bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Securitized Protection
Authors: Cretu Doina Anca
Published: May 2023

This chapter explains how Austria-Hungary established refugee camps in response to people's forced displacement after the Russian army invaded in 1914. However, the basis of the refugee policy was based on the immobilization of the moving population. Since the men were signed to fight in the military, most of the refugees consisted of women, children, and the elderly, who then became the object of a protective state's welfare scheme. The chapter then looks into the organization of healthcare assistance in refugee camps in Austria-Hungary. It cites how healthcare assistance became a tool to enable camp confinement and population management during the war.
Collective Care
Authors: Praspaliauskiene Rima
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers enveloped care as particularly bittersweet. Through the story of a small-town baker and his family that dates back to 1944, the chapter underscores how offerings of food and money have connected families, neighbors, and doctors in caring collectives. It looks at the assemblages that are activated by the will to care for the sick within existing conditions, which are a vital element of enveloped care that puts the emphasis not on a patient's autonomy but on interdependency and kinship. The chapter discusses the relationships that are mediated by money, food, or other objects and created a particular economy of health that poses challenges to neoliberal health care reforms. It mentions health care reform projects that seek more efficiency and transparency that do not necessarily deliver better care.
Nationalism and Civic Duty Across the World
Authors: Hur Aram
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the most expansive test of the contextual argument that the context, rather than the content, of nationalism shapes its relationship to democracy. The national theory of civic duty was inspired by the impressive show of civic duty in the unlikely setting of South Korea's young and fragile democracy during the Asian financial crisis. The chapter also assesses the theory's logic about national stories and beliefs of linkage through a paired comparison of civic duty in South Korea and Taiwan. In an entirely different cultural and historical setting from East Asia, the chapter emphasizes how Germany externally validated the civic effect of national stories. It tests how consequential the national pull toward civic duty is in democracies across the world.
Resurrected
Authors: Starks Tricia
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses how the tobacco industry resurrected after the 1920 war, revolution, and civil war. It notes how the entire economy suffered, so Vladimir Il'ich Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP) to replace the policies of War Communism. To manage the troubled tobacco industry, the Bolsheviks nationalized all 136 tobacco factories and then consolidated them. Securing tobacco production also satisfied the vast number of smokers even as it helped the general economy and enriched the state. Thus, tobacco remained sought after, and inflated prices continued. Even though Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko failed to shut down the tobacco culture, his campaign discouraged increased tobacco use.
On the Waterfront
Authors: Blumin Stuart M. , Altschuler Glenn C.
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the influence of the East River and its waterfront, noting commuters to Manhattan that either enjoyed the brief passage across the river in good weather or cursed the ice and chill of winter. It cites Walt Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, which details his mystical connection to all those who would experience his own depth of feeling during the seemingly humdrum act of crossing the river. The chapter also discusses how the evocations of the magnetism of the waterfront were matched in the real lives of Brooklynites and New Yorkers. The chapter recounts the 1850s wherein an incoming tide pushed masses of harbor ice into the already icy East River, creating a solid bridge from shore to shore and drawing thousands to the thrilling experience. It provides accounts of the drudgery of loading and unloading ships, filling and emptying warehouses, and manufacturing rope, white lead, glass, and dozens of other products.
Newcomers
Authors: Blumin Stuart M. , Altschuler Glenn C.
Published: May 2023

This chapter highlights Julian Ralph's characterization of Brooklyn in 1893 as a vast suburb that was shaped by his view of thousands of men crossing Brooklyn Bridge after a day's work in New York City. Ralph's essay quickly pivots to Brooklyn's excellent schools, the natural product of a city of homes, and of women's influence. It considers the growth of manufacturing in Brooklyn as part of a larger story of industrialization in the United States. The chapter points out how Brooklyn contributed substantially to the industrial revolution, noting how its industrial sector increased tenfold and outpaced the sevenfold growth in the entire country. While Brooklyn's industrial sector was expanding so rapidly, the city's population grew more diverse, continuing a trend that began before the Civil War.
Forging Global Connections
Authors: Marker Emily
Published: May 2023

This chapter assesses youth exchanges and international mobilizations in the global arena from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The tension between French recognition of the need for African participation in forums and dismissal of what Africans had to say came to operate on a broader scale in the 1950s. French officials grew increasingly alarmed as the onset of the Cold War and the rise of Third Worldism dramatically multiplied the venues and opportunities for African youth to participate in the global debate about what the postwar world should look like. The outbreak of the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), and Algerian militants' extensive and largely successful international public relations campaign to win sympathy for their cause, intensified French paranoia about international meddling in France's colonial affairs and heightened French concerns about Islam. The chapter considers how fears about international youth mobilizations in that broader global context collided and converged with more particular anxieties about Franco-African and European integration, further deepening the purchase of postwar racial common sense and the culturalization of Christianity. Those entwined historical processes both contributed to and helped naturalize the astonishingly rapid disaggregation of African and European France in the early 1960s.
Epilogue
Authors: Marker Emily
Published: May 2023

