Music accompanied the US intervention in Nicaragua. Above all other genres, US popular music dominated Nicaraguan culture beginning in 1919. And it never left. This article examines the foxtrot, a wildly popular US music and social dance, as a lens for understanding how Nicaraguans saw themselves, how they negotiated the intervention, and how they acted upon the world. It argues that Nicaraguans developed new musical expressions, making foreign culture their own, despite the dominance of US intervention. Through transculturation, Nicaraguans maintained a sense of national identity. More than an entertainment, the foxtrot grew into a discourse for reckoning with US intervention and contesting Nicaraguan cultural values. Remarkably, the transnational circulation of the Nicaraguan foxtrot resonated beyond Central America, putting Nicaraguan music on the global stage. The first section traces the origins and transmission of the foxtrot during the ragtime era between the 1890s and 1917, followed by the early jazz period. The second section narrates the foxtrot’s 1919 arrival and rooting as a popular music in western Nicaragua. The third section surveys the foxtrot’s domestic and transnational dissemination via Nicaraguan entertainments and US recording companies from 1919 to 1933. The fourth section explores the cultural embrace of the foxtrot in Nicaragua during that same period. Conversely, the fifth section pursues its literary critiques. The sixth and final section examines Nicaraguan composer Luis A. Delgadillo as a prominent advocate and critic of the foxtrot. The conclusion places the Nicaraguan foxtrot in context of greater Latin American production.

The article examines the Slovenization of public space in the Habsburg crownland of Gorizia and Gradisca from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. As in other ethnically mixed regions of the empire, public space became a contested arena shaped by the rise of nationalism, with competing national groups seeking to inscribe their ideologies onto the urban landscape. The Slovene national movement aimed to assert its identity and political aspirations through symbolic spatial interventions. However, owing to the specific circumstances of the Slovene community in the region—characterized by a predominantly rural population and internal divisions between liberal and conservative currents—Slovene spatial politics exhibited distinctive features compared to other nationally driven spatial strategies. The article traces the gradual assertion of a Slovene presence in local public space, from the first nationally inspired monument erected in 1898 to the construction of the national hall in the center of the provincial capital, Gorizia.

Widowers make occasional appearances in Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and—even though Old Norse did not even have a word for them—they exhibit some distinctive behavioral patterns. This article uses the framework of bereavement studies to examine the interplay of gender, affect, and small-scale politics in the wake of the loss of a wife. It proposes two archetypes of dysfunctional bereaved husband, observable in the medieval Norse world which the sagas describe (ca. 800–1300): the widower on the warpath and the widower on the bridal path. Both followed cultural scripts for widowers’ conduct, but did so imperfectly, in a manner that exposes their society’s constructions of masculinity, its prescriptive family codes, and the clandestine channels linking private emotional turmoil with public socio-political disruption. My typology of maladjusted Norse widowers offers heuristic tools for further study of bereaved husbands in other periods and places, as well as for comparison with bereaved wives and with men in other life-stages.

In southeast Asia, upland rice (Oryza sativa L.) is typically grown by subsistence farmers under shifting cultivation systems in mountainous regions. In Laos, glutinous upland rice is grown in the north and along the Laos-Vietnamese border in central and southern regions. Previous research has examined requirements for upland rice in northern Laos, but not in the south, which is lower in altitude, with higher evaporation. This paper examined the adaptation of six upland rice genotypes, (preferred traditional tropical japonicas Nok and Mak Hin Sung, preferred traditional indicas Laboun and Non, and improved indica B6144F-MR-6-0-0 (B6144), which were compared with a tropical japonica Local Check (which varied from site to site), over seven sites (from new to continuous cultivation) in southern Laos. Mean grain yield of the site ranged from 1.04 to 3.71 t ha−1, with higher yields in the wetter year 2011 than in the drier 2012 (3.19 t ha−1 with 1718 mm vs 1.23 t ha−1 with 1034 mm rainfall). Nevertheless, cluster analysis identified three sites and three genotype groups, which were not simply related to annual rainfall. Three principal component axes were associated with yield potential (PCA1), cultural history (PCA2), and resource limitation as the growing season progressed (PCA3). Consequently, upland rice response was related to 4 cultural history by year groups: Nong 2011 (E1: new cultivation, wet year, high yield potential), Xepon 2012 (E2: old cultivation, dry year, low yield potential), and intermittent stress (E3) associated with either old cultivation in a wet year (Xepon 2011) or new cultivation in a dry year (Nong 2012). Among genotypes, Nok, Non, and Laboun were high-yielding over sites (2.30 t ha−1), B6144 and Local Check were low yielding over sites (1.69 t ha−1), while Mak Hin Sung was highest yielding in the Xepon 2012 sites only (1.62 t ha−1). The results suggested a stronger importance of water deficit in southern Laos, especially during grain filling. Nevertheless, genotypes which performed well in southern Laos, the early indica Laboun and the specifically adapted tropical japonica Mak Hin Sung, were adopted by upland farmers in the south, and were still being grown there seven years later. Relative to upland and aerobic rice for northern Laos, which is exposed to only mild or intermittent water deficit, upland rice for southern Laos requires greater tolerance to water deficit.

Although the social democrats fundamentally opposed the political order of the German Empire, they participated in parliament from the beginning. The party not only sat on the parliamentary benches, but its representatives also proved to be committed parliamentarians. Using a combination of parliamentary, party, and movement sources, this article shows that social democrats’ parliamentary participation followed two lines of reasoning. First, the party admitted that parliamentary participation served publicity purposes. In fact, social democrats took the Reichstag stage to present their political project to the masses. Second, the party was less willing to admit that parliament fitted perfectly into the associational tradition of working-class culture. Orderly and fair debate had been the norm of social democratic activism long before the party was founded. It is precisely this last aspect that provides an important and previously overlooked explanation for the social democrats’ surprising devotion to a political system they so deeply detested.

This article assesses the cultures of assembly in the Dutch global sphere of influence. It focuses on so-called landdagen (‘land days’), formal assemblies of Dutch provincial communities. While originating in the late medieval Low Countries, several such bodies were instituted in Dutch colonies in the seventeenth century. This article is the first to compare contemporary reflections on three such land days, namely that of the province of Guelders in the metropole, and those in New Netherland (North America) and Formosa (now Taiwan) in overseas territories. These three assemblies offer an illuminating case study, for, while differing in some respects, they possessed similar powers in the political structure of the Dutch Republic. This article examines how the Dutch traditions of assembly interacted and/or hybridised with other European parliamentary cultures and Indigenous traditions of assembly in overseas contexts. It argues that early modern Dutch perceptions of the genesis and functions of the landdagen reveal a pragmatic commingling of different assembly traditions, calculated to foster a shared sense of political community.

The Publicity Department of the Austrian Fatherland Front served the Ständestaat regime (1933–38). An elaborate organization on paper, the Fatherland Front's actual work was bound up in the performance of para-fascism and the surveillance of opposing parties. Each of these modes of being mutually reinforced the need for the other and created a unique self-awareness of failure within the movement. As such, the Publicity Department offers a microcosm of the larger challenges of the Ständestaat, which faltered in the face of economic collapse, political violence, and a population largely indifferent to its attempt to secure Austrian sovereignty in the 1930s.