bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Historical Interpretation Research— New Sources and Methodologies
Authors: Köpp Kai
Published: February 2025

Increased interest in the musical practices of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to a greatly expanded definition of “early music,” referring to certain methods of recreating music of the past so that historic distance remains perceptible in performance. This definition embraces a wide range and great number of sources, including instructive editions, early recordings, piano rolls, and organological user interfaces that require developing new approaches and tools to comprehend them. For this expanded perspective of historically informed performance (HIP), the term “interpretation research” (Interpretationsforschung) has been established in German musicology. It differs from traditional HIP through its particular interest in understanding the latitude of decision-making in the performance of music since the nineteenth century. Thanks to the abundance of interrelated sources, very detailed questions about these artistic choices can be answered, leading to a new quality of HIP that may be described as “early recordings informed performance.”
Developing Virtual Acoustic Systems for Use in Early Music Research
Authors: Callery Eoin , Abel Jonathan
Published: February 2025

Virtual acoustic systems can radically alter the acoustic conditions of performance venues and other spaces. When using these systems, the audience and performers have the sense that they are listening in another acoustic environment, a different space than the one they actually occupy or expect. Such systems have profound implications for many disciplines, especially those that intersect with the music and performing arts. Here we describe key virtual acoustic systems we have developed, ones that have made it possible to reproduce detailed acoustic models of actual spaces, including space that are inaccessible for detailed study. These systems have provided a means to investigate and theorize about how repertoire likely written for specific spaces may have been originally performed and heard. We discuss two such projects and review our findings, offering important insights into the potential of virtual acoustic systems to transform our understanding of music, performance, and more.
Race, Time, and Utopia
Authors: Paris William M.
Published: February 2025

Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation argues that racial injustice, at its core, is the domination of time, and utopia has been the response to this domination. The racially dominated are not free to define what counts as “progress,” they are not free from the accumulation of past injustices, and, most importantly, they are not free from the arbitrary organization of work in capitalist labor markets. Racially unjust societies are forms of life where the justifications for how to organize time around life, labor, and leisure are out of the hands of the dominated. Utopia has been a crucial resource for the refusing submission to time domination by opening pathways towards alternative futures. This book provides a theoretical account of utopia as the critical analysis of the sources of time domination and the struggle to create emancipatory forms of life. Rather than focusing on inclusion and equality before the law, as found in liberal theories of racial injustice, Race, Time, and Utopia analyzes the neglected “utopian” tradition of emancipation in black political thought that insists freedom can only be secured through the transformation of how we organize social time. Bringing together the work of W. E. B Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and James Boggs with the critical theory of Karl Marx, Ernst Bloch, Rahel Jaeggi, and Rainer Forst, this book reconstructs a social theory and normative account of forms of life as the struggle over how time will be organized. Race, Time, and Utopia asks, “can there be freedom without a new order of time?”
Introduction
Authors: Paris William M.
Published: February 2025

The introduction offers an overview of what a “critical theory of utopia” is. It proceeds in two moves. First, it argues that “utopias” are not primarily about ideal blueprints, but an expression of indignation towards social injustice. Utopias are, primarily, the denunciation of a society as whole. Second, the chapter advances a critical theory of capitalist society as a form of life where other orders of time are increasingly disciplined by the imperative of production and accumulation. Thus, racial justice should be analyzed as the utopian attempt to emancipate forms of life from the arbitrary control of capitalist time.
Race and the Fragmentation of Time
Authors: Paris William M.
Published: February 2025

Following from the previous chapter, this chapter turns to the work of W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk as a resource for diagnosing how racial injustice dominates and fragments the forms of life of the dominated. It analyzes Du Bois’s ambivalent relationship toward black people as both not yet modern and exhibiting practices for a future, just society. It argues that an underappreciated aspect of Du Bois’s argument in Souls is the normative character of time and synchronization in social life. Du Bois interprets black forms of life as containing the promise of a future time where all peoples will be able to live as contemporaries in culture. Here the chapter begins reconstructing a social theory of racially unjust societies as temporally out of joint and thus raising the question of how they can be synchronized justly.
Justifying Freedom
Authors: Paris William M.
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines James Boggs’s black power critique of civil rights. He argues civil rights did not go far enough in radically changing the white, capitalist power that shapes modern societies. The chapter argues that utopia is the work of replacing one form of power with a new set of justifications. Analyzing Boggs’s conception of black power shows that power for him is the capacity to develop new binding norms that will underwrite the economic and social patterns of a form of life. By breaking with the justifications of the present that naturalize black economic disempowerment, Boggs endeavors to bring even heretofore taken-for-granted economic relations within the space of reasons. Black power envisions a society where democratic contestation and negotiation are the basic justifications for a form of life rather than the imperative of permanent capital accumulation.
Statecraft, Its Meaning, and Why It Is Often Done Poorly
Authors: Ross Dennis
Published: February 2025

