bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Battle of the Atlantic
Authors: Prior Robin
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the Battle of the Atlantic. It starts with Winston Churchill's first encounter with U-boats, which was not any kind of existential threat to Britain. However, the impressions changed following the fall of France and the establishment of U-boat bases in the Biscay ports of Lorient, St Nazaire and others. The chapter elaborates on the operation of Churchill's Anti-U-Boat Committee. It also highlights how Churchill gave the Battle of the Atlantic the attention it deserved, simultaneously and sporadically. Despite the crisis in the U-boat war, Churchill had to attend other conferences involving the Casablanca and Mediterranean strategy.
Conclusion
Authors: Prior Robin
Published: May 2023

This concluding chapter covers the correlation between the two world wars and British politicians and the military. The world wars demonstrated how democratic politicians can wage war with the required level of ruthlessness to fight totalitarian states. Thus, Britain's politicians were able to mobilise their states effectively to fight protracted wars after receiving support from their population. The chapter considers the impact of world wars on civil and military relations in democracies. It also highlights the importance of the primacy of politics and civilian leadership of the military, while also referencing the difficulty of civilians to achieve in-depth knowledge of military affairs and effectively intervene.
Legitimate Opposition
Authors: Kirshner Alexander S.
Published: May 2023

In political systems defined by legitimate opposition, those who hold power allow their rivals to peacefully challenge and displace them, and those who have lost power do not seek to sabotage the winners. Legitimate opposition came under assault at the American capitol on January 6, 2021, and is menaced by populists and autocrats across the globe. This book provides the first sustained theory of legitimate opposition since the Cold War. On the orthodox view, democracy is lost when legitimate opposition is subverted. But efforts to reconcile opposition with democracy fail to identify the value of the frequently imperfect, unfair, and inegalitarian real-world practice. Marshaling a revisionist reconstruction of opposition's history, the book provides a new account of opposition's value fit for the twenty-first century and shows why, given the difficult conditions of political life, legitimate opposition is an achievement worth defending.
Opposition’s Value
Authors: Kirshner Alexander S.
Published: May 2023

This chapter develops an independent account of opposition's value—that is, the adversarial conception of legitimate opposition. Along the way, the chapter critically discusses rival perspectives developed by Ronald Dworkin, Robert Goodin, and Ian Shapiro. Here, the aim of the chapter is not to justify why the practice would be a necessary or intrinsic feature of a fully legitimate regime. Instead, the chapter describes why one ought to abide by the practice and what is lost when it is not institutionalized. Individuals have a number of interests that might be advanced by a system featuring opposition. But this chapter focuses on individual and collective agency.
Opposition under Attack
Authors: Kirshner Alexander S.
Published: May 2023

This chapter reconsiders recent challenges to opposition, like populism and autocracy. The orthodox, democratic conception leads to the systematic misdiagnosis of those challenges. The chapter attempts to identify the malady in question: real-world regimes that undermine opposition curtail the most effective limit on their influence and block the institutional paths that citizens can use to exercise their agency. Regimes lacking opposition do not provide citizens adequate formal opportunities to impact political outcomes. What is more, they build institutions that persistently exploit and subvert their citizens' agency, encouraging them to participate in fraudulent political activity like elections whose outcome is forgone. This is what is lost when regimes undermine opposition.
Convoying Before 1803
Authors: Knight Roger
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the practice of convoying before 1803. The principles and practicalities of convoying had been long established by the start of the Napoleonic Wars. Convoys were used far back in antiquity, but the system can be conveniently traced back to the English Civil War, when the Parliamentary navy convoyed London trade, protecting it from royalist privateers. As trade grew through the seventeenth century, so too did the need to expand its protection. By 1674, after the Third Dutch War, the organisation of convoys developed, particularly in the Mediterranean, when trade with the Levant was threatened by Barbary corsairs. Early convoy discipline was established, with the principle that escorting warships should stay with the merchant ships and not pursue corsairs for prizes. Through the century, the Royal Navy and the commercial world had gradually established legal frameworks and routines to solve their differences.
Coastal Waters and the Western Approaches, 1803–1814
Authors: Knight Roger
Published: May 2023

