp. 21,50€

Abstract This article focuses on the influence of liberal and postliberal historiography on the study of Christianity. It aims to define a postliberal historiography that goes beyond the constraints of existing critiques of liberal historiography. Postliberal historiography critiques liberal historicism but has yet to fully escape its ontological assumptions. To move beyond its limitations, history must be reinterpreted through a new ontological framework that redefines history's nature, time, causality, and human agency. The article then examines how a truly postliberal historiography reshapes the historical study of Christianity. Such an approach sees Christianity not as a historical phase to be outgrown but as a continuous and authoritative tradition integral to human history.

Abstract The aim of the article is to understand historians’ silences toward certain topics. The main argument is that sometimes historians’ silence can be considered as unspoken judgment and such judgment tends to be more meaningful and important than spoken and articulated one. To achieve the goal and demonstrate the argument, I will utilize modes of conceptual implications that are derived from legal theory ( uṣūl al-fiqh ) as a methodology and apply them to some cases from pre-modern Arabic historiography. The article is an opportunity to vitalize humanities fields via interdisciplinarity and likewise to give legal theory a chance to engage with humanities fields.

Abstract Expectations for the future infused 1950s culture. Drawing on the recent wartime past and the new Cold War, individuals and governments around the world imagined the years to come, anticipating both the unbounded potential and the terrifying problems that seemed just over the temporal horizon. The governments of East and West Germany became particularly invested in describing the better future and especially in trying to bring their visions to fruition. Despite claiming that they were embarking toward opposing futures of socialism and capitalism, the two states presented the future in similar ways. They focused on predictions that were concrete, achievable, and near at hand. Indeed, the future was so near that it was possible to point out some ways in which it was already present.

Abstract During the Cold War, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted extensive surveillance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), claiming to protect national security and prevent communist infiltration. Influenced by J. Edgar Hoover's personal biases against the civil rights movement, the FBI used methods such as wiretapping, infiltration, and psychological tactics. These surveillance operations had a considerable impact on the NAACP's operational dynamics, inducing psychological distress among its members and adversely affecting public perception. In response to the intensifying red scare, the NAACP adopted a pronounced anti-communist position. The FBI's surveillance not only squandered substantial resources within the US judicial system but also severely disrupted the internal functioning of the NAACP, tarnished its external reputation, and ultimately undermined its leadership role in the civil rights movement.

Abstract The history of modernity's emergence has often been described as secularization, with the Enlightenment understood as a crucial chapter. Since the late twentieth century, however, the secularization paradigm has been severely undermined in various disciplines. This article intends to contribute to these historiographical debates by tracing core Enlightenment ideas to the religiously grounded philosophy of the Middle Ages, revealing major yet overlooked continuities between scholasticism and Enlightenment thought. Focusing on one especially influential stream of Enlightenment moral philosophy, which provided the intellectual basis of the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility, it demonstrates that the concept of an instinctive moral sense originated in Aristotelian-Thomist scholasticism as developed by Bonaventure. This tradition was transmitted to seventeenth- century England through John Wilkins's circle, enabling Shaftesbury's engagement with these ideas. Shaftesbury subsequently influenced Enlightenment moral philosophy both in Scotland and, via Diderot and Rousseau, in France.

Abstract Focusing on Jewish child refugees from Central Europe in France and the United States, this article explores the question of language. What does it mean to migrate as a child, alone, and to be forced to adapt to a new language, during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust? Based on ego-documents and oral history interviews, this article questions to what extent the children noticed their passage from one linguistic world to another, and if so, how they discussed it and what they deemed important about it. The article argues that the children were aware of the problems associated with life in a new language. A struggle to communicate plagued postwar encounters with rare surviving family members. The children's observations on language are thus often always a means of alluding to deeper issues of identity and loss.

Abstract Following the Fourth Lateran Council, the Benedictine Order became increasingly centralized. Individual houses, however, maintained a strong sense of their own privileges and identity as independent communities. The tension between communal autonomy and the enforcement of canon law was exhibited and tested in the process of abbatial election. This article takes as a case study the diocese of Lincoln, England's largest medieval diocese, which offers the largest sample of Benedictine monastic superiors. Using episcopal registers alongside monastic cartularies and customaries, it examines the process and significance of the election of monastic superiors. The article also seeks to integrate the study of male and female monasteries and to study relationships between individual houses and both secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies. The research findings come from the author's database of all known monastic superiors of independent Benedictine houses in the diocese of Lincoln from 1183–1340.

Abstract English campaigns in France during the Hundred Years War were military operations and significant governmental undertakings. The monarchy needed to mobilize and deploy men, animals, and equipment across the Channel to wage war in France. Once assembled, the English army employed a complex administrative system to ensure its soldiers were funded and resourced, leaving records of financial expenditures. The often-cited Vadia Guerre (War Wages) represented one section of the military finances for such English campaigns. This article presents a snapshot of English efforts to wage war during King Edward III's final campaign in France, culminating in the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360. It utilizes a database to track the names, numbers, and payments of various English troops and subsidies for expenses. It then uses the categories of newly created knights and combat support personnel to highlight the challenges of employing administrative records in such research and complicate our understanding of service and military-financial compensation in the fourteenth century.