bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“Gloomy Finland” and Russian Gothic Tales of Assimilation
Authors: Sobol Valeria
Published: May 2021

This chapter draws on a variety of sources, from ethnographic publications in contemporary journals to Romantic novellas and historical novels that construct the image of the “wild” but docile Gothic Finland that is finally included in history and civilization through its incorporation into the Russian Empire. Both ethnographic and literary texts depict the Finns as a magic-prone, semi-mythological people destined by both history and geography to be ruled by others and enthusiastically embracing the Russian civilizational mission. Odoevsky's Gothic novella The Salamander stands in stark contrast to these optimistic interpretations of the annexation of Finland. It offers a dark story of a failed conversion where “natural,” intuitive and irrational Finland (embodied by the heroine Elsa) resists the mechanistic spirit of Petrine Russia and ultimately wreaks vengeance on the Russified Finnish hero.
Imagining the Moro
Authors: Charbonneau Oliver
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the ways Americans understood the Muslim South and its inhabitants. It discusses the construction of “the Moro” that arose from eclectic sources, such as translated Spanish books, North American frontier expansion, imperial readings of Islam, ethnographic study, and the cultivation of regional expertise. It identifies governors, district administrators, missionaries, and businessmen-instrumentalized ideas in structures they created in the South. The chapter reviews the establishment of new laws, modernization of Moros through education, introduction of Western forms of market capitalism, and induction of sedentism that became paramount to the colonial state. It explores the production of racial and territorial knowledge on the Philippines' southern frontier.
Introduction
Authors: Liston Noelle Molé
Published: May 2021

This chapter establishes television and print media as foundational to Silvio Berlusconi's antiestablishment politics to its many aftermaths. It explains that the immediate aftermath is about how science became seen as worth saving and a rallying cry to mobilize to the streets. It also recounts the rise of Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement as a consequential outcome that forms a new kind of digital populism through the Internet and algorithmic processes. The chapter examines why Italy was one of the first countries to attempt to hold disinformation and “fake news” legally accountable, and how social actors hyperinvest in scientific thinking. It refers to how the current hegemonic form of knowledge and customized Internet influence forms of governance and politics.
Manifest Disguise and Mediatized Politics
Authors: Liston Noelle Molé
Published: May 2021

This chapter concentrates on a mystery of late-twentieth-century Italy, which recounts how Silvio Berlusconi enchanted citizens and dominated Italian politics for nearly twenty years despite widely shared agreement on his corruption and ineptitude. It analyses how a dazzling political culture changes how Italians discerned what counted as accurate and reliable information, and which actors might be trusted to offer the facts. It also focuses on Striscia la Notizia, one of the world's first fake news programs, and its plush mascot Gabibbo, a human-sized red puppet who is praised as a civil defender. The chapter uses Gabibbo to unravel why Italy became a site in which puppets talking politics were more reliable than puppet-like politicians. It suggests that postwar political spectacle gave way to a widespread popular cynicism capable of simultaneously propelling former prime minister Berlusconi's peculiar popularity and puppets seen as truth-tellers.
Catching Nature by the Tail
Authors: Hodge Thomas P.
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses the roots of Ivan Turgenev's nature philosophy. It discusses how Turgenev was able to assimilate a number of ideas from Goethe's and Schelling's thoughts on the natural world that became central figurations in Turgenev's own nature writing. The chapter describes Turgenev's early grounding in German Romantic nature philosophy and traces the development of his own conception of nature's indifference in relation to Alexander Herzen's thought on the subject. It then discusses Turgenev's ideal as a hunter writer, and how nature served as a guide and a model for him. The chapter proposes and explains the concepts of venatic equipoise, ecotropism, and anthropotropism as tools for analyzing Turgenev as a nature writer.
The Gun before the Lyre
Authors: Hodge Thomas P.
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the three most prevalent kinds of sport hunting pursued in nineteenth-century Russia — coursing, hounding, shooting — and suggests that their essential differences pointed to very distinct modes of interacting with nature. Illustrative examples of Ivan Turgenev's zealous devotion to shooting are taken from memoir accounts of his actual hunting praxis. The chapter discusses Turgenev's hunting experience and proclivities. Hunting became one of the most important aspects of Turgenev's existence, even an obsession. The chapter mentions Turgenev's close friend Dmitrii Iakovlevich Kolbasin's memoir, which gives us a glimpse of Turgenev as a hunting tutor. It also discusses Turgenev's afield in memoirs and letters.
“A Different Kind of Game”
Authors: Hodge Thomas P.
Published: May 2021

