bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Branding the City
Authors: Guvenç Muna
Published: October 2024

This chapter assesses how the mobilization of Kurdish society and the rise of nationalism in Diyarbakır were entangled with commodification and neoliberal modes of urbanism. It studies the sites of everyday consumer culture and urban development to elucidate how they embraced the aspirations for the rise of an autonomous Kurdish nation. While the previous chapter focused on the urban poor and rural migrants, this chapter turns to the pro-Kurdish party’s ties to the urban upper middle class and the rich. It demonstrates how neoliberal urban development served the imperative of nationalizing the city, proposing Diyarbakır as the Kurdish capital to be. City expansion, major urban construction projects, and even new sites of consumption intended to serve as tangible proof of the movement’s inexorable journey toward Kurdish autonomy in Turkey.
An Incomplete Break with the Past
Authors: Lim Wah Guan
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses how Stan Lai's works reflect a Taiwan grappling with emerging nativist sentiment and a declining global position due to the rise of China. It points out how Lai, who was born to a diplomatic family in Washington, D.C., was first exposed to Western culture before his extended creative career in the Chinese world. Despite the challenges of his youth and financial struggles during his PhD at UC Berkeley, Lai's bilingual proficiency in Mandarin Chinese and English positioned him as a significant cultural figure in Taiwan. The chapter looks at his plays that evoked memories of Republican China, stirring deep cultural recollections amidst Taiwan's complex socio-political landscape. The strategies in Lai's works not only navigated the Taiwan Strait but also sought to heal internal conflicts.
The Irreplaceable Role of Nature in Scientific Discovery
Authors: Espinoza Robert E. , Espinoza Robert E.
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the important role of nature in scientific discovery. It highlights how early childhood experience cemented the passion of most herpetologists for the organisms they study, referencing the euphoria of discovering something in nature. The diverse pursuits of herpetologists ranged between anatomy, behavior, ecology, biogeography, and systematics. The chapter provides an overview of the study conducted around the locality of the viviparous morph with the herpetologists of the Fundación Miguel Lillo (FML) at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. It explains the best way to learn about the intricate lives of organisms is to study them in nature.
Finding the Frog That Sings Like a Bird
Authors: Rowley Jodi , Rowley Jodi
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses the hunt for the frog that sings like a bird in the vast mountainous forests of Pu Hoat Nature Reserve in northwest Nghe An Province, Vietnam. It elaborates on the fieldwork of recording the calling of frogs that allowed researchers to identify each one. One of the frogs was Quang's Tree Frog (Gracixalus quangi) which had a unique call consisting of high-pitched chirps, whistles, and chirps similar to a bird. Thus, the tiny turquoise frog was coined “loài ếch có tiếng kêu nhu tiếng chim hót,” or “the frog that sings like a bird.” The chapter also notes the frog's cluster of eggs resembling pearls perched on the tips of leaves.
My First Summit Camp
Authors: Donnelly Maureen A. , Donnelly Maureen A.
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses a first tepui summit camp experience in Venezuela. It mentions that the camp was held on a narrow ridge across from Pico Tamacuri. The Tapirapecó Expedition to “La Ultima Frontera” (the Last Frontier) was a year-long effort led by the Fundación para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias (FUDECI) to explore a poorly known mountain range in the southern extent of Amazonas territory in Venezuela. The chapter elaborates on how every experience was unique, including the exploration and the unusual non-sandstone element of the Mundo Perdido (Lost World). It also notes the sampling of frogs near the summer camp, referencing the Ceuthomantis cavernibardus.
Frogs in the Clear-Cut
Authors: Earl Julia E. , Earl Julia E.
Published: October 2024

This chapter looks into frogs in the clear-cut. It provides an overview of the life expectancy and survival of juvenile Wood Frogs (Lithobates sylvaticus). Wood Frogs are a species of conservation concern in Missouri since the population was at the very southern edge of the species' geographic range. Logs help the little frogs survive longer as they protect the soil from drying while providing the frogs a protected area to shelter from the heat and predators. The chapter notes how vegetation shaded the ground enough that there was no difference in the temperature or soil moisture between clear-cuts and forest.
Once Upon a Diamondback
Authors: Wüster Wolfgang , Wüster Wolfgang
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake (Crotalus atrox) in Cochise County to elaborate on the fragility of desert life. It highlights the balancing act between life and death in extreme environments. Desert snakes need to balance the need to forage, the need to avoid dehydration, and especially the need to avoid overheating in the daytime. Western Diamondbacks are extremely abundant snakes in many parts of the southwestern United States. The chapter then discusses an observation of a diamond snake having a bulge before elaborating on how a little disturbance made a difference in its survival or its demise.
The Captain and the Frog
Authors: Poo Sinlan , Poo Sinlan
Published: October 2024

