bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Village
Authors: Erikson Kai
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on one location where people have spent their lives —the village—paying particular attention to the ways of life that have emerged there. What we have been calling “the village ethos,” “gemeinschaft” or “folk ethos” is the way of life of the fishing village, the mountain hollow, the island community, as well as the kind of rural hamlet in which Kasia and Piotr Walkowiak grew up. It dominates the life of peasants everywhere. The chapter considers a number of themes that are common in village life everywhere, including an overarching sense of unity, niche, heritage, surveillance and tolerance, craft, leveling, and spirituality. It also calls on voices from parts of the world where a sense of community once remained strong to help illustrate the nature of the village ethos.
Worlds Beyond
Authors: Erikson Kai
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines three new social formations—“places” in at least a sense—that have exerted a strong impact on our times: the emergence of the modern state and the sometimes tense relationship that can develop between peoplehood and statehood, the colonization of a large portion of the world, and globalization. It first describes a number of factors that provided the thrust for European colonization before discussing the benefits of civilization. It then locates the modern state on our map of “places” in human social life and considers the emergence of global networks that now stretch across the surfaces of the earth, along with the economic forces that drive globalization such as capitalism. It also looks at social formations that connect people together but have no obvious location on the earth's surface, including global corporations and sovereign states, and the reappearance of the folk ethos.
The Roots of Human Ecology
Authors: Burch William R. , Machlis Gary E. , Force Jo Ellen
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at how the roots of human ecology lie primarily in general ecology, sociology, geography, and anthropology, as documented by numerous literature reviews. The idea for the application of general ecological principles to human activity was sparked by sociologists at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. Sociologists Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess drew analogies between human and nonhuman communities, describing society’s symbiotic and competitive relationships as an organic web. Biological concepts such as competition, commensalism, succession, and equilibrium were freely borrowed, mirroring the biologists’ use of social science concepts. Borrowing from contemporary plant ecologists and their focus on plant community zones, early human ecologists moved from classrooms to city streets to map “natural areas” or zones of the urban metropolis.
Extending the Capability of the Model
Authors: Burch William R. , Machlis Gary E. , Force Jo Ellen
Published: January 2018

This chapter explains the significance of building better capability in forecasting the likely consequences of natural resource and environmental decisions. The goal here is not just to know what is connected but also to identify which connections are most critical in balancing risk and benefit. At the core of this analysis are the hierarchical variables of territory, status, and power, along with the identity variables of age, gender, and class, all of which come from the social order component. The chapter connects these to the population variable from the socioeconomic resource component. Meanwhile, the biophysical resources component provides a shifting set of variables such as land, energy, air, water, and flora and fauna, as do the individual and institutional cycles of change and the flows of individuals (immigration and emigration).
Conclusion
Authors: Burch William R. , Machlis Gary E. , Force Jo Ellen
Published: January 2018

This concluding chapter talks about how the complexity of combining human and nonhuman elements presents an obvious challenge to one’s understanding and management of ecosystems. The usual solution for understanding such complexity is to concentrate observations on the co-variation between a limited set of variables within a limited time–space setting. Important as that approach is, the need to unify these findings and practices may be of even greater importance for meeting future challenges to human ecosystems. The chapter shares some of the lessons learned in trying to develop and apply a more unifying approach to the study of human ecosystems. It offers a template of concepts that helps in reducing information overload by not attending to all the possible and actual connections in a given system.
Transforming Memory into Literary Narratives about the Past
Authors: Becker Eve-Marie
Published: January 2018

