bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Segregation and Space in the Modernist City
Authors: Gardner Andrew M.
Published: October 2024

This chapter assesses the enclaving and segregation of transnational labor migrants in the urban landscape of the city, considering the overlapping hierarchies that characterize the diverse population of humans resident on the Qatari Peninsula. The chapter demonstrates how transnational labor migrants' place in the city is shaped by a variety of different forces and processes, some of which are clearly the result of enduring structural features of the kafala. These different forces include several that are imposed on migrants as a condition of their existence in a land foreign to them: when accommodation is provided by their employer, they often have no say at all about their placement in the urban landscape, and at certain times and in certain places, their mobility in the urban landscape is actively inhibited. Other forces stem directly from migrants' agency: they value and oftentimes need to connect with culturally and linguistically familiar compatriots, and when market forces are at work, their place in the urban landscape is shaped by the economic inequalities that underpin their presence in Qatar. None of these forces typically operates in isolation. Instead, they intersect and overdetermine the resulting spatial segregation and spatial distinction.
Compounds, Walls, and Cultural Sovereignty
Authors: Gardner Andrew M.
Published: October 2024

This chapter begins by addressing the housing compounds where transnational labor migrants reside in Doha. In 1936, the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) constructed the first set of homes at Dhahran to accommodate American employees and their families. While Aramco may have built the first modern compounds in Arabia, the form of this habitation and the cultural segregation it manifests at least resonate with regional traditions and customary form. In Doha, a city replete with foreigners, the sea of compounds sprawls to the horizon in many portions of the city's suburban landscape. Another fascinating feature of this suburban belt, however, is the coagulation of Qatari citizens in this same landscape. Paying attention to space, the chapter considers how incorporeal foreign matter is also compartmentalized in urban space. It looks at gender and the education system in Qatar, the prohibition of alcohol, and land ownership. Finally, it looks at the concept of cultural sovereignty.
An Urban Spatial Discourse
Authors: Gardner Andrew M.
Published: October 2024

This chapter presents an urban spatial discourse, starting with a discussion of the expanding unit of urban development observable in Doha's recent history. Those units of urban development can be most readily conveyed via a handful of emblematic examples drawn from Doha's urban landscape. The chapter looks at the Msheireb Project, Asian City, and The Pearl, which is the Qatari example of the offshore residential developments for which the Gulf states are renowned. It then turns to an “archaeology” of that urban spatial discourse—a discussion of the historical conditions and the ideological structures that shaped the emergence of this urban spatial discourse. The chapter argues that this urban spatial discourse is the template for the governance of the abundant “foreign matter” present in the city.
Introduction
Authors: Peers Glenn
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores how, three centuries before Galileo's telescopic discoveries in 1610, Byzantine humanist Demetrius Triclinius and his assistant John Astrapas conducted their own investigations into celestial observations. Though Triclinius's findings were not scientific breakthroughs like Galileo's, his experiments and manuscripts introduced a device that enhanced vision and revealed the mechanism of seeing. The chapter traces how the Byzantine mirror evolved from a simple tool to a medium through which humanity could understand its place in the universe. The chapter reviews Triclinius's recorded observations emphasizing the importance of media in representing reality, showing that the moon's image was grounded in reflective air and mirrored human forms. The moon's image, central to Byzantine thought, resonates with contemporary media theory, highlighting how representation shapes human existence.
Monk-Making in Time
Authors: Peers Glenn
Published: October 2024

This chapter looks at time, monks, and manuscripts, highlighting how each medium influences and intertwines with the others. Monastic enterprises in the Byzantine world, particularly through typika, are shown to be complex systems that marshal resources and control subject populations. The chapter reviews the manuscript in the Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi on Mt Athos, commissioned by Procopius Chantzames in 1346 and painted by John Argyrus, which provides a rare glimpse into monastic book culture in the kingdom of Trebizond. It details how the manuscript of the Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi created a Christian universe for its monastic subjects, modeling new, totalizing chronologies with its impressive illustrative cycle featuring saints' portraits, labors of the month, and zodiac signs. By manufacturing time through images and text, the chapter exemplifies how cultural techniques measure and allot time, making it a machine of invisible time-making where only its time is imaginable and livable.
Mirror as Media and Triclinius’s Man in the Moon
Authors: Peers Glenn
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines a late Byzantine moment of discovering the human in the moon, and consequently on earth, through the use of a nearly invisible mirror. This media-event, involving Demetrius Triclinius and John Astrapas in Thessaloniki, revealed a human form on the moon, which was a reflection of the human form on earth. It discusses Astrapas' documentation of the discovery of the human form on the moon in a fifteenth-century manuscript. The chapter delves into the long history of lunar speculation and the location of the human vis-à-vis the moon, emphasizing that the medium of representation is crucial for storing, representing, and communicating these findings. It illustrates how media, as described by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, emerge from interactions predating their conceptualization, ultimately serving as the Byzantine anthropotechnic nonpareil.
Headwaters
Authors: Van Noy Rick
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the origins and significance of the Delaware River, emphasizing its complex beginnings from creeks, springs, and snowmelt in the Catskill and Pocono mountains. It considers the Delaware River as being historically significant since Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage, as it provided drinking water for millions and served as the longest undammed river in the East. The Delaware River was once known to the Lenape people as Lenape Sipu and to Dutch settlers as Viskill, “great fish river,” eventually named Delaware after Thomas West, the Baron de la Warr. The chapter recounts how the Delaware interlaces with history and modern life, shaping towns and inspiring writers like Henry David Thoreau, who celebrated its liberating influence. The chapter intertwines personal reflections and experiences, demonstrates how the Delaware River remains a constant yet evolving presence and shapes the landscape and the lives connected to it.
Rift
Authors: Van Noy Rick
Published: October 2024

