bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Jane at the End
Authors: Dickinson Rachel
Published: May 2023

This chapter reminiscences on the author's mother, especially her final moments. She had died a year before Jack, whose death only compounded her loss even further. Furthermore, she had been in assisted living for almost a year by then, leaving behind a locked and empty house. This house also presented many reminders of her mother's own life and family—a stark visual reminder of her past not unlike the author's own. The chapter goes on to recount further reminiscences of these final moments with the author's mother, and how, before the author had turned to say goodbye, her mother had reassured her that “Everything's going to be all right.”
Beside the Volcano
Authors: Dickinson Rachel
Published: May 2023

This chapter meditates on the author's life and what could have been, interspersing these recollections with a trip to Iceland six years after Jack's death. It discusses the highly volatile Icelandic volcanoes, particularly Hekla, which stood near to where the author had stayed in Laugarvatn, Iceland. Hekla, like many Icelandic volcanoes, was active and unpredictable, and it has become a metaphor for both Jack's passing as well as for the author's own roiling emotions. Interspersed between these recollections and local histories, however, are the author's own reminiscences as a geology student. To conclude, the chapter discusses a letter written by Jack's childhood friend, Will, which was sent to the author during her stay in Iceland.
Feeling Isolated
Authors: Dickinson Rachel
Published: May 2023

This chapter recounts a conversation between the author and her husband some time prior to their daughter's engagement party. Tim had confessed to having trouble sleeping and having difficulty with social interactions, particularly during the months of COVID shutdown. He was struggling despite being a gifted writer and speaker, because he had not had a conversation with another person besides his wife in months. And now he was expected to deliver a toast to an audience of prospective in-laws, all the while struggling with his own difficult background as well as the ghost of Jack constantly looming over them. The author in the end could only reassure him that everything will be all right.
Tim Writes Me a Letter
Authors: Dickinson Rachel
Published: May 2023

This chapter takes a look at the author's family, and how they have coped with Jack's passing. It comes in the form of a letter from the author's husband, who states that the ordeal has brought him and their remaining children closer together. Unlike the author, Tim was more inclined to remain where he was among all the reminders and personal “minefields” Jack had left behind, seeking comfort in the closeness it all brings. However, he remarks that he did not resent the author for coping in the opposite way by constantly traveling. He and their daughters only came to rely on each other all the more, but during months of COVID lockdown, everyone in the family seemed to finally be moving on from the past. The author, in the meantime, longs to reconnect with her children as well.
The Corncrake
Authors: Dickinson Rachel
Published: May 2023

This chapter talks about a visit to Iona, Scotland, when the author was forty. She reminisces about the history of Saint Columba and Celtic Christianity in the area as she spent time in the Iona Abbey, a rebuilt thirteenth-century Benedictine monastery, and took part in a workshop run by an ecumenical group called the Iona Community. While there, the author had gone birding with fellow workshop participants and eventually embarked on the search for the elusive and nearly extinct corncrake. The search proved a failure, and the author had also neglected to fully immerse herself in the workshop. Yet, as the author considers this memory during the present, she remarks that it does not matter, as she had nevertheless been involved in a search for hope. And perhaps that was enough.
Finding the Optimum Mix
Authors: Kaplan Edward
Published: May 2023

This chapter addresses the “optimum mix” targeting study and the 1959 annual report that turned its attention to “paralyzing” the USSR, foreshadowing the counterrecovery targeting of the Nixon administration. Looking forward to a notional 1963, NESC 2009 started by laying out the problem as comparing the “relative merits from [the] point of view of effective deterrence of retaliatory efforts” with the three target systems pushed for by the navy: mostly military, mostly urban-industrial, and an “optimum mix” of the two. The optimum-mix target set became the basis for the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), which merged Strategic Air Command's (SAC) Emergency War Plans with the Navy's Polaris. The SIOP became the basis for US nuclear war planning through the end of the Cold War and beyond. It established that nuclear war fighting (and targeting) was a national affair, not a service or theater one. In doing so, the SIOP placed nuclear weapons and planning in a novel position.
Conclusion
Authors: Kaplan Edward
Published: May 2023

