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This article explores the life and work of writer Grace Paley, whose short stories made their stylistic and thematic marks on the American short fiction genre. Drawing on her multiple identities as an American woman of the World War II generation, a political activist, a lifelong New Yorker, and a Jew born to immigrant parents who had fled oppression in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, Paley’s writing highlights women’s lives and their struggles against established social roles. The article then looks at Paley’s first book, The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Women and Men at Love (1959), which established her reputation as a fiction writer. It also considers her subsequent short story collections: Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985). In addition to short fiction and essays, Paley has published poetry collections, including Leaning Forward (1985), Begin Again: Collected Poems (2000), and Fidelity (2007).

The medieval cell doctrine was a series of speculative psychological models derived from ancient Greco-Roman ideas in which cognitive faculties were assigned to “cells,” typically but not exclusively corresponding to the cerebral ventricles. During Late Antiquity and continuing during the Early Middle Ages, Christian philosophers reinterpreted Aristotle’s De Anima, along with later modifications by Herophilos and Galen, in a manner consistent with Christian doctrine. The resulting medieval cell doctrine was formulated by the fathers of the early Christian Church in the 4th and 5th centuries. Illustrations of the medieval cell doctrine were included in manuscripts since at least the 11th century. Printed images of the doctrine appeared in medical, philosophical, and religious works beginning with “graphic incunabula” at the end of the 15th century. Some of these early psychological models assigned various cognitive faculties to different nonoverlapping “cells” within the brain, while others specifically promoted or implied a linear sequence of events. By the 16th century, printed images of the doctrine were usually linear three-cell versions, with few exceptions having four or five cells. These psychological models were based on philosophical speculations rather than clinicopathologic evidence or experimentation. Despite increasingly realistic representations of the cerebral ventricles from the end of the 15th century until the middle of the 16th century, and direct challenges by Massa and Vesalius in the early 16th century and Willis in the 17th century, the doctrine saw its most elaborate formulations in the late 16th and early 17th centuries with illustrations by the Paracelsian physicians Bacci and Fludd. In addition, Descartes reinvigorated the ventricular localization of cerebral faculties in the 17th century beginning with his La Dioptrique (1637) and later with the Latin and French editions of his posthumously published Treatise of Man (1662-1667). Overthrow of the doctrine had to await the development of alternative models of brain function in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The story of mass culture from 1900 to 1945 is the story of its growth and increasing centrality to American life. Sparked by the development of such new media as radios, phonographs, and cinema that required less literacy and formal education, and the commodification of leisure pursuits, mass culture extended its purview to nearly the entire nation by the end of the Second World War. In the process, it became one way in which immigrant and second-generation Americans could learn about the United States and stake a claim to participation in civic and social life. Mass culture characteristically consisted of artifacts that stressed pleasure, sensation, and glamor rather than, as previously been the case, eternal and ethereal beauty, moral propriety, and personal transcendence. It had the power to determine acceptable values and beliefs and define qualities and characteristics of social groups. The constant and graphic stimulation led many custodians of culture to worry about the kinds of stimulation that mass culture provided and about a breakdown in social morality that would surely follow. As a result, they formed regulatory agencies and watchdogs to monitor the mass culture available on the market. Other critics charged the regime of mass culture with inducing homogenization of belief and practice and contributing to passive acceptance of the status quo. The spread of mass culture did not terminate regional, class, or racial cultures; indeed, mass culture artifacts often borrowed them. Nor did marginalized groups accept stereotypical portrayals; rather, they worked to expand the possibilities of prevailing ones and to provide alternatives.

