bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Chicana Pedagogy for Digital Pen Pals
Authors: Rivera Diana Noreen , Johnson Leigh
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights both authors, who are scholars of Mexican American/Chicanx/Latinx literature at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) and Marymount University (MU), respectively. The chapter details the way the authors pivoted their year-long planning for study-away trips with their students to each other's campuses by focusing on the aspect of digital pen pal exchanges. The authors highlight the possibility of digital partnerships across diverse campuses that respond to urgent sociopolitical, public health and educational challenges. Their students collaboratively engaged in learning networks of care, as pen pals motivated each other to persevere as their personal concerns and pandemic hardships came through in their literary evaluations. The chapter covers the benefits of integrating pen pal models for face-to-face and online learning across disciplines at all levels of education in the era of pre-COVID-19 instruction.
Negotiating and Rebuilding Civic Engagement through Loss
Authors: Muñoz Alicia
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights the author's struggles to adapt her course's civic engagement component to a virtual classroom while also attempting to build a relationship with a new community partner. Contemplating the popularized pandemic term, “pivot,” the author explains that the word is a facile term that obscures the substance of loss and extraction left in its wake. The chapter details the author's experience of building an authentic relationship with a community partner while also recognizing what could not be accomplished. The chapter covers the working community partnership the author fostered before COVID-19, her unsuccessful attempts to forge a brand-new relationship with another organization during the pandemic, and the promising new collaboration and work-in-progress that ultimately emerged. It places her efforts and relationships in the context of pervasive disruption in student lives, physical space, her own life and work, the priorities of community partners, and the Twin Cities community at large.
Our Women Have Made Us Famous
Authors: Hart Judy
Published: May 2024

This chapter reviews the various projects becoming like tributaries running into a base of community pride for Seneca Falls and its heritage. It talks about the Women's Hall of Fame, which created renewed interest in women of achievement and the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Foundation, which came into existence to raise the funds to purchase Stanton's house. The new Urban Cultural Park program had a mission of economic development in addition to preserving historical sites and promoting recreation. The chapter highlights the recognition of the Park Service of the story of the women's rights convention in Seneca Falls as nationally significant. In July 1979, Seneca Falls hosted its first Convention Days, honoring the 1848 women's convention.
Alan Alda Opens the Park
Authors: Hart Judy
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights Alan Alda, who cut the ribbon for the new visitor center of the Women's Rights National Historical Park on July 17, 1982, for the grand opening. Alan Alda did a detour from women's history to passionately denounce the policies of the new administration and specifically Interior Secretary James Watt. The chapter emphasizes how the park was still vulnerable to Secretary Watt's determination to abolish unnecessary parks. The chapter mentions Pat Haines, who had been hired as park staff to help with administration, which had suggested that the Women's Rights Park sponsor an expansive three-day history conference during Convention Days weekend in 1982. It recounts the transfer of the ownership of the Stanton home from the Stanton Foundation to the Park Service.
Stanton House Sheds Her Disguise
Authors: Hart Judy
Published: May 2024