This chapter looks into a first field research experience in herpetology, which involves the Red-Eyed Treefrog (Agalychnis callidryas). The research primarily focuses on predator simulations to determine the trigger of the escape response of hatchlings from the egg capsules. The chapter then details the experience of talking with The Captain, an old Taiwanese cargo ship captain imprisoned in Panama, about frogs since he was not able to go outside the prison walls. The researcher continued communication with The Captain while highlighting the joys of sharing their research about frogs. The chapter mentions the connection through the small creatures, offering a mental escape and connection between both parties.
Terror, Courage, and the Little Red Snake
Authors: Doan Tiffany M. , Doan Tiffany M.
Published: October 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the fieldwork and studies conducted at Sachavacayoc Centre, in the Tambopata Province of southeastern Peru. It looks into an encounter with Drepanoides anomalus, a tiny red snake more commonly known as the Amazon Egg-Eater Snake or the Black-Collared Snake. The snake was studied and petted by students who gathered enough courage to touch it, which then became a precious memory for a student who initially had a phobia. The chapter explains how the trips to the Amazon were important adventures in the students' lives. It highlights the interrelation between people's trepidations and fascination with snakes.
Preferred Freedoms
Authors: Kasper Eric T. , Kozma Troy A.
Published: October 2024

This chapter shows how, as the first Red Scare ended, Holmes's and Brandeis's free expression jurisprudence gained traction on the Supreme Court. Joined by another admirer of John Stuart Mill, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the Supreme Court would espouse a type of Millian approach to many First Amendment questions in the 1930s and 1940s. This began with Stromberg v. California (1931), which struck down a conviction for displaying a communist flag. Other cases during this era overturned prior restraints on the press, anti-syndicalism laws, convictions for handbill distribution and picketing, and the expulsion of public school students for refusing to salute the US flag. Thomas v. Collins (1945) would emphasize “the preferred place given in our scheme to the great, the indispensable, democratic freedoms secured by the First Amendment.” With the exception of a few cases in the early days of World War II, the 1930s and 1940s were two decades of almost unimpeded expansion of free expression rights. In the early post-World War II period, it seemed as though a Millian understanding of this right was becoming accepted by the Supreme Court, but a close observation of the justices' divisions by 1949 showed that a move away from Mill was on the horizon.
Epilogue
Authors: Reich Anna
Published: October 2024

This epilogue discusses how, since gaining independence, Lithuania has viewed its citizens who were conscripted into the Soviet army and deployed to Afghanistan as victims of the Soviet regime. In addition to not acknowledging their status as veterans, the label of “victim” carries weight due to its broader implications. While a notable fraction of the interviewees in this book mentioned that Afghan War veterans' associations often gain political importance in the months leading up to an election, the social recognition the veterans have so persistently sought continues to remain out of reach. This recognition would bring the potential for improved social programs and access to greater benefits and support. The epilogue considers how the overwhelming majority of the Lithuanian veterans who commented on the Ukrainian crisis, during interviews conducted between 2014 and 2016, vocalized solidarity with Ukraine, some even going so far as to express negative sentiments about Russia and its social and political climate. In 2022, when Russian military forces staged a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Vilnius Association of Afghan War Veterans clearly expressed their condemnation of Russia's actions.
Milwaukee: Walker’s Point, Burnham Park, Lincoln Village, Forest Home Hills, and Lyons Park
Authors: Wiggers Raymond
Published: October 2024

