bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“Wondres to Here”
Authors: Lears Adin E.
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores several versions of Piers Plowman, wherein the poem's opening lines stress hearing before vision. It talks about Will, the Dreamer, who sets out on his spiritual quest in early summer, dressed in the rough woolen garments of a hermit. It also mentions how hearing receives emphasis at the close of the Prologue, wherein the last lines devolve into a cacophony of street songs sung by the urban tradesmen and professionals that populate the end of Will's dream. The chapter describes how Piers Plowman draws on and reworks the dreamvision topos of birds lulling a dreamer to sleep in any number of places, including in the first dream, when Will falls asleep at the sound of rushing water. It elaborates on hearing as it is inextricably tied to feeling, both as sensation and as emotion.
“Litel Sercles” of Sound
Authors: Lears Adin E.
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses the Dreamer's journey to Fame's house as a reward for years of diligent service to the god of Love through an explanation by the eagle and visionary guide of Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame. It analyses Chaucer's semi-self-deprecating characterization that engages the key problem of authorship and authority that has driven study of the poem over the past few decades. It also explores the idea of experience that has been important to readings of The House of Fame, which located the poem in a larger intellectual context particular to late medieval philosophy. The chapter discusses Sheila Delaney's reading, in which Chaucer-the-Dreamer must navigate toward truth according to a principle of “skeptical fideism.” It determines where and how Chaucer locates an alternate model of literary authority that often stresses the importance of vernacular language and voices.
The Forces that Push and Pull
Authors: Barton Nimisha
Published: May 2021

This chapter retraces the trajectories of foreign-born men, women, and children driven out of their homelands and directed into French factories and fields by employers and labor recruitment organizations before, during, and after the Great War. It follows immigrants to the two lively melting-pot neighborhoods in Paris where they settled in greatest numbers between the wars and into the Occupation. It also looks at the lived experience of immigrants that observed how gender, marriage, and family that shaped the ways migrants moved through provincial France in search of work. The chapter discusses France's northern, eastern, and southern departments that drew large numbers of seasonal border migrants from Belgium, Italy, and Spain. It refers to migrant laborers that concentrated in mining areas of the Pas-de-Calais region after the war, as well as large city centers like Marseille or Lyon and its industrial peripheries.
Neighborly Networks and Welfare Work under Vichy
Authors: Barton Nimisha
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes the 11th arrondissement that emerged as a sustained official target of rafles or Jewish roundups in consideration of the massive settlement of foreign Jews during the German Occupation of Paris. It discusses the German authorities that collaborated with Paris police forces in orchestrating two especially large rafles from August 20 and 21, 1941, one of which was centered on the onzième. It also mentions the Comité Amelot or the Groupe Amelot as France's first Jewish resistance organization that was founded in June 1940 and pursued social assistance during the war. The chapter explores the activities of the Groupe Amelot and its social workers, which were embedded within larger rescue networks throughout France that involved Jewish and non-Jewish assistantes sociales. It shows the continuities between interwar welfarist activity and wartime resistance work undertaken by female social workers.
Conclusion
Authors: Barton Nimisha
Published: May 2021

This chapter mentions the Third Republican lawmakers, politicians, bureaucrats, employers, and social workers who summoned reproductive citizenship into being against the backdrop of severe depopulation and an imagined “crise de familles.” It reviews the routine application of social policies, states and social actors that worked in both official and unofficial spheres toward the goal of repopulating France with immigrant families. It also describes France's working-class urban neighborhoods, in which the gendered rhythms of neighborhood life reinforced the making and remaking of mixed and foreign-born families. The chapter points out how a female culture of mutual aid flourished in the social world of the apartment building and provided material support to French and immigrant wives and mothers. It identifies that immigrant women adopted French patterns of marriage, employment, fertility, and child-rearing.
“In the Thought of the World”
Authors: Quinan Jack
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on the Larkin Building, which is firmly entrenched in histories of architectural modernism, such as Henry-Russell Hitchcock's Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration of 1929. It cites Hendrik Petrus Berlage's Amsterdam Stock Exchange, Peter Behren's AEG Turbine Factory, and Otto Wagner's Post Office Savings Bank as buildings that rival Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin commission for architectural distinction at the turn of the twentieth century. It also reviews the origins of Wright's Larkin Building in the company's history, its material characteristics, and its principal functions. The chapter weighs the Larkin Building against similar considerations of three European buildings in order to identify the ideas and qualities that all four architects shared while also demonstrating characteristics in Wright's building. It describes the Larkin Administration Building that was modern in the abstractness of its blocklike forms and its many innovations.
In the Buffalo Community, but Not of It
Authors: Cieślak Marta
Published: May 2021