This chapter details how the vulnerability of square-rigged ships when sailing against strong winds in the entrance to the English Channel had always been Britain's disadvantage in the wars against France, whose vessels were able, for instance, to reach the West Indies more quickly from more southerly French ports. The area of the ‘Soundings’, as it was often known, was largely of deep water, with cliffs and headlands that could be seen from afar on clear days to aid navigation. However, it was dominated by tides, very strong at springs, while visibility could be reduced by thick winter fogs or spring and autumn mists, and heavy swells and breaking seas could be devastating in winter storms. For the first years of the war, at least, nowhere in the world did British shipping suffer more casualties from winter weather than in coastal waters and the Western Approaches. With an unlucky combination of adverse wind and tide, these could be very demanding waters, and the long winter nights brought more casualties and difficulties for convoys.
Financial Isolation, 1934–1942
Authors: Gill David James
Published: May 2023

The immediate consequences of the British government’s default on its war debts to the United States were surprisingly limited. The extant literature understandably tends to focus on the dire political costs to incumbent governments as well as on significant economic costs. Yet most of these consequences appear to have been relatively limited for the United Kingdom. The British government reversed heavy increases in taxation as well as cuts in allowances of all kinds. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin went on to secure another large majority in the election of November 1935. Britain had limited interest in accessing foreign debt immediately after default but was able to borrow from the United States immediately after the Second World War. Nor did default halt broader economic cooperation between the U.S. and the UK. Yet there was one profoundly negative consequence to British default. As the United States struggled through the Great Depression, the memory of unpaid war debts lingered. U.S. disappointment concerning Europe’s unpaid debts and disillusionment with the Continent’s drift to war produced powerful congressional and public barriers to international lending and diplomatic alliances, which hampered the United Kingdom’s attempts to balance economic stability with military rearmament.
Sports in South American History
Authors: Brown Matthew
Published: May 2023

This chapter provides an overview of how sports became important in South America. It clarifies that the popularity of soccer is fed on pre-existing sporting cultures across the continent that have long been forgotten or ignored. Additionally, individuals and institutions used sports, like rowing, and racing, to improve and incorporate immigrant communities into society. The chapter also explains that the book aims to explore the roles of sports in the continent's unique republican histories within global networks by the legacies of colonialism. It explains how diverse pre-existing sporting cultures were transformed by political visions, migration, institutions, and technology.
Sports from the Margins
Authors: Brown Matthew
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the history of sports in South America. Many of the surviving records of indigenous sports prove that South America had sports that predated the arrival of modern, codified games. Meanwhile, indigenous cultural traditions explain why they should prosper in soccer and other forms of athletics. The chapter references the work of Mapuche intellectual and political activist Manuel Manquilef, which involved collections of traditional games, such as palitun, tejo, and zinucati. It explains that horse racing and horse games are excellent examples of the ways South American sports transformed in the face of urbanization, migration, and cultural change.
Colonial Sports
Authors: Brown Matthew
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the colonial sports promoted by Spanish and Portuguese authorities. The sports often involved animals, so the successes of nineteenth-century campaigns against animal cruelty promoted resistance to the inclusion of these activities in a historical study of sports in South America. In correlation, complaints about the violence inherent in sports with a Hispanic legacy can be linked to legends of Spanish cruelty. The chapter elaborates on the history of cockfighting and bull sports. It explains how the colonial origins and inherent violence of cock and bull sports have resulted in the erasure of these activities from most South American sports history.
Education
Authors: Brown Matthew
Published: May 2023

This chapter tackles the education surrounding sports. It starts with how sports were institutionalized through unprecedented physical education reforms in the 1880s and 1890s and the establishment of clubs, leagues, and associations in the 1900s. A generation of sports-mad teenagers formed clubs and maintained the custom of organizing and playing sports due to their enjoyment and health benefits. Moreover, sports developed their place within South American societies as a result of their centrality in the key moments of secularizing state education. The chapter explains how playing sports achieved a notion with political and social meanings and attachments. It notes that physical educators understood the aim of South American sports to improve their republics and overcoming colonial legacies.
Clubs
Authors: Brown Matthew
Published: May 2023

This chapter highlights the importance of sports clubs. In the early 1900s, sports clubs were crucial in fostering activity, discipline, and belonging to create communities and build social order in South America. Moreover, sports clubs filled institutional spaces hitherto left empty by impoverished, indifferent, or negligent states and provided a place ostensibly free of political and religious disagreements. The chapter cites the work of Lima Cricket, Gimnasia y Esgrima in La Plata, and the São Paulo Athletic Club in popularizing soccer and channelling the sport into urban, regional, and national frameworks. It also discusses the multisport nature of the earliest clubs and the subsequent fractures between inclusive popular clubs and socially exclusive country clubs.
International
Authors: Brown Matthew
Published: May 2023

