bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sowing the Sacred
Authors: Barba Lloyd Daniel
Published: August 2022

Sowing the Sacred traces the development of Mexican Pentecostalism in the context of migrant labor in California’s industrial agriculture from the 1920s to the 1960s. During this time period, many believed Pentecostalism to be a distasteful new sect rife with cultish and fanatical tendencies; U.S. growers thought that Mexicans were not fit to be citizens and were a mere workforce; and industrial agriculture was celebrated for feeding American families, but its exploitation of workers was largely ignored. Contrary to the image of farmworkers as culturally vacuous, lacking creative genius, and mere bodies of labor in a vertiginous cycle of migrant labor in California’s industrial agricultural system, this book argues that Pentecostal farmworkers from La Asamblea Apostólica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús carved out a robust socio-religious existence in these conditions and in doing so produced a vast record of cultural vibrancy. Sowing the Sacred queries what stories are portrayed about racialized Mexican workers and their religious life if we examine the photographs taken by the farmworkers themselves. The oral histories, photographs, and material from new archival collections tell an intimate story of sacred-space making in the form of mapping out churches, outdoors baptisms in grower-controlled waterways, building houses of worship in the fields, artistic creations of handmade goods and decor, and the role of historical memory in telling these stories.
The Heresy of Jacob Frank
Authors: Michaelson Jay
Published: August 2022

The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth is the first monograph on the religious philosophy of Jacob Frank (1726–1791), who, in the wake of the false messiah Sabbetai Zevi, led the largest mass apostasy in Jewish history. Based on close readings of Frank’s late teachings, recorded in 1784 and 1790, The Heresy of Jacob Frank presents Frank as an original and prescient figure at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, reason and magic. Frank’s worldview combines an antinomian, skeptical rejection of religious law with a supernatural, Western Esotericist myth of immortal beings, magic, and worldly power. Frank’s goal was alchemical in nature, culminating in physical transformation, power, and immortality, and his messiah was a syncretic female figure known as the Maiden, whose characteristics draw on Kabbalah, magic, and the veneration of the Black Virgin of Częstochowa, where Frank was imprisoned for twelve years. Sexual ritual, apparently tightly limited and controlled by the sect, was not a libertine bacchanal but a transgressive enactment of the messianic reality, a corporealization of what would later become known as spirituality. While Frank was undoubtedly a manipulative, even abusive leader whose sect mostly disappeared from history, his ideology anticipated themes that would become predominant in the Haskalah, early Hasidism, and even contemporary “New Age” Judaism. And his unbelievable, winding journey from Sabbatean heretic to eighteenth-century charlatan- alchemist-spy is perhaps even more remarkable than the radical theology he preached.
Introduction
Authors: Michaelson Jay
Published: August 2022

The introduction to The Heresy of Jacob Frank introduces the religious philosophy of Jacob Frank (1726–1791), a once-notorious messianic heretic who led the largest mass apostasy in Jewish history. While scholars have often dismissed Frank’s teachings as purely opportunistic, manipulative, or even sinister, in fact Frank was an original and prescient figure at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, reason and magic. He rejected religion on quasi-humanistic, rationalistic grounds, but in its place wove a bizarre myth of magical beings and the pursuit of immortality. The introduction next summarizes the eight chapters of the book. Chapter 1 is devoted to Frank’s actual life, and to the quite different character of “Jacob Frank” described in Frank’s teachings. Chapter 2 discusses Frankist antinomianism, that is, his principled rejection of religious law, and chapter 3 presents Frank’s materialist worldview and worldly conception of redemption. Chapter 4 discusses his occult quest for immortality, and chapter 5 discusses the role that sexual liberation and transgression played (and were rumored to play) in the Frankist sect, including veneration of the female messiah and the liberation of sensuality. The final three chapters situate Frank in the contexts of Jewish mysticism and messianism (chapter 6), Western Esotericism (chapter 7), and later movements of Jewish rationalism and spirituality which he anticipated (chapter 8). While Frank was undoubtedly a manipulative leader whose sect mostly disappeared from history, his ideology anticipated transformations in religion that would become predominant in the 20th and 21st centuries.
“I tell you everything and tell you nothing”
Authors: Michaelson Jay
Published: August 2022

Chapter 1 introduces two Jacob Franks: one historical, one largely fictional. The first, born Yankiev Liebowicz in 1726, first dabbled in trade, then made his way to Salonica, the center of Sabbatean activity, where he quickly became a charismatic leader. Returning north, he became one of many heretical, charismatic preachers in 1750s Podolia, and eventually, the most notorious Jewish apostate of his day. Yet even after conversion, Frank’s sectarian activity continued, causing him to be imprisoned from 1759 to 1772. Following release, Frank lived as a faux-noble charlatan, active in Western esotericist networks, until he died in 1791. The second Jacob Frank is a character in hundreds of fantastic tales: both boor and prophet, trickster and “holy fool,” frustrated failure and world-historic figure. His autohagiography is more myth than history, questioning the boundaries of “high” and “low” religious discourse and satirizing religion itself.
“We don’t need the books of Kabbalah”
Authors: Michaelson Jay
Published: August 2022