This chapter reviews the rise of Russian hunting literature and surveys Turgenev's own venatic writing. It mentions the works of Reutt, Odesskaia, Osnovskii, and Vaksel. It talks about Turgenev's first work, “Fifty Flaws.” It also mentions his series of poems in prose he classified as “Senilia.” The remainder of the chapter is devoted to Notes of a Hunter, which, it proposes, shares key structural features with hunting manuals. It discusses its reception among other hunter writers. The interplay of ecotropic and anthropotropic modes in this extraordinarily influential cycle of short stories reinforces moral opposition to the arbitrary exercise of power (proizvol).
Introduction
Authors: Rogers Susan Fox
Published: May 2021

This introductory chapter recounts how E. B. White's essay titled “Mr. Forbush's Friends” opened a new bird world to the author. The essay introduced the author to Edward Howe Forbush, who is best known for writing Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States, a three-volume set published in 1928. Within the pages of Forbush's work, the author found the expected information — breeding and feeding, size and color — and a bit of the unexpected in his reports on the “Economic Status” of each bird. In this section, he offers how the birds are perceived in the human economy, like the Black-crowned Night Heron, which “is accused of being injurious to the fishery interests.” Forbush was an inspiration for this collection of reports from the field, which expand with reflections on love, family, life, and death and engage a range of emotions from wonder to humor. And because birds magnify our relationship to the natural world, this collection include stories about habitat loss, declining species, birds that collide with buildings, or birds now extinct.
Wild Swans
Authors: Townsend Alison
Published: May 2021

This chapter looks at how tundra swans arrived the day before Thanksgiving in the town of Island Lake in Wisconsin. Navigating by the stars and their memory of earth's moonlit landscape, they came, traveling from their summer breeding grounds in shallow pools, lakes, and rivers in the Arctic toward their winter residence in Chesapeake Bay and the marshes of Virginia and North Carolina. Tundra swans, which used to be called whistling swans for the sounds their wings make in flight, often travel in groups of several hundred. According to an Audubon guide, “they present a spectacular sight” when they make mass landings in places like the Niagara River. Like adolescents not quite ready to leave home, cygnets remain with the parent flock for at least a year, learning the route and where to feed and rest.
The Snowy Winter
Authors: Gessner David
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes the author's experience while staying on Cape Cod to finish a novel. The best moment came when the author was standing alone out on Coast Guard Beach — on almost the exact spot where the naturalist-writer Henry Beston lived for a year in his outermost cabin on Cape Cod's ocean shore — when the young snowy owl rose off the tundra-like marsh with a black duck in its talons. The duck hung down limp below the owl, and below that the duck's lifeless feet hung down even lower, like damaged landing gear. The author saw a couple who attempted to follow the owl. The couple were not birders, but they were considerate, giving the owl plenty of space. “Radiant” is a word the author had been using a lot during their last few days of owl-watching, though mostly to describe the white unworldly shine of the snowy owl's feathers.
The Keepers of the Ghost Bird
Authors: Dean Jenn
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on the birds in Bermuda. Prior to 1600, it is estimated that half a million pairs of devil birds bred on Bermuda, making it, in essence, a gigantic seabird colony. The cedar trees that covered Bermuda were endemic and low-growing; they tilted in high winds, uprooting and leaving small cavities beneath. The birds used their black beaks, which ended in a graceful hook, to dig twelve-foot burrows beneath the trees, and used their webbed feet to push the dirt out behind them. The sailors called it the cahow after its sound. It would be centuries before it would emerge as a species of gadfly petrel — a sleek-bodied, hollow-boned soarer with three-foot-long, paddle-shaped wings. In 1906, Dr. Louis Mowbray, who would become the first director of the Bermuda Aquarium, found a live bird in a hole on one of the Castle Harbor Islands; he classified it as a Peale's petrel from New Zealand, blown off course. A decade elapsed before an ornithologist realized that Mowbray's live bird was actually the real thing: a Bermuda petrel.
The Hour (or Two) before the Dawn
Authors: Kroodsma Donald
Published: May 2021

This chapter details the author's experience listening to birds an hour or two before the dawn during a cross-country ride. As the author crossed the Big Hole River, a lone marsh wren sang lazily. It was a western marsh wren, with all of the harsh buzzes and rattles and whistles one would expect from its more than one hundred different songs, so different from the eastern marsh wren the author heard on the other side of the Great Plains. Yellow warblers race among a dozen or so different songs, filling all air time between songs with frenetic chipping. The author also listened to northern waterthrushes.
Secret of Owls
Authors: Bannerman K.
Published: May 2021

This chapter looks at the author's experience hiking in the Cumberland Forest, which stretches up from swamps and wetlands, along ridges of hemlocks and pines, into a series of canyons that contain frozen rivers and a couple of small, ice-locked lakes. For three nights, the author had heard the sounds of Vancouver Island northern pygmy-owls. It is not uncommon to hear barred owls or great horned owls in Cumberland Forest, but the unique call of a pygmy-owl is relatively rare, and they had been more active than usual. Northern pygmy-owls were once numerous on the island, but since the 1920s, their numbers have been declining fast due to logging, urban development, and other activities leading to habitat destruction and so the fragmentation of their population.
Chasing the Ghost of the Imperial Woodpecker
Authors: Gallagher Tim
Published: May 2021