This chapter explains how and why South Americans pioneered international sports in the 1910s and 1920. It highlights that South American sporting histories were central in the creation of a global sporting culture of international competition in the 1920s. In 1930, the first FIFA World Cup in Uruguay was the culmination of twenty years of international sporting tournaments in the continent, which were held to celebrate the centenary of independence from colonial rule. The success of the Uruguayan team at the Olympics originated from the continent's less visible international sporting traditions. The chapter cites how South America's international tournaments and their consolidated political meanings shaped around celebrations of national independence could now be opened to competitors from elsewhere.
Epilogue: World Champions, Local Histories
Authors: Brown Matthew
Published: May 2023

This concluding chapter cites the relevance of the history of South American sports beyond the continent. It explains that the South American soccer culture became the envy and fantasy of the world in the twentieth century. Compared to Europe and North America, the role of sports in transforming migrant communities is the most visible difference in sports histories. The development played a central role in opening spaces for national citizenship for Black, mestizo, and indigenous people in South America. The chapter clarifies that the decolonization of sports history will involve more than reducing the British pioneers' prestige in the narrative and bringing the sports of indigenous peoples back into the picture.
Introduction
Authors: Cronin James E.
Published: May 2023

This chapter provides a background on the creation of liberal order, the conditions and choices that made it more or less stable, and what happened to weaken liberal order. It recounts the economic crisis of the 1970s, noting the faltering of the economy that was due to the external shocks of the oil crises and inability of policies pursued in the early postwar era to deliver growth after the early 1970s. It also discusses how the economic collapse created an opportunity for liberal order, for capitalism, and for political democracy to extend their reach. The chapter highlights the extension of liberal order that was limited by the unwillingness of voters in countries to support policies to organize a more stable global order. The end of the Cold War had unforeseen results in domestic politics and in the level of public support for the spread and maintenance of liberal order.
An Illiberal World of Rival “Orders”
Authors: Cronin James E.
Published: May 2023

This chapter talks about the order that came into being in and around 1945, which was liberal in inspiration but compromised in detail. It describes the details of the postwar arrangements that were crafted in response to the Great Depression, the rise and temporary triumph of fascism, and the horrors of the Second World War. It also explains the resulting liberal order that requires a brief look at the realities of the years 1929–39 and how people came to make sense of these during the war. The chapter mentions the simultaneous retreat of democracy, the abandonment of economic liberalism, and the failure of the international system to prevent another major war that made the 1930s a uniquely illiberal decade. All three were products largely of the Great Depression and, more specifically, of the failure of governments to find the means to end the slump.
The End of the Cold War and the Expansion of Liberal Order
Authors: Cronin James E.
Published: May 2023

This chapter talks about the explicit connection between security and the opening of markets that could be understood as a sign of America's long-term commitment to a capitalist future. The United States had a long tradition of seeing the expansion of free markets as a key foreign policy goal. It considers 1990s as the extent to which market-friendly policies had displaced other priorities and redefined the role of government. The chapter describes the turn to markets in the 1980s to “neoliberalism,” which ensured that the expansion of liberal order after 1989 would be qualitatively different from the establishment of liberal order in the 1940s. It describes a model promoted after 1989, which establishes market economies and constrains states from interfering with their functioning.
Challenges to Liberal Order, at Home and Abroad
Authors: Cronin James E.
Published: May 2023

This chapter looks at the contribution of contingent and long-term factors to Donald Trump's victory in November 2016, arguing that the local, the recent, and the superficial converged with trends in American politics to produce an unexpected result. It reviews observations that disentangle the reasons for Trump's win. The main debate was whether it was a revenge vote by those who were “left behind” by shifts in the economy and by their lack of education. The chapter highlights the Republican commitment to an austere neoliberalism, which made the party turn increasingly to the culture wars as a means to motivate voters. It covers Trump's contribution in bringing toxicity and dysfunction together at a moment that was uniquely favorable to him and his message.
Book Madness
Authors: Gigante Denise
Published: May 2023