To the extent he is known today, Jacob Frank is understood to be a false messiah preaching Kabbalah and Sabbateanism. Chapter 6 shows that, at least in the period of ZSP’s dictation, this is not the case. First, Frank does not declare himself the messiah, though he predicted imminent apocalypse. The Maiden is the messiah, not Frank, who seeks immortality and power. Second, Frank explicitly rejects Kabbalah and Sabbateanism, ridiculing them for their ineffectualness. Kabbalistic language or symbolism appears in fewer than fifty dicta out of over 2,500 in ZSP. And the view that Frankism is a continuation of Sabbateanism obscures more than it reveals. While Frankism begins from a Sabbatean framework, and returned to it after Frank’s death, it inverts the Sabbatean emphasis on faith and the unseen; for Frank, faith in the invisible is ridiculous, and the manifest is all he trusts.
“All religions change and go beyond the borders laid down by their ancestors”
Authors: Michaelson Jay
Published: August 2022

Chapter 8 explores how late Frankism foreshadows the Haskalah, Hasidism, and “New Age” Jewish spirituality, even if it did not influence them directly. First, while Sabbateanism did not, as Scholem argued, bring about the Haskalah by destabilizing rabbinic authority, Frank’s quasi-rationalistic critique of traditional theodicy did foreshadow those of the Haskalah, and was known to the Prague Frankists who became Maskilim. Second, Frankism is referred to directly by the Baal Shem Tov and Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, and both movements displace the messianic from the historical to the personal-experiential. Third, Frank anticipated Jewish New Age spiritualities, which extract personal-transformational elements from religious frameworks and insert them into a syncretic, feminist, “spiritual,” and universalist one. Like Frank, the New Age combines skeptical antinomianism with esoteric myth. Though he did not influence them directly, Frank anticipated trends that would become widespread in Jewish religious life.
A Boy from Pskov Province, 1747–1762
Authors: Mikaberidze Alexander
Published: August 2022

This chapter begins by recounting the birth of Mikhail in September 1747 into the Russian noble family of the Golenischev-Kutuzovs. The Golenischev-Kutuzovs were a junior branch of the Kutuzovs, a family that could trace its origins back to the Middle Ages. The General Armory of the Nobility of the Russian Empire, the authoritative record of Russian noble households, notes that the family’s founder was Gavriil, who migrated from Prussia to the Novgorod region in the second half of the thirteenth century. The chapter highlights how the Kutuzovs and their Golenischev-Kutuzov cousins prospered through the years, serving as diplomats, palace officials, and military commanders. They contributed to the rise of the Grand Duchy of Moscow and its transformation into the Czardom of Russia. The family fortunes were somewhat revived with the success of Ivan Savinovich Golenischev-Kutuzov, who distinguished himself in several wars waged by the newly installed Romanov czars.
“The Glorious Hero of Măcin,” 1791–1792
Authors: Mikaberidze Alexander
Published: August 2022

This chapter opens with Nikolai Repnin’s order for Mikhail Kutuzov to start preparing for an early campaign should Sultan Selim III refuse to negotiate. It details how the new instructions required Kutuzov to raze Izmail’s fortifications, fill in the moat, and search for as many of the cannonballs that the Russian army had fired at the fortress during the storming as possible. Due to a lack of ammunition in the army, Kutuzov was also told to strip the roofs of the local mosque and residences and melt them down to make cartridges. The chapter talks about how stripping the roofs of mosques is an order Kutuzov could not comply with fully, as he knew that local Muslims would be enraged. Sultan Selim III, dismayed as he was by the fall of Izmail, was disinclined to negotiate with the Russians in light of the fast-evolving international situation.
The Envoy of Her Imperial Majesty, 1793
Authors: Mikaberidze Alexander
Published: August 2022

This chapter discusses Mikhail Kutuzov’s time in the Polish-Lithuanian borderlands from 1792 to 1793. This was during a time when the commonwealth of Poland experienced another political convulsion. The first Polish Partition had demonstrated the dangers a weak Polish state was facing and helped nurture public opinion favorable to the reform movement. The chapter describes Enlightenment ideals and prospects of structural reforms that strengthened the Polish monarchy and removed the Cardinal Laws, which were imposed on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by Russia. The chapter looks at the Great Sejm and demonstrates how the Sejm created an opportunity to enact an ambitious package of reforms in the spring of 1791. The advantage of the timing of this is that Poland's neighbors were preoccupied. On May 3, the Sejm produced Europe’s first codified national constitution. This created a more effective constitutional monarchy and took steps toward reviving the Polish-Lithuanian state.
The Wrathful Czar, 1796–1801
Authors: Mikaberidze Alexander
Published: August 2022

