bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Practical Divinity
Authors: Hall David D.
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on “practical divinity,” or how Puritan ministers and laypeople understood the workings of redemption and developed a dense system of “means.” Summing up the essence of theology, the early seventeenth-century English theologian William Ames described it as “living to God,” or in such a way that the divine–human connection became visible. Well before Ames was emphasizing the interplay of piety and practice, the sixteenth-century humanist Desiderus Erasmus had advised clergy to avoid “intricate syllogisms” and focus on the “gospel life.” The makers of the practical divinity wanted to convert Catholics into Protestants and to stabilize the contours of orthodoxy, but a more telling goal was to raise the bar for all those who contented themselves with the vernacular wisdom summed up in the saying, “the God that made me, save me.” Nothing this simple would do. To these goals, the makers of the practical divinity added another, its value as an instrument of social and moral reformation.
A New Sion? Reform, Rebellion, and Colonization c. 1625–1640
Authors: Hall David D.
Published: May 2020

This chapter studies how, in the aftermath of his failure to subdue the Scottish insurgency by military means, Charles I authorized the election of two new parliaments. Its policies were so at odds with Charles I's understanding of monarchy and the true church that the outcome was civil war in England between supporters of the king and supporters of Parliament. Explaining this sequence of events tests every historian of 1630s and 1640s Britain. The puzzles are many. In the context of this book, the most significant of these is the relationship between civil politics and the politics of religion. Intertwined throughout the history of the English and Scottish reformations, their relationship tightened in the practice and rhetoric of Charles I and the party he favored, here known as the Laudians. Like his immediate predecessors, the young king took for granted that opposition to his version of true religion was equivalent to challenging his authority as king. At once, the religious and the political become inseparable. Before 1640, the political and the religious in Scotland had also become intertwined, but in a quite different manner. There, it was being argued that a monarch's policies were corrupting a perfect church. And there a unique event in British history unfolded.
Legacies
Authors: Hall David D.
Published: May 2020

This epilogue recounts how Puritanism as a movement within the Church of England came to an end in 1662, when some 1,600 ministers who refused to conform were “ejected” and, thereafter, became known as Dissenters (or Dissent). Anyone who accepted the provisions of the Act of Uniformity of May 1662 had to prove that a bishop had ordained him or accept ordination anew. Conformity also required scrupulous adherence to the Book of Common Prayer. Understandably, some of the ejected ministers found their way back into the state church or, because of local circumstances, were able to carry on their ministry for a while. Meanwhile, the situation in Scotland is less easily summarized. There, episcopacy was restored and the royal supremacy reaffirmed, but no English-style prayer book was reimposed. The Scots who thought of themselves as Presbyterians continued to practice their tradition, although they were harshly criticized for compromising with government of Charles II by countrymen who clung to the covenants of 1638 and 1643. On all sides, the personal tragedies were many. Even after William III agreed to replace episcopal governance with Presbyterian, schisms continued to fracture the kirk in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The WPA and the Opening of the American Arts
Authors: Lena Jennifer C.
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the infusion of state subsidies during the New Deal, which accelerated the pace of artistic legitimation and widened its path. Federal and state governments paid for the production and display of an enormous amount and variety of culture. This diversified the content and personnel in American creative fields and accelerated the transformation of many forms of vernacular culture into art. It was this world, rich with variety, in which an artistically voracious group of Americans was born and enculturated. The chapter then looks at the establishment of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). While the purpose of the WPA was to provide an income for starving artists, its unintended consequence was a radical opening of access to the arts and heretofore “illegitimate” culture. Under the WPA, the four programs referred to as “Federal Project Number One” provided subsidies for the production of visual art, music, theater, and literature.
Expansion: 1900–2000
Authors: Lena Jennifer C.
Published: May 2020

