bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Mythos and Ethos of America in the Work of William Faulkner
Authors: Blumenberg Hans
Published: January 2021

This chapter addresses Hans Blumenberg's “The Mythos and Ethos of America in the Work of William Faulkner” (1958). The manner in which the epic oeuvre of William Faulkner is read and understood is but a paradigm for such an obscured view of the freedom underlying history. Is his prose not full of descriptions of overwhelming and intractable fates, entangled and impenetrable, which make it all but inevitable to conclude freedom's meaninglessness from its futility? Is this America of Faulkner not altogether of the mythical kind, of the stuff of fate? The destinies of Faulkner's characters are tightly interwoven with the primal stirrings from which the American world emerges, with the cosmogony of the continent. But the national glory of the pioneer generations conceals the guilt inherent in their foundational achievements: taking land and carving out property, establishing legislation and ordering society.
Advancing into Eternal Silence
Authors: Blumenberg Hans
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses Hans Blumenberg's essay “Advancing into Eternal Silence: A Century after the Sailing of the Fram” (1993). This essay was written three years before his death. It offers not just the philosophical reading of an episode in the history of polar expeditions ripe with significance, but draws on an anecdote to muse on the relationship between media-archaeology and nihilism. Blumenberg explains that humans are risky beings, and not just because they seek frontier-pushing adventures like the voyage adrift of the Fram. They are risky for the very reason that their biological origins lie in the narrow span of the last interglacial period, when they learned the ability to cope with life caught between the advancing and receding glaciers; the natural being was now pitted against nature.
Introduction
Authors: Devereux Andrew W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the Spanish expansion into the Mediterranean basin during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the monarchy sought to forge a multicontinental empire at the heart of the Old World. It talks about the fact that the early modern Spanish Empire is often thought of as an Atlantic empire, one that arose as a result of the Castilian colonies of the Caribbean and, later, the American mainland. It also provides a reminder that during the early decades of overseas expansion, Spain looked to the east as much as it did to the west. The chapter seeks to address historical discrepancies by analyzing arguments that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spaniards developed in order to justify acts of war and conquest in the context of the Mediterranean. It connects Spain's Mediterranean imperial project to its Atlantic corollary, reviewing the ways in which the Mediterranean experience sometimes informed and influenced Spanish arguments justifying war and conquest in the Americas.
Explaining the Oil Wars Myth
Authors: Meierding Emily
Published: January 2021

This chapter explains why people believe in classic oil wars. It argues that the credibility of the oil wars myth arises from its connection to two other hegemonic narratives about the causes of violent conflict: Mad Max and El Dorado. The Mad Max myth asserts that countries, groups, and individuals fight because of existential need, while the El Dorado myth intimates that actors fight out of greed and in order to gain extraordinary wealth. The chapter traces the dual narratives of the Mad Max and El Dorado myths across centuries of academic and popular discourse. It also shows how the Mad Max and El Dorado myths were applied to oil after it was identified as a valuable natural resource.
A Theory of Strategic Anticipation
Authors: Kelanic Rosemary A.
Published: January 2021