Charles Lamb's library—a heap of sixty scruffy old books singed with smoke, soaked with gin, sprinkled with crumbs, stripped of illustrations, and bescribbled by the essayist and his literary friends—caused a sensation when it was sold in New York in 1848. The transatlantic book world watched as the relics of a man revered as the patron saint of book collectors were dispersed. Following those books through the stories of the bibliophiles who shaped intellectual life in America, this book brings to life a lost world of letters at a time when Americans were busy assembling the country's major public, university, and society libraries. A human tale of loss, obsession, and spiritual survival, the book reveals the magical power books can have to bring people together and is an absorbing read for anyone interested in what makes a book special.
Prologue
Authors: Gigante Denise
Published: May 2023

This chapter follows the trail of books from Charles Lamb's library. Those old books have a perennial fascination—even if, in themselves, they were not worth much. By focusing on the dispersal of Charles Lamb's library in New York in 1848 and the story of book collectors in America, the chapter brings together and recalls to life the leading figures from the transatlantic book world at midcentury, a time when Americans were busy assembling libraries, public as well as private, from masses of old books in circulation. The chapter reviews how Lamb inspired American bibliophiles, as well as the language necessary to combat the idea that bookishness was an Old World affectation incompatible with life in the New. The chapter concludes by arguing that the library sale catalogue of virtually every major American book collector in the nineteenth century who owned books from Charles Lamb's library appealed to its audience by boasting of its association with Saint Charles. It emphasizes that to some degree, Lamb's popularity was owing to the fact that he was a working man of letters: he served as a mouthpiece for all those whose weekdays were spent in the grind of economic survival but whose evenings and fugitive hours were all spent with books.
Bookmen Across the Atlantic
Authors: Gigante Denise
Published: May 2023

This chapter recounts New York City's unprecedented growth in the midcentury as waves of dazed and seasick immigrants, driven by famine and political instability in Europe, clambered from the bowels of ships in the harbor. It follows how the city grew in a robust, headstrong fashion that the American bard celebrates. A mere two decades earlier, the intersection of the city's two busy thoroughfares, Broadway and the Bowery, was still farmland. Amidst all this urban hubbub, the chapter pays attention to one bookstore tucked away on the ground floor of the Astor House at 229 Broadway, and examines how it gained a reputation as a beacon of taste. The bookstore, owned by John Russell Bartlett and Charles Welford, had a commodious reading room. The chapter underlines that the booksellers in the Astor House were intellectuals as well as businessmen. While Welford fielded questions across a range of ancient and modern literature, Bartlett served as a resource for those interested in American history, ethnography, and philology. The chapter explores how the store attracted a circle of literary lights throughout the 1840s and became a legend in the literary world of New York by the end of the decade.
The Literary World
Authors: Gigante Denise
Published: May 2023

This chapter looks at the prevalence of books and printed matter in New York in the 1840s. From storefront windows, new books appealed to pedestrians with siren songs of entertainment and instruction at bargain prices, while literary annuals, gift books, and illustrated editions catered to an expanding American readership. The chapter chronicles the invention of new steam-powered rotary printing technology and stereotype printing in New York in the mid-1840s, and examines how it revolutionized the print industry and enabled a boom in cheap reading matter. Looking at the growing networks of transcontinental and transatlantic correspondence, the chapter recounts how telegraph and railway lines branched across the American continent. The chapter elaborates on how a new generation of American literary professionals (publishers, editors, journalists) struggled to take their place in the transatlantic world of letters. It recounts how the literary professionals shared a desire to publish, edit, review, and publicize more than things in books' clothing: books that really were—or were worthy to be called—books.
Prologue
Authors: Tripodi Francesca Bolla
Published: May 2023

This chapter covers a narrative of extremism in Charlottesville. It highlights how local law enforcement did little to control the crowd despite their violation of a flame ordinance, Nazi slogans, and lack of permit. The city also allowed the protest of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) at Justice Park, but residents pushed back and refused to disperse after the police released tear gas and arrested people who blocked the KKK vehicles. Extremists organized white supremacist rallies around the removal of two Confederate statues, which these groups used as alleged proof of white genocide. The chapter mentions how the Black Lives Matter movement triggered the arrival of KKK members in the city.
The Symbolic Power of Muslim Difference
Authors: Patel Youshaa
Published: May 2023