This epilogue explores the consequences of the disjuncture between what had seemed possible and desirable to colonial reformers and European unity activists in the mid-to-late 1940s and what actually came to pass in 1950s. To overcome colonial domination in the empire and national division in Europe, French politicians, administrators, and educators proposed a vast array of education reforms and youth programs in the hopes of stimulating European integration and imperial renewal from the ground up. However, these entangled initiatives to turn African subjects into French citizens and national citizenries in Europe into “Europeans” in the 1940s and 1950s did not produce the desired effects. Implemented unevenly and on a small scale, these initiatives provided formative experiences for small cohorts of future French, francophone African, and West European leaders, but the majority of French people and other Europeans who came of age during this period did not develop a strong European political identity. Ultimately, the study of postwar youth and education initiatives across metropolitan French, colonial African, and transnational European contexts reveals that though French and European officials learned to rhetorically denounce religious and racial discrimination in the wake of World War II, their practices and policy choices laid the groundwork for the processes of exclusion and the structural inequalities that continue to organize politics and social life in France, ex-French Africa, and the EU today.
Atomic Bill
Authors: Kiernan Vincent
Published: May 2023

This book examines the fraught career of New York Times science journalist, William L. Laurence and shows his professional and personal lives to be a cautionary tale of dangerous proximity to power. Laurence was fascinated with atomic science and its militarization. When the Manhattan Project drew near to perfecting the atomic bomb, he was recruited to write much of the government's press materials that were distributed on the day that Hiroshima was obliterated. That instantly crowned Laurence as one of the leading journalistic experts on the atomic bomb. As the Cold War dawned, some assessed Laurence as a propagandist defending the militarization of atomic energy. For others, he was a skilled science communicator who provided the public with a deep understanding of the atomic bomb. Laurence leveraged his perch at the Times to engage in paid speechmaking, book writing, filmmaking, and radio broadcasting. His work for the Times declined in quality even as his relationships with people in power grew closer and more lucrative. This book reveals extraordinary ethical lapses by Laurence such as a cheating scandal at Harvard University and plagiarizing from press releases about atomic bomb tests in the Pacific. In 1963, a conflict of interest related to the 1964 World's Fair in New York City led to his forced retirement from the Times. The book shows Laurence to have set the trend, common among today's journalists of science and technology, to prioritize gee-whiz coverage of discoveries. That approach, in which Laurence served the interests of governmental official and scientists, recommends a full revision of our understanding of the dawn of the atomic era.
Introduction
Authors: Kiernan Vincent
Published: May 2023

This chapter begins with a discussion about William Leonard Laurence, the famed science writer for the New York Times, who covered the atomic bombings of Japan as well as many other landmark stories in science and technology. It investigates how Laurence ignored ethical and professional rules in order to satisfy his thirst for status and money and his desire to cozy up to the powerful and rich. The chapter then shifts to recount how the modernizing of society began to wreak ripple effects on the journalistic ecosystem around the start of the twentieth century. It delves into the emergence of modern science which created new products and technologies that touched the lives of Americans—electric lighting, aviation, early physics, the beginnings of modern medicine. Editors and publishers began to perceive a public hunger for news about science, medicine, and technology—and with that hunger, a market opportunity. Gradually, a new generation of reporters focusing on science, medicine, and technology began to emerge. Ultimately, the chapter reviews the beginning of an essential era in journalism as well as the most exciting fields of science at the start of the twentieth century: physics and astronomy.
Aftermath
Authors: Kiernan Vincent
Published: May 2023

This chapter looks at William Laurence's return as the nation eagerly transitioned to the postwar era. It recounts his first story after his return: a front-page eyewitness account of the Nagasaki bombing, and analyzes how his Tinian story was changed relatively little by the War Department. He had written it right after the bombing, but the War Department had sat on the dispatch for weeks until finally releasing it to all newspapers for use on that date. The chapter then shifts to investigate the possibility of long-lived and highly poisonous radioactivity that the atomic bombs may have deposited at their bombing sites. This directly contradicted the US government's position that the atomic bomb was deadly only because of its enormous blast, extreme heat, and powerful but short-lived radiation released in the blast. The chapter also reviews a powerful report on the plight of the survivors, emphasizing the continuing radiation. It particularly discusses the report from Lawrence quoting General Thomas Farrell, who had visited the bomb site, claiming that the atom bomb had left no persistent radiation at Hiroshima. Ultimately, the chapter assesses how the article produced enduring confusion about Laurence's role in covering the early controversy about the radiation effects of the two atom bombings.
Post Scriptum to the Essay on the Name of God
Authors: Bulgakov Sergii
Published: May 2023

