Seaside resorts are widely researched in tourism studies of Europe, North America and Australia. Much less attention has been given to resort development and the evolutionary pathways of seaside resorts in other parts of the world. Using archival material and existing secondary sources this paper offers a novel contribution on the making of seaside resorts in South Africa. East London is the case study. It is demonstrated that East London took on many of the characteristics associated with British seaside resorts. In charting the development directions of the resort from the 1880s to 1939 an important role was played by ‘local agency’ in terms of municipal actions. Further, for building the tourism economy the production of publicity material and promotional efforts of the South African Railways and Harbours organisation raised both domestic and overseas awareness of East London’s tourist assets. The initial anchors for tourist attraction were pleasure and health which were linked to sea-bathing. By the 1920s, a new focus is on sporting activities as an additional vital element of the touristic capital of this South African seaside resort.

The paper explores the residential architecture of the port-industrial town of Ploče in the period from 1945 to 1971, affirming the town as a unique example of planned modernist realization on the eastern Adriatic. Ploče is a unique town that developed on the Dalmatian karst in a deep natural harbour at the mouth of the Neretva River, in which a modern port-industrial town was built for the needs of the magnificent harbour, combining the principles of modern architecture with elements of tradition, and urbanism that affirms views of the harbour, pedestrian connections, and autochthone horticulture. By employing various methods - historiographical and morphological analysis of residential architecture, as well as the study of unpublished archival materials - the paper valorises the contribution of local architecture within the broader context of Croatian postwar Modernism.

ABSTRACT With the commencement of oil extraction from the Naftun oilfields in 1908, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company designated Abadan Island in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, Iran, as the pivotal locus for refining and exporting Iranian oil. This decision transformed the island into a company town while embedding it within the broader geopolitical and economic framework of British imperialism. From its inception, the oil company town of Abadan was conceived as a strategic hub in the British Empire rather than an isolated settlement. Its architecture and infrastructure were designed to standardise spaces, ensuring Abadan’s integration into imperial circuits, in preparation for imperial expansion, powered by oil’s strategic mobility. Two central elements of the project were the reconfiguration of property rights and the cultivation of a spatial imagination that reinforced colonial hierarchies. The result was a racially segregated “island within an island,” where expatriates enjoyed privileged environments while local and non-European labourers were confined to inferior living and working conditions. Drawing on archival materials, including maps, correspondence, and contractual records from British governmental and corporate sources, this paper examines the political, legal, and spatial strategies that shaped Abadan Island and its oil company town between 1908 and the 1930s. It argues that Abadan’s early urban form was a calculated imperial construct, rather than a conventional company town, and thus intended to materially situate a local oil site onto the British imperial map.

ABSTRACT Studentification leads to significant socioeconomic and demographic changes in urban neighborhoods. Yet the phenomenon is understudied in midsized U.S. college towns. Using census data from 1990 to 2020, resident interviews, and archival materials, this study examines five neighborhoods surrounding Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. The study explores demographic shifts, off-campus housing dynamics, and socioeconomic transformations in the five study neighborhoods. We identify the acquisition of residential property by parents of college-aged students, which we term student-parent homeownership, as a central mechanism of neighborhood transformation in Lubbock. By examining this process in a midsized U.S. college city, the study extends the studentification scholarship and contributes to ongoing debates about how parent-led housing acquisition reshapes urban neighborhoods. These findings contribute to the broader discourse on urban change and to the long-term study of how competition for urban space evolves across generations and national contexts.

ABSTRACT This study examines the road to Jerusalem and its transformation in the 1960s, from an historically significant route for pilgrims and travelers that embodied deep cultural, religious, and historical layers, to a modern highway, leading to the new capital of the young state of Israel. This transformation, led by landscape architect Arye Dvir, involved substantial modifications that altered the physical landscape as well as the travel experience, integrating scenic and cultural elements into the road’s expansion. Drawing on archival materials, aerial imagery, historical maps, and an interview with Dvir, the study situates the road within broader discourses on landscape architecture, heritage preservation, and national identity. Looking at other scenic highways abroad highlights the road’s unique role in shaping collective memory and national symbolism, thus offering new perspectives on infrastructure development within cultural landscapes.