This chapter assesses the aesthetic legitimation of creative fields in the postwar period. Based on an analysis of primary and secondary texts documenting the history of ten creative fields, it identifies the resources that helped advocates convince skeptics that these fields were, in fact, forms of art. The similarities among burgeoning artistic fields are hard to miss. Framed as disputes, these include debates over what objects and creators “belong” within the field and how objects should be valued, including important discussions among experts over which aesthetic or formal criteria of assessment are appropriate. Expanding legitimacy is signaled by the evolution of an intellectualized discourse and the maturation of critical and academic study. Increases in the provision of resources accompany this process, as spaces for publication or consumption of the work are created or adapted; of particular importance, legitimacy is signaled when fine-arts organizations provide such space. As the legitimation process proceeds, and consensus builds about how to act artfully within it, entrepreneurs are able to stake out new positions within the field. As they do so, communities of fellow artists begin to work in similar styles and compete for resources. Instead of draining the energy from a field, this energizes the legitimation process, lending credibility to those entrepreneurs who are seen as innovative and creative.
The Trickster in Midan al-‘Abbasiyya
Authors: Armbrust Walter
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on Taufiq ʻUkasha, a talk-show host and minor parliamentarian in the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) before the revolution, re-created in the protracted state of antistructure after the fall of the regime as a “media personality” and advocate for a cult of Egyptian militarism. He became a primary spokesman for the counterrevolution, and ultimately a political force in his own right. ʻUkasha was often seen during his moment in the political limelight as an appendage of SCAF. He showed a remarkable ability to emerge onto the political stage at a particular moment—specifically, from near the end of 2011 until the rise of Sisi in the summer of 2013. But his political capacities depended crucially on a well-publicized “loose cannon” media persona. It was never likely that ʻUkasha would achieve meaningful power, but he does exemplify potentialities of revolutionary liminality not well captured by viewing a revolutionary situation as a theater in which contention occurs between established political actors. Ultimately, ʻUkasha emerged as a Trickster within the larger arc of the revolution.
Animating the Market
Authors: Beunza Daniel
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at how to ensure that social cues are present on the trading floor. It introduces the sales desk at International Securities, along with its convivial work atmosphere. Sales traders did not buy or sell stocks for the bank's proprietary account but executed trades for their customers instead. Their skills and resources, including humor, excitement, charisma, or business contacts at the stock exchanges, were different from and complementary to those of other traders on the floor. In the course of the chapter's observations, the sales traders appeared to be engaged in a number of seemingly controversial practices such as earning soft-dollar commissions, crossing the Chinese Wall, or pulling pranks on accidental callers to the bank's phone line. By examining the ways in which these sales traders adopted, modified, and conceived of these practices, the chapter reveals their practiced, as opposed to stated, morality.
Performative Spirals
Authors: Beunza Daniel
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers the performative effect of economic models and their influence on the financial properties of securities such as stocks. New representations of value, typically in the form of new economic models, devices, and tools, reveal new properties of the securities, which can themselves be represented and profitably exploited. The chapter captures this dynamic with the concept of performative spiral. It also shows how the successive waves of innovation in modeling can be exploited by aligning the layout of the trading room with the emerging interdependencies between the properties of the stocks. The chapter refers to this dynamic as performative trace.
Conclusion
Authors: Beunza Daniel
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter brings together the emerging themes of the book into an overarching framework. It considers integration, organizational norms, judgment, moral disengagement, and the breakup of Wall Street banks. The chapter proposes the concept of proximate control, a hands-on approach to management that stands in contrast to what governmentality scholars such as Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose have called “government at a distance.” Proximate control calls for better supervision of quantitative traders by resisting the temptation to evaluate those employees using models. It entails a combination of the social and the technological, such as preserving face-to-face interaction on the trading floor, the use of personal evaluation of quantitative results, or the qualitative judgment of financial calculations.
War
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter addresses how France's victories and occupations resulted in varied forms of emancipation. In Italy, equal rights came (1796–99) and went and came again (1800) with Napoleon Bonaparte's occupations. Under pressure from the French occupation, the Batavian Republic's Assembly engaged in a comprehensive eight-day debate before voting to grant Jews political rights (1796). The characteristically fragmented German states divided into three groups over the issue of Jews' rights. In the territories France occupied, the government granted full rights, for example, in the Kingdom of Westphalia and Hamburg. Allied states such as Baden and Bavaria struggled to reconcile French law with corporate structures. They granted partial rights by moving Jews “into” estates; they legislated regeneration, imposing a state-supervised quid pro quo. Baden granted state but not local citizenship. Bavaria imposed harsh quotas on residence and moved Jews “out of” estates by dismantling the corporate Jewish community. In competition with France, Prussia granted basic civil rights by shifting Jews “out of” estates (1812). It withheld the political right of state service and kept Judaism in an inferior status.
Central Europe, 1850–1871
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter explains that it took a third seismic event to enact full emancipation in central Europe. Within a little over two decades, the creation of the Dual Monarchy and the unifications of Germany and Italy completed what the two previous revolutions had begun: they sufficiently dismantled the corporate and confessional state to begin creating civil societies and constitutional monarchies, however imperfect. The three developments were intimately related. Piedmont and Prussia both took to the battlefield to overcome Habsburg opposition to unification; Piedmont's success guided Prussia's ambitions. In turn, the Habsburg Empire's shattering defeats forced its restructuring. The very nature of those three developments entailed new complications. Unification and restructuring left multiple forms of inequality intact and created new ones. The struggle for equality continued in a “post-emancipation” guise. The German Empire introduced a new dualism between the federal constitution and state laws that left aspects of the Jews' status in contention and inherited forms of discrimination in place. Meanwhile, the new Kingdom of Italy had seized the Papal States; the Church opposed its very foundation. As one of the kingdom's beneficiaries, Jews became targets of intense Church opposition. Ultimately, the new Dual Monarchy unleashed competing nationalisms. Jews were caught in the conflict between various recognized “peoples” without the advantage of being one.
Western Europe
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at how the achievement of equality in western Europe was limited in scope. In England, it turned on removing the disabilities that prevented Jews from exercising political rights. In France, it entailed removing vestiges of inequality that qualified the Jews' supposedly full and unconditional emancipation. In Algeria, emancipation recapitulated the experience of Alsace: the full scope of rights was at stake. Jewish leaders mounted concerted political campaigns that constituted an emancipation politics. The chapter then considers the founding of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (1860), which marked a high point of confidence in emancipation: the Jews of France, the Revolution's beneficiaries, would now strive to bring emancipation to Jews everywhere.
The Atlantic World
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter assesses how the Atlantic world of Dutch and British colonies followed the west European pattern of emancipation. Jews were spread across numerous colonies. The thirteen British colonies were not preponderant: each of the communities of “Curaçao, Surinam and Jamaica had more Jews in the mid-eighteenth century than all of the North American colonies combined.” In the British colonies of Canada, Jamaica, and the thirteen colonies, Jews achieved civil rights largely without controversy or conflict. In contrast, Jews organized and campaigned for political rights. In the early American republic, Jews received rights state by state, in Canada colony by colony. In the United States and Canada, political rights were linked to disestablishment of the church and the enactment of religious equality. In Jamaica, it was entwined with race relations.
The Waterford Experiment
Authors: Whatmore Richard
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes the historical context which led to the formation of the New Geneva settlement. Attacked as anarchists and democrats by the French during the eighteenth century, the Genevan rebels were invited to come to Britain. Britain offered to help to create a New Geneva, proving that it remained supportive of liberty, whatever the republicans in America might declare. The plan, of course, was not simply to abandon an old city and to found a new one. The move was accompanied by great expectations, for the transformation of Ireland, for the growth of wealth and of virtue and for the reform of the empire of Britain itself. In short, the transfer of republicans from Geneva was expected to inaugurate an era of radical reform and reformation. The result was a remarkable experiment at the ancient city and significant port of Waterford in southern Ireland. New Geneva was established at the site of a village called Passage, located near Waterford. The settlement was to be peopled by rebels.
Civil War
Authors: Whatmore Richard
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the events leading up to the Revolution of 1782 in Geneva. It had been anticipated in the 1760s, because of the extent of the antagonism between the parties in Genevan politics, and the accusations levelled against one another. Many of the magistrates involved in the events of the 1760s believed that they had suffered a defeat with the compromise or pacification of 1768. They were also sure that the lesson was learned that France needed to intervene militarily to crush the anarchists and democrats among the représentants. Certainly the magistrates were prepared for civil war in 1782, in a manner that they had not been in the 1760s.
After Revolution
Authors: Whatmore Richard
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter reflects on the events at New Geneva and the political context of Europe at large. There was more than a hint of irony in the fact that members of the United Irishmen were put to death at New Geneva. This was one of the most significant outcomes of the Waterford experiment. The intention had never of course been to create a military base for soldiers. The buildings were made for republicans. Yet it was at the site of New Geneva that the British troops and loyalist volunteers employed dreadful violence against the United Irishmen. New Geneva Barracks passed into folklore because of the bloody treatment of the rebels. The British government, still at war with revolutionary France, used the example of what happened in 1798 to justify a ‘Scottish solution’ to the Irish problem: the Acts of Union of 1800, which created the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1801.
Conclusion
Authors: Wang Fei-Hsien
Published: May 2020