This chapter cites that Europeans who migrated to the United States had the goal of securing industrial jobs in the rapidly growing Northeastern and Midwestern urban centers between 1871 and 1910. It talks about the sheer magnitude of the transatlantic wave that triggered a debate over who was a desirable and, more importantly, who was an undesirable immigrant. It also refers to the large number of immigrants that came from East Central and Southern Europe. The chapter mentions how several citizens perceived the European immigrants that settled in urban areas to be a threat to American cities and, by extension, to the American nation. It discusses the European settlement and its relationship to poverty spreading in urban industrial centers that became a key point in the intense debate over the new immigrants.
Rust Belt Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Özay Erkin
Published: May 2021

This chapter begins with a background on the demolition of Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin building in 1950 which proved ominous for Buffalo. It sketches Buffalo's impending socioeconomic decline by citing several landmark events from the decade, such as the relocation of the prominent Technical High School from the black East Side to the white West Side in 1954. It also follows five decades of decline that halved Buffalo's population and hastened its transformation into a rust belt cornerstone. The chapter focuses on Buffalo in the present time, which looks to refugee resettlement as a means to rejuvenate its distressed neighborhoods, starting with 11,000 refugees who have resettled in Buffalo since 2008. It stresses how Buffalo continues to receive the highest number of refugees in New York State, which afforded the city with a much-needed urban stimulus and jolted its lethargic public systems reeling from decades of regression.
Coda
Authors: Christensen Peter H.
Published: May 2021

This chapter mentions Nicolai Ouroussoff, former architecture critic for the New York Times, who published an editorial entitled “Saving Buffalo's Untold Beauty” at the peak of the 2008 financial crisis. It discusses how Ouroussoff depicted Buffalo as a place replete with architectural treasures and a history of experimentation that was in outsize proportion to its population, economic health, and the resources of its preservationists. It also examines Ouroussoff's article delighted many local officials and cemented some of the very clichés that have trapped Buffalo in a fugue of “ruin porn.” The chapter points out how Buffalo ardently remains a dynamic city that neither begs pity nor romance from its inhabitants. It highlights Buffalo's traits of being quotidian, emblematic, and archetypal as part of a larger effort to move beyond facile depictions of Buffalo and show how its lessons are transposable by being allegorical.
The Life of Cognition and the Cognition of Life (Kant)
Authors: Gailus Andreas
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the conceptualization of life as formative form around 1800. Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment is the first book in the German tradition to articulate the new dynamic notion of life as a convergence of mind and nature. For Kant, aesthetic experience is important because it involves an intensification of the life of the mind (including the social dimension of mind as sensus communis) and enables us to develop a regulative notion of organic life. Kant's claim is that to understand the peculiar organization of natural beings, we must view them as products of an intrinsic formative activity, and hence as in some way analogous to the mind's power of cognitive and perceptual synthesis, which we experience most vividly in our encounter with beauty. Aesthetic experience allows us to grasp the nature of human, or symbolic, life and its place within the natural world.
Metamorphoses of Form (Goethe)
Authors: Gailus Andreas
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the metamorphoses of form. Goethe's biological and literary writings of the 1790s radicalize Kant's insights. On the one hand, he emphasizes the “metamorphic” fluidity of both natural forms and human cognition; on the other, he stresses the erotic and social dimension of subjectivity. For Goethe, human life is singularly precarious because it is subject to libidinal investments and the unruliness of the imagination. To develop properly, human life must therefore be regularized by social forms that (re)direct its innate vitality — it must assume a second-order, socialized naturalness. Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship associates the creation of this second nature with liberal forms of governing, depicting liberalism's normative force as a necessary, if at times violent, supplement to human life. With Goethe, vitalism opens itself to biopower.
Enter the Hybrid (Kleist)
Authors: Gailus Andreas
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the radicalization of this violent dimension in Kleist. While Kant and Goethe model life as a self-organizing form, Heinrich von Kleist highlights its divided and conflictual nature, depicting it as driving beyond form into the territory of deformation and disarticulation. In Kleist, this anti-organicism manifests in a poetic practice that emphasizes both the self-interrupting power of language and the prosthetic character of human life. Whereas Kant's and Goethe's autopoetic models seek to reconcile art and life, Kleist's heteropoietics frames art as an artificially intensified mode of life: art exceeds ordinary life, not by providing it with a beautiful form, but by extracting and magnifying its capacity to exceed itself, to break its own form, to become hybrid.
Brains (Benn)
Authors: Gailus Andreas
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores modernist figurations of life in Gottfried Benn who developed his poetics through an engagement with and rejection of earlier models of vitalism. Benn's avant-garde Ronne novellas, written during World War I, deconstruct the Kantian belief in the mind's capacity to unify sensory data, replacing the latter's emphasis on formal unity with an emphasis on linguistic and bodily disarticulation. Himself a medical doctor, Benn writes literature in part as a pathology report, finding in the focus on disintegrating bodies and subjectivities an opening toward a new prose and therefore a new way of conceptualizing the human bios.
Getting Ahead
Authors: Howe Paul
Published: May 2021