To understand the magnitude of the value of difference to Muslims, and to elicit the manifold social and cultural meanings it carried, this chapter pivots from the panoramic view of hadith traditions in the previous chapter to a focused analysis of a small cluster of traditions that draw practices of Muslim difference into close view. From this vantage point, it becomes apparent how everyday practices became potent symbols of Muslim identity, and why they mattered. This chapter introduces, and in some cases revisits, a series of hadith traditions that charged a repertoire of embodied practices with symbolic meaning; they include growing and dyeing the beard, wearing turbans and headscarves, summoning Muslims to prayer, wiping over leather socks, prostrating before God, and consuming food with the left hand. By discerning the meanings reflected on the surfaces of these practices, this chapter shows how practices designed to set Muslims apart draw on preexisting cultural idioms that paradoxically connect them to the peoples around them.
Ibn Taymiyya and the Innovation of Imitation
Authors: Patel Youshaa
Published: May 2023

Set in the Mamluk Sultanate, several centuries after the canonization of hadiths, this chapter presents a close reading of the influential treatise against imitation of controversial jurist-theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328): The Obligation of Following the Straight Path Is to Be Different from Those Damned to Hell. The chapter argues that Ibn Taymiyya’s discourse of difference is a discourse of power, designed to position Muslims a degree above their rivals. The analysis of the treatise reveals a theorization of Muslim difference that is unexpectedly supple, moderated through notions of the Muslim community as a middle community and grounded in a psycho-spiritual model of intent that resists categorical oppositions.
“A person belongs with the one he loves”
Authors: Patel Youshaa
Published: May 2023

This chapter draws attention to novel conceptions of imitation among medieval Sufi communities that have been marginalized in Euro-American academic and traditional Muslim scholarship alike—most notable among them, the figure named the “Imitator of the Imitator.” Unlike the Partisans of Hadith portrayed in earlier chapters who invoke the vocabulary of tashabbuh to define the social boundaries of the Muslim community, the Sufi figures discussed here draw upon the same language to expand the social boundaries of their spiritual communities.
Epilogue
Authors: Patel Youshaa
Published: May 2023

The concluding chapter presents an argument for thinking of difference as a distinct style of being in the world, where style is construed as a frame concept that weaves together the threads of Muslim difference, summarizing, in the process, this book’s key findings. It also furnishes a point of entry into the critical task of reimagining Muslim difference in late modernity, contending that cultivating a more inclusive style of religious difference that displays genuine respect and sincere affection for the religious Other is a moral imperative in our intertwined world.
America's Frozen Neighborhoods
Authors: Ellickson Robert C.
Published: May 2023

This Book Asserts That Local Zoning Policies Are The Most Consequential Regulatory Program In The United States. Many Localities Have Created Barriers To The Development Of Less Costly Forms Of Housing. Numerous Economists Have Found That Current Zoning Practices Inflict Major Damage On The National Economy. Using Silicon Valley, The Greater New Haven Area, And The Northwestern Portion Of Greater Austin As Case Studies, The Book Shows In Detail How The Zoning System Works And Recommends Steps For Its Reform. Zoning Regulations, The Book Demonstrates, Are Hard To Dislodge Once Localities Have Enacted Them. The Book Develops Metrics To Measure The Existence And Costs Of Exclusionary Zoning, And Suggests Reforms That States And The Federal Government Could Undertake To Counter The Detrimental Effects Of Local Policies. These Include The Cartelization Of Housing Markets And The Aggravation Of Racial And Class Segregation.
Leviathan Goes Local: The Abuse of Zoning
Authors: Ellickson Robert C.
Published: May 2023

This chapter provides a background on local zoning practices in three metropolitan areas: Silicon Valley, Greater New Haven, and the northwestern sector of Greater Austin, Texas. It describes, in unprecedented detail, how the zoning system works and recommends steps for its reform. It also offers metrics for measuring zoning abuse and applies them to the three regions. The chapter highlights evidence proving the rigidity of local zoning practices, noting how local politics tends to place land uses in a legal straitjacket. It makes specific recommendations for reform, urging state governments to take the lead in zoning reform and gain support by specific federal initiatives.
Silicon Valley: Slamming the Door on Growth
Authors: Ellickson Robert C.
Published: May 2023