This chapter reflects on the early Christian shape of literary religious memory. The earliest Christian memorial culture does not stand alone. In order to develop, especially by literary means, it reiterates basic patterns that already circulate in its surrounding world. While maintaining continuity with both the Hebrew and Septuagint versions, the influence of Roman memorial culture is decisive in terms of how Christian groups organize their memoria. Moreover, early Christian authors tend to maintain the concepts of memory which are constitutive for Israel's history with God. In the New Testament writings, the concept of memory—which predates history-writing—is affiliated with a variety of contexts: ritual practices, the memorization of Jesus's teaching, and certain events and experiences.
The Imitation of Christ
Authors: Marshall Peter
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the Reformation as a long collective argument about what was truly involved in the imitation of Christ; about what people needed to do, or avoid doing, in order to achieve salvation. It first considers the imitation of Christ that began with becoming a Christian before discussing the ways that printing both reflected and invigorated lay piety and the practice of pilgrimage. It then explores Erasmus' description of people hostile to the studia humanitatis (the ‘humanities’) as ‘barbarians’, along with the debate between the scholastics and humanists over the question of piety. It also analyses how a loosening grip of the religious orders was accompanied by an intensification of the collegiate system, focusing on new colleges that were founded between 1495 and 1525.
Head and Members
Authors: Marshall Peter
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the role of the bishops of Rome, or popes, as ‘vicars of St Peter’, and also as ‘vicars of Christ’. St Paul taught that the Church was the body of Christ. If the Church was a body, then clearly, as John Alcock, bishop of Ely, declared in 1497, ‘in every realm of Christianity, the head thereof is Christ’. The chapter first considers what ordinary English people thought about popes and the papacy before discussing the issue of royal taxation of the clergy and the appointment of clergy to English benefices. It then explores lines of demarcation between common law and canon law, along with the arrest, imprisonment and death of a merchant named Richard Hunne, who was accused of heresy. It also looks at the issue of reforming the Church of England and people.
Mumpsimus and Sumpsimus
Authors: Marshall Peter
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the Act of Six Articles, passed in 1539 by Henry VIII to enforce under heavy penalties the fundamental doctrines of the Church of England. In many respects, the Six Articles were a disaster for the reformers, affirming a traditionalist line on all the propositions Norfolk placed before Parliament. For one, heresy and treason became thoroughly conflated. The Six Articles were a setback for evangelicals, and a shot in the arm for conservatives, but they did not signal any fundamental repudiation of the path Henry had followed since 1532. The chapter analyses the ways that the Act of Six Articles not only reinforced existing heresy laws and reasserted traditional Catholic doctrine as the basis of faith for the English Church, but also determined the political fate of Thomas Cromwell, archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, and the other reformist leaders.
The Supernatural Roots of Nazism
Authors: Kurlander Eric
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the occult, mythological, and ‘border scientific’ ideas that permeated Vienna's cafés and Munich's beer halls before the First World War. Although these ideas were remarkably fluid and interconnected, they fall loosely into three overlapping subcultures. The first is Ario-Germanic religion, folklore, and mythology. The second is occultism, including the esoteric doctrines of theosophy, anthroposophy, and ariosophy. Third and finally is the so called ‘border sciences’, ranging from astrology, parapsychology, and radiesthesia (‘dowsing’) to World Ice Theory. These subcultures played an important role in the rise of Nazism. First, in terms of ideological content, all three subcultures circulated and popularized ideas and doctrines that informed the Nazi supernatural imaginary and impressed a broader Nazi constituency. Second, these subcultures legitimized an esoteric and border scientific approach to understanding the world that informed Nazi thinking on race and space, science and religion.
Exploiting Hitler’s Magic
Authors: Kurlander Eric
Published: January 2018

This chapter illustrates how the National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP) appropriated supernatural ideas in order to appeal to ordinary Germans, enlisting the help of occultists and horror writers in shaping propaganda and political campaigning. By exploiting the supernatural imaginary, Hitler tied his political mission into something out of the Book of Revelation, as one ‘divinely chosen’ to create the Third Reich. The chapter then looks at three case studies. The first assesses Hitler's approach to politics through his reading of Ernst Schertel's 1923 occult treatise, Magic: History, Theory, Practice. The second considers the NSDAP's propaganda collaboration with the horror writer, Hanns Heinz Ewers. The third delves into the relationship between the NSDAP and Weimar's most popular ‘magician’, Erik Hanussen. In coopting Schertel's magic, enlisting Ewers, and forming an alliance with Hanussen, the Nazis diverted the masses from objective reality and toward the coming Third Reich.
The Stars Come Down to Frozen Earth
Authors: Kurlander Eric
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks systemically at the application of the ‘border sciences’ promoted by many Nazis, including astrology, World Ice Theory, and ‘biodynamic’ agriculture, between 1933 and 1941. In terms of astrology and parapsychology, biodynamic agriculture, and World Ice Theory, the regime's approach was often highly public. High-profile support for border science is evident in the regime employing biodynamic agriculture to prepare the athletics grounds for the 1936 Olympics or in Hitler and Himmler promoting World Ice Theory as official science despite the opposition of the entire academic establishment. Similarly, when it comes to anthroposophy's border scientific approach to ‘higher knowledge’ — whether in terms of radiesthesia, natural healing, or biodynamic agriculture — a remarkable number of Nazis expressed enthusiasm and support. During the Second World War, this border scientific approach to decision-making and policy helped facilitate projects both fantastical and monstrous.
Lucifer’s Court
Authors: Kurlander Eric
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the Nazis' interest in Germanic paganism, witchcraft, Luciferianism, and Eastern spirituality in their attempt to find a suitable Ario-Germanic alternative to Christianity. The Third Reich embraced a range of pagan, esoteric, and Indo-Aryan religious doctrines that buttressed its racial, political, and ideological goals. That is why Nazism posed a different threat to Christianity than secular liberalism or atheist Marxism. Nazi religiosity was a ‘fluid and incoherent thing which expresses itself in several different forms’. Part of a shared supernatural imaginary, these various religious strains were to some extent embraced and exploited by the Third Reich in the process of building spiritual consensus across a diverse Nazi Party and an even more eclectic German population.
Nazi Twilight
Authors: Kurlander Eric
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at the regime's increasingly desperate, if futile, investment in ‘miracle weapons’, partisan warfare, and cataclysmic ‘twilight’ imagery during the final years of the war, providing a fitting corollary to the disintegration of the Third Reich. During the final months of the war, when defeat appeared inevitable, many Nazis and millions of ordinary Germans wanted to believe that death was not permanent, that fantasy was reality, and that a ‘magical priest’ might rescue them from annihilation. In this way, the regime's fanciful invocation of miracle weapons, of partisan werewolves and vampires, and of ritual self-immolation, functioned as a form of therapy for Germans suffering through material and psychological distress. However, if twilight imagery helped Germans reconcile themselves to everyday violence, criminality, and loss, it also augured the disintegration of the Third Reich and Germany's post-war rebirth.
Spaceflight: Discerning Its Meaning
Authors: Neal Valerie
Published: January 2018