This chapter offers a Sophiological interpretation of the dogma of the Name of Jesus. The Name of God does not differ formally from other proper names: it, like they, is a naming that adheres to its subject in a special way and insofar as it is identified with it. This very subject, in the given case the hypostatic essence of God, is nameless because it is beyond name. In the Sophiological interpretation of the Name of God in general, of both the Old Testament name Yahweh and the New Testament name Jesus, the following fundamental question arises. To what does the divine revelation contained in the Name of God refer, to the hypostasis only, the Divine Person, or to the essence, the nature, the “energies,” the wisdom and glory, and to Divine Sophia in general? The chapter argues that the Name of God and the Name of Jesus, in heralding the hypostatic being of God, at the same time are also sophian. Ultimately, the “Name of God” is not only a word, a Divine word, in all the depth and inexhaustibility of its meaning, but also Divine power and essence.
Anthropological Witness
Authors: Hinton Alexander Laban
Published: May 2023

This book tells the story of the author's encounter with an accused architect of genocide and, more broadly, his attempt to navigate the promises and perils of expert testimony. In March 2016, the author served as an expert witness at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, an international tribunal established to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes committed during the 1975–79 Cambodian genocide. His testimony culminated in a direct exchange with Pol Pot's notorious right-hand man, Nuon Chea, who was engaged in genocide denial. The book looks at big questions about the ethical imperatives and epistemological assumptions involved in explanation and the role of the public scholar in addressing issues relating to truth, justice, social repair, and genocide. The author asks: Can scholars who serve as expert witnesses effectively contribute to international atrocity crimes tribunals where the focus is on legal guilt as opposed to academic explanation? What does the answer to this question say more generally about academia and the public sphere? At a time when the world faces a multitude of challenges, the answers that the author provides to such questions about public scholarship are urgent.
Introduction
Authors: Parvulescu Anca , Boatcă Manuela
Published: May 2023

This chapter provides an overview of the correlation between inter-imperial creolization and colonial and imperial entanglements of Transylvania. It defines creolization as a mode of transformation premised on the unequal power relations that characterize modernity or coloniality: dispossession, colonization, and enslavement. The project of creolization involves the rethinking, reframing, and creative recomposition of the received categories structuring disciplines from the modern to the comparative method. The chapter highlights the significance of the politics of multilingualism, also known as interglottism, in the process of creolization. It also details a historical sketch of Transylvania's inter-imperiality, which implies the coloniality that gradually engulfed the world after 1492.
God Is the New Church
Authors: Parvulescu Anca , Boatcă Manuela
Published: May 2023

This chapter explicates the correlation between inter-imperiality and religion by referencing Transylvania and its history of multiconfessionalism, conversion, and tolerance. It looks into the inter-imperial dynamics wherein institutionalized religion influenced subaltern social strata, languages, and histories into the concept of modernity. Due to Transylvania's status as a meeting place for Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches, Transylvania functioned as a venue for negotiations between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. The chapter explains that Liviu Rebreanu's novel clarified how antisemitism cannot be divorced from religion. It also discusses that a longue durée approach to the imbrication of religion, inter-imperiality, and coloniality provides the necessary context for understanding the Catholic mission in Transylvania.
Border Games
Authors: Andreas Peter
Published: May 2023

This third edition charts the rise and transformation in policing the flow of drugs and migrants across the US–Mexico border. Recent border crackdowns and wall-building campaigns, the book argues, are not unprecedented. Rather, they are the outcome of an escalatory dynamic already in motion—but now played out on a far bigger stage, with higher stakes, and in new security and political contexts. Focusing on the power of symbolic politics and policy feedback effects, the book traces the logic behind such build up. Border policing is an attractive political mechanism for handling the often unintended consequences of past policy choices, signaling a commitment to territorial integrity and projecting an image of territorial authority. Yet its negative aftermath is not only frequently glossed over; it also fuels further escalation. With new chapters on the border policies of the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, the book continues to help readers grasp how the busiest border in the world is also one of the most fortified, and why it plays such a complicated and contentious role in both domestic politics and US–Mexico relations.
Introduction
Authors: Balbale Abigail Krasner
Published: May 2023