This chapter starts with a description of a serene morning on the Delaware River, where dawn brought a bright feeling and the steady flow of water that marked how far the author had journeyed. It notes the slight drop in temperature, which was a welcome relief as the author took stock of his dwindling supplies and prepared a simple breakfast of oatmeal and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Leaving his dog Sully ashore, the author paddled peacefully, interrupted only by distant car sounds across the river. The chapter discusses how he reflected on local history along the Old Mine Road and pondered the area's past inhabitants and ongoing community tensions. Throughout the day, the author encountered familiar landmarks and engaged with local residents, all while navigating the river's natural beauty and reflecting on contemporary issues like politicized public health measures.
Falls
Authors: Van Noy Rick
Published: October 2024

This chapter highlights the author's observation of the tranquil scene from above, spying an empty boat tied to the dock below, remnants of rainwater and mud hinting at its recent use. As morning light casts a soft glow over the gray-green river, the author prepares for the final leg of a reflective journey. The chapter details how the author left behind most gear and packed essentials including a water bottle, coffee, and a bag with camera and notebooks. Reflecting on historical accounts of Trenton's past, the author explores Rotary Island, formerly Park Island, a site rich in indigenous artifacts and local lore. The Delaware River's role as a nexus of commerce and community growth along the East Coast parallels reflections on personal resilience and environmental stewardship.
The Colonial Transport Problem
Authors: Denning Andrew
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the complexities of colonial transport and its role in European colonialism, as reflected in a 1931 speech by Charles Maître-Devallon. Maître-Devallon emphasized that European nations had assumed both moral and material responsibilities for their colonies, aiming to advance civilization and production. The chapter explores the belief that transportation was synonymous with civilization and was echoed by various European figures and institutions, underscoring the high stakes of the transport problem. The chapter mentions colonial officials and scholars who viewed geography as a key factor in the success of colonial projects and linked mobility, infrastructure, and civilization. It discusses how the paradoxical focus on both settlement and movement shaped European understandings of Africa and influenced their approaches to the colonial transport problem.
Roads before Cars in French Madagascar
Authors: Denning Andrew
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores General Joseph Gallieni's utilization of infrastructure to “Frenchify” Madagascar, demonstrating how colonial transport projects were central to European colonialism. It highlights Gallieni's efforts to construct a modern transport network that were aimed to transform Madagascar into a French territory and to overcome the logistical difficulties of governing an expansive colony. Gallieni's and his successor Victor Augagneur's initiative facilitated movement and communication, dismantled precolonial political structures, and imposed French control. The chapter notes how roads became a tool for the French to extract resources, enforce labor, and assert their civilizing mission, marking a significant shift in Madagascar's political and social landscape. It also underscores how infrastructure projects were both a means to control the colony and a reflection of the broader European imperial ideology.
Cars without Roads in German East Africa
Authors: Denning Andrew
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses Paul Graetz's ambitious automotive expedition in Africa before World War I, which exemplifies the entrepreneurial imperialism of the time. Graetz, a former member of the German Schutztruppe in East Africa, became frustrated with the colonial administration's preference for railways and instead envisioned a future for motor vehicles in the colonies. The chapter recounts Graetz's expedition from German East Africa to German Southwest Africa and through various British territories, which challenged the perception of Africa as impassible and inhospitable. The chapter describes Graetz's approach, which was less about building new roads and more about utilizing existing paths, offering a cheaper and more adaptable method of colonial expansion. Graetz's detailed documentation of his journey provides critical insights into the early intersection of personal adventure, technological prowess, and imperial ambitions in the context of automotive empire.
The French Model
Authors: Denning Andrew
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the development of Route Nationale 1 in Algeria and the French model of automotive empire that sought to address both infrastructural and socioecological challenges. It describes the seasonal fluctuations of the Oued M'zi near Laghouat that posed significant obstacles to traffic, prompting French officials to prioritize constructing a bridge to ensure reliable passage and bolster Laghouat's economic and touristic potential. The French administration viewed the construction project as a demonstration of European superiority, aiming to civilize Algerians through encounters with modern infrastructure. The chapter contrasts the French emphasis on road construction with the British preference for railways, underscoring the varied colonial strategies and their socio-political implications. In French Africa, roads symbolized a civilizing mission that intertwined development with control and shaped both the environment and social relations to align with European imperial ideals.
The Italian Model
Authors: Denning Andrew
Published: October 2024