Chapter 1, “Spaceflight: Discerning Its Meaning,” introduces key concepts of framing, branding, and construction of meaning and then explores the heroic, pioneering spaceflight imaginary of the 1960s as an example of the power of ideas and images to shape public understanding. For Americans, human spaceflight resonates with core ideas that pervade U.S. history and culture--exploration, pioneering, the frontier, freedom, innovation, leadership, success. President John F. Kennedy notably placed spaceflight in this frontier tradition, and pioneering the space frontier became NASA’s signature theme. Establishing the origins, influences, and communication of that matrix of meaning sets up the shift into the shuttle era.
Astronauts: Reinventing the Right Stuff
Authors: Neal Valerie
Published: January 2018

The third chapter, “Astronauts: Reinventing the Right Stuff,” examines how the astronaut as icon embodied new meanings of spaceflight. A salient distinction of the shuttle era was the broadening, diversity, and democratization of the astronaut corps through new roles and new selection criteria. The nature of the job (engineering and scientific research) contrasted with the public’s ingrained perception of astronauts as pilots, especially in the wake of the two shuttle tragedies. Two memes coexisted in a shifting balance: the astronaut as exceptional and heroic, and the astronaut as an extraordinarily capable “ordinary” person.
Science: Doing Research in Space
Authors: Neal Valerie
Published: January 2018

The fourth chapter, “Science: Doing Research in Space,” traces the shift in the purpose of spaceflight from practical work to laboratory research and the increase of knowledge during the 1980s and 1990s. It presents the rationale for and rapid growth of a new field--microgravity research--in the life and physical sciences, and surveys selected results from shuttle science missions that helped set the stage for research on a space station. In the space station era, spaceflight became synonymous with research.
Plans: Envisioning the Future in Space
Authors: Neal Valerie
Published: January 2018

The sixth chapter, “Plans: Envisioning the Future in Space,” surveys the episodic effort to redefine the purpose and chart the course of future human spaceflight beyond the space station. It examines the effort by presidents, NASA planners, and blue-ribbon commissions to present energizing ideas and images--to generate a new imaginary--for expanding (or curbing) the human presence in space. These exercises in charting a way into the future typically failed, in part because they were ineffectively framed for consensus or political support. The current spaceflight imaginary puts humans on the moon again, or on Mars, or visiting an asteroid at some unspecified time.
Introduction
Authors: Williams Abigail
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the lesser known world of the everyday uses of books and reading in company, in the homes of the middling sort and lesser gentry. Although the schoolroom, the parish church, the tavern, the coffeehouse, and the university all provided important locations for reading aloud, the home was a space distinct in itself, a place that was both public and private, a site of intimacy and also of social display. It was a place of leisure and also of work: a way in which to retreat from the world, but also to prepare oneself for it. In exploring the reading life of the home, we get a sense of the complex mix of piety, control, self-improvement, irreverence, and social exchange that shaped eighteenth-century society.
Verse at Home
Authors: Williams Abigail
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers the use and transmission of verse by eighteenth-century readers. It argues that certain characteristics of eighteenth-century verse ensured that its take-up was different from other forms of writing. Most obviously, it is the genre most closely related to an oral tradition—to make metre and rhyme work, we need to hear, or imagine, how a poem sounds. The transition from print to vocal performance is assumed, even if it does not actually happen. Moreover, the couplet form and the liftable, aphoristic quotability of much eighteenth-century verse made it highly transferrable into a whole range of media, from commonplace books and printed miscellanies to cups and rings and samplers. The relative brevity of entire poems ensured it was possible to copy them out, collect them, compose them, read them out, or send them with a frequency not possible for the longer genres such as plays, novels, or essays.
Piety and Knowledge
Authors: Williams Abigail
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers how books about history, science, or religion were shared. Library catalogues and diaries show that the borrowing, selling, and reading of sermons, histories, and travel writing dwarfed that of literary works. Records of books sold in parts show that the largest genre available in this form was history, followed by geography, topography, and travel, then biblical commentary, church history, and treatises on morality. The expanding print market created newly accessible formats across many areas of intellectual enquiry, and the display of generalist knowledge about historical figures, botany, or astronomy was a prominent part of polite accomplishment for both men and women. Eighteenth-century readers consumed nonfiction works together at home—for piety, self-improvement, and entertainment.
Taxing America
Authors: du Rivage Justin
Published: January 2018

