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Two years after the revolution in Russia, the social revolution was once again fermenting on the ruins of the empires defeated in the war. The First World War was turning into a civil war and not only in countries defeated in the war. The year 1919 saw the spread of workers’ and soldiers’ councils and a series of anti-colonial revolts in the Middle East and Far East. As yet, the link between these and the October Revolution was largely symbolic, since the Communist International generally learned of events only after the fact even as it endeavoured to integrate them within a global theoretical framework. Nevertheless it felt as though revolution were spreading like a contagion, at the same time as a wave of repression no less generalized was building up. Opening in revolutionary struggle, the year 1919 would end in victory for counter-revolution.

This article explores the impact of de-Stalinization on the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. Writers, artists, and intellectuals welcomed the curtailment of repression—the so- called ‘thaw’—but their calls for openness and tolerance unnerved the Soviet party authorities. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin but he did not question the fundamentals of socialism. Still, his criticism of Stalin led to turmoil in the socialist camp, most notably unrest in Poland and the anti-Soviet insurrection in Hungary. While Khrushchev agreed to a reduction of Soviet influence in Poland, he ordered military intervention in Hungary. This intervention undermined the legitimacy of communism, as it made clear that communism in Eastern Europe was a Soviet imposition. Meanwhile, de-Stalinization untied Mao Zedong’s hands. He felt free to pursue China’s socialist transformation the way he thought best. Mao took advantage of Khrushchev’s predicament to assert China’s claim to leadership in the communist world.

Territorialist ideology emerged together with Zionist ideology. From the moment Leon Pinsker wrote in his Auto-Emancipation that “the goal of our present endeavors must be not the Holy Land, but a land of our own,” there were those in Jewish society who clung to the idea of “a land of our own” and wanted to set up some independent autonomous entity outside of the Land of Israel. This chapter traces territorial ideology from its ideational beginnings in the 1880s, through its conversion into an organized ideology and a political force in the Jewish world of the early twentieth century to its decline in the 1950s.

Through their successfully waged war and also by their novel political strategies, eighteenth-century North Americans seeking home rule made history. By systematically organizing around a refusal of British goods and developing a new national taste, they politicized the everyday. Twenty years later, this politicization was reprised in the French Revolution. Whereas the new American aesthetic was defined by sobriety and domestic production, the forms generated in the French Revolutionary decade combined the symbols of Republicanism with styles connoting non-aristocratic values. The likeness and difference of the role of culture, domesticity, and gender in the American and French revolutions are represented in their iconic forms—homespun for the United States and the dress of the sans-culottes for France. Both revolutions were characterized by a consistent investment in material culture and everyday life, and gave rise to new political cultures. This reformulation is best conceptualized using the term “cultural revolution.”

To demonstrate the growth and sophistication of ancient sport studies, this chapter surveys Greek athletics and Roman spectacles from their origins to their overlap in the Roman Empire. It notes trends, debates, and new discoveries (e.g., of victory epigrams, agonistic inscriptions, gladiator burials). Revisionists are exposing traditional ideologies of sport and spectacle rooted in Victorian idealism and moralism. Challenging the traditional amateurist scenario of early athletic glory and tragic decline, they suggest continuities, transitions, and cultural discourse. Questioning Olympocentrism and the “exceptionalism” of Greece and Rome, studies now favor broader chronological, geographical, comparative, and inclusive approaches. Scholars are rethinking the significance of sport and spectacle for society, identity, spectatorship, violence, gender, and the body. Forgoing sensationalistic approaches to the shows of the Roman arena, scholars now suggest that gladiators were professional performers whose preparations, combats, and rewards had “sporting” aspects.

How do artifacts get their functions? It is typically thought that an artifact’s function depends on its maker’s intentions. This chapter argues that this common understanding is fatally flawed. Nor can artifact function be understood in terms of current uses or capacities. Instead, it proposes that we understand artifact function on the etiological model that Ruth Millikan and others have proposed for the biological realm. This model offers a robustly normative conception of function, but it does so naturalistically by employing our best scientific theories, in particular natural selection. To help make this case, it proposes “living artifacts” (organisms designed for human purposes through artificial selection) as a bridge between the artifactual and the biological realms.

This chapter uses theories of diaspora—which transcend narrative of origins/dispersal and explore instead synchronic ties between multiple centers—to examine phenomena of Jewish cultural and social life in Central Europe during the early modern period (ca. 1500–1800), an geo-cultural association that was captured by the term “Ashkenaz.” Using examples from print culture, social history, and epistolary exchanges, it argues that Jews occupied a position of “variant-participants”—at once participating in wider social, intellectual, and cultural trends and translating those trends into a particular idiom with a distinctly Jewish inflection, shaped both by relationship to past texts and traditions and to other Jewish communities both within and outside of Central Europe. Considering the accommodations of diaspora existence, which creates a “home away from home,” provides a useful lens for conceptualizing the dimensions of Jewish distinctiveness, even while recognizing their local indigeneity, and allows for a consideration of the creation of local practices as well as extra-territorial forms of identification.