This chapter scruitinizes Milwaukee's architectural tapestry through iconic landmarks, such as the Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church that stands as a testament to early German–American craftsmanship with its Cream City Brick façade. The John Burnham Block at 907–911 W. National Avenue echoes the city's industrial past with its enduring Cream City Brick and cast iron detailing. It covers St. Joseph's Convent Chapel at 1501 S. Layton Boulevard, designed by Brust & Philipp in 1917, that blends Salem Limestone and Flemish Bond Brick. The chapter highlights the St. Josaphat Basilica at 2333 S. 6th Street, erected in 1901 using Buena Vista Siltstone and “Maine Granite,” considered as a towering symbol of Polish immigrant community resilience and architectural grandeur. St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Cathedral at 3201 S. 51st Street showcases Fond du Lac Dolostone and Salem Limestone, highlighting Milwaukee's enduring use of regional stone in religious edifices.
From Liminality to Genocidal Violence
Authors: Tezcür Günes Murat
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the devastating genocidal campaign of the Islamic State (IS) against the Yezidis, beginning with the horrific coordinated bombings in Til Ezer and Siba Sheikh Khidir, Iraq on August 14, 2007. These attacks, targeting impoverished Yezidi towns, killed hundreds and marked a tragic escalation in violence against this minority group. The chapter recounts the IS's ruthless 2014 campaign in Sinjar that further decimated the Yezidis, highlighting the IS's extreme religious violence and its local support base among Sunni Arabs and Turkomans. The chapter argues that the IS's violence stemmed from deep-seated religious stigmatization and political resentments that were exacerbated by post-2003 power shifts. It cites survivor accounts and diverse sources offering critical insights into the motives and dynamics of the IS' atrocities, underscoring the complex interplay of local dynamics and IS ideology.
From Massacres to Denied Victimhood
Authors: Tezcür Günes Murat
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the historical context and dynamics of religious stigmatization, focusing on events involving Alevis in Turkey. It begins with the 1996 Susurluk traffic accident, which exposed a corrupt network involving politicians, security forces, and mafia during a counterinsurgency campaign against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The government's dismissive response to civil society protests using the derogatory “snuffing out candles” smear reflects deep-rooted historical stigmatization of Alevis, which dates back to Ottoman times. The chapter argues that the stigmatization of Alevis was pivotal in later violent episodes, where ordinary people participated in mass violence against Alevis. It critiques scholarly and public discourse for hesitancy in attributing ordinary Sunni Muslims' roles in the massacres and highlights the enduring appeal and centrality of religious mobilization in fomenting communal violence.
Practicing
Authors: Blenkinsop Sean , Kuchta Estella
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the unique learning environment of the Maple Ridge School, where students immerse themselves in the natural world by learning amidst towering trees, babbling rivers, and diverse flora and fauna. Despite lacking traditional classrooms, the school offers rich educational experiences and challenges both students and teachers to adapt to a different way of learning and teaching. The chapter emphasizes the importance of pedagogy and highlights the need for teaching practices that align with the principles of ecologizing education, such as relationality, non-anthropocentrism, and cooperation. The chapter warns against the pitfalls of teaching content without aligning it with pedagogical practices, using examples like teaching participatory democracy in a top-down manner. It calls for a more thoughtful and intentional approach to teaching, one that integrates the natural world into the educational process and prepares students to be active.
Listening to the Philosophers
Authors: Cribiore Raffaella
Published: October 2024

This book offers the first comprehensive look into how philosophy was taught in antiquity through a stimulating study of lectures by ancient philosophers that were recorded by their students. The book shows how the study of notes—whether Philodemus of Gadara's notes of Zeno's lectures in the first century BCE, or Arrian recording the Discourses of Epictetus in the second century CE, or the students of Didymus the Blind in the fourth century and Olympiodorus in the sixth century—can enable us to understand the methods and practices of what was an orally conducted education. By considering the pedagogical and mnemonic role of note-taking in ancient education, the book demonstrates how in antiquity the written and the spoken worlds were intimately intertwined.
Listening to Women’s Voices
Authors: Allum Felia
Published: October 2024

The chapter provides an overview of the role of women in the Camorra. The Piazza Carolina gender division corresponds to the gender inequalities that exist in Neapolitan civil society. However, regardless of the gendered spaces, women in mafias and criminal organizations rarely acknowledge the basic gender inequalities or examine the power relations that exist for women in the public and private spheres. The chapter discusses the methodology process of researching organized crime and the roles of women through a specific mixed methods-qualitative approach. It cites the interplay of facts that explain Camorra women as multidimensional actors with various layers of complicity.
Hard-Working Foot Soldiers
Authors: Allum Felia
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses the involvement and agency of women foot soldiers. It highlights that foot soldiers are the foundation of all mafias, so without them, organizations would not survive. Camorra women foot soldiers who occupy space both in the public sphere and in the private sphere are very resourceful with their initiative and agency. Generally, traditional foot soldiers have more criminal responsibility and freedom of action, while specialized foot soldiers often only deal in one sector like drugs, extortion, or loan sharking. The chapter explains that women were not separate from the Camorra's control of the illegal economy but were its army of workers in the 1970s as they are still today.
Challenging Monetary Orthodoxy in a New Context
Authors: Moschella Manuela
Published: October 2024

