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.

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.

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.

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.