This chapter explains the book's theory and identifies the two independent variables that drive the choice of anticipatory strategies: the petroleum deficit and the threat to oil imports. When combined, these two independent variables determine the state's overall coercive vulnerability. The chapter also discusses how the military value of oil is a necessary condition to explain great power behavior. The economic value of oil, while important, is not sufficient to explain why states pursue anticipatory strategies. The chapter then looks at the three categories of anticipatory strategy from which states select: self-sufficiency, indirect control, and direct control. Ultimately, a state will choose the lowest cost anticipatory strategy capable of fulfilling its oil security needs, given its degree of vulnerability. Finally, the chapter considers whether oil is “different” from other resources.
British Vulnerability and the Conquest of Mesopotamia
Authors: Kelanic Rosemary A.
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses British oil policy before World War I. In the decade before World War I, the British government was becoming increasingly aware of the importance of oil for military power. But few officials anticipated that oil would become so indispensable to war that a country would be unable to prevail in a conflict without it. The chapter then analyzes Britain's choice to pursue a direct-control strategy in late 1918 by invading Mesopotamia. Dire vulnerability, underpinned by a yawning petroleum deficit and Britain's severe susceptibility to blockade as an island nation, spurred the government to accept the high costs and risks of securing oil with this most extreme strategy.
The State and Rural Development in East Asia
Authors: Looney Kristen E.
Published: January 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the state and rural development in East Asia. In many developing countries, ruling elites pursue industrial development at the expense of the rural sector. They regard industry as critical for national security and economic competitiveness, and many believe that industry-led growth is sufficient to reduce poverty. This preference for industry is known as urban bias. In contrast with most developing countries, East Asia emerged in the post-World War II period as a region that seemed to defy the logic of urban bias, achieving both urban-industrial growth and rural-agricultural development. Nevertheless, it is also true that East Asian governments exploited agriculture, eroding the prospects for long-term development and giving rise to significant rural–urban disparities. Focusing on Taiwan, South Korea, and China, the book examines how and why East Asia achieved rural development, and it advances a theory to explain variation among East Asian countries. It demonstrates that rural transformation in East Asia was not a byproduct of industrialization, but the result of aggressive interventions by strong and activist (if not exactly developmental) states.
The Role of Rural Institutions and State Campaigns in Development
Authors: Looney Kristen E.
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses the role of rural institutions and state campaigns in development. Most accounts of rural development in East Asia privilege the role of land reform and the emergence of developmental states. However, this narrative is incomplete. A thorough examination of rural sector change in the region reveals the transformative effects of rural modernization campaigns, which can be defined as policies demanding high levels of bureaucratic and popular mobilization to overhaul traditional ways of life in the countryside. East Asian governments' use of campaigns runs counter to standard portrayals of the developmental state as wholly technocratic and demonstrates that rural development was not the inevitable result of industrialization. Rather, it was an intentional policy goal accomplished with techniques that aligned more with Maoism or Leninism than with market principles or careful economic management. The chapter begins by assessing common explanations for East Asian rural development in the post-World War II period. It then turns to the case of China and explores some of the reasons for rural policy failures in the Mao era (1949–1976) and successes in the reform era (1978–present). Finally, the chapter revisits the case of Japan and concludes with a few points about why existing theories of state-led development need to be reexamined.
Rural Development in China, 1980s–2000s
Authors: Looney Kristen E.
Published: January 2021

This chapter analyzes Chinese rural development in the reform era. Before the 2000s, China's reform-era agricultural policy could be summed up as decollectivization followed by resource extraction and neglect. Between 1978 and 1984, the replacement of the people's commune system with household contract farming resulted in historic poverty reduction. After 1984, however, central government investment and growth rates in agriculture started to decline. As was the case during the Maoist period, local governments were expected to be self-reliant and raise their own funds for development. Under pressure to impress higher-level officials with economic achievements, many local governments resorted to imposing heavy taxes on farmers. These went toward developing industry instead of providing public goods. In 2004, China had entered a new era in which “industry should nurture agriculture, and the cities should support the countryside.” Two policies in particular came to embody this principle. First, after a period of experimentation with rural tax reform, the central government decided in 2006 to completely eliminate agricultural taxes. Second, a policy called Building a New Socialist Countryside was introduced as the top domestic priority of the eleventh five-year plan (2006–2010).
Flexible Despotism
Authors: Wood Alex J.
Published: January 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of flexible despotism. New economic processes are taking hold in the spaces opened up by the steady decline of collective workplace regulation. No longer is working time understood as a standard, stable eight hours, five days a week. Instead, working time is flexible, on demand, and 24/7. Consequently, many workers are increasingly employed flexibly, while others may not even have an employment contract at all, and instead be classified as self-employed—and yet have their labor controlled by a platform. Even workers with standard, full-time, permanent contracts can experience high levels of insecurity as a result of flexible scheduling within this new temporal order. As a result, the benefits and drawbacks of flexible scheduling have been widely debated. These discussions, however, have tended to focus on issues of job quality, work–life balance, and well-being. This book goes further, by drawing attention to important but under-researched issues of managerial power and workplace control. This is necessary, as it is only when one understands paid work as a power relationship that one is able to see how precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism—a new regime of control within the workplace.
The Dynamics of Work and Scheduling Gifts
Authors: Wood Alex J.
Published: January 2021

This chapter describes the main characteristics of retail work at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo, considering how managerial control at the two workplace regimes was aided through misrecognition by workers of the workplace relations. It provides a brief history of work games, that is, the manner in which workers create games that make their work more enjoyable but that also lead them to become complicit in their own exploitation, for winning these games invariably entails producing additional profit for their employer. The chapter then discusses the absence of work games at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo. In place of the mystifying effects of work games, one finds that flexible working time aids control as a consequence of “schedule gifts” obscuring exploitation. Schedule gifts are found to be crucial for understanding control in the on-demand economy.
Religious Freedom and the New Evangelical Foreign Policy Lobby
Authors: Turek Lauren Frances
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores how evangelical internationalism developed into a focused vision for U.S. foreign relations that provided the foundation for political advocacy on a wide range of global issues by the late 1970s and early 1980s. It argues that a powerful evangelical foreign policy emerged in response to growing anxieties about developments in international relations. It also explains how evangelicals drew on their connections with coreligionists abroad and combined their spiritual beliefs with human rights language in order to build support among policymakers for the cause of international religious liberty. The chapter reflects the layered and multimodal nature of evangelical internationalist development and of the foreign policy challenges that evangelical activists confronted. It also reveals how evangelical leaders, missionaries, and interest groups drew on their political power and the international evangelical network to shape international relations and national policies in the United States, the Soviet Union, Guatemala, and South Africa.
Conclusion
Authors: Turek Lauren Frances
Published: January 2021