This chapter retraces the curious and crooked journey of copyright in modern China from the translingual transplantation of copyright/hanken/banquan in East Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century to Shanghai booksellers' customary banquan regulation and their private antipiracy policing in the late Qing and early Republican period. It also revisits the fading away of the very term banquan and its associated practices in the communist 1950s. The chapter illustrates how the internationalizing legal doctrine was reshaped and appropriated in China's local contexts as a powerful means for authors and publishers to create new orders of ownership in a changing knowledge economy. Challenging the conventional notion that the Chinese were forced to adopt the alien legal doctrine under foreign pressure reveals that Chinese booksellers and authors, no less than the foreign powers, were zealous in exercising banquan/copyright to justify and exclusively secure the profit their works generated. Copyright was introduced in China at a particular moment when China's cultural market and knowledge world were undergoing an intellectual paradigm shift at the turn of the twentieth century.
Dickens
Authors: Duncan Ian
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Dickens brings to a head the Romantic intuition about urban life developed by Walter Scott and Victor Hugo in their novels of Paris: the world-city, the total human habitat, is where human nature comes undone. Monsters belong here, as modern cinema confirms. For all both novels' shared vision of a scale of natural history overwhelming human life, Dickens's leviathan affords an insight the reverse of Melville's. Where the whale is a living creature, the embodiment of a planetary ecosystem, Dickens's dinosaur is a phantasmatic emanation of the Victorian metropolis—an allegorical figure for the “Dickens World.” Against Moby-Dick's sublime vision of the world as a nonhuman natural order, upon which humanity imprints its violent signature of epic striving, the world of Bleak House is unnatural, man-made, an “artificial nature,” which reconstitutes its human origins in the aesthetic mode of the grotesque, according to a genetic logic of monstrosity, and is legible through the techniques of allegory.
Neoplatonist Inroads
Authors: Stroumsa Sarah
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyzes how the attraction to Neoplatonism unfolded in al-Andalus in the fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries. Until the middle of the twelfth century, philosophy in al-Andalus was almost entirely dominated by Neoplatonism. It ranged from mystical philosophy and Sufi-inspired pietism, via compositions dedicated to the occult, to comprehensive, sometimes highly abstract Neoplatonist systems. In itself, this Neoplatonist near-monopoly in al-Andalus is hardly surprising: different shades of Neoplatonism were also prevalent in the Islamic East in this period. Remarkable, however, are the relative parts played by Muslims and Jews in Andalusian philosophy. Within the overarching Andalusian Neoplatonism, one can clearly detect a two-pronged development, the two branches of which progress in the same direction. They do so, however, at a drastically different pace and with different levels of self-confidence. Thus, beginning with Isaac Israeli in the tenth century, Jewish philosophy emerged in an uninterrupted vigorous tradition. In contrast, since Ibn Masarra in the first half of the tenth century, Muslim al-Andalus witnessed a decidedly sporadic growth of Neoplatonism, one that alternately ducked and surfaced. It was the political map of al-Andalus, and the different ways it impacted on Muslims and Jews, that determined this difference.
The Global Bourgeoisie
Authors: Motadel David , Dejung Christof , Osterhammel Jürgen
Published: May 2020

