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What happened to peoples who felt colonized in post-colonial states? After the Second World War, the formal international order of the United Nations and Cold War political alignments recognized national self-determination as a right, but only saw claims of self-determination within European empires. However, there are hidden stories of anti-colonial claims within post-colonial states, claims that operated through informal networks because they were invisible to international institutions. These networks produced a layer of international relations that took on the issue of minority nationalisms. Through the travelogues and visa difficulties of nationalist claimants from Nagaland in Northeast India and Namibia in Southern Africa, this article makes visible this layer of politics. It considers the peoples for whom 1960s global decolonization did not mean national liberation, the unofficial individuals who spoke for them that were empowered by the UN's inability to do so, and the symbiotic relationship between these two sets of actors. By showing the mutual, yet unequal dependence of nationalists and their advocates, this article argues that certain nationalist claimants achieved forms of pre-independence recognition from advocacy, but that this support came with strings–strings that constrained nationalist claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Actress and singer Nina Sibirtzeva (1899, Russia–1957, Buenos Aires) developed her inconspicuous career in the popular Jewish theater in Russia and Eastern Europe and moved to Buenos Aires in 1938, where she adapted her repertoire and from where she toured other cities in the Americas, always performing on circuits that were removed from mainstream entertainment. What can we make of her obscure journey? This article attempts to understand Sibirtzeva's artistic choices and, through them, some structural but unexplored aspects of the globalization of popular music in the twentieth century. Based on evidence rescued from the almost destroyed archives of the IWO (Idisher Visnshaftlejer Institut or Yiddish Research Institute) in Buenos Aires, the article focuses on the meaning of the words popular and populism in music; the engagement of popular artists with musical technologies, markets, migration, and politics; and the conceptual and historiographical question of how to deal with biographies that do not match the cultural mainstream, operating instead at the intersection of different cultural streams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each year, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees publishes detailed information on refugee applications and determinations by States Parties to the Refugee Convention. However, there are noticeable gaps in the utility and availability of these figures across jurisdictions prior to the mid-1990s, particularly with respect to Australia. This has limited our understanding of how refugee status determination functioned in Australia during the formative years of its modern refugee policy, from 1977 to the early 1980s, and it leaves researchers with little knowledge of the number and provenance of asylum-seekers coming to Australia during this time. The present article contributes to a body of literature that gauges possible political influences on the determination of protection claims. This article reveals previously unpublished data on protection claims in Australia between 1978 and 1983 under Australia's first formal refugee status determination procedure, the interdepartmental Determination of Refugee Status Committee. The article shows that at times there was some discrepancy between the views of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Department of Foreign Affairs on conditions in countries of origin. Information supplied by the Department of Foreign Affairs informed Determination of Refugee Status Committee deliberations, and there is evidence to suggest that at times there were issues with the quality and objectivity of this information. Finally, there is evidence that on a very small number of occasions external political and strategic interests informed deliberations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article briefly describes several websites including the World Digital Library, located at www.wdl.org, from the U.S. Library of Congress, the Oceania Digital Collection, located at library.ucsd.edu, from the University of California at San Diego, and the Digital Library on American Slavery, at library.uncg.edu/slavery, from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The article examines accusations of fraud against poet George Wither when he served as steward to bishop John Howson of Durham, England between 1628 and 1632 referenced in the poem "Aquæ-Musæ" by John Taylor. It states that no biographers have discovered evidence to substantiate the claim or to prove Wither was in Durham during that time.

The author discusses the history of "Western Historical Quarterly" by considering the Western History Association and the Department of History at Utah State University (USU). Topics include "American West" magazine, "Western Historical Quarterly's" founding in 1970, and the study of regional history in the United States during the 1960s.

When Walter Reed United States Army General Hospital opened its doors in 1909, the Spanish-American War had been over for a decade, World War I was in the unforeseeable future, and army hospital admission rates were steadily decreasing. The story of the founding of Walter Reed, which remained one of the flagship military health institutions in the United States until its 2011 closure, is a story about the complexities of the turn of the twentieth century. Broad historical factors—heightened imperial ambitions, a drive to modernize the army and its medical services, and a growing acceptance of hospitals as ideal places for treatment—explain why the institution was so urgently fought for and ultimately won funding at the particular moment it did. The justifications put forth for the establishment of Walter Reed indicate that the provision of publicly funded medical care for soldiers has been predicated not only on a sense of humanitarian commitment to those who serve, but on principles of military efficiency, thrift, pragmatism, and international competition. On a more general level, the story of Walter Reed's founding demonstrates a Progressive Era shift in health services for U.S. soldiers—from temporary, makeshift hospitals to permanent institutions with expansive goals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews the website entitled World Trade Organization (WTO) History Project, created by historian Margaret Levi and the WTO History Project team as well as the Manuscripts, Special Collections, and University Archives Division of the University of Washington Libraries, available at http://depts.washington.edu/ wtohist/.

This paper investigates ways in which early modern English recipe collections constructed domestic medicine as broader and more powerful than is often appreciated. It shows that their compilers frequently selected recipes that promised to allow them to address a wide range of surgical ailments, to heal serious surgical conditions medicinally, and to avoid invasive interventions. Claims of remedies' virtues and stories of their successes imagined domestic medicine not only as a ‘first port of call’, but also as a potent counterpart to the work of practitioners; a last resort when practitioners had failed; and as an alternative to the knife. Using the writings of the surgeon John Woodall, it argues that surgeons were sensitive to the attitudes and preferences that motivated this collection. In seeking to discipline surgery, Woodall invoked the stereotypical gentleness of women's and domestic medicine in an effort to inculcate greater discernment in the use of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a case study of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 in which confrontations surrounding the arrest of an African American man accused of assaulting a white woman led to the destruction of an African American community and the placement of several community members in detention camps. Topics discussed include the social structures, ideologies, and experiences of the participants and their connections to the events that triggered the riots.

Bibliotheca Parisiana—or in its French version Bibliotheca elegantissima Parisina—is a catalogue of the London bookdealer James Edwards for an auction of books, mainly consigned in Paris, held in London in March 1791. The catalogue has many shortcomings, as Arthur Rau noted in an important article in 1969, and the identity of the French consignor (if not unknown) has been obscure. This article expands on Rau's critique, drawing on recent publication to give a more precise account of the items given a false provenance from Claude d'Urfé by Edwards and considering more closely the quality of the descriptions in the catalogue, noting interesting divergences between the French and English versions. The consignor is firmly identified as Antoine Marie Pâris d'Illins (1746-1809), nephew of a well-known collector Jean Baptiste Pâris de Meyzieu (1718-1788), who is persistently named in the literature as the owner of the Bibliotheca Parisina. Pâris d'Illins, who seems to have been an active and knowledgeable bibliophile, was a military man who was to die in Napoleon's Spanish campaign. He apparently sold his most valuable books on the eve of his exile from France (with the Marquis de Lafayette) during the Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the first decade of the twentieth century John Pierpont Morgan assembled a collection of Renaissance bronzes which rapidly became the most important of its kind in private hands. The collection, which until 1912 was on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, was the result of joint efforts on the part of dealers, experts and Morgan himself to establish a record for the marketing, value and interpretation of Renaissance bronzes. In 1912 Morgan's entire collection was shipped to New York and while it was on exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was dispersed. In order to analyse the cultural and economic implication of this transatlantic relocation, the article examines the making of Morgan's collection of Renaissance bronzes within the context of European connoisseurship, its reception in New York, its acquisition and dispersal by Joseph Duveen and its partial purchase by Henry C. Frick, a collector of profoundly different character. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the Tamil Diaspora in the Bay of Bengal region and aspects of the circulation and mobility of the Tamil people. The author compares the Tamil community across national boundaries with other diaspora communities in topics such as cultural purity, public spheres, and multiethnic popular culture. The author suggests that diasporic consciousness is developed from the interaction of multiple diasporas. Other topics include construction of Hindu temples in Tamil settlements, cultural connections, patterns of migrations and social development, and global labor markets that function through ethnic differentiation.

This article presents information about various events and meetings related to history. The Organization of American Historians is pleased to announce the Liberty Legacy Foundation/OAH Travel Fellowships for pre-collegiate history teachers to attend the 2004 OAH Regional Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, July 8-11 2004. From its inception as a route for Native American travel before European contact to its present form as Interstate 81, the Valley Road through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia has proven to be one of the most important avenues for travel, trade, migration and commerce in North America.

The article offers information on the beautiful hand-coloured frontispiece from Euclid's Preclarissimus liber elementorum, which was printed in Venice, Italy in 1482.