This chapter reviews the influential role that evangelical lobbyists played in shaping human rights legislation during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. It mentions how evangelical lobbyists placed their work on the International Religious Freedom Act within a larger historical context. The chapter traces the early history of effective evangelical lobbying efforts on matters related to human rights and U.S. foreign policy. It illuminates key moments when evangelical activism actually influenced the specific policy directions that government leaders pursued or the manner in which they discussed and understood global issues. It also reflects on the legacy of earlier evangelical foreign policy engagement in building the political capital and international networks necessary for effective advocacy at the turn of the twenty-first century.
An Amazing Record of Red Plotting
Authors: Woods Colleen
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines how anticommunist politics emerged alongside international socialist and communist anti-imperial movements during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when U.S. and Philippine political and military officials turned to anticommunism politics to explain the rise of labor and peasant protest, proscribe class-based anti-imperial critiques, and bolster the nationalism of the governing Filipino political elites. Indeed, even before the official formation of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) in 1930, U.S. and Philippine officials deployed “anti-red” politics to limit the acceptable range of political debate and protest in the archipelago. Throughout the 1930s, U.S. and Filipino policymakers attempted to eliminate socialist, communist, and peasant labor activists' ideas from the political sphere through state repression. Yet by 1939, with the rise of fascism in Europe and Japan and the subsequent embrace of the “popular front” by Western communist parties, Franklin D. Roosevelt pressured the Philippine Commonwealth to minimize its persecution of the political Left. Focusing on the economic, political, and social structures of the colonial state that gave rise to anticolonial critiques and movements, the chapter shows how a transnational political class of Americans and Filipinos anticipated independence by tightening their hold on social, economic, and political power within the islands.
Efficient, Honest, and Democratic
Authors: Woods Colleen
Published: January 2021

This chapter investigates U.S.-sponsored technocratic development and aid programs in the Philippines in the context of the local anticommunist politics that coexisted—and sometimes conflicted—under the umbrella of a globally oriented, U.S.-driven anticommunist project. Beginning in 1949, U.S. policymakers began to gain a sense of the scale of corruption in the new nation, and, into the 1950s, programs to address the problem were proposed on various technocratic levels. Public Administration Week, proposed in 1954, was just one of those proposals, but it would not be staged for another two years. In the interim, Filipinos saw a flurry of technocrats and specialists arrive to “clean up” their country, but they also heard increasingly ominous warnings about the threat of communism. In effect, two sets of anticommunist actors clashed over the most important geographic scale of the Cold War conflict: the local or the global. In both cases, anticommunist ideology helped Filipino elites and U.S. administrators push back against the vision of political and economic equality that was most vocally promoted by the targets of anticommunist campaigns.
A Dirty, Half-Hidden War
Authors: Woods Colleen
Published: January 2021