This chapter describes how Empress Catherine, who had struggled with her health in preceding months, surprised her courtiers by organizing a grand luncheon, attended by Mikhail Kutuzov and others, on November 13, 1796. Three days later the empress suffered a stroke. She eventually passed away on November 17 in the sixty-eighth year of her life and the thirty-fifth year of her reign. Kutuzov found himself at the epicenter of Pauline transformations, feeling alarmed by the new emperor’s intentions. The chapter shows how Empress Catherine’s son Paul expunged his mother’s loyalists and anyone expressing reservation about the reforms. The purge involved 7 field marshals, more than 330 generals, and more than 2,000 officers, including Alexander Suvorov, who decried the introduction of Prussian-inspired uniforms and drills.
“The Glorious Retreat”
Authors: Mikaberidze Alexander
Published: August 2022

This chapter recounts Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory at Ulm. This was a remarkable achievement. He was able to outsmart his opponents and destroy one hostile army. He was on the point of chasing the second one into the heart of the Habsburg Empire. The first to feel the consequences of Napoleon’s triumph was Mikhail Kutuzov, whose army was less than eighty miles from Munich. The chapter examines Napoleon’s decision to postpone his advance until after October 25, which meant that Kutuzov was given an opportunity to assess the situation, weigh different options, choose a course of action, and start to execute it. The chapter looks at Kutuzov’s immediate objective, which was to avoid battle and safeguard the Russian army in the face of the French juggernaut. To ensure a safe and orderly withdrawal, Kutuzov decided to keep a sting in his tail and appointed Major General Bagration to command the rear guard.
The Eclipse of Austerlitz
Authors: Mikaberidze Alexander
Published: August 2022

This chapter looks toward the arrival of both the Russian and the Austrian sovereigns, who promised to boost the allied war effort. This seemed that it would ensure political and military unity. Russian emperor Alexander was able to convince Prussian king Frederick Wilhelm III to sign the Treaty of Potsdam and promise to support the coalition if Napoleon Bonaparte did not accept Prussian mediation. The chapter looks at the role of the Anglo-Swedish army, which was ready to march from Hanover into Holland. Meanwhile, an Anglo-Russian expedition was finishing its preparations for the invasion of Naples. The chapter recounts how Napoleon Bonaparte eventually found himself being threatened on all sides and on the defensive as his army weakened. This put him at the end of his logistical tether. Alexander and Francis II agreed to keep Mikhail Kutuzov in charge of the combined allied army, which could muster some 68,000 Russian and 15,000 Austrian troops at Olmutz, but they disagreed with his strategic assessments.
The Wilderness Years, 1806–1808
Authors: Mikaberidze Alexander
Published: August 2022

This chapter describes how Mikhail Kutuzov sought to channel the energies produced by his sense of injustice into his service to the army. It details Kutuzov’s stay in western Ukraine, shuttling between Brest-Litovsk, Dubno, and Mozyr, where he handled a myriad of tasks that reorganized a beaten army. Regiments had to be replenished, equipment accounted for and refurbished, reports on losses finalized, men rewarded and disciplined. The chapter describes the spring of 1806, which proved to be a time of reckoning for many Russian officers whose performance during the campaign left much to be desired. Kutuzov investigated dozens of cases of senior officers who were found to be mismanaging their units, embezzling funds, and abandoning their men after the battle.
The Carnage on the Danube, 1809
Authors: Mikaberidze Alexander
Published: August 2022

This chapter recounts Mikhail Kutuzov’s arrival at Jassy during the last days of April 1808. Prince Prozorovskii welcomed Kutuzov with a warm embrace and made him second-in-command of the Army of M``oldavia, as the Russian forces in the Danubian Principalities soon became known. The chapter describes the Armistice of Slobozia, which Alexander Meyendorff had negotiated six months earlier and which was still in effect when the Russian and Ottoman armies were divided by the Danube River. The chapter analyzes the two sides’ disagreement over the armistice, which caused them to spend the rest of the year in debate. Two years of military operations and the presence of tens of thousands of troops had taken a toll on the Danubian regions, which suffered from widespread looting; regular outbreaks of scurvy, plague, and other diseases; and a drop in agricultural production. The Russian assault on the Ottoman fortress of Brăila was repelled with heavy losses.
Call to Arms, 1810–1811
Authors: Mikaberidze Alexander
Published: August 2022

This chapter focuses on Mikhail Kutuzov’s assumption of his responsibilities as the governor-general of Lithuania on August 12, 1809. Formed fifteen years earlier, the Governorate-General of Lithuania encompassed an immense territory that Russia had acquired in the wake of the last Polish Partition. The chapter highlights how Kutuzov’s life revolved around the familiar routine of managing a huge province and handling the never-ending stream of supplications and administrative affairs. The chapter emphasizes how Kutuzov differed from other corrupt governors as he came into the position already possessing considerable administrative experience and having served in it almost a decade earlier. Kutuzov took his responsibilities seriously and there is no evidence that he ever abused power or enriched himself.
The Hollow Victory
Authors: Mikaberidze Alexander
Published: August 2022