This chapter unfurls the story of Ibn Mardanīsh, both in his lifetime and in the eight and a half centuries that have followed. It situates Ibn Mardanīsh in the Islamic world of the Middle Period when vast numbers of non-Arabs converted to Islam and began to integrate themselves into Islamic political systems. It also talks about how Ibn Mardanīsh operated in the polyglot setting of the western Mediterranean and drew on traditions near and far to legitimate his authority. The chapter traces how ideas about Ibn Mardanīsh have transformed over time, as his territory was lost first to the Almohads and then split between Castile and Aragon. Ibn Mardanīsh's story illuminates the dynamism of politics and culture in the medieval western Mediterranean and how its complexity has been flattened to serve more modern ideologies.
Postscript
Authors: Balbale Abigail Krasner
Published: May 2023

This chapter demonstrates the enduring significance of Ibn Mardanīsh today. It talks about how Ibn Mardanīsh appears as a regional hero in Murcia, as the subject of comic books for schoolchildren, as the leader of a troop of “Moros” in the “Moors and Christians” festival of Murcia, and as a regular subject of columns in both right-wing and left-wing newspapers in Spain. By projecting contemporary visions of secularism and nationalism back across time, scholars have used Ibn Mardanīsh and the history of al-Andalus to fuel arguments about the essence of their countries, their religions, and modernity. The chapter analyzes the violence that Ibn Mardanīsh perpetrated against Christian and Muslim rivals, while his Almohad rivals are referred to as “the ISIS of the Middle Ages.” The chapter also recounts Ibn Mardanīsh's efforts to preserve Sunnī ideals of the caliphate and his connections to Baghdad that are lost.
Escaping the Deadly Embrace
Authors: Bartoletti Andrea
Published: May 2023

Encirclement, the book argues, is an essential strategic possibility of the international system and a key trigger of major war. Using historical case studies, the book examines how great powers try to escape the two-front war problem and seek to preserve their security. Encirclement is a geographic variable that occurs in the presence of one or two great powers on two different borders of the surrounded great power. The surrounding great powers may not have the capacity to initiate a joint invasion. Yet their threatening presence triggers a double security dilemma for the encircled great power, which has to disperse its army to secure its borders. When the surrounding great powers become capable of launching a two-front attack, the encircled great power initiates war. This situation, disastrous in itself, can also lead to war contagion when other great powers intervene in the new conflict owing to the rival-based network of alliances. The book demonstrates the efficacy of this by assessing three major wars: the Italian Wars, the Thirty Years' War, and World War I. These findings, the book shows, have important implications for future major wars. Challenging the current focus on the US–China rivalry, the book argues that the most concerning strategic scenario is the encirclement of China by India and Russia.
Introduction
Authors: Bartoletti Andrea
Published: May 2023

This chapter provides a background on encirclement and addresses the gap in the theory that analyzes the impact of the two-front-war problem on security competition, alliance formation, and great-power war. It elaborates a new explanation on the origins of major wars or the encirclement theory. It also challenges arguments that consider major wars to be the result of the most powerful state's attempts to either achieve or preserve its hegemony. The chapter explains how the encirclement theory highlights the importance of quick operational shifts in the ability to invade of the surrounding great powers, rather than gradual power changes. It outlines an argument that explains both endemic characteristics of state behavior and the dynamic outbreak of major wars.
A Theory of Encirclement and Major War
Authors: Bartoletti Andrea
Published: May 2023

This chapter lays out a theory that links encirclement to major war, defining key variables that include the invasion ability of the surrounding great power, major war, and great-power status. The chapter analyzes the theory that can provoke the outbreak of major war and identifies the main competing explanations on their origins. Major wars have their foundations in the encirclement of one great power and unfold through a three-step process, the causal mechanism of which is the result of changes in the invasion ability of the immediate rival. The chapter examines how encirclement lies at the origins of major wars through the unfolding of three steps: double security dilemma, war initiation, and war contagion. It mentions the rival-based system of alliances that entwines the survival of all the members of each bloc and ties the separate dyadic antagonisms of immediate rivals in one unified zero-sum game.
France and the Italian Wars
Authors: Bartoletti Andrea
Published: May 2023

This chapter provides an assessment of encirclement theory in the Italian Wars (1521–1559). It outlines how the encirclement of France by Austria and Spain emerged and triggered a double security dilemma that revolved around the French attempts to create a buffer zone in northern Italy with the goal of breaking the lines of communication between the surrounding great powers. After Charles V inherited the Spanish and Austrian possessions of the Hapsburg in 1519, France initiated a series of attacks to prevent him from controlling the Duchy of Milan. After giving a historical background on how the encirclement of France emerged, the chapter assesses the dynamics of the double security dilemma. It examines the motivation for intervention by the other European great powers and reviews findings that have important implications for the characteristic of future major wars.
Making Counterrevolution
Authors: Delury John
Published: May 2023