This chapter reveals the strictness of the local zoning imposed on the Silicon Valley's largest landowner, Stanford University, and identifies the few locations where developers have been able to supply housing to meet pent-up demand. It traces the history of zoning in Silicon Valley and describes many of its suburb that were pro-development during the postwar period but withdrew their welcome mats between roughly 1965 and 1975. It also mentions the pronounced drop in the undeveloped but readily buildable acreage in Silicon Valley as one of the main causes of the shift in the suburbs. The second reason for Silicon Valley's shift toward antidevelopment policies was the advent of the environmental movement. The chapter points out how housing prices soared when demand by well-paid tech workers to live in Silicon Valley surged.
Zoning Politics at City Hall
Authors: Ellickson Robert C.
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the dynamics of local zoning politics, noting how social scientists increasingly have come to recognize the massive effects of local zoning practices on both the national economy and household migration choices. It asserts that, when a local government is in charge, zoning politics tends not to be local, but hyperlocal. When a zoning issue arises in an established neighborhood, local officials tend to defer to the preferences of the residents living closest by. The chapter considers zoning decisions as political outcomes that tend to reflect the ideologies of local officials and the interests of those best able to lobby city hall. It aims to enhance the sophistication of theories of local zoning politics.
Private Covenants: Often Valuable, But Inflexible
Authors: Ellickson Robert C.
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on private covenants, which constrain a landowner's choices among land uses. Covenants saddle a large majority of recently developed land in urban America and threaten to aggravate the freezing of existing land uses. The chapter explores how drafters of covenants, courts, and legislatures could deal with the reality that covenants may become obsolete. Covenants come in two basic forms: negative restrictions on the use of land and affirmative obligations to perform duties, especially that of paying an assessment to a homeowners association. The chapter traces covenants restricting land uses that first appeared in the United States in the early nineteenth century, gaining notoriety as a mechanism for the exclusion of households from neighborhoods because of race and sometimes religion.
My Soul Is a Witness
Authors: Crabtree Mari N.
Published: May 2023

My Soul is a Witness traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. By interweaving the stories of people and places haunted by lynching, Mari N. Crabtree unearths how Black southerners lived through and beyond these horrors, offering a theory of Black collective trauma and memory rooted in the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility—a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain. Jim Crow and its threat of violent, if not deadly, reprisals tried to impose silence upon Black southerners, but they did find their voices. They often shielded their loved ones from the most painful memories of local lynchings with strategic silences but also told lynching stories about vengeful ghosts or a wrathful God or the deathbed confessions of a lyncher tormented by his past. They protested lynching and its legacies through art and activism, and they mourned those lost to a mob’s fury. In these and other ways, they infused a blues element into their lynching narratives as they confronted traumatic memories and kept the blues at bay, even if just for a spell. Telling their stories troubles the simplistic binary of resistance or suffering that has tended to dominate narratives of Black life and reminds us that, amid the utter devastation of lynching, were glimmers of hope and an affirmation of life.
Introduction
Authors: Crabtree Mari N.
Published: May 2023

“Reckoning” begins with the inspiration for this book: James Baldwin’s short story about southern memory and lynching, “Going to Meet the Man.” Though it shares Baldwin’s sense of time and memory as nonlinear, unlike Baldwin’s story, this book centers Black southern stories and theorizes Black collective trauma and memory. The introduction sets up the three major interventions of the book: (1) how looking at lynching beyond the episodic and linear and through the lens of memory studies captures the lasting impact of lynching on Black southerners, (2) how the blues sensibility provides a useful metaphor for understanding the myriad ways that Black southerners lived through and beyond the trauma of lynching, and (3) how analyzing Black southern lynching memories through the blues sensibility troubles the dominance of the resistance paradigm in Black studies.
Silence
Authors: Crabtree Mari N.
Published: May 2023

Many white southerners enveloped lynching in a shroud of silence, concealing their memories of these unpunished crimes in a fog of denial and projecting their guilt onto others. Some Black southerners also took refuge in silence, but theirs was born of a desire to shield themselves, their families, and their communities from the pain of remembering lynchings and the humiliations of Jim Crow. However, unlike literal silence—the absence of sound—these silences were neither ephemeral nor weightless, but could exact a heavy toll. This chapter unpacks the discordant resonances between white and Black silences and places them in the broader context of the civil rights era.
Violence
Authors: Crabtree Mari N.
Published: May 2023