This chapter argues that good statecraft is characterized by marrying objectives and means, but also points out that it is rarely done. The failure to do so is not the preserve of either Republican or Democratic administrations: both tend to fail more than succeed in this regard. The failure results from both a lack of clarity in objectives as well as often choosing the wrong objective. Political considerations, poor assessments or lack of understanding the situation, and adopting objectives that are too general and not easily operationalized help to account for this. To illustrate how presidents of both parties have failed to marry objectives and means, the chapter looks at a number of examples, including Obama in Libya (and Syria), Trump in Iran, and Biden on the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
George W. Bush and the Iraq War: A Tale of Two Terms
Authors: Ross Dennis
Published: February 2025

This chapter describes the vast differences in the deftness of statecraft practiced during the first and second terms of the Bush 43rd administration by examining the decision-making in the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2007 troop surge. The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was not vigorously debated; there was no clear understanding of what the United States was getting into, as the administration relied on a faith-based rather than fact-based assessment. The author demonstrates that a clear objective, a foundational component of good statecraft, was lacking in 2003: was it regime change, or disarming weapons of mass destruction (WMD)? Without clarity on the effort's ultimate objective, international coalescence was limited, contributing to the quagmire that Iraq was to become. By 2006, when the Bush administration recognized it needed a strategic shift, personnel changes helped to facilitate more rigorous, parallel assessments. Contrasting the statecraft of the Bush 43rd administration in 2003 and 2006, this chapter explores how the Surge came to be and what factors contributed to such an improvement in statecraft within a single administration.
Guardians of the Archives
Authors: Martin Quijano Boris X.
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines the power relationship between the researcher and state employees working in Cuban archives and libraries, in particular how those relationships are impacted by the intersection of status, race, and religion. The author uses three stories from his fieldwork to discuss several problems he encountered and the strategies he developed to overcome the barriers to archival research confronting a native researcher. For example, Martin Quijano explains societal prejudice against the Afro-Cuban religion and in one instance recounts the need to hide his Afro-Cuban religious symbols prior to entering the archives to ensure access. However, his story takes a surprising twist when he finds out the race of a senior religious authority whose authorization was needed to access the Catholic Church’s archives, which were essential to his project.
Take the Message Everywhere
Authors: Darden Robert F. , Newby Stephen M.
Published: February 2025

With the help of songwriter Audrey Mieir, the new configuration of Andraé Crouch and the Disciples was soon singing to packed (mostly white) churches across Southern California. Their success in singing a congregation-friendly and more contemporary version of gospel to a wide variety of audiences caught the ear of fabled religious producer Ralph Carmichael, who signed them to his new label, Light Records. With Christian music veteran Jimmy Collins as producer, the Disciples recorded their first LP, Take the Music Everywhere. Following a world tour with evangelist John Haggai, Andrus left the Disciples, to be replaced by Tramaine Hawkins.
Keep On Singin’
Authors: Darden Robert F. , Newby Stephen M.
Published: February 2025

The success of the Disciples’ live performances led them to Irv Kessler, a veteran producer with Liberty Records. Though the group’s lone 45 for Liberty, “Christian People,” didn’t sell particularly well, they were welcomed back on Carmichael’s Light Records. Midway through the production of Keep On Singin’, Tramaine Hawkins left the group, devastating Andraé. Keep On Singin’ produced several gospel standards, including “I’ve Got Confidence,” later recorded by Elvis, and “My Tribute (To God Be the Glory),” an anthemic ballad that is still found in many hymnals, used in both Black and white congregations, today.
Emotionally Charged
Authors: Denham Smith Dina , Grandey Alicia A.
Published: February 2025

Leaders are confronted with more emotional demands than ever, due to changes in the way people work, who they work with, and why they work. Emotionally Charged provides a comprehensive guide to help leaders and those who support them appreciate and navigate these exceptional new emotional demands. Each chapter equips readers with evidence-based insights and tools for building and applying the advanced emotional skills for effective leadership today, from regulating emotions in yourself and others to navigating emotionally charged work events effectively. Throughout the book, the authors delve into critical leadership topics such as emotional labor, authenticity, stress and recovery, emotion regulation, and self-compassion. They offer evidence-based strategies and techniques for leaders to thrive in the new world of work. Their guidance includes managing difficult conversations like communicating difficult feedback or handling layoffs, supporting employees struggling with personal challenges and mental health, and building connection and trust virtually. They also share specific strategies for leveraging diversity and building inclusive teams, and managing the new tensions and stressors introduced by advanced technologies such as AI. Through a blend of scientific evidence and practical advice, this book equips leaders with the tools and insights needed to navigate the complex emotional landscape at work, fostering healthy and productive work environments in the 21st century.
Become the Architect of Your Own Emotions
Authors: Smith Dina Denham , Grandey Alicia A.
Published: February 2025

