Examines the role of the yeti in shaping Cold War popular science networks and relations between official and popular scientific practices in the Soviet Union.

In the 1960s, the concept of development became increasingly intertwined with conceptions of independence amongst Basotho. Politicians and administrators before and after independence wanted to use development to legitimize their rule and consolidate power for a fairly weak central government. Their inability to procure funding for large projects…[Read more]

An Introduction to the special issue of the International Journal of African Historical Studies on Localizing the History of Development in Africa.

This article tells the story of Maleseko Kena, a woman born in South Africa but who lived most of her adult life in rural Lesotho. It narrates how her story of helping apartheid refugees cross the border and move onward complicates understandings of what the international border, belonging, and citizenship meant for individuals living near it. By…[Read more]

The rhetoric of development served as a language for Sotho politicians from 1960–70 to debate the meanings of political participation. The relative paucity of aid in this period gave outsized importance to small projects run in rural villages, and stood in stark contrast to the period from the mid-1970s onwards when aid became an ‘…[Read more]

A review of Marek Inglot, S.J., How the Jesuits Survived Their Suppression. The Society of Jesus in the Russian Empire (1773-1814), ed. and trans. D. L. Schlafly (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2015), Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 85, Fasc. 169.

Review of Nikolaos Chrissidis, An Academy at the Court of the Tsars: Greek Scholars and Jesuit Education in Early Modern Russia

A review of Au service de la reconciliation des Églises: Jean Gagarin, Jean Martynow et Victor de Buck: Correspondance, edited by Robert Danieluk, S.J., and Bernard Joassart, S.J.

In 1791, amidst growing anxiety about British encroachment on its fur trade with the Qing Empire, the Russian government discovered that Britain was sending a large and important embassy to Beijing, led by Lord Macartney. In an attempt to derail the negotiations, Russia enrolled the Polotsk Jesuits in a plot to convince the Qing of the…[Read more]

A study of the ideological and transnational context of informatics and cybernetics in the late Soviet Union, focusing on the leading Soviet computer scientist Andrei Ershov.

A study of the relationship between pastoral poetry and urban politics in eighteenth-century New York City.