Because of the small field of educational history, the relatively small population of Asian American youths who grew up before 1970, and the nature of education being part of a larger sociocultural phenomenon, publications on Asian American education history have been relatively few—when compared with European American, African American, and Latino education histories. This essay expands on the three factors mentioned above while discussing the extant literature on Asian American education history and suggesting areas for further inquiry. The essay examines not only formal education—K–12 schooling and higher education—but also nonformal and informal education. It further discusses the use and nonuse of theory, the intersection of Asian American education history with Asian education history, and the role of international relations in influencing the education of Asian American youths.

The notion of assimilation by immigrant groups remains beset by conceptual confusion. An examination of the way that assimilation developed in the American past, especially in the period after World War II, provides a way of cutting through the conceptual fog. Key features of historical assimilation are captured by the definition of the concept in neo-assimilation theory. However, debate over the present-day role of mainstream assimilation has been renewed by the advent of segmented assimilation. Both theories can point to evidence about the second generations issuing from contemporary immigrant groups to support their claims. A mixed picture is also found in the fundamental economic and demographic trends that are prognostic about assimilation.

The Atlantic Northeast emerged as a distinctive region between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Its largest tribal groupings were the Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, Penobscot, and other Wabanaki peoples; the Delaware and other Lenape peoples; and Mohegan, Mohican, Munsee, Narragansett, Pequot, and Wampanoag Indians. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these peoples struggled to survive in the face of depopulation from diseases, warfare, emigration, and other effects of European, particularly English, colonization. Thereafter, they and their communities persisted, despite further marginalization in non-Native law, society, and discourse in the United States and Canada. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Native peoples have begun to resist such marginalization through greater public visibility as celebrities and activists, by regaining some lands and rights, and by proclaiming their own perspectives on their history.

In 1825, the father of gastronomy, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, proposed that the perfection of the senses in Western history coincided with the European encounter with America. How exactly did novel sensations of pleasure and pain change people on both sides of the Atlantic? Smelling, tasting, hearing, seeing, and touching changed profoundly for those who experienced the opening of the Atlantic world. This article uses the classical ‘five senses’ organisation of Western physiology as an organising principle, doing so for convenience's sake rather than to suggest that it operated as a universal structure of sensing in every culture of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. For smelling, it concentrates on the East Indies and West Indies, for hearing on Africa and Ibero-America, for tasting Central America and the West Indies (with a side glance at Africa), and for seeing north Europe and North America.

This chapter plots out the emergence of a diaspora center in Babylonia, beginning in the late Biblical era and continuing through late antiquity, as it grew into probably the foremost community in the Jewish world by the early Middle Ages. It outlines the geographical settlement of the region and the development of a Babylonian Jewish self-consciousness and self-confidence. Among the key factors in this achievement was the constant and close economic and intellectual contact between Babylonia and Palestine. Although Babylonia and Palestine were, for the most part, ruled by separate empires, often in conflict with one another, the Jews, and significantly the rabbis in both places, maintained close contact. The importance of Babylonia within the Sasanian Empire, and subsequently within the Abbasid caliphate, both economically and militarily, also contributed to the development and preeminence of the region in global terms.

Baseball spread beyond US borders, taking hold in the Caribbean and parts of the Pacific, but never attained the global influence that British sport achieved. A. G. Spalding’s efforts to export the game and, with it, “American” values, via his 1888–1889 circumnavigation of the world met with little success. Baseball could not dislodge British football, rugby, and cricket, which had already gained purchase abroad due to Britain’s larger global presence. In the Caribbean, where baseball became the dominant sport, Cuba, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and other countries made the game into their own national pastimes. Baseball there, open to players of all races and nations, modeled the democratic version of sport that would not exist in US pro leagues until integration after World War II. Since then, Major League Baseball has attracted ever-greater numbers of players from abroad, first from the Caribbean and more recently from Japan and Asia.

This chapter traces the rise of global Jewish organizations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that such groups helped usher Jews into modernity. This was a period of great technological advancement, in which the rise of mass transportation and mass communication meant that Jews enjoyed unprecedented mobility. Jewish communities also experienced great upheaval, with the breakdown of traditional Jewish institutions, particularly the medieval kehilla. As a response to these changing circumstances, Jews in the United States and Europe established modern and secular organizations and found ways to be Jewish in a changing world. These associations served a range of purposes: fraternal, political, cultural, and memorial. This chapter focuses on some of the most important of these bodies, including the International Order of the B’nai B’rith, the Jewish Labor Bund, and landsmanshaftn, which together helped shape the lives of millions of Jews in the modern period.