This chapter evaluates the changes that central banks were confronted with in the crisis period that spanned from 2008 to 2020 and highlights the challenges to orthodox monetary policy. It begins by looking at three major policy problems that central banks had to grapple with: the collapse of the financial system, secular stagnation, and a global pandemic that disrupted both domestic demand and global supply chains. The chapter considers the political changes that materialized in the context in which central banks operate. In particular, it traces the rise of the politicization of central banks—that is, the increasing visibility of the distributive effects of monetary policy and the attendant public contestation of central banks and their decisions. In examining how monetary authorities coped with these new economic and political challenges, the chapter brings to the surface the common trends in the institutional trajectory of central banks in high-income countries.
Transforming Fire Dance Surfaces
Authors: Pollock Tiffany Rae
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the village-to-beach narrative common among Thai fire dancers, exemplified by Som, a dancer from Uttaradit. The chapter recounts Som’s transformation from a poor village boy, marked by his worn school uniform and coconut-picking days, to a highly paid performer in Thailand’s tourism industry. Som’s journey, marked by unanticipated meetings and opportunities, reflects the magical thrust that often propels fire dancers into new economic and social realities. The chapter investigates the dramatic changes in the fire dancers’ lives and identities that are influenced by the intersection of local, global, and regional politics within tourist sites. In Thailand’s Theravada Buddhist context, identity remains fluid and relational, shaped by the dynamic interplay of karma, anicca, and the pressures of social, political, and economic forces that both enable and constrain their creative self-reinvention.
Striving on Koh Phi Phi
Authors: Pollock Tiffany Rae
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on the small tourist island of Koh Phi Phi and the quiet destruction of ecosystems, economies, and livelihoods following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Centering on the insights and affective contestations of Nam, a fire dancer, The chapter highlights how he lives hopefully amid the violence of tourism and neoliberal capitalist expansion. Nam striving toward his goal illustrates an affective politics connecting him to the “secret histories” of those who strive alongside him. The chapter considers Nam’s rustic shop in the Gypsy Village, filled with leather goods, artisan jewelry, and North American Indigenous dreamcatchers, as a haven from the bustling tourist lanes. Amidst the backdrop of Southern Thai rasta reggae, Nam and his friends engage in daily routines of crafting, sharing meals, and relaxing, which embody slower pace that contrasts sharply with the island’s intense tourist-driven rhythms.
Friday Ethnography and the City
Authors: Gardner Andrew M.
Published: October 2024

This chapter begins by discussing ethnography, which is best defined as a toolkit containing many different research tools. What binds them together under the moniker of ethnography is not the component tools, but instead the overarching aspirations of ethnography's practitioners—to holistically understand, as best possible, the experiences, perspectives, and understandings shared by a group of people culturally unfamiliar to the ethnographer. The anthropologist Caroline Osella coined the term “Friday ethnography” to describe a characteristic of the ethnographic work with labor migrants in contemporary Arabia. Most labor migrants on the Arabian Peninsula are busy with work six days a week. “Friday ethnography” aptly describes those anthropological attempts at cultural immersion that by necessity are largely consigned to a single day each week. The chapter explains the methodological approach called urban drifting. Like ethnography, the method of urban drifting is experiential by design; it is exploratory in nature, as practitioners seek out the unexpected, the hidden, and the unforeseen in the urban landscape; and like ethnography, in this methodological approach the practitioner herself serves as the research instrument. The chapter also considers the use of photography in anthropology.
Ceaseless Growth and the Urban Trophy Case
Authors: Gardner Andrew M.
Published: October 2024

This chapter assesses why the city of Doha continues to grow. It begins by considering Arabian modernity, looking at a set of foundational themes that have long percolated through scholarship concerned with the Arabian Peninsula and the peoples who reside there. These foundational themes include the historical transition away from “shaikhly authority,” as well as the conceptual gravity of the rentier state. The chapter then explains how the social and political hierarchies characteristic of contemporary Qatar have grown in dialectic with the economy of urban growth and development that solidified in the late twentieth century. Moreover, it suggest that Doha's ongoing urban development—or the process of constructing the urban future envisioned by Qatar's leaders—has emerged as the keystone in social, political, and economic arrangements on the peninsula. Finally, the chapter discusses the global symbolic economy and the prevalence of trophy architecture and mega-events in Qatar.
The Mandylion’s Marital and Martial Message Machines
Authors: Peers Glenn
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the extensive traditions and complex meanings of the Mandylion, the originary self-portrait of Jesus Christ, highlighting its role as a medium of power in Byzantine media. The chapter discusses how the Mandylion conferred authority to its imperial clients, such as King Abgar of Edessa and Emperor Constantine VII, and its representation in a tenth-century icon illustrates the merging of rulers' identities. The Mandylion, compared to a defensive weapon, made its custodians feel invulnerable, like a battle mask, and demanded union, mirroring Jesus's gaze into human creation. The chapter highlights that the Mandylion's entry represents a union of king/emperor and Mandylion/representation, linking wedding, Annunciation, and the Trinity. This scene reveals the layers of media's role in shaping power, war, and divine–human reflection, aligning with Friedrich Kittler's media theory that media determine our situation.
Mingling Musical Subjects
Authors: Peers Glenn
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines music and sound as key means for connecting humans with their environments by citing a fifth-century Antioch festival described by Isaac, a prolific churchman. Isaac emphasized the transformative power of music, which blurred the lines between human and instrument, suggesting that music and sound could form human subjects. The chapter discusses how Isaac's observations highlight the significant role of sound in shaping human experiences and identities within a predominantly Hellenic culture, despite being an outlier for his focus on musical media and his Syriac Miaphysite identity. The chapter underscores the materiality and transformative potential of sound in the Byzantine world. Isaac's reflections serve as a reminder of the deep historical roots of media theory, describing how ancient insights can inform contemporary understandings of media's impact on human perception and identity.
Living Historical Practice
Authors: Weiner Daniela R. P.
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores how, between the late 1960s and the 1980s, Italy, East Germany, and West Germany increasingly embraced a more active textbook model. There was a push for students to connect emotionally to the history narrative being presented. This was accomplished through memory trips, educational films, and essay contests. Through both the textbooks and other mediums of history instruction, teachers and governmental officials attempted to have students increasingly engage with complex historical processes. This trend was further catalyzed by the Italian and West German broadcast of the Holocaust miniseries in 1979. Influenced by the broadcast of the miniseries and encouraged by the highest levels of West German government, local students began to conduct their own research into the history of ordinary life in Nazi Germany. Living historical practice became the gold standard of history education about the Nazi past.
Conclusion
Authors: Taylor Scott K.
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on Thomas De Quincey, author of the first addiction memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which highlighted opium dependency and foreshadowed modern drug epidemics. It narrates the history of opium, which was known as a painkiller and sleep aid since ancient times. In the nineteenth century, figures like De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge marked the shift of opium from a medicine to a recreational drug. Opium, like other intoxicants, altered social relations, raised concerns about its physical and mental effects, and, due to its Asian origins, sparked fears of racial degeneration in Europe. The chapter discusses the dependence of the East India Company on the sale of opium and the evolving understanding of addiction that positioned opium as a critical point in the history of drugs, summarizing three centuries of trends and shaping modern perceptions of drug and alcohol use.
Working to Just Live
Authors: Strauss Claudia
Published: October 2024