This chapter assesses the formation of a private paramilitary organization in the 1950s by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents who were associated with Edward Lansdale, as well as by a group of veterans from the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). This “Freedom Company” was meant to transport the “lessons of the Huk campaign” to sites elsewhere in Asia and Latin America. As an organizing principle, the Freedom Company and its U.S.-based supporters assumed that U.S. colonialism had imparted “modern political knowledge” to Filipinos; as the most “politically modern” Asians, therefore, they were best equipped to “export democracy” throughout the region. The Freedom Company Philippines (FCP), staffed entirely by Filipinos in an effort to distance contemporary U.S. interventions from a history of Western imperialism, actively promoted the idea that the U.S. colonial project in the Philippines had succeeded, while European imperial practices had failed to develop Asian societies properly. Though steeped in racialized perceptions regarding the political capacities of colonized or formerly colonized peoples, anticommunists contended that U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and contemporary U.S. interventions demonstrated the United States' interests in liberating Asians from colonialism across the region.
Making Moods
Authors: Trnka Susanna
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses another core facet of familial and social life. It analyzes technologies of food and drink and the ways in which they are used to foster particular senses of sociality, time, and space through the cultivation of interrelational pleasures. The chapter centers on the centrality of moods in Martin Heidegger's depiction of being-in-the-world and uses anthropology to focus on how moods are intentionally or unintentionally created rather than merely experienced. It also considers the affective dimensions of eating and drinking and their impact on bodily and mental well-being. The chapter illustrates a feast that transforms time by following a married couple on an alcohol-fueled revisioning of the world. It examines when and how the possibilities of bodily transcendence turn into dissolution and potential demise.
Managing Flexibility Without Security in Toronto’s Direct Funding
Authors: Cranford Cynthia J.
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the Direct Funding Program of Ontario's Self-Managed Attendant Services. The evident willingness of self-managers and personal attendants to engage in relational work and the still unmet labor market security of workers were both necessary for self-managers to realize the Direct Funding Program's promise of flexibility. However, within a context of insufficient funding and little to no collective backing, this program produced labor market insecurity for workers, in the form of insufficient hours, earnings, and protection. Moreover, the position of workers in the broader racialized and gendered labor market shaped their labor market choices, or lack thereof, and shaped their experience at the intimate level. Failing to address broader racialized and gendered labor market insecurity not only has implications for workers who are less able to negotiate what they do and how. It also limits the progressive potential to value all forms of intimate labor and to rethink skill.
Introduction
Authors: Lieber Keir A. , Press Daryl G.
Published: January 2021

This chapter explains the central anomaly of the nuclear age. It talks about the continuation of great power competition under the shadow of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the most effective instruments of deterrence ever invented, but they have not eliminated the incentives for countries to compete intensely with each other for greater security, power, and strategic advantage. The chapter focuses on understanding why power politics endure in the nuclear age, which not only solve a puzzle for international relations theory but also provides vital insights into the requirements of nuclear deterrence. It also explains the trends that may undermine nuclear deterrence in the coming decades.
Getting to Stalemate
Authors: Lieber Keir A. , Press Daryl G.
Published: January 2021

This chapter analyzes how much nuclear retaliatory capability must countries build to reliably deter nuclear attack and how easy is it to establish nuclear stalemate. It discusses competing views and explains why the outcome of the debate is crucial for understanding the central puzzle of the nuclear age. One view holds that even minimal nuclear arsenals are “enough” to create stalemate, while another contends that stalemate requires far more robust nuclear forces and the virtual certainty of retaliation. However, the chapter also shows that minimal arsenals have not been enough. It looks into the intense rivalry of the Cold War, in which the threshold of nuclear capability required to generate deterrence was higher than the capability to create the mere possibility of retaliation.
Conclusion
Authors: Höcker Arne
Published: January 2021

This chapter explains that, without any doubt, Goethe's and Moritz's novels as well as Schiller's and Kleist's novellas are part of today's German literary canon. But just as certainly, this literary canon did not yet exist around 1800. It cannot even be assumed that the writers of these texts considered themselves literary authors. Werther and Anton Reiser conceal Goethe's and Moritz's authorship, and instead frame their novels by means of a fictitious editorship. In Schiller's and Kleist's novellas, the reference to the truthfulness of the story and the historically documented origin of the material have a similar function. What might have been the premises of and motivations for writing about cases for Goethe, Moritz, Schiller, and Kleist when we assume that they did not write as literary authors? The reading of their cases as literary fiction obscures the fact that these novels and novellas might just as well be understood as vehicles for lawyers, medical doctors, pedagogues, and philanthropists to inform each other about the legal and mental status of the individual and, thus, to continue the medical and legal traditions of thinking, arguing, and writing in cases. And yet the close reading of these texts shows that in them the representation of cases began to change.
The Man of Possibilities
Authors: Höcker Arne
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores Robert Musil's case-based concept of an “imaginary precision” in the novel The Man without Qualities (1930–1943). In the 1920s and 1930s, Musil's literary production also follows the formula of contingency, which the protagonist of his novel The Man without Qualities connects with the “principle of insufficient cause.” One of the central objectives of this sprawling text is to take this principle seriously and to make it the basis for a literary program that would surpass the representation of the real world with the realization of the possible one. It is one of the major differences between Döblin and Musil's poetologies that Döblin's literary program is centered around facts and based on a material foundation, but Musil's novel is interested in that which is possible. To Döblin's call for a fantasy of facts Musil responds with the concept of fantastic precision. And whereas Döblin demands from literature to get closer to reality, Musil claims in an interview of 1926 that he is not interested “in the real explanation of real events.” In fact, Döblin's and Musil's realism can be distinguished by the opposite direction of their reference to reality.
Amdo at the Edge of Empire
Authors: Weiner Benno
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses the subimperial practices pursued in the Repgong area of Amdo by the Republican-era “Ma family warlords.” It begins by providing a brief look at the development of these institutions from their founding in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries during the Mongol Yuan Empire. Over the centuries, various imperial centers frequently invested members of Amdo's religious and secular leadership—including the Shartsang lineage of Rongwo Monastery, the Rongwo nangso, and a multitude of qianhu and baihu—with honors, titles, and rewards in exchange for expressions of loyalty and their service as intermediaries between the imperial state and local society. Rather than clearly demarcated institutions in perpetual competition, it might be best to think of authority in Amdo as operating within an integrated, syncretic, often conflict-ridden, but mutually authenticating web of personal and institutional relationships. This syncretism did not vanish in 1912 with the collapse of the imperial system. Instead, the new rulers of Amdo would reconstruct, if not quite replicate, imperial-style linkages with many members of the Amdo elite.
Establishing a Foundation among the Masses
Authors: Weiner Benno
Published: January 2021