This chapter describes Elizabeth Cady Stanton's house, which was particularly significant as Stanton herself designed and supervised the construction of changes to the neglected house. It addresses why Stanton's house, which had such a significant structure, had not been protected as other important historic sites were. Despite the great honor of becoming a National Historic Landmark in 1965, the Stanton home had no federal action that followed. The chapter recounts how the National Park Service commenced researching the Stanton house after the Women's Rights National Historical Park was authorized by Congress on December 3, 1980, and signed into law a few weeks later by President Jimmy Carter. Thanks to Ralph Peters' belligerence and Park Service director Russ Dickenson's enthusiastic support for the Women's Rights Park, funding for research and restoration was granted to the park quickly.
Wesleyan Chapel Reimagined
Authors: Hart Judy
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about the sculpture that seemed to be a bathtub filled with women: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony, three women known in the fight for women's rights. It details how the “bathtub sculpture” had become notorious when a group of women organized by the National Women's History Museum waged a campaign to raise it from the basement up to the much-visited Rotunda. Many policy issues arose between the Park Service and the National Endowment for the Arts, such as the Park Service's many unbendable strictures for preserving the historic remains of the Wesleyan Chapel. The chapter addresses whether the Wesleyan Chapel, as a religious symbol, affected the 1848 convention and whether it should affect the new design. It describes Ray Kinoshita and Ann Marshall's winning design, which was haunting and challenging and has the intention to create an emotional reaction and intellectual understanding.
The Black Woods
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This book chronicles the history of Black pioneers in New York's northern wilderness. From the late 1840s into the 1860s, Black pioneers migrated to the Adirondacks to build farms and to vote. On their new-worked land, they could meet the $250 property requirement New York's constitution imposed on Black voters in 1821, and claim the rights of citizenship. Three thousand Black New Yorkers were gifted with 120,000 acres of Adirondack land by Gerrit Smith, an upstate abolitionist and heir to an immense land fortune. Smith's suffrage-seeking plan was endorsed by Frederick Douglass and most leading Black abolitionists. The antislavery reformer John Brown was such an advocate that in 1849 he moved his family to Timbuctoo, a new Black Adirondack settlement in the woods. Smith's plan was prescient, anticipating Black suffrage reform, affirmative action, environmental distributive justice, and community-based racial equity more than a century before these were points of public policy. But when the response to Smith's offer fell radically short of his high hopes, Smith's zeal cooled. Timbuctoo, Freemen's Home, Blacksville and other settlements were forgotten. History would marginalize this Black community for 150 years. This book recovers a robust history of Black pioneers who carved from the wilderness a future for their families and their civic rights. The immersive story returns the Black pioneers and their descendants to their rightful place at the center of this history. With stirring accounts of racial justice, and no shortage of heroes, the book amplifies the unique significance of the Adirondacks in the American imagination.
Nothing Would Be More Encouraging to Me
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This chapter recounts the repeal of the Missouri Compromise that turned Kansas into a battle zone and revived the threat of slavery's tarlike spread a few years after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was passed. In 1857, the highest court in Kansas ruled that no Black American had a legal claim to citizenship or freedom. The chapter cites the Frederick Douglass' Paper, which closely covered Gerrit Smith's headlong gallop into Congress and his just-as-swift retreat. The chapter also covers the story of Solomon Northup of Saratoga Springs, the man who was tricked, kidnapped, transported south, and rescued from enslavement only after twelve horrific years. It details the formation of a new political party formed by disaffected Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats in 1854.
An Empowering Diaspora
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This chapter tells stories of the drift of freed people after the Civil War that swept refugees into small towns all over the Northeast, such as a white officer from Franklin named Alfred Skiff who invited home the once enslaved teenager Walter Scott. In Company K of the Ninety-Sixth were several North Elbans who knew Old Brown the abolitionist as a neighbor. The chapter discusses few members of John Brown's family, Black farmers like Josiah Hasbrook and Leonard Worts, and farm laborers like Jerry Miles, who were was once enslaved that were in North Elba. The chapter highlights the demographic pop that resulted in a surge of marriages after the war. Legal marriage became every ex-slave's portion and free Black New Yorkers spared no time to marry.
Pilgrims
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins with the dentist Jesse Max Barber, who wrote the New York conservation commissioner and other Lake Placid notables about his long-dreamed-of plan for a Black pilgrimage to John Brown's home and grave. It discusses the colored people who have accumulated wealth in order to visit North Elba to look upon the grave of their greatest Friend. Although thousands have attended the pilgrimages in 1889, 1896, 1899, and 1903, they were white organized and were mostly white attended. The chapter includes Byron Remembrance Brewster, a local judge with deep roots in the Adirondack region and personally knew the Browns family, who organized a pilgrimage in August 1916. Brewster's pilgrimage, unlike all predecessors, would reach for racial inclusivity and social relevance.
Lord Acton for Our Time
Authors: Lazarski Christopher
Published: May 2024

This book illuminates the thought of the English historian, politician, and writer who gave us the famous maxim: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Extracting lessons for our current age, the book focuses on liberty—how Lord Acton understood it, what he thought was its foundation and necessary ingredients, and the history of its development in Western Civilization. Acton is known as a historian, or even the historian, of liberty and as an ardent liberal, but there is confusion as to how he understood liberty and what kind of liberalism he professed. This book provides an introduction that presents essentials about Acton's life and recovers his theory of liberalism. The book analyzes Acton's type of liberalism, probing whether it can offer a solution to the crisis of liberal democracy in our own era. For Acton, liberty was the freedom to do what we ought to do, both as individuals and as citizens, and his writings contain valuable lessons for today.
A Brief Biography
Authors: Lazarski Christopher
Published: May 2024