This chapter illustrates how the author became thoroughly obsessed with the imperial woodpecker after dreaming about it. The author spent years searching for its closest relative, the ivory-billed woodpecker, and actually had a sighting canoeing through an Arkansas bayou in 2004. A year or so later, the author was photographing woodpecker specimens at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology when an assistant curator brought out a tray containing more than a dozen imperial woodpeckers. For millennia, the imperial's pounding drumbeat echoed like the blows of a wild axman through the old-growth forests of the Sierra Madre as it bored into the massive, grub-infested pines, hammering on them powerfully for weeks at a time until they groaned, shuddered, and finally toppled with an impact that shook the ground. Victorian ornithologist John Gould dubbed it the imperial woodpecker. But it had already been named long before. To the Aztecs, it was cuauhtotomi; to the Tarahumaras, cumecocari; to the Tepehuans, uagam; and to the Mexican Mestizos, the pitoreal.
Extralimital
Authors: Világ Alison
Published: May 2021

This chapter reflects on the author's experience as a guide of St. Paul Tour in Alaska's Pribilof Islands. During the two springs that the author guided there, he saw wood sandpipers — Eurasia's equivalent of America's lesser yellowlegs — on more days than he saw blue skies. But the wind, when it came from the right direction, blew in the good birds — the ones from Russia. For the serious North American birder, Alaska is some semblance of the final frontier. Soon, the islands — especially Attu, the outermost Aleutian, St. Lawrence Island, and St. Paul, in the Pribilofs — became revered vagrant traps: places where one could almost depend on encountering an aggregate of birds virtually never found on North America's mainland, such as common snipe and Siberian rubythroat. The St. Paul Tour is founded on the daily work of finding these out-of-place birds.
Birding on Bleaker Island
Authors: Dickinson Rachel
Published: May 2021

This chapter narrates the author's first island-hopping trip to Bleaker Island, wherein she hoped to see at least two penguin species, the steamer duck, and maybe a black-necked swan. There are no trees on Bleaker — which is true throughout most of the Falklands — and a large rocky hill covers about half of the small island. Because the author hails from the land of trees in central New York State, the sheer openness of the landscape felt raw and exposed. The author then describes the skuas. These are huge, predatory birds that look like ubergulls. They are the bird bullies of the islands — harassing other birds to drop their food, attacking and devouring young birds, and swooping and diving on anything they do not like, including people.
Conservative Representations of Executions
Authors: Taïeb Emmanuel
Published: May 2021

Executionary publicity was not universally contested. Many people were still attached to the show of political force embodied by public executions, as well as the opportunity to morally “test” oneself. Faced with the advocates of this form of “brutalization,” the chapter examines the arguments that backed the preservation of public rituals of execution. It includes discussions about the demand for exemplarity and attempts to delegitimize the regime in its attempts to reform the Criminal Code; the plan to restore the use of corporal punishment and the whip as a deterrent to crime; the people's thirst for the guillotine in the wake of the Soleilland affair paradoxically led to a major victory for the pro-death-penalty camp; compartmentalization of the civilizing process and insensitivity to suffering of the general populace; the executions, brutalization and glorification of the violence of war; the diffusion of military values in service of executions being conditioned by “trivialization”; a martial relationship to executions, executions that attracted spectators; lastly the transforming of an execution into a good death “by self-punishment” and a “good death” by convincing the public that punishment was administered by an autonomous individual to himself rather than by the law.
The Liturgical Crisis of Executionary Rituals
Authors: Taïeb Emmanuel
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses executionary rituals. The executionary ceremony retained its general formal structure, although several elements were forbidden over time. As a result, the actors responsible for managing executions also became ad hoc guardians, working to prevent photographs from being taken or holding executions at night so that the spectacle would quite literally become invisible. The ritual that was specific to the Third Republic entered crisis mode. It was discussed by parliament, which sought to come up with a new publicity regime that would be capable of incorporating the emerging channels of information. The chapter dicsusses neutralizing of the publicity principle due to the public barely being able to tolerate the spectacle by the Third Republic, and the mechanization of representation thanks to journalists and photography. Moving the ritual into the night was able to ocucur thanks to the development of public lighting. Hostile political representations of publicity were thwarted in the Chamber of Deputies, with failed legislative attempts to eliminate publicity.
Hiding a Ritual of Obedience
Authors: Taïeb Emmanuel
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes executions as rituals of obedience and discusses how it was used in the symbolic construction of the relationship between rulers and citizens by attempting to force individual internalization of the state's monopoly over legitimate physical violence. The chapter talks about how the elimination of executionary publicity becomes inseparable from the practices of the modern public sphere. Under the Third Republic, many people learned to be the spectators of new sights that worked by representing a reality that was physically absent (dioramas, cinema) and in turn acquired new standards of speed. They came to find executions too slow, marred by shocking incidents, severed from reality, and likely to produce unhealthy emotions. Ultimately, these spectators began to develop a public culture accustomed to more distanced forms of political communication. The depublicization of executions was achieved when the authorities concluded that the public spectacle of death no longer had an exemplary effect and was no longer a tool that legitimized the state's monopoly over physical violence.
Reappraising Jewish War Experiences, 1914–18
Authors: Geheran Michael
Published: May 2021