This chapter analyzes the varying meanings of working to live and the implications of unemployment in contemporary US society amid financial hardship. It explores how individuals sustain themselves outside of market economies, such as through family farms or reciprocal assistance, and highlights differing societal norms regarding who should earn an income. It also discusses the challenges faced by the unemployed, especially during deep recessions, where many must rely on family and state assistance. The chapter examines the psychological and social effects of reliance, the stigma associated with receiving aid, and the evolving notion of self-sufficiency. Through the experiences of participants like Ann Lopez, who struggled with the shame of applying for food stamps despite her financial need, the chapter illustrates the complex interplay between economic necessity, personal values, and societal expectations.
Revisiting Stalinist Social Mobility
Authors: Fitzpatrick Sheila
Published: October 2024

This chapter evaluates the author's motivations for taking up social mobility, specifically “proletarian promotion,” as a theme and the “strong criticism” it provoked from both the Marxist left and “the totalitarian-model right.” Worker promotion was part of a broader complex of “promotion” policies through which the new regime strove to increase opportunity for those formerly denied it, including poor peasants, members of “backward” ethnic minorities, and women. The three main channels of promotion were recruitment to party membership, direct promotion on the job, and preferential admission to higher education, for which strict process of class selection to favor workers, poor peasants, and party and Komsomol members were put in place. The chapter then looks at what happened to the Soviet promotees in terms of access to universities and thence professional and managerial jobs in the late Stalin years and under Khrushchev in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It invokes Jerry Hough's observation that the end of large-scale upward mobility in the 1980s doomed the regime launched by Stalin. Thus, the theme of affirmative action Soviet style not only retains its historical cogency but finds broader contemporary applicability.
Lost and Found Revolutions Between Emancipatory Dreams and Mass Terror in the Soviet Union
Authors: Rittersporn Gábor T.
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the contradictory relationship between violence and power, highlighting social antagonisms that were inherently part of the Stalin system. It argues that between the February and October revolutions of 1917, there was an even larger social upheaval, which can be called the “April Revolution,” when peasants seized the land. It was the April Revolution that peasants remembered and later defended against Stalinist collectivization. During the Stalinist forced transformations of the 1930s, villagers and workers resisted the demands of the state, and like the managerial cadres in the state itself, they devised strategies to cope with and resist the demands of that state and its leaders. The chapter explains that paradoxically the state could not function without these dysfunctional schemes and conflicts, and that Stalin's attempts to enforce obedience were therefore bound to fail.
Affective Dispositions, Bolshevism and Stalinism
Authors: Suny Ronald Grigor
Published: October 2024