This chapter continues the story of the Third Force, focusing on the evolution of America's covert, military interest in anti-Mao and anti-Chiang elements. It details early contacts that were established by the US wartime intelligence service OSS. It also highlights bold plans for arming anyone opposing the Communists during the Chinese Civil War, which floated around Washington. In the context of the Korean War, Harry Truman's National Security Council secretly approved aiding anti-Communist forces and the senior intelligence official at Far East Command in Tokyo encouraged the CIA to operationalize the Third Force idea as an armed group. The chapter considers the Third Force mission targeting Manchuria as one of the CIA's counterrevolutionary projects, which ranged from China's frontier with Burma in the remote southwest to the southeastern coastal provinces in Chiang Kai-shek's island fortress of Taiwan.
Conclusion
Authors: Colbourn Susan
Published: May 2023

This chapter reviews what the Western allies confronted that cast doubt on the very foundations of the transatlantic bargain. It addresses the questions of whether the Americans would remain in Europe, whether the Soviets would keep out, whether the (West) Germans would remain down, and whether their publics and parliaments would continue to accept that their security was best protected with weapons that could destroy humankind. NATO's history makes it easier to ignore how close-run some events really were, although punctuated as it was by crisis. The chapter emphasizes how repeated assertions of an alliance in crisis can obscure the fact that not all of the crises plaguing NATO were created equal. Too often, the history of the Euromissiles is described as one crisis, but there was no single overarching source of crisis.
The Loneliest Places
Authors: Dickinson Rachel
Published: May 2023

A child's suicide pitches you into a hellish place of fragmentary images, the deepest depression imaginable, efforts to destroy yourself, and an almost complete break with what's happening in the world around you. That was the author's experience. The essays in this book began as a chronicle of the author's life after her son's suicide. The pieces became much more. The author writes the unimaginable and terrifying facts of heartbreaking loss. She tells stories from her months on the run, fleeing her grief and herself, as she escapes to Iceland and the Falkland Islands—as far as possible from the memories of her dead son, Jack. She frankly relates the paralyzing emotion that sometimes left her trapped in her home, confined to a single chair, helplessly isolated. The tales from these years are bleak and the author's journey home, back to her changed self and fractured family, is lonely. However, she describes how hope was sighted, allowed to perch, and then, remarkably, made actual.
Autumn, Again
Authors: Dickinson Rachel
Published: May 2023

This chapter contains the author's reminiscences of autumn, especially significant life events which took place during this season. Indeed, as the writer remarks, major life events tend to come to mind as happening during autumn. The chapter remarks on the bittersweet memories of the season, the beauty it brings, and the feelings of loss that seem to linger at this time of year. It discusses yearning for lost loved ones, particularly the “joy and sadness of living in the place where you grew up and where most of the pivotal events of your life happened.” Such memories, the chapter explains, become heightened in autumn.
Mourning and Melancholia, Rejected
Authors: Dickinson Rachel
Published: May 2023

This chapter dwells on the death of the author's mother and mother-in-law, both of whom died only a short while before Jack did. In doing so, it references Sigmund Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia,” where it is suggested that mourners have to reclaim for themselves the energy they have invested in the deceased loved one. To this end, grieving is the process of reclamation. This notion, however, involves creating a new world that does not include the deceased, which the author finds difficult to do given Jack's lingering presence in her life. The chapter then turns to the final moments of her mother and mother-in-law and the way they had impacted the lives of the author's family so strongly that their own presences are still felt—and missed. In the end, the author rejects Freud's process of reclamation, choosing instead to indulge in a fantasy world where loved ones still live and linger.
From Forcible Action to Coercion
Authors: Kaplan Edward
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the Kennedy administration's fresh approach, controlled response, which attempted to coerce an enemy during nuclear operations. It looks at the Basic National Security Policies (BNSPs), which identified four criteria to protect US wartime interests by maintaining military superiority throughout a conflict. First, the Soviet military would have to be reduced while retaining “ready, effective and controlled” US capabilities. Second, damage to the United States would have to be limited to a “level consistent with national survival and independence.” Third, to the degree that destruction could be minimized, Washington would seek “decisive military superiority” and, fourth, use that to end the war on acceptable terms. The chapter then considers how the Net Evaluation Subcommittee's (NESC) “project 12” aided long-term decision-making in the McNamara Defense Department, though friction with the secretary and his systems analysts soon became apparent. The subcommittee's 1961 annual study, presented during the Berlin Crisis, reinforced the costs of failure to the new administration.
Testing Controlled Response
Authors: Kaplan Edward
Published: May 2023