This chapter overturns the belief that emotions are an automatic and fixed response to the environment and replaces it with a more up-to-date perspective based on scientific evidence. This modern view sees emotions as social constructions, built from a combination of your current mood, appraisals, situational context, and availability of emotion words. The chapter focuses on how leaders can use these four building blocks to construct emotions: developing awareness of internal states and more nuanced appraisals of events, assessing context (who/what/where/when), and learning more emotional labels for how one feels. The significance of emotional granularity and differentiation by developing a richer emotional vocabulary is highlighted. Strategies for expanding emotional vocabulary are offered. Overall, this chapter presents a new lens for thinking about emotions that provides a sense of control and confidence for managing emotions in the leadership role.
Keep Your Engine Running Smoothly
Authors: Smith Dina Denham , Grandey Alicia A.
Published: February 2025

A significant portion of leaders report feelings of overload and exhaustion—which can impair performance, creating more stress. Drawing on extensive research, this chapter presents the stress spiral and a compelling argument for why it occurs: the recovery paradox, a phenomenon whereby when you most need to recover, you are least likely to do so. Explanations for this paradox include societal norms, dopamine motivating productivity and progress, the power of habit, and the knowing-doing gap. Leaders must DARE to prioritize recovery to ensure their health and effectiveness. DARE indicates four essential recovery experiences: detachment from work, autonomous choice, relaxed state, and engagement in personal growth. The four big-needle movers of healthy nutrition, sleep, exercise, and social connection may be challenging for leaders but are also critical for ensuring they are ready for the emotional demands of the job.
Become a BRAVE Leader
Authors: Smith Dina Denham , Grandey Alicia A.
Published: February 2025

In the workplace, emotionally charged events are typically characterized by novelty, criticality, unpredictability, and uncontrollability, demanding that people respond in new and adaptive ways. The connections between events and reactions are not fixed, but influenced by personal tendencies (i.e., personality), job features (i.e., frequent interaction with people), and how well you regulate yourself in the moment. This chapter provides evidence and strategies for leaders to navigate emotional events, introducing the five-step BRAVE framework. These steps are: breathe to reduce bodily arousal, recognize your physiological response, accept your emotions without judgment, verbalize the emotional label to yourself or others, and engage with intention). Readers will learn how to tune into their physical sensations; recognize, verbalize, and nonjudgmentally accept their emotions; and engage in perspective-taking techniques to respond thoughtfully to triggers.
Leading With Humanity in the Digital Age
Authors: Smith Dina Denham , Grandey Alicia A.
Published: February 2025

This chapter delves into the intricate balance required of leaders in the digital age, where human emotions and interactions must coexist with advanced technologies. The chapter highlights three core tensions arising from integrating technology in the workplace that leaders must now manage. These tensions include relief from mundane tasks but increased fear of job insecurity; the ease of connecting virtually coupled with increased feelings of isolation and loneliness; and the personal freedoms created by remote work technologies and the stress of being “always-on.” These tensions create new emotional demands on leaders and require advanced emotional skills. This chapter offers leaders ways to address employees’ fears and exhaustion related to technology and guidance on expressing emotions effectively in virtual communication. Finally, it explores how to leverage technology to regulate emotions, mitigate stress, and foster positive outcomes for themselves and their teams.
Watchdogs in the Digital Age: Digital Surveillance, Information Security, and the Evolution of Journalist-Confidential Source Relationships
Authors: Dwyer Deborah L.
Published: February 2025

Research and industry reports suggest that national security concerns, advances in surveillance technologies, rising public interest in data privacy, and increased legal risks for sources engaging with the press pose a unique threat to the American news media. This rising pressure comes at a time when government criticism of the media is at historic highs and public trust is at an all-time low. This chapter focuses on a specific aspect of the intersection of journalism and national security: the journalist-confidential source relationship and the hazards government surveillance poses to the watchdog function of the news media. As information brokers and gatekeepers, journalists must protect confidential information and those made vulnerable by providing it. This makes news workers and their sources a likely target of surveillance by the government and other powerful entities. After an introduction to the problem, this chapter summarizes several incidents of journalist surveillance and information security breaches in the face of rising tensions between the news media and the American government. It then examines the critical role confidentiality plays in the journalist-source relationship and the challenges information security practices create for the news media. Subsequently, findings from prior research inform an understanding of the security challenges cited by working journalists. Lastly, the chapter offers a list of considerations to bolster both future academic inquiry and industry practices as information security tensions, challenges, and capabilities continue to evolve and mature.
Charging Journalists under the Espionage Act: Have We Reached a Tipping Point?
Authors: Pollack Barry J. , Fleming Brian J.
Published: February 2025