This chapter illustrates how roads, symbolic of colonial power and progress, became targets of violence during conflicts. It recounts the Ethiopian attack on the Gondrand labor camp near Mai Lala on February 13, 1936, that resulted in the deaths of seventy-six Italians. The Mai Lala massacre served as a propaganda tool for the Fascist regime to justify its colonial aggression by framing the conflict as a battle against barbarism. The chapter details how the Mai Lala massacre underscored the importance of roads in the Italian war effort and colonial strategy, which shared similarities with the French model of automotive empire but was distinguished by Fascist Italy's emphasis on roads as symbols of civilization and Roman heritage. Roads were central to Italian colonial policies and reflected a broader European colonial ambition to transform African landscapes and societies through infrastructure.
The Lives and Afterlives of Automotive Empire
Authors: Denning Andrew
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines a 1943 Nazi audit of European colonial infrastructure, highlighting the critical view that effective economic assimilation of Africa required a developed transport network. Nazi officials concluded that roads were crucial for extending European power into the African interior, echoing the strategies of earlier colonial powers like France and Italy. It describes roads and vehicles that served areas of European settlement, leaving much of rural Africa disconnected. The chapter examines how the audit underscored persistent challenges, including vast spaces, climate, and fuel shortages, and is compounded by competition and fragmented colonial administration. The audit report called for a coordinated, pan-African transport network to overcome obstacles that seemed unachievable within the existing colonial frameworks.
A Just Future
Authors: Barton Nimisha
Published: October 2024

From a global pandemic to a national reckoning with anti-Blackness, the 2020 historical conjuncture brutally revealed the impact of structural inequalities on historically marginalized communities and galvanized college students, diversity officers, and educators on a scale not seen since the 1960s. In so doing, it exposed the unfinished business of the civil rights era and the limits of diversity and inclusion reforms. The time has now come to create a more just future for the most marginalized community members at higher education institutions. To do so, we must share a common understanding of where we have been, what went wrong, and how to get back on track. This book draws on abolitionist frameworks of social change to provide a bold, comprehensive guide to abolitionism in education, not only for diversity, equity, and inclusion practitioners but also higher education leaders and faculty. As a result, the book provides new values, tools, and mindsets to address—and redress—ongoing forms of oppression that thrive on college campuses.
Introduction
Authors: Barton Nimisha
Published: October 2024

This introductory chapter looks into the trouble of higher education with diversity and inclusion efforts. The pandemic tested university leadership while also unveiling the impact of wider structural inequalities on students from historically marginalized backgrounds. Historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs) were forged in the crucible of white supremacy, an ideology justifying the conquest, enslavement, and oppression of nonwhite peoples whom white Europeans deemed intellectually and culturally inferior. Over time, HWCUs accumulated centuries of exclusivist traditions, structures, and practices. The chapter discusses the inarguable obligation of HWCUs to help eliminate societal inequalities within the country that they helped create over the centuries.
Origins
Authors: Barton Nimisha
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses modern colleges and universities shedding light on the notions of white settler colonialism and Atlantic slavery. It notes that colonial institutions of higher education functioned as part of a wider strategy of colonial domination. Colonial colleges also produced increasingly racialized discourse about degraded Natives that drove its leaders and alumni to wage war against them. Moreover, higher education expanded at the same time as the peak of the African slave trade. The chapter explains that settler colonialism and anti-Blackness run deep in today's colleges and universities, enabling racist institutional traditions, practices, and cultures to endure.
Turning Points
Authors: Barton Nimisha
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on the efforts to keep the interests of marginalized students on the institutional agenda and stay relevant throughout the last two decades of the twentieth century. To accomplish their goals, student activists of the Black campus movement turned their attention toward building community among themselves through conferences and national student networks across the country. The chapter notes the spread of racial affinity centers and minority affairs offices. It cites that the 1978 Bakke v. Regents of California decision marked the beginning of the end of the progressive era of higher education. By the early 2000s, “diversity” replaced terms like institutional racism to survive the political storm that engulfed universities.
Diversity Practitioners and Institutional Whiteness
Authors: Barton Nimisha
Published: October 2024