In the early 20th century, due to the immigration of thousands of people from the countryside to urban centers, the large city became a symbol of modernity for many reasons, among them because it was where the shop windows, the lights in storefronts, posters on walls or trams, and billboards were concentrated. In the city, there was also greater access to the illustrated magazines that had started to circulate. Alongside city culture, the culture of advertising also emerged, changing the visual landscape. Advertising also echoed in the neighborhoods, with the voices of peddlers selling products at doorsteps. Propaganda, therefore, went through a modernization process, although old ways of advertising and selling continued. Consumption was also divided between the old and the new, since the opportunity to make purchases in glass-fronted department stores discouraged people from buying food products from street vendors who circulated around the neighborhoods. In the early years of the 20th century, the new visuality of advertising, which brought an air of modernity, was still at an amateur stage in Brazil or originated abroad. This scenario began to change at the beginning of the 20th century when the first advertising agency began to operate in Brazil (between 1913 and 1914). In the 1950s, the first Advertising College was created in the country to enhance the study and development of the field. Brazilian advertising would peak in the last three decades of the 20th century, when Brazilian advertisements, especially those produced for television, gained international prestige due to the many awards they received at international festivals. During the 1990s, some Brazilian publicists would become famous personalities, known throughout the country. The demand for higher education in the area began to grow. Consumption in Brazil, however, suffered ups and downs due to various economic crises (and a few periods of growth), which possibly pushed Brazilian advertising to invest in creativity. On the other hand, forms of consumption went through major transformations in the form of new media and forms of commerce. Although the door-to-door sale of some types of food continued, the largest volume of purchases during the second half of the century occurred in large stores, malls, or hypermarkets, where you can find all sorts of products. From vegetables sold at the doorstep to washed, cut, and ready for consumption commercialized vegetables; from meat preserved in lard to canned sausage; from clothes made by dressmakers or seamstresses, to ready-made clothes; from fashion deriving from Hollywood cinema to fashion inspired by telenovelas; from radio or television shared by the family in the living room, to the subdivision of consumption via miniaturization and individualization of goods (phonograph and personal TV, Walkman, and portable CD player), from the dial-up phone that served all residents of the household to the cellphone—these are some of the most important changes in consumption over the 20th century.

Deconstruction is one of the most significant and controversial intellectual movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Beginning with the French writer Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), and subsequently adopted by many others, the reading strategy known as deconstruction works to dislocate or destabilize the structures and assumptions that shape human history. Deconstruction calls into question the fundamental concepts and hierarchies of Western philosophy, demonstrates how notions of “writing” and “text” are generalizable beyond human language and thought, and foregrounds the undecidable or incalculable aspects of reading and being. Through extremely attentive readings of philosophical and psychoanalytic texts, Derrida’s work brings to light the various centrisms and oppositions upon which they are based (centrisms such as logocentrism; anthropocentrism; and phallocentrism; and oppositions such as nature and culture; life and death; presence and absence; speech and writing; human beings and other animals). Alongside having a strong engagement with contemporary issues in society and politics, Derrida was consistently concerned with the literary effects at work in both literary and nonliterary texts, recognizing that meaning and context can neither be absolutely closed off nor fixed by author or reader. Contrary to common misapprehensions about deconstruction, the recognition of the irreducible literariness of all writing is not to suggest that texts are “meaningless,” and nor is Derrida’s generalized notion of writing meant to privilege language over the real world. Its sustained attention to literature and the effects of reading and writing perhaps account for why deconstruction has been, and is still, most eminent within the field of literary studies. Indeed, much of the prominent deconstructive work after Derrida—including, for example, that of Hélène Cixous, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller—is explicitly and primarily concerned with reading literature. That said, deconstruction cannot be reduced to merely a mode of literary criticism, and it remains influential in numerous other fields, including cultural studies, the environmental humanities, feminism, film studies, history, the life sciences, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and religious studies, to name a few.

From the late 19th to the late 20th century, Latin America was a developing region of the world in which public and private health discourses, practices, and a network of agencies were consolidated. Many organizations appeared as a response to pandemics, such as yellow fever, that attacked the main ports and cities, and they interacted with global agencies such as the Rockefeller Foundation. Frequently, single-disease-focused and technocratic approaches were promoted in a pattern that can be defined as the “culture of survival.” However, some practitioners believed in public health programs as a tool to improve the living conditions of the poor, the most important being comprehensive primary health care, which emerged in the late 1970s. Toward the end of the Cold War (ca. 1980s), neo-liberal reformers supported a restrictive idea of primary care health that overemphasized cost-effectiveness and efficiency.