Electricity was a new and developing field of research during the eighteenth century. With a focus on the experimental apparatus employed and the sociable exchange of ideas, this chapter examines how electricity was taught to Harvard students and members of polite society in the Boston area over the course of the century. Without local instrument makers or suppliers of glass and brass parts, colonial American experimenters had to import equipment and repair parts from London. When time and money discouraged imports, they became bricoleurs, incorporating recycled, traded, and ready-to-hand materials into their apparatus. Benjamin Franklin was an important intermediary in getting scientific instruments from London to Boston and Cambridge, and he shared instructional know-how so that locals could assemble their own Leyden jars and other electrical instruments.

The concept of a group called “the bourgeoisie” is unusual in being both central to early modern and modern European history, and at the same time highly controversial. In old regime France, people frequently used the words “bourgeois” or “bourgeoisie” but what they meant by them was very different from the meaning historians later assigned to those terms. In the nineteenth century the idea of a “bourgeoisie” became closely associated with Marxian historical narratives of capitalist ascendancy. Does it still make sense to speak of a “bourgeoisie”? This article attempts to lay out and clarify the terms of the problem by posing a series of questions about this aspect of the social history of Ancien Régime France, with a brief look across the Channel for comparison. It considers first the problem of definition: what was and is meant by “the bourgeoisie” in the context of early modern French history? Second, what is the link between eighteenth-century economic change and the existence and nature of such a group, and can we still connect the origins of the French Revolution to the “rise” of a bourgeoisie? And finally, can the history of perceptions and representations of a bourgeoisie or middle class help us to understand why the concept has been so problematic in the longer run of French history?

For a long time, oral history documents have been encountered and understood in two polar dimensions, not inaccurately described as “raw” and “cooked.” Considering oral history as primary source material, many discussions focus on the conducting, collecting, preserving, transcribing, and organizing of interviews as the basic “stuff” of work in the field. Alternatively, oral history has been often been approached from the vantage of its use—as selectively “cooked” and presented as History—in or as an exhibit, a film, a book, an article, a website, a text sidebar, and so on. These dimensions are each vitally important, of course, and much of the discourse of the field has been oriented to one or the other of these poles. This article further discusses the method of intra-interview passage in recording oral history. Importance of history makers in recording oral history and making them accessible is demonstrated in this article.

Few people today are familiar with the ideas and personalities associated with Jewish diaspora nationalism, or “autonomism,” as it was often called. The creation of the State of Israel has made the central premise of autonomism, the notion of the diaspora as the primary locus of Jewish intellectual and cultural creativity and the authentic home of the Jewish people, seem irrelevant. Jewish national identity has become inextricably linked with political sovereignty and land. And despite a recent spate of scholarly works on the leading figures in the movement, diaspora nationalism remains a mere footnote in modern Jewish historiography. Yet little more than a century ago, advocates of Jewish national rights in the diaspora aggressively competed with Zionists for the hearts and minds of Jews living in the multinational empires of Austria-Hungary and Russia. In the period between the 1880s and the 1930s, the movement to ensure national rights for Jews played a major political and cultural role in the Jewish communities of eastern and central Europe and among immigrants in the United States. This chapter examines some of the leading proponents of “autonomism,” including Simon Dubnow, the Bund, Nathan Birnbaum, Haim Zhitlowski, and Simon Rawidowicz. A conclusion discusses Jewish diasporist thinkers in western Europe and in the United States in the era after the Second World War.

This chapter focuses on sport historiography in Australia and New Zealand, with three broad aims: to survey historic and historiographic developments, to consider the historiographical predominance of team ball sports, and to chart new and emerging directions. While sport had long formed part of popular discourse in both countries, in the 1980s historians began to analyze sport comprehensively, and the decades since have witnessed a substantial growth in sports historiography produced by academic scholars. Research has had a particular focus on certain sports, especially cricket, rugby, and Australian Rules football, which has been problematic in terms of its exclusivity and yet generative of important scholarly discussion and debate. New research directions, especially those emerging from an increased engagement with the cultural turn in the past decade, have yielded important studies into the fields of affect, bodies, materiality, visuality, and other areas new or rare in sports history.

Childhood and youth have undergone a period of much more intensive scrutiny within the social history of medicine in the past few decades. This article discusses the significance of health and well-being of the younger generation as it reflects a variety of wider societal concerns about national efficiency, confidence in medical practice, a healthy and well-balanced population, and the quality of social relations. It discusses more insightful discoveries about the nature of child patients and disease by studying how they are treated compared with others experiencing similar impairment. It also deals with the second theme to emerge in recent medical histories of childhood and youth focusing on the boundaries of normal life experiences. The history of child health is moving from the margins of welfare and employment into its own field, and it is hoped that future work will continue to build up a more convincing set of theoretical reference points.