In an effort to determine whether we have reached a tipping point that could lead to the prosecution of a journalist under the Espionage Act, this chapter first examines two cases from the Barack Obama administration—one that typifies the more aggressive approach of the Justice Department during President Obama’s first term (United States v. Stephen Kim) and one that illustrates the somewhat more restrained approach taken during Obama’s second term (United States v. Jeffrey Sterling). Next, we examine public statements by former President Donald Trump and senior administration officials to assess whether threats lobbed at the news media—both explicit and implicit—should be taken seriously or disregarded as mere rhetoric. Finally, we look holistically at the recent cases, the political climate, the legal and structural impediments to charging journalists for conduct related to their newsgathering and reporting activities, and certain external factors that could ultimately determine whether this hypothetical scenario ever becomes reality.
Digital Shackles: The Political Economy of Surveillance Technologies and the Emergence of Transnational Surveillance Fascism
Authors: Henrichsen Jennifer R.
Published: February 2025

The use of spyware against journalists is becoming ubiquitous and pervasive in many countries around the world as states strive to control information and as technologies used to surveil civilians become more sophisticated and inexpensive. This confluence of factors is creating a new reality for activists and journalists in many countries globally as they seek to mobilize or hold powerful interests to account. The creation and sale of sophisticated surveillance systems by companies in Western democracies to authoritarian regimes further facilitates this asymmetrical power dynamic between states and their citizens. Yet there has been limited examination of the political economy of surveillance technologies, which are often created in democratic countries and sold to authoritarian regimes that use them to suppress dissent or critical journalism. This chapter examines the companies that create spyware technologies and sell them to the Bahraini government, which has and continues to use these technologies to target journalists and activists. The findings will shed light on the shrouded political economy of surveillance technologies and the implications these technologies have for human rights and journalism. Ultimately, this chapter argues that close cooperation between the state and corporations in the development and sale of surveillance technologies contributes to an emerging phenomenon of transnational surveillance fascism.
Enemies Foreign and Domestic: America’s Media Ecosystem and the Externalization of Domestic Threats
Authors: Fuller Christopher J.
Published: February 2025

Russian information warfare is not new. The state has long employed such techniques, first domestically to influence individuals and shape narratives, and eventually outside of its borders. Yet throughout the Cold War, the Kremlin’s propaganda campaigns proved ineffective. Changes in technology have provided Russia’s agents with new avenues, but the central principles remained unchanged. This begs the question: If the Kremlin’s foreign propaganda methods have barely changed since the Cold War, what has made them so effective now? The answer is that the United States has become more vulnerable. This chapter reveals how shifts in the domestic political landscape, developments in the digital space, and changes in the media ecosystem amplified the power of traditional Russian information warfare while simultaneously increasing the United States’ vulnerability to such nefarious tactics.
Weaponizing Images
Authors: Moeller Susan D.
Published: February 2025

Visual content is coming to dominate social media platforms, especially on mobile devices. Users engage more meaningfully with photos, video, and graphics than with other forms of media, and only a minimal encounter with them is needed for their impact to be felt. The lesson in these observations—for terrorists, for technology companies, and for public policy experts alike—is self-evident: seeing matters. What we see and how we see have become preoccupations over the last several decades—among neuroscientists interested in unraveling the secrets of the brain, philosophers interested in unpacking the inclinations of the mind, entrepreneurs interested in monetizing how we construct our visual identity, art historians interested in changing presentations of the self, and journalists interested in using visual technologies to bring scenes of the world, cross-platform, to their audiences. Yet the question of why seeing matters has been neglected, perhaps because the answer has seemed self-evident. The dramatic turn toward visual communication has had extraordinary personal, economic, and political implications. The “why” does matter—a lot. And now, more than ever, because of the confluence and implications of two facts: (1) seeing is becoming the way the world chooses to transfer information, via tools/apps/platforms that are increasingly visual, and (2) seeing still remains—even in our manipulated world—a linguistic synonym for knowledge and understanding.
Women and War
Authors: Giri Keshab
Published: February 2025