While the nineteenth century has been described as the golden age of the European bourgeoisie, the emergence of the middle class and bourgeois culture was by no means exclusive to Europe. This book explores the rise of the middle classes around the world during the age of empire. The book compares middle-class formation in various regions, highlighting differences and similarities, and assesses the extent to which bourgeois growth was tied to the increasing exchange of ideas and goods. It indicates that the middle class was from its very beginning, even in Europe, the result of international connections and entanglements. Chapters are grouped into six thematic sections: the political history of middle-class formation, the impact of imperial rule on the colonial middle class, the role of capitalism, the influence of religion, the obstacles to the middle class beyond the Western and colonial world, and, lastly, reflections on the creation of bourgeois cultures and global social history. Placing the establishment of middle-class society into historical context, the book shows how the triumph or destabilization of bourgeois values can shape the liberal world order. The book changes the understanding of how an important social class came to be.
Population Planning for a Global Middle Class
Authors: Bashford Alison
Published: May 2020

This chapter shows how, in the twentieth century, states aimed to implement new ideas of population planning in order to foster the emergence of stable middle classes. The control of fertility thus became an integral part of the global history of the middle classes. Because the nuclear family was at the core of middle-class lifestyle and a prerequisite for its reproduction and economic capacity, states across the globe resorted to population planning after the early twentieth century. For economic and political planners immersed in adapted Malthusian arguments, limiting fertility was a means by which widespread poverty could be mitigated and standards of living raised at a population level to allow everyone to afford middle-class lifestyles. Population control was thus part of the dream of, and for, a global middle class.
The Muslim Bourgeoisie and Philanthropy in the Late Ottoman Empire
Authors: Mestyan Adam
Published: May 2020