This chapter tackles the questions over how best to reconcile the demands of colonial defense with the interests of the British Empire. Americans had repeatedly demanded British military aid, raised large sums of money for the king's troops, and praised the empire as a force for good. And although there is little doubt that colonial assemblies clashed with royal governors, they often worked closely together to expand colonial fiscal-military states. But, as in Britain, the growth of armies, taxes, and debts created new burdens and stirred intense controversy. However, these conflicts were not, fundamentally, between localists and imperialists or libertarians and statists; rather, they were between radical Whigs and authoritarian reformers. They turned on competing conceptions of political economy and government, and they exposed deep ideological rifts within colonial society.
English Blood by English Hands
Authors: du Rivage Justin
Published: January 2018

This chapter shows how the ideological conflict over empire and public finance continued throughout the war. The American War of Independence was one of the most controversial wars in Britain's history, provoking demands for domestic reform and even flashes of republicanism. In the colonies, the difficulties of forging a new and effective American state meant that conflict was endemic. For both sides, common cultural ties and lingering affection for the British Empire prompted repeated attempts to negotiate a settlement. Those efforts ultimately failed, however. Most colonists were strongly attached to building a new, republican empire in North America, one made possible by the Articles of Confederation. When the war finally ended, Britain's radical Whig prime minister, William Petty, not only granted the new United States a generous peace but sought to reunite the empire along radical Whig lines.
Conclusion
Authors: du Rivage Justin
Published: January 2018

This concluding chapter draws some insights in the aftermath of American independence, arguing that America's revolution against empire was a revolution against domination. But domination was about far more than power; it was about denying people the fruits of their labor. And for that reason, radicals on both sides of the Atlantic contended for a more equal society and a more perfect union. But the reality of American empire proved far more equivocal. The future of the United States was marked by growing inequality and by laws that denied many their dignity and their freedom. Independence created a state strong enough to conquer a continent and robust enough to keep millions in bondage.
The Conquest of Death
Authors: Lockwood Matthew
Published: January 2018

The Conquest of Death considers the concepts of violence and state power far more broadly and holistically than previous accounts of state growth by intertwining the national and the local, the formal and the informal to illustrate how the management of incidental acts of violence and justice was as important to the monopolization of violence as the creation of the machinery of warfare. It reveals how the creation and operation of everyday bureaucracy built systems of power far exceeding its original intent and allowed a greater centralized surveillance of daily life than ever before. In sum, this book forces us to think about state formation not in terms of the broad strokes of legislative policy and international competition, but rather as a process built by multiple tiny actions, interactions and encroachments which fundamentally redefined the nature of the state and the relationship between government and governed. The Conquest of Death thus provides a new approach to the history of state formation, the history of criminal justice and the history of violence in early modern England. By locating the creation of an effective, permanent monopoly of violence in England in the second-half of the sixteenth century, this book also provides a new chronology of the divide between medieval and modern while divorcing the history of state growth from a linear history of centralization.
Coroners and Communities
Authors: Lockwood Matthew
Published: January 2018

If we are to fully understand the process through which a monopoly of violence was established in early modern England, it is first crucial to understand the nature of the office that was created for the express purpose of detecting and investigating inter-personal violence. As such, chapter 1 examines the parameters of the office of the coroner in both theory and practice. Using legal treatises and office holding manuals as well as a variety of local records, the chapter explores the duties and responsibilities of the coroner both legally and in reality, before moving to a discussion of the various jurisdictions within which coroners operated. As coroners were elected officials, chapter 2 also examines the election process and argues that the position of coroner was eagerly sought and the election of coroners contested and often contentious. If violence was to be effectively regulated, it was crucial that coroners interacted productively and efficiently with the communities they policed as well as the officers and courts of the legal system more generally. In order to properly situate the coroner in this dynamic apparatus, this chapter will examine both the process of a coroner’s inquest—from discovery, to inquest, to trial—and the coroner’s role in and interactions with communities, constables, justices of the peace and the local and central courts
One Concept of Justice
Authors: Lockwood Matthew
Published: January 2018