This concluding chapter reviews how system analysis had eclipsed net evaluation, looking at the establishment of the Defense Department's Office of Net Assessment (ONA). Both ONA and the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC) used qualitative and quantitative methods for their work in a way that was more balanced than the quantitative-heavy systems analysis approach. The differences between the two are also important. Where the NESC measured the worst failure of an existing strategy, ONA considered peacetime competition dynamics. A last parallel, though, is perhaps the strongest: both organizations provided analysis to the key strategic decision-makers of their day. ONA continues its work today, and systems analysis lives on as cost assessment and program evaluation, but the NESC has been largely forgotten. The chapter argues that the NESC deserves restoration to the historical record because it is a vital missing piece of the narrative of US nuclear strategy in the middle of the twentieth century.
Making a Mirror for Priests
Authors: Klepper Deeana Copeland
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the text in Mirror for Priests, which was written by priest Albert of Diessen. It highlights the malleability of Christian pastoral expectations, especially when many authors wrote many works that are addressed to different audiences. Albert made authoritative texts available to less-educated clerics to provide a succinct and manageable guide to the essential aspects of the care of souls and the management of a parish community. The chapter lists some of Albert's sources and references for the Mirror for Priests, such as Augustine, Gregory the Great, and John of Freiburg's Summa. It elaborates on the structures of the different versions of the Mirror.
Conclusion
Authors: Klepper Deeana Copeland
Published: May 2023

This chapter cites the contribution of Albert of Diessen and his work, Mirror of Priests, in the understanding of late medieval Christianity. The Mirror as a book illustrates the fluid nature of medieval texts and manuscripts and the interactiveness of manuscript books. Moreover, the Mirror as a model for living parish communities extends the understanding of pastoral literature as a bidirectional genre. The chapter then discusses how the Mirror of Priests served as the nexus between an imagined Christianity and the communities that lived a version of that Christianity every day. It highlights the usefulness of Albert's effort when the Mirror continued to be copied for over a century after its original composition.
Turn to …
Authors: Ghosh Ranjan
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers plastic as a discourse and an aesthetic figure that emerges from the material. It recognizes plastic as having its structure of representation and meaning. However, plastic as a discourse builds an oppositional network of concepts and signifiers. As part of petromodernity, plastic fixes and unfixes the energy regimes that expose certain conditions of materiality, such as sociocultural conditions of consumption, the politics of garbology, commodification, and desire, and a unique globalization of need and disability. The chapter proposes a plastic turn that does not emphasize the formal quality of plasticity but takes inspiration from the materiality of plastic itself. It also elaborates on plasticity with material-aesthetic as the operative theory machine.
Singing
Authors: Safran Gabriella
Published: May 2023

This chapter investigates depictions of listening by people in Aleksei Khomiakov's circles, including Baron von Haxthausen, a Rhenish thinker who was invited to travel through the Russian Empire in the hopes that he would produce a more sympathetic book than other foreigners had written. It shows that the claim to listen better to “the people” than one's rival—a claim that was at the center of Custine's self-presentation—would be echoed by the Slavophiles who disdained him. They reappropriated his notion of Russian silence and thereby changed the rules of his listening contest so that they could win, even as the government rewarded the German Haxthausen for championing Russia against its French critics. The chapter begins by addressing the people's attraction to the philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and their evocations of telegraphy. It then looks at Haxthausen's celebration of Russian silence and Konstantin Aksakov's concept of choral listening, before considering the position of listening and transcription in the Slavophiles' arguments about the ownership of culture.
The Most Interesting Book the Old Man Had Ever Read
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter details Bruce White's near-death experience after he was arrested and accused of illegal firearms. It details how White was high on Dilaudid before the cops broke into the White family home. Medics took over to save his life, a man who pointed a gun at police officers. White experienced hanging in limbo when he flat-lined after getting shot. The chapter cites that White admitted there were no white lights, no tunnel leading to a better place when he flat-lined. White met an old man with his book in the supposed afterlife before he returned to the mortal veil to fight for his life while being resuscitated on the operating table.
Birth / School
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the birth and school experience of Bruce White. Bruce was born at Maryland General Hospital to the couple, Charles Wood White Sr. and Maxine White of Baltimore. On the outside, life in the White family was typically all American with white privilege amplified with new cars and private swim clubs. The chapter looks into Bruce's personality of deep insecurity well into childhood, while also referencing some family narratives where he was well provided for and often joyous. It explains Bruce's sexual assault broke him in new ways that all of the drugs in the world cannot cure.
Last Chance High
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses Bruce White's life after getting kicked out of Sheppard Pratt and getting into Baltimore Experimental High School. The year at Sheppard Pratt did not heal or help White with anything. The chapter provides an overview of White's experience in Baltimore Experimental High School which allowed pot in the parking lot and drinking in the backyard. White graduated from the Baltimore Experimental High School in June 1978. The chapter looks into the infatuation of Stuart “Whitney” Denham in White and the dark world he was living in. Denham and White became one of the ruthless teams White had been a part of, especially when Denham was a solo act and robbed more pharmacies.
Spanish Harlem
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter covers the time Bruce White almost got arrested in Harlem. White was dealing drugs with Panama in New York, giving him $3,500 for a variety of heroin and coke. However, Panama did not come back within the promised time and White was seriously contemplating murder with the gun he brought from Baltimore. However, just as White thought of committing multiple murders on Panama's family, Panama came back with two white men that White instinctively knew as cops. White and his buddy, Fat Donald, were almost arrested if the police did not doubt that they were junkies. After the eventful night, they spent the night getting high and returned to Baltimore the next morning.
Frank White / Inmate Junkie
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses Bruce White's twenty-year imprisonment. Bruce still managed to find ways to get high despite jumping in between prisons: the old jail in Hagerstown, Eastern Correctional Institution, Maryland House of Correction, and Western Correctional in Cumberland. At the House of Correction in Jessup, Bruce's identity only stalled at being a junkie and the inmates dubbed him as Frank White after Christopher Walken's drug lord character in the 1990 gangster film King of New York. As Bruce shifted through varying prisons, Fat Donald Echert and his father Charles Wood White Sr died. The chapter also mentions Bruce's disassociation from the world when the World Trade Center came down while he snorted heroin in prison.
College / Career / Shirt and Tie
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on Bruce White's college and career life. Whilst he was not so keen on education in his younger years, White still managed to graduate from Baltimore City Community College at the age of 51. White met Craig Lippens, who then became his mentor in the industry of drug and alcohol treatment. The chapter highlights how White thrived in his job with Gaudenzia, wherein he understand that the job of providing treatment was a product of his personal recovery. It also elaborates on the One Promise treatment business he established in Northeast Baltimore in 2016, referencing as one of the busier drug treatment and counseling centers in Baltimore.
Unpacked
Authors: Scott Blake C.
Published: May 2023