Mongol lands were bastions of Mahāyāna (Mon. yeke kölgen) and Vajrayāna (Mon. vačir kölgen) Buddhist life from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, vast territories of the Buddhadharma deeply twinned with Tibetan traditions but always of local variation and distinct cultural content and purpose. Mongol contact with the Dharma reached its apex in the early decades of the 20th century, a flourishing of Buddhist knowledge, craft, and institutionalism that would soon face the blunt tool of brutal state violence. As the great Eurasian Empires came undone with tectonic force and consequence, Mongol lands along the frontiers of the Qing and Tsarist formations had the highest per capita rate of monastic ordination in the history of Buddhism (up to one in three adult men holding some monastic affiliation). Decades into the revolutionary aftermath of imperial collapse, at the interface of Republican China and Soviet Russia, Mongolian monastic complexes were hubs of cultural, economic, and intellectual life that continued to circulate and shape anew classical Indian and Tibetan fields of knowledge like medicine and astrology, esoteric and exoteric exegesis, material culture, and performance traditions between the Western Himalaya; the northern foothills of the British Raj; the Tibetan plateau; North China; Beijing; all Mongol regions; and Siberia, right to St. Petersburg. In addition to being dynamic centers of production, Mongolian Buddhist communities in the early 20th century provided zones of contact and routes of circulation for persons, ideas, objects, and patronage. Pilgrims, pupils, merchants, diplomats and patrons (and those that were all of these) moved from Mongol hubs such as Urga, Alashan, or Kökeqota to monastic colleges, markets, holy sites (and at this time, universities, parliaments, and People’s Congresses) in Lhasa, Beijing, Wutaishan, France, and St. Petersburg. In the ruins of the Qing and Tsarist empires, to whatever uneven degree these had been felt in local administrative units, Buddhist frames of references, institutions, and technologies of self- and community formation were central in the reimagination of Mongol and Siberian communities. In the decades this article considers, such imperial-era communal and religious references were foundational to new rubrics associated first with the national subject and then the first experiments with state socialism in Asia. In many Mongol regions, Buddhism was at first considered “the very spirit” of revolutionary developments, as the Buryat progressive and pan-Mongolist Ts. Jamsrano once put it. By the late 1930s, however, the economic, social, and political capital of monks (especially monastic officials and khutuγtu “living buddhas”) and their monastic estates were at odds with new waves of socialist development rhetoric. Buddhist clerics and their networks (though not “Buddhism” as such) were tried en masse as counterrevolutionary elements. Able only to speak their crimes under interrogation and in court, monks fell to firing squads by the tens of thousands. All monastic institutions save three were razed to the steppe grasses and desert sands. Any continuity of public religiosity, other than minimal displays of state-sponsored propaganda, was discontinued until the democratic revolution of 1990. Mongol lands and its Buddhism was thus an early exemplar of a pattern that would repeat itself across socialist Asia in the 20th century. From China to Cambodia, Tibet to Vietnam and Korea, counter-imperial and colonial nationalist and socialist movements who were at first aligned with Buddhist institutions would later enact profound state violence against monastics and their sympathizers. Understanding Buddhism in early 20th century Mongolia is thus a key case study to thinking about the broad processes of nationalization, reform, violence, Europeanization, state violence, and globalization that has shaped Buddhism and Buddhists in much of Asia in the recent past.

Professional studies of lynching and its tragic history, especially its unique American character, depth, and dynamics, evolved in critically important ways from the pioneering scholarship of W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells in the 1890s and 1900s across the 20th century and into the 21st century, their different stages introducing fresh categories of analysis amidst moments of dramatic civil rights protests. The first stage was heralded by pioneering research by African American intellectuals, such as Du Bois and Wells, and growing black demands for an end to discrimination in the late 19th century. Joining them in the early 20th century was a small group of social scientists whose case studies of lynching illuminated race relations in local communities or, from a very different vantage, saw them as symptoms of the violence so common in American society. The push to end racial and gender segregation and the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s and 1970s encouraged historians to review lynchings from new perspectives, including gender, sexuality, religion, memory, and black community formation and resistance, stressing their centrality to modern southern history. The late 20th century saw a comparative turn. Historians evaluated lynching across America to identify common patterns of racial subjugation, but also to see how it was used to punish a wide range of Americans, including Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans. By 2000, the field shifted again, this time toward memorialization and community remembrance. Scholars and lawyers recalculated the total number of lynchings in America and found a large number of unrecorded killings, asked why so little was known about them, and created memorials to the victims. They demanded, too, that the causes and long-term consequences of the nation’s history of racial violence be discussed openly and taught in public schools. This effort is of particular resonance in 2020 as America confronts rising protests over a culture of mass incarceration and police brutality that disproportionately affects men and women of color. Indeed, the historical study of lynching has never been so vital as it is in the early 21st century.