Chapter 4 explores the coroners’ jury, its makeup, its purpose and its relationship with the coroner. This section contends that the structure of the early modern coroners’ jury indicates that it was designed to provide the coroners’ inquest with local knowledge and expertise at the same time that it incorporated checks on the potential biases of local residents charged with investigating their neighbors. Focusing primarily on trial juries, traditional interpretations of early modern English judicial tribunals have highlighted their function as a site of negotiation between state and local society and between central and peripheral conceptions of justice. By examining a wider range of juries the chapter stresses the early modern jury's function as a site of state control. In an era with few official judicial officers, the effective maintenance of order required local information and local knowledge. In order to secure this crucial information without sacrificing state control over justice, a strategy of jury composition which blended geographical diversity with status qualifications was employed. Thus, the seeming contradiction in the early modern legal system witnessed by historians and contemporaries alike between discretion and impartiality was in fact a method of obtaining much needed local information without ceding the state's definition of justice to peripheral interests.
Economic Interest and the Oversight of Violence
Authors: Lockwood Matthew
Published: January 2018

While, earlier chapters establish that the officer and investigative techniques necessary to create a monopoly of violence were in place in England by the beginning of the sixteenth century, these alone only provided the potential for the effective regulation of violence. To ensure that the state’s definitions of legitimate and illegitimate violence were rigorously enforced, oversight of the coroner system was necessary. Chapter 5, therefore, charts the rise of a new, more robust system of oversight that came into effect in the sixteenth century. The growth of oversight, it is argued, began in the 1530s as a result of competing economic interests in the outcome of coroners’ inquests and the growing popularity of the central courts as a venue for adjudication. This combination of economic interest in forfeiture and greater central court involvement in forfeiture disputes resulted in a system of surveillance which allowed central government officials unprecedented control over the coroner system and thus, for the first time, an effective monopoly of lethal violence.
The Changing Nature of Control
Authors: Lockwood Matthew
Published: January 2018

The robust central oversight of the coroner system achieved in the 1530s began to erode by the middle of the seventeenth century. Chapter 6 explores the possible causes for this erosion in central oversight of the coroner system and the concomitant decline of forfeiture litigation. The second half of the seventeenth century was undoubtedly a time of crisis for state and citizen alike and the chaos and uncertainty of the era was no doubt at least partially responsible for shifting the gaze of the state away from the regulation of violence and towards other, more pressing political and military agendas. And yet, while the effects of such political and legal instability on the regular oversight of the legal system is demonstrated, it is also shown that even in an age of crisis the coroner system and the regulation of violence continued to operate. Inured to a system of justice, coroners and communities continued to hold their inquests and culpability for violent death continued to be determined. The eyes of the central government may not have been fixed on the coroner system as strongly as before, but criminal death was still punished and the monopoly of violence maintained.
A Crisis of Violence?
Authors: Lockwood Matthew
Published: January 2018

The rise of a new, more effective system of oversight in the mid-sixteenth century has many implications for early modern society and for the history of crime. Some of these implications, are investigated in chapter 8, primarily the impact of the new oversight and the subsequent growth in record keeping for the history of homicide. The chapter argues that while previous historians have detected a sharp increase in homicide in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, this growth in violence is, in fact a mirage. These years did not witness an appreciable rise in homicide, but instead saw a growth in detection and record-keeping spurred by greater central oversight of the coroner system.
Cultivating Rational Thought (Iliad 9)
Authors: Anhalt Emily Katz
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines how the Iliad promotes rational thought and continuously evokes the audience's capacity for critical moral judgment. It explains how the Iliad prompts the audience to consider the costs of Achilles' rage and the irrationality of his desire to be honored by the very people he is failing to protect. As Achilles' rage pursues its destructive path, the Iliad overtly calls attention to the capacity of stories to develop the audience's aptitude for logic and critical thought. Numerous stories throughout the epic encourage logical reasoning and critical judgment by offering models to emulate or avoid. The chapter also discusses Achilles' conviction that success in warfare is the highest form of human achievement and worthy of the highest honor.
Branding the Authentic Self: The Commercial Appeal of “Being Real”
Authors: Duffy Brooke Erin
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the pervasive narratives of authenticity, self-expression, and realness that structure activity in the social media sphere. After all, many social media producers articulate the importance of expressing themselves “authentically.” Hence, the chapter considers what social media producers mean by “authenticity,” “realness,” and “relatability.” In addition, this chapter examines how these definitions vary within and across intersectional social categories, and to what extent these ideals guide the production and promotion of creative content. Finally, the chapter looks at the ways that aspirational laborers aim to resolve the tension between internal compulsions and external demands, given that the “authenticity” trope is increasingly compliant with the demands of capitalism.
The “Instagram Filter”: Dispelling the Myths of Entrepreneurial Glamour
Authors: Duffy Brooke Erin
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the way by which the fulltime social media producers articulated their work styles: they lauded the flexibility and autonomy of their pieced-together careers while drawing attention to some of the less glossy features of the independent work-style. Indeed, the social media professionals detailed careers marked by a chaotic pace of work, periods of insecurity, and the demand to be ever-present to both audiences and advertisers. These individuals thus engage in aspirational labor, albeit of a different sort: they labor persistently—and at times, invisibly—to maintain their status in the midst of a “political economy of insecurity,” where neoliberal ideologies and practices shift organizational risks and responsibilities onto the individual.
The Aspirational Labor of an Academic
Authors: Duffy Brooke Erin
Published: January 2018