This book offers a critical, novel perspective on the Caribbean's now taken-for-granted desirability as a tourist's paradise. Dreams of a tropical vacation have become a quintessential aspect of the modern Caribbean, as millions of tourists travel to the region and spend extravagantly to pursue vacation fantasies. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, travelers from North America and Europe thought of the Caribbean as diseased, dangerous, and, according to many observers, “the white man's graveyard.” How then did a trip to the Caribbean become a supposedly fun and safe experience? The book examines the historical roots of the region's tourism industry by following a well-traveled sea route linking the US East Coast with the island of Cuba and the Isthmus of Panama. The book describes how the cultural and material history of US imperialism became the heart of modern Caribbean tourism. In addition, it explores how advances in tropical medicine, perceptions of the tropical environment, and development of infrastructure and transportation networks opened a new playground for visitors.
Empire’s Lake
Authors: Scott Blake C.
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses how the building of the Panama Canal from 1904 to 1914 was a watershed moment in the Caribbean's transformation into a desirable vacation destination. Tropical vacationing as a cultural rite of passage, and as a regional industry, emerged just as the United States secured its imperial control over the isthmus. Indeed, the history of the Panama Canal highlights a cultural shift in tropical travel dependent on US empire-building and its associated advances in tropical medicine. The canal construction project also supported the development of a fast and efficient transportation network. Ultimately, the Caribbean's transformation from a diseased to a desirable region emerged out of the crucible of US imperial expansion in a number of important ways: as a nature to conquer and make safe, as a frontier to enjoy and exploit, as an extension of US commercial and political interests, and as a revenue source for maintaining the infrastructure and influence of empire. Although the historical scars and injustices have submerged into the tropical landscape, excavating this history raises serious questions about the meaning and practice of modern leisure travel.
Changing Routes from Sea to Air
Authors: Scott Blake C.
Published: May 2023

This chapter investigates how Pan American Airways (Pan Am) grew into the world's largest international airline carrier, expanding rapidly from Florida to Cuba and across the Caribbean. The chapter studies how the “logic of the air” rejected the significance of the ocean's territoriality, not only for US political, economic, and military interests but also for tourism. The transition from sea to air mobility restructured how and where tourists would travel on vacation. Although air travel remained an economically elite form of leisure mobility until well into the “jet age,” the development of air routes in the first half of the twentieth century foreshadowed the future experiences and destinations of mass tourism. Indeed, aviation dramatically altered tourism to the Caribbean. Ultimately, the history of aviation is a remarkable story of expansion, all the more interesting when brought into dialogue with the long history of transportation technology.
Traveling Writers
Authors: Scott Blake C.
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the journeys of creative writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, illustrating “the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion” of foreign travel so appealing in the twentieth century. Between the world wars, a new generation of writers began to articulate and practice leisure travel as the ultimate expression of “freedom.” The circum-Caribbean and its emerging tourism industry were fundamentally entangled with this new era of literature. The chapter begins by studying the Lost Generation's counter-cultural movement. The travel experiences of writers offer a window into the Caribbean's history of tourism, highlighting many of the escapist motivations encouraging tourists to leave home for a vacation. Literary experiences abroad also show how tropical destinations and ways of understanding cultural and geographic difference entered into mainstream thought. In their collective biography of mobility, one can see both push (domestic) and pull (international) forces coming together to create cultural routes of Caribbean tourism. Away from home, writers translated their experiences into literature for public consumption, igniting travel imaginations.
Flooded Pasts
Authors: Carruthers William
Published: May 2023