This chapter looks into diversity practitioners in line with the notion of institutional whiteness. Diversity practitioners support students in critical ways, but they also increasingly make up for institutional shortfalls. The power-blind diversity regime feeds institutional whiteness, which constrains diversity practitioners at all levels. Thus, the regime prevents historically white colleges and universities from responding to the imperatives to change. The chapter highlights how cultures of institutional whiteness will always limit what diversity professionals can do, referencing how diversity practitioners are reduced to low-level microaggression managers since they operate within an ecosystem where structural racism cannot be named.
Introduction
Authors: Weiner Daniela R. P.
Published: October 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how serious discussions about how to teach Fascist and Nazi crimes were taking place soon after the end of the Second World War. In many cases school history textbooks were driving these discussions forward. Indeed, textbooks framed contemporary history and schoolbooks helped young people understand the Fascist/Nazi past in Italy and the Germanys, long before the public recognized “the Holocaust” as a distinct concept. Most historians, when considering European Holocaust memory, have focused on sources like speeches or public commemorations. This book challenges this temporal scheme and instead argues that great educational strides were made in the process of coming to terms with the past during the 1950s and early 1960s. It proposes both a methodological and a temporal rethinking of the narratives surrounding the development of European Holocaust memory.
“History as the Crux of Our Problem”
Authors: Weiner Daniela R. P.
Published: October 2024

This chapter investigates how history instruction was a major problem for the Allied occupiers and local German reformers. Because history tended to be more heavily inflected with Nazi ideology than mathematics, creating new history books for schools represented a more arduous task. Some of the occupation zones forbade teaching of history for a time. Even when history instruction resumed, the Weimar-era textbooks that were used were deeply unsatisfactory to all involved. The chapter looks at several collaborations between occupiers and German educators aimed at reforming history education. It argues that the Allies found retaining German educational infrastructure so unacceptable that more dramatic reforms to history textbooks were possible. The years 1945–1949 were undeniably a flashpoint, transforming how the Nazi past would be taught for years to come.
Early Grapplings
Authors: Weiner Daniela R. P.
Published: October 2024

This chapter assesses how Italy, East Germany, and West Germany staked out different paths when it came to representation of Nazi crimes against the Jews. Italian textbooks were almost completely mum on the topic until the educational reforms of the early to mid-1960s and the new textbook series that accompanied these reforms. East Germany was never silent. In the socialist state, contemporary history was emphasized from the start and history textbooks discussed Nazi crimes against Jews. Although East German textbooks employed discourse that bundled Jewish victims with other victim groups, they provided specific discussion of Jewish Holocaust victims from the beginning. But as in the Italian case, there was an upswing in attention to Nazi crimes in the East German books of the 1960s. In contrast, West German textbooks were not exactly silent during the 1950s, but there were radical changes to how textbooks discussed Jewish victims and national complicity during the early to mid-1960s.
Redeeming the State
Authors: Weiner Daniela R. P.
Published: October 2024

This chapter addresses the formation of resistance narratives in the Italian, East German, and West German contexts. The resistance narrative served a dual purpose. All three states believed that teaching young people about the resistance would allow them to emulate these heroes and therefore take on an appropriately democratic mindset, necessary for the postwar world. More practically, the resistance narrative also allowed postfascist states to deflect complicity for wartime crimes by presenting themselves as heirs to the resisters. However, the resistance did not play exactly the same role in Italian and German textbooks. Although there was public ambivalence toward the resistance in both Italy and West Germany during the early postwar years, it can be argued that in both German states the Allied occupiers and postwar politicians had made it clear that the Nazis were irrevocably “evil,” while the resisters were to be perceived as “good.” Italy, however, struggled with a more ambivalent legacy. Because of the divided memory of Italian partisans and general Italian uneasiness regarding teaching contemporary history, the resistance did not play as large a role in Italian textbooks until the early 1960s.
Ambivalent Pleasures
Authors: Taylor Scott K.
Published: October 2024

