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During the 1920s and 1930s, black South Africans were subjected to a large number of discriminatory laws. African leaders of the time decried both this and the iniquities Africans faced when dealing with the justice system. Curiously, though, some of those same leaders expressed confidence in South Africa’s judges and the balanced approach with which they ran their courtrooms. In this article, we explore the accuracy of those statements by seeking quantifiable evidence that South Africa’s judges acted impartially toward African defendants standing before them. The evidence of hundreds of criminal review and criminal appeal judgments demonstrates that Africans were subject to considerably different standards of fairness, depending on where within the judicial system their case was heard. Alleged violators of the law were usually tried first in the magistrates’ courts. Magistrates were government civil servants, and their courts were crowded venues in which decisions were often meted out too quickly and on limited evidence. A fair hearing was often denied. However, an unusual oversight system, consisting of automatic reviews and initiated appeals before trained judges in the country’s superior courts, led to impartial hearings and a small measure of justice, with judges regularly overturning magistrates’ decisions. Judges intervened in the decisions of magistrates when they determined that there had been errors of law or irregularities of trial process or sentencing that led to failures of justice that were prejudicial to defendants. We conclude that, at least in some circumstances, Africans could anticipate an impartial hearing before the country’s judges, and that the stated confidence in judges was not without foundation. © 2025 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

There is an “under-representation problem” in philosophy departments and journals. Empirical data suggest that while we have seen some improvements since the 1990s, the rate of change has slowed down. Some posit that philosophy has disciplinary norms making it uniquely resistant to change. We present results from an empirical case study of a philosophy department that achieved and maintained male-female gender parity among its faculty as early as 2014. Our analysis extends beyond matters of gender parity because that is only one, albeit important, dimension of inclusion. We build from the study to reflect on strategies that may catalyze change.

Historians have long recognized Matthew Fontaine Maury as an important if controversial figure in the histories of science and of maritime and naval affairs. These assessments, however, rest on scholarship that is by now more than a half-century old. It is therefore appropriate to look at Maury’s significance from fresh perspectives, incorporating recent historiographical trends in the history of science and cartography, environmental history, cultural history and military history. This article focuses on the ways in which Maury’s cartographic work reframed mariners’ understanding of the marine environment away from what he perceived to be a watery wilderness towards an ordered environment safe and favourable to American commerce. Maury was long known as ‘The Pathfinder of the Seas’, but I argue that his significance, in fact, lies in the ways he and his staff at the Naval Observatory organized the sea as a ‘common highway’, tracing paths, but also imposing narratives and constructing new meanings. Maury’s tool was the nautical chart and, particularly, his Wind and Current Charts series that by the 1850s reimagined the ways mariners, navigators and naval officers understood and harnessed the ocean environment. The article briefly considers these charts from three perspectives – method, process and representation – in order to see the ways in which Maury was pushing the boundaries of the cartographic medium to usher in revolutionary ways of envisioning the ocean environment. By quantifying winds, symbolizing whales and infusing the sea with ship tracks, among other things, Maury was imposing potent, if sometimes flawed, new ways of understanding and imagining the sea that were central to American maritime expansion in the antebellum era. In this and other ways, we can see Maury anew, a figure central to the growth of American commercial empire and to new ways of understanding and thinking about the sea.

Looking at colour can be a way not only to think within or about culture but also to probe the boundaries of cultural approaches. The "Cultural Turn," as it has been called, has made an impact across disciplines. In history, it replaced long-established explanatory models provided by Marxism and modernisation theory. Even fields like art history and literature, which always considered themselves allied to the arts rather than to the sciences, were reshaped by new understandings of culture - for instance, as a much larger system of meaning in which the works they studied were a part. But "culture" is notoriously murky, and its analytical use can obfuscate patterns of causality. This volume analyses how looking at colour can take us further.

La historia fue tan importante para la construcción de la identidad comunitaria y la legitimidad política en el siglo XV como lo es hoy, y en los reinos de España igualmente tenso. Los cronistas y biógrafos católicos castellanos parecen inseguros del estado preciso de los moros en Iberia. Todos estaban de acuerdo con el control político o el señorío de los cristianos castellanos, pero pocos tenían una idea clara de las implicaciones de ese señorío para los moros. ¿Debería permitirse a los moros permanecer como parte de la comunidad una vez que un monarca cristiano castellano tomara el control de su ciudad, región o reino, o no había posibilidad de que pertenecieran? Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo (1404-1470), Fernán Pérez de Guzmán (c. 1377-c. 1460), Alonso Fernández de Palencia (1423-1492), Hernando de Pulgar (1436-c. 1492), y Mosén Diego de Valera (1412-1488) dieron diferentes respuestas. Todos coincidieron en que la comunidad castellano-leonesa existía antes de al-Andalus y, por lo tanto, era la comunidad política legítima de Hispania. La mayoría de ellos aceptaron la presencia de Granada de facto pero no de jure. Sin embargo, Arévalo, Valera y Pulgar sugieren la posibilidad de una comunidad política musulmana de jure bajo dominio castellano; Palencia y Guzmán no.

The Umayyad Caliphate (661–750) was the first Islamic dynasty. Muʿawiya ibn Abi Sufyan established himself as caliph in Damascus after his victory over ʿAli ibn Abi Talib in the civil war that followed the murder of ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan in Medina. Muʿawiya and his successors expanded the territory under Muslim rule dramatically. At their peak, the Umayyads ruled an empire stretching from Spain to the frontiers of China and India. The Umayyads made significant contributions to the development of the Islamic faith and to the spread of the Arabic language throughout the region. Dynastic crises, revenue shortfalls, and the limitations of an empire based on conquest ultimately led to their demise at the hands of the Abbasids in 750.

Race has long shaped shopping experiences for many Americans. Retail exchanges and establishments have made headlines as flashpoints for conflict not only between blacks and whites, but also between whites, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and a wide variety of other ethnic groups, who have at times found themselves unwelcome at white-owned businesses.  Race and Retail documents the extent to which retail establishments, both past and present, have often catered to specific ethnic and racial groups. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the original essays collected here explore selling and buying practices of nonwhite populations around the world and the barriers that shape these habits, such as racial discrimination, food deserts, and gentrification. The contributors highlight more contemporary issues by raising questions about how race informs business owners’ ideas about consumer demand, resulting in substandard quality and higher prices for minorities than in predominantly white neighborhoods.  In a wide-ranging exploration of the subject, they also address revitalization and gentrification in South Korean and Latino neighborhoods in California, Arab and Turkish coffeehouses and hookah lounges in South Paterson, New Jersey, and tourist capoeira consumption in Brazil.   Race and Retail illuminates the complex play of forces at work in racialized retail markets and the everyday impact of those forces on minority consumers. The essays demonstrate how past practice remains in force in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

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<em>Gale</em> OneFile includes Swarms, Herds, and Peoples: Examinations of Interspecie by David A. Bello and C. Michele Thompson. Click to explore.