This chapter points out how it was fortunate for the Russians that Napoleon Bonaparte was less dynamic at Borodino than he had been on previous occasions. Napoleon complained of the fickleness of fortune, which he lamented had begun to turn her back on him, until one of the staff officers came to inform him that the Russians were still in position and that the army was awaiting the order to attack. Napoleon set up his observation point east of the Shevardino Redoubt, where his Imperial Guard was drawn up. The chapter recounts how the Russians advanced as far as the village of Borodino but Mikhail Kutuzov and Barclay de Tolly ordered them to burn the bridge and return to the eastern bank of the Kolocha. The opening act of the battle ended in a stalemate, a portent of things to come.
The Turning Point
Authors: Mikaberidze Alexander
Published: August 2022

This chapter begins with an account of Napoleon Bonaparte’s relief after hearing Marquis de Lauriston’s retelling of his meeting with Mikhail Kutuzov. Lauriston assured Napoleon that his letter would be delivered directly to the Russian emperor and that a response should arrive within two weeks. Had Kutuzov refused to accept the letter, Napoleon might have been forced to consider other possibilities, including hastening his departure. The chapter highlights how Napoleon paid little heed to warnings of the arrival of Russian reinforcements, which could threaten the security of the Grande Armée’s rear. General Mathieu Dumas later wondered whether the emperor had been properly informed about the situation.
“The Golden Bridge”
Authors: Mikaberidze Alexander
Published: August 2022

This chapter discusses the news that Mikhail Kutuzov received of Napoleon Bonaparte’s departure from Moscow several days beforehand, noting that the events at Tarutino shook Napoleon out of his complacency. The Grande Armée had dwindled to 115,000 men and was accompanied by a vast baggage train that included some 15,000 wagons and carts transporting food, the wounded, and refugees. Civilians who had thrown in their lot with the French and feared repercussions followed as well. The chapter recounts Napoleon’s dispatch of Colonel Pierre Augustin Berthemy to Kutuzov, ostensibly to complain about the Russian violation of the established rules of war. In reality, Berthemy was to determine whether the Russian commander was aware of the ongoing French preparations for the departure from Moscow.
After the War
Authors: Doniger Wendy
Published: August 2022

This new translation of the end of the great Sanskrit epic depicts the final years of the surviving heroes, their debates about the justice of war and the meaning of life, their ultimate deaths, and their experiences of heaven and hell. The men now contemplate the ways in which they had violated the warrior code, and the women lament the conditions under which they had conceived their sons, often against their will, and the tragic and often unjust deaths of those sons. Finally, in heaven, enemies are reconciled, wounds healed, and deaths undone, as the heroes regain the divine natures that had been merely suspended during their sojourn on earth. The author, a distinguished translator of Sanskrit texts, has put the text into clear, flowing, contemporary prose, with a comprehensive but unintrusive critical apparatus. This book will delight general readers and enlighten students of Indian civilization and of great world literature.
Introduction
Authors: Doniger Wendy
Published: August 2022

The ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata, some 75,000 Sanskrit verses, composed in India between 300 BCE and 300 CE, tells of a great fratricidal war. The final books describe the ethical and philosophical quandary of the survivors, the victors, the five Pandava brothers, led by King Yudhishthira. We learn of the mourning of their women, their magical visions of their beloved dead, and their attempts to find peace in a life of renunciation in ashrams in the forest. Beset by curses from men and women they wronged in the past, some of them destroy one another in a drunken brawl, see their women carried off by bandits, or die in forest fires. Finally, they experience hell and heaven, where they shed the vengeful pride that has kept them from becoming reconciled with their enemies, and they reunite with the gods who had become incarnate in them at the start. The Introduction summarizes the earlier events that form the background to these final books, discusses some of the meanings of the end of the story, and explains the principles that have guided this translation.
Book Sixteen, Mausala Parvan, The Book of the Battle of the Clubs
Authors: Doniger Wendy
Published: August 2022

Young men of Krishna’s clan play a trick on powerful sages, who curse one of them to bring forth a monstrous club that will eventually destroy their people, in the city of Dvaraka. The king orders the club reduced to powder, and the powder is thrown into the ocean. But evil omens immediately appear, and the people seek help from Krishna. Krishna, realizing that the moment has arrived for the fulfilment of Gandhari’s curse, made thirty-six years ago, sends all the people of his clan on a pilgrimage. There the men get drunk and kill one another with blades of grass that turn into lethal clubs in their hands. Krishna watches and then joins in the killing. Later, Krishna dies when a hunter mistakes him for a deer and shoots him in the foot, his one vulnerable spot. Arjuna leads the women, now bereft of their husbands and protectors, out of the city, and the ocean floods Dvaraka. Bandits overpower Arjuna and abduct the women he has failed to protect. He seeks solace with Vyasa and Yudhishthira.
Book Seventeen, Mahaprasthanika Parvan, The Book of the Great Departure
Authors: Doniger Wendy
Published: August 2022