This book examines a world famous yet critically underexamined event—UNESCO's International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia (1960–80)—to show how the project, its genealogy, and its aftermath not only propelled archaeology into the postwar world but also helped to “recolonize” it. In the book, the author asks how postwar decolonization took shape and what role a colonial discipline like archaeology—forged in the crucible of imperialism—played as the “new nations” asserted themselves in the face of the global Cold War. As the Aswan High Dam became the centerpiece of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egyptian revolution, the Nubian campaign sought to salvage and preserve ancient temples and archaeological sites from the new barrage's floodwaters. Conducted in the neighboring regions of Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia, the project built on years of Nubian archaeological work conducted under British occupation and influence. During that process, the campaign drew on the scientific racism that guided those earlier surveys, helping to consign Nubians themselves to state-led resettlement and modernization programs, even as UNESCO created a picturesque archaeological landscape fit for global media and tourist consumption. The book describes how colonial archaeological and anthropological practices—and particularly their archival and documentary manifestations—created an ancient Nubia severed from the region's population. As a result, the Nubian campaign not only became fundamental to the creation of UNESCO's 1972 World Heritage Convention but also exposed questions about the goals of archaeology and heritage and whether the colonial origins of these fields will ever be overcome.
Introduction
Authors: Carruthers William
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers how visions have occluded Nubian displacement entirely, enabled by archaeological and preservation work. It cites that Nubia and its citizens disappeared for good by the mid-1970s. UNESCO's International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia aimed to ensure the inqādh of numerous ancient structures and archaeological sites from the Aswan High Dam's floodwaters. Moreover, earlier British occupation and colonial rule in Egypt and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan meant that Nubians and their structures have been treated in questionable and racist ways. The chapter highlights the destructive force and constructive presence of floods. It notes how Nubia gained shape as an object and an image of colonial archaeology.
Documenting Nubia
Authors: Carruthers William
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the documentation involving Nubia. It cites that paperwork was both a crutch and a curse to the Nubian campaign. UNESCO predicated its Nubian campaign on the organization's ability to generate credible acts of monumental preservation and archaeological excavation. Centre d'étude et de documentation sur l'Ancienne Égypte (CEDAE) is tasked with producing elements of this documentation and with collecting paperwork produced by other organizations during the campaign. The chapter examines the intersection of the Nubian campaign with practices common to Egyptology. Moreover, the proposed construction of the High Dam meant that Nubia was ripe for enfolding within the forms of national sovereignty that the proposed documentation center promoted.
Traces of Nubia
Authors: Carruthers William
Published: May 2023

This chapter tackles the traces of the Nubian campaign. Despite the flood, traces of Nubia remained and unveiled the unevenness of the campaign that took place there. An early and obvious indication of the issue came in the different names given to the reservoir forming behind the High Dam. Nubia's flooding could not conceal the incoherence of the documentation, nor its populational and cultural violence. The chapter explains how the Nubian campaign's spectacle ultimately helped to constitute UNESCO's notion of heritage. It also highlights how the traces became more visible after Egypt and Sudan adapted to national, regional, and global political change.
“The Fruits of Shakerism”
Authors: Hessinger Rodney
Published: May 2023

This chapter evaluates reactions to the Shakers. While Shaker celibacy provoked concern, the sharpest reaction against Shakers concerned their seeming violation of maternal love. Shaker opponents like Eunice Chapman conjured scenes of physical distress caused by women losing children to the Shakers. Whereas in the high fertility culture of colonial America, the womb had been the locus of motherhood, in this new literature, the breast, as a site of nurturance, came to define women. Shakers were said to be so cruel as to rip children away from the bosom of women. Shakers would react to this criticism by reimaging their founder, Ann Lee. They defended her motherhood by stressing the loving care she showed followers. But even more so, Shakers hearkened back to older maternal ideals. In this celibate sect, Lee was described and even drawn (in Shaker spirit drawings) as a fruitful mother.
Mixing “the Poison of Lust with the Ardor of Devotion”
Authors: Hessinger Rodney
Published: May 2023