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which philanthropic organizations in Ottoman provincial capitals emerged from the mid-1870s with the mission to foster public education and health care through charity. In places like Izmir, Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus, emerging bourgeoisies organized theater performances, concerts, and balls to raise money for charity, which they perceived as being patriotic activities. Such charity events were occasions when the middle class could not only exercise its habitus but also show patriotism. Public religiosity and religious sociability were central to this Ottoman civil society, shaping the emergence of a public middle-class culture in the cities. This middle-class culture was thus the result of private initiative and took place beyond state institutions.
The “Missing” or “Forgotten” Middle Class of Tsarist Russia
Authors: Smith Alison K.
Published: May 2020

This chapter shows that the idea that Imperial Russia lacked a middle class was well established by the middle of the nineteenth century. Starting from that point, contemporary commentators and later historians debated the existence of that middle class. These discussions have taken place in dialogue with a vision of the “West” that served as Russia's opposite, something given all the more weight in discussions of nineteenth-century Russia, when Russian (or, perhaps more generally, Slavic) tradition was increasingly seen as opposed to a modernity seen as Western, or even global. The result has often been a kind of self-othering, in which the lack of an obvious middle class is read as indicative of a pervasive particularity in Russian social structures. This tendency to see Russia in contrast to this outside other, viewed as more properly normal, has served to obscure the existence of the middle of Russian society, in particular by erasing some groups that fit neither the model of absence nor the ideal of a prosperous, politically active middle class (the meshchane, or petty bourgeois, the artisans, and the honored citizens) from the record. Furthermore, it ignores Imperial Russia's role in a world economy through its long-standing Eurasian networks.
In Suburbia
Authors: Finn Chester E. , Scanlan Andrew E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the Advanced Placement (AP) program in suburban school districts. Even as urban centers like Fort Worth and New York typify today's livelier venues for AP expansion, the program has deep roots in the prosperous suburbs that abut them. Along with elite private schools, upscale suburban high schools were among the program's earliest adopters, and they remain natural habitats for a nationally benchmarked, high-status venture that gives strong students a head start on the college education that they are almost certainly going to get and perhaps an extra advantage in gaining admission to the universities they aspire to. Yet they are also ripe for attention as they struggle with equity and growth issues of their own. The chapter then reviews two well-known yet very different suburban districts: Dublin City Schools in Ohio and Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. Both are celebrated as education successes in their states and both boast long and impressive AP track records. Both, however, face distinctive challenges as they seek to serve today's constituents. Their stories illustrate how AP is functioning in places that know it well yet continue to evolve with it.
Advancing Charter Schools
Authors: Finn Chester E. , Scanlan Andrew E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter studies the Advanced Placement (AP) program in charter schools. Because America's seven thousand charter schools primarily serve disadvantaged urban populations, and because the charter sector contains far more elementary and middle schools than high schools, AP has not loomed large there. Yet a handful of prominent charter networks beg to differ, for they have placed AP near the curricular center of their high schools and, sometimes, their middle schools. Unsurprisingly, the tightest embrace has come from networks that obsess about getting their graduates into colleges, especially competitive four-year colleges. For the most part, however, they also focus on poor and minority youngsters and thus can fairly be said to partake of the widening view that AP is no longer just for privileged kids. It is also a way to accustom disadvantaged students to challenging academic work, give them confidence that they can handle such work, incorporate college aspirations and possibilities into their own sense of reality, and, when successful, propel those young people forward with a nationally recognized credential attesting to their capacity to engage in heavy-duty academics and perhaps speeding their progress toward a valuable, marketable degree and the upward mobility that often follows.
Advanced Placement Fights the Culture Wars
Authors: Finn Chester E. , Scanlan Andrew E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter addresses how the Advanced Placement (AP) program became entangled with both partisans and critics of “liberal education.” Conflicts between devotees of liberal education on the one hand and disciplinary specialization on the other—often referred to as “culture wars”—extend far beyond academe, but they are especially intense among university faculty, particularly in the humanities and social sciences—and in the field of education itself. For AP to remain credible with both high schools and colleges, it must balance these contending forces. If an AP class strays too far into the esoteric, subjective, and sometimes doctrinaire realms of many college courses in these fields, it forfeits its ability to provide high school students with a broad and reasonably objective “universal grounding.” However, if it remains a simple survey course, particularly the kind that—in the case of history—concentrates on factual knowledge of things like elections, presidents, and wars, it will no longer convince professors in that field that doing well in it justifies college credit.
Article III versus the National Security State
Authors: Flaherty Martin S.
Published: May 2020