This chapter details the work plans of the newly formed Zeku County Joint Committee. Chaired by Hor chieftain Wagya under the supervision of Party secretary Guo Min, the forty-two-member joint committee included most of the region's prominent Tibetan leaders. As such, it served as the primary venue at which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recruited the critical support of Zeku's Tibetan upper strata for its state- and nation-building efforts. The joint committee would meet three times over the course of 1954. Each time, reports were drafted, propaganda disseminated, directives issued, work tasks assigned, and quotas set. However, each meeting revolved around a primary work task: establishing subcounty districts, social welfare, and tax collection. Each of these undertakings—bureaucratic administration, public welfare, and resource extraction—is, of course, a fundamental aspect of modern governance. In total, they also are indicative of a desire to replace subimperial arrangements struck between the CCP and indigenous elites with a more direct and deeply felt relationship between state and society.
Church and Homeland
Authors: Kitroeff Alexander
Published: January 2021

This chapter looks at how the Greek Orthodox Church played a central role in Greek American efforts to shape US foreign policy toward Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus between the 1960s and 1980s. It talks about the Amercanization process of Greek Orthodox Church that not only advocated for Greek interests but for American and Christian values as well. The chapter explains “Ethnarchy,” which when the highest ecclesiastical leader of the church in a given area assumes political leadership. It mentions Stanley Harakas who provided two examples of ethnarchs in the twentieth century: Archbishops Damaskinos and Makarios. Archbishop Damaskinos served as regent from the time Greece was liberated from Axis occupation in 1944, while Archbishop Makarios served as the first president of the Cyprus Republic between 1960 and 1977.
A Spectacular Success
Authors: Bailey Heather L.
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on the Russian Orthodox press, which represented the new church as a spectacular success. It explains why, according to Orthodox publicists, the Paris church was signified as the light of Orthodoxy that was dawning in the West and represented a critical step in Russia's providential task of reuniting Christendom. Even though Orthodox publicists had great expectations that the new church represented a harbinger for overcoming the schism that divided West and East, like French discourses about the Paris church, the Russian accounts described in the chapter reinforces the dichotomy between the Orthodox Christian and the heterodox other. It also discusses the French Catholic polemicists that clung to the law of schismatic churches and their narratives about the enslaved Caesaropapist Russian Church when the papal question unsettled in the 1860s. It investigates the elements of backlash against the Russian Orthodox Church's closer proximity and greater visibility that was indirectly caused by the establishment of a Russian church in Paris.
User Innovation and System Management
Authors: Lindsay Jon R.
Published: January 2021

This chapter investigates the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC), the analogue to the Fighter Command Ops Room in the modern U.S. Air Force. The air force formally designates the CAOC as a weapon system, even as it is basically just a large office space with hundreds of computer workstations, conference rooms, and display screens. The CAOC is an informational weapon system that coordinates all of the other weapon systems that actually conduct air defense, strategic attack, close air support, air mobility and logistics, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). One might be tempted to describe the CAOC as “a center of calculation,” but modern digital technology tends to decenter information practice. Representations of all the relevant entities and events in a modern air campaign reside in digital data files rather than a central plotting table. The relevant information is fragmented across collection platforms, classified networks, and software systems that are managed by different services and agencies. Thus, in each of the four major U.S. air campaigns from 1991 to 2003, CAOC personnel struggled with information friction. They rarely used the mission planning systems that were produced by defense contractors as planned, and they improvised to address emerging warfighting requirements.
Irregular Problems and Biased Solutions
Authors: Lindsay Jon R.
Published: January 2021