This chapter presents a brief biography of Lord Acton. It begins by describing his childhood, when he was placed in a boarding school, moving from one place to another and hardly ever seeing his mother and grandmother. If Acton's childhood formed his personality, his stay in Munich shaped his scholarly interests and lifelong passions. Father Döllinger, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Edmund Burke became Acton's intellectual staples in his youth and continued to exert influence on him thereafter. Together they made him a thinker and a liberal of a unique kind, linking a belief in progress with respect for tradition; a love of liberty with an emphasis upon conscience, self-government, and citizenry; and the adornment of liberalism with contempt for and rejection of its doctrinaire currents. The chapter then looks at Acton's Aldenham estate; his view of the United States as a prime example of civic liberty; his efforts to reconcile Catholicism with liberalism; and his position as the Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge.
Reception and Legacy
Authors: Lazarski Christopher
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on the reception and legacy of Lord Acton's thought. One cannot be surprised when a person of strong convictions, even one as reserved as Acton, proves to be controversial and evaluation of his complex legacy varies widely, from admiration to derision. To bring some order to contradictory opinions about Acton's thought, the chapter considers separately views that prevailed immediately after his death and those that evaluated his impact from a greater temporal distance. The chapter further splits the longer-term perspectives into two categories: first, those concerning his legacy as a historian, and second, those reviewing his legacy as a political thinker, especially with regard to liberty and its history. Finally, the chapter summarizes the negative assessment of Acton's ideas and takes a look at the most recent publications by and about Acton, both his own writings and works that evaluate his thought.
The Speed of the Image (1940)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines how fear prevents us from full communication. The author explains that in any communicative act, the hope is not for an identical attitude, because that would destroy the need for communication. And communication is the social pleasure of shared relationship towards the same object. Full communication, in that definition, would be reached when the full consciousness of both members is turned on the object. The description, the illumination under which the object can be shown in its meaning, the processes of that act, the grammar of communication itself, is the formal interest of poetry. The author then reflects on Hollywood, the making of films, and the ethics of communication.
Belief and Poetry (1940)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter evaluates the relationship between belief and poetry. It begins by considering how D. L. Watson, in his book Scientists Are Human (1938), speaks of all experience, all classification, as “biased abstraction.” The author claims that there is an index in that term to the kind of belief that is most effective in poetry, that is deepest in the definitions of poetic perception. “Biased abstraction” combines two kinds of selection: the belief and selection according to belief that offers the “bias,” and the ability to classify and apply and create according to a structure that provides “abstraction.” That definition is at rock-bottom for the creative process. The chapter looks at two examples of modern belief in art: T. S. Eliot's Waste Land (1922) and Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (1843).
Women and Scottsboro (1933)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights the women who played important parts in the Scottsboro case. There are two pairs. On the one side are the mothers who were most prominent, Ada Wright and Janie Patterson, who saw the slow sacrifice of their sons to a deepening class struggle. On the other side are the two women who led the Scottsboro boys to conviction, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price. Behind one pair stand the other mothers, and all conscious women workers; behind the other are grouped the ignorance and vulgarity of the bourgeoisie and the prejudice of the group that used to be referred to delicately as “the flower of Southern womanhood.” Ultimately, the fundamental issues of the Scottsboro case are more clearly tied up with the problems of the woman worker.
Words and Images (1943)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter explains the importance of the use of words and images in war posters. A poster can be attractive through its technique, execution, printing, or presentation; but if it is not moving, it does not meet its aim, and is a bad poster. Every spectator must feel that the message is directly intimate to him; thus, he will accept its human and vital meaning. All anti-Nazi propaganda must therefore provoke an energetic impulse. The chapter mentions the disbanding of the Graphics Division of the Office of War Information, when the funds for domestic posters had been cut off.
A Pane of Glass (1953)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter recounts the author's experience during Christmas. One day, six boys threw several snowballs to the doorway of her house. The snowballs had gone through the door in places, and one pane of the fanlight was shattered. The author confronted the boys but they told her that she could not prove which one of them threw it. She fixed the fanlight with some corrugated paper from a Christmas present and some brown paper. The chapter then details how a woman who gave birth on the roof threw her baby down the airshaft. The author found out that the woman threw her first baby under the wheels of a car two years prior. The woman was arrested for abandoning the child.
Many Keys (1957)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines poetry by women in America. If one looks at the books, or the poems in anthologies, by women who may be thought of as artists, one will find an ease in tracing the forming powers of certain forces through their work and their lives. For one thing, the group of actual artists is small, even smaller than the comparable group of men. For another, there are fewer literary influences than one might expect, and some of the same writers emerge almost everywhere. The range is to be found in two kinds of influence; and these have hardly begun to be explored. One is the variety of nonliterary material: observations, images absorbed from dreams or landscapes and with a brilliant integrating gesture given as meaning, and the details of daily life made personal. The other, fascinating and difficult to trace, consists of those influences rejected in the writer's work.
Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact (1968)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks at poetry in relation to fact, verifiable and unverifiable. It begins by considering the needs for poetry. People claim in every way possible, not only in classes and through books but in songs and in jokes, in the way people look, that poetry is a rare and curious and very peculiar thing in which to have interest, in which to engage, to which to be committed. Ultimately, writing poems is a human activity; almost everybody writes a poem at some time in their lifetime. The author speaks of the writing of poetry as part of a deep indication of what the nature of our lives actually is—what the reverberations and recurrences are, what the facts, verifiable and unverifiable, are, and how we share these with each other. The chapter then discusses the music and powerlessness of poetry.
Thoreau and Poetry (1972)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter addresses transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau's poetry. Thoreau wanted to deal with reality. More than walking on the earth and mud and muck, he said he must have that. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that Thoreau's poems were the best poems to come out of the American forest. However, they come out of many things: the pressure on Thoreau to be a pastoral poet. This was a pastoral strip made in the attempt to make a civilized strip of America. He was reaching for something beyond him as we reach for something beyond us. The chapter then looks at civilized ways of dealing with political struggle.
The Tournament at Chauvency
Authors: Leach Elizabeth Eva
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses The Tournament at Chauvency as a source of many aspects of the multi-day tournament event. It explains that scholars consider tournaments as one of the central rituals of chivalric idealism. Chauvency typically depicts musical, noisy, and violent forms of courtly entertainment as being mediated through the pedagogical figures of the herald Bruiant and/or the narrator himself, making social and sexual scripting aspects of the multi-day tournament event fairly explicit. Moreover, Chauvency's representation of a courtly love song is potentially useful in suggesting aspects of performance and audience interpretation of tournaments, songs, dances, and other games. The chapter examines the key concepts of jeu-parti and Love Questions before considering the use of refrain songs.
Afterword Aftercare
Authors: Leach Elizabeth Eva
Published: May 2024