This chapter assesses how the pervasive influence of the adolescent character provides insight into the workings of another sector of modern life relevant to us all: the economy. Less of a collective undertaking than politics, economic activity is guided primarily by individual decisions and actions in the free market system; so many of the relevant effects are seen first and foremost at the individual level. But these individual effects can multiply and cascade to generate patterns that do have important consequences for the general economic and social fabric. Emotions, misperceptions, intangible costs and benefits, influenced in many instances by underlying character traits, lead people to act in ways that the traditional models do not anticipate. As in other fields, it is only recently that some researchers have started to link personality to economic behavior in interesting and enlightening ways to dig deeper into what makes people tick when it comes to economic decision making and activity. When we combine some of these findings with ideas about the changing contours of character in the adolescent society, we can develop new understandings of some of the more salient economic trends of the past number of years.
Adolescence Alone?
Authors: Howe Paul
Published: May 2021

This chapter addresses some key forces reshaping society over the past century (or more) that have combined with the rise of adolescent character traits in interesting and often unexpected ways to produce the adolescent society we see all around us today. The critical development was the articulation and dissemination of a philosophy that rejects entrenched privilege and tradition in favor of individual freedom. Personal autonomy and freedom of choice for all — or more simply liberalism, in the classical sense of the term — became the defining principles of the modern age. Other leading thinkers seeking to understand the state of today's society focus less on abstract philosophical ideals and more on the material realities that shape our lives. One prominent perspective holds that the main force of change is capitalism, now the dominant economic system in most parts of the world. In thinking about other factors that can help us better understand the evolution of the adolescent society, there is one that deserves special extended attention: the dramatic expansion in educational opportunities for people of all backgrounds. One trend that has puzzled many observers is the long-term decline in political engagement even as education levels have risen steadily over time.
Patricians of Bukhara
Authors: Pickett James
Published: May 2021

This chapter identifies who created, recreated, and maintained the Persian cosmopolis. Islamic scholars were not the only patricians of Bukhara, and they cannot be understood outside of the larger ecosystem. They shared their elite status with merchants, competed for spiritual and cultural leadership with street preachers, and were reliant on a Turkic military elite for their wellbeing. No formal barriers existed between these categories, and non-scholarly patricians frequently invested their resources to educate themselves and become ulama. Even though there were many ways to wield influence in Bukhara (as in all societies), only the scholarly elite and the Turkic nobility were explicitly valorized as such, albeit by fundamentally distinct justifications. Merchants and preachers might also be considered patricians, but they lacked a formal place in the cosmopolis and were rhetorically subordinated to the twin pillars of the patriciate: Turkic nobility and the ulama.
Opportunity from Upheaval
Authors: Pickett James
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on different crises during the long nineteenth century that catalyzed new “dynasties” of scholars, allowing them to entrench their descendants in the state and nonstate institutions that provided resources and authority in their world. It looks at two families of scholars, both of whom came into prominence as a result of the political upheaval coinciding with the Manghit dynasty's rise to power. These two households provided services to the Turkic nobility that helped their patrons to justify their rule and extend it over new territories. In return, Manghit nobles provided the scholarly families with the resources necessary to perpetuate their legacy for over a century and a half. The chapter then considers the new geopolitical realities precipitated by the Russian subjugation of Bukhara in 1868 and how they led to the empowerment of a new crop of family dynasties alongside or in place of the old ones — albeit for a briefer duration, with the Bolshevik Revolution just around the corner.
The Sovereign and the Sage
Authors: Pickett James
Published: May 2021