Examining American history through the lens of black girlhood underscores just how thoroughly childhood everywhere is not “natural” but depends heavily on its social construction. Furthermore, ideas about childhood innocence are deeply racialized and gendered. At the end of Reconstruction, African Americans lost many of the social and political gains achieved after the Civil War. This signaled the emergence of Jim Crow, placing many blacks in the same social, political, and economic position that they occupied before freedom. Black girls who came of age in the 20th century lived through Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, Black Power, and the rise of the New Right. Moreover, black girls in the 20th century inherited many of the same burdens that their female ancestors carried—especially labor exploitation, criminalization, and racist notions of black sexuality—which left them vulnerable to physical, emotional, and sexual violence. In short, black girls were denied the childhood protections that their white counterparts possessed. If fights for cultural representation, economic justice, equal access to education, and a more just legal system are familiar sites of black struggle, then examining black girlhood reveals much about the black freedom movement. Activists, parents, and community advocates centered black girls’ struggles within their activism. Black girls were also leaders within their own right, lending their voices, bodies, and intellect to the movement. Their self-advocacy illustrates their resistance to systemic oppression. However, resistance in the more obvious sense—letter writing, marching, and political organizing—are not the only spaces to locate black girls’ resistance. In a nation that did not consider black children as children, their pursuit of joy and pleasure can also be read as radical acts. The history of 20th-century black girlhood is simultaneously a history of exclusion, trauma, resilience, and joy.

The history of Mexican Catholicism between 1910 and 2010 was one of successive conflict and compromise with the state, latterly coupled with increased concern about religious pluralism, secularization, and divisions of both style and theological and ecclesiological substance within Catholicism. The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) represented a particular threat to the church, which was identified by many revolutionaries as an institution allied to the old regime, and hence persecuted. In the same period, and until 1929, the church was openly committed to implementing its own social and political project in competition with the state. Religious conflict reached a tragic peak in the 1920s and 1930s, as revolutionary anticlericals waged political and cultural campaigns against the church, provoking both passive and armed resistance by Catholics. With some exceptions, the period from the late 1930s to the late 1960s was one of comparative church–state conciliation, and a period of institutional collaboration that began when both institutions stood down their militant cadres in the 1930s. In subsequent decades, an over-clericalized and socially conservative church and a theoretically revolutionary but undemocratic state made common cause around the poles of civic and Catholic nationalism, economic stability, and anti-communism. From the later 1960s, however, the church grew increasingly vocal as a critical interlocutor of the state, in terms of both the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s failing socioeconomic model and, especially in the 1980s, its authoritarian political practices. In places, radical strains of Liberation Theology helped to guide indigenous and urban protests against the regime, while also posing an internal, ecclesial problem for the church itself. The rise of economic neoliberalism and qualified democracy from the 1980s onward, as well as the political reorientation of Catholicism under the papacy of John Paul II, saw the church assume a frankly intransigent position, but one that was significantly appeased by the 1992 constitutional reforms that restored the church’s legal personality. After 1992, the church gained in political prominence but lost social relevance. Should the church cleave to an unofficial corporatist relationship with a generally supportive state in the face of rising religious competition? Should Catholics assert their newfound freedoms more independently in a maturing lay regime? A cursory view of Catholicism’s religious landscape today reveals that the tension between more horizontal and vertical expressions of Catholicism remains unresolved. Catholics are to be found in the van of rural self-defense movements, leading transnational civic protests against judicial impunity, and decrying the abuses suffered by Central American migrants at the hands of border vigilantes. At the same time, the mainstream church seeks official preferment of Catholicism by the state and lends moral support to the PRI and PAN parties alike.

In the Latin American milieu, Mexico stands out as a host nation for exiles. It is somewhat paradoxical that a country with very restrictive migration policies was always willing to receive victims of political persecution, and later expanded this behavior to include victims of ethnic, religious, and gender persecution, generalized violence, and natural disasters. Explaining this paradox involves considering the transformations that the 1910 Revolution introduced into Mexico’s domestic and international politics and how these transformations impacted abroad, above all in the Latin American space, projecting the idea of a nation committed to the construction of political order and just and democratic societies. Political asylum and the Refugee Status Determination are the legal instruments by which Mexico has welcomed foreigners in conditions of extreme vulnerability. The widespread use of these instruments forged the image of Mexico as a nation of exiles. Many victims of persecution entered the country under the protection provided by the instruments of political asylum and refugee status; undoubtedly, many more did so by circumventing migratory obstacles thanks to generous governmental conduct in situations of political persecution. A journey through the most important experiences of exiles in Mexico must start with the first Latin American exiles persecuted by dictatorial regimes in the 1920s, before turning to the case of the Spanish Republicans after the Civil War in the late 1930s, and then immediately incorporating European victims of Nazism during World War II. During the Cold War a second stage of exile began with the arrival of Americans persecuted by McCarthyism in the United States, and later by the influx of thousands of Latin Americans victims of new military dictatorships. This cycle ended at the beginning of the 1980s when large contingents of Guatemalans crossed the border with Mexico to protect themselves from a war of extermination launched by the army of that country. The size and the social composition of this exile obliged Mexico to draft policies for the reception of victims of persecution that led to adjustments in national legislation and strategies for collaboration with the United Nations. In the final decades of the 20th century, the redemocratization processes in Latin America led to a marked decrease in the number of victims of political persecution. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 21st century Mexico has faced new challenges, no longer in terms of political asylum but in terms of refuge. The increasing flows of foreign migrants who, irregularly, transit through Mexican territory to reach the border with the United States and the migration enforcement policies implemented by the US government have generated a considerable increase in requests for refugee status in Mexico. This phenomenon, unprecedented in the history of the reception of victims of persecution, leaves Mexico facing an enormous challenge in terms of humanitarian protection for foreigners who flee their countries to preserve their freedom and protect their lives.