Anti-Black violence and terrorism, including lynchings, assassinations, and bombings persisted in the civil rights era, though often the form this violence took adapted to a growing white intolerance for lynching. Bookended by the story of James Meredith’s harrowing encounters with white terrorist violence, this chapter explores how white southerners invoked the memory of lynching with lethal violence, but also with effigies and rhetoric that celebrated and defended white supremacy. The continuation of racial violence exposed how the racial and gender anxieties that underpinned lynching and white supremacy in the first place festered and bubbled to the surface as civil rights activists worked to dismantle Jim Crow.
The Economic Consequences of U.S. Mobilization for the Second World War
Authors: Field Alexander J.
Published: May 2023

Many believe that despite its destructive character, war ultimately boosts long-term economic growth. For the United States, this view is often supported by appeal to the experience of the Second World War, understood as a triumph of both production and productivity. This book shows that between 1941 and 1945, manufacturing productivity actually declined, depressed by changes in the output mix and resource shocks from enemy action, including curtailed access to natural rubber and, on the Eastern Seaboard, petroleum. The war forced a shift away from producing goods in which the country had a great deal of experience toward those in which it had little. Learning by doing was only a partial counterbalance to the intermittent idleness and input hoarding that characterized a shortage economy and dragged down productivity. The conflict distorted human and physical capital accumulation and once it ended, America stopped producing most of the new goods. The war temporarily shut down basic scientific research and the ongoing development of civilian goods. U.S. world economic dominance in 1948, the book shows, was due less to the experience of making war goods and more to the country's productive potential in 1941.
Dietary Laws
Authors: Adler Yonatan
Published: May 2023

Numerous dietary restrictions are found scattered throughout the Pentateuch. Foremost among these are proscriptions against the consumption of certain taxa of animals, fish, birds, and insects as delineated in Leviticus 11 and in Deuteronomy 14. This chapter examines the earliest evidence for when Judeans were observing these rules. The chapter begins by examining evidence that demonstrates the degree to which Judeans in the first century CE actually complied with many of the Pentateuchal food prohibitions. Several first-century CE writers, Judean and non-Judean alike, were quite explicit in asserting that dietary restrictions based on the Pentateuchal laws were observed by Judeans on a widespread basis. These claims are in concert with the archaeological data, especially the absence of pig and scaleless fish (such as catfish) at Judean sites. The chapter then examines evidence from periods prior to the first century CE and demonstrates that the earliest evidence for observance of the Torah’s dietary rules dates to the middle of the second century BCE. Prior to this, there is no surviving evidence, whether textual or archaeological, which suggests that Judeans adhered to a set of food prohibitions or to a body of dietary restrictions of any kind.
Tefillin and Mezuzot
Authors: Adler Yonatan
Published: May 2023

This chapter opens with a survey of the evidence demonstrating that tefillin (“phylacteries”) and mezuzah (plural: “mezuzot”) existed as Judean ritual practices in the first century CE. Although it is difficult to know how widespread these practices were, it is shown that the tefillin remains from the Judean Desert provide invaluable data concerning the details of the practice, data that may be “reverse engineered” to reveal the exegetical pathways taken in the development of the ritual. The fact that different types of tefillin were found among the caves suggests that Judean legal experts were actively debating the minutiae of the ritual, an insight that contributes to our understanding of how Torah as a legal system was developing at this time. Texts and archaeological remains pointing to tefillin or mezuzah observance prior to the first century CE are rather less certain, and in any event these date to no earlier than the second century BCE. No evidence for the observance of any practice resembling either tefillin or mezuzah is available from any time before the middle of the second century BCE.
Miscellaneous Practices
Authors: Adler Yonatan
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines successively six distinct practices that characterized Judaism in the first century CE: circumcision; the Sabbath prohibitions; the Passover sacrifice and the Festival of Unleavened Bread; fasting on the Day of Atonement; the two central rituals of the Sukkot festival—building and residing in booths and taking of the “four species”; and having a continually lit seven-branched menorah in the Jerusalem temple. In each case, evidence for the practice or prohibition in the first century CE is surveyed, followed by an examination of the earliest available evidence from prior to the turn of the first millennium. It is demonstrated that observance of all these elements of Torah law is well attested in the first century CE, in the first century BCE, and to some degree also in the second century BCE, but none of these practices are clearly attested to