The Pandavas install two of the surviving young princes as kings and depart, to die by walking to heaven. As they circumnavigate the earth and climb the mountain at the center of the earth, one by one Draupadi and four of her five husbands—Sahadeva, Nakua, Arjuna, and Bhima—fall and die because of minor faults that they have committed: partiality, intellectual arrogance, vanity, empty boasting, and gluttony. Yudhishthira continues alone to heaven, followed by a dog. Indra, king of the gods, invites Yudhishthira into heaven, on the condition that he abandon the dog. Yudhishthira refuses—and the dog reveals himself to be Dharma incarnate, Yudhishthira’s father. Yudhishthira enters heaven.
Sea and Land
Authors: Morgan Philip J. , McNeill John R. , Mulcahy Matthew , Schwartz Stuart B.
Published: August 2022

Sea and Land provides an in-depth environmental history of the Caribbean to ca. 1850, comprising a close examination of some of the central forces and characteristics that defined the region, with a coda that takes the story into the modern era. It explores the mixing, movement, and displacement of peoples and the parallel ecological mixing of animals, plants, microbes from Africa, Europe, elsewhere in the Americas, and indeed Asia. It examines first the arrival of Native American to the region and the environmental transformations that followed. It then turns to the even more dramatic changes that accompanied the arrival of Europeans and Africans in the fifteenth century. Throughout it argues that the constant arrival, dispersal, and mingling of new plants and animals gave rise to a creole ecology. Particular attention is given to the emergence of black slavery, sugarcane, and the plantation system, an unholy trinity that thoroughly transformed the region’s demographic and physical landscapes and made the Caribbean a vital site in the creation of the modern western world. This volume integrates research concerning natural resources, conservation, epidemiology, and climate in a new general environmental history of the region. It makes environmental perspectives more accessible and more indispensable, to scholars and students alike, to foster both a fuller appreciation of the extent to which environmental factors shaped historical developments in the Caribbean and the extent to which human actions have transformed the biophysical environment of the region over time.
Introduction
Authors: Morgan Philip D.
Published: August 2022

The introduction features German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), who visited the circum-Caribbean region for a number of years at the turn of the nineteenth century and wrote about it for the rest of his life. His observations and wide-ranging interests—especially his recognition of the binaries of land and sea, humans and animals, bewitching beauty and nightmarish horrors, exuberance and menace, utopian visions and dystopian realities, health and sickness—prefigure many of the themes of this book. His view of nature, confirmed and elaborated by his tropical sojourn, was that it was a web, in which all elements were connected. It was a living whole, a unified ecosystem, always prone to the dangers of environmental destruction, deforestation, and climatic shocks. The introduction then raises and provisionally answers the four key questions that animate this book: why focus on this part of the world, specifically? Who are the pioneers of Caribbean environmental history? How is the region defined geographically? Finally, what are the important chronological markers? The introduction emphasizes the mixing, movement, and displacement of peoples that led to intense sociocultural interaction and hybridity. The term for this moving and mixing is creole, which designates any person or thing born or created in the Caribbean, with an ancestry external to the region. The rest of the book elaborates on the emergence of this creole ecology resulting from the constant arrival, dispersal, and mingling of peoples, plants, pathogens, and products.
Natural Disasters in the Caribbean to 1850
Authors: Schwartz Stuart B. , Mulcahy Matthew
Published: August 2022

This chapter examines various natural disasters—specifically hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, drought, flooding, and insect infestations—in the Caribbean between roughly 1500 and 1850. In doing so, it argues shifting social, political, and economic conditions across the various islands and across time shaped the impact of these events, paying particular attention to the development of the plantation complex—the combination of large-scale landholdings, a dominant export crop, and the use of enslaved labor—during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We suggest the cumulative threat and impact of these hazards shaped everyday life in the region and, over time, gave rise to distinct social and cultural forms. Although several broadly similar understandings of, and adaptations to, various disasters emerged in the region, some significant differences existed between different European colonies, between religious groups, between Europeans and Africans, and between island geographies and their respective vulnerability to these hazards.
The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution
Authors: Fisher Samuel K.
Published: August 2022