This chapter details how fears about particular ministers and faith groups coalesced in the 1830s and 1840s into a larger fear of religious enthusiasm. From John Maffitt to Arthur Dimmesdale, preachers, both real and fictional, were charged with preying on their flocks as the nineteenth century progressed. The figure of the “reverend rake” was first popularized in trial reports. Starting with the case of William Parkinson in 1811, an unrelenting series of publicized trials tarnished the standing of ministers. While each trial had its own unique elements, some larger themes emerged. Repeatedly, ministers were accused of deception and hypocrisy, using heart religion to gain inappropriate intimacy with their female followers. By the 1830s, the notorious cases of Ephraim Avery and Robert Matthews, otherwise known as the Prophet Matthias, produced a broader indictment. Conservative critics insisted that enthusiastic religion, anchored in the insecure foundation of emotions, was inherently prone to manipulation, mixing carnal and religious feelings.
The Weimar Picture Palace
Authors: Parker Luke
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the move in Vladimir Nabokov's work from film theory to cinema theory between 1925 and 1928. In his early stories of 1925, his first novel Mary (1926), and the play The Man from the U.S.S.R. (1927), Nabokov focuses on film as a metaphor for exile, combining the clichés of Russian prerevolutionary literary responses to the movie screen with his own practical experience with film production. But after several years of close friendship with the film critic Georgy Gessen, Nabokov invests more fully in the Weimar context, writing about a shared experience of Berlin's urban cinematic culture for a Russian and German audience. By examining Gessen's reviews for Rul' (the émigré newspaper their fathers had cofounded), the chapter shows how this critical engagement with a large mass of films provided a discursive model for an engagement with cinema with consumption at its center. Nabokov's writing of the later 1920s—for émigrés, in the previously untranslated poem “The Cinema” (“Kinematograf,” 1928), and for a Russian and German audience in his second novel, King, Queen, Knave (1928)—provides an insider–outsider account of how the urban environment of Berlin was suffused with cinematic culture, from spaces and images to language itself.
Coda
Authors: Parker Luke
Published: May 2023

This coda addresses Vladimir Nabokov's first American short story, “The Assistant Producer” (1943), as his summation of the Russian emigration's history through the medium of the cinema. In metafictional terms, Nabokov's first American short story is an exercise in freedom, criticizing America as a Russian émigré and Europe as a new American. By placing this work into the context of German émigré culture in the World War II-era United States, the chapter shows how Nabokov's cinema praxis approaches film noir from the unexpected angles of craft and audience triangulation. It argues that the dynamic interplay of America and Europe, present even in the 1920s, would continue in Nabokov's work of the 1950s, resulting in the American success, via Europe, of Lolita (1955). As Nabokov's first American novel, Lolita showcases his successful adaptation to an American audience.
Peasants, Religion, and the Church
Authors: Bouchard Constance Brittain
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the relationship between French peasants and the high medieval church. Given the large number of medieval churches with which the northern French countryside is still dotted, it should not be surprising that medieval peasants always had to be aware of churches and ecclesiastics. Some clearly preferred being serfs of a monastery to being serfs of a layman, to the extent that they might give up free status to become a monastic serf in the eleventh century. Peasants who became the serfs of a religious house gave their most valuable possession, their own labor, and even when such willing subjugation was no longer recorded in the twelfth century, they might make gifts of other property—sometimes small, but sometimes quite substantial. They could become ordained priests at least occasionally, and the spread of the new monastic orders that tried to avoid peasant tenants would have been impossible without peasant conversi. The chapter also considers the revolt of the capuciati, which involved the local peasantry in Burgundy.
Peasants, New Towns, and Communes
Authors: Bouchard Constance Brittain
Published: May 2023

