How Parisians Transformed Popular Credit at the Revolutionary Justice of the Peace: A Hidden Groundwork of Nineteenth-Century Capitalism in France?
France's revolutionary justice of the peace gave ordinary citizens low-cost access to local courts for debt, trade, and rent disputes. An analysis of 174 contested cases from the Parisian section of Les Arcis in 1792 shows that, for the first time, people systematically distinguished consumer debts from personal debts and transformed rent repayment practices — shifts that may have shaped postrevolutionary capitalist markets.

The Cunning of Desire: Queer Thinking in the History of Science
A love triangle between neurologist Henry Head, psychologist William Rivers, and schoolteacher Ruth Mayhew illustrates how queer desire shaped scientific knowledge between 1903 and 1922. Understood beyond sexual identity, queer thinking informed alternative models of the unconscious at the very moment Freudian ideas peaked in Britain — models that, paradoxically, downplayed the role of sex in the human psyche.

On the Edge of Power: Peasants and Escape Ecologies in Eastern Europe, 1700–1850
Inaccessible landscapes such as forests, swamps, and wastelands in Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine emerged from cooling climate, wars, epidemics, and economic collapse. Despite a negative master narrative, the crisis weakened repressive power, fostered re-wilding, and turned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into a destination for migrants who preferred hiding places, access to commons, and privileges over conscription, high taxes, and loss of cultural or religious autonomy.

An End to All Doubt and Disorder: Genealogy and Law in Spanish History
Centuries of Spanish law compilations aimed less at clarity or efficiency than at displaying royal power and genealogy. From the thirteenth to early nineteenth centuries, monarchs promised to end disorder, while the sheer size, glosses, and parallel programs of legal and historical volumes made origins, authority, and completeness symbolically visible, overshadowing law’s practical function.

Reproductive Unfreedom and Structural Violence in Early Modern Catholic Europe
This article argues that reproductive unfreedom was a form of structural violence that significantly constrained poor women’s and children’s lives across early modern Catholic Europe. Reproductive freedom entails parents’ ability to raise their own children safely and sustainably. This was impossible for the thousands of poor women who were forced to delegate their mothering by abandoning children to foundling hospitals, where mortality rates were extraordinarily high through much of the period. How did these hundreds of thousands of infant lives become “ungrievable”? This article takes apart the social logic of reproductive unfreedom, and it investigates how structural violence implicated not only institutions but also the intimate dynamics between women and the children in their care. It pays particular attention to the multiple ways that care work was coerced, and how women refused to undertake this care, which often meant that infants became collateral damage of labor disputes. The article thus contributes to scholarship on early modern social and gender history by reframing the history of delegated mothering as a history of structural violence perpetrated on poor women and children, and perpetrated in turn by poor women themselves.

I Queue, Therefore I Am: Splendeurs et Misères of Waiting in Line in Nineteenth-Century Paris
In late-19th-century Paris, standing in line for entertainment became a leisure activity in its own right. The queue—its length, social mix, and shared anticipation—turned into a spectacle. Waiting itself became something to consume, signaling status, curiosity, and the pleasure of being part of a temporary urban crowd.