This chapter reviews the contents and context of D308. It explains that sexual desire, arousal, and the behaviors these prompt are dependent on a myriad of factors, so diversity is reflected in the variety of song forms and types and the variety of their performance possibilities. Thus, songs have value, use, and affective power for both the individual and the broader social collective. The sexual scripting perspective provides an opportunity to open up some queer possibilities for what appears ostensibly a rather sexually restrained heteronormativity. The chapter cites that songs of the medieval monophonic tradition in the European west showcased specific complexities of the lives of their audiences.
The Czech Manuscripts
Authors: Cooper David L.
Published: May 2024

This book is dedicated to one of the most important literary forgeries on the model of Macpherson's Ossianic poetry. The Queen's Court and Green Mountain manuscripts, discovered in 1817 and 1818, went on to play an outsized role in the Czech National Revival, functioning as founding texts of the national mythology and serving as sacred works in the long period when they were considered genuine. A successful literary forgery tells a lot about what a culture wants and needs at a particular moment. One fascinating aspect of this story is how a successful fake was able to function in an integral way as part of the Czech cultural revival of the nineteenth century, both because it played to expectations and nationalist values and because it met real cultural needs in many ways better than genuine historical literary works and artefacts. Also fascinating is the vainglorious Václav Hanka, a prolific and dedicated forger who was likely the center of the conspiratorial ring that created the manuscripts and who went on as the librarian of the Czech National Museum to alter a number of others. The book analyzes what made the manuscripts a convincing imitation of their Serbian and Russian models. It looks at how translation shaped their composition and at the benefit of examining them as pseudotranslations, and investigates the quasi-religious rituals and commemorative practices that developed around them. The book brings the Czech experience into the broader developments of European history.
Conclusion
Authors: Cooper David L.
Published: May 2024