This chapter studies how the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC) explored the shortcomings of controlled response with its 1962 and 1963 reports. The 1962 report examined two alternatives. In the “First General War,” the USSR caught the US by surprise. The “Second General War” began when Washington preempted the Soviets. The first war examined controlled response, with both sides limiting their initial attacks to counterforce targets and attacking cities only after negotiations failed. The second saw the US begin with a counterforce strike, but Moscow's retaliation struck both military and urban targets; in response, the US hit Soviet urban centers. The NESC concluded that at the end of the counterforce exchange, the US retained strategic superiority. The 1963 report reinforced the conclusions of the previous year's study. John F. Kennedy's closing comment accurately captured a more general judgment that there were no acceptable outcomes to nuclear war in the 1960s, at least with the US and Soviet weapons programs as they existed. Not only was preemption impossible, but so was controlled response.
Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany
Authors: Klepper Deeana Copeland
Published: May 2023

This book explores how local religious culture was constructed in medieval European Christian society through close study of a set of neglected, late fourteenth-century manuscripts. The Mirror of Priests is a pastoral work written by Albert, an Augustinian canon from the Bavarian market town of Diessen, to guide local priests in their work with parishioners. Multiple versions of the text in Albert's own hand survive and, by comparing them, the book shows how ostensibly universal religious ideals and laws were adapted, interpreted, and repurposed by those given responsibility to implement them, thereby crafting distinctive, local expressions of Christianity. The vision of Christian community that emerges from Albert's pastoral guide is one in which the messiness of ordinary life is evident. Albert's imagined parish was marked out by geographic and legal boundaries—property and jurisdictional rights, tithes, and sacramental responsibility—as well as symbolic realities. By situating the Mirror of Priests within Albert's physical and conceptual spaces, the book affirms the centrality of the parish and its community for those living under the rubric of Christianity, especially outside of large cities. Pivoting between the materiality of texts and the sociocultural contexts of an overlooked manuscript tradition, the book offers fresh insights into the role of parish priests, the pastoral manual genre, and late medieval religious life.
Plastic Touch
Authors: Ghosh Ranjan
Published: May 2023

This chapter tackles the premise of material-aesthetic in plastic art. It explains how the premise addresses a new dynamic where humanity's relation with plastic goes beyond consumerism, cultural habituality, economic viability, the eco-catastrophic mandate, and spectrality into the (im)pure realm of art and imagination. The dynamic, then, resulted in the compelling interplay between the plasticity of plastic and an artistic mind. Plastics demand a connective radicality that requires a consciousness different from the structural isolation and self-referentiality of individualism. The chapter elaborates on the concept of the plastic affect, which brought plastic sensorium. It also highlights the centrality of desire in the material-aesthetic phenomenon.
Plastic Literature
Authors: Ghosh Ranjan
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the concept of plastic literature. It starts with the ever-presentness and invasiveness of plastic in people's lives. Across the planets, plastics declared their presence in forms that are durable, malleable, degradable, nondegradable, sinister, and toxic. Similar to the transcultural and transnational dimensions of literary thinking work and performance, plastic is regarded as athletic as it travels through borders without regard. Moreover, plastic literature has its dharma in travel, estrangement, and nexus. The chapter also elaborates on the concept of plastic li(t)terization, which provides a fresh perspective on the ‘taking place’ within the complexity of time-curve, surface-depth, visibility of the invisible, and understanding.
Nesting
Authors: Safran Gabriella
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines how, in his writing about his listening and his use of others' words, Vladimir Dahl set up contests in which he could demonstrate his superiority to people who heard the world in more rigid ways. His vitalist thought, meaning his sense that everything is alive, including words, prompted him to call his dictionary entries “nests,” a term that he was the first to use but that would become common in Russian lexicography. In using it, Dahl responded to two of the notions about Russian listening explored in previous chapters: to the stories of frozen northern sounds that need to be warmed up before they can be heard, and to the Slavophile conviction that listeners need to belong to a group in order to hear them correctly. Dahl sympathized with some Slavophile ideas, but the nation-building project that he undertook with his lexicography was based on omnivorous listening that could be done by anyone. The chapter addresses Dahl's own omnivorous listening, the politics of his categorization of proverbs, his discussion of nests, his use of paper, and finally the suspicious listening of those who disagreed with him.
Bonnie and Clyde
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the romantic relationship and marriage between Bruce White and Patricia Faith McCormick. Similar to White, McCormick was a young drug addict dependent on methadone and street drugs. Both of them robbed pharmacies together, sealing the fact that they were partners in love and crime. However, their laidback days were soon over when McCormick was arrested for trying to shoot a cop with White's gun. The chapter cites how White and McCormick went on a motorcycle run while being high on methadone and Valium, which ultimately resulted in another surgery for White and the death and miscarriage of McCormick. It also notes White's daughter with Cynthia L. Levering, who has been serving a life sentence for murder.
The Stolen Carpet and the Fat Girl
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter narrates the time Bruce White was detained at the Baltimore County Detention Center and transferred to the Central Laundry after a local junkie reported him for shooting at a car. White was particularly chasing John J. Szymanski after stealing the family's Persian rug. During his detention, a Fat Girl would help him hide drugs under the guise of a passionate kiss. The chapter explains that White was hardly concerned with his parents' declining health after his release, still laser-focused on getting some drugs. It cites how Greg Burke died from AIDS, while Szymanski became the first pedestrian to be killed by Maryland's Light Rail.
Free to Go
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers the aftermath of Bruce White's imprisonment. White started feeling hope and remorse after two years of being drug-free behind bars. In 2005, Judge Christian Kahl, who sentenced his imprisonment in 1998, deemed he was no longer a threat to anyone anymore and let him go home. The chapter looks into the fear White experienced being unable to buy his own candy bar after years of being institutionalized. White attempted to reunite with his daughter, who was now seventeen and held the same addiction he did. The chapter details his attempts to remain clean by attending the New Hope meeting of Narcotics Anonymous despite his environment and company.
Third Time a Charm
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter elaborates on Bruce White's experience with Narcotics Anonymous. White learns the power of recovery by believing the word “can.” Genuine sobriety is not for people who need it, but for people who wanted it. The chapter details White's attendance at New Hope meetings, where he met someone to sponsor him through his recovery. It also explains that White had to juggle between his work in Atlas Auto and meetings in New Hope. Additionally, White had to make peace that his parents did the best they could and he was not surprised he did not get clean until they passed away.
The D Train
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers the industry of drug treatment, referencing the frequency of death in the industry. It explains that the drug treatment industry reflects the global market for illegal drugs. The rehab community's Florida shuffle revolves between addiction, treatment, billing for insurance, relapse, billing for insurance, more treatment, and another relapse, which results in a constant flow of revenue in the industry. The chapter notes that Bruce White was mentioned in the eulogy of Judge Christian Kahl as proof of the judge's compassion. It notes White's plans with One Promise going into trust and his legacy including an annual education scholarship for people who served two years of imprisonment and sobriety.
Smitten
Authors: Hessinger Rodney
Published: May 2023