Between 1962 and 1989 the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) provided policing assistance projects for the Paraguayan police. After the United States, the FRG was the country in which most Paraguayan police officers completed their training. German policing assistance, called Polizeihilfe, was based on the idea that the transfer of models and principles of constitutional and democratic policing would lead to the stabilization of politics and the reduction of violence and delinquency in the beneficiary countries. The study of policing cooperation and assistance between countries from the Western hemisphere during the Cold War reveals processes of transfer, translation, and appropriation of a set of practices and knowledge which affected the local security of beneficiary countries and the professional careers of those who carried out that training. Also important were the tensions and criticisms that arose when the FRG, a democratic state, gave assistance to the police of Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorial regime.

Cinema began in Uruguay with the exhibition of foreign films by visiting representatives of the Lumière brothers in 1896 before the first Uruguayan film was produced and shown in 1898. From the early period of Uruguayan cinema to the end of the 20th century, Uruguayan national cinema struggled to exist in the estimation of critical observers. Considering these periods of growth and stagnation, this history of Uruguayan cinema seeks to shed light on the industry’s evolution by focusing on exhibition, production, and spectatorship. This essay explores Uruguay’s national film productions, transnational businesses in shaping local film exhibition, the growth of mass publics and critical spectatorship, and the significance of political filmmaking in understanding the evolution of Latin American cinema during the 1960s. The history of Uruguayan cinema during the 20th century also provides a lens for understanding the political, social, and cultural histories of a country that has struggled to live up to its reputation as South America’s “most democratic” nation.

The Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Preußischer Kulturbesitz (IAI; Ibero-American Institute at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) owns a collection of some 750 works of Mexican popular culture, the majority of which were illustrated by the printmaker and engraver José Guadalupe Posada (1851–1913) and printed by Antonio Vanegas Arroyo (1850–1917), whose company operated from the 1880s to the 1940s. The collection is comprised of a broad range of media, from chapbooks and magazines to Hojas sueltas (broadsheets). The texts of the published works cover a broad range of topics, on the one hand drawing on themes from Ibero-American—and especially Mexican—oral traditions and popular piety; and on the other hand, covering current affairs in Mexico and, to a lesser extent, abroad. The majority of the texts are in prose. Various forms of poetry, above all corridos (ballads), are also featured. The Posada Collection continues to be systematically enlarged and forms part of the Ibero-American Institute’s exceptionally rich collections of popular culture around 1900 from Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. Completely in open access, it is one of the IAI’s most consulted digital collections.

Twentieth-century science and technology in Brazil were marked by the building of new institutions of higher education, research, and research funding as well as by the professionalization of scientific practice in the country. Most of these changes were state driven and state funded, while some support came from foreign philanthropic foundations and states and, on a smaller scale, from the private sector. The mid-20th-century was when most activity took place, for instance the founding of the University of São Paulo, as a reaction of the state of São Paulo to national political changes in 1930, and the establishment of funding agencies such as Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), as initiatives of the federal government. Throughout the century the institutionalization of science moved from a strictly pragmatic model toward the acknowledgement of science as the professional activity required for the production of new knowledge. In Brazil the development of science has been marked by a succession of ups and downs closely following economic cycles and political times, albeit not perfectly synchronously. Therefore, a major brain drain began in 1960 during a democratic regime, and the 1964 military dictatorship restrained civil rights while supporting science from 1970 on. Chronological limits in this history are not turning points. On the one hand, as the 21st century began Brazilian academia suffered further ups and downs closely related to political and funding crises, which have worsened since President Jair Bolsonaro assumed office in 2019. On the other hand, the huge impact of the 20th-century changes in Brazilian academia should not detract from the production of science and technology in previous centuries.