This chapter addresses the emotional states induced by the October Revolution and what followed. To get beyond the mystery of the choices made by Stalin in domestic and foreign policy in the 1930s, simple economic calculations of programs to advance socialism as he understood it, or personal insecurities and the desire to hold on to power, or deductions from Marxism–Leninism as it was being formulated are inadequate. The rationalities of development and the self-interest in remaining in power were conceived in a cognitive and emotional environment, an affective disposition, which sutured those ends of political power, and building socialism to the choice of means to achieve them. Rather than structures, environmental conditions, or experience determining motivation for action, it is within the affective disposition that particular meanings are created, and it is on the basis of those understandings that people are propelled to act on their feelings and convictions. The chapter then considers how explanations of the use of violence were embedded in and nourished by the affective disposition of the Russian revolutionary movement, its extraordinary ambitions, and the vulnerabilities that Bolsheviks experienced before and after October 1917.
Stalin as Historian and Legalist
Authors: Rieber Alfred J.
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores how Stalin “followed Lenin's path, but not always in his footsteps.” Stalin considerably enlarged the autonomy of the superstructure. Once having taken power, he endowed state institutions, especially the army and security services, with performance and ideological functions equal and occasionally superior to those of the party. Gradually, he assigned them a more prominent place in his pursuit of socialist societies at home and especially abroad than the class struggle, without abandoning the classic foundations of Marx's revolutionary scenario. This modification was necessary if the backward agrarian tsarist empire was to be transformed within his lifetime to become the most advanced form of society and polity as well as the driving force of the international revolutionary movement. This view underlaid his policies of forced industrialization and collectivization of agriculture as the foundations of socialism in one country. The chapter then links Stalin's views on socialism in one country, the autonomy of language, the heroization of the Russian people, a history of great men rather than impersonal economic forces, the end of class conflict, and a strict legalism in foreign policy, all into a consistent theoretical whole.
How I Learned to Read Stalin’s Time in Space
Authors: Schlögel Karl
Published: October 2024

This chapter argues for a focus on space rather than time as a historical narrative. There cannot be a history of the late Russian Empire without rethinking the production of “imperial space” through administration, industrialization, railway construction, telegraph, and other means of communication. There cannot be a history of the Russian Revolution and Civil War excluding the dimension of fragmentation of the empire, disruption and degradation of the infrastructure, and so on. And there is no history of Stalinism beyond the violent transformation of the spaces of the former empire. The chapter then looks at Constructivism, post-Constructivism, Soviet Art Deco, and Stalin's imperial style. It contends that to grasp the coexistence of extremes, we need a stereoscopic-panoramic overview of what happened because events took place not only in time but also in places.
Artivism Avant la lettre
Authors: Murray Yxta Maya
Published: October 2024

This chapter highlights the early artivists. It begins by considering how, in the 1930s and the 1940s, Gladys Bentley and Elizabeth Catlett provided two powerful and incipient examples of intersectional artists who, in the service of their creative labors, engaged direct action to critique existing laws and policies. Episodes of artistic and insurrectionist interplay further laid the ground for the 1960s and 1970s, decades that saw the Civil Rights, antiwar, and feminist political movements traversing the careers of an increasing number of intersectional artists who began to intentionally and visibly use direct action as integral parts of artworks that critiqued the state, its institutions, and its laws. The chapter then looks at the artivism of Yoko Ono, Faith Ringgold, Judy Baca, Marsha P. Johnson, Howardena Pindell, Assotto Saint, and Charlene Teters. Starting in the early 2000s, women of color and queer artists confronted the long-term impacts of chattel slavery, global warming, housing and economic inequality, and queer- and transphobia. The artivist tradition, now firmly grounded in the earthworks laid by women of color and queer of color artists working from the 1930s onward, gained an upswell of energy and participants who would go on to change not only the history of art but also challenge the fundaments of law itself.
Selling the State
Authors: Anderson Scott W.
Published: October 2024

This chapter shows how New York State was given away piecemeal in large tracts for small sums to elites with political connections from the earliest colonial times, and this process continued into the early American period. With a few notable exceptions, such as the New Military Tract and the Cayuga and Onondaga Reservations, all the land alienated from Haudenosaunee possession after the revolution passed into and through the hands of speculators. Although these speculations gave wealth to a few, they bankrupted others. A close examination of the financial history of these speculations reveals a great deal about the challenges and difficulties faced by participants in the land market at the time. It also provides clues to the real value of land. The chapter then describes the business of land dealing in several of the more carefully investigated of these speculations, including the Holland Land Company purchases in Cazenovia and western New York and the Phelps–Gorham and Pulteney purchases to the west of Seneca Lake.
Upholding Orthodoxy in Troubled Times
Authors: Wagner William G.
Published: October 2024

