This introduction provides an overview of the theories and methodologies necessary to reveal the social, economic, and political lives of Afro-descended Mexicans after the abolition of slavery and caste. Beginning with the cofradía del Rosario in what is now Morelia, it sets the stage for the collection by showing how references to Afro-descended communities continued after independence in 1821. The introduction argues that the limited sources about Afro-descended Mexican citizens do not preclude the study of these communities after emancipation. Instead, it requires careful, often against the grain, readings of racial identities as well as of individual and collective agency, historical themes related to slavery and freedom that are better known in the colonial period. Ultimately, the introduction attempts to provide a roadmap for future studies into the history of Afro-Mexicans in the nineteenth century.

This chapter provides practical guidance for using four types of digital resources: finding aids, digitized analog records, databases, and born-digital records. It points out a variety of potential pitfalls to consider, including searching finding aids in ways limited to the immediate and most obvious object of interest, compared to the benefits of wider searches based on a fuller understanding of bureaucratic structures and personnel. Effective use of the National Archives Catalog requires a full awareness of its limitations and how it can obfuscate relationships among various organizations and records. The discussion of digitized analog records describes various approaches, using as examples the online resources of the National Reconnaissance Office and the CIA, as well as the digitized microfilm of Department of State records by the National Archives. The World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers Data Files and the Disaster History Files are examples of traditional databases discussed. The Department of State Central Foreign Policy File for the years 1973–1979 is discussed in depth, including what is and is not online, how to effectively search the records, the use of P-Reels, and how to interpret the TAGS system. The chapter closes with suggestions on steps to take before visiting research institutions.

Adopting a microhistorical approach and narrowing the scale of observation offers Cold War historians invaluable heuristic and narrative opportunities, uncovering little-known, seemingly “small” stories that nonetheless hold significant illustrative and historiographical power. This approach repositions human agency at the center of historical narratives and examines its interplay with broader political, geopolitical, and ideological structures. Drawing on Edoardo Grendi’s famous “exceptional/normal” antinomy, the book reconstructs the story of the evangelical Church of Christ’s mission in Italy – a story that is, at first glance, highly exceptional, but on closer examination proves to be remarkably normal within its broader historical context. The analysis seeks to connect global history with microhistory, bridging the dynamics of world integration, such as the Cold War, with the bottom-up perspectives of long neglected actors. This methodological challenge is compounded by the abundance of primary sources available to historians of post-1945 international relations. By exploring the Church of Christ’s Italian mission, the book highlights the potential of microhistory to enrich global historical frameworks, weaving together large-scale structural forces with the intricate, human-scale dynamics that often drive historical change.

The chapter offers a critical social-historical and theoretical framework to analyze transitional justice politics in Eastern Europe, particularly Polish lustration, in the global post-Cold War moment marked by the proclamations of the “end of history” and ideology, the “moral turn,” the memory boom, the rise of human rights and rule-of-law imaginaries, neoliberal globalization, and their crises and alleged ends today. The chapter unpacks the concept of moral autopsy, which underpins transitional justice efforts such as lustration and reconstructs communism as a dead and ruinous past and criminality, the truth of which it seeks to trace and dissect in the persons associated with communism, especially communist secret service. The chapter focuses on the themes of truth-telling, deception, and treason articulated by moral autopsy and Polish lustration, and places them in the context of postsocialist contradictions of liberal legal and capitalist transformations. The chapter discusses the key methodological orientations of the book, particularly the conditions of ethnographic research on lustration, marked by pervasive suspicion of betrayal and moralization of politics and history.

Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a city of innovations. Explosive economic growth and the expansion of overseas trade went hand in hand with a high level of religious tolerance. In this world of increasing complexity, legal and governmental innovations were essential in order to adapt the urban institutional landscape to the challenges posed by these great social, economic, and cultural changes. The topic of insolvency legislation, as a crucial junction of the fundamental contextuality of commercial law, is most suitable to shed new light on the precise circumstances under which the most striking and seminal developments in the rise of a modern commercial order took place. This introductory chapter explains how new empirical evidence from Amsterdam's legal archives can help understand how innovative governance and legal practices interacted with moral thought in order to produce a liberal, open-access insolvency regime.