This chapter brings the survey of custom to the beginning of this century. That survey shows how U.S. foreign policy has continued to pressure the judiciary to go in the direction of Curtiss-Wright, an invitation it has still generally refused in light of the recommitment to the original constitutional framework set out in Youngstown. That the courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, maintained their position as well as they did stands as a testament to the original constitutional design and nearly a century and a half of constitutional custom. Starting roughly midcentury, the nation was placed on a type of near-permanent war footing. These developments accelerated the trend toward greater claims of executive power in particular. In this setting, arguments that the judiciary was ill suited to second-guess executive foreign policy, and to intervene in foreign affairs more generally, were sounded with greater frequency. At times the Court bowed, much to its later regret. Yet, for the most part, it has shown itself capable of maintaining its role. In the end, the survey of constitutional custom falls short of showing constitutional demotion of the judiciary's role in foreign affairs as originally envisioned and long practiced.
American Courts, Global Norms
Authors: Flaherty Martin S.
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers a phenomenon that has consistently been among the most contentious of modern legal controversies—the application by American courts of international human rights. Recent years have witnessed high-profile conflicts over international human rights law. One major battle involves whether, when, and how U.S. courts should recognize rights set out in the nation's treaty obligations. Another heated area of contention has arisen under an act of Congress, the Alien Tort Statute. Perhaps most heated of all have been debates over the use of foreign legal materials, including customary international law, to interpret the Constitution of the United States. In these areas as well, the Supreme Court, and the judiciary generally, has wavered. Yet once more, a fresh appreciation of the principles the Founders entrenched, the subsequent custom that on balance confirms that original vision, and the consequences of the way nations interact in a globalized age—all these imperatives point away from the path that the judiciary appears more and more to be considering, and back to the course first established.
Situating Ethical Costs in Context
Authors: Morton Jennifer M.
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that ethical costs are unfairly leveled on students born into disadvantage for three contingent reasons: socioeconomic segregation, an inadequate safety net, and cultural mismatch. It shows how several of the ethical costs strivers face are not a necessary feature of striving itself but are instead dependent on how opportunities are unequally distributed in the United States. The chapter explains how strivers are more likely to bear ethical costs in a society that suffers from socioeconomic segregation, inadequate safety net, and cultural forces that privilege those who are already otherwise advantaged. It talks about how strivers are liable to face tragic conflict more frequently than those who are better off because of the socioeconomic structures into which they are born. It also points out ethical costs that are embedded in larger social, economic, and cultural structures that do not occur in a vacuum and affect everyone equally.
Socialist Modernity and the Birth of the Third World
Authors: Lorenzini Sara
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines how the Soviet Union attacked Point Four as “A Program for Expansion under a Screen of Anti-Communism” that was no different from older forms of imperialism. While condemning American assistance, however, they applauded a fair aid policy that supported political independence and invested to promote national agriculture and industry. This signaled that they were open to joining a multilateral program and offering technical assistance and industrial machinery to underdeveloped countries, with a stress on equality and open criticism of imperialist dynamics. But what would the Soviets contribute? Western analysts thought of expertise, while critics familiar with the Central Asian precedent worried about the repression of minorities. Only in 1954 did the Soviet Union respond with a plan for the Virgin Lands, the campaign to bring up-to-date farming and irrigation techniques to backward steppe regions in Kazakhstan. This became a paradigm for what socialist modernity could offer to less developed countries. The chapter then recounts how, in the early 1950s, the world's less-developed countries began identifying as a homogeneous group. In the United Nations, the phrase used was “underdeveloped countries,” but this was soon replaced by a much more evocative concept: the “Third World.” The expression was coined in 1952 by French demographer Alfred Sauvy, who anticipated a collective awakening of the subject peoples previously ignored, exploited, and watched warily.
Christianity
Authors: Dweck Yaacob
Published: May 2020

This chapter studies Jacob Sasportas's The Fading Flower of the Zevi within the context of Jewish responses to Christianity. Unlike the overwhelming majority of Sephardim in northwestern Europe, Sasportas had little to say about Christianity for much of his life. This changed dramatically in 1665–1666 when he made a pointed analogy between the followers of Sabbetai Zevi and the early followers of Jesus. Sabbetai Zevi and the Sabbatian movement forced Sasportas to confront Christianity. The emergence of a contemporary Jewish heresy—for no actual social distinctions divided “believers” from “unbelievers” in the early stages of the movement—propelled him to reimagine Christianity, which he now described as a heretical or ideological offshoot of ancient Judaism. Sasportas's turn to Christianity was not at all directed at learned Protestant readers in contemporary Hamburg or Amsterdam. Rather, it was an attempt to convince his fellow Jews that the figure they had embraced as the Messiah was closer to Jesus than to the redeemer envisioned in the final chapters of Maimonides's Code. Religious belief threatened the inviolate status of the law and, therefore, undermined the social authority of the one who determined the law: the rabbi.
Hydropolitics
Authors: Folch Christine
Published: May 2020