The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution offers a new way of understanding the American Revolution and the relationship between diversity and revolution in the British empire. Drawing on little-used sources in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the book shows how people experiencing colonization in the eighteenth-century British empire—Irish-speaking Catholics, Scottish Highlanders, and Indigenous nations of North America—fought back by building relationships with the king and imperial officials. In the process, they created a more inclusive empire and triggered conflict between the imperial state and formerly privileged provincial Britons: Irish Protestants, Scottish Whigs, and American colonists. The American Revolution was only one aspect of this larger conflict between inclusive empire and the exclusionary patriots within the British empire. By putting typically excluded Gaelic and Indian voices at the center of the story and taking a comparative approach that includes Scotland and Ireland as well as North America, the book offers a new account of how empires functioned in the eighteenth century, how they fell apart, and how questions of diversity explain both. In the process it uncovers the British, imperial origins of Americans’ racial dilemmas, showing how these were not new or uniquely American but instead the awkward legacies of a more complex imperial history.
The French Connection
Authors: Fisher Samuel K.
Published: August 2022

Faced with the exclusionary constitution created in the wake of the revolution, many Gaelic and Indian people turned to the French to help them redress their grievances. They aimed not to sever their relationships with England but to readjust them. Irish and Scottish Gaels did so by taking up the Jacobite cause, supporting the attempts of James II and his descendants to recapture their thrones with French help. Indigenous communities in America strengthened their own French connections, shunning exclusive alliances with the British colonies in favor of a multilateral diplomacy in which they could play competing empires against each other. These French connections were designed to resist the exclusionary constitution, enabling Gaelic and Indian people to imagine different ways of relating to Britain and its empire.
Imperial Go-Betweens
Authors: Fisher Samuel K.
Published: August 2022

Not all Gaelic and Indian people agreed that French connections offered the best way to cope with the exclusionary constitution. Some imperial go-betweens pursued a more accommodating course, forming a counter-balance to French influence within their own communities as well as to the most exclusionary tendencies of the British. Often enough, these imperial go-betweens also met suspicion from British officials, who prized the exclusionary constitution above the possible support of Gaels and Indians. While they endured suspicion both from excluded communities and from the government in the first half of the eighteenth century, these imperial go-betweens would ultimately play a crucial role in shaping Britain’s empire in the second half. Crucially, these voices of cooperation were often saying the same things their Francophile fellows were about the evils of the exclusionary constitution. They would play a key role in its downfall.
Reform
Authors: Fisher Samuel K.
Published: August 2022

The Atlantic ’45 forced imperial officials to question the exclusionary constitution as a strategy for managing imperial diversity. In its wake, provincial Britons, imperial officials, and imperial go-betweens engaged in an empire-wide debate about whether it should be replaced and what would replace it. Crucially, imperial officials came to see provincial Britons as at least partly to blame for the empire’s inability to keep Gaelic and Indian people within the fold. Imperial go-betweens also exerted their influence on the process, pushing officials toward inclusive empire as the way forward and arguing for conciliation rather than a renewed crackdown as the best way for the empire to manage diversity.
King George Will Have Us All
Authors: Fisher Samuel K.
Published: August 2022

This chapter discusses Gaelic and Indian contributions to the shaping of Britain’s empire following the Seven Years’ War. As imperial leaders debated the empire’s future, weighing the merits of various approaches to managing diversity, Gaelic and Indian people intervened in powerful ways that helped inclusive empire carry the day. Scottish Highlanders defended Highland soldiers, Irish Catholics formed agrarian secret societies, and Indigenous nations went to war to resist exclusionary empire. Gaelic and Indian communities divided among themselves about whether to trust the empire, or on what terms they could do so. By resisting exclusionary arrangements, they pushed the empire in inclusive directions, but not without cost to themselves and not without underlining, once again, that this was an alliance of “interest,” not friendship.
Movements After Revolution
Authors: Rodríguez Miles V.
Published: August 2022

Movements After Revolution is a history of how and why people’s movements organized and struggled in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20. Focusing on the first decade after the Revolution in 1920-30, it explains the rise of an unprecedented variety of organizations among industrial workers and rural communities, and how they fought for a vast array of demands and diverse forms of justice. The most independent and strategic parts of the labor movement and the agrarian movement grew in relation to Communist organizers who sought to create a national revolutionary alliance against capitalism and the state, as part of an international revolutionary movement for socialism. In response to national crises and changes in global revolutionary strategy, these parts of the labor movement and the agrarian movement formed unique allied organizations and prepared for ultimately ruinous struggles with companies, landlords, and the state. By examining the roles of activists, their antagonists, divisive contexts, and complex consequences, this work offers original insights into the influences and limits of the Revolution on people’s movements in Mexico.
Getting Started
Authors: Mele Alfred R.
Published: August 2022

This introductory chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book by clarifying some of the key concepts, discussing why people care about free will, providing a preliminary sketch of the author’s own view of free will, and articulating the primary aim of the book. Concepts clarified include decision-making, the ability to do otherwise than one did, moral responsibility, and free will itself. Two different approaches to conceptualizing free will are explained. They are dubbed straight and mixed and clarified further in subsequent chapters. It is suggested that one important source of our caring about free will is the value we place on it being up to us—at least sometimes—what we do. What is valued is a certain kind of control over what we do. The book’s primary aim is identified as helping readers to think through the questions raised about free will for themselves.
A Whirlwind Tour
Authors: Mele Alfred R.
Published: August 2022