This chapter explores a form of anticolonial resistance that has gone relatively unnoticed by social theorists – insurrections aboard slaving ships. How might social theorists effectively represent, theorize, and contextualize these moments of anticolonial action? Drawing on the materials from the newly opened Lloyd’s archives, we discuss the importance of the insurance archive to histories of slavery and how these materials – despite their colonial ontologies – can offer novel understandings of anticolonial action. The materials permit scholars to uncover a complex set of financial logics that convey multiple different meanings about the category of the human and allow social theorists to ask different questions. Even the smallest details in the most highly localized spaces can provide insight into the nature of resistance and revolution.

This section sets out the key aims, argument, and methodology of the book, concluding with a comprehensive chapter summary.

Although several scholars have expanded their selection criteria when editing anthologies of Latinx literature, they rarely include writings by colonial Creoles. Focusing on Francisco de Florencia (1620–1695), this chapter argues that his 1694 provincial chronicle of the Jesuits in New Spain deserves to be studied with other colonial texts that have been described as “symbolic precursors” to Latinx writings. Unlike other Spanish explorers and missionaries who traveled to the Spanish Borderlands, Florencia was born there; his hometown was Saint Augustine, he lived most of his life in Mexico City, and he spent almost a decade in southern Europe representing his religious province. Florencia’s frontier crossings offer early modern examples of border crossings, themes that emerge in the ways he deals with transnational experiences and influences, questions of belonging, and a sense of space. Even though sacred (or ecclesiastical) history is often overlooked in studies of Latinx literature, an analysis of the ways in which Florencia engages with earlier Spanish accounts of the Jesuit missions in La Florida is a unique window onto Creole identities in the early modern Spanish world.

The twenty-first century is a digital century, and the use of digital media and data-analyzing technology has become widespread and even trendy in the humanities. What does this mean for the legacy of the Holocaust? What are the advantages and challenges of digitalization in the context of Holocaust archives, for example with online access to videos of survivor testimony? Are there new strategies for representing or analyzing the Holocaust that draw on the techniques of digital humanities? This chapter explores the uses (and abuses) of digital technologies for both analyzing the history of the Holocaust and presenting that history to a public audience. It also considers the question of the post-survivor future, for example holograms of survivors, and what this says about “authenticity” and authority.

Even in the worst conditions, Jews needed to hear music, read books, attend lectures, watch actors perform, and participate in a myriad of cultural activities in order to connect to prewar values and memories. This chapter highlights the extraordinary cultural production of Jews in situations from cramped, dangerous ghettos, to the worst possible extremes, concentration and extermination camps. Jews stressed how much cultural activity helped them retain their psychological integrity and resist Nazi attempts to dehumanize them.

This chapter introduces the extraordinary range of archival materials and archives used by Holocaust scholars. It chronicles the efforts of prewar organizations to preserve Jewish papers and artifacts, and the clandestine efforts in ghettos and even in camps to document the unfolding genocide. This is followed by accounts of postwar retrieval efforts, often delayed for decades, and documentation efforts with multiple legal, historical, memorial, and welfare goals in mind. Some lacked a fixed home and dissolved, others followed their organizers to new homes. A fierce battle developed over German government, military, and industrial records and over postwar civilian search records. Since the 1980s, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined Yad Vashem as a central collection point for Holocaust material. Finally, the chapter turns to what constitutes a valuable artifact and to the impact of digitization on the Holocaust archive.

Setting sail from Gujarat across the western Indian Ocean, Chapter 2 disembarks on Mauritius, an island of sugar plantations located between South Asia, Africa, and Australia. At the heart of the chapter is Bel Ombre, a sugar plantation owned by a Gujarati merchant from the port city of Rander and the site of his residence in the late nineteenth century. In Gujarat, old merchant homes erase the wider oceanic context of plantation capitalism, slavery, and indentured labor. An emphasis on family itineraries displaces economic profits and proscribed intimacies. To track these points of contact in the late nineteenth century, the chapter analyzes colonial records of plantation ownership in the notarial records in autopsies, letters of helps, and other documents from the Protector of Immigrations records in the Mauritius National Archive in order to understand the broader context of racial capitalism that shaped life in Gujarat’s ports. The chapter argues that plantations – paradigmatic sites of colonial capital – were intimately connected to Gujarat’s havelis. In doing so it provides a critical understanding of family and belonging beyond the endogamous merchant family.