ABSTRACT Digital mediation is the context in which we propose to look at the aspirational lives of young women in Asia’s neoliberal cities. However, this context emerges out of longer histories of social change through which gendered modernities have taken shape. Modernity within non-Western contexts, we propose, unfolds in uneven and distinctive ways, whether the society in question has been formally colonised or not. To understand contemporary transformations, we need to grasp the dynamics of what we could call the national-modern (a modernity with national or quasi-national features) as they shape our four cities. As female selves re-make themselves today through education, consumption and labour, they draw on much longer histories inter-referenced by our research. These are histories of how the discourses of nation and modernity are entwined with the re-shaping of gender and sexuality nineteenth and early twentieth century debates around culture, tradition and modernity crucially hinge on the “woman question” that this essay discusses in comparative perspective and brings into the present day via the formation of nation-states in the post-colonial world. And today, as older pathways of social reproduction are transformed through neoliberal restructuring, new ideas of selfhood and subjectivity generate states of uncertainty, risk and ambiguity that highlight the production of aspirational selves.

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934, is one of the most influential Italian authors of the early twentieth century. His work offers an exact and humane vision of childhood at a time when paediatrics was still emerging as a distinct discipline.This essay explores selected stories from the collection Novelle per un anno (Short Stories for One Year) that depict childhood illness, vulnerability and care. Fragile newborns and neglected or exploited children are shown as shaped not only by disease but also by poverty, limited medical knowledge and cultural beliefs. Through these narratives, Pirandello anticipates key concerns of contemporary medical humanities: the importance of integrating empathy and awareness into paediatric care to help clinicians remain humane in their practice.

Aim: This study examines how nineteenth-century transformations in pharmacy, toxicology, and poison regulation unfolded in Europe and within the Ottoman Empire’s resulting hybrid system, comparing their distinct reform trajectories. Drawing upon Ottoman court records, the research demonstrates how toxic substances impacted medicine, crime, and public health, while also revealing the gendered legal and social dynamics surrounding poisoning cases.Methods: This study analyzes twenty nineteenth-century Ottoman poisoning cases using archival court records and registers from the early nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Cases were classified by perpetrator gender and the types of poisons used. The study also evaluates how limited forensic tools, reliance on testimony, and the gradual adoption of European toxicological methods.Results: The findings show that women were the primary perpetrators in nineteenth-century Ottoman poisoning cases, responsible for fifteen of twenty incidents, mostly targeting husbands. Poisons were typically domestic and accessible, especially sıçan otu (rat poison) and aksülümen (mercuric chloride). Most cases were fatal, with 18 deaths, and evidence often relied on testimony rather than forensic proof.Conclusions: The study concludes that poisons were integral to nineteenth-century Ottoman domestic, medical, and legal life, blurring the line between remedy and harm. Women, constrained by patriarchal limits, often used accessible household toxins such as arsenic and plant-based poisons in marital conflicts. Courts struggled to prove poisoning due to limited forensic tools and reliance on testimony, yet punishments ranged widely. By the late century, Ottoman legal practice began integrating medical examinations and European toxicology, marking a gradual shift toward modern forensic justice.

The Arab Renaissance (Nahda) represented acrucial historical phase for the Arab world, marking the beginning of intellectual awaking and the call for a comprehensive reform project. Owing to the significant role played by reform leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this focuses on two prominent Arab thinkers – Abdul Rahman Al-Kawakibi and Rashid Rida- to highlight their roles within the framework of reformist ideas, and the emergence of Arab revolutions.

ABSTRACT This paper is grounded in the premise that examination of testamentary documentation can be vital for reconstructing social and cultural histories when primary sources are scarce. Read alongside ancillary materials, such as newspaper and contemporary accounts, they can elucidate the obscure. If obtainable, these records present as a form of life writing, often the only surviving self-narrative an individual leaves behind. Scholars have long utilised similar records across different periods and settings, yet women’s wills remain largely overlooked in an Irish context. Consideration of the case of Isabella Honan (d. 1913) will serve to highlight the utility of women’s wills in historical reconstruction. Isabella was the last surviving member of a distinguished Cork mercantile family of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose name is associated with significant philanthropic projects of local and national importance. Little of substance has been recorded regarding Isabella’s motivation and the factors underlying her charitable work. Few details are recorded as to how the Honans became wealthy, and no attention has been focused on family relationships and dynamics. Such is the paucity of information that the singular contribution of Isabella Honan, who bequeathed the large family fortune to various causes, is unremembered; her ‘voice’ is silent.