During the early modern period, psychotropic drugs like sugar, chocolate, tobacco, tea, coffee, distilled spirits like gin and rum, and opium either arrived in western Europe for the first time or were newly available as everyday commodities. This book shows that these substances embodied Europeans' anxieties about race and empire, religious strife, shifting notions of class and gender roles, and the moral implications of urbanization and global trade. The book tracks the emerging understanding of addiction; fears about the racial, class, and gendered implications of using these soft drugs (including that consuming them would make users more foreign); and the new forms of sociability that coalesced around their use. Even as Europeans' moral concerns about the consumption of these drugs fluctuated, the physical and sensory experiences of using them remained a critical concern, anticipating present-day rhetoric and policy about addiction to drugs and alcohol.
Stained with Spots of Human Blood
Authors: Taylor Scott K.
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on sugar to explore stimulants and their engagement of the senses. It highlights sugar's role as a sweetener that made the consumption of bitter drinks like chocolate, coffee, and tea possible in Europe. Unlike other new soft drugs, sugar remained uncontroversial until the late eighteenth century, when antislavery activists like Thomas Trotter targeted it to end the transatlantic slave trade, believing that eliminating the demand for sugar would reduce the need for enslaved labor in the Caribbean. The chapter recounts how the boycott of sugar brought women into politics due to their control over household sugar use. While antislavery activists condemned the filthiness and offensive sensory effects of psychoactive drugs like chocolate and tobacco, sugar held an irresistible allure of pleasure and created a tension between appeal and disgust that characterized European engagement with all exotic drugs.
What Work Means
Authors: Strauss Claudia
Published: October 2024

This book goes beyond the stereotypes and captures the diverse ways Americans view work as a part of a good life. Dispelling the notion of Americans as mere workaholics, the book presents a more nuanced perspective. While some live to work, others prefer a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic that is conscientious but preserves time for other interests. The study's participants often enjoyed their jobs without making work the focus of their life. These findings challenge laborist views of waged work as central to a good life as well as post-work theories that treat work solely as exploitative and soul-crushing. The book explores how diverse Americans think about the place of work in a good life, gendered meanings of breadwinning, accepting financial support from family, friends, and the state, and what the ever-elusive American dream means to them. By considering how post-Fordist unemployment experiences diverge from joblessness earlier, the book paves the way for a historically and culturally informed discussion of work meanings in a future of teleworking, greater automation, and increasing nonstandard employment.
Two Protestant Work Ethics (Living to Work or Working Diligently)
Authors: Strauss Claudia
Published: October 2024

This chapter delves into the question posed by political theorist Kathi Weeks: “Why do Americans work so long and so hard?” Weeks argues that Americans work excessively not just to cover expenses but because they are socialized to view their job as central to their identity. The chapter critiques Weeks' oversimplified view, highlighting how various groups, from professors to students, and tech entrepreneurs to hourly wage workers, experience and value work differently. The chapter explores the pressures of long work hours in high-status jobs and the contrasting norms of work hours globally, illustrating that productivist values, where self-worth is tied to productivity, dominate in the United States. It contrasts the “diligent 9-to-5 work ethic” with the “living-to-work ethic,” showing how these differing values shape people's lives and priorities.
Working to Live Well
Authors: Strauss Claudia
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the interplay between work, consumption, and middle-class identity in contemporary US society, focusing on the experiences of long-term unemployed individuals. Drawing on Max Weber's insight that historical shifts from productivism to consumerism have complex implications, the chapter explores how participants' consumption patterns and aspirations shape their class identity. It also cites the case of Carl Mathews, who worked excessively to afford a luxurious lifestyle, which illustrates the deep shame and fear of destitution that can accompany unemployment. The chapter reveals the mixed messages about consumer spending and its impact on self-perception through a range of attitudes towards consumption, from indifference to intense distress. It highlights the nuanced ways individuals navigate financial hardship and societal expectations.
Good-Enough Occupations and “Fun” Jobs
Authors: Strauss Claudia
Published: October 2024

This chapter scrutinizes the specific meanings of work for individuals, moving beyond abstract notions like the productivist work ethic, the American dream, self-sufficiency, and gendered work. It emphasizes that work's significance is shaped by specific past experiences, job tasks, physical environments, and interpersonal relationships. Many assume that people's willingness to work is inherent, but it is often influenced by their job history and future opportunities. While some seek meaningful jobs that contribute to life purpose and personal growth, many find satisfaction in jobs they simply enjoy or find fun. The chapter highlights the importance of considering individual job experiences in discussions about work.
A Post-Pandemic Update and the Future of Work
Authors: Strauss Claudia
Published: October 2024

This chapter challenges the notion that Americans are either workaholics or unwilling to work, arguing instead that most exhibit a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic and take pride in their jobs but happily disengaging at the end of the day. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the conflicting view that nobody wants to work anymore emerged, fueled by difficulties in filling low-wage positions. The chapter examines the assumptions and values of influential voices regarding work and explores the policies they advocate, such as unemployment benefits and social welfare assistance. The chapter considers the future of work in the context of automation, AI, remote work, and economic security, highlighting the need to understand how changing contexts will shape the meanings of work. It delves into the diverse motivations behind work and the potential impacts of evolving job landscapes.
Introduction
Authors: Getty J. Arch , Siegelbaum Lewis H.
Published: October 2024