This chapter details how Abbess Mariia led the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross during a challenging period. Less than two years after her installation, Nizhnii Novgorod and the surrounding region erupted into social and political unrest. Attempting to quell this unrest and restore order, in April of 1905, Nicholas II expanded religious toleration for non-Orthodox faiths and in October granted civil and constitutional reforms that legalized a form of modern politics. In this environment of division and anxiety, intensified by accelerating social, economic, and cultural change, the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross reached the apogee of its growth, wealth, and significance as a focal point for Orthodox piety. Although this flourishing represented a continuation of trends that had shaped female monasticism in the diocese throughout the post-emancipation period, it was conditioned by the social, political, and cultural turbulence taking place in the region and the empire more broadly in the decade prior to World War I. Monastic communities appeared to many Orthodox clerics and lay believers to provide both vital bastions for the preservation of the faith and Russian cultural identity and important mediums for the promotion of Orthodox understandings of social and moral order. But while remarkably successful, female monastic communities in the empire generally were perceived by some as too restrictive to meet the needs of a changing and conflicted society, leading to efforts for both monastic reform and an expansion of the role of women within the church.
Conclusion
Authors: Wagner William G.
Published: October 2024

This concluding chapter addresses how the history of the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross and the other convents and women's communities in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese demonstrates how Orthodox women contributed significantly to the renewal, growth, and transformation of both Orthodox monasticism in Imperial Russia and Christian virtuoso religious life in general during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This outcome resulted from the creation by women of new forms of community that reflected the interaction between Orthodox monastic traditions and ideals, the particular character of modernizing change in Imperial Russia, and the shifting impact of this change on different groups of women. The ability of these communities to first flourish in the conditions of emergent modernity and then survive the revolutionary upheavals of early Soviet Russia shows how religion can both empower women and provide a medium for adapting creatively to change. The chapter considers two further aspects of the distinctive path of development of the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross. These include the growth of a modernizing state and the convent's interconnections with the city of Nizhnii Novgorod.
Epilogue
Authors: Wagner William G.
Published: October 2024

This epilogue reflects on the current situation of the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross, after the site had been returned to the Orthodox Church. In 2004, the reestablishment of the convent was authorized; as of 2014, the community had ten members. Their obediences include singing in the convent's choir, baking prosfora, sewing, and working in the kitchen and refectory. Resurrecting earlier traditions, sisters also tutor children at one of the homes in Nizhnii Novgorod and inmates in one of the city's prisons and offer outpatient medical care to anyone requiring it. Indeed, the traditions of the convent are gradually being restored through the efforts of Abbess Filareta and the other sisters. But as its past demonstrates, how the convent evolves will depend as much on the future evolution of Nizhnii Novgorod as on the ideals, motives, and actions of its members.
Vladimir Putin, 2000–2008
Authors: Van Oudenaren John
Published: October 2024

This chapter addresses Vladimir Putin's first two terms, from 2000 to 2008, when the Russian president moved to consolidate the power of the Russian state, revived economic growth, and began adopting a more assertive posture on the international stage. This period saw particularly close personal interactions between James H. Billington and Putin, who was keen to revive Russia as a great cultural power and, as subsequently became known, sought to influence and manipulate opinions in the West, in part through cultural diplomacy and information warfare. The chapter covers the continued cooperation between the Library of Congress and an array of Russian institutions in Meeting of Frontiers and Open World, as well as several new projects. These projects include those carried out under the US–Russian Library Cooperation Initiative that Putin and President George W. Bush concluded at their summit in Kennebunkport, Maine, in July 2007. As Vladimir Putin's second term neared its end, the Library of Congress–Russia relationship was flourishing, delivering on and promising big things in the areas of digital libraries, technical assistance, exchanges of people and library materials, exhibitions, and much else.
Science
Authors: Wankhammer Johannes
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the role of attention in solidifying a set of dualisms that became the mainstays of modern architectures of knowledge. It then features the works of Francis Bacon and René Descartes who gave conceptual shape to a new way of going about knowing. In New Organon, Bacon revealed that the reorientation of attention was premised on a fundamental incongruence between the inquiring mind and the world. Meanwhile, the critical role of attention in ensuring the mind's freedom to act became the subject of scholarly debate concerning the locus and nature of freedom in Descartes. The chapter explains how blocking out the world and refocusing attention on the mind's operations is a necessary step to separate the mind's contribution to perception and cognition.
Globalizing Late Development
Authors: Chen Muyang
Published: October 2024