This chapter assesses the ulama's relationship with state power. By the long nineteenth century, the ulama stood as a pillar of the state, limited though that state was. Islamic scholars systematically deployed their diverse Persianate skill set and leveraged Islamic knowledge on behalf of the Turkic nobility. Nevertheless, the ulama still envisioned the state as an Islamic state, and they carefully guarded their moral prerogative to speak for the religion both groups agreed had a total monopoly on politics and social life. Although in certain instances evidence exists of this most important of prerogatives — the authority to legitimately speak for religion — shifting in favor of the Turkic military elite, the ulama cultivated a spirit of moral independence and superiority to the state.
On Mimicry and Ukrainians
Authors: Sobol Valeria
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines Antonii Pogorel'sky's novel The Convent Graduate (1830–33), set in Ukraine. The novel mockingly plays with the clichés of the Gothic tradition to subtly point to the true threat — the “menace of mimicry,” to use Bhabha's terminology. It discusses Ukraine as the “other” as it introduces to the reader the exotic low classes of Ukraine, not fully assimilated into the Russian imperial identity. It discusses how The Convent Graduate offers several competing models of education and the resulting cultural identification. Ukrainian mimicry, ruthlessly satirized in the novel, exposes its very object, the Russian imperial self, as a simulacrum, and thus calls into question the Russian colonial strategy of assimilation.
Introduction
Authors: Bauman Chad M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter explains and theorizes anti-Christian discrimination and violence in India, including the global rise in anti-Christian hostility or increase in antireligious hostility and interreligious violence over the last decades. It highlights the vast majority of violence in contemporary India that targets Christians, such as the large-scale and deadly riots in Kandhamal. It also cites the occurrence of several small-scale incidents of violence against India's Christians every year. The chapter looks at the everyday forms of violence against Christians that go unnoticed, as well as the anti-Christian violence that garner international media attention and shock or mystify observers. It recounts the attack on half a dozen Catholic institutions in Delhi in December 2014 and January 2015 where several cases had anti-Christian sentiment as the prime motivation.
A Socio-cosmological Approach to Anti-Christian Violence
Authors: Bauman Chad M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes the distinctive nature of the constructivist approach to the analysis of Hindu–Christian conflict that is relative to the well-developed literature on ethnic and religious conflict. It explains how the constructivist approach differs from both the instrumentalist and essentialist approach to interreligious conflict. It also elaborates the conflict between Christian and Hindu groups in the instrumentalist view that occurs as a result of competition over material resources and political power. The chapter describes the conflict between groups in the essentialist view that occurs because of long-standing differences between Christians and Hindus in terms of ethnicity, religion, language, social custom, culture, and political governance. It explores the constructivist position that accepts the insight that human behavior is primarily driven by material and political interest.
Tropical Idylls
Authors: Charbonneau Oliver
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the pleasures and anxieties of American colonials as they negotiated landscapes significant with hazard. It reviews the writings of Charles Ivins and others that contain vivid depictions of how schismatic notions of the tropics and their inhabitants shaped colonial rule. It also describes the social environment of Mindanao-Sulu that laid bare the tension between the integrationist claims of the tutelary colonial state and the continued operation of racially exclusionist structures. The chapter mentions Outlook magazine journalist and playwright Atherton Brownell, who fawned over Zamboanga as a model of cleanliness and tropical picturesqueness. It notes empire builders in Mindanao-Sulu that looked to preestablished discourses on tropical architecture, sanitation, and urban planning for inspiration.
Moros in America
Authors: Charbonneau Oliver
Published: May 2021

This chapter talks about Moros and Americans negotiating an increasingly globalized world beyond colony and metropole. It mentions a vernacular dime novel about the St. Louis World's Fair published in 1904 titled Uncle Bob and Aunt Becky's Strange Adventures at the World's Great Exposition. It also describes how overseas colonies appeared to a skeptical metropolitan public and how cultural producers appropriately portrayed the America's foreign subjects. The chapter mentions the U.S. newspapers that followed the Moros closely as they met with presidents, performed for midwestern crowds, took in the Manhattan skyline, and embraced collegiate life. It cites the Moros' appearance in assorted fictions, such as comic operas, children's adventure stories, radio serials, and motion pictures that manufactured Muslim colonial subjects and presented them in varied ways to a curious public.
U.S. Guns Kill U.S. Nuns
Authors: Keeley Theresa
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the murders of the churchwomen and how Reagan officials' critiques, which revealed that intra-Catholic conflict had become an integral part of United States–Central America policy with Reagan's ascension to the White House. It looks at remarks that bolster the Salvadoran junta's reputation or diminish the murders' impact on the protest movement against U.S. policy. It also discusses that the murdered churchwomen symbolized the church's championing of the poor and a U.S. foreign policy that was morally corrupt and politically unsound for training and arming their killers. The chapter cites that two murdered Maryknollers were members of a Catholic order and represented a dangerous trajectory for U.S. foreign policy and the church. It elaborates how the U.S. government aligned with conservative U.S. and Central American Catholics and amplified their perspective.
Reagan and the White House’s Maryknoll Nun
Authors: Keeley Theresa
Published: May 2021

