Arts and Humanities

Abstract: Background: In 1983 Plaitakis and Duvoisin identified Homeric moly with Galanthus nivalis L., and read the Circe episode as the earliest recorded use of an anticholinesterase against antimuscarinic poisoning. The identification held for four decades. Recent multidisciplinary criticism has now put its philological and biogeographical foundations in doubt. Objective: To ask what survives of the pharmacological thesis once those foundations are removed — by reconstructing the clinical phenotype the poem describes, extracting the constraints the texts actually impose, and testing five candidate taxa against them. Methods: Critical review, integrating the Homeric and classical sources (Theophrastus, Dioscorides) with Amaryllidaceae phytochemistry and with the clinical toxicology of antimuscarinic delirium. Results: The phenotype as narrated, delirium with inner awareness preserved (noos empedos), corresponds closely to central antimuscarinic toxicity. Five constraints emerge from the texts: a dark-tunicated bulb, a white flower, arduous extraction, an inland habitat, and the pharmacodynamic capacity to reverse the syndrome. Against these, Galanthus nivalis performs well on morphology and pharmacology and badly on biogeography, being effectively absent from the Aegean lowlands. Peganum harmala does possess anticholinesterase activity, contrary to a claim often made in this debate, but its habit is wrong and so is its ecology. Allium nigrum belongs to the moly of the later botanists and offers no centrally acting mechanism; Mandragora belongs to the kykeon, not to the cure. Only Pancratium spp. satisfy all five, and they do so for a reason no other candidate can supply: contractile roots that bury the bulb, accounting for precisely the difficulty of extraction that Theophrastus singled out as diagnostic. Conclusions: The pharmacological reading of the episode stands. The single-species identification does not, and should give way to a clade-level hypothesis centred on the Mediterranean Amaryllidoideae, with Pancratium as the likeliest archetype — that is, to an ancient ethnobotanical complex in which empirical antidotal knowledge was carried by a group of plants rather than by one.

Abstract: Amid shifting urban renewal approaches and industrial restructuring in China, small and medium-sized cities face the challenge of conserving industrial heritage through adaptive reuse. Drawing on gazetteers, planning documents, and interviews, this paper examines the transformation of the Anqing Baiqitun Cement Plant into a cultural and creative park across environmental, social, economic, and governance dimensions. The case is significant as typical heavy industrial heritage in a smaller city, while the enterprise's restructuring and relocation have produced a rupture in collective memory and identity. The study finds that minimal intervention in the heavy industrial remains achieved carbon sequestration and emission reduction, succeeded in ecological restoration, and attained financial viability by leveraging local markets and intangible assets. However, the industrial past has been selectively reconstructed, creating a divide between the former industrial community and the present one, partly due to an over-reliance on Authorised Heritage Discourse logic and insufficient collaboration with the existing enterprise. Participatory governance, driven mainly by government coordination and market capital, proved efficient but lacked public engagement. The paper argues that regenerating industrial heritage in small and medium-sized cities requires not only physical upgrading but also social mechanisms that enable public participation in conservation.

Abstract: While humour requires closeness, it may also be understood at distance, in books or newspapers, where jokes play an important role both as attractive elements for reading and as political and social devices. One of the problems that shall be discussed is a particular case of 'Anglobalization': the reception and appropriation of British cultural and political influence via the translation of British authors or through the satire on the influence of British Army officers. Thereafter, along with the concept of the British presence in Portuguese reading materials, the question is to understand whether we may speak about British humour or about Portuguese humour on British characters. While the meanings of jokes change, being far from the cultural area where texts were born and understood, they may still function for different readers. Humour is a strong case in discussing cultural transfer and reading expansion, as readers deal with jokes meant to be heard or to be seen, and hardly to be read.

Abstract: Sunday Schools provided access to books that would otherwise have not been available to rural children and teenagers in Australia. These books were largely written in the late nineteenth century by lower middle-class women, the daughters of clerks and grocers in England. The books produced by these writers were hardly sedate or regimented but laced with techniques deriving from the sensation novel, with unreliable narrators and unreliable figures of authority. An examination of one young woman’s reading choices reveals a world characterized by insecurity in identity, danger and uncertainty.

Abstract: Why did Portuguese diplomacy survive in Benin and Warri while Christian conversion failed to produce lasting social transformation? What explains the survival of diplomatic exchange in the face of the fragility of missionary success? This paper explores the diplomatic and religious aspects of Portuguese relations with the kingdoms of Benin and Warri from the late fifteenth century to 1725. It argues that African political agency, rather than European initiative, was the decisive structural feature of early Afro-Portuguese relations in the Bight of Benin. Diplomacy endured because the Oba of Benin and the Olu of Warri found Portuguese engagement useful for trade, prestige, military advantage, and external legitimation. Christianity, however, failed to achieve lasting social transformation because it threatened the sacred foundations of kingship in Benin and, in Warri, remained largely a court religion rather than a socially translated and locally sustained faith. The divergence between diplomatic success and missionary failure was therefore not incidental: it reflected African rulers’ capacity to select, adapt, and refuse foreign influence according to local political priorities.