This chapter provides an overview of a possible condition that the author calls deep openness. What is needed for people to have deep openness when they make a decision is that more than one option is open to them at the time, given everything as it actually is at the time—their mood, all their thoughts and feelings, their brains, and their environment, along with the entire universe and its entire history. It is explained that this condition, which is claimed by some philosophers to be necessary for deciding freely, depends on the falsity of determinism. A toy model of deep openness is created and used as a springboard for exploring whether deep openness contributes to free will or instead precludes it because of the luck deep openness brings with it. A parallel issue is raised about moral responsibility.
Mixing It Up
Authors: Mele Alfred R.
Published: August 2022

This chapter has three main goals. The first is to develop a problem that considerations of luck pose for believers in free will who maintain that people decide freely only if their decision is undetermined at the moment they make it. The second goal is to sketch a potential solution to this problem. The potential solution acknowledges the existence of luck in the imagined circumstances and offers an explanation of why the luck involved leaves room for free decision-making. The third goal is to describe a view of how a decision’s being made in the imagined circumstances may make a positive contribution to free will. Related issues discussed include the bearing of luck of the sort at issue on moral responsibility, how neonates might develop into free and morally responsible agents, and the bearing of Frankfurt-style stories on the chapter’s main topics.
Wrapping Things up
Authors: Mele Alfred R.
Published: August 2022

This concluding chapter is partly a review of some landmarks from earlier chapters and partly a presentation of the author’s own position on free will. Landmarks include leading conceptions of free will and arguments—both philosophical and neuroscience-based—for skepticism about free will. The author’s own position combines a reflective agnosticism about compatibilism versus incompatibilism with the belief that it is more credible that free will exists than that it does not. The chapter explains why this combination is possible and what is attractive about it, both theoretically and practically. The book’s aim has been to take readers on a philosophical journey that gives them a good feel for the interesting issues, options, and arguments that need to be dealt with in any respectable attempt to arrive at a position on free will, thereby helping them to think things through for themselves.
Unhappy China
Authors: Blanchette Jude
Published: August 2022

This chapter details how Bo Xilai became the Party secretary of Chongqing and how he set about transforming the city into a staging ground for his political assault on Beijing. Having found local popularity and national acclaim for his Chongqing Model, Bo next turned to a widespread and ruthless anticrime campaign named “strike black,” a reference to the organized crime, known in Chinese as the “black society.” Bo’s unabashed use of state violence in the “strike black” campaign evoked comparisons to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution by many liberals. Online, Bo’s legions of neo-Maoist supporters issued striking declarations of solidarity. By the summer of 2011, Utopia cofounder Yang Fan was having second thoughts about the organization he had helped launch and expand for nearly a decade. He was also rethinking his support for Bo Xilai and the Chongqing Model. The chapter then looks at how Bo was stripped of his position as Chongqing Party head and was expelled from the CCP in 2012; he was charged with corruption, abuse of power, and bribery.
Forgetting History Is a Betrayal
Authors: Blanchette Jude
Published: August 2022

This chapter addresses how China was facing a crisis of ideology, of politics, of organization, of discipline, and of confidence when Xi Jinping assumed office in November 2012. Xi’s drive to reform the Chinese political system spared few, least of all the Communist Party itself. The goal of these reforms was to arrest and reverse the CCP’s internal decay by restoring rigid political and organizational discipline in order that the Party lead the Chinese people to the “national rejuvenation” that Xi first outlined in November 2012. Far from being a relic of the 20th century, in Xi’s mind the Party was bold, capable, disciplined, and absolutely vital to China’s continuing rise. Ultimately, Xi Jinping has inherited the world his predecessors’ decisions shaped, and at the center of that world remains Mao Zedong.
Red Nation
Authors: Blanchette Jude
Published: August 2022

The epilogue studies whether neo-Maoists still matter. As an emergent, independent political force that can fundamentally reshape Chinese politics, the answer is no. Xi Jinping is not worried about neo-Maoists, and he does not need to worry about being outflanked to the left, as, perhaps, his predecessors once did. The Communist Party holds a firm grip on both the digital and physical realm, which means neo-Maoists have few avenues for dissent. And, broadly speaking, they are not inclined to press the challenge so long as Xi proclaims the glory of the CCP, shows sympathy for Mao Zedong, and asserts China’s interests on the global stage. He may not be as radical as some neo-Maoists would like, but when compared to the “compradors” they believed ran Party for much of the Reform and Opening period, he is a big improvement. The critical question is this: how much longer will this iteration of the CCP leadership be in power?
The Expressive Value of Answering Survey Questions
Authors: Graham Matthew H. , Huber Gregory A.
Published: August 2022