This chapter concludes the significance of the Czech manuscripts. The high tensions and high stakes of the late-nineteenth-century debates surrounding the authenticity of manuscripts have mostly died down and remained in the past. However, the Czech Manuscript Society ensured to keep the doubts alive and maintain the fiction that the debate was still ongoing. Czechs have agreed upon their penchant for mystification as a nation that they were forced, by the manuscripts, to confront the artificial aspect of their national culture long before many other cultures. In the European context, the manuscripts offer important lessons on the distorting effect of nationalism and national movements on the cultural spheres.
The New Resource Nationalism
Authors: Warburton Eve
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks into the rise of resource nationalism in Indonesia during the twenty-first century. It primarily focuses on nationalist mobilization and policy transformation in the wake of Suharto's fall and during the global commodities boom. The collapse of Suharto's centralized regime unleashed new demands for greater local control over political and economic decisions. Moreover, the decentralization of authority over land and resource governance had significant consequences for the structure of ownership in land-based resource industries. The chapter then explores nationalist policy interventions within the mining sector, plantations, and the oil and gas sector. It clarifies that resource nationalism in Indonesia is not tethered to global prices.
The Rise of Domestic Business
Authors: Warburton Eve
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on the rise of domestic business in Indonesia. It provides an overview of the sectors of mining and plantation, which highlighted the decisive role of domestic business interests in determining the distinct nationalist trajectories of laws and regulations. Indonesia's emergent democratic political economy was marked by a new and more intense overlap between private sector mining interests and public office. The chapter then looks into how the domestic private sector played a critical role in shaping nationalist trajectories in Indonesia. It cites that a business-driven form of resource nationalism helped to lock in the trend toward nationalization.
Introduction
Authors: Levine Laura
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter begins by looking at two poles of debate about witchcraft in sixteenth-century England. First is the position taken by Reginald Scot, in his 1584 The Discoverie of Witchcraft, that most witch hunts were scapegoating practices aimed at poor, menopausal women and that the “witchcraft,” if there was any, was in the mind of the victimizer. Second is the position taken by King James the VI and I, whose 1597 Daemonologie argued for the reality and extermination of witches. The chapter then considers Jean Bodin's 1580 De la Demonomanie des Sorciers (The Demon-Mania of Witches), which describes the elaborate rules a judge must submit to in order to prove a suspect is a witch. Toward the end of this demonological treatise, Bodin admonishes future judges not to make a “sorcery” of justice by turning to spectacle. A skilled judge will neither attempt to recreate the witchcraft he is trying to prove exists nor seek a theatrical display. The chapter explains that the book offers a reading of four of the most influential and important demonological treatises of the period, before examining four major literary texts by Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare. It studies how the literary texts imagine “what if ” situations that dramatize the premises at work in the treatises, testing and interrogating their implications.
Our Mutual Fiend
Authors: Levine Laura
Published: May 2024

This chapter evaluates Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Early in book 12 of The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Scot says that the words of incantations and charms have no magical power. Although he insists that charms and incantations have no magical power, Scot recites ad nauseam most of the charms and incantations he knows. The chapter argues that Scot's recitation of charms and incantations functions in part to exorcise from his own way of thinking habits of mind which have a potential grip on him and which share a fundamental similarity with those of the “witchmongers” he exposes. In this way he expels them as irrational. At stake in such a claim is the attendant one that “statemental” ideals of language are often achieved by deeply performative means. The chapter looks at the verbal performance of the Discoverie, as well as the kinds of influences that have been seen as formative for Scot.
Newes from Scotland and the Theaters of Evidence
Authors: Levine Laura
Published: May 2024

This chapter assesses Newes from Scotland, the 1591 pamphlet describing King James VI and I's interrogation of a set of witches. Toward the middle of the pamphlet, the king has one of the defendants reenact for him the actions she is accused of having committed. If witchcraft is the devil's performance, what need is served on the part of the court by having it reenacted? In one sense the answer to this is obvious: such performances serve as evidentiary procedures, confirming to king and court that the crimes for which the defendants are being tried have actually taken place. However, not all the actions defendants are accused of are susceptible to being acted out. At these moments, what kinds of evidentiary procedures does the court turn to? The chapter then looks at the hierarchy of evidence used in the pamphlet. It considers the cases of the defendants who receive the most sustained attention in the pamphlet—Geillis Duncane, Agnes Sampson, and Doctor Fian—against the background of examination records and indictments. The chapter demonstrates how the liberties the pamphlet takes in embellishing records suggest the values of the pamphlet.
Epilogue
Authors: Levine Laura
Published: May 2024

This epilogue examines William Shakespeare's The Tempest. Like The Winter's Tale, The Tempest presents madness and specifically the madness induced by loss as a stage on the way to spiritual change. Under what conditions does spiritual change take place? Can it be engineered or must it come spontaneously from within? These questions are complicated by the fact that The Tempest provides at least two kinds of lenses under which to examine the possibility of change, one induced by explicitly theatrical means and the other implicitly anti-theatrical, involving the shedding or at least apparent shedding of theatricality. Both vehicles for change invoke the languages of witchcraft and magic in the terms King James VI and I articulated these in Daemonologie, but they do so in ways which interrogate that book. If The Winter's Tale juxtaposes two kinds of rival theaters, a trial staged by Leontes designed to clear himself of blame and a rhetoric of blame articulated by Paulina designed to break him down and soften him up, The Tempest seems to collapse that opposition. There are no rival theaters in the play, only alternate expressions of theatricality on the part of Prospero.
A Few Acres of Ice
Authors: Martin-Nielsen Janet
Published: May 2024