This chapter details how the U.S. intervention in Iraq completed a full cycle through the information practice framework between 2003 and 2008. During the invasion and its aftermath, managed practice turned into insulated practice, which prompted both internal and external actors to adapt. During the subsequent occupation, adaptive practice turned into problematic practice, which in turn encouraged the U.S. military to institutionalize doctrinal reforms. The chapter explores the ways in which insulated practice still persisted at the end of this process, curiously enough, even in a tactical unit close to the fight that had ample opportunity to make sense of facts on the ground. It also surveys the Special Operations Task Force's (SOTF) information system and then compares the SOTF to other units that conducted a similar mission (Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC) or operated in the same environment (U.S. Marines) to demonstrate how different institutional choices can generate different qualities of information practice.
Becoming Richard Spencer
Authors: Smolla Rodney A.
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on Richard Bertrand Spencer, a known racial supremacist from Boston. It describes Spencer as someone dangerous because he was smart. Not only did he know history, politics, and culture but he knew how to use that knowledge. Spencer evolved as the illiberal product of a liberal education, pressing his study of music, language, history, philosophy, politics, and culture into the service of ethnic cleansing. The chapter also follows the events of 2013 when Spencer grew increasingly radical in his white supremacist thinking. It looks into the conference of white nationalists called the American Renaissance where Spencer gave a speech urging “the creation of a White Ethno-State on the North American continent” and advocated for “ethnic cleansing.”
Kessler v. Bellamy
Authors: Smolla Rodney A.
Published: January 2021

This chapter explains how Charlottesville became the epicenter of the national debate over Confederate monuments. It discusses the colourful sideshow battle between Wes Bellamy, a local African American teacher, activist, and political leader, and Jason Kessler, Charlottesville's emerging alt-right supremacist man-on-the-scene. Kessler was offended by Bellamy's crusade against the Robert E. Lee statue and created a crusade of his own to remove Bellamy. Kessler searched Bellamy's Twitter account for embarrassing posts and published several of Bellamy's tweets on his own blog to call for Bellamy's resignation or removal from office. This chapter narrates the events of December 2016 when Kessler launched a petition drive demanding that Bellamy resign or be removed due to anti-white, racist and pro-rape comments.
The Monuments Debate
Authors: Smolla Rodney A.
Published: January 2021

This chapter recalls the approval of the resolution to create the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces by the Charlottesville City Council on May 28, 2016. It explains that the resolution will provide the council with options for telling the full story of Charlottesville's history of race and for changing the City's narrative through public spaces. It also identifies nine persons who were appointed to the Blue Ribbon Commission, which had as its principal focus the statues Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The chapter highlights protestors that favor the removal of the statues, arguing that modern society should not idolize an evil history. It analyzes the Blue Ribbon Commissions compromise to not remove the Lee and Jackson statues on the condition that their meaning is transformed, and their history is retold.
The Day of the Klan
Authors: Smolla Rodney A.
Published: January 2021

This chapter describes the Klan's rally at Justice Park, where counterprotestors came openly carrying firearms or knives and wearing Black Lives Matter shirts. It describes how the police divided Justice Park into four zones for all groups to conduct their protest. It also mentions the media staging area that was established on East Jefferson Street, wherein the police allowed members of the media to enter the buffer zone. The chapter details the arrival of Antifa members at Justice Park, who were highly prepared for potential physical confrontation as they wore helmets, shields, body armor, padded clothing, and gas masks. It discloses how the police were not able to prevent the counterprotesters from tossing punches, hurling fruit and bottles, and berating the Klan with catcalls and insults during their rally.
Lien An
Authors: Norland Patricia D.
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on Lien An as the seventh Vietnamese woman in the Saigon sisters. It describes how Lien An grew up in a very rich francophone family where she was coddled at home and chauffeured around town before shaping her own voice and direction. It also points out that Lien An was one of the students awakened by Luu Huu Phuoc's music to seek independence. The chapter explains Lien An's resentment towards the expectation that girls stay home and have nothing to do with politics, as well as her appreciation for her mother that urged her to get a profession so she would not have to rely on a husband. It details how Lien An was greatly influenced by Minh for courageously rallying support for those fighting for independence.
Oanh
Authors: Norland Patricia D.
Published: January 2021

This chapter centers on Oanh, who was born in the Mekong Delta, attended Lycée Marie Curie, and was considered the ninth Vietnamese woman of the Saigon sisters. It recounts the revolution of 1945, where Oanh's father was almost beheaded for being a landowner and collaborator but was spared at the last minute. It also emphasizes how Oanh took pride in being Vietnamese but did not have a strong political consciousness, only going along with student marches and other activities to “help make the crowd.” The chapter discusses her studies at Viterbo College in Wisconsin and life in the United States. It discloses her return to Saigon, where she applied her degree to help young women affected by the social upheaval of the Geneva Accords.
Minh
Authors: Norland Patricia D.
Published: January 2021

