The American Colonization Society (ACS) and Liberia: Unforeseen Legacies of U.S. Intervention
The American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded in 1816 with the primary intention of repatriating free African Americans and emancipated slaves to a colony in West Africa. The society believed in the concept of colonization as a solution to racial tensions and the issue of slavery in the United States and aimed to recruit volunteers from among free African Americans and emancipated slaves in the United States. Examining the continuum from the ACS’s actions to the later crisis establishes a broader trend of US interventions having enduring, unforeseen implications, positioning the Liberian case as emblematic of a larger phenomenon where ostensibly short-term actions possess far-reaching and unforeseen consequences within US foreign relations.
Pro-Palestinian Messaging in Children's Media During the Lebanese Civil War
This article examines the work of Dar al-Fata al-Arabi, a Beirut-based children's publishing house affiliated with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1970s and 1980s. Lebanon’s complex and protracted civil war, which saw an Israeli invasion of the country in 1982, forced Dar al-Fata’s relocation to Egypt. Pan-Arab and pro-Palestinian convictions were closely linked during the conflict and while Dar al-Fata sought to elevate revolutionary politics in the global south more generally, its pro-Palestinian media is the only instance of any contemporary Arab publisher directly addressing a nation of children.
Animals in Islamic Philosophy: Humility to Nature and The Bounds of Humanity
Philosophers and mystics in the Islamic tradition generally seek to reconcile the innate anthropocentrism of Islamic cosmology with the Aristotelian axiom that humans are animals. Thus, animals are central to the philosophical question of human nature and the justification for an anthropocentric worldview. Animals have also been consistently used by Islamic philosophers from the 8th century to the modern era to push for an ecological ethic of humility in the face of a natural world created by God.
Baltic Frontiers
Although historiography tends to focus on the Teutonic Order’s continental politics, the Teutonic Knights were deeply involved with German commercial and military expansion in the Baltic Sea. For these reasons, exploring the overlapping spatial histories of the Hanse and the Teutonic Order can shed new light on the political and economic development of both organizations, and of their Northern European mare nostrum.
The Narrative of the Second Crusade: An Alteration of the Traditional Life Cycle
The new life cycle narrative created for the recruitment of second crusaders altered the typical medieval life cycle that existed outside of the crusading enterprise. This new life cycle included a biological-theological division of the different life stages such as conception, birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, old age, death, and afterlife.
Slavery, the Thief of Virtue: the Social Visibility and Alienation of Enslaved Black Women in Abolitionist Discourse
But before virtuous womanhood was significantly challenged as anachronistic, it played a critical role in abolitionist rhetoric. In the mid-nineteenth century, white Christian abolitionists would argue that to sanction slavery was to sanction rampant adultery by white male enslavers who were systematically engaging in extramarital sex with their enslaved Black women and thereby depriving them of their virtue.
Contesting the ‘New Japan’: Rethinking Japanese Interwar Politics (1919-1941)
The histories of Japan in the interwar period must be framed not by the tragedy and destruction of the World War, which ended it but by the contemporary attitudes and larger picture which emerged from the Great War that began it. Let us continue to write about the voices of dissent and opposition to the changes of the Taishō era without assuming their inevitable and effortless triumph in the Shōwa. In lieu of privileging the narratives of people and policies that would lead Imperial Japan to war in the 1930s, let us shed light on the stories of those who constructed a “New Japan” in the peace of the 1920s.