This chapter talks about the Jewish war experience in the German military and the slow rise of anti-Semitism starting from the end of the World War 1. Although Jewish experiences during World War I cannot be reduced to a single Kriegserlebnis, as the chapter shows, Jews were united in the hope, as they joined thousands of other German men rushing to the colors in 1914, that the spirit of national unity would obliterate antisemitic stereotypes. Their participation in the immense violence of an industrialized war led to the formation of powerful bonds with gentile Germans, fueling Jewish hopes that the war would be the culmination of the long struggle for social acceptance.
Defiant Germanness
Authors: Geheran Michael
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses the Wannsee Conference and the deportations to and the experiences of Jewish veterans in Theresienstadt. The Wannsee Conference in January 1942 established Theresienstadt as the destination for highly decorated and war-wounded Jewish veterans. The German public's negative reaction to the deportations of Jews that began the previous year, together with interventions by senior officers, pressured the Schutzstaffel (SS) to create a special camp for “privileged” types of German Jews. Theresienstadt was merely a ruse, a way station on the road to Auschwitz. But as the chapter shows, despite the brutal conditions they faced there and at other Nazi camps, Jewish veterans' connection to their former status and their identity did not abruptly end.
Epilogue
Authors: Geheran Michael
Published: May 2021

The book closes with a short glimpse into the history of Jewish veterans after 1945, as the survivors of the camps returned to Germany, outlining ruptures and continuities in comparison with the pre-Nazi period. Jewish veterans imposed different narratives on their experiences under National Socialism. As the past receded into the distance, it became a concern for the survivors to engage with the past, which they variously looked back on with nostalgia, disillusionment, or bitter anger. Although National Socialism threatened to erase everything that Jewish veterans of World War I had achieved and sacrificed, sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the nation, as well as bonds with gentile Germans that had been forged under fire during the war, threatened to sever their connections to the status they had earned as soldiers of the Great War and defenders of the fatherland, their minds, their values and their character remained intact. Jewish veterans preserved their sense of German identity.
Introduction
Authors: McGuire Brian Patrick
Published: May 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who almost defies characterization. Monk, abbot, adviser of kings and popes, author of some of the finest Latin prose to emerge from the Middle Ages, he was a man of many talents. At first glance he can seem abrasive, overconfident, and almost arrogant. But as this book shows, he is a point of departure for European culture in its search for faith, meaning, and community. Any history of Western Europe in the twelfth century has to include Bernard and his almost frenetic activities. Bernard deserves reevaluation as a person and participant in the history of Christian life and spirituality. His inner life and external actions illuminate his own time and provide a context for ours. In addition to his sophisticated theology, his moving sermons, and his influence among kings and popes, Bernard can plausibly be considered the first European. Through his vision and talent for inspiring people to work together, he helped build Christianity's first continent-wide monastic order, the Cistercians, whose monasteries extended from Ireland to Sicily and Norway.
A Time of Hope and Change
Authors: McGuire Brian Patrick
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses how the world into which Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was born in 1090 was full of hope and promise. The search for intimacy would come to characterize Bernard's life and helps explain why he joined a monastery. At the same time, however, he benefited from other factors in creating his life. A few decades before Bernard was born, the Western Church had experienced the upheaval of what many history books call the Gregorian Reform. This movement can be called the first medieval reformation, for it brought about a genuine reformation or restructuring of the Christian Church. Bernard came to the monastery as an adult, and the new monasticism that he joined insisted on individual choice. In this sense, Bernard and his contemporaries would discover the meaning of Christianity as manifested in the words of Jesus, emphasizing the consent that comes from the heart instead of the gesture's symbolic assent.
Monastic Commitment and Church Politics, 1124–1129
Authors: McGuire Brian Patrick
Published: May 2021