This concluding chapter explains how the ideologies and social practices propelling the social media sphere bear a striking resemblance to contemporary academe. With its staid, ivory tower facade, the academy might seem far removed from the creative industries, a cluster of professions marked by an aura of bohemian cool. But it is much less of a conceptual leap to understand the creation and dissemination of knowledge as a form of cultural work. And many of the same venerated ideals—autonomy, flexibility, the perennial quest to “do what one loves”—seem to animate workers in both arenas. Indeed, academia is unique among professions that fuse the personal identity of their workers so intimately with the work output, which might well be said of the creative industries.
The Constitutional Crisis
Authors: Strote Noah Benezra
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores both sides of the country's deep-seated class conflict, which revealed itself in a public debate about constitutional democracy between the highest levels of the judiciary and the leaders of Germany's powerful labor unions. Legal theorists often emphasize the importance of reaching consensus on moral principles for the stability of a constitutional system. In Germany, that consensus did not exist. The political representatives whom Germans elected after the Great War to draft a constitution could agree that the new German state should be a republic as opposed to a monarchy. However, they could not find common ground regarding as foundational a question as the authority of the three branches of government and their proper relationship to one another. Most important, minds diverged on whether the state should embrace parliamentary supremacy: the idea that the legislative branch, not the judicial or executive, should enjoy final authority in national decision making.
The Battle over National Education
Authors: Strote Noah Benezra
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at the volatile debate about the future of German youth and the ability of the schools to turn them away from nationalism and toward a vision of international understanding. After the resignation of Heinrich Brüning in May 1932, a battle over the future of national education exposed a dangerous ideological rift running through Germany. Although conflicts over constitutive issues such as the separation of legal powers and political economy had been fierce in the preceding years, German journalists began writing about the actual possibility of “civil war” in the summer of 1932. It was the precise point at which a new national government, led by chancellor Franz von Papen, began laying plans for a radical centralization of educational policy. It was the first time since Germany's political unification sixty years earlier that the national regime in Berlin took administration of schools and curriculum away from the individual states and began centralizing decision making in the capital.
The Culture of Christian Partnership
Authors: Strote Noah Benezra
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the creation of a post-Nazi state whose leaders celebrated cultural pluralism instead of uniformity, focusing particularly on the remarkable public campaign of the late 1950s to reintegrate Jews into German culture. Scholars of German history have often argued that the country's transformation from a society that valued cultural uniformity in the beginning of the twentieth century to one that valued cultural plurality by the end of the century resulted from the rise of a new post-Nazi generation. They argue that this generational cohort, whose formative experience was the fall of Hitler in 1945, was able to face Germany's genocidal past in a way the older generation could not, and in the process opened up society to cultural diversity. It was under this generation's leadership that German politicians began using the term “multiculturalism” and built a Holocaust memorial in the heart of the nation's capital.
“The World was Paradise Malformed”: Poetic Language, Anthropomorphism, and Secularism in Wallace Stevens
Authors: Mutter Matthew
Published: January 2018

That Stevens’s poetry repeatedly returns to the death of God as a condition of existential vertigo is a scholarly commonplace, but this chapter argues that for Stevens, language itself harbors a dangerous bias toward transcendence. Stevens is mistrustful of the way metaphor slides into metaphysics, the way an analogical worldview becomes a theological one, and the ways in which signs and symbols tend to refer solid, immanent things to supersensible narratives or “meanings.” In the face of this danger, he develops a poetics of tautology meant to divest language of such bias. Yet later in his career, this chapter contends, he returns to analogy as a mode of transcendence-in-immanence, and establishes a concept of “description without place” in which imagined goods, which have no immanent existence, correspond to details of a particular scene. Stevens is, in other words, working out a version of Nietzsche’s famous claim that we are not rid of God until we are rid of grammar while simultaneously harnessing the religious possibilities of language.
“Tangled in a Golden Mesh”: Virginia Woolf and the “Deceptiveness” of Beauty
Authors: Mutter Matthew
Published: January 2018