This book is an in-depth study of France's complex relationship with the Antarctic, from the search for Terra Australis by French navigators in the sixteenth century to France's role today as one of seven states laying claim to part of the white continent. The book focuses on environment, sovereignty, and science to reveal not only the political, commercial, and religious challenges of exploration but also the interaction between environmental concerns in polar regions and the geopolitical realities of the twenty-first century. The book details how France has worked (and at times not worked) to perform sovereignty in Terre Adélie, from the territory's integration into France's colonial empire to France's integral role in making the environment matter in Antarctic politics. As a result, the book sheds light on how Terre Adeìlie has altered human perceptions and been constructed by human agency since (and even before) its discovery.
“All That Is Required Is to Discover It”
Authors: Martin-Nielsen Janet
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights the idea of a great southern continent that permeated geographical dreams and theorized from antiquity. For the terrestrial masses to be in equilibrium, a southern continent was needed to counterbalance the known northern lands of Europe, Asia, and North Africa. The chapter discusses that Antarctica stems from the Greek word antarktikos, which means opposite the Arctic, noting that arktos is the Greek term for bear, which represents the eponymous constellation that graces the northern sky. The chapter looks at the Antipodes in European medieval geography that lay at the heart of the debate over Earth's configuration and the extent of its habitation. It delves into the French interest in Terra Australis that grew in line with public fascination with faraway lands and the scientific, commercial, and colonial questions they raised.
Formalizing Sovereignty
Authors: Martin-Nielsen Janet
Published: May 2024

This chapter mentions the end of Word War I; nearly eighty years passed since Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville had claimed Terre Adélie for France. For eighty years no French citizen had returned to the territory and the French state had shown all but no interest in it. The chapter highlights the long-term intention of Britain and its southern dominions to claim the white continent, causing France to urgently act in order to retain its Antarctic territory. France was motivated by the need to protect fishing, whaling, and sealing rights around Terre Adélie and around its sub-Antarctic possessions, including a desire to secure coal and mineral resources in those possessions. The chapter covers how France formalized its claim to the Antarctic territory and its sub-Antarctic possessions with a series of decrees.
Environmental Authority
Authors: Martin-Nielsen Janet
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights air access as an idea that stood out as a panacea for all the problems facing French Antarctica, particularly Terre Adélie that was engulfed by crises. It emphasizes how the French had, by mischance of discovery, been cursed with one of the least accessible sections of the Antarctic coast. The effort to build an airstrip in Terre Adélie stretched from the late 1960s until the early 1990s, but it was a massive and costly endeavor that ultimately ended in failure as the continent's political dynamics evolved. The chapter highlights the benefit of an airstrip in boosting France's polar legitimacy at a time when the Antarctic Treaty was being challenged by developing countries and environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs). It recounts how the airstrip became symbolic of a new chapter in human interaction with Terre Adélie's environment, one that integrated technology, science, and sovereignty.
Soviet Liberalism
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter investigates how Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Party, later renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), transformed Russian territories under its control. Under Joseph Stalin, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics replaced the free market economy with a state-controlled, centrally planned system and clamped down firmly on any manifestations of political dissent. The chapter examines the period of relative freedom of thought and expression known as the “Thaw” after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech denouncing Stalin at the twentieth congress of the CPSU in 1956. The chapter discusses the Prague Spring in 1968, wherein communist authorities in Czechoslovakia embarked on a series of reforms designed to liberalize Czechoslovak society. It mentions physicist Andrei Sakharov, who is the most prominent Soviet dissident for forming the Human Rights Committee in Moscow to highlight Soviet human rights abuses.
Catalonia in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Freedman Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins by outlining the rise of Catalonia as a European power before looking at the series of what were regarded retrospectively as defeats, betrayals, or evidence of declining fortunes. The 1713–1714 siege of Barcelona was a truly desperate affair since the Catalans were resisting implementation of the Treaty of Utrecht, which the great powers had already signed, settling the dynastic succession question in favor of the Bourbons. Abandoned by their erstwhile English and Austrian allies, the Catalans held out with futile tenacity. September 11, 1714—the day of the breach of the walls and final capitulation—is remembered as a harbinger of the long-term repression of Catalan culture. The construction of the massive fortress of the Ciutadella also symbolized the end of Catalan constitutional liberties. Nevertheless, the condition of Catalan culture was really not so dire in the eighteenth century; the language was not completely marginalized, and circles such as that of Jaume Caresmar’s Bellpuig de les Avellanes show a lively and constructive awareness of Catalan history. The chapter then considers how Caresmar worked with the leading Catalan social observer and reformer, Antoni de Capmany i de Montpalau.
The Catalan Language in an “Age of Decadence”
Authors: Freedman Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines Catalan in Jaume Caresmar’s time in light of what seems to be a paradox that a scholar so devoted to Catalonia’s past should write voluminously in Castilian, in Latin secondarily, and in Catalan seldomly. Antoni de Capmany regarded the intimate importance of the Catalan language and its public irrelevance with neither satisfaction nor regret. His deprecation of Catalan was not because of political or aesthetic preferences but because of practical reasons; Castilian was the language of commerce and public discourse. Capmany and Caresmar’s choice of language reflects the gradual disappearance of Catalan from administrative and learned discourse. However, the term “decadència” is misleading as applied to the eighteenth century, because the actual use of Catalan was not endangered. In addition, the nadir of its use in government and publications came later, in the early nineteenth century. As opposed to its precipitous literary marginalization, Catalan as an institutional language experienced only a gradual falling off in use and reduced prestige. Catalan officials were careful to preserve the ceremonial use of their language in government acts, especially when addressing officers of the Spanish crown. The chapter then looks at the revival of Catalan and its flowering as a normal written language and as a national identity marker.
The Circle of Bellpuig and Other Learned Societies
Authors: Freedman Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on the circle of Bellpuig and other learned societies. The Bourbon victory in 1714 was followed by a long period of domestic peace characterized by demographic growth, urban expansion, a more vigorous economy, and progress in arts and letters. The signs of intellectual vitality are not without certain ambiguities—the new University of Cervera, whose foundation was preceded by the closure of all other Catalan universities, was both an ambitious project and a sign of subjugation; the Real Academia de Buenas Letras in Barcelona was a learned society under royal patronage but in the modern era has often been dismissed as an indolent, if mildly cultivated, circle. The historians of Bellpuig de les Avellanes are more ignored than criticized in contemporary Catalan historiography that is only marginally concerned with ecclesiastical history. Beginning with the School of Bellpuig, the chapter looks at centers of Catalan erudition, their interconnections, and programs. It considers Jaume Caresmar’s work on the cartulary of Bellpuig; his Castilian history titled Anales del Real Monasterio de Bellpuig de las Avellanas; and his examination of the contents of the tombs belonging to the ruling family of Urgell. The chapter also discusses the work and activities of Jaume Pasqual, Josep Martí, Gonzalo Saura, and Francesc Ignasi Ribot.
Conclusion
Authors: Freedman Paul
Published: May 2024