This chapter details how, until he left for Italy in the early 1130s and became involved in resolving the papal schism, Saint Bernard spent most of his time at his monastery of Clairvaux. The years before he dedicated himself to defending the papacy might at first seem rather tame by comparison with what came afterwards. But a closer look especially at the letters composed at this time shows that Bernard was already committing himself to causes that had nothing to do with Clairvaux or even with Cistercian monasticism. In 1127 or 1128, Bernard drew up a statement about how bishops should behave. It is possible to see the beginning of the polemic against abuse of office in the Church. What is remarkable here, however, is not Bernard's concern with the state of the Church. It is his public statement about what was happening in his own Cistercian Order.
Toward Reformation of Church and Monastery
Authors: McGuire Brian Patrick
Published: May 2021

This chapter reflects on how Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was born in the aftermath of the first medieval reformation of the Church and grew up in a world where royal, ducal, and other secular figures had to respect the prerogatives of the Church. His actions in defending what he found to be ecclesiastical interests reflect his attachment to this reformation, even though he by no means was extreme or radical in his view of how Christian society should function. Like other church figures, he took it for granted that there would be a great amount of cooperation between ecclesiastical and secular powers. They could strengthen each other, and only in extraordinary situations was it necessary for churchmen to distance themselves from kings and other lay authorities. In 1129, Bernard joined with other Cistercian abbots, including his father abbot, Stephen Harding, and addressed King Louis VI of France concerning a quarrel between the king and the bishop of Paris, Stephen of Senlis. This is a classic case of the old regime, where king and churchmen supported each other, in the face of a new world where the Church reformed itself and kept secular authority at a distance.
Healing a Divided Church, 1130–1135
Authors: McGuire Brian Patrick
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes how in the first years of the 1130s, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux became a European figure, involving himself in the ecclesiastical and secular politics of his time and influencing them to a greater or lesser degree. He dedicated himself to solving the perilous situation in which there were two popes at the same time in the Western Church. By 1138, he had been to Italy a number of times and had traversed what today is France. These journeys must have been grueling for an individual with gastric problems and with a firm commitment to the prayer life of the monastery. At the same time as Bernard missed the daily office, he was separated from the brothers he loved in Clairvaux, both his brothers in the flesh and his spiritual brethren, who looked to him for spiritual guidance and inspiration.
Victory and Defeat: A Conflicted Church, 1136–1140
Authors: McGuire Brian Patrick
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores how the autumn and early winter of 1135–36 provided sufficient time for Saint Bernard to give his first sermons on the Song of Songs at Clairvaux and also to familiarize himself and come to terms with the brothers' ambitious building program. But just when he may have felt he had returned to the routine of monastic life, he was called back to Italy. His companion now, as previously, was his brother Gerard, Clairvaux's capable cellarer whom Bernard felt he needed at his side rather than leaving him behind to deal with the material affairs of the monastery. In March or April of 1137 at Viterbo, Gerard became severely ill. Bernard's description of events emphasizes how important it was for him to restore Gerard to his monastic community so that he could die there. During the last year of Gerard's life, Bernard must have lived in fear that he soon would lose the man whose company and guidance had shepherded him since childhood. Just as the papal schism was coming to a seemingly happy end, Bernard was facing the end of the world that had made him.
The World after the Schism: One Thing after Another, 1140–1145
Authors: McGuire Brian Patrick
Published: May 2021

This chapter studies how, in the years that followed the final departure of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux from Italy, he encountered what might be called “one damn thing after another,” the chaos that makes up the very stuff of history and human life. Probably during Lent of 1139, he faced his first challenge. His friend and later biographer, William of Saint-Thierry, sent him a brief treatise attacking the theology of Peter Abelard. Sometime between May of 1139 and June of 1140, Bernard composed a fairly lengthy treatise attacking what he considered to be the heresies of Abelard, concerning the doctrines of the Trinity and the Redemption. He addressed it to no less a person than Pope Innocent II, the very man from whom he temporarily had broken off contact because of Innocent's refusal to reinstate Cardinal Peter of Pisa. The Abelard affair thus forced Bernard to get back in touch with Rome and abandon the solitude he must have sought at Clairvaux after the death of his brother Gerard.
Detestable and Wicked Arts
Authors: Moyer Paul B.
Published: May 2021

This book places early New England's battle against black magic in a transatlantic perspective. The book provides an accessible and comprehensive examination of witch prosecutions in the Puritan colonies that discusses how their English inhabitants understood the crime of witchcraft, why some people ran a greater risk of being accused of occult misdeeds, and how gender intersected with witch-hunting. Focusing on witchcraft cases in New England between roughly 1640 and 1670, the book highlights ties between witch-hunting in the New and Old Worlds. Informed by studies on witchcraft in early modern Europe, it presents a useful synthesis of scholarship on occult crime in New England and makes new and valuable contributions to the field.
Introduction
Authors: Moyer Paul B.
Published: May 2021