ABSTRACT This article examines the historical development of Afaan Oromo print media within Ethiopia’s evolving media system and analyses how language-based journalism has been shaped by shifting regimes of state power. Drawing on historical and political economy approaches to journalism, the study traces the trajectories of Oromo-language newspapers from the late imperial period through the Dergue military regime and into the post-1991 era of ethnic federalism. Using archival materials, policy documents, and secondary scholarship, the article demonstrates that Afaan Oromo print media were consistently framed by successive governments as politically subversive and were subjected to censorship, prohibition, co-optation, and economic marginalisation. While the post-1991 constitutional order formally recognised linguistic rights, independent Afaan Oromo journalism remained structurally constrained by restrictive media laws, unequal access to resources, and party-state dominance of the public sphere. The article further shows how indigenous Oromo communicative traditions functioned as alternative journalistic practices during periods of severe repression, sustaining political consciousness and linguistic continuity. By situating Afaan Oromo print media within Ethiopia’s authoritarian media history, the study contributes to African journalism scholarship by highlighting how language operates as a key axis of media control, journalistic exclusion, and resistance in multilingual postcolonial states.

Haaken Bergh spent eleven years as a patient in psychiatric institutions in Norway and Sweden in the early twentieth century. Following his discharge from Dikemark Asylum in 1921, he devoted the rest of his life to seeking redress and campaigning for reform of the mental health service. Bergh published two books, brought legal proceedings against Oslo local authority, petitioned the Norwegian parliament (the Storting) for ex-gratia compensation and held lectures throughout Norway. He attracted considerable public attention during his lifetime but was largely forgotten after his death. This article is based on Bergh's books Levende begravet (buried alive) (1925) and Jo galere, jo bedre (the crazier, the better) (1928), searches in the National Library of Norway's digital collections, a review of Bergh's medical records from Solna Hospital outside Stockholm and Dikemark Asylum in Norway, and archival material from the Office of the Municipal Finance Director in Oslo relating to Bergh's damages claim. Bergh was a prominent critic of psychiatry, and his books and lectures reached a wide audience. He ultimately received a token ex-gratia payment from the Storting, but the authorities largely ignored him. His criticism mainly concerned the inadequate safeguards governing involuntary admission, the limited expertise in asylums and the need to revise the Insanity Act of 1848. The solitary nature of his campaign and his polemical style probably contributed to his lack of impact.

ABSTRACT This study examines how private philanthropy influences the development of urban policies. It analyzes the Taconic Foundation’s role in shaping the Chicago-based Gautreaux program and elevating that local experiment into the national Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program. We conduct a novel historical analysis of paired archival materials from the Taconic Foundation and its grantee, Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI), examining grant cycles, correspondence, and decision-making processes from 1977 to 1996. With both financial and social capital, Taconic helped enable the U.S.’s most significant experiment in housing mobility, while also amplifying white liberal preferences for suburban solutions over community-centered approaches. This research demonstrates the value of organizational archives for understanding urban policy development in the 20th century and makes visible a typically invisible institutional actor. Archival materials expose the presence of marginalized voices and alternative approaches that were overshadowed by philanthropic influence.