This book examines how the Second Great Awakening disrupted gender norms across a breadth of denominations. The displacement and internal migration of Americans created ripe conditions for religious competition in the North. The book argues that during this time of religious ferment, religious seekers could, in turn, play the missionary or the convert. The dynamic of religious rivalry inexorably led toward sexual and gender disruption. Contending within an increasingly democratic religious marketplace, preachers had to court converts in order to flourish. They won followers through charismatic allure and making concessions to the desires of the people. Opening their own hearts to new religious impulses, some religious visionaries offered up radical dispensations—including new visions of how God wanted them to reorder sex and gender relations in society. A wide array of churches, including Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, Shakers, Catholics, and Perfectionists, joined the fray. Religious contention and innovation ultimately produced backlash. Charges of seduction and gender trouble ignited fights within, among, and against churches. Religious opponents insisted that the newly converted were smitten with preachers, rather than choosing churches based on reason and scripture. Such criticisms coalesced into a broader pan-Protestant rejection of religious enthusiasm. The book reveals the sexual disruptions and subsequent domestication of religion during the Second Great Awakening.
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings
Authors: Jukes Helen
Published: May 2023

This book begins as the author is entering her thirties and struggling to settle into her new job and home. Then friends gift her a colony of honeybees—a gift that, according to folklore, brings good luck—and the author embarks on the rewarding, perilous journey of becoming a beekeeper. The author writes about what it means to “keep” wild creatures and to live alongside beings whose laws of life are so different from our own. She delves into the history of beekeeping, exploring the ancient—and sometimes disturbing—relationship between keeper and bee, human and wild thing. And as her colony grows, the very act of beekeeping seems to open new perspectives, making her world come alive again. A beautifully wrought meditation on uncertainty and hope, feelings of restlessness and home, and how we might better know ourselves, the book shows us how to be alert to these small creatures flitting among us that are yet so vital a force for the continuation of life.
Mass Violence without Mass Politics
Authors: Mishkin Benjamin
Published: May 2023