This chapter assesses peasant collective action and readiness both to fight and to negotiate, which is evident in their participation in “new towns” and communes. Charters of franchise, new towns, and communes are all markers of the ability of twelfth- and thirteenth-century rural inhabitants to seek improvements in their lot. In most cases, new towns were granted rights and freedoms because the powerful who controlled the land saw economic benefit in doing so. In other cases, such as in Vézelay, villagers and peasants fought determinedly for what they considered their rights. Their determination to end what they believed to be harsh dues and arbitrary demands earned them enough respect that the count of Nevers thought it necessary to recruit them in fighting his own battles with the abbot, and they were able to reach compromises adjudicated by powerful secular and ecclesiastical lords, including two cardinals. The peasant search for better conditions and more predictable obligations is also reflected in charters of franchise, for example in the royally approved Customs of Lorris.
Peasant Agency
Authors: Bouchard Constance Brittain
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on peasant agency. It begins by looking at peasant initiative in situations where they renegotiated the terms of their tenure. The same determination and collective action that allowed peasants to negotiate better terms for themselves allowed them to fight back against what they considered imposition and injustice. It is possible for scholars to read documents where peasants objected to their treatment by their lords in two ways: either as an indication of how badly peasants were treated, or as an indication that in spite of lords' best efforts at oppression, peasants were entirely capable of resistance. Catalan peasants were also able to bring their complaints about their castellan lords to the highest court of the land, that of the count-kings. In court, peasants might give testimony on their own behalf, even offer to prove a point through the ordeal. Their testimony was sought out as highly valued when great landowners were disputing where borders might lie, because their knowledge of the land was respected.
Alphabetic Analogies
Authors: Blumenberg Hans
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the synthetic achievement representing a meaningful unity, noting the book metaphor for nature and the world that presupposes an analytical achievement. It was not by chance that the Greeks met the analytical condition for the metaphor without exploiting its synthetic consequences. The chapter highlights giving atoms the same label as “letters,” which is more than a clever metaphor as tracing reality back to a few indivisible units from which it is then reassembled is an alphabetic procedure. The chapter addresses the question of why the obvious extension of the metaphor to the word, sentence, and book, but above all to readability, never came about. It mentions that Socrates' switch from nature to ideas recalls the strategy of self-proclaimed converts from theory to practice, which was simply swapping one kind of books for another.
The Delayed Appearance of the Second Book
Authors: Blumenberg Hans
Published: May 2023

This chapter traces the relocation of the Platonic ideas in relation to the concept of the divine, from a self-sufficient cosmos that can only be the object of a mind contemplating it from without to the inner world of the universe's creator. It confirms how the ideas would have to change with respect to their content and function in order to become something like thinking itself, rather than the thinkable. The book of nature would have become of necessity a picture book as it had the metaphysics of the imitative character of phenomena and concepts that have not yet been abandoned. The chapter explores the metaphorics of the book that can take hold of nature to the extent that it can be understood through the mind, but not the eyes. It stresses the belated systematization of the biblical precept that the world was created through commands and not through technomorphic deeds.
Encryption and Decryption of the Human World
Authors: Blumenberg Hans
Published: May 2023

This chapter details how Baroque was marked by its hypertrophic rhetoric as the epitome of the Counter-Reformation's emotional engagement with the book of nature. It points out the special significance of the work's metaphors of deciphering, which is the text of the world that must be laboriously read from start to finish. The book of nature maintains a background presence that is a contrast to the difficulty of reading the book of the human world in its moral coding. The chapter explains how professionalized theory had legitimated the difficulty of the modern idea of science with the mathematical encryption of its materials. Scientifically formed experience reads the text of appearances in the human world with a view to their true driving forces and the mechanisms by which these are implemented.
Anticipations of the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Blumenberg Hans
Published: May 2023

This chapter covers the “Apokatastasis,” which was written at the dawn of a century that it could not influence and defined the space of possibilities that opened up for the century. The difference between possibility and reality had become the unexpected thematic problem facing the production of an imaginary universal library. It highlights the assertion that God had chosen and realized the best from the infinite number of possible worlds that proves insufficiently dynamic from the standpoint of human history. The chapter considers the production of readability as a phenomenon that is closely related to the interpretation of the real in light of the possible. It describes the new production of readability that followed the age of discoveries and optical instruments.
“How Readable the Book of Nature is Becoming for Me …”
Authors: Blumenberg Hans
Published: May 2023

This chapter mentions Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who engaged with the proponent of the Enlightenment as a token of fashionable rebellion and as a possible realization of the undefined concept of perception. Goethe wanted natural phenomena to be self-evident and self-sufficient but not ciphers for something else. The chapter talks about how Italy completes the turn Goethe had taken in perception after his futile attempt to make friends with algebra and the conclusions he drew from it in Ilmenau. The chapter examines the concept of nature and the world that had spurred and sustained the Sturm und Drang movement as a counter to rule-bound order and rationality. This concept of nature had merged with enthusiasm for Shakespeare, with the rejection of books, the simplicity of instruments and the endless wealth of natural and other phenomena.
“The World Must Be Romanticized”
Authors: Blumenberg Hans
Published: May 2023

This chapter highlights the Enlightenment, which was decided in favor of the wide field of judicial metaphorics, even to the point of establishing courts and judgments in matters of taste. It points out the direction that held an ongoing fascination with its aura of the primordial legitimacy of humanity's relationship to the world. Romanticism can be calibrated against the horizon of alternative metaphors of philosophers to legislators or of experimenters to inquisitors putting the object to the rack. The chapter describes that the expression iudex ratio comes from Augustine's Confessions and its long-forgotten premise that one may not love the world if the impartiality of judicial inquiry is to be preserved. The religion of the book can never do enough to reduce phenomenal nature to the mere backdrop of the processes that decide on its existence.
Making Dreams Readable
Authors: Blumenberg Hans
Published: May 2023