This chapter talks about Minh, who was dubbed faithful daughter, wife, mother, and “adopted mother” to nieces and nephews while she endeavored to find ways to support the resistance. It details Minh's external life as a teacher while she built networks and arranged activities among teachers and other intellectuals sympathetic to the revolution. It also discusses Minh's arrest and imprisonment to the jail in which Trang was held after her secret contributions to the resistance had been discovered. The chapter narrates how Minh welcomed Thanh and Trang back into the family compound on Cach Manh Thang Tam after the war. It also mentions the jobs she took that allowed her to travel and explore other cultures in order to satisfy her curiosity about the world.
Epilogue
Authors: Norland Patricia D.
Published: January 2021

This chapter begins with a narrative of the death of the first Saigon sister, Thranh, in a freak motorcycle taxi accident when she was about to meet a close friend and fellow diplomat at the Paris Peace Talks. It is followed by an account of Oanh's passing in 2001 and Lien An's death in 2017. It also describes Minh and Trang's retirement, in which Minh scoots around town to attend concerts and check on friends and colleagues while Trang returned to being an emotional “turtle.” The chapter talks about the death of Xuan in 2010 that left Trang in absolute mourning. It also mentions Tuyen enjoying choreographing reunions and navigating the chaotic streets of Saigon on her motorcycle.
The Contradictions of Catholic Neoconservatism
Authors: Russell Jesse
Published: January 2021

This chapter details the rise and fall of perhaps the most unusual bloc within the neoconservative movement: the Catholic neoconservatives. It traces how Michael Novak's best seller The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982) caused Catholic neoconservatives to shift American Catholic discussion of economics to a defense of “democratic capitalism” as the purest distillation of Catholic social teaching. This argument was reinforced when another Catholic neoconservative, George Weigel, seized the public image of John Paul II for political purposes with the publication of Weigel's biography Witness to Hope (1999). Once the neoconservatives were able to speak for conservative Catholicism in America, they rallied American Catholic celebrities to their positions on foreign interventionism, support for multinational corporations, and Jewish ultranationalism. Integral to this campaign was the success of Catholic neoconservatives in fashioning an American Catholic understanding of political philosophy, starting with the social teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. In The Hemisphere of Liberty, Novak dwells on a statement made by the English Catholic classical liberal Lord Acton in order to present St. Thomas as the “First Whig.” This was part of an arduous effort to reconcile medieval political philosophy with the neoconservative understanding of Anglo-American liberalism.
The Unwanted Southern Conservatives
Authors: Cathey Boyd D.
Published: January 2021

This chapter assesses Southern conservatism, its history, and its relationship to the American conservative movement. It particularly looks at the fate of Southern regionalists within a now-transformed American conservative movement. The chapter considers the deliberate removal of the Southern traditionalists from this establishment, a process that was greatly accelerated once the neoconservatives became a force to be reckoned with. This displacement represented a major reorientation of the conservative movement, given that Southern Agrarians and, more generally, Southern traditionalists had been significant cultural and social critics in the post-World War II Right. The loss of a Southern conservative presence was so total that any memory of this influence has been shoved down a memory hole and/or bleached out of authorized histories of the conservative movement.
Introduction
Authors: Shibata Saori
Published: January 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the rise of a nonregular workforce in Japan. Around the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, nonregular workers were identified as a key group whose members were suffering from low wages and insecure employment. As part of this growth in nonregular employment, Japan has also witnessed a growing number of workers' protests, which have both sought to highlight the plight of Japan's precarious workers and attempted to oppose and resist the new conditions that they were experiencing. Indeed, over the past twenty years, Japan has witnessed the emergence of a new form of labor activism. This book investigates the way in which Japanese capitalism has undergone a process of restructuring, with a particular focus on the workplace and how changing socioeconomic structures have affected workers. It explores how workers have responded and contributed to the construction of the Japanese political economy, as well as how the country's model of capitalism has been transformed as a result.
Precarious Labor Power and Japan’s Neoliberalizing Firms
Authors: Shibata Saori
Published: January 2021