This concluding chapter identifies three layers to the story of the Bellpuig historians: the Middle Ages, the Bourbon ascendancy, and modern reifications of Catalonia’s political and cultural identity. This involves how historians study the Middle Ages—the archival and historiographic contributions of the scholarly circles of the eighteenth century—but also how contemporary observers deal with the period of Bourbon rule over Catalonia, specifically the paradox that what is often presented as the nadir of Catalan culture coincided with the reception of Enlightenment ideas and the first acceleration of the modern Catalan economy. Since Jaume Caresmar’s era, efforts to assimilate Catalonia into a centralized Spain have been met with advocacy of cultural pluralism within the Spanish state, although recently, many in Catalonia have abandoned this idea in favor of a demand for an independent polity. Catalan nationalist movements evoke past constitutional and cultural accomplishments and the struggle against a Castilian-dominated unified Spain. Bourbon centralization has therefore been retrospectively likened to twentieth- and twenty-first-century attempts at cultural homogenization. Such a connection to modern concerns has the advantage of underlining that the study of medieval sources and history was not an antiquarian pursuit.
Characters of Language
Authors: Johnson Daniel
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on electronic text in online media platforms. It looks into a notion of characterization meant to describe the process by which electronic text is used to mediate user identities in anonymous and asynchronous media. Moreover, characterization also commodifies the logic of popular culture incorporated into modes of expression. The chapter discusses the toyification of language wherein dialect becomes treated as an accessory to communication and expression grounded in comedic or character-oriented exchanges and performances. It also considers the key concept of soramimi, the style of mishearing or misunderstanding speech as a way of producing humor, which references the prominence of variety TV's influence on internet culture.
Poetry as Pedagogy
Authors: Hill Patrice
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about the author, an educator and poet, who reflects on her time in the classroom as a teacher. It highlights the duty of a teaching artist to intentionally integrate and blend art, social justice, history, hip-hop, and current events in a historical and present context to help make learning more engaging, student centered, exciting, and empowering. It also considers the author's work as director of Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (SAYS) as one of the most consistent and powerful ways to engage with Black youth in Sacramento. The chapter explains how SAYS strives to change the world through education and empowerment by building on a foundation of critical literacy and spoken word performance poetry. Black youth are experiencing life in a way they often do not get the opportunity to explain, but they do have something to say.
Doing the Real Work
Authors: Duncan Kenneth
Published: May 2024