This chapter talks about the zootomy professor Carl Brühl, whose text celebrated human beings as part of nature and its eternally renewed multitude of forms. The choice of metaphor indicates an affinity to a certain exegetical type of nature experience, anticipating the conflict inscribed from the beginning in psychoanalysis between the therapeutic intimacy of analysis or self-analysis. The chapter cites the example of “On Nature,” which demonstrates the intensity of experience one could bring to the read and the readable. It considers death as nature's device to continuously bring forth new life, which is read alongside the passage about nature speaking perpetually while preserving its secret. The chapter highlights the use of neuroses and madness to achieve objectives and smuggle past the censoring subject in various disguises that cannot be openly revealed.
The Genetic Code and Its Readers
Authors: Blumenberg Hans
Published: May 2023

This chapter reviews the high-level stability of the hereditary factor in relation to the multiple micro-physical influences of its environment, especially the unceasing heat motion of the atoms. It highlights the significant capacity for long-term change as the precondition for selective evolution. The great revelation of quantum theory was the features of discreteness that were discovered in the Book of Nature and in a context in which anything but continuity seemed to be absurd according to the views held until then. The chapter discusses the reference to the great metaphoric legacy that responded to a change of significance in nature's writing, which could only be appropriately illustrated through an epochal change in the representation of the intellectual tradition. The transition from linear continuity in the appearance of all ancient and early medieval manuscripts to the written and finally printed form of discretely articulated words.
Authoritarian Laughter
Authors: Klumbyte Neringa
Published: May 2023

This chapter introduces the concept of authoritarian laughter and its paradoxical nature. It also covers the political history of Broom, a Lithuanian satire and humor magazine. The Soviet government's project of satire and humor aimed to serve Communist Party ideological agendas and involve editors, artists, writers, journalists, and readers in creating a communist society while simultaneously encompassing opposition that undermined the government's initiatives. The chapter provides an overview of the complexities of state governance and political participation in the context of the project of Soviet laughter in Lithuania. It highlights laughter as transformative in the sense that it communicates dissensus and reconfigures authorized common sense, state ideology, and order.
Banality of Soviet Power
Authors: Klumbyte Neringa
Published: May 2023

This chapter covers the concept of the banality of power to capture the everyday commonplace process of participation in the authoritarian milieu. It explains how joining and working for Broom was a commonplace experience for those in search of security, autonomy, and self-expression. According to Hannah Arendt's concept of the “banality of evil,” participation in murderous projects sometimes can have no deep ideological roots or motives. Thus, people may join the Nazi Party or any other power structure in search of purpose and direction and just find themselves within it. Moreover, the history of Broom indicates that the editors did not occupy clear-cut roles in Soviet history in Lithuania.
Political Aesthetics
Authors: Klumbyte Neringa
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on political aesthetics. It discusses Broom's ideological editing of fictional and fact-based pieces submitted to the magazine by its regular contributors and amateur writers. The Broom editors' letters of rejection to authors criticized authors' lack of literary skills, humor, or the overall literary-aesthetic quality of their work, which makes their censorship different from Glavlit censors' conceptualization. The Power of Pedagogy showcases that the censoring of Broom editors is based on pedagogy. The chapter explains that Broom's political aesthetics advanced certain moral and emotional sentiments encoded in humor. It details the categories used for Broom's ideological editing that followed the long tradition established in Soviet satire more generally.
Soviet Dystopia
Authors: Klumbyte Neringa
Published: May 2023

This chapter looks into citizens' relations to Soviet modern materialities, which refers to everyday encounters with objects and surroundings in public spaces. The published and unpublished letters to Broom expressed dissociations from the Soviet project, disenchantment with Soviet modernity, and yearnings for a better future. Moreover, the letter indicates that people see the regime and public spaces' shortcomings as inseparable from everyday life. The chapter clarifies that Broom censored and edited letters to mute the direct criticism or anger toward the regime. It recognizes Broom readers were political actors raising arguments about their sensory experiences of Soviet materialities, challenging Soviet modernity's vision with their stories of Soviet dystopia.
Revolution and Post-authoritarian Laughter
Authors: Klumbyte Neringa
Published: May 2023