This chapter presents four case studies documenting ways in which Japan's precarious workers have mobilized in opposition to Japanese employers, and some of the effects that the workers have had in doing so. Nonregular workers face working conditions characterized by precarity, lack of bargaining power, low wages, and a rapid turnover of employment. Nevertheless, these case studies illustrate a number of important ways in which, through collective action, nonregular workers in Japan have been able to impose a number of sanctions on employers and receive a range of important concessions. This has led to changes in corporate governance, better treatment of workers, the payment of unpaid wages, and improved employment security. In some cases, solidarity among precarious workers has led to the collapse of temporary employment agencies (temp agencies), clearly demonstrating that workers' acts of refusal can generate changes in employment practices.
Cut
Authors: Feldmann Doug , Ditka Mike
Published: January 2021

This chapter reflects on how, after a four-year journey with tiresome nights of classes while balancing professional football and being a new husband, Bob Thomas got set to tackle his final term at Loyola University in the spring semester of 1981. His daily routine required driving to Lake Forest for meetings and practices from his home in the western suburbs, into Chicago for law school in the evenings, and then commuting back home. By May, he had plowed through the remainder of his coursework. Only the bar exam—looming in late July—stood between him and his goal of becoming a practicing attorney. He took a break from his studies in early June and returned to Rochester to continue a summer tradition with his father. For the past several years, his father had run a two-week kicking camp with which Bob assisted. It was one of the few places where youngsters could learn the finer points of the soccer style. In retrospect, Bob was indeed proud of the results his father had attained at the camp—but was equally impressed with what an innovator his father was. The chapter then recounts how Bob was dismissed from the Chicago Bears.
The Recalibration of Tsarist Policies ­toward Armenians inside and outside Russia, 1857–1880
Authors: Riegg Stephen Badalyan
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on the cleric and intellectual named Gavril Aivazovskii. It investigates how the tsarist authorities navigated internal Armenian tensions surrounding visions of national identity based on religious and secular principles. It also uncovers the government's alliance with the Armenian Church against U.S. and European proselytizers. The chapter contends that St. Petersburg continued to promote itself as the defender of Western Armenians during the Russo-Ottoman War, which confirms that the first cracks in the political symbiosis had already appeared in the mid-1870s. It examines the imperial officials' negotiation of delicate Armenian debates about their national identity, the state's continued partnership with Ejmiatsin in various international contexts, and the first signs of Russian hesitation about Armenian socio-political reliability.
Beginnings
Authors: Yamaura Chigusa
Published: January 2021

This introductory chapter provides a background of transnational marriage agencies, which emerged within a very specific historical and geographical context. Transnational marriage agencies specializing in introducing Chinese women to Japanese men first appeared as a significant phenomenon in Japan in the 1990s. Some marriage brokers were professionals for whom the brokerage business was a full-time job. Others were amateurs, often themselves part of a Japanese–Chinese couple. Many of these marriage agencies had an online presence. Indeed, numerous male clientele had found their way to a marriage agency via the Internet. This book offers an ethnographic study of the making of cross-border marriage. Understanding contemporary practices of crossing borders between Japan and northeast China for the sake of marriage entails exploring and theorizing the following: (1) marriage and the construction of marriageability; (2) the influence of the local; (3) the politics of similarity, proximity, and familiarity; and (4) the implicit ideologies pertaining to marriage itself.
The Making and Unmaking of “Unmarriageable Persons” in Japan
Authors: Yamaura Chigusa
Published: January 2021

This chapter explains how, despite shifting social contexts, marriage still mattered in contemporary Japanese society. Against this background, it looks at how the category of “unmarriageable” persons was created and stigmatized, but also negotiated, as it pertained to Japanese–Chinese transnational matchmaking. An increasing number of people, willingly or unwillingly, are remaining single in contemporary Japan. Thus, bachelorhood was not a condition limited to those seeking a Chinese bride. Those who voluntarily remained single in Japan might end up being categorized as either “unmarried” or “unmarriageable.” But paradoxically, despite even finding a marriage partner, Japanese men seeking a Chinese bride would also never be fully free from the image of being “unmarriageable.” The chapter then addresses how marrying a Chinese bride through commercial marriage brokers reaffirmed men's status as “unmarriageable.” It also demonstrates how participants categorized as “unmarriageable” attempted to negotiate their marriageability.
Gendered Investments in Marriage Migration
Authors: Yamaura Chigusa
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses how Chinese women in the town of Xinghai navigated their marriageability. In doing so, it offers a picture of cross-border matchmaking practices that, due to differences in the local context, is distinct in a number of ways from Dongyang. In a community where it was socially expected that one should go to Japan, marriage migration to Japan had become a strategy and gendered site of investment for women. By paying expensive brokerage fees, many women actively produced the circumstances of their marriageability and commodified their marriage. But despite their active efforts, their sense of subjectivity within these processes remained unstable. This was due to the unequal and dependent nature of the mobility they engaged in, namely, marriage.