This chapter traces the long-standing interpretations of witchcraft in New England. It takes advantage of studies on occult crime in early modern Europe that has enriched the understanding of how concerns over magical mischief intersected with gender, class, religion, and the law. It also identifies historians that stressed the divergence of elite and folk views on the occult and tended to see witch-hunting as a process imposed from above. The chapter looks at newer studies on European witchcraft that have broken down dichotomous views. It reveals a greater level of give and take between common folk and elites when it came to witch beliefs and shared responsibility for witch-hunting.
“Hanged for a Witch”
Authors: Moyer Paul B.
Published: May 2021

This chapter presents a narrative of witch-hunting in New England between the late 1630s and 1670 and begins the process of placing it in the broader context of the English Atlantic. It examines the process by which cases of occult crime took shape. It also illuminates the transatlantic dimensions of witch prosecutions in the Puritan colonies and addresses questions essential to understanding the phenomenon of witch-hunting in the early modern period. The chapter mentions Alice Young of Windsor, Connecticut who appears to have been the first person executed for witchcraft in New England. It investigates how Young's execution marked the beginning of an intense period of witch-hunting in New England.
“A Forward, Discontented Frame of Spirit”
Authors: Moyer Paul B.
Published: May 2021

This chapter outlines the traits that characterized the accused and explores why New Englanders associated them with occult crime. It talks about Mary Parsons (née Lewis) and Mary Parsons (née Bliss), who coincidentally had the same name and were accused as witch suspects, who came to the attention of New England authorities in the 1650s. It also stresses the lack of theological or legal stipulations limiting who could be accused of witchcraft, in which people in New England and across the English Atlantic did not equally share the risk of denunciation. The chapter investigates why certain individuals were more vulnerable to suspicion and, once accused, more apt to suffer arrest, trial, and conviction of witchcraft. It refers to Reverend John Davenport's sermon in 1965, which stated that a person with a forward-discontented frame of spirit was a subject fit for the Devil.
“The More Women, the More Witches”
Authors: Moyer Paul B.
Published: May 2021

This chapter details how witch fears intersected with gender constructs. It refers to John Bradstreet, who came before a Massachusetts court in 1652 on suspicion of having familiarity with the Devil after stating that he had consulted a book of magic in order to invoke a demonic spirit. It also talks about Margaret and Thomas Jones who stood accused of occult crime in 1648, but only Margaret was hanged for it. The chapter illustrates how the treatment of witch suspects in the Puritan colonies often varied according to sex, and women bore a greater risk of accusation, trial, and execution. It elaborates how female suspects outnumbered male ones by more than two to one, emphasizing that of the fifteen people sent to the gallows for witchcraft, thirteen were women.
“There Was Some Mischief in It”
Authors: Moyer Paul B.
Published: May 2021

This chapter delves into the dynamics of accusation and investigates what motivated people to denounce others as witches. It recounts how William Meaker of New Haven initiated a slander suit against his neighbor, Thomas Mullenner, for claiming that the defendant had called him a witch in 1657. It also explains how Meaker's case illustrates the important link between witchcraft and interpersonal conflict in early New England. The chapter explains the social context of witchcraft and examines the social situations that gave birth to fears of malefic attack as well as the motives that drove one person to accuse another of black magic. It examines how Puritan colonies closely match dynamics of witch-hunting across the early modern English Atlantic.
Conclusion
Authors: Moyer Paul B.
Published: May 2021

This chapter looks at factors that shaped alleged cases of occult crime in New England, the broader English Atlantic, and Europe during the early modern era. It talks about a widow residing in Lynn, Massachusetts, by the name of Ann Burt, who came under suspicion for witchcraft in 1669 and was believed to have been acquitted as she died of natural causes in 1673. It also details the malefic affliction of five victims as the main charge laid against Widow Burt, including other witnesses that claimed she could read minds and move with preternatural speed. The chapter describes the forces operating on a local, regional, and transatlantic level that shaped the episode of Widow Burt coming under suspicion for witchcraft in 1669. It discusses how the case of Ann Burt was linked to a larger campaign of witch-hunting that stretched across the seventeenth-century English Atlantic.
Introduction
Authors: Erickson Jennifer
Published: May 2021

This chapter introduces Race ing Fargo as a case study for how citizenship is practiced and how diversity is approached in Fargo, North Dakota, and what the consequences of these practices are. The chapter compares citizenship practices among two social service institutions, the refugee resettlement and county welfare agencies, and two groups of refugees — New Americans — Bosnians and Southern Sudanese. The chapter discusses Fargo's topography and how Fargo has transformed from a city with an economy centered on manufacturing and agriculture to one with a more diversified economy that includes education, healthcare, software, and service based industries. It talks about the Northern European Ancestry of Fargo residents, and how the arrival of refugees complicated understandings of citizenship in the dominant population. It defines race as a broadly encompassing term that refers to skin color and physical variations among people and the harmful social judgments based on those differences, alongside also referencing language, behavior, dress, and ethnicity. The chapter talks about how the size of cities affect how refugees and immigrants are accepted by their residents, and differentiates immigrants from refugees. It then tackles citizenship and approaches it as a set of practices that seek to establish belonging to one or more places and that are relational and always in flux. Finally, the chapter discusses and defines assemblages as a theoretical concept that challenges the idea of nations, cities, or communities as bounded or homogenous spaces and instead focuses on diverse practices and relations that occur in and through the city.
Conclusion
Authors: Erickson Jennifer
Published: May 2021