There has been a small movement among recent critics and philosophers to rehabilitate the reputation of beauty, which suffered under the modernist fascination with ugliness, Romantic and postmodern prejudice in favor of the sublime, and political criticism of beauty as elitist, inefficacious, and complicit with injustice. This chapter seeks to reframe these debates by examining the link between beauty and religious ontologies. Weber, following Nietzsche, insisted that secular modernity had broken sympathetic relations between beauty and goodness, but in Woolf’s novels the beautiful cannot shed its theological aura: its promise of reconciliation, peace, and divine benevolence. Woolf’s famous conception of “the world as a work of art”—which has, nevertheless, no “creator”—remains entangled in the aesthetic theodicies she repudiates. Her novels struggle to conceptualize secular, mundane models of beauty while simultaneously clinging to intimations of a metaphysical and moral order implicit in aesthetic experience. Beauty is, in her writing, the last and most intractable stronghold of mystical feeling.
Max Eastman
Authors: Irmscher Christoph
Published: January 2018

The definitive biography of radical activist, poet, editor, and public intellectual Max Eastman (1883–1969), based on unrestricted access to the Eastman family archive. Considered one of the “hottest radicals” of his time, Eastman edited two of the most important modernist magazines, The Masses and The Liberator, campaigned for women’s suffrage, sexual freedom, and peace, and published several volumes of poetry and two books on laughter. A fierce critic of Joseph Stalin, Eastman befriended and translated Leon Trotsky and remained unafraid to express unpopular views, drawing criticism from both conservatives and the Left. Maintaining that he had never changed his political opinions and that, instead, the world around him had changed, Eastman completed his public turn to the right by becoming a contributor to Reader’s Digest. A stubborn, lifelong admirer of Lenin as well as a defender of the Vietnam War, Eastman, who now called himself a “libertarian conservative,” died in Bridgetown, Barbados, on March 25, 1969. Set against the backdrop of several decades of political and ideological turmoil, this biography interweaves Eastman’s singular life with stories of the fascinating people he knew, loved, and admired, including Charlie Chaplin, Florence Deshon, Claude McKay, and Leon Trotsky.
Faun with a Typewriter
Authors: Irmscher Christoph
Published: January 2018

Max Eastman was, for quite some time, one of the most widely known American writers both at home and abroad. He was admired and loved, loathed and lambasted. Joseph Stalin called him a “gangster of the pen,” a characterization quite at odds with the man even casual acquaintances found irresistibly charming in person. Once a well-known radical, the Prince of Greenwich Village, he later in life became an advocate for anti-left causes and a frequent contributor on the payroll of ...
The Devil at Park Church
Authors: Irmscher Christoph
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses Max Eastman’s upbringing in Elmira, NY, as the son of two progressive Congregationalist ministers and specifically the influence of his mother, Annis Ford Eastman, and of his sister, Crystal Eastman. Other formative factors in Eastman’s childhood and youth include his sexual awakening, the time spent with his family in the alternative community of Glenora, NY, and his schooling at Mercersburg Academy, Pennsylvania, where, despite a tendency toward melancholy inherited from his mother, he excels academically.
A Village Apollo
Authors: Irmscher Christoph
Published: January 2018

After a return of his mysterious backache, Max Eastman seeks a cure at Dr. Gehring’s sanatorium in Maine, where he falls for the beautiful Swedish maid/nurse Anna Carlson. He joins Crystal in New York, studies philosophy with John Dewey at Columbia University, and begins to teach as an associate instructor. During summers spent at Glenora he perfects his diving technique but cannot rid himself of his sexual inhibitions. In two searching essays he celebrates Walt Whitman as a sexual healer, learning to reject his mother’s insistence on spiritual purity. Moving in with Crystal, Max becomes interested in woman’s suffrage and helps found the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage in New York. Max becomes a sought-after and well-paid speaker at suffrage events, reinventing himself as a “man suffragette.” Dewey accepts one of Max’s essays on Plato in lieu of a dissertation. Plato’s struggle to reconcile his enjoyment of beauty with morality is a metaphor for Max’s own inner conflict; he never submits his dissertation. The painful death of Annis Ford Eastman in 1910 leaves Max and Crystal bereft.
Ruminating on Paul’s Food in the Second Century
Authors: Penniman John David
Published: January 2018