Abstract:

The thesis of this essay is this: the concept of “national sovereignty” is a “poisoned candy”. Their universalization prevents, among other things, the existence of “nations of nations”. Perhaps the clearest example is the “Spanish nation”, which includes territories that, for centuries, have been called “nations” without ceasing to be part of the “Spanish nation” or posing problems of sovereignty. Only the recovery of the original meaning of the Latin “natio” can eliminate this unavoidable lexical problem, which has become a conceptual obstacle. The author traces the history of the two words involved in the question, both from their Latin origin: “natio” and “soberanitas”. To explain their union, he then reviews the various forms and political theories with which the concept of “supreme authority” has been attempted to be expressed until he reaches that of “national sovereignty” with Sieyès. This forces him to review more than two millennia of history of political thought, from the fifth century B.C. to the end of the eighteenth century.

Abstract: This paper explores the intertwined history of Africa and Atlantic Europe between 1400 and 1800. Unlike other works that view Africa as only a passive subject of Europe's outward expansion, this paper demonstrates that African kings, traders, priests and intellectuals were key players in the construction of the Atlantic world. Using four overlapping themes: political diplomacy; commodity knowledge; religious translation; and cartographic imagination, the paper shows that the histories of Africa and Europe during this period cannot be accurately reconstructed through the lens of a single region in isolation.

Abstract: This study examined the social and economic structure of the village of Rumnos, which was located in the district of Devrek in the Province of Bolu of the Ottoman Empire (now located in the District of Devrek, in the Province of Zonguldak in Turkey), based on Temettuat Register number 3378, dated 1844–1845. According to this particular volume of the Temettuat Register, the primary sources of income in the village were agriculture and animal husbandry. The prevalence of occupations directly related to agriculture is remarkable, as it generates the majority of wealth. The types of taxes paid by the tax-liable heads of household, together with their incomes derived from their occupational activities, were identified, and their overall tax burdens were determined. An income distribution analysis using statistical methods was conducted for this study. A Lorenz curve was constructed, and the Gini coefficient was calculated as 0.33. The analysis determined that there was a moderate level of inequality in the income distribution among the households in the village of Rumnos.

Abstract: The Sinaia Lead Plates constitute a corpus of over one hundred inscribed and illustrated metal plates reportedly discovered in Romania in the late nineteenth century, of which forty-six are currently preserved. Frequently classified as modern forgeries, the assemblage has not previously been subjected to a systematic, corpus-level archaeological analysis. This study presents an integrated reassessment of the plates combining material examination, epigraphic classification, linguistic analysis, iconographic evaluation, and contextual review of historical references. Rather than presupposing either authenticity or fabrication, the article adopts a structural and methodological approach, examining internal coherence, technical parameters, and functional plausibility. The analysis identifies consistent correlations between writing systems, linguistic patterns, iconographic organization, and historical associations across the corpus. Arguments advanced in support of the forgery hypothesis are reassessed within a comparative methodological framework, highlighting both their contributions and their limitations. Although the question of authenticity cannot be resolved conclusively on the basis of currently available evidence, the structural integration and conceptual organization of the corpus challenge simplified explanatory models and underscore the need for sustained interdisciplinary investigation.

Abstract: This paper examines China's unprecedented economic transformation from 1978 to 2025, analyzing the strategic policies and pragmatic approaches that enabled the world's most populous nation to lift over 800 million people out of poverty. Drawing on recent scholarship and empirical data, this study identifies five critical factors that drove China's success: pragmatic economic reform prioritizing competence over ideology; strategic experimentation through Special Economic Zones; export-led industrialization; massive infrastructure development; and disciplined collective action. The analysis demonstrates how China's development model offers important lessons for developing nations while acknowledging its unique contextual factors. This research contributes to contemporary development economics by examining how systematic, evidence-based policy implementation can achieve rapid poverty reduction at scale.