This chapter concludes that globalized capitalism has resulted in unprecedented amounts of goods, services, ideas, and people circulating the planet, which has provoked a range of responses at the local level, from excitement and acceptance of new forms of diversity, to fear, aversion, and panic, depending on one's experiences and point of view. The ever-increasing numbers of refugees and immigrants around the world calls into question the role of the nation state and how citizenship has been defined and practiced at national and local levels. It states that cities also host parallel assemblages, where even chance encounters with certain groups of people (for example, New Americans) are minimal and lack context and meaning, which can serve to fuel fear and hate. The chapter discusses “incipient commoning”, and how sensationalist media has shaped the contours of the refugee resettlement debate in Fargo.
Feeding the Hungry
Authors: Jurkovich Michelle
Published: May 2021

Food insecurity poses one of the most pressing development and human security challenges in the world. This book examines the social and normative environments in which international anti-hunger organizations are working and argues that despite international law ascribing responsibility to national governments to ensure the right to food of their citizens, there is no shared social consensus on who ought to do what to solve the hunger problem. The book provides a new analytic model of transnational advocacy. In investigating advocacy around a critical economic and social right — the right to food — the book challenges existing understandings of the relationships among human rights, norms, and laws. Most important, the book provides an expanded conceptual tool kit with which we can examine and understand the social and moral forces at play in rights advocacy.
The Limits of Law
Authors: Jurkovich Michelle
Published: May 2021

This chapter considers the puzzling role of international law around the right to food and examines why the existing law has been unable to generate norms within the advocacy community. It explores the reasons why international anti-hunger organizations rarely legitimate the right to food in legal terms and how this case can challenge the understanding of the relationships between norms, human rights, and law. It also provides a conceptual discussion of the distinction between formal law and norms, underscoring the importance of not conflating the two concepts. The chapter argues that many international anti-hunger organizations still do not conceptualize food as a human right, making international human rights law less relevant. It looks at the hunger case that suggests there is nothing automatic about law generating norms among activists or society at large.
Policy Implications and the Road Ahead
Authors: Jurkovich Michelle
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines international advocacy around hunger and the right to food, which provided a new analytical model to describe and explain this area. It explores how it is possible that international anti-hunger advocacy would behave differently from human rights advocacy and mentions international anti-hunger activists that are working in an environment without a norm around hunger. It also describes hunger's placement between two different analytic frameworks, development and rights. The chapter discusses the international anti-hunger organizations with in-country operations, which has strong incentives not to blame national governments for fear of jeopardizing the safety and security of staff and active programs. It reviews the study of international anti-hunger advocacy that has important theoretical implications for how norms, human rights, and law are understood.
Diagnosing Dissent
Authors: Bennette Rebecca Ayako
Published: May 2021

Although physicians during World War I, and scholars since, have addressed the idea of disorders such as shell shock as inchoate flights into sickness by men unwilling to cope with war's privations, they have given little attention to the agency many soldiers actually possessed to express dissent in a system that medicalized it. In Germany, these men were called Kriegszitterer, or “war tremblers,” for their telltale symptom of uncontrollable shaking. Based on archival research that constitutes the largest study of psychiatric patient files from 1914 to 1918, this book examines the important space that wartime psychiatry provided soldiers expressing objection to the war. The book argues that the treatment of these soldiers was far less dismissive of real ailments and more conducive to individual expression of protest than we have previously thought. In addition, the book provides an important reevaluation of German psychiatry during this period. The book's argument fundamentally changes how we interpret central issues such as the strength of the German Rechtsstaat and the continuities or discontinuities between the events of World War I and the atrocities committed — often in the name of medicine and sometimes by the same physicians — during World War II.
Introduction
Authors: Bennette Rebecca Ayako
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines an array of files within the context of the time to understand how and why physicians made certain diagnoses and proposed treatments to patients of World War I. It analyses the practices and perceptions that were prominent in the system of military psychiatry during World War I. It also considers the process of diagnosing dissent, which is an endeavor that German physicians focused more on the medical part than on the moral end. This chapter investigates that German wartime psychiatry during World War I concentrated on the diagnosis and treatment of the Kriegszitterer or shell-shocked soldiers. It identifies German soldiers that were presented with a notorious mixture of symptoms that were labelled as hysterics.
Antecedents
Authors: Bennette Rebecca Ayako
Published: May 2021