In the second century, the apostle Paul’s legacy was far from settled. This was especially true concerning the meaning of his reference to milk and solid food in 1 Corinthians. In the contentious exegetical battles that ensued during the next generations of Jesus followers, the argument for ownership of Paul emphatically relied upon the idea that common nourishment could establish one’s kinship with the apostle and with a legitimate Christian sociality. That is to say, in the unsettled world of second-century Christianities, appeals to a shared source of milk served a strategic function, insofar as it came to authorize certain arrangements of Christian social identities and relations over and against others. So many authors reflect an urgency about solving problem of Paul’s enigmatic references to milk and solid food. Nowhere is the urgency more evident than in the writings of two very different contemporaries, Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria, as they sought to wrest the Pauline text away from so-called Gnostic opponents. But rather than solving the problem, Irenaeus and Clement only intensified the theological and anthropological issues generated by Paul’s troublesome categories.
Animal, Vegetable, Milk
Authors: Penniman John David
Published: January 2018

In Origen of Alexandria, there is a consistent emphasis on the slow transformation of material bodies into spiritual beings—that is, of the passage from a corporeal to a noetic existence. And certain types of food play a crucial role within this ongoing process of transformation insofar as eating becomes a mechanism for integrating body and soul and elevating them into a nature of spirit. Origen uses the Pauline food categories found in 1 Corinthians 3 as a hermeneutical key to unlock the whole of scripture and its significance for the structure and formation of the Christian life. This chapter demonstrates how Origen employs the symbol of breast milk as one of several “diets” for those embodied souls undergoing the slow transformation into a spiritual body. Crucially, Origen is the first to develop at length the relationship between the milk and solid food of 1 Corinthians and the “vegetables for the weak” found in Romans 14. The inclusion of vegetables enables Origen to harmonize Paul’s threefold anthropology of fleshy, soulish, and spiritual. As a result, he creates an elaborate taxonomy of souls—a dietary system for classifying the different statuses of souls among Christians.
Gregory of Nyssa at the Breast of the Bridegroom
Authors: Penniman John David
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the role of nurturance in Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding of the progressive perfection of the soul. Reflecting the social ideology of his time—in which maternity and breastfeeding functioned as indexes for social legitimacy and the transfer of cultural identity—Gregory regularly emphasizes the symbolic power of nourishment in the formation of the soul. Throughout his work, milk is described as a transformative meal, a form of subsistence that is the essence of salvation and the way toward perfection. The chapter begins with a comparison of Gregory’s Encomium on Saint Basil and the Life of Moses in order to demonstrate how these texts emphasize the maternal food given to an infant as the foundation of and guarantor for later intellectual prowess and social position. The chapter turns next to the Homilies on the Song of Songs and the ways in which maternity, infancy, and breastfeeding enable the various transformations of the soul that take place throughout Gregory’s interpretation. For Gregory, the Song of Songs is an itinerary of trophic mutations premised on the assumption that all food contains an essence that perfects the one who eats it.
The Spirit of Brown
Authors: Brooks Roy L.
Published: January 2018

This chapter lays the foundation for an understanding of the socio-legal race problem and possible solutions. It begins with the Supreme Court’s inglorious racial history in which the Court, from Dred
Scott up to Brown
v.
Board
of
Education, engaged in a pattern and practice of sabotaging black equality granted by Congress. Racial oppression, including the torture and murder of blacks without trial, was part of a national narrative largely written by the Supreme Court. Brown was a conscious attempt by the Court to reverse its inglorious racial past. Brown had a profound effect on racial progress, changing the legal status of blacks which in turn greatly improved their socioeconomic and socio-cultural position in our society. But the Court, in the years following this landmark decision, did not remain faithful to the spirit of Brown. It began to impede black progress through its civil rights rulings by suppressing the black equality interest litigated in those cases. This is juridical subordination, which can be resolved if the Supreme Court remains faithful to the spirit of Brown. This is good social policy.
Race and Culture
Authors: Brooks Roy L.
Published: January 2018

The conflicting racial and cultural values that underpin much of the Supreme Court’s decision making in civil rights cases are brought under critical review in this chapter as part of a larger argument regarding cultural diversity made in the next chapter. Thus, this chapter is a bridge between the socio-legal and socio-cultural race problems. In preparation for arguing in the next chapter that cultural diversity rides with a corpse in its cargo—to wit, cultural subordination—this chapter discusses the conflicting racial and cultural crosscurrents of the American middle class and working class. White-middle-class values, more than any other values, shape the American mainstream culture—“It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!”—wherein the problem of cultural subordination lies.