This chapter explains how Ronald Reagan's public diplomacy campaign reflected conservative Nicaraguan and U.S. Catholic viewpoints and language. It talks about the officials who worked with Catholic allies, including a former Maryknoll sister, that critique the Maryknoll and liberation theology in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. It also recounts Reagan's promotion as defender of the Nicaraguan Catholic Church to win support among conservative Catholics for U.S. policy and his reelection bid. The chapter discusses the White House's attempt to move the public focus from human rights in El Salvador to Nicaragua by alleging that the Sandinista government persecuted religion and was trying to create a fake church. It describes the public diplomacy campaign that involved cooperation with religious conservatives, including its design and execution that reflected conservative Catholic viewpoints and language.
The Soldiers of Rationality
Authors: Liston Noelle Molé
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the yearly demonstration organized by the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Pseudoscientific Claims (CICAP), in which the group stages a national protest against superstitious belief. It details how CICAP members identify as “soldiers of rationality” who protect Italy's credulous public, whom they see as victims of dangerously irrational and misguided beliefs. It also discusses CICAP's promotion of scientific knowledge and debunking of irrational convictions, which enables them to lump together witchcraft, 9/11 conspiracy theories, UFOs, and the Shroud of Turin. The chapter unravels the mystery of why CICAP has become urgent in contemporary Italy, a country known for its centuries-old belief in witchcraft, magic, and superstition. It cites the crisis that led to the rise and intensity of Italy's scientific skeptics that is not only economic and political but also epistemological.
Fluid Jurisdictions
Authors: Yahaya Nurfadzilah
Published: May 2021

This book tells the story of the Arab diaspora within the context of British and Dutch colonialism, unpacking the community's ambiguous embrace of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. The book looks at colonial legal infrastructure and discusses how it impacted, and was impacted by, Islam and ethnicity. But more important, it follows the actors who used this framework to advance their particular interests. The book explains why Arab minorities in the region helped to fuel the entrenchment of European colonial legalities: their itinerant lives made institutional records necessary. Securely stored in centralized repositories, such records could be presented as evidence in legal disputes. To ensure accountability down the line, Arab merchants valued notarial attestation land deeds, inheritance papers, and marriage certificates by recognized state officials. Colonial subjects continually played one jurisdiction against another, sometimes preferring that colonial legal authorities administer Islamic law — even against fellow Muslims. The book demonstrates the interplay between colonial projections of order and their realities, Arab navigation of legally plural systems in Southeast Asia and beyond, and the fraught and deeply human struggles that played out between family, religious, contract, and commercial legal orders.
Conclusion
Authors: Yahaya Nurfadzilah
Published: May 2021

This chapter recounts how the members of the Arab diaspora attempted legal arbitrage under colonial rule. It analyses the members' expansion and modification of Islamic law, while at other times they policed the boundaries of Islamic law even as mere translators. The chapter tells the story of the surprising involvement of the outsider — the Arab diaspora — in aiding colonialists to accumulate legislative power. The pace of change from the mid-nineteenth century onward was brisk, and the Arab diaspora capitalized on it while attempting to navigate uncertainty and risk. This chapter also investigates how Arab diaspora in Southeast Asia were able to influence the shape of law to a great extent. It takes a look on how concessions to Arabs in the Straits Settlements, in the form of the Mohamedan Marriage Ordinance, and their appointments as members of the Mohamedan Advisory Board after the Sepoy Mutiny subsequently tied them more closely to the British colonial government, along with the rest of the Muslim population in the colony.
Nighthawks
Authors: Fallon Katie
Published: May 2021

This chapter details how the author saw nighthawks while bird-watching in Lake Perez in Stone Valley. Nighthawks and their relatives — whip-poor-wills, oilbirds, frogmouths, pauraques, and nightjars — are odd, secretive, mostly crepuscular or nocturnal birds. On the wing, a common nighthawk is acrobatic and incredibly sleek. In the hand, however, its wings seem too long, its body squat and strange. A nighthawk's tiny black beak hides an enormous mouth that resembles a bullfrog's when it opens. Because they eat and drink while flying, this oversized mouth is useful for trapping insects and skimming lake water. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that these unusual birds used their huge mouths for another purpose: drinking milk from the teats of goats and sheep under the cover of night. According to the lore, a goat suckled by a nightjar met an unfortunate end — blindness and then death. Of course, the birds do not engage in this behavior, but the belief earned their family the name Caprimulgidae, or “goatsucker.”
Spotted Owls
Authors: Nixon Rob
Published: May 2021

This chapter looks at the author's experience looking for Mexican spotted owls in Scheelite Canyon in the Huachucas. Like most people living in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the author had never heard a spotted owl's high-pitched four-note bark. The one-and-a-half pound owl became an inadvertent celebrity. The spotted owl emerged as an indicator species not just of forest health, but of a fevered nation's political temperature. The bird's fate provoked legal fisticuffs between two federal agencies, the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service. By the early 1990s, the spotted owl seemed to have migrated opportunistically from the ancient forests it had favored historically to a whole new ecological niche in the federal court system.
Crane, Water, Change
Authors: Byl Christine
Published: May 2021