This book is a ground-breaking investigation of the world's largest power plant and the ways the energy we use shapes politics and economics. Itaipu Binational Hydroelectric Dam straddles the Paraná River border that divides the two countries that equally co-own the dam, Brazil and Paraguay. It generates the carbon-free electricity that powers industry in both the giant of South America and one of the smallest economies of the region. The book reveals how Paraguayans harness the dam to engineer wealth, power, and sovereignty, demonstrating how energy capture influences social structures. During the dam's construction under the right-wing military government of Alfredo Stroessner and later during the leftist presidency of liberation theologian Fernando Lugo, the dam became central to debates about development, governance, and prosperity. Dams not only change landscapes; the book asserts that the properties of water, transmuted by dams, change states. It argues that the dam converts water into electricity and money to produce hydropolitics through its physical infrastructure, the financial liquidity of energy monies, and the international legal agreements managing transboundary water resources between Brazil and Paraguay, and their neighbors Argentina, Bolivia, and Uruguay. Looking at the fraught political discussions about the future of the world's single largest producer of renewable energy, the book explores how this massive public works project touches the lives of all who are linked to it.
Introduction
Authors: Nord Philip
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter discusses how the globalizing world proved a tough environment for secularism but less so for border-hopping religions, which promised salvation in another life. The coming of this brave new world has prompted scholars to call into question once confident secularization narratives that predicted religion's inevitable demise. That questioning has taken a variety of tacks. The first and most profound makes the case that secularism itself is a variety of belief, one that posits its own triumph in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy, a prophecy, however, that has now proven false. A second line of critique blames present-day religious conflict on a secularism all too militant, which has excluded religion from the public sphere, causing it in certain of its forms to radicalize. And a third bemoans the spiritless character of contemporary life in secular societies, which seem to lack the capacity to resonate to their citizens' deepest emotional needs. Yet, how is it that secularity, for all such obvious limitations, got as far as it did, projecting an image of inevitability that persuaded so many for so long? The new literature on secularism has an answer to this question as well. Reformed Christianity and the Enlightenment are often pointed to as the main culprits, promoting individual autonomy and a critical-minded rationalism, which were the building blocks of secularist thought. The book revisits these two issues: the origins and crisis of secular forms.
Peaceful Families
Authors: Hammer Juliane
Published: May 2020

This book chronicles and examines the efforts, stories, arguments, and strategies of individuals and organizations doing Muslim anti-domestic violence work in the United States. Looking at connections among ethical practices, gender norms, and religious interpretation, the book demonstrates how Muslim advocates mobilize a rich religious tradition in community efforts against domestic violence, and identify religion and culture as resources or roadblocks to prevent harm and to restore family peace. The book paints a vivid picture of the challenges such advocacy work encounters. The insecurities of American Muslim communities facing intolerance and Islamophobia lead to additional challenges in acknowledging and confronting problems of spousal abuse, and the book reveals how Muslim anti-domestic violence workers combine the methods of the mainstream secular anti-domestic violence movement with Muslim perspectives and interpretations. Identifying a range of Muslim anti-domestic violence approaches, the book argues that at certain times and in certain situations it may be imperative to combat domestic abuse by endorsing notions of “protective patriarchy”—even though service providers may hold feminist views critical of patriarchal assumptions. It links Muslim advocacy efforts to the larger domestic violence crisis in the United States, and shows how, through extensive family and community networks, advocates participate in and further debates about family, gender, and marriage in global Muslim communities. Highlighting the place of Islam as an American religion, the book delves into the efforts made by Muslim Americans against domestic violence and the ways this refashions the society at large.
Need to Know
Authors: Hammer Juliane
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the multifaceted projects of Muslim advocates to educate Muslim communities about domestic violence (DV) and offer Islam as a resource for ending abuse. Such awareness work forms one point of a triangle in Muslim DV efforts, combined with offering services and resources as the second point, and educating mainstream providers and the larger public about Muslim needs and perspectives as the third. For many American Muslims, domestic violence awareness competes with other issues, among them increasing anti-Muslim public sentiment and hate crimes, foreign policy issues, and government surveillance as part of the “War on Terror,” not to mention concerns about practicing their religion, living life, and just generally being human. The chapter then presents moments of profound insight and analysis from domestic violence awareness events held in Muslim community settings. It also considers several examples of how male Muslim scholars and leaders have developed religious arguments against domestic violence in public speeches and online lectures.
To Support and Defend
Authors: Hammer Juliane
Published: May 2020

