{"title":"Activism across Borders since 1870: A Review Dossier","authors":"Jessica Reinisch","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000099","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay introduces a review dossier dedicated to Daniel Laqua's <span>Activism across Borders since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and beyond Europe</span> (London, 2023). The dossier features comments by four historians – Constance Bantman, Georgina Brewis, Nicole Robertson, and Mark Hurst – as well as a response from Laqua himself. Laqua's book provides a framework for studying different forms of transnational activism in connection to one another.</p>","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140096846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Humanitarian and Youth Activism across Time and Space","authors":"Georgina Brewis","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000105","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay engages with Daniel Laqua's book <span>Activism across Borders since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and beyond Europe</span> (London, 2023) from the perspective of a historian of both humanitarianism and youth. This short reflection therefore focuses primarily on the book's engagement with the topic of humanitarianism, before discussing an understated, albeit important, cross-cutting theme of the book: the significance of youth in transnational activism. It highlights a number of features of Laqua's book, for instance the merits of adopting a broad chronological approach. At the same time, the essay also uses the space to present a number of reflections on activism, from questions about the generational appeal of particular causes to the way in which particular figures might spark activism. It ends with some thoughts about the source base used to write such histories of activism.</p>","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140096911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reflections on Activism across Borders: A Response","authors":"Daniel Laqua","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000117","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay discusses different approaches to studying transnational activism in historical perspective. In doing so, it concludes a review dossier in which several historians have commented on aspects of Daniel Laqua's book <span>Activism across Borders since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and beyond Europe</span> (London, 2023). The author responds to the preceding pieces by addressing the contributors’ questions and arguments, while also noting how their pieces have applied his book's framework to different causes (e.g. anarchism, feminism, human rights, humanitarianism, labour). Moreover, this essay raises several wider points regarding the subject under consideration. For example, it stresses that activists’ notions regarding the interconnectedness of different causes could generate fresh ruptures. The discussion highlights the amorphous nature of transnational activism, including its potential use by vastly different movements, and it situates the book within a broader, and developing, research agenda.</p>","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140096972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Side by Side with Fighting Nations”: Making the New Culture of Pro-African Solidarity in the Campaigns of the Czechoslovak Committee for Solidarity with African and Asian Peoples","authors":"Barbora Buzássyová","doi":"10.1017/s0020859023000688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859023000688","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The article analyses the solidarity campaigns organized by the Czechoslovak Committee for Solidarity with African and Asian Peoples between the 1960s and 1980s. It situates the Czechoslovak solidarity towards African countries in the wider framework of the solidarity politics of the Eastern bloc and points out differences as well as similarities. Although the Czechoslovak Solidarity Committee was one of the first such committees to be founded in Eastern Europe, in the 1960s its official as well as public commitment to internationalist principles was modest compared with those of solidarity movements elsewhere in the bloc. However, the solidarity campaigns with African liberation movements intensified in the early 1970s. The campaigns in this period were marked by strong national symbolism, which drew on historical parallels between the African and Czechoslovak struggles for independence. The everyday internationalism in this case filled the public space with images of shared suffering, inferiority, and occupation, through which Czechoslovak citizens made sense of their historical role in the world. The article argues that this “nationalization” of official solidarity campaigns helped to embed the victimization narratives that survived the Velvet Revolution and that, in the 1990s, became a basis for new Czech and Slovak political identification.</p>","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139967236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Africans and the Soviet Rights Archipelago","authors":"Thom Loyd","doi":"10.1017/s0020859023000640","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859023000640","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The history of Soviet “rights defenders” is seemingly well known. Emerging in the 1960s in response to fears of a creeping re-Stalinization, the rights movement was part of the broader dissident milieu that coalesced in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Drawing on new documents from the Ukrainian KGB, this article broadens the canon of what we consider “Soviet rights talk” by focusing on a group completely ignored in the existing history of Soviet rights defenders: African students. As the article demonstrates, Soviet citizens were not the only people to draw on a discursive repertoire of civil and universal rights to articulate their demands against the Soviet state. By closely examining the letters and petitions activists produced, it becomes clear that African students’ language of rights grew alongside and, in many respects, pre-empted the Soviet rights movement. The article concludes by considering why, despite sharing the same discursive and physical spaces, neither African nor Soviet rights defenders succeeded in building bridges between their respective islands of protest. Examining this failure to build meaningful solidarities demonstrates the value of pursuing the social history of internationalism; it is only in the banality of the everyday that the capacity for Soviet internationalism to create unanticipated frictions and conflicts reveals itself.