This chapter reflects on how the author witnessed the migration of sandhill cranes. The author's neighborhood is a rural subdivision; pocketed with wetlands, it is also a home for birds. The chapter then discusses three things that the author has learned about cranes. First, the birds that migrate over the town of Healy are lesser sandhill cranes, of fifteen crane species worldwide, the only one that breeds in Alaska. Second, cranes, like most creatures, have multiple calls. Third, the Athabascan word for crane is dildoola, lilting the onomatopoeia of their song, and the word for cranberry is dildoola baba, meaning “crane's food.” The author also argues that one cannot write about sandhill cranes without writing about wetlands.
One Single Hummingbird
Authors: Knapp Eli J.
Published: May 2021

This chapter narrates the author's quest to see a lucifer hummingbird. To better appreciate bird diversity across the United States, the author brought twelve college students to Texas for the culminating week of their intensive ornithology course. In field guides, lucifer hummingbirds did not seem too different from the dozens of ruby-throated hummingbirds they had seen in the east. Nor were its proclivities different. Like the other twenty-four hummingbirds that spend time in the United States, the lucifer specialized in drinking nectar. More noteworthy was its name; lucifer means “light-bearing” in Latin, likely a reference to its iridescent gorget. That, and according to one dubious source, a group of lucifers is called an inferno.
Nest Watcher
Authors: Cerulean Susan
Published: May 2021

This chapter details how the author began to watch over wild birds along the north Florida coast. The author was a volunteer steward, and her first assignment was on a bit of sand, a spoil island south of the Apalachicola bridge. There, the author was to keep track of nesting activity by least terns, black skimmers, certain small plovers, or American oystercatchers. The island had historically hosted a seasonal congregation of 700 nesting pairs of brown pelicans. But after a large quantity of spoil was dredged from the river channel and heaped onto the island one winter, the pelicans abandoned the site and had never returned. Another year, more than 200 least terns and a handful of gull-billed terns had nested on the fresh spoil. It was not clear whether pelicans would return, or the terns — or neither.
My Bird Problem
Authors: Franzen Jonathan
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes the author's experience while birding in South Texas. There is no better American place for birds in February than South Texas. In three days, the author had seen fetchingly disheveled anis flopping around on top of shrubs, Jurassic-looking anhingas sun-drying their wings, squadrons of white pelicans gliding downriver on nine-foot wingspans, a couple of caracaras eating a road-killed king snake, an elegant trogon and a crimson-collared grosbeak, and two exotic robins all lurking on a postage-stamp Audubon Society tract in Weslaco. The only frustration was the author's number one trip target bird, the black-bellied whistling-duck. A tree nester, strangely long-legged, with a candy-pink bill and a bold white eye ring, the whistling-duck was one of those birds in the field guide which the author could not quite believe existed.
The Impossible Task of Designating Execution Sites
Authors: Taïeb Emmanuel
Published: May 2021

This chapter talks about execution sites. The political desire to alter executionary rituals can be seen in the choices made regarding execution sites, which were increasingly subject to a process of rationalization that moved executions ever closer to the prison walls in order to stop their public spread. The chapter discusses the executionary transformation of the urban landscape by means of a portable guillotine and a single, traveling executioner; the statutory regime for choosing execution sites, and setting the stage for executions once it was confirmed that no presidential pardon would be granted. It further talks about the symbolism found in execution sites, and the logical displacement off the death penalty thanks to the siren call of the prison. Execution sites moved from temporary places to uncertain places with legislation moving execution sites closer to prisons, which saw the naturalization of penitentiary dominance mostly because of the prison presenting a solution to the unsolved location problem of execution sites.
Comedy in an Age of Close Reading
Authors: McRae Calista
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on John Berryman, who situates himself at the center of what he calls “the world” and uses everything else in the world to define his self. The chapter includes a poet reacting to the critical atmospheres in which Berryman developed, which is described as having been spoken by someone who seems to have chosen the wrong form and genre. The chapter also examines how Berryman flouts the canonical expectations of mid-century formalist criticism and suggests how he breaks and defaces his form to depict an unusually wide range of mental states. The chapter points out an iridescence between a lyric reading of The Dream Songs and the ways Berryman undermines that reading. It then explains how Berryman transcribes the less-than-perfect mind, such as its irrationality and obsessions.
Robert Lowell
Authors: McRae Calista
Published: May 2021

This chapter looks at the ways in which being alienated from and encumbered with one's self, of inevitably being caught in a role, can be funny. It discusses how Robert Lowell wants to shed the way he sounds, the thoughts he gravitates toward, the reputation he has, and the physical brain he fears and depends on. It also mentions Lowell being at odds with his own style as he keeps changing style and undercuts the one he is working in. The chapter refers to Lord Weary's Castle and Day by Day, describing the act of writing about the self that is loaded with one's extreme instability, predictableness, and self-dramatization. It then talks about Lowell's frequent revolutions of form which question the tonalities of humor that change when poetry loses the guarantees and obligations of rhyme and meter.
A. R. Ammons
Authors: McRae Calista
Published: May 2021