Although histological criteria underpin current classification, accurate risk stratification, particularly for borderline and malignant tumours, remains challenging. We analysed a 20-year institutional series of phyllodes tumours (PTs), integrating clinicopathological data with long-term clinical outcomes. Histological features were extracted from original pathology reports, with slide re-review where archival material was available. Among 111 PTs, 80% were benign, 11% borderline and 9% malignant. The follow-up ranged from 0 to 20 years, with 11.3, 10.3 and 7.6 years for benign, borderline and malignant PT, respectively. Most patients underwent local excision; mastectomy was performed in 22% of malignant PT. Final positive margins were identified in 18% of benign, 8% of borderline and none of the malignant tumours. Adjuvant radiotherapy was administered in 18% of borderline and 67% of malignant PT. Local recurrence occurred in 3%, 11% and 22% of benign, borderline and malignant tumours, respectively. Distant metastases were observed exclusively in malignant PTs (33%, 3/9 cases), two of which were preceded by local recurrence. Notably, two of the three metastatic malignant PTs showed either ≤10 mitoses/10 high-power field or <marked stromal atypia and lack of stromal overgrowth, which are required for diagnosis of malignant PT per WHO 5th edition recommendation. The low event rate precluded robust multivariable analysis. Our results highlight the biological heterogeneity of malignant PTs and the limitations of rigid histological thresholds. These findings underscore the need for collaborative, multi-institutional prospective studies with standardised tumour sampling and reporting and molecular correlation to refine clinically meaningful risk stratification in PT.

This study analyses two selected green public spaces located within the historic urban fabric of Kraków, a provincial capital in southern Poland: Wisława Szymborska Park on Karmelicka Street and the green space at Axentowicza Square. The former area historically served as a barracks parade ground and later as a car park, while Axentowicza Square, whose origins date back to the early 20th century, underwent modernization in 2021–2022. The analysis considers the historical context of each site and the influence of surrounding heritage on their present form. The research is based on desk studies, including a review of relevant literature and archival materials, complemented by site visits to assess the current state of development. Field analyses were supported by photographic documentation. The study evaluates the extent to which green spaces located in historic settings respond to contemporary functional and social requirements. The findings are a contribution to academic discussion and may also support practical decision-making related to the revitalization and modernization of public urban spaces of historical significance.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the development of modern nursing education in China through a case study of the Xiangya School of Nursing in Changsha between 1909 and 1926. Founded in 1911 by the Yale‐in‐China Association, a non‐denominational mission, Xiangya was among the earliest nursing schools in China to promote undergraduate nursing education and public health nursing. Drawing on archival materials, published primary sources, and Chinese and English historiography, we analyze the cultural, political, and gendered challenges that shaped the school's development under the leadership of American nurse Nina Gage. While Gage initially sought to implement an Americanized model of nursing education, she and her colleagues adapted admission policies, educational goals, and curricula to local social and cultural conditions. Recognizing the need for Chinese nursing leadership, they prioritized the establishment of a Bachelor of Science degree to prepare nurses for teaching, administration, and public health roles. By 1926, Xiangya had trained approximately 16% of China's qualified nurses and had become one of only two schools in China offering university‐level nursing education. This history highlights the interplay of transnational influence, cultural adaptation, and gendered reform in the professionalization of nursing in early 20th‐century China.

The National Normal College of Guoshu and Physical Education (NNCGPE) stands as a pivotal yet long-misrepresented institution in modern Chinese physical culture. Drawing on Republican-era archival materials and official gazettes, a revision of the institution’s chronology corrects five core factual errors in existing scholarship: the NNCGPE’s direct precursor was The National Guoshu and Physical Education Institute founded in 1933 (not the aborted 1930–1931 Physical Education School plan); its renaming to The College of Physical Education, Central Guoshu Institute occurred in late 1933 (not 1934); its elevation to national college status took place in 1938 (not 1936); its renaming to the National Normal College of Guoshu and Physical Education was finalized in 1941; and the launch of its five-year teacher-training program was in 1942 (not 1941). This revised timeline reveals the gradual and contested institutionalization of Guoshu within China’s modern educational system, reflecting the Nationalist government’s evolving strategies to shape national physique and cultural identity through physical education. The NNCGPE embodied a distinctive form of hybrid modernity in modern Chinese physical education – a systematic effort to integrate traditional Guoshu techniques with Western physical education theories and pedagogies, cultivating a new generation of teachers disseminating this hybrid bodily culture across Chinese society.

