This article attempts to bring together religious history and the history of the public sphere. It proposes to reinterpret the historical significance of doctrinal controversies by examining the relationship between a regime of publicity and an ecclesiastic regime. For instance, seventeenth-century French theological controversies were characterized by the frequent publication of letters, which indicates just how strongly the religious legitimacy of a given controversy was called into question. The publication of letters appears to have offered a means of responding to the destabilization of publishing practice caused by these controversies. It also attests to both the religious refusal to transform the church into a public sphere and how the ecclesiastic aspect of doctrinal controversies made them difficult to resolve. The relationship between publicity and religion thus appears particularly relevant for both historians of early modern Catholicism and historians of the public sphere.

Hispanic-American societies of the colonial period are traditionally described as being hierarchized along a system of racial classification. Indeed, the Spanish term casta has been translated as race for that very purpose. Considering both terms as synonymous, however, leads to a conflation of colonial categories and contemporary concepts, thus simplifying a highly complex and lengthy process.

This article focuses on the distinctly colonial elements that contributed to transforming a notion derived from nobiliary terminology into a science of phenotypes. The study of this visual culture and vocabulary, initially rooted in Mesoamerica, reveals the regional and interimperial dialogue that established a Euro-American space of shared conceptual creation.

Prior to the massive wave of emigration to South America during the nineteenth century, inhabitants of rural communities in the western French Pyrenees emigrated in large numbers to Saint-Domingue and other Caribbean islands. This article examines the connections between migratory movements and the organization of these communities into “house societies” (Lévi-Strauss) in which the continuation of the “house” was paramount and no new “houses” could be founded. Adopting a microhistorical approach, it analyzes the complex role of inheritance rights in the decision to emigrate and reconstructs the networks that made emigration possible. Unlike the traditional belief that sons were forced to leave because they were deprived of their share of inheritance, the family unit fully supported the emigration of its younger members. This article also argues that emigration simultaneously resulted from and undermined the “house system.”

Using contemporary accounts, letters drafted by former slaves, and the memoir written by Toussaint Louverture shortly before his death, this article attempts to recreate the language spoken by Haitian revolutionaries and, in particular, Toussaint Louverture. Detailed historical and linguistic analysis of these sources shows that Louverture wrote predominantly in French, only employed Kreyòl orally (especially when addressing a working-class audience), and rarely used the Ewe-Fon language of his Arada ancestors. His memoir suggests that Haitian Kreyòl, which some linguists think is derived from African languages, was more influenced by archaic, popular, or regional variants of French. Louverture’s preference for French also reinforces theses that describe him as a moderate figure inclined toward the European model.

The Lakota leader Sitting Bull was first buried on the Standing Rock reservation, only to be disinterred and re-buried sixty years later. A historical study of these graves leads less to the commemoration of a great man than an opportunity to reexamine colonialism within America. While American colonial power was a fragile one and challenged by some, it was also deeply rooted in the symbolic interactions that took place on and around the reservations, which involved depriving people of land, singling out certain segments of the population, and Americanizing people’s belief systems. While this attempt at internal colonization has been considered a massive failure due to the resistance of native populations, this article seeks to lend nuance to this interpretation and analyze the situation in all its complexity

The colonization of the land that is now Vietnam and the establishment of a French protectorate in Tonkin in the late nineteenth century led to new methods of agricultural production and new means of exploiting natural resources. This article examines this evolution by focusing on the endogenous and spontaneous movement of colonization that developed “illegally” during the first half of the twentieth century and which concerned several villages located in the hills of two districts in Phú Thọ province. A comparison of archival sources produced by the protectorate authorities with the testimonials recorded by former colonist-planters and their descendants reveals how the colonial state manipulated and falsified information in order to subsequently claim ownership of this colonial movement, which transformed the region’s environment, society, and economy.