This chapter illustrates A. R. Ammons's lyric ideals as sources of comedy for poets who are less firmly situated in institutional traditions and mid-century lyric practices. It probes how Ammons let his poetry fall short of the aspirations of canonical lyric decorum, of more experimental movements like Objectivism and non-literary communication. It also includes the explicit enactments of failure found in Ammons's first published book titled Ommateum, which strives for vatic power and finds the glimmerings of a ludic style. The chapter discusses Tape as Ammons's initial attempt to convey insignificant thought processes and emphasize his growing interest in an explicitly comic mental life grounded in the failures of intellect and communication. The chapter then considers poetry of Tommy Pico, who alludes to Ammons and extends some of his techniques.
Terrance Hayes
Authors: McRae Calista
Published: May 2021

This chapter presents Terrance Hayes as a contemporary poet who continues to implement and push back against lyric reading as handed down and evolving from the New Critics. It recounts the experiments of Hayes's first book that began with a simple desire to challenge, impress, and piss off the people. It mentions how Hayes's work continues to have the ambivalent self-consciousness that shapes how one writes about one's self. The chapter talks about Hayes's main comic iridescence between expression and something beyond expression. It looks at centrifugal effects of Haye's poetry that seem in excess of a poem's meaning as it affirms a view of both a mind and a lyric as taking in more than their most visible apparent subjects.
Under the “Absolute” Power of National Socialism, 1938–41
Authors: Geheran Michael
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyzes the massive deterioration of the situation of Jewish veterans after 1938 and the intense debates between the higher echelons of the Wehrmacht, Schutzstaffel (SS), and Nazi Party officials over the remnants of the special status that they, at this stage, still enjoyed. It also examines Jewish veterans' ongoing attempts to preserve their honor as prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps following the mass incarcerations after Kristallnacht. As they were rounded up, physically and verbally assaulted, and deported to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, Jewish veterans not only relied on their military training and memories of the war to overcome the ordeal; they also remained committed to preserving their honor and their dignity. This also held true for those Jewish veterans deported to the ghettos of Lodz, Minsk, and Riga in late 1941.
From the New Monastery to the Valley of Light, 1115–1124
Authors: McGuire Brian Patrick
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines how Saint Bernard founded Clairvaux Abbey. Bernard's desire was to save souls by bringing them to the monastery and keeping them there. He confided that his only concern was “to have a mother's love for every soul.” The theme of motherhood returns time and again in Bernard's writings and shows his attention to his brothers. In the anecdotes about the beginnings of Clairvaux, it is possible to see who Bernard was becoming. The isolated figure of the New Monastery was now father abbot and mother caregiver of a community of men. He expected his foundation to grow and prosper, but he was also afraid of failure. Like every monastic founder from the Desert Fathers onwards, Bernard faced the possibility that his way of life would come to nothing. But Bernard was attached to a movement where the individual monastery gained sustenance from a network. Bernard takes his place here as part of a monastic institution.
“According to God’s Law”
Authors: Moyer Paul B.
Published: May 2021

This chapter explains why some witch suspects went free while others went to the gallows, by dissecting the terminal phase of many witchcraft cases. It reviews the judicial process that transformed informal suspicions against the accused into formal, criminal prosecutions. It also mentions Elizabeth Seager, who was set free after being acquitted of occult crimes three times. The chapter elaborates how Seager's experience is considered a reminder that court proceedings were a critical component of witch-hunting. It reviews Seager's odyssey through the legal system that involved the arrest warrants, indictments, and trials familiar to any criminal prosecution and notes it as one of the longest and most complex judicial process among most witch suspects.
How to Think about Advocacy
Authors: Jurkovich Michelle
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on contemporary international anti-hunger advocacy, which describes the nature of contemporary campaigns across top international anti-hunger organizations. It introduces dominant human rights models, namely Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink's “boomerang model” and Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink's “spiral model.” It also provides an alternative model of advocacy, the “buckshot model,” which describes and explains advocacy around hunger and the right to food. The chapter identifies the hidden assumptions behind dominant human rights models and explores their limitations by using the hunger case to set up a contrast with more-often-studied civil and political rights campaigns. It reviews interviews with international anti-hunger activists that were completed by 2015, which reflected contemporary campaigns and efforts until 2014.
Deserters
Authors: Bennette Rebecca Ayako
Published: May 2021