This chapter notes the active role that Broom took in the Sąjūdis and the Lithuanian revolution. It starts with the Broom editors' decision to publish Red Genocide, which accused Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Army of civilian deaths and claimed that communist ideology was murderous. Moreover, Broom laughter promoted a new politics of virtue rooted in ideas of nationhood, freedom, and democracy and denounced Soviet oppression and violence. The chapter covers the collapse of the Soviet Union. It also elaborates on how Broom did not survive post-Soviet despite transforming into an independent legal entity in 1991 and a humor newspaper in 1995. Moreover, the era of sovereignty marked the rise of digital media and the decline of print media.
Lost Laughter and Authoritarian Stigma
Authors: Klumbyte Neringa
Published: May 2023

This concluding chapter elaborates on the legacy of Broom. Even though the editors acknowledged their relative power and freedom to authorize certain forms of laughter, the post-Soviet nostalgia for Broom laughter reflects dissociation from new post-Soviet communities of laughter that does not reflect their generational experiences. Moreover, Broom's political laughter was multidirectional even though editors engaged Communist Party ideology and slogans to speak about their work. The chapter details the aims of the book, which were to contribute analytics of multidirectional laughter and Soviet western periphery studies, while also elaborating on the notion of authoritarianism by inquiring into intimate and everyday experiences of power. It also highlights how laughter in its multiple genres is intrinsically political and transformative.
Pogrom Violence and Visibility during the Kristallnacht Pogrom
Authors: Solomon Daniel
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines factors that differentiate those synagogues attacked during the Kristallnacht pogrom from those that were not, casting light on community attributes of anti-Jewish violence. It begins by surveying competing explanations for pogrom violence, which can be defined as a relatively brief episode of multiple violent acts against a specific social community. The chapter then describes two outstanding theoretical problems in the empirical approach to the Kristallnacht case: (1) the multiple interpretations of causality that underpin statistical studies of subnational variations in violence, and (2) the heterogeneity of Jewish social roles and cultural practices in Weimar- and Nazi-era Germany. These theoretical problems have specific implications for the findings about the causes of pogrom violence, but they also pertain to more general challenges surrounding the social science of the Holocaust. The chapter concludes by discussing pathways for future research and the implications of the tentative findings for social science research about the Holocaust and the practice of preventing pogrom violence.
Defeating Typhus in the Warsaw Ghetto
Authors: Stone Lewi , Lehnstaedt Stephan
Published: May 2023

This chapter analyzes the origins and curtailment of the typhus epidemic in the Warsaw ghetto. It begins by reassessing the number of individuals who were infected over the course of the typhus epidemic and the number of those who died. The chapter does this by making use of a detailed study of the often-contradictory literature, combined with mathematical principles commonly used in epidemiological modeling. It then looks at explanations for the end of the epidemic at the beginning of winter 1941–42, an occurrence considered completely surprising and inexplicable at the time. The chapter considers the public health actions that were successful in stemming the epidemic and preserving the lives of the tens of thousands infected. Ultimately, the findings highlight the commitment and actions of the Judenrat and the devotion and success of the ghetto's professional medical practitioners.
Addressing the Missing Voices in Holocaust Testimony
Authors: Einwohner Rachel L.
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores some methodological issues in using survivor testimony from the USC Visual History Archive. Are studies based on survivor testimonies biased, and if so, can these biases be addressed? What research questions can be answered using survivor testimonies, and what questions cannot be answered? Can social scientists properly study the Holocaust by using survivor testimony? The chapter addresses these questions by drawing on the author's use of Holocaust survivor testimonies in a study of Jewish resistance. In her studies of the Warsaw and Vilna Ghetto Uprisings, the author analyzes ways to include the missing voices of those who did not survive as a prerequisite to assessing the validity of survivors' voices as reflections of the entirety of the Holocaust victims' experience.
Legitimating Myths and the Holocaust in Postsocialist States
Authors: Gitelman Zvi
Published: May 2023

This chapter presents Belarus and Ukraine as case studies to examine how postsocialist states have shaped their Holocaust histories to secure the continuing political legitimacy of the ruling elites. The major theme of Belarusian governments since 1995 is that Belarus deserves sovereignty because it is the “partisan republic,” the country that resisted the Nazis ferociously, courageously, making the greatest sacrifices. In Jewish and Israeli literature, Jewish partisans in Belarus are depicted as resisters to the Holocaust and heroes. However, when one examines memoirs and oral testimonies by Jewish partisans one finds many testimonies to the capriciousness of partisan commanders, theft, rapes, desertion, betrayal, drunkenness, corruption, and licentiousness. Accounts such as these, bringing to light antisemitism, ethnic tensions, and arbitrary behavior among the partisans, do not appear in Soviet or post-Soviet Belarusian literature. The chapter then considers the role of national myths and national history in guiding individual and collective behavior.