This introductory chapter discusses historians' continued interest in the Stalin period. In their attempts to grapple with the Stalin era, polemicists and scholars traditionally have wondered about its place in Russian history, its origins. In one way or another, almost all of them have asked, “where did it all go so wrong?” or “who or what is to blame?” For many Russian conservatives, the answer was easy. Stalinism was inherent in Leninism which, in turn, was the natural result of socialism; the original sin was Marx's. Things first went off the rails in February 1917 when the monarchy was overthrown. Western conservatives also pointed to long Russian traditions of autocracy, patrimonialism, and violence as roots of Stalinism. For liberals, Russia was on course to democratic modernization but was derailed by the accident of World War I, which led to a political crisis and brought fanatics to power in 1917. The chapters in this book approach the “how did it go wrong?” question in a variety of ways. They reflect on the Stalin period of Soviet history based on decades of research and writing about it.
Marxism and the Study of the Stalinist System
Authors: Filtzer Donald
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on Marx's concepts of the social relations of production and class antagonisms, which enhances the understanding of the Stalinist system. It begins by considering why Marxism fell out of fashion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The chapter then applies several of Marx's insights into the nature of capitalist society to the Soviet Union. It argues that the objective condition of workers as providers of labor power alienated from them by a ruling elite is the key to understanding the nature of Soviet society, its inefficiencies, waste, shortages, and other characteristic features. The chapter also looks at how the social antagonism between workers and the Soviet elite, an antagonism put in place through the process of Stalinist industrialization, led to the long-term decline of the Soviet system.
Wrestling with Aspects of Interwar Stalinism
Authors: Chase William J.
Published: October 2024

This chapter offers perspectives on Stalinist violence and shows how Ezhovshchina, Stalinshchina, Great Terror, and Great Purges are each inadequate to describe what happened in the 1930s. It focuses on two defendants in the August 1936 Moscow trial: Ivan Smirnov and Valentin Olberg. Declassified materials force one to reassess whether that trial was simply political theater. Many Europeans wondered why Stalin chose to hold a political trial when the fascist threat was mounting, and the new Soviet Constitution suggested that the USSR might become more democratic. The new evidence suggests that he did so because he feared the threats were real. The chapter then assesses how much of the standard view of Stalinism comes from Lev Trotsky. Even though Trotsky publicly denied any operational connection to underground followers in the Soviet Union, it turns out that he and his son Sedov were actively engaged with them, and in the murky world of émigré politics in the 1930s, with others connected to Nazis. These connections provided the background for Stalin's claims that the oppositionists were German agents.
Fear, Belief, and Stalinism
Authors: Getty J. Arch
Published: October 2024

This chapter describes the roles of fear and belief in the unfolding of Stalinist violence. It argues that Stalin and the Bolsheviks' experience caused them to fear for the fragility of their regime, and that “fear-induced aggression” was an important precipitant of the violence of the 1930s. Indeed, fear as a precondition to violence helps contextualize Stalin's trigger of mass violence and explains why it resonated with others who were prepared to believe in all kinds of dangers and conspiracies. The chapter then contends that Stalin's fear of conspiracy was not something he invented or inflicted on society but was rather a widely shared belief from top to bottom of party and society, stemming from class conflict, Russian “underground” traditions, and Civil War experience. Among the Stalinists' main internal fears were the military, religion, and ethnic conflict.
“I Just Didn’t Feel Safe”
Authors: Murray Yxta Maya
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses Young Joon Kwak's Mutant Salon, which was a queer and anti-capitalist venture that sought to create healing, community, selfhood, and liberation by practicing a species of playful “objectification” that did not involve oppression but rather affirmation and self-creation. This project required a horizontal approach to class status and the development of safe spaces where mutants—queer, poc, often femme-identified people who experienced economic precarity—could feel free to be beautiful. As a solo artist, Kwak has held gallery shows of drip ceramics, sculptures of atypical bodies, and cathartic video work navigating parental relations and queerness. The chapter then focuses on Mutant Salon's artistic, activist, and Black, Brown, female, queer, intersectional artivist lineage. It also examines the provocative questions the Salons raise about the law's role in the creation of identity and safe spaces, and these things' relationship to legal rights.
“So Many Stories Like That”
Authors: Murray Yxta Maya
Published: October 2024