This chapter discusses the dominant narratives of victimhood and agency regarding women engaged in political violence. It then turns to the everyday to highlight how the intersectional everyday experiences in both public and private spheres can be a productive way to explore complex experiences of female combatants. Prevailing narratives of victimhood in earlier scholarship have been moderated by scholarship in the last decade that demonstrates the diverse and complex roles women play in war. Yet there is a greater ambivalence, hesitancy, silence, discomfort, anxiety, and even anger among some feminist scholarship on the experiences of female combatants in rebel groups constituting multiple or further forms of victimization and marginalization. This chapter proposes that everyday experiences conditioned by intersectional social subjectivities and identity of female combatants are a rich avenue of thinking about “complexes” and “continua of violence” beyond a binary framework of victimhood and agency.
Male Researcher Doing Feminist Fieldwork in the Global South
Authors: Giri Keshab
Published: February 2025

How does an intersectional identity of a research shape the research? While the other chapters explore the experiences of women ex-combatants shaped by their intersectional identities, this chapter focuses on how my intersectional identity shapes my research on the women ex-combatants. I explore theoretical and political debates in feminist research leading to epistemological and methodological concerns originating from being a male researcher in the Global South. I argue that while gender is a primary concern for male researchers conducting research on women, there are other overlapping identities and axes of power that interact with gender to create complex power dynamics to influence both the research process and outcome. The chapter proposes that critical self-reflexivity with honesty on limitations and partiality of research, situated knowledge, positionality, and power, including ethics of care, moral responsibility, and reciprocity as key considerations to establishing personal accountability in knowledge production for the male researcher engaging in feminist research.
Meaningful Economics
Authors: Wilson Bart J.
Published: February 2025

Economics has a problem. It cannot distinguish the causes of human action from the consequences of human action. It models representations of optimal agents, not flesh-and-blood human beings in ordinary life. Meaningful Economics is about understanding the principles of economics—the exchange of goods and services, the specialization that trade makes possible, and the system of property that undergirds both—in their origins and outcomes rather than exclusively in their consequences. It explains the roots of conduct, and not merely its economic effects, by going to the human capacity for moral sentiments that prompt human beings to act. The book is about what makes meaningfulness the very core of economics. You read that correctly. Meaning and value and purpose have everything to do with traditional talk of economics. Economic science, including, behavioral economics, unintentionally, proceeds as if the human mind does not matter. The origins of our actions—ideas—do indeed matter. They make us human. They make us beings who imagine our futures and who use language to achieve what we wish for. Economics and ethics are, in fact, two sides of the same coin, and, moreover, we can study both sides at the same time. We can study the costs and benefits of our decisions and our motives and goals in an integrated, humanly way. The book builds a science of economics that retains the human mind.
Human Conduct Is a Challenge to Study
Authors: Wilson Bart J.
Published: February 2025

From the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, we learn the challenges of understanding conduct as intelligent human action. Human beings do not choose satisfactions or outcomes. Human beings choose actions with specific meanings that cannot be reduced to outcomes or bare physical facts. We understand each other by predicating actions on five abstract concepts: feel, think, know, want, and don’t want. Linguists say that every language has a word for each of these mental concepts, and, moreover, these words mean precisely the same thing in every language. When we act, we do so, or fail to do so, in a way set forth by the customs of the people around us and handed down to us. An individual carries out an action in the company of other people.
Because There Are Four Ways to Explain Why We Do What We Do
Authors: Wilson Bart J.
Published: February 2025

Following the evolutionary biologist and geneticist David Haig, we repurpose for economics Aristotle’s four ways to answer a question of why?: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final cause. These causes provide one approach to dissolve a fundamental tension between molecular genetics and evolutionary biology; that is, they show how both material genes and the function of a trait can serve as explanations in biological evolution. In this chapter I focus on how we can analogously apply biological genotypes, phenotypes, and evolution to our study of ideational genotypes, phenotypes, and evolution in human customs. Time and history dissolve the two-way causation problem of a moral sentiment and a custom.
The Mind Creates Human Customs
Authors: Wilson Bart J.
Published: February 2025

From the philosopher John Searle, we learn how mind and language create distinctly human customs. We use language to describe how things are in the world, as, for example, when I say, “X is green.” And we use language to change things in the world, as when I say, “I promise to do Y,” and people now believe that I will do Y. But amazingly, we further use language to do both things at the same time, as when an officiant says, “I pronounce you married.” With such an utterance, the officiant simultaneously describes the world as it is and changes the world in the minds of everyone present. Human conduct in the principles of economics rests on the marvelous work that language does in the world.
Materials Alone Can’t Enrich Us; Ideas Plus Materials Can
Authors: Wilson Bart J.
Published: February 2025