This chapter gives a broad overview of developments within the main areas of psychiatry, the military, and pacifism and provides the necessary background to understand the conditions prevailing in Germany leading up to 1914. It highlights the rising fortunes and expanding purview of psychiatry in the decades before World War I and references the limits of describing the trends as medicalization. It also explores the general prestige of the military and the role of pacifism in imperial German society. The chapter looks at August Fauser and Erwin Ackerknecht's estimations of psychiatry around 1900, which inhabited opposite ends of the opinion spectrum. It analyses attitudes toward the insane that had been lumped with the larger category of the poor over the nineteenth century.
Epilogue
Authors: Bennette Rebecca Ayako
Published: May 2021

This chapter covers the narrative of dissent and medicalization during World War I into the post-1918 era, and provides a summary of some of the larger conclusions that can be taken from the re-examination of wartime psychiatry. It discusses pre-war pacifism that never embraced conscientious objection as a stance before the war. It also refers to the pacifists who during the fighting between 1914 and 1918 refused to serve and became leaders of the growing movement of more radical pacifism in Weimar Germany. The chapter recounts the subsequent development of the radical pacifism of Weimar and its roots in the dissent that was evident in the medicalized system dealing with psychologically traumatized soldiers. It reviews wartime psychiatry that fundamentally informs larger historical questions concerning modern German history.
Checkpoints
Authors: Streicher Ruth
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses how checkpoints were the most obvious signs of the militarization of southern Thailand. In general terms, the installation of road blocks from the beginning of the conflict has marked Patani as a different country within Thailand. More specifically, in day-to-day encounters between soldiers and those crossing, racialized ideas have emerged as a key marker to differentiate peaceful from dangerous subjects. The chapter outlines how the racialization of the southern population has historically extended itself to include certain ideas of dress and language, and it details how these differentiations are drawn in contemporary checkpoint interactions. It also shows the gendering of ideas of the Malay khaek, which entails attributing Orientalized and often sexualized beauty to young local girls.
We Walk
Authors: Lutz Amy S. F.
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on the author's experience with her twenty-one-year-old son, Jonah, who has severe autism as they walk around Atlantic City. It mentions home in Philadelphia, where they hike through Valley Forge National Park and Fairmount Park, the largest city park in the world. It also refers to their walk around their neighbors' field or up and down their driveway, which is harder than it sounds since it's a quarter of a mile up a steep hill. The chapter talks about the laps they did around the top deck of a cruise ship to the Bahamas but had to abort once they discovered how determined Jonah was to launch himself overboard the way he likes to jump off the little motorboat. It recounts their walk on the beach at Key Largo and down abandoned railroad tracks by the Susquehanna River in Maryland.
Physical Guidance
Authors: Lutz Amy S. F.
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes Jonah's life, which is described as an endless onslaught of impositions. It relates the things Jonah learned from the earliest age that were considered difficult and contested for severely autistic children, such as speaking, toilet training, table manners, and basic academic skills. It also mentions Jonah's time in the feeding clinic at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where he was forced to eat. The chapter describes Jonah's diet when he was three years old, which was nothing but pretzels smeared with peanut butter. It examines Jonah's extreme selectivity towards food, which was explained by experts as an overall regression that many autistic kids experience between the ages of one and two.
Just Say Yes
Authors: Lutz Amy S. F.
Published: May 2021

This chapter mentions the pharma CBD oral spray, which the author saw on her Facebook feed that had allegedly caused a nine-year-old autistic Puerto Rican boy to utter his first words. It refers to Marie Myung-Ok Lee of Rhode Island, who published a four-part series on Slate about why she decided to give her nine-year-old marijuana. It also speculates whether CBD might help Jonah with the myoclonic seizures he had been experiencing with increasing frequency. The chapter recounts antiseizure drugs that had been prescribed to Jonah as a young child to control his mood but had terrible side effects, such as rapid weight gain. It talks about Jennifer Abbanat, who has been treating her fourteen-year-old son with various cannabis products for several years.
Praesidalism
Authors: Lutz Amy S. F.
Published: May 2021

This chapter explains how it is easy for the author to focus on the communicative function of language when a mother has a child with minimal language. It points out how language remains a blunt instrument in the author's house as she paid more attention to equipping Jonah with tools to express his preferences. It also discusses vitriol that was being exchanged online over whether to use the phrase “autistic person” or “person with autism.” The chapter emphasizes the person-first language endorsed by the disability rights movement since the 1980s. It refers to Lydia Brown and other self-advocates that opt for identity-first language, such as “autistic person” or simply “autistic,” as they understand that autism is an inherent part of an individual's identity.