Infectious disease outbreaks on the scale of the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic are a new phenomenon in many parts of the world. Many isolation unit designs with corresponding workflow dynamics and personal protective equipment postures have been proposed for each emerging disease at the health facility level, depending on the mode of transmission. However, personnel and resource management at the isolation units for a resilient response will vary by human resource capacity, reporting requirements, and practice setting. This study describes an approach to isolation unit management at a rural Uganda Hospital and shares lessons from the Uganda experience for isolation unit managers in low- and middle-income settings.

It underplays the significance of James Kloppenberg's monumentally ambitious and massively learned Toward Democracy to call it a big book—though at seven hundred pages of text, a hundred pages of notes and another five hundred pages of additional endnotes online it is surely that. It is, in voice and subject, several books in one. The first is a sweeping narrative account of the struggles for self-rule in England, the United States, and France from the seventeenth century through the middle third of the nineteenth century. The great revolutions stand at this history's center—the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s, the British North Americans’ revolt against monarchy and their construction of an enduring kingless polity in the 1770s and 1780s, and the revolutionary upheaval in France in the years after 1789—their origins, struggles, and dramas etched with a skilled narrative historian's hand.

A little over thirty years ago at the invitation of Stanley Kutler at Reviews in American History, I spent a summer trying to puzzle through the historiography surrounding Progressive Era society and politics. “In Search of Progressivism” the result was titled, and it has had a much longer life than most historiographical pieces of that sort do. Many excellent historiographical treatments of the Progressive Era have been published since that essay's appearance in 1982, along with a huge amount of historical writing. The field has burgeoned in ways that were barely visible thirty years ago. And yet the essay endures, and from time to time I think of revisiting and revising it.

In the concluding contribution to this issue, this article asks how patterns in the movement of social policies between nations can be explained. It particularly highlights the ways in which policies often move in clusters from ‘model’ nations outward. The article finds answers in the asymmetries of social policy networks and, most importantly, in the power of the narratives through which policy models travel.

A series of editorials in this Journal have argued that psychiatry is in the midst of a crisis. The various solutions proposed would all involve a strengthening of psychiatry's identity as essentially ‘applied neuroscience’. Although not discounting the importance of the brain sciences and psychopharmacology, we argue that psychiatry needs to move beyond the dominance of the current, technological paradigm. This would be more in keeping with the evidence about how positive outcomes are achieved and could also serve to foster more meaningful collaboration with the growing service user movement.

Charles Evans Hughes's career ran along the fault lines of most of the major political events of his lifetime. Muckraking catapulted him to fame. He governed New York during four key years of the Progressive era as an effective administrator and earnest reformer. He stayed with the Republican Party when the Progressives bolted in 1912. He ran for the presidency in 1916 but missed the prize, albeit by a narrower electoral college margin than any other contender until the very end of the century. He was instrumental in negotiating the international naval disarmament accords of 1921–22, landmarks of progressive internationalism in their day that fell under sharp criticism a decade later. He presided over the U.S. Supreme Court during the key years of the New Deal, though in most histories of the 1930s Court he comes across as something of an also-ran behind its more memorable shapers: Brandeis, Cardozo, Sutherland, Black, even Roberts. Hard to pin to any achievement or distinct idea, slipping in and out of the dramatic movements of his day, he was the kind of man who makes history but easily falls out of the history books.