The dominant question in economics is how?, which prioritizes mechanisms and processes in resource allocation and which overlooks the deeper “why” questions about human action and its origins. This chapter contrasts the materialistic and process-oriented approaches of economic historians with Deirdre McCloskey’s perspective, which explains modern wealth with liberal values and bourgeois equality. I argue that McCloskey’s project is an example of using formal and final causes to explain the innovation and economic growth of the modern world. The book concludes with the question of questions that guides my inquiries in economic science.
Epilogue
Authors: Norðfjörð Björn
Published: February 2025

The Epilogue discusses the four paradigms that are the defining characteristics of contemporary Icelandic cinema: local filmmaking informed by a national address, art cinema intended for the international film festival circuit, genre cinema influenced by Hollywood, and, finally, foreign runaway productions. In bringing the history of Icelandic cinema up to the present day, the Epilogue considers how the films of the early 2020s are shaped and formed by these paradigms. Additionally, a close analysis of Lamb (Valdimar Jóhannsson, 2021, Dýrið) and Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022, Volaða land/Vanskabte Land) draws attention to how Icelandic cinema is increasingly manifesting an awareness of its own past as filmmakers look to older Icelandic films and other cultural traditions for inspiration.
Two Souths or One?
Authors: Jones Bryan D.
Published: February 2025

This chapter explains the vast differences between two home counties of the author’s ancestors. Blount was a poor mountain county settled by small farmers and craftsmen, mostly of Scots and Scots-Irish descent. Sumter was in the Black Belt, where the soil was rich and slavery and plantations flourished. In Sumter, oligarchy thrived; in Blount, democracy thrived, and the uplanders there were capable of rising up against the ruling plantation oligarchs in Sumter and the Black Belt. The chapter explores the large differences between the two conceptions of governance—oligarchy versus democracy—and how they followed geography.
Plantation Politics
Authors: Jones Bryan D.
Published: February 2025

James Powell Carr moved to Sumter County at the middle of the 19th century, bringing his slaves. He was representative of the small-time planters who supported oligarchical government that characterized the slaveholding South. During the Civil War he signed up with a Confederate partisan ranger regiment, basically a unit that raided Union supply lines and known Union supporters without military supervision. Much of the Carr wealth was lost because of Emancipation, but James Powell, like most plantation owners, reestablished a considerable amount of it. After the war he worked as an election official in which role he either engaged in fraud or watched as it happened. The stealing of Black votes in Sumter County was rampant, and Powell Carr engaged in it.
The Two Faces of Brother Charley Jones
Authors: Jones Bryan D.
Published: February 2025

All theories of Southern politics that see an oligarchic ruling system also postulate a follower class, the “common man.” Observers have depicted these men and women as part of a hierarchical society in which leadership had once been a “moral right” of the rich and entitled. The author’s ancestors, the Joneses, represent the common white men and women of the Wiregrass, but politics was but a sideshow to them. The chapter shows that there was nothing of the genuflecting to a revered upper class in the Joneses, although they did not challenge the ruling class by participating in the Populist uprising. Rather they were consumed by religion, prohibition, and earning a living. They seemed to have been networked into the Bourbon faction through friendship and war remembrances rather than through ideology or deference. Around 1816, small-time South Carolina planter, slaveholder, and the author’s fourth great-grandfather, Charles S.V. Jones, got out of the business, gave up his slaves, and went out into the wilderness to preach the Gospel. Charley joined the mobile and open nation created in the wake of two great social movements: the Second Great Awakening and Jacksonian Democracy.
Charles Cade Jones Goes to War
Authors: Jones Bryan D.
Published: February 2025

On July 3, 1861, at the urging of recruiters, Brother Charley Jones’s grandson and the author’s great-grandfather Charles Cade Jones, a small-town carpenter, enlisted as a private in Company E of the 15th Alabama Infantry. He held no slaves nor did he own any property. Of the 84 enlistees in Company E, only five were from slaveholding families. Charley was grievously wounded, yet stuck with his company until it surrendered with Lee at Appomattox. Looked at through a class lens, Charley’s behavior is puzzling. This chapter traces Charles Cade Jones’ tribulations in war and the myths passed down through the author’s grandparents about his experiences in one of the most famous regiments in the Confederate army.
Three Southern Editors
Authors: Jones Bryan D.
Published: February 2025

In the late 1940s, three young men took over as publishers or editors of three daily newspapers in Alabama. Buford Boone of the Tuscaloosa News, Grover Hall Jr. of the Montgomery Advertiser, and Glenn Jones, the author’s father, of the Troy Messenger. All held their positions throughout the intense flames of the civil rights movement and the brutal white backlash that buffeted their newspapers. All called themselves moderates. In the late 1940s, two, Boone and my father, excoriated the resurgent Klan while Hall sent a mixed but mostly anti-Klan message. All faced increasing pressures steming from the Supreme Court’s decisions on desegregation.
A Bad Hotdog and a Big Orange
Authors: Jones Bryan D.
Published: February 2025