This chapter offers a comparison of policy banks and Japan's public financial agencies (PFAs), using three case analyses to illustrate how policy banks support Chinese firms. In addition to supporting industrial champions' international expansion and competition, policy banks have also helped Chinese contractors—companies that build infrastructure works—undertake financially nonviable projects in less developed regions. Through collateralizing state-owned and state-coordinated revenue flows of host countries, policy banks enhanced the creditworthiness of projects and created an advantage for Chinese firms in conducting business in low-income and middle-income economies. When doing so, the state's role is not channeling fiscal revenue to subsidize firms and distort market-pricing mechanism, because neither China nor the host countries are willing to or fiscally affluent enough to do so. Rather, the state financialized its revenue flows and allowed projects to be capitalized in a market-based manner.
The Latecomer’s Challenge
Authors: Chen Muyang
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the impact of China's overseas development finance on three Western-led international regimes: bilateral development finance/aid, export finance, and sovereign debt. It also identifies and examines three types of Western-regulated public financial agencies (PFAs)—aid agencies, export credit agencies, and development banks that the policy banks are comparable with—and then discusses the interaction between China and the international regimes that govern these PFAs. The chapter finds that the lending destinations of aid agencies and export credit agencies of advanced industrial economies diverge significantly, whereas China does not distinguish development finance from trade finance. Policy banks capitalize development-oriented projects with loans supporting national firms' foreign trade and overseas investment. This is an advantage of backwardness that advanced industrial economies do not have, which has allowed China to largely fund the infrastructure gap faced by the developing world. The interplay between a rising China and the existing regimes is thus more than a rivalry. In export finance, China contests the existing regime; in development assistance, it converges with it.
The “Errand” to Iran
Authors: Shannon Matthew K.
Published: October 2024

This chapter delves into the centrality of “mission” and “place” in the history of US–Iran relations, positing that the American evangelical mission in Iran was driven by a deeply rooted sense of providentialism and exceptionalism. It elucidates what Presbyterian evangelicals and other Americans meant by mission. It also explores the socio-affective worlds of Tehran and focuses on the Del Be Del network that included both American and Iranian friends. The chapter examines Tehran's built environment and the institutional presence of the Presbyterian Mission, emphasizing the city as a conduit between East and West and the administrative hub of the mission. It looks at Iranian supporters of the Presbyterian Mission, particularly Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and underscores the intertwined nature of religious and geopolitical ambitions in mid-twentieth-century US–Iran relations.
“Into the Commonwealth Stage”
Authors: Shannon Matthew K.
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the “old mission” pursued by American evangelicals in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which was driven by a literal interpretation of the New Testament's Great Commission. The mission was initially marked by church-planting efforts, starting with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in northwest Iran in the 1830s. The chapter explores how the Presbyterian Mission and Evangelical Church of Tehran, established in 1876, navigated church–mission relations amid the socio-political dynamics of the time. The chapter highlights the transformation of the mission's meaning due to American globalism and Iranian nationalism, especially during the Second World War and the Cold War. It discusses the evolution of the mission into an independent Iranian institution in 1965, encapsulating the complexities and challenges faced by American evangelicals in Iran.
German POWs and the Postwar Reconstruction of the USSR
Authors: Grunewald Susan C. I.
Published: October 2024

This chapter looks into the role of German prisoners of war (POWs) in the reconstruction of the USSR. It notes the consternation surrounding the Gulag system, citing the purposes of economy or political repression. Although German POWs had contributed to the wartime forced-labor system, their real economic contribution was in postwar reconstruction. The chapter explains that the growth of the camp system throughout the war and in the immediate postwar era corresponded directly to the economic needs of the Soviet Union. It elaborates on how the German POWs provided significant contributions to the Soviet economy, citing that most of the POWs were repatriated after the economy stabilized.
Commemoration of German POWs in the USSR and Russia
Authors: Grunewald Susan C. I.
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses the memory and commemoration of the German prisoners of war (POWs) in the Soviet Union and Russia. It notes that the memory of World War II furthered the political aims of the USSR and the Russian Federation. By the twentieth anniversary of victory in World War II, public memory of the war and its political uses evolved into a full-blown cult. Moreover, since Vladimir Putin's ascendancy to the presidency of the Russian Federation in 2000, he has resurrected the cult of the Great Patriotic War. Relations between Germany and Russia have improved enough over the past quarter-century, but the shift remains unclear following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Introduction
Authors: Marullo Thomas Gaiton
Published: October 2024

This introductory chapter explores the works and identity of Russian writer Ivan Bunin. It explains that Bunin had lived to tell his story of struggle and survival in repeated revolutions and wars, while also mentioning that Russian literature was declining rapidly. In Recollections, Bunin seemed intent on continuing literary vendettas while also presenting several known people as painfully human. Moreover, Bunin proudly presented his views on literature and life. The chapter explains how Bunin knew that with his final work, he was confronting readers and reviewers with images, ideas, and ideals that they had forgotten, that they had rejected, or, worse, that they did not know.
Gorky
Authors: Bunin Ivan
Published: October 2024

This chapter details Ivan Bunin's relationship with Maxim Gorky. It explains that Gorky and Bunin have a strange relationship because for the first twenty years they were perceived as good friends when in reality, they were not. Gorky often played the same side with the same pleasure in the same untiring way. The chapter highlights how Gorky's fame spread throughout Russia and it only continued to grow until the Russian intelligentsia lost its head over him. People have always spoken about his rare knowledge of Russia, which he acquired in the short period of time of wandering in the south of Russia.