This article examines one of the most violent episodes in Mexico’s recent history—the Corpus Thursday massacre orchestrated by the Mexican government against young students on June 10, 1971. The event marked the beginning of a period known as the guerra sucia (dirty war), marked by the systematic repression of students and dissenting political groups by government forces. The present work advocates for “making history with photographs,” urging readers to explore the historical moment through the narratives presented by three distinct historical actors: the press, independent photographers, and the perspective of power from governmental organizations.

Church construction was one of the most challenging, and most political, tasks undertaken by medieval cities. Comparing examples from across Europe reveals profound differences, however, in both the architecture of politics and the politics of architecture; that is, how building projects were administered and how their administration shaped their socio-political significance. Although ranging across the continent, this article is centered on construction in two representative cities: Vienna and London. While the former had a small number of churches, all under the direct control of the mayor and council, the latter had over a hundred, each overseen by locally appointed officers. In Vienna, church construction was, thus, an important field of activity for the city government, which oversaw the work and celebrated its own leadership of the project; in London, it lay outside civic control and offered local opportunities for domination by wealthy families. This difference can be found across the continent, separating the large, old cities of England, northern France, Spain, and the Low Countries, which could have numerous churches, from smaller towns and cities both in these places and across the rest of central, northern, and southern Europe, which typically had a single, major parish church and only a few subordinate ones. This article considers the implications of these two contrasting models—centralized and decentralized, civic and parochial, high government and local politics—on how architectural production functioned as a field of political activity and how church building shaped local distributions and articulations of power in medieval Europe.

For over forty years, presidents of the Summer School Association of Queen’s University wrote annually to teachers across Canada, encouraging them to attend summer courses for credit toward a bachelor of arts. In the 1920s, presidents’ messages associated attendance with societal progress and the professionalization of teaching. In the 1930s, such messages linked attendance with personal growth and career development. In the 1940s and 1950s, they linked attendance with having an enjoyable summer vacation. This article analyzes how and why these messages evolved and argues that the underlying structure of the messages remained consistent: they were means through which Queen’s Summer School Association presidents marked symbolic boundaries between more and less professional teachers. This article contributes to our understanding of the social history of teacher education by interpreting a unique primary data source to explore the participation of teachers themselves in the construction of symbolic boundaries marking professional status.

Luchino Visconti is widely recognised as a high-culture director. However, in his films of the period 1943–63 there was a firm engagement with consumer culture and modernity in terms of themes, characters and references. This article explores this often overlooked dimension in Visconti's films by analysing a number of key sequences and moments that relate directly to consumption, consumer culture, leisure, modernity, Americanisation and youth culture. The analysis shows how these representations related to the ongoing changes in Italian postwar society and to incoming Americanisation in particular. My research is informed by the work of Gary Cross, Victoria De Grazia and Emanuela Scarpellini on consumer culture and contextualises how Visconti's referencing of consumer culture and modernity was received by the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano or Italian Communist Party).

The Byzantine lead seals of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts number in total 146 pieces, mostly collected in the region of Trebizond. They offer valuable insights into the middle Byzantine society of the Pontos region, which despite its location on the easternmost borders was connected with other, even more remote, regions of the empire. The majority of these seals come from local officials and reflect their local preoccupations, perhaps as a backlash to the dominant culture of the capital. Fifteen selected pieces from the collection are published here and provided with commentary.

The northern coast of the Black Sea has produced an abundance of documentary texts dating from the sixth through fourth centuries BC. Of great value to the epigraphist and historian are dozens of Greek letters, receipts and curses inscribed on lead and ceramic media. When placed in dialogue with one another, these texts yield new insights into daily life and literacy in communities for which literary sources are scant or absent. They document the bustling trade in saltfish, enslaved persons and textiles, and the web of relations between Greek and non-Greek individuals in north Pontic cities, from marriage to commercial ties with indigenous groups of the Pontic interior. This article demonstrates how trade could drive literacy in non-elite communities of the northern Black Sea. Literacy and mercantile activity were very much entwined, and developed in parallel with one another and with other civic and social institutions within these port communities.

This is a review article of a three-volume book in Persian by Ali Akbar Tashakori on the social history of Yazdi Zoroastrians in medieval and modern times.1 The work goes beyond the history of the Yazdi community, encompassing the broader history of Iranian Zoroastrians. Despite certain novelties, the volumes largely rely on a conventional reconstruction of the history of Iranian Zoroastrians in the second millennium CE. The foundational elements of this reconstruction include the gradual Islamization of Iran and the subsequent “retreat” of Zoroastrians to the “marginal” regions of Yazd and Kerman, the challenging conditions faced by Zoroastrians in medieval and early modern times, the beginning of Iranian Zoroastrians’ social and intellectual “emancipation” in the nineteenth century with Parsi assistance, the community's increasing political and economic influence in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi eras, and the Pahlavis’ exceptional role in elevating the status of Zoroastrians within wider Iranian society. Tashakori's extensive reliance on these narratives offers an opportunity to not only review his own new interpretations, but also to reassess these long-standing assumptions. Additionally, the article highlights neglected primary sources pertaining to the Yazdi community.

This work examines the history of smallpox, a highly infectious and epidemic disease, in Argentina, throughout different governments and public health policies from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The study focuses on the smallpox vaccine and the social and collective significance of universal immunization. It also analyses the relationship between governments of different political orientations and the international community regarding the production of vaccines and vaccination campaigns from their implementation to the eradication of the disease.