Sometimes an insight about the injustices in an historical era emerges quickly and spontaneously. This happened to the author when he realized the lack of any reasonable justification for Jim Crow. After a long walk pushing a bicycle in the hot summer sun, the author as a boy became nauseous and then violently sick after eating a chilidog and drinking an orange soft drink at a segregated Dairy Queen. He associated the sickness with the stupidity of separate windows for Blacks and whites. Associational learning seared a distaste for chilidogs and segregation in his mind. The incident led to further rethinking of the segregated small town bubble that he inhabited.
Introduction
Authors: Schatz Edward , Silvey Rachel
Published: February 2025

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a trillion-dollar program of development assistance and infrastructure financing, has enormous potential to transform states, societies, and economies across the globe. In addition, it has potential to extend China’s geopolitical influence. This introductory chapter lays out the analytic and practical stakes at play in rival understandings of this global endeavor. Beyond the BRI’s evident materiality, the authors argue that much of its political, social, and economic impact is a function of how we see the BRI. By highlighting the politics of sight, this chapter sets the stage for the empirical chapters that follow, which together illustrate the great variety, indeterminacy, and contingency of the BRI’s enormous downstream consequences.
China and the Visual Politics of World Order
Authors: Kaneti Marina
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines how images, objects, and narratives displayed as part of an international collaborative museum exhibit about the Silk Road both reaffirm and contest Beijing’s BRI vision. The chapter shows how the exhibit openly displayed the international collaborators’ acceptance, resistance, and disregard for the notion of a shared past and common future. But beyond the divergent responses, the author argues that the exhibit sheds light on how Beijing uses the politics of sight to incorporate multifaceted perspectives into a new global imaginary. The exhibit case therefore enhances a broader understanding of how the realm of visual politics facilitates the Chinese government’s pursuit of international legitimacy and recognition of its vision for world order.
Behind the Spectacle of the Belt and Road Initiative
Authors: DiCarlo Jessica
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines infrastructure development in northern Laos through a politics of sight. Drawing on the viewpoints of residents, workers, and officials, the author asks how people see (or do not see) the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); for whom is the BRI hypervisible or invisible; and what might certain measures of visibility obscure or omit? This chapter extends conceptual and theoretical engagements with infrastructure to theorize infrastructural visibility on a spectrum. It explores how projects are seen and the ramifications of different ways of seeing. Through a follow-the-corridor approach, it ethnographically illuminates the downstream experiences of infrastructure development for Chinese and Lao communities. By challenging prevailing narratives and emphasizing localized experiences, this chapter contributes valuable insights to understanding the BRI and China’s global role. It underscores the importance of considering diverse contexts in which the BRI unfolds, emphasizing its contingent nature and the influence of local dynamics on projects’ meanings and effects.
Conclusion
Authors: Schatz Edward , Silvey Rachel
Published: February 2025

This concluding chapter elaborates a way to think about transnational, transformative power. Building on the previous chapter contributions, it considers a framework that starts from looking downstream. This framework takes flows of power seriously, while appreciating how indeterminacy, contingency, agency, and a number of other factors generate a broad unpredictability. As much as such unpredictably exists in hydrological basins, this volume reveals the ways it is especially pronounced in social dynamics such as those set in motion by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This conclusion considers the implications of downstream transformations associated with the BRI for understanding large-scale changes in global power relations, such as those unfolding in the 21st century.
The Problem of Biblical Violence
Authors: Strømmen Hannah M.
Published: February 2025

This chapter addresses how scholars might respond to the violent Bible-use identified in the preceding chapters. Examining trends in scholarly literature on Bible and violence, it characterises four approaches: historicising biblical texts; battling selectivity; challenging biblical authority; and resistant reading. These approaches are explained and evaluated in light of the previous analysis of biblical assemblages, including their functions in far-right milieus. The four approaches offer valuable possibilities for grappling with biblical violence, such as a better understanding of the otherness of biblical texts as part of another time and place, disrupting simple notions of biblical authority, and resistance to the patriarchy that permeates this collection of texts. However, the chapter goes beyond these approaches by arguing that the complex affective investments people have in biblical texts and Bibles and the way Bible-use functions beyond the confessional and the textual need to be taken into account.
Drop Dead (1970s)
Authors: Moskos Peter
Published: February 2025