In the late nineteenth century, the popularity of cycling prompted a series of medicalised warnings, particularly for women. Among these was "bicycle face": a "nervous condition" attributed to a constant state of stress from attempting to balance a bicycle combined with prolonged facial grimacing, which was believed to result in nervous exhaustion and facial disfigurement. In New Zealand, media coverage peaked between 1895 and 1897, framing it as a threat to women's health, beauty and morals. Related conditions included "cyclemania", "bicycle stoop", "bicycle hump", "bicycle walk" and "bicycle heart". These designations reflected gender norms and anxieties over female independence, rather than medical evidence. The episode mirrors a broader historical pattern in which emerging technologies have triggered dubious health fears which parallel contemporary concerns over the safety of mobile phones, 5G towers and wind turbines. The authors explore the cultural and medical construction of "bicycle face" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how a small number of rogue physicians used the media to amplify unfounded fears, implanting them into the public consciousness. The historical tendency for health practitioners to superimpose prevailing attitudes and beliefs onto health risks linked to new technologies highlights the need for evidence-based evaluations and vigilance against allowing cultural anxieties to masquerade as novel medical conditions.

Abstract Focusing on cooperative marketing associations (CMAs) in the raw cotton sector, this article asks how the federal government got involved in providing intermediate credit to farmer cooperatives. Around the turn of the twentieth century, farmers and financiers shared some key financial reform objectives, but it was only during and after World War I that the federal state began supporting CMAs’ access to credit through the Federal Reserve and War Finance Corporation. Key public and private actors appropriated decades-old Populist claims about cooperatives’ macroeconomic benefits to justify top-down efforts to support their development. Cotton played a central role in these institutional reforms designed to neutralize the danger that commodity markets and agrarian politics posed to US capitalism through centralized mechanisms of monetary and credit control. But even the creation of the Federal Intermediate Credit Banks in 1923 failed to provide CMAs with the generic working capital necessary to coordinate both production and distribution. Instead, federal policies focused on trade financing in the name of good financial practices and therefore patently ignored Southern Populists’ progressive dream of eliminating the crop-lien system.

This article analyzes the textual features of the lithographic editions of the work Boburnoma from a textological perspective. The study examines the general characteristics of lithographic copies, as well as their orthographic, lexical, and stylistic peculiarities. Special attention is given to the comparative analysis of manuscript and lithographic versions in order to determine their similarities and differences in terms of textual stability, language norms, and editorial interventions.The research demonstrates that lithographic editions reflect the textual state of the work during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and represent an important transitional stage between manuscript tradition and later typographic publications. The orthographic system, preservation of Chagatai language features, use of Arabic and Persian lexical elements, and the retention of the author’s memoir style are analyzed as key textual components. The findings confirm that lithographic copies serve as a significant source for textology, historical linguistics, and literary studies, contributing to the reconstruction of the complete textual history of the work.

Alzheimer disease (AD), first described by Alzheimer and Perusini in the early twentieth century, is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder without a definitive cure. Unraveling the subcellular alterations underlying AD is essential to elucidate disease mechanisms, track progression, link cellular abnormalities to functional deficits, and develop therapeutic strategies aimed at preventing, slowing or reverting the disease course. Electron microscopy (EM) has been pivotal in this field since the 1960s, when Terry and Kidd characterized the ultrastructure of amyloid-beta (Aβ) deposits and paired helical filaments (PHFs) composed of hyperphosphorylated tau. Over the decades, conventional transmission and scanning EM have been complemented by advanced approaches such as volume EM (vEM), cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), and cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET). These techniques enable three-dimensional reconstructions, minimize fixation artifacts, and provide near-native, near-atomic resolution insights into AD pathology. EM has also revealed critical contributions of other subcellular compartments to AD pathogenesis, including synapses, mitochondria, lysosomes, the blood-brain barrier, iron deposits, and inflammatory machinery. Importantly, EM studies extend beyond human tissue, encompassing animal models, cell cultures, and synthetic assemblies, thereby allowing cross-system comparisons that highlight conserved pathological features. By integrating data from diverse experimental settings, EM provides a uniquely comprehensive view of the AD subcellular landscape. This makes it an indispensable tool not only for dissecting disease mechanisms but also for guiding the rational design of therapeutic molecules with potential disease-modifying effects. This review synthesizes the state of knowledge on EM-based studies of AD, emphasizing their central role in advancing both mechanistic understanding and translational approaches.