This chapter introduces a new method for understanding the expressive value of answering survey questions. Drawing on data from a survey-embedded experiment that allowed participants to choose to answer additional questions, the authors generate several novel findings. Most survey respondents derive expressive benefits from answering survey questions; expressive benefits are greatest for questions about matters that are easily connected to partisan politics; and expressive responding appears to be driven more by internal factors than by a desire to be “heard” by others. The anticipation of partisan political content in a survey introduces a sorting effect: Respondents who choose to answer questions about politicized rumors are also more partisan in their responses than those who choose not to answer such questions. The results have implications for research designs that aim to alter the expressive context of surveys, such as paying for correct answers, list experiments, recruiting materials that advertise a survey’s content, and designs that use the threat of a longer survey to vary the cost of selecting different response options.
Conspiracy Theories and Political Identities
Authors: Enders Adam , Uscinski Joseph
Published: August 2022

This chapter draws on a recent survey of Americans to gauge the popularity of prominent conspiracy theories and understand their causes. The authors establish two main causes underlying belief in conspiracy theories: for many, partisan bias encourages belief in conspiracy theories aligned with their political views; for some, a psychological attraction to conspiracy beliefs motivates their adoption regardless of political content. Conspiracy theories and beliefs are ever present, but they are most likely to proliferate during polarized periods such as the present, when partisan elites are increasingly willing to push conspiracy theories for political gain.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter
Authors: Godbold, Jr. E. Stanly
Published: August 2022

This book is a dual biography of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, the powerful First Couple who attempted to use their presidency and their long post-presidency to bring peace, human rights, and justice to all peoples of the world. It describes in intimate detail their tumultuous involvement in national and international politics as well as their personal lives. From intensive research in presidential archives, declassified documents, personal papers and interviews, the Carters emerge as among the greatest peacemakers of their century. The book includes new revelations about the Camp David Accords, the normalization of relations with China, the infamous “October Surprise,” and other events of their presidency. Famous for their work with Habitat for Humanity, they have devoted most of their time, post-presidency, to the Carter Center, an institution they founded to promote universal good health, democracy, and peace. When Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, he immediately declared that the prize belonged equally to Rosalynn and the Carter Center. Poet, writer, Sunday School teacher, Jimmy Carter has remained active until well into his nineties.
Candidate from the South, 1975
Authors: Godbold Jr. E. Stanly
Published: August 2022

This chapter shows how Carter set out to become the first president from the Deep South to be elected in more than a century. It shows how he and his wife Rosalynn, working as a political team, used their Georgia background, experience in the Navy, and success governing Georgia to become advocates of human rights and racial equality. The chapter also discusses Carter’s father Earl, his strict parenting and also his charitable work, and the fact that he appeared to be a more important molding parent than Jimmy’s famous mother Lillian. Finally, the chapter shows how Jimmy and Rosalynn put together a campaign team headed by Hamilton Jordan and set about proving that a Southerner could win the presidency.
“It’s Going to Happen”
Authors: Godbold Jr. E. Stanly
Published: August 2022

This chapter reviews the results of the early state primaries and the Carters response to them. It shows the confidence of Rosalynn Carter, who after Carter had entered all except one of the Democratic primaries and was fighting hard to win them, told a reporter that “It’s going to happen.” An astute politician who had worked diligently with Jimmy, his Aunt Sissy Dolvin, and other family members, she believed that Carter would win the Democratic nomination. Despite public opposition from Lester Maddox, and with the help of their neighbors calling themselves “the Peanut Brigade,” the Carters won Iowa, New Hampshire, and enough other states to expect it to happen.
A Different Presidency
Authors: Godbold Jr. E. Stanly
Published: August 2022

This chapter opens by describing how, after being sworn in as the thirty-ninth president of the United States on January 20, 1977, Jimmy Carter, his wife Rosalynn, and their children, walked along Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. That unprecedented act indicated that Carter intended to be accessible to the people and establish an administration atypical of his predecessors. The chapter goes on to show how Carter brought an African-American woman, Mary Fitzpatrick, to the White House to be his daughter Amy’s nanny, and he and Rosalynn enrolled Amy in a public school. Rosalynn established the Office of First Lady and assumed an active role in the administration. Carter chose cabinet members and other appointees on the basis of merit, and he opened the recreational facilities at the White House to staff members and their families. He went to work his first day in office.
Rosalynn Steps Out
Authors: Godbold Jr. E. Stanly
Published: August 2022

This chapter shows how, from the moment of her husband’s inauguration, Rosalynn made clear that she would be a working First Lady. She promoted mental health care and care for the elderly and children, but she also gave political advice and became involved in policy discussions. Carter reiterated that she was his “equal partner,” and he proved it in June 1977 when he named her as ambassador to Latin America. She visited seven countries with the authority of the president himself. She occasionally sat in on cabinet meetings, suggested appointees to government positions, and traveled widely in the United States and abroad supporting the country’s human rights policies. By bringing the wives of heads of state into foreign policy issues, she often succeeded to help the United States win its points. No US First Lady had ever exercised such power and influence over the presidency as she did.