New York City in the 1970s was close to fiscal bankruptcy and in crisis. Thousands of police officers and others were laid off. A city blackout in 1977 resulted in widespread looting and destruction. The Knapp Commission unveiled and reduced systemic police corruption, and the department as a whole was lethargic, demoralized, and resistant to change. These layoffs and the chaos of the decade would scar the NYPD for a generation. But they were formative experiences for the young officers who would later become police leaders during New York City’s extraordinary 1990s crime drop.
Miracles on 42nd Street (1990s)
Authors: Moskos Peter
Published: February 2025

Once dubbed, “the sleaziest block in America,” Manhattan’s 42nd Street witnessed major changes in the 1980s, as “business improvement districts” were created to address conditions in local areas. Bryant Park was redesigned and reopened in 1992. Independently, Port Authority Bus Terminal began Operation Alternative, a program designed to improve safety and address the horrendous social condition of people living in the bus terminal. In Times Square, another BID was created that worked with police and property owners to make visitors feel welcome. The quantity of porn businesses was drastically reduced, and Mayor Dinkins signed an agreement with Disney Corporation to invest in Times Square, buy a theater, and open a family-friendly retail store.
Follow-Up and Assessment (1996–2000)
Authors: Moskos Peter
Published: February 2025

New York City’s decline in crime in the 1990s went against established academic theory, which stressed crime’s supposed “root causes,” such of poverty, racism, and drug addiction. But between 1993 and 1996 murders declined 50 percent for no other obvious reason than the a newly focused and aggressive approach to policing, coupled with effective prosecution. The NYPD was perceived as the world’s leading crime fighting organization, with Compstat at its core. In January 1996 Time magazine gave credit for the crime drop to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. Mayor Rudy Giuliani fired Bratton three months later. Murders would continue to decline until 1998, and then level off.
Introduction
Authors: Smith Christian
Published: February 2025

This introductory chapter argues that traditional religions are increasingly culturally obsolete due to macro-cultural, social, and generational shifts. It attributes this decline to a host of factors, including the rise of “spiritual but not religious” identities, the diminishing influence of religious institutions, and scandals that have eroded public trust. The chapter lays out basic ideas needed to make sense of the argument that follows, including the ideas of traditional religion, culture, and obsolescence. It also addresses issues of historical change and empirical evidence for demonstrating the causes of religious obsolescence.
The 1990s
Authors: Smith Christian
Published: February 2025

This chapter discusses the challenges traditional American religion confronted in the 1990s, leading to its growing obsolescence over the next 20 years. The end of the Cold War diminished religion’s role in American identity as the ideological conflict with atheistic communism receded. Neoliberal capitalism reshaped the economy, increasing job pressures, mobility, and individualism, which eroded community ties and religious participation. The rise of digital media also provided alternative communities and exposed individuals to information that challenged religious authority. Postmodernist and social constructionist ideas fostered skepticism toward absolute truths, especially among younger generations, while multicultural education inadvertently promoted cultural relativism, making strong religious adherence less plausible. Geographic mobility and “intensive parenting” further eroded the appeal of traditional religion. By the early 2000s, these combined factors had significantly weakened traditional religious institutions in the United States.
Religious Self-Destructions
Authors: Smith Christian
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines how religious scandals, particularly those involving sexual and financial misconduct, helped cause a massive decline in trust in and respect for traditional religion. These scandals, coupled with the rise of digital media, reinforced perceptions of hypocrisy and systemic moral problems within religious institutions, especially among Millennials. Evangelicalism’s shift toward political activism and its emphasis on a “personal relationship with God” unintentionally contributed to a disengagement from organized religion by many, as younger generations especially rejected religious institutional authority. The “purity culture” movement, which promoted abstinence, faced massive backlash for its harmful effects, further alienating many from evangelicalism and religion. Additionally, religious institutions were increasingly seen as overly controlling and damaging, driving broader disengagement, particularly among post-Boomers.
Through the Exit Doors
Authors: Smith Christian
Published: February 2025

This chapter explores the obsolescence of traditional religion from the viewpoint of post-Boomers. What did they object to about religion and why did so many leave the religions they were raised in? Many view religion as a source of violence, social injustice, and manipulation, while others criticize its exclusivity and political involvement. Of the 209 Americans interviewed, 135 identified as religious Decliners, preferring personal spirituality over institutional affiliation and expressing discontent with religious hypocrisy and corruption. The chapter then looks at three important minority American religions: Judaism, Black Protestantism, and Mormonism. Jewish Millennials show increased engagement with their faith due it seems to targeted interventions, while Black Protestant Millennials exhibit stronger retention compared to other groups, although they begin to show signs of religious distancing. In contrast, Mormon Millennials are experiencing major disaffection from the LDS church, driven by disillusionment with church practices and exposure to critical perspectives online.