To review the historical, conceptual, and ethical foundations of intelligence testing in neuropsychology and to consider whether alternative cognitive performance labels offer greater conceptual precision while reducing stigma. We conducted a narrative review of early twentieth century cognitive assessments, tracing the evolution of intelligence testing and its intersections with eugenic ideology. Key examples include the Army Alpha and Beta tests administered during World War I and Ellis Island immigration assessments, which were frequently interpreted without consideration of cultural or educational influences. We examine how these practices informed early interpretations of neuropsychological performance, particularly in individuals with epilepsy, and shaped initial characterizations of neurologically based cognitive abilities. Early intelligence testing was grounded in the belief that intelligence was a fixed and directly genetically determined trait. Test performance was interpreted as an index of biological superiority, lending scientific legitimacy to eugenic ideologies and reinforcing stigma toward individuals with epilepsy. Although modern frameworks emphasize multidimensional cognitive abilities, intelligence-based characterization persists and continues to be frequently reported as a primary outcome of neuropsychological testing. In contexts that require a single summary indicator of cognitive performance, labels such as Total Cognitive Composite are recommended since they avoid implying a fixed or unitary capacity. Continued reliance on the construct of "intelligence" is inconsistent with contemporary models of cognition, reflects outdated theoretical assumptions, and carries enduring psychosocial stigma. Moreover, its circular and internally inconsistent definitions substantially limit its validity and appropriateness within contemporary adult clinical neuropsychological practice.

Since the early twentieth century, historical accounts of belief in the devil have tended to see the period from the Enlightenment onwards as the nadir of belief in a personified devil, particularly in secularising Europe. While this is demonstrably the case in some regards, more recent scholarship has complicated this picture, and this is particularly salient with reference to sectors of the Roman Catholic Church. This article examines the specific case of the survival of Roman Catholic demonology in the period from the late nineteenth century through to the eve of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). By surveying a series of discursive fields usually treated separately, this article highlights that far from being abandoned, demonological discourse remained a feature of various sectors of the Church during the period between around 1850 through to 1960 and can be evidenced in a variety of intellectual domains ranging from the developing discipline of Biblical Studies to the historiography of witchcraft and touching on areas extending from the Roman Catholic response to Spiritualism through to the modernist controversy and popular literature.

The postwar anti-colonial resistance that paved the way to the independence of many African colonies did not appear out of nowhere. Resistance groups could build upon the work of action groups that emerged in the early twentieth century out of discontent with the European colonial governments. André Matswa organized such an action group in French Moyen Congo during the interwar period, dubbed the Société Amicale. Postmortem, Matswa became a Messiah for the people of Moyen Congo, but he was already an important and influential figure in the 1920’s and 1930’s. In 1929 Matswa, who operated from Paris, sent two delegates from the Société to Moyen Congo to collect money to further the aims of his organization. Surprisingly, large sums of money were collected, but the French colonial authorities never cared to discover why. To understand how Matswa’s Société could convince the people of Moyen Congo, the documentation of Swedish missionaries has, perhaps unexpectedly, proven to be extraordinarily useful.

Abstract. An understanding of Earth's past climate can help put current and future changes into historical context. Widely used tree ring-based drought atlases generally target the Palmer Drought Severity Index or other metrics of soil moisture and/or drought risk. These indices reflect contemporaneous meteorological conditions, and it is possible to extract information about temperature and precipitation given the existing reconstructions. Here, we present a fully Bayesian inverse method that infers a joint posterior for monthly mean temperature and precipitation given tree ring-based PDSI reconstructions from the North American Drought Atlas. The method is skillful at reconstructing early twentieth century conditions when compared to instrumental measurements from the CRU TS dataset. Moreover, the reconstructions can capture the complex temporal and multivariate covariance structure between monthly regional temperatures and precipitation. By reconstructing regional temperature and precipitation for the last millennium, we identify the driest and wettest years and decades in each region. Our results highlight the unique nature of the 1930s Dust Bowl drought in central Kansas and the late twentieth century pluvial in the North American southwest.

ABSTRACT During the early twentieth century, tourism flourished along Nova Scotia’s South Shore. Much of the industry’s success can be attributed to the social and physical constructions of the region’s landscape. The South Shore landscape was constructed to appeal to antimodern sentiments. In efforts to draw in a broad array of middle-class tourists, tourism promoters constructed landscapes along gendered lines. The South Shore was portrayed as a sportsman’s paradise, appealing to a bourgeois sense of masculinity. Meanwhile, the pastoral landscapes, sublime coastlines, and inviting beaches were highlighted in tourism promotional materials, such as newspaper articles and advertisements, to attract families. While men participated in hunting and fishing activities, their wives and children could enjoy the beaches and other recreational pursuits. Although the outdoor landscape was conceptually constructed to convey both a rugged wilderness for sportsmen and a more domesticated landscape for their families, the landscapes were also physically reconstructed through the creation of the resorts. The construction of comfortable resorts with electricity and running water, such as White Point Beach Lodge, attracted tourists who, tapping into the antimodernist sentiments of the time, sought to escape city life but not its comforts and amenities.