This chapter speaks to the significance of being a Black community educator outside the walls of the school. It focuses on the impact of Kenneth Duncan Jr. and day-to-dayinteraction with “at-promise youth” and on the importance of trust and relationships in communities. Crisis response and intervention are huge parts of the work that aims to help those who have suffered traumatic situations to feel somewhat whole again. The chapter details how Kenneth Duncan Jr. and his group try to provide whatever they can to begin the healing and to connect families to housing if a child loses a parent or a mother loses a child. The pain does not go away soon, but it matters to try and help ease that pain in the most difficult times.
Honoring the Legacy
Authors: Gonzalez David Blanco , Youth Participatory Action Research Team
Published: May 2024

This chapter offers principles for leaders involved in community building and describes how community leaders applied these lessons after a local youth was murdered. Young people in Sacramento yearn for a way to memorialize their peers who passed away and honor Black life. The chapter details how local artist David Gonzalez and the young people from the Mutual Assistance Network of the Arden Arcade Community Incubator Lead (CIL) for the Black Child Legacy Campaign developed a participatory action research project to elevate and honor the life of a child or young person killed in Sacramento County. The chapter talks about how David Gonzalez was commissioned to sit in on meetings of the Youth Voice Advocacy project and create portraits of each of the victims. Throughout the meetings, the youth shared personal stories of their family members, friends, and peers falling victim to violence.
Community-Based Leadership
Authors: Ononuju Ijeoma
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the intricacies of community-based leadership and the importance of having a license to operate. It focuses on Ijeoma Ononuj, who was hired by the Roberts Family Development Center (RFDC) to be the program director for the Black Child Legacy Campaign's Del Paso Heights/North Sacramento Community Incubator Lead. It also explores how Ononuju earned the kind of trust that would allow her to assume a leadership role within the community. The chapter highlights the Black Child Legacy Campaign that created an unapologetically Black movement in the city of Sacramento with one purpose: save the lives of Black children. BCLC was given to the community, to regular everyday people who were empowered politically, socially, and economically to become the change they sought.
The Starving Empire
Authors: Slobodkin Yan
Published: May 2024

This book traces the history of famine in the modern French Empire, showing that hunger is intensely local and sweepingly global, shaped by regional contexts and the transnational interplay of ideas and policies all at once. By integrating food crises in Algeria, West and Equatorial Africa, and Vietnam into a broader story of imperial and transnational care, the book reveals how the French colonial state and an emerging international community took increasing responsibility for subsistence, but ultimately failed to fulfill this responsibility. Europeans once dismissed colonial famines as acts of god, misfortunes of nature, and the inevitable consequences of backward races living in harsh environments. But as the book recounts, the twentieth century saw transformations in nutrition, scientific racism, and international humanitarianism that profoundly altered ideas of what colonialism could accomplish. A new confidence in the ability to mitigate hunger, coupled with new norms of moral responsibility, marked a turning point in the French Empire's relationship to colonial subjects—and to nature itself. Increasingly sophisticated understandings of famine as a technical problem subject to state control saddled France with untenable obligations. The book not only illustrates how the painful history of colonial famine remains with us in our current understandings of public health, state sovereignty, and international aid, but also seeks to return food—this most basic of human needs—to its central place in the formation of modern political obligation and humanitarian ethics.
Bodies and Souls in Algeria, 1867
Authors: Slobodkin Yan
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on the famine in Algeria in 1867. It explains how famine hindered France's experiment in state-building while helping inaugurate a colonialism rooted in economic liberalism. The famine of 1867 appeared to the French to be two separate problems, the locust infestation affecting European commercial farms and the starvation and cholera among indigenous people. The famine became fodder for the conflict revolving around the competing visions of colonialism and the replacement of military rule with civil government. The chapter then details the key concepts involving Marshal of France Patrice de MacMahon, settlers, Christian colonialism, the Arab Kingdom, journalists, and indigenous Algerians.
The Science of Hunger in the International Sphere, 1890–1939
Authors: Slobodkin Yan
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the science of hunger in the international sphere. Until World War I, French colonial administrators shared a view that famine was the unavoidable result of incompetent races interacting with difficult environments. The developments in scientific knowledge of the human body and its relationship to food closely correlate to what colonial states should do about famine. Moreover, amidst the interwar period, developments in internationalism and nutrition science drastically changed expectations for the French Empire's famine relief and provision. Nutrition became a framework for understanding and managing workers, races, and society in general. The chapter also considers the significance of hygiene, beriberi and Vitamin B in Indochina, and international gastrotechnics.