This chapter probes the reality of agency and space for dissent that medicalization offered to soldiers during World War I. It explains how the tendency to refer deserters for psychiatric observation and treatment frequently served to shield the soldiers from the full brunt of military discipline if they committed overt acts of disobedience. It also reviews the contemporary understanding of the boundary between mental illness in the actual sense and those who were not truly sick, even if they did not allegedly exhibit complete mental fitness. The chapter reveals the flexibility shown by wartime psychiatrists in determining issues of mental competence for transgressions of discipline related to desertion and the similar charge of going AWOL. It describes how soldiers expressed dissent and avoided significant unwanted involvement in the war, such as direct fighting.
All Possible Spaces
Authors: Lutz Amy S. F.
Published: May 2021

This chapter emphasizes how Jonah never had friendships with other children, even after being taken to toddler playgroups, Gymboree, and Sally's Music Circle. It notes Robert Selman's five-level theory of friendship that is based on neurotypical development. It also examines that the author's assumptions about what friendship looks like were based on the interactions of her children and memories of her own early relationships. The chapter describes Jonah's most meaningful relationships, which have been with paid caregivers who have worked with him at home or school. It refers to philosophers who have wrestled with the definition and significance of a friendly relationship since Aristotle observed that without friends no one would choose to live.
Defending Amelia Norman
Authors: Miller Julie
Published: May 2021

This chapter introduces Amelia Norman, a twenty-five-year-old woman that was born in New Jersey and known as a servant, seamstress, and sometime prostitute. It recounts how Amelia failed to kill thirty-one-year-old Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant and her lover in the spring of 1841 during the depression that followed the economic collapse known as the Panic of 1837. It also describes Amelia's trial, which attracted the excited attention of the penny press, particularly Bennett's Herald, which thrived on sensation. The chapter explores what attracted the attention of the press, the public, and coterie of influential supporters to the would-be murderess. It mentions the American Female Moral Reform Society as one of Amelia's supporters, which had been working since the 1830s to criminalize “seduction.”
Harlot’s Fate
Authors: Miller Julie
Published: May 2021

This chapter reviews the later years and final fates of many of the players in Amelia Norman's story, such as Mike Walsh, the Democratic politician and journalist who had championed Amelia. It mentions Amelia's celebrated jail mate, George Wilkes, who capitalized on his experience in the Tombs and produced his prison memoir, Mysteries of the Tombs. It also traces Frederick Tallmadge's reputation after he became the principal judge of the Court of Sessions and struggled in vain to persuade the jurors to ignore the context of Amelia's crime. The chapter points out how Amelia's story is still remembered in studies of abortion, prostitution, seduction in law and literature, the “unwritten law,” female murderers, and in studies and biographies of Lydia Maria Child. It includes Lydia's letter to a friend, indicating Amelia had come to a bad end.
Enter the Syrians
Authors: Baylouny Anne Marie
Published: May 2021

This chapter presents each of Jordan and Lebanon's refugee policies at the start of the Syrian exodus and state legal obligations under international treaties. It analyzes the effects of the refugees on Jordan and Lebanon in the context of past incapacities by presenting conclusions from the refugee literature about the effects of forced migration. It also examines the numerous changes in rent, jobs, inflation, the public services of health care, education, and waste removal, and resource provisions of electricity and water, using available data. The chapter discusses disputes about data and details the benefits that accrued to some citizens as a result of the presence of the Syrians and international organizations. It recounts how the Western world awoke to the Syrian refugee crisis four years into the Syrian civil war, when Syrians arrived on Greek shores as refugees fleeing.
All Roads Lead to Rhodes
Authors: Rosenthal Laura J.
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the reopened theater with particular attention to William Davenant. He transformed English theater in significant ways. Restoration theater artists not only intensified onstage explorations of an increasingly interconnected global network, but also defended the revived theater as more sophisticated than a posited barbaric past. Further, they understood theater as a mechanism for national refinement. Davenant became the most successful advocate for this vision, arguing for the positive effects of theater through its capacity to help England emerge from its crude provincial past and match the more advanced European and Asian empires. The Siege of Rhodes transformed theatrical possibilities, featuring moveable scenery, a new genre (the heroic), and the professional actress. At the moment of the Stuart restoration, after defeat and exile, it also marked the first English stage representation of an admirable Ottoman Empire. Davenant's production flattered, but also revealed the vulnerabilities of the restored monarch's cosmopolitics. Even though the play features the defeat of Christians at the hands of Ottomans, The Siege does not promote fear or hatred, but rather envy of this empire's sophistication and power. Ottomanphilia became fashionable in the Restoration. Charles II wore Eastern clothing to the opening of Roger Boyle's play Mustapha. Davenant's immensely popular Siege of Rhodes inaugurated, a new form of cosmopolitanism that promoted the widespread consumption of global objects and ideas as signs of sophistication.