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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.

Propaganda in the first half of the 20th century is usually associated with the atrocity stories from World War I and the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazi regime and World War II. This chapter provides a brief overview of the history of propaganda and propaganda theory before turning its attention to a theory of propaganda in civil war. It argues that what makes propaganda in a civil war unique is that it is a combination of both political and war propaganda. Current research on propaganda theory emphasizes that propaganda is in service of an ideology and focuses on propaganda as disseminating information that tries to avoid reason and veracity. The chapter argues that propagandists in a civil war setting are presenting the ‘truth’ as they understand it. Informed by Carl Schmitt’s “friend/enemy” distinction in his Concept of the Political, the author argues that each side argued and was convinced that they represented the values and interests of the nation and its people, and that because the stakes of the conflict were so high that all actions could be justified.

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.

h4Explores the major political, social, economic, religious and cultural changes impacting what was once the most important region of the Roman world/h4ulliThe first modern research volume on a core region of Late Antiquity/liliA tight and distinctly chronological focus on the second quarter of the first millennium CE, that allows for a different vision of the many vicissitudes of Late Roman Italy, among other works on Ancient and Late Antique Italy./liliAn emphasis on one of the key features of Late Antiquity: the transformation of the Roman Empire in the West into successor polities./liliA balanced range of topics, including ones rarely encountered in this type of work (such as gender or environmental history), with a special focus on political transformation and violence./li/ulpThis research volume reassesses one of the most fundamental transformations in Late Antiquity, centered on a pivotal region: the transition from ‘Empire’ to ‘Kingdom’ in Italy c. 250-500. During the first quarter of the first millennium, Italy was still the heart of the Roman Empire; the only political superstructure ever managing to encompass the entire Mediterranean world and its European hinterland. Yet during the second quarter of this millennium, Italy underwent dramatic evolutions from demotion to a provincialized region (c. 285-395), to a new imperial hub kept afloat by cannibalizing other provinces’ resources (c. 395-476), to an autonomous regnum governed by non-Roman rulers as part of an Eastern Roman ‘Commonwealth’ (c. 475-535)./p

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.

Examining early Chinese ritual discourse during the Warring States and early Western Han Periods, this book reveals how performance became a fundamental feature of ritual and politics in early China. Through a dramaturgical lens, Thomas Radice explores the extent to which performer/spectator relationships influenced all aspects of early Chinese religious, ethical, and political discourse. Arguing that the Confucians conceived ritual as primarily a dramaturgical matter, this book demonstrates not only that theatricality was necessary for expression and deception in a community of spectators, but also how a theatrical 'presence' ultimately became essential to all forms of public life in early China. Thomas Radice illuminates previously unexplored connections between early Chinese texts, aesthetics, and traditions. © Thomas Radice, 2025. All rights reserved.

An important reason for the success of the Venetian Paolo Sarpi’s ideas in England is found in the ‘Englishing’ of his printed works, that is, their adaptation and appropriation by printers and translators. During the Venetian interdict (c. 1606–1608), Sarpi’s tracts were treated as timely, informative, and politically useful news. Englishing consisted of re-writing titles by adding bombastic phrases, changing printers’ ornaments, and adding marginalia to help readers unfamiliar with Italy. In the History of the Council of Trent, published in 1619 (Italian) and 1620 (English), the Englishing became more substantive – adding lengthy prefaces, inserting words into Sarpi’s text, and including the translator’s name. The prefaces framed the book’s contents, while the translator’s name provided authority. The additional words made the English History even more partisan than the Italian Historia. Publishers and translators modified Sarpi’s works to produce aggressive readings that diverged from his own political and religious goals.

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The editors of Fragrant Frontier have produced an impressively researched book on the contemporary growers, in northern Vietnam and Southwest China, of three spices—star anise, black cardamom, and cinnamon, each of which has local, regional, and international economic importance—as well as the human links in the global commodity chain of these spices. This volume is much more coherent than many edited volumes, and readers should not skip any of it, as there are nice little surprises waiting here and there in the text.A good example is the “Preface and Acknowledgements” section, as this not only provides interesting information on how the volume came into being but also links to websites and scannable QR codes for “story maps” on the three spices and the places mentioned in the rest of the volume. This is a nice touch that gives this volume about the recent situation of farmers, local traders, marketplace workers, street vendors (of both the spices and foods prepared with them), wholesalers, exporters, and state officials a very contemporary feel. These story maps are only the first of an extensive number of relevant, well-done, and well-used illustrations including photographs, maps, and tables inserted throughout the following chapters.

This series of four presentations sought to examine case studies of Greek-Russian relations in the early modern and, mostly, modern period. In the choice of topics, I was guided by two considerations: first, I sought to highlight topics that, to my mind, have not yet attracted the attention they deserve in historiography. For example, although alms collections in the Russian Empire in the early modern period have been discussed repeatedly, this has not been the case until quite recently for t...