This chapter highlights Muslim service providers of many kinds and the organizations in which they work. Muslim service providers, in different ways from advocates and community leaders, not only are at the front lines of the struggle against domestic violence (DV) in Muslim communities but also most directly and persistently interact with the mainstream DV landscape/movement. Service providers are at risk themselves in more acute ways as their direct contact with victims and survivors can also become contact with perpetrators who are a threat not only to DV victims but also to anyone who supports those victims. The chapter then explores the significance of their religious convictions and identities for the work they perform and for the ways in which they relate to their clients on the one hand and to “the system” on the other. It also sketches the landscape of Muslim DV services and offers some insights into the specific challenges this work entails.
Democratic Equality
Authors: Wilson James Lindley
Published: May 2020

Democracy establishes relationships of political equality, ones in which citizens equally share authority over what they do together and respect one another as equals. But in today's divided public square, democracy is challenged by political thinkers who disagree about how democratic institutions should be organized, and by antidemocratic politicians who exploit uncertainties about what democracy requires and why it matters. This book mounts a bold and persuasive defense of democracy as a way of making collective decisions, showing how equality of authority is essential to relating equally as citizens. The book explains why the US Senate and Electoral College are urgently in need of reform, why proportional representation is not a universal requirement of democracy, how to identify racial vote dilution and gerrymandering in electoral districting, how to respond to threats to democracy posed by wealth inequality, and how judicial review could be more compatible with the democratic ideal. What emerges is an emphatic call to action to reinvigorate our ailing democracies, and a road map for widespread institutional reform. The book highlights the importance of diverse forms of authority in democratic deliberation and electoral and representative processes—and demonstrates how that authority rests equally with each citizen in a democracy.
Proportional Representation
Authors: Wilson James Lindley
Published: May 2020

This chapter studies the claim—common among political theorists who consider the matter—that political equality requires proportional legislative representation. This issue involves fundamental questions about the proper relationship between citizens' votes and the makeup of the legislature, and therefore about the basic structure of electoral systems. Debates about proportional legislatures turn on what constitutes fair representation of groups of voters. The chapter argues that proportional representation is not a fundamental requirement of political equality. Proportional representation of groups in the legislature does not necessarily guarantee appropriate consideration more reliably than single-member district (SMD) systems with plurality elections. In some circumstances, proportional representation may better secure certain forms of consideration and practical consequence for citizens than would other legislative systems. But the suitability of different legislative schemes varies with historical and social context. In some circumstances, alternative systems may better secure consideration for group members without guaranteeing those members official presence in the legislature. Securing legislative presence often comes at the expense of voter authority over coalition formation in the legislature itself. There is no general reason to think this sacrifice is justified, either for particular groups or for the citizenry as a whole.
The American Dream Comes Home
Authors: Offner Amy C.
Published: May 2020

This chapter talks about Don Terner who imagined a new household appliance. Across the First and Third Worlds, he explained, “the concept of dweller autonomy appears to offer one of the few hopes for truly broad-based housing improvement.” This chapter also describes between the War on Poverty and Terner's death how over 26,000 US households had built their own homes using FmHA Section 502 loans. Self-help remained a small program, but it had grown since the 1960s, accounting in 1996 for 1,514 new loans totaling over $100 million. In 1995, the Clinton administration designated Self-Help Enterprises a “Partner in the American Dream” as part of its National Homeownership Strategy. A policy born alongside public housing in the expansionary days of the welfare state now thrived under the banner of Third Way politics.
Martial Ethiopianism in Verse
Authors: Nurhussein Nadia
Published: May 2020

This chapter addresses the explosion of verse dealing with the “Ethiopian Crisis,” or the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, such as J. Harvey L. Baxter's “Sonnets for the Ethiopians” and Melvin Tolson's “The Bard of Addis Ababa.” Returning to traditional tropes of nineteenth-century Ethiopianism even in the face of modern warfare, Baxter calls upon the nation's resources of antiquity to produce a counteroffensive against the ancient Roman Empire that Mussolini looked upon with such nostalgia. It also discusses the occasional verse by lesser lights and unknown bards such as Rufus Gibson and Jay N. Hill and by important figures such as Marcus Garvey. The tenor of Garvey's elegies written in honor of fallen Ethiopian war heroes Ras Nasibu of Ogaden and Ras Desta presents a fascinating contrast to his expressed disdain for Haile Selassie. The chapter also talks about the global importance of the agitprop role of the New Times and Ethiopia News.