ABSTRACT How are Black and Indigenous education in the US related? How are antiBlackness and settler colonialism interconnected? This essay addresses these questions, reexamining the history of one of the only US schools to educate both groups: Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. To explore the contemporary legacies of Hampton, we bring together a race-centered historical methodology and Black and Indigenous studies perspectives. We argue that three enduring legacies – subhumanity, genocide and self-determination – with roots in the school itself frame the present, collective struggle for Black and Indigenous justice in education. This focus provides both historical and current insights with global relevance on Black and Indigenous education in analyzing the post-US Civil War era to the early twentieth century. To conclude, we highlight implications for educational stakeholders related to building interracial coalitions for racial justice and recognizing how settler colonialism and antiBlackness have historically been and continue to be intertwined in contemporarily revealing ways.

The directivity of the human voice has been studied since the early twentieth century using different measurement systems with progressively higher spatial resolution. Artificial heads and mouths have been used because of their ability to repeat a given sound production, hence allowing sequential measurements of directivity with a reduced number of microphones and still achieving high spatial resolution. Unlike most artificial heads, whose external geometry is abstracted, this study uses a custom 3D-printed head with detailed geometry and three different mouth openings, all based on 3D scans from magnetic resonance imaging data. The impulse response measurements were performed using a 3D robotic arm, resulting in directivity data with 5° resolution in both azimuth and elevation. The measured directivity patterns are consistent with previous research on energy distribution in space over angles (azimuth and elevation) and frequency, with a higher spatial resolution and for different mouth shapes. The resulting data set is made available in several standardized file formats to facilitate accurate voice directivity simulations in virtual acoustic environments.

The sanitation infrastructure that was introduced in South Asia during the British colonial era was often viewed as an intervention in the sphere of public health to control epidemics and enhance urban hygiene. But, in addition to its professional and medical purposes, sanitation was also a tool with the help of which colonial governments could control the population of cities and restructure the social space. This paper discusses the role of colonial drainage and sewerage systems in Lahore as the tools of control and management between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. The research uses the municipal documents, colonial administrative reports, urban planning documents, and historical maps to explore the ways in which the sanitation reforms reconfigured the space and strengthened the social hierarchies that existed in the colonial city. The discussion shows that the policies of sanitation were well connected to the colonial city control policies. The drainage systems, inspection systems, and sanitation laws provided colonial administrators with the ability to patrol the neighborhoods, provide hygiene standards, and categorize urban areas based on cleanliness. Such categories often overlapped with the socio-economic and professional boundaries, so the distribution of the sanitation facilities in Lahore was uneven. Elite local neighborhoods and residential zones in Europe were given a higher priority in terms of drainage systems and waste management systems, and the crowded native quarters and working areas were not uncommon in terms of being under increased surveillance and management control. In turn, the reforms in sanitation not only have a positive effect on the social health issues but also led to the spatial isolation and governmental control of the colonial urban populations. This analysis allows the development of a concept of sanitation as a variety of surveillance, which is why it contributes to a body of literature on colonial urban governance and environmental history. It emphasizes the role of infrastructural systems in the formation of the patterns of power, social differentiation, and urban control in colonial Punjab, which provides new perspectives on the political aspects of sanitation and public health policy in South Asian colonial cities.

ABSTRACT Angola has a network of sixteen museums under government management. This network comprises five national, three regional, and eight local institutions. These public museums serve not only as exhibition spaces but also as vital centres for heritage conservation, education, and research. Since their inception in the early twentieth century, Angola’s museums have undergone significant transformation. The earliest museums were established by the Portuguese colonial administration, primarily to serve the interests of the elite. Following independence in 1975, the structure and purpose of the museum system underwent a dramatic shift. The focus turned to themes of national significance, with museums playing a crucial role in affirming Angolan identity and supporting the cultural foundations of the newly sovereign state. This paper provides a historical overview of the emergence and evolution of Angola’s museums, tracing their development from colonial institutions to contemporary cultural platforms that reflect the country’s diverse heritage and postcolonial aspirations.

Johan Turi published his famous, classical work Muittalus samiid birra over 100 years ago (1910). It was the first book ever written by a Sami in the Sami language. Although Turi’s book made him famous worldwide already in the early twentieth century, recognition among his own community, on the other hand, was much slower. In this article I discuss how this book can be understood from postcolonial and indigenous perspectives and what kind of new epistemological and indigenous ways of knowing are opened when reading this book. The article also discusses in which kind of historical, social and cultural circumstances this book was written and what kind of meanings it carries to the present day and for future Sami readers and researchers.

Utopian Communities in Britain in the Early Twentieth Century: The Example of New Town