This chapter evaluates the role of Lithuanian paramilitary forces in mobilizing mass violence against their Jewish neighbors, contrasting the mobilization of Lithuanian violence with communal anti-Jewish violence in Poland. The key difference was the variation in prewar political culture in the two countries. Whereas both countries eventually became right-wing dictatorships of varying degrees of enlightenment, in Poland, some form of party politics, however circumscribed, continued. This continuity in party politics facilitated ethnic-based mobilization against Jews that would later contribute to the outbreak of pogroms. By contrast, politics in Lithuania, after initial parliamentary enthusiasm in the years immediately following independence in 1918, settled into a distinctly authoritarian elite-centered political pattern. The chapter then elaborates on how the contrasting political cultures in Poland and Lithuania mirror differences in how the killing was carried out by the respective subaltern collaborators. It concludes by highlighting areas for further research and discussing how the argument demonstrates the usefulness for Holocaust research of small-N cross-case comparisons familiar to social scientists.
Holocaust Survival among Immigrant Jews in the Netherlands
Authors: Tammes Peter , Simpkin Andrew J.
Published: May 2023

This chapter assesses whether immigrant Jews in the Netherlands had different experiences related to isolation, deportation, and victimization than Dutch-born Jews. Examining differences in these experiences could reveal underlying mechanisms for Jewish immigrants' better survival chances, as shown in previous studies. Using immigrants' motives, opportunities, and restrictions in the life course approach, the chapter formulates hypotheses on Jewish immigrants' experiences during the Nazi persecution. To test these hypotheses, it uses data from administrative sources to construct life histories for about 1,300 Jews, including both survivors and victims, living in eight Dutch municipalities before the beginning of systematic or regular deportations to concentration and destruction Nazi camps abroad in July of 1942. The chapter then uses logistic regression and survival analyses to analyze these data.
The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet
Authors: Neidorf Leonard
Published: May 2023

This book explores the relationship between Beowulf and the legendary tradition that existed prior to its composition. The Beowulf poet inherited an amoral heroic tradition, which focused principally on heroes compelled by circumstances to commit horrendous deeds: fathers kill sons, brothers kill brothers, and wives kill husbands. Medieval Germanic poets relished the depiction of a hero's unyielding response to a cruel fate, but the Beowulf poet refused to construct an epic around this traditional plot. Focusing instead on a courteous and pious protagonist's fight against monsters, the poet creates a work that is deeply untraditional in both its plot and its values. In Beowulf, the kin-slayers and oath-breakers of antecedent tradition are confined to the background, while the poet fills the foreground with unconventional characters, who abstain from transgression, display courtly etiquette, and express monotheistic convictions. Comparing Beowulf with its medieval German and Scandinavian analogues, the book argues that the poem's uniqueness reflects one poet's coherent plan for the moral renovation of an amoral heroic tradition. In Beowulf, Neidorf discerns the presence of a singular mind at work in the combination and modification of heroic, folkloric, hagiographical, and historical materials. Rather than perceive Beowulf as an impersonally generated object, the book argues that it should be read as the considered result of one poet's ambition to produce a morally edifying, theologically palatable, and historically plausible epic out of material that could not independently constitute such a poem.
Free Culture and the City
Authors: Corsín Jiménez Alberto , Estalella Adolfo
Published: May 2023

This book examines how and why free software spread beyond the world of hackers and software engineers and became the basis for an urban movement now heralded by scholars as a model for emulation. By the late 1990s, digital activists embraced a philosophy of free software and “free culture” in order to take control over their cities and everyday lives. Free culture, previously tethered to the digital realm, was cut loose and used to reclaim and resculpt the city. In Madrid the effects were dramatic. Common sights in the city were abandoned as industrial factories turned into autonomous social centers, urban orchards, guerrilla architectural camps, or community hacklabs. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic and historical work with free culture collectives in Madrid, the book shows how, in its journey from the digital to the urban, the practice of liberating culture required the mobilization of, and alliances between, public art centers, neighborhood associations, squatted social centers, hackers, intellectual property lawyers, street artists, guerrilla architectural collectives, and Occupy assemblies.
Among Women across Worlds
Authors: Kim Suzy
Published: May 2023

This book excavates the transnational linkages between women of North Korea and a worldwide women's movement. Women of Asia, especially those espousing communism, are often portrayed as victims or pawns of a patriarchal Confucian state. This book undercuts this standard analysis through detailed archival work in the international women's press and finds that North Korean women asserted themselves in unexpected places from the late 1940s—just before the official beginning of the Korean War—to 1975, the year designated by the United Nations as International Women's Year. By centering North Korea and the “East,” the book defies convention to offer an entirely new genealogy of the global women's movement. Women of the Korean Democratic Women's Union, as part of the global left women's movement led by the Women's International Democratic Federation, insisted family and domestic issues must be part of both national and international debates, highlighting how race, nationality, sex, and class connect to form systems of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Their intersectional program claimed that there is “no peace without justice,” that “the personal is the political,” and that “women's rights are human rights” many decades before activists of the West embraced such agendas. The book is an archaeology of forgotten movements and ideas that became the foundation for those that have come to define our era.