</p>","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139967281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Solidarity and the Aesthetics of Pain: Soviet Documentary Film and the Vietnam War","authors":"Kristin Roth-Ey","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000051","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The Soviet campaign in support of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the Vietnam War saturated Soviet public culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was the longest solidarity action in Soviet history and the first to reach mass television audiences. This article examines the production and reception of a televised documentary film about the Vietnam War made by Konstantin Simonov – a celebrity writer who played a crucial role in Soviet culture during World War II, and then, in the post-war period, in the struggle to come to terms with terrible truths about Stalinism and the chaos and trauma that war had rendered. Simonov's film presented the Vietnam War in lyrical rather than analytical terms, calling upon viewers to draw connections between the suffering of the Vietnamese and the Soviet wartime experience and to enact their solidarity with the Vietnamese in terms of feeling. The film proposes a solidarity of pain and an understanding of war and wartime suffering as elemental and overwhelming. In dozens of letters to Simonov, we find an understanding and appreciation of this vision, which decentres Vietnam and instead sends viewers on a journey back to Soviet history and trauma.</p>","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139967304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transnational Echoes of Spenceanism: A Text-Mining Exploration in English-Language Newspapers (1790–1850)","authors":"Matilde Cazzola, Anselm Küsters","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000014","url":null,"abstract":"By tracing mentions of the English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), his revolutionary “Plan”, and his disciples (the “Spencean Philanthropists”) in digitized collections of English-language Irish, Caribbean, Indian, Australian, Canadian, and US-American newspapers in the 1790s–1840s, this article explores the dissemination of the ideas and militancy inspired by Spence (“Spenceanism”) across the British Empire and the United States. By applying Digital Humanities methods to investigate British radical history from a transnational perspective, the global reception of Spenceanism is reconstructed by examining and comparing a corpus of 275 newspaper articles through text-mining methods such as keyword analysis, co-occurrences, and sentiment analysis. These methods enable the identification of key themes in references to Spenceanism and advance hypotheses concerning both their geographical and chronological distribution: not only when and where Spence and the Spenceans were alluded to and commented upon, but also how a newspaper's geographical location may have impacted its rhetoric in a specific year and historical context. By combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, this article contributes new insights regarding the global circulation of radical ideas across the nineteenth-century English-reading world.","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139670403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Winter-Quartering Tribes: Nomad–Peasant Relations in the Northeastern Frontiers of the Ottoman Empire (1800s–1850s)","authors":"Yener Koç","doi":"10.1017/s0020859023000639","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859023000639","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Focusing on the winter quartering of Kurdish nomadic tribes among peasant villages, this article discusses the patterns of Kurdish nomadism and nomad–peasant relations in the Ottoman sanjaks of Muş, Bayezid, and Van during the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the political structure of these regions and the requirements of animal husbandry among the nomads not only created a distinct pattern of nomadism among the Kurdish tribes, but also led to the polarization of relations between nomads and peasants. Moreover, the article observes how nomad–settled, tribe–peasant relations in these regions evolved as a result of the gradual sedentarization of the pastoral nomads and related changes in their subsistence economies starting from the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, this article provides a background for a better understanding of the intercommunal tensions and conflicts over land in the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.</p>","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138544625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lorenzo Costaguta. Workers of All Colors Unite. Race and the Origins of American Socialism. [The Working Class in American History.] University of Illinois Press, Urbana (IL) 2023. 254 pp. Ill. $110.00. (Paper: $28.00; E-book $19.95.)","authors":"Chad Pearson","doi":"10.1017/S0020859023000536","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000536","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139018864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ISH volume 68 issue 3 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0020859023000615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859023000615","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139019713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}