This chapter evaluates the artivism of Imani Jacqueline Brown. It begins by looking at Blights Out, which created events that made arguments about the ways that the government had deprived people of property upon the landfall of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 and in the years since. Brown's work has many important legal implications, particularly those concerning the relationships between the Thirteenth Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the problem of environmental racism. The chapter then focuses on her 2015 grassroots event Live Action Painting. In Live Action Painting, Brown exhibited the violent effects of the state's neglect of the Mississippi River—Gulf Outlet and its disinvestment in Black neighborhoods.
“We Wanted to Open Up”
Authors: Murray Yxta Maya
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on the Drawn Together project, which studied the contracts that artists sign with arts institutions, agreements understood to be shaped by an unequal balance of power. Seeking to discover how that disparity operated, and wondering if contract law could come to the aid of artists, the project interviewed creatives about their interactions with arts institutions. The interviews with art workers revealed a community confounded by low pay, lack of power, an absence of choices, and almost no access to institutional support. Simultaneously, these art workers manifested resilience, fury, humor, and bountiful insights and innovations that could help repair this broken system. However, the resulting project, Drawn Together, struggled to reform art workers' experiences with forming and fulfilling contracts with arts institutions.
Introduction
Authors: Tounsel Christopher
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the intricate dynamics surrounding the conceptualization of blackness. It highlights how racial categorization hinges on diverse elements such as physical traits, geography, ancestry, and cultural stereotypes. The American system of racial classification emerged as a response to social constructs rather than biological determinism, underscoring that humans, not biology, define race. The chapter describes the interconnectedness of global racial dynamics that underscores African Americans' engagement with India's caste struggles, drawing parallels with American racism. It points out how complexities and contradictions reveal nuanced intersections and tensions within global racial solidarity movements, particularly concerning Arab–Black relations and the fluidity of racial boundaries.
Negro Canaan
Authors: Tounsel Christopher
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the historical significance of the Tuskegee Institute's cotton cultivation project in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan during the early twentieth century. Spearheaded by Booker T. Washington and businessman Leigh S. J. Hunt, this initiative aimed to introduce African American expertise in agriculture to Sudan, alongside broader implications for African American engagement in Africa. Despite its ambitious goals, the project was prematurely curtailed due to health concerns among the Tuskegee graduates sent to Sudan, revealing complexities in Washington's approach to African development and his interactions with colonial powers. This endeavor highlighted themes of Black internationalism, African American contributions to colonial economies, and the nuanced dynamics of racial solidarity versus colonial exploitation. The project's legacy underscores ongoing debates about the motives and impacts of African American engagements in overseas colonial ventures, contrasting with later efforts in Togo and Uzbekistan, and setting a precedent for future interactions between African Americans and Sudan.
Call to Brotherhood
Authors: Tounsel Christopher
Published: October 2024

This chapter covers the life and career of Louis Eugene Walcott, who later became known as Louis Abdul Farrakhan. Farrakhan initially pursued a music career after studying at Winston-Salem Teachers College, but his path changed significantly when he joined the Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1955. Adopting the name Louis X, he rose through the ranks to become a prominent minister, later succeeding Malcolm X as the leader of Harlem's Temple No. 7 and assuming a national role within the NOI. The chapter recounts Farrakhan's international tour, including a controversial visit to Sudan in 1996, that underscored his divisive stance on US foreign policy and strained relations with mainstream America. The chapter examines Farrakhan's complex support for the Sudanese government amidst the tumult of the Second Sudanese Civil War, highlighting the NOI's unconventional role in African American engagement with global geopolitics and Islamic solidarity.
The Equality of Flesh
Authors: Dawson Brent
Published: October 2024

This book traces a new genealogy of equality before its formalization under liberalism. While modern ideas of equality are defined through an inner human nature, the book argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conceptualized equality as an ambivalent and profoundly bodily condition. Everyone was made from the same lowly matter and, as a result, shared the same set of vulnerabilities, needs, and passions. Responding to the political upheavals of colonialism and the intellectual turmoil of new natural philosophies, leading figures of the English Renaissance, including Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, anxiously imagined that bodily commonality might undermine differences of religion, race, and class. As the period progressed, later authors developed the revolutionary possibilities of bodily equality even as new ideas of fixed racial inequality emerged. Some challenged political absolutism through the idea of humans as base, embodied creatures. Others offered limited yet important interrogations of racial paradigms. This moment, the book shows, would pass, as bodily equality was marginalized in the liberal theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In its place, during the Enlightenment pseudoscientific racism would come to anchor inequality in the body. Contending with the lasting implications of material equality for modernity, the book shows how increasingly vehement notions of racial difference eclipsed a nascent sense of human commonality rooted in the basic stuff of life.
“No Earthly Thing Is Sure”
Authors: Dawson Brent
Published: October 2024

