Tens of thousands of European ‘intellectuals’ faced starvation by 1920 and Vienna was the epicentre for international humanitarian aid. This chapter focuses on how the feeding of intellectuals was organized by a range of humanitarian organizations in this period. The most striking example of this was the phenomenon of the ‘intellectual kitchen’, a site where intellectuals were fed away from the wider populations of their towns and cities. The chapter explores the mechanics of food and clothes aid, and argues that issues of class, gender, and race shaped the status of the ‘intellectual’ for humanitarian organizations as well as aid workers.

Chapter 1 presents a social and spatial reconstruction of the Royal Exchange, at the heart of London’s trade, as a place of women’s work. An apprentice imprisoned for debt shows how young women moved through the shops of the Exchange, working, shopping and using and losing credit. As the Exchange recovered after the Fire, women moved into at least half of its small shops; they also lived close by, often sharing lodgings, and made networks of patronage and credit through and outside the City companies. As apprentices, mistresses, shopkeepers and outworkers, women were central to the sewing industry which made early modern fashion.

Two young women in apprenticeship, Katherine Venner and Christiana Hutchins, offer case studies of the difficulties that adolescence in apprenticeship might produce. It was a period in which girls learned, and resisted, gender identities. Mistresses might find themselves managing girls who refused to learn, spoke rudely, purloined shop goods and failed to perform the civil manners expected of seamstresses and milliners. Alongside court testimonies, the advice of Hannah Woolley, the one writer who dealt with female apprentices, presents a guide to the ways female apprentices were told to manage their minds and bodies, and how they responded. Work, this chapter argues, was formative of femininity.

Responses to prompts for words and phrases used to describe clothing

Responses to prompts for words and phrases used to describe clothing

Chapter 2 examines US survivors’ layered belonging as it played out on Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s ground zero in 1945. In partucular, the chapter argues that their cross-nationality remained persistent as their culture – clothes, medicines, and food – became the essential means of surviving, rescuing, and caring in the bomb’s immediate aftermath. Despite the enormous destruction that appeared to erase any human distinctions, cultural diversity and gender differences came back powerfully in the hours and days after the bomb’s explosion. Women emerged as chief caretakers of the ill and injured in the utter absence of hospitals, doctors, and nurses, crafting what might be called improvisational practices of folk medicine. Men, in contrast, felt as if it was their duty to rescue others at any cost, sometimes at the sacrifice of their own safety. Not only universality of nuclear destruction, but also uniqueness of individuals and cultures affected by it, came to light. Altogether, US survivors’ experiences are explored as a cross-cultural history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which became the basis of US survivors’ memory, identity, and activism after the war.

Keith Michael Green’s “Disabling Freedom: Bloody Shirt Rhetoric in Postbellum Slave Narratives” explores the mystifications and erasures of anti-Black violence that characterized Reconstruction-era writing.Green pays deep attention to how select narratives – especially the much-neglected Story of Mattie Jackson and Keckley’s better-known Behind the Scenes – strategically employed oblique narrativizations of Black pain and personhood to avoid pernicious narratives of Black unfitness and hyper-embodiment.Green draws on what he calls the “poetics of the bloody shirt” to study the ventriloquization of injury through surrogate objects and persons, with emphasis on not only Jackson and Keckley’s texts but also works by Sojourner Truth, Still, and William Wells Brown to underscore how indirect representations of injury helped postbellum slave narratives articulate the contradictions and risks of Black life and to revise ableist visions of freedom – in the process, contesting the erasure of Black pain in post-emancipation discourse.

The much-feared event of Lorenzo’s death happened on 8 April 1492, heralded ominously by a bolt of lightning striking the cupola of the Duomo in the direction of the Medici palace.1 Piero’s years of apprenticeship were over and everyone awaited his response to the challenges ahead. ‘Who would Piero side with’, Parenti wondered, ‘and how would he be treated, as the boss, the equal or the inferior of the others?’2 Uncertainty about Piero’s reaction to the new, upside-down world that confronted him was widely shared, not least by Lorenzo’s secretary, ser Niccolò Michelozzi, who found himself isolated in Naples as his patron lay dying, consoled only by the letters he received from Florence.