Abstract: During the Little Ice Age (1490-1760), natural disasters were primarily caused by extreme weather conditions featuring significant drops in temperature, which caused damage to crops; the resulting decrease in agricultural production led to famines. Recurring famines, in turn, caused the outbreaks of pandemics, resulting in massive death worldwide. The Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty (朝鮮王朝實錄) recorded a wide range of unusual events during the Little Ice Age including significant drops in ground-level temperature, reduced crops, repeated famines, and the prevalence of infectious disease, along with abnormal changes in the sky. Additionally other disasters during the Little Ice Age included frequent crop damages from insects and the appearance of deformed animals. This paper focuses on the appearance of deformed animals. By analyzing the 271 cases of deformed animals identified in the Veritable Records. While investigating the main cause of the Little Ice Age, I noticed that what space science refers to as “cosmic dust” was brought into the earth’s atmosphere by a multitude of meteors or accumulated in the atmosphere due to atmospheric meteor explosions. The Veritable Records recorded unusual situations such as pressed dust or powder falling from the sky or thick fog blocking vision and causing darkness during the day. This paper thus regards such records of unusual situations as indications of the long-term accumulation of “space dust,” which this paper identifies as the cause of animal deformations. This paper also relies on thirty-eight cases of deformations in the German flugblatt published during the Little Ice Age. These resources were collected from the German National Museum in Nuremberg, Germany and other European institutes.

Abstract: Democratic systems rest on institutional counterbalances capable of limiting authority concentration. Historical transitions toward dictatorship often emerge not through abrupt institutional destruction, but progressive weakening of stabilizing mechanisms like parliamentary oversight, judicial autonomy, political pluralism, decentralized governance. Adolf Hitler’s power consolidation following the Weimar Republic’s collapse provides a historical example in which democratic counterbalances lost corrective capacity under economic crisis, institutional fragility, coordinated mass mobilization, etc. While the historical causes of authoritarian transitions have been extensively studied, the dynamics governing the failure of democratic stabilizing mechanisms is less characterized. We introduce a dynamical systems framework aimed at identifying early-warning signals associated with democratic destabilization and executive power concentration. We represented democratic governance as a multidimensional attractor stabilized by negative feedback mechanisms generated by institutional independence, distributed authority, informational plurality, constitutional constraints. Using historical data from Germany between 1928 and 1934, we built a composite systemic stress index integrating economic instability, war trauma, ideological vulnerability, institutional fragility, political polarization and Nazi mobilization. Simulations based on nonlinear response functions and state-space trajectories showed threshold-like transitions in which progressive stress accumulation was followed by accelerated concentration of political authority, once stabilizing feedbacks became insufficient. Democratic collapse could be interpreted as a loss of systemic resilience associated with attractor deformation and feedback amplification. Potential applications of nonlinear approaches include comparative analysis of institutional fragility, quantitative assessment of democratic resilience and development of early-warning frameworks for detecting conditions associated with excessive concentration of political power in contemporary political systems.

Abstract: This study examines the north-western access corridor to Žilina through the Kysuca valley (the Kysucká brána area) and the Budatín crossing during the revolutionary years 1848–1849. Using local archival excerpts, a regional chronicle manuscript and a cartographic reading of historical and present-day topography, we reconstruct the probable road alignment between Brodno, Budatín and the bridgehead towards Žilina and identify its recurrent military use by Imperial, Hungarian and Russian forces. The paper argues that the corridor’s strategic value stemmed from a combination of terrain constraints (narrow valley and floodplain), bridge dependence and the connectivity of the Jablunkov Pass trade route. We provide a chronology of troop movements in 1848–1849 and discuss source limitations, including internal inconsistencies in local narratives that require verification against primary military records. The article contributes a microhistorical case study to military geography of Upper Hungary and highlights the analytical potential of regional sources when integrated with critical source evaluation.

Abstract: To date, many studies on the Nazi Special Courts have focused on the individuals involved in passing judgement or in the prosecution process in general, as well as on their political significance. For our study, we undertake a re-evaluation and computational ‘upcycling’ of an archive catalogue from the 1970s containing around 10,000 legal cases from the Munich Special Court (1933–1945). Although this was not an entirely new phenomenon–they were originally introduced by the Weimar Republic–, the special courts were unique in that they brought together general criminal law and ‘crimes’ in the form of non-conformity with National Socialist ideology under a single jurisdiction.

Abstract: From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, both Great Britain and the United States implemented large-scale child-emigration schemes aimed at relocating so-called «surplus» children—impoverished but considered «of good stock»—from major urban centres to rural households overseas or in the American interior. These programmes emerged from a shared diagnosis: industrial and agricultural economies in metropolitan areas were allegedly unable to absorb growing populations of poor children, who were framed as both a social burden and a latent threat to urban order. Emigration was thus promoted as a form of social reform—an intervention that would simultaneously relieve urban poverty and overcrowding while promising the children a healthier, morally improving environment on the farm.Central to this policy logic was the belief that agricultural labour and rural domesticity would function as vehicles of knowledge acquisition, moral rehabilitation, and civic formation. By learning farm work and rural norms, the children were expected to develop the dispositions necessary for productive adulthood and responsible citizenship, thereby securing redemption from an otherwise bleak urban future. Yet the historical record complicates this narrative of benevolent rescue. Although some children undoubtedly escaped severe deprivation, many migrant youths struggled to adapt to rural life, faced abuse, exploitation or isolation, and carried the consequences of these ruptures into adulthood. Rather than straightforward instruments of uplift, these schemes often reproduced existing inequalities under the guise of paternalistic reform.

Abstract: This article reconceptualizes Cold War intelligence reports as a form of “involuntary ethnography.” Drawing on declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (ESSR) from 1947 to 1955, it examines how intelligence gathering practices generated detailed accounts of everyday life under socialism. Produced for strategic and military purposes, these reports nonetheless contain systematic observations of housing conditions, food consumption, clothing, social behavior, and political attitudes. Situating these materials within debates on knowledge production and state surveillance, the article argues that intelligence reports functioned as a hybrid form of social knowledge, positioned between bureaucratic observation and ethnographic description. Focusing on Tartu and wider Estonia, it demonstrates how intelligence archives can be used to reconstruct lived experience under conditions of scarcity, repression, and militarization — among them a divided city in which the open intellectual space of the university and the sealed military space of the Raadi airfield yielded radically different kinds of social knowledge. By foregrounding intelligence as a mode of social observation, the article contributes to Cold War historiography and proposes a new analytical category: intelligence ethnography.

Abstract: Imperialism as a system of exploitation profoundly shaped the natural and human landscapes of colonized regions. This paper examines how the Second World War accelerated imperial transformations in East Africa, focusing on the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme (1947–1951) as a case of business-imperial collaboration. Set against Britain’s post-war reconstruction needs, the scheme shows how corporate interests, especially Unilever’s, shaped colonial development through industrial agriculture. Drawing on archival research and recent historiography, the article argues that the scheme was not merely a failed agricultural experiment, but a structural expression of business-imperial partnership with lasting environmental and institutional legacies. Its ecological damage and social disruption reflect broader patterns of environmental violence inherent in imperial capitalism. This study contributes to imperial environmental history in two ways: first, by tracing the long-term ecological impacts of post-war industrial development in colonial spaces; second, to show that imperial agro-economic practices were not temporally isolated events, and the effects of even short-lived, failed ventures such as the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme continued into the post-colonial period.

Abstract: The Deori community represents one of the most ancient indigenous tribal communities of Assam, with a rich cultural heritage spanning over a millennium. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the Deori people, examining their historical origins, social structure, cultural traditions, linguistic heritage, and contemporary challenges. Drawing on ethnographic research, government records, and academic studies, the paper explores how this Sino-Tibetan community has preserved its distinct identity while navigating centuries of political change, from ancient kingdoms to colonial rule to modern democratic governance. The establishment of the Deori Autonomous Council in 2005 marked a significant milestone in the community's political empowerment, though ongoing demands for Sixth Schedule status reflect continuing aspirations for greater autonomy. The article also examines contemporary efforts to document and preserve the Deori language and culture, particularly through recent collaborations with academic institutions such as the reputed universities and IITs, while addressing the challenges of language endangerment, economic development, and cultural preservation in the 21st century.

Abstract: This article introduces a tutorial-style implementation of Quantum Link Prediction (QLP) for citation network analysis in historiographical research, with a specific focus on the transnational historiography of Mongol military campaigns. Using a manually curated citation network of Russian and American military treatises from 1875 to 2012, the study applies simulated quantum random walks to identify previously unknown citation pathways. The article is structured to guide researchers through each phase of the QLP workflow, from network preprocessing and quantum circuit construction to result interpretation, making it accessible to scholars in the humanities new to quantum methods. Through this approach, we discover a previously unknown transmission link connecting the Russian and American corpora. This finding not only reshapes the existing citation network but also demonstrates the potential of QLP as an introductory use case for teaching quantum computing to learners in the humanities. To support reproducibility and future adoption the open-source QuantumRandomWalks package was published in conjunction with this paper.

Abstract: Selections for sick and unfit prisoners and their murder through lethal injections or in gas chambers were characteristic of Nazi camps like Auschwitz. This article investigates the start of these murders through the lens of a system of forced labour camps for Eastern Upper Silesian Jews, so-called Schmelt camps, that did not form part of the usual concentration camp system. Their independent status gave Schmelt camps more leeway for experimenting with killing methods and they implemented respective policies to liquidate unfit prisoners several months before the concentration camps. However, they were also supervised by SS physicians from Auschwitz and began to send unfit prisoners to the camp's gas chambers from early 1942. In parallel, they developed despicable killing methods, primarily water-induced murders. These events are contextualized within Giorgio Agamben's concept of 'homo sacer.' The paper demonstrates that Fritz Todt, whose Reich Motorway Company utilized Jewish labour for construction work in Silesia, was a driving force behind Himmler's decision to eliminate 'unproductive' prisoners. It shows how civilian camp leaders collaborated in these crimes. Finally, it delineates the transformation of convalescent camps in Schmelt's system from places of recovery for lightly ill prisoners to killing centres and collection points for Auschwitz transports.