This chapter begins by discussing Edmund Spenser's treatise on colonial administration. A View of the State of Ireland provides unforgettable eyewitness accounts of the events Spenser witnessed in his first few months in Ireland. The vivid descriptions of wounded and starving bodies create important but contradictory meanings in Spenser's text: they summon a leveling feeling of compassion that unsettles the treatise's policy recommendations, yet they also spur assertions of the necessity of violence to create a stable political state. The chapter then reads book 2 of The Faerie Queene as a reflection on these two conflicting responses to a sense of bodily commonality that Spenser encountered in Ireland. It argues that both the poem and the colonial treatise are early examples of the twinned forces that will run throughout this book: an emerging sense of low equality and racial ideologies that co-opt that sense. Spenser's writing bears witness to how colonial projects can paradoxically summon a new sense of the bodily equivalence of persons, whether in the sheer violence they unleash, the social instability they create among colonizer and colonized, or the strange intimacy and exchange they bring about between groups despite their unequal relations.
Of Mushroom Men and Rational Creatures
Authors: Dawson Brent
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores two foundational works of liberal political philosophy in which modern forms of low equality begin to emerge. These are Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689). Hobbes and Locke are the two most familiar and influential seventeenth-century theorists of political equality. In both cases, the chapter shows that their foundational modern theories of equality are less recognizably modern than one might imagine. Both authors are writing in a moment when ideas of equality are still inchoate, and their versions of equality give more importance to the body than has previously been recognized. At the same time, these authors are important for the transition they mark: both in different ways oppose and bracket out the traces of low equality located in them. That is, these works articulate within themselves the shift away from low equality that is also taking place more broadly in the period, and move toward the division between formal equality and racial inequality that would characterize the subsequent era.
Renting the Reservation
Authors: Anderson Scott W.
Published: October 2024

This chapter begins by looking at the impact of the Market Revolution on farming families in central New York and what a growing cash economy would mean to the value of farmland through time. It then uses the information gathered in the previous chapters to place a dollar value on how much rent a proprietor might have collected on a tract such as the Cayuga Reservation for 204 years, from 1796 to 2000. Using methods required during the Cayuga Land Claim trials, the chapter determines the interest and appreciation this rental income might have accrued. Such estimates require three steps. These include finding a value per acre for reservation farmland for each of the 204 years; finding the net earnings each year that the tract in leasehold would have returned to a proprietor (taken as a percentage of the value per acre); and using expert witness Mark Berkman's method to determine how all this money would have grown through interest and appreciation over 204 years.
Introduction
Authors: Wagner William G.
Published: October 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross in the city of Nizhnii Novgorod. Having emerged in the latter part of the eighteenth century from a process of state reform that sharply reduced the number of monastic communities and monastic clergy, the convent was suppressed and its community dispersed during a far more radical state assault on religion in the late 1920s and the 1930s. Between these two episodes, the convent had blossomed into a multi-faceted religious community and prominent spiritual center that repeatedly reshaped itself in response to the dramatic changes occurring in its social, economic, cultural, and political environments. Through their actions, the Russian women composing this community helped redefine both the character of Orthodox monasticism and Orthodox ideals of womanhood in a dramatically changing context. The chapter explains that the book tells their story and, through their experiences, explores the interrelationship between Orthodox monasticism, modernity, and women in Imperial and early Soviet Russia.
The Geopolitics of Culture
Authors: Van Oudenaren John
Published: October 2024

Through the lens of James Billington and the institution he led as Librarian of Congress during a key period of US–Russian relations, this book examines culture as a neglected area of US foreign policy. Billington advised presidents and members of Congress and mobilized the resources of the Library of Congress to promote reform in Russia. He believed that rather than preaching to the Russians, the United States should expose the rising generation of Russian leaders to what was best in America and encourage them to rediscover positive elements in pre-Bolshevik Russian culture. The book chronicles Billington's influence on US engagement with Russia as it transitioned from communism to democracy under Gorbachev and Yeltsin and back to authoritarianism under Yeltsin and Putin. It casts new light on this era. Billington's efforts led to a remarkable degree of cooperation between the Library of Congress and Russian cultural and political institutions. Yet these efforts ultimately failed as Putin turned back toward authoritarianism. The experience of the Library of Congress during this period nonetheless holds important lessons for today. Billington believed that a transition to democracy in Russia was essential if the United States was to head off the geopolitical nightmare of a Eurasia dominated by an alliance of hostile authoritarian powers. The “geopolitics of culture” thus remains a challenge for US foreign policy.