In Spring 2025 a collective of artists, scholars, poets, curators, and designers exhibited A Smile Split by the Stars, which closely engaged a single poem, nourbeSe philip’s “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones.” Working with philip and her archival materials, the installation sought to spatialize the poem by staging a series of multi-textured, multi-sensorial, and audio-visual compositions. This essay thus offers its own meditation on this experience through lessons learned about black feminist placemaking, drawing attention to a constellation of alternative imaginative and geographic practices of freedom, which in turn offer brief moments of reprieve, rebellion, and respatialization. Across seven interrelated sections, we reflect on how our curatorial process experimented with multidisciplinary and collaborative methodologies for engaging black women’s creative texts beyond extractive scholarly conventions, while remaining attentive to institutional limits.

This article reframes the “Sydney School” discourse within a transnational context of Australian architectural engagement with Asia from the 1950s to the 1980s. Rather than defining the movement through its familiar stylistic traits, the article argues that these characterisations have obscured a deeper intellectual transformation driven by direct encounters with Asian architectural traditions and philosophy. Drawing on newly accessible archival material from the State Library of New South Wales, the article reconstructs the extended cultural immersions of Adrian Snodgrass and his network. It traces Snodgrass’s engagement with Hindu and Buddhist thought in Ceylon and Japan, Alan Gilbert’s commissions in Hong Kong and China, and Peter Muller’s collaborations in Bali and beyond, to argue that these cases reveal a gradual but profound shift from Western interpretations of Asian architecture toward authentic cultural exchange. By foregrounding these transnational networks, the article calls for a fundamental rethinking of late twentieth-century Australian architectural historiography.

This article presents a multi-temporal dataset of historical photographs and replicates from the Langtang Valley, located in the Central Himalaya of Nepal. The collection and collation of historical images from various archives and thematically focused repeat photography surveys enables detailed analysis of landscape, glacier and settlement changes. Characterized by harsh topography and glaciers at higher elevations, the high mountain landscape of Langtang Valley is also known as a prominent destination for mountain tourism. Based on historical landscape and settlement images, rephotographic surveys were conducted in the years 2008, 2012, 2017, 2018, and 2025. Hence, the dataset allows for comparative views before and after the massive 2015 Gorkha Earthquake, which heavily affected the Langtang Valley. The first part of the dataset (A) contains a set of ten examples of bi- and multi-temporal landscape photographs and allows to detect glacier changes, including debris cover, ice cliffs, and disconnection from headwalls. The second part (B) contains a set of twelve examples of bi- and multi-temporal photographs that focuses on structural and functional changes in the two main settlements Langtang village and Kyanjin Gompa, both affected by the 2015 mega-rupture. The imagery taken before and after the earthquake illustrate the rapid reconstruction activities and the massive transformation process, mainly driven by mountain tourism. The dataset can be used by glaciologists, climate scientists, geographers and planning experts in urban development and tourism. It supports a recently submitted article (Klaus et al. 2026, Before and after the 2015 Disaster: Development Trajectories in the Himalayan Riskscape of Langtang from 1949 to 2025, Progress in Disaster Science) with original archival material.

This article recovers some of the key moments and contributors in the convoluted and consequential debates in microbiological taxonomy in the mid-twentieth century. By reconstructing and refining some of the critical transnational debates about the nature of microbiological systematics in a pre-phylogenetic age, it reveals how prominent and influential individuals in mid-twentieth century microbiology were preoccupied with discussion about the merits of different approaches to bacterial taxonomy and nomenclature. Drawing on previously unstudied archival materials, as well as scientific publications and textbooks, it sheds light on how a small but highly active group of microbiologists continued to wrestle with exactly how, or even whether, to classify microbial species. It also examines the parallel development of practical tools to support the vital work of identifying organisms in laboratory settings. These devices were designed to make sense of a vast volume and range of morphological, metabolic, biochemical and serological data.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the Ford Foundation’s role in shaping educational governance in early postcolonial India, focusing on secondary education reforms between 1952 and 1962. Drawing on archival materials from the Ford Foundation records, it argues that the Foundation’s significance lay less in directing policy than in assembling the infrastructural conditions that made reform governable: new advisory bodies, professional routines, comparative study practices, and channels linking Indian officials and educators to transnational circuits of expertise. Working as a quasi-state partner to the Indian Ministry of Education, the Foundation helped convene regional and national reform forums, organised international study teams, supported headmaster and inspector training camps, expanded teacher-training extension centres, and backed the creation of the All-India Secondary Education Council as a hub for coordination and assessment reform. At the same time, the paper highlights the limitations of the Foundation’s influence. Its projects unfolded within India’s planning-oriented, non-aligned framework, where shifting bureaucratic priorities and institutional frictions limited their scope and coherence. Rather than a straightforward story of Americanisation, the case shows secondary education as a politicised arena where postcolonial nation-building and Cold War infrastructures of expertise became entangled through uneven, negotiated processes of governance-making.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of the Center for Yugoslav-American Studies at Florida State University in mediating economic diplomacy between the United States and Yugoslavia during the Cold War. Drawing on archival materials from Serbian, Croatian, and U.S. institutions, this study traces the Center’s evolution from an academic institution to a facilitator of bilateral economic relations across the Iron Curtain. The findings reveal that the Center shaped U.S. perceptions of Yugoslavia’s self-management socialism, framing it as investment-friendly through publications, conferences, and professional networks. However, its efforts were constrained by Yugoslav government scepticism and the country’s deepening economic crisis in the 1980s. This research highlights how academic institutions holding a hybrid position between state funding and scholarly autonomy created alternative channels for East-West economic engagement during the Cold War.

ABSTRACT A productive and reciprocal synergy between literary practice and subaltern studies opened the archive to literary scholars. This paper offers a close reading of four essays from The Routledge Handbook of Subalterns across History, edited by Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee, and identifies some contemporary variants and contestations of subalternity through emergent conceptual filters in the fields of literary practice, performance studies, and cinema studies. The discussion demonstrates the methodological convergences between literary studies and history-writing. These include practices of reading against the grain, analysing the procedures of narrative emplotment and erasures, interrogating the politics of representation, turning to non-evidentiary genres as historical material, attention to emergent and suppressed voices in history, and illuminating the mediated nature of historical knowledge. Taken together, these concerns reflect the shared interpretive and methodological apparatus of both fields. The paper demonstrates how aesthetic and non-evidentiary genres can be constituted as archival material and focuses on reading the subaltern as ‘optic, a persuasion, and dissonance’, and as an interpretive tactic. The paper examines the function of creative imaginations in the theoretical formulations of subaltern historiography as they subvert, unsettle, and reconfigure the subaltern and the archive.

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs the trajectory through which the first Prodi government (1996–1998) succeeded in bringing Italy back to the core of European integration after years of political marginalization, financial instability, and diplomatic isolation. Drawing on extensive archival material, it analyzes the dual challenge faced by Prodi: regaining the trust of European partners and restoring domestic credibility after the turbulent Berlusconi and Dini governments. The chapter examines the strategic centrality of Europe within the Olive Tree coalition’s platform, the role of key technocrats such as Ciampi and Dini, and the intense diplomatic efforts undertaken between 1996 and 1998. Particular attention is devoted to the negotiations over the Maastricht parameters, the struggle to meet convergence criteria, and the creation of the ‘Group of Four’, which coordinated Italy’s final push toward E.M.U. membership. Ultimately, the article shows how political determination, fiscal consolidation, and diplomatic activism enabled Italy to join the founding group of countries adopting the euro.