In recent years, social scientists have “(re)discovered history” by visiting archives, collecting documents, and analyzing their findings to address concerns about the causes and consequences of violence. Nevertheless, social scientists frequently appear at their archives with little to no training on the methods and ethics of archival research as they increasingly rush to examine primary historical records. This has resulted in a dearth of discourse on how the practice of historical research influences the outcomes of our analyses. Our article, as a result, employs findings from research on political violence in sociology and political science, as well as insights from history and archival studies, to introduce three broad ethical concerns related to politics, interpretation, and harms and benefits that, we argue, have methodological implications for historical social science. These methodological implications are too often ignored in historical social science, but we contend they are necessary to consider prior to and during archival research, as well as afterward when analyzing data, in order to ensure that the results of that research are valid, reliable, and ethical despite the constraints involved in working with historical evidence. We also discuss contemporary conflicts and how data collection on violence influences our understanding of the past. The objective of this article is to identify and address the primary challenges that social scientists who work with archives encounter, as well as to advocate for increased transparency in archival research.

Since the 1990s, Japan has experienced the rise of a phenomenon known as “lonely death” (kodokushi 孤独死): people who die alone and whose death goes unnoticed for a certain period of time. This has triggered public anxiety and moral panic because lonely death is often perceived as a form of “bad death” and a sign of the breakdown of family ties and neighborly relations. In the 2020s, this “feeling rule,” which associates lonely death with shame and fear, has quietly begun to be challenged by a group of post-mortem cleaning workers. By sharing their work experience and feelings through blogs, artworks, and books, the workers’ accounts of how they deal with the remnants of the deceased have turned the public perception of lonely death from an abstract, totalizing, fearful category into an understanding that such incidents have specific causes that can be faced and even prepared for. The cleaners’ emotional labor, especially their mourning for the dead, creates a sense of relatedness to the deceased, a feeling which is conveyed to the public through the cleaners’ narratives. The cleaners thereby change the feeling rules associated with the labor of dealing with the aftermath of a lonely death, turning it from “dirty work” into meaningful social action. This article contributes to an understanding of feeling rules by highlighting how individuals’ efforts, particularly, their reflections on their emotional labor, can change collective feeling rules.

Many early modern Italian nobles were obsessed with duelling. Despite bans from secular authorities and the Council of Trent, the violent honor complex was veiled in part under the title of the scienza cavalleresca, the knightly science, which provided rules for the conduct of conflicts between aristocrats and those with noble aspirations. Such rules were both concerned with emotions and the object of emotions. Using the tools of the history and sociology of emotions, this article contributes to the emotional history of the scienza cavalleresca through examining the rules proposed both as feeling rules in themselves and as objects of emotional judgment. Toward the turn of the eighteenth century, more aristocrats began rejecting such codes with explicit objections to the scienza cavalleresca and its ethical basis. One such noble was Paolo Mattia Doria (1667–1746), a notorious duellist in the closing years of the Spanish regime, who renounced the vendetta and expressed disgust with its practitioners. A zealous convert against the noble vengeance system, he will serve as an example to explore the wider struggle over emotional values in early modern Italy and, more generally, in societies with high levels of violence. The article traces the role of emotions in the scienza cavalleresca, the taste for dispute through one genre (letters of challenge or cartelli di sfida), then explores the case of Doria. From these three stages, the article argues for the significance of adopting approaches from the sociology of emotions to analyze elite cultures of violence.

This study examines the credit market in seventeenth-century Stockholm, a rapidly growing city whose credit market is an early example of a market with both private and institutional actors. Using a sample of 1,500 probate inventories from 1679 to 1708, we focus on the practices and experiences of municipal and state servants, and we examine in detail the probate inventories of employees of the royal court. The latter group had their wages paid by the king in a world where being in arrears was the norm, and their spatial and social proximity to the Bank of the Estates made them potential pioneers in the movement towards an institutionalized and formalized capital market. The credit market has a mixed character, both in terms of the opportunities available to investors and in terms of their behavior. For people with a surplus of cash and good connections, money lending could be a way to increase their income. The court servants and many others moved seamlessly between institutional and private, as well as formal and informal, credit. The article shows that wage earners and state servants were central to the transformation of the early modern credit market. For them, the credit market and the bank offered investment opportunities that matched their skills and circumstances.

The articulations of science and politics in the Cold War in the United States are well studied in histories of American political culture. However, these histories are often given focus and coherence via concepts and understandings taken from political realism and sociological institutionalism, thereby underestimating the transformations in the very idea of political reality that helped form the Cold War era in the United States. This paper launches an investigation of the relationship between speculative fiction and scientific and political discourse during that era to explore how the political culture of the United States came to be structured not only by a certain imagination but also by a particular set of fantasies. Building on the history of war-gaming at the RAND Corporation, the author conducts a close reading of a RAND Corporation report turned popular science publication. This suggests that, during the Cold War, a new standpoint from which to view the political world – the view from outer space – began to organize how the American political project for the globe represented its own modernity to itself. This view, drawn from science fiction but made real in its ethos and its political consequences, projected an understanding of “mankind” as but an infant in the early stages of what would become its interstellar destiny. A baleful consequence of this view was its tendency to free political actors and intellectuals from the urgent problem, identified acutely by Hannah Arendt in her essay “Man’s Conquest of Space,” of creating a world in common on earth.

This article focuses on the discussions around female athletes and their emotions in the German and Austrian press of the 1920s. In the course of the sports boom of the interwar years, more and more women participated in public sports competitions and demanded their right to be taken seriously as sportswomen. Their public appearance aroused mixed feelings and heated social debates about how much and what kind of sport was appropriate for women, which were reflected in discussions and narratives around the figure of the “sportsgirl.” Sportsgirls were imbued with a novel emotional style to which ambition and audacity – ways of feeling that were cultivated during competitive sports and that contrasted with traditional bourgeois female feeling rules – were key. Sportsgirls and their emotional style were the subject of many stories, reports, pictures, and articles that were published in the growing sports press of the time – and they were judged and evaluated for the emotional style they embodied. The press was a potent platform and site of the formation of feeling rules; as such, discussions around sportsgirls point to the (embodied) experiences of the athletes and indicate how the emotional style that derived from them was turned into a tool to reshape social conventions and feeling rules for women beyond the sports arena.

Attempts to measure social mobility before the twentieth century are frequently hampered by limited data. In this paper, we use a new source – annual, matched tax censuses over more than 70 years – to calculate intragenerational income mobility within a preindustrial, settler society, the Dutch and British Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa. Our unique source allows us to measure income mobility along several dimensions, helping to disentangle reasons for the high levels of persistence we find.

As some of the most intensively devoted football fans in Germany, ultras coordinate crowd atmosphere in the arena to support their respective clubs on the field while actively positioning themselves against sport’s governing bodies, whom they see as corrupted by the strategies used to transform professional football from a game into a capitalist industry. Focusing on travel and transportation as a key feature of hardcore fandom, I examine the relationship between ultras’ activities in transit to games and their congregation in public spaces (on the streets, on trains, at rest stops, in stadia), in which quotidian ambience is often hijacked and repurposed as an estranged form of public address. I focus on the dynamic ways that ultras move through space as a means of charting the stages in which fan scenes become crowds, and crowds are mobilized as a means of protesting against the alienating dynamics of modern football, the contrasting stylistics of which result in divergent outsider interpretations and reactions from the state, the German Football Association (DFB), the media, and onlookers confronted by ultras’ public transgressions. Through the fan scene’s ability to coordinate movement and heighten bodily capacity, varied expressions of antisocial behavior become a means of harnessing fans’ own disaffection in a way that reclaims public space as it conjures a heightened emotive environment.

In the mid-20th century, The Cold War structured possibilities for politics across the Global South. These strategies were articulated through three competing means to realize the justice and equality promised by newly won independence from colonialism. Global South states could choose from among the following three options, which had many overlaps and intersections: alignment with the United States, alignment with the Soviet Union, and non-alignment. By the 1970s and into the 1980s, left- and right-wing alternatives developed to oppose the limitations of these three perspectives. On the left, Maoism inspired anti-imperialists of the Global South and also sympathizers in the North who stood in solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles. On the right, newly oil-wealthy Saudi Arabia developed a puritanical Islamic alternative to Maoist anti-imperialism and promoted these ideas across Africa and Asia. These ideas did not fall from public consciousness with the formal collapse of the Soviet Union and live on today. My article assesses the different templates for political and economic development that the Cold War engendered, focusing on the legacy of left and right alternatives developed in reaction to their failures. I conclude that these ideological contestations from the Global South reveal that the Cold War was not a mere rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union, it was a global ideological contestation over liberalism; the constituting ideology of capitalism.

This paper looks at the progress that the Mosaic database has enabled in the study of family structures in continental Europe in the past. Our main argument is that the combination of comprehensive archival research, digitization and computation, data mining, and open-access dissemination that is at the core of the Mosaic project is bringing about an important shift in the fundamental principles that have driven European family history research to date. These transformative features of Mosaic go beyond mere data infrastructural developments, as scaling up to much larger datasets leads to qualitative differences in measurements, methods, and questions. Integrating these perspectives can lead to an important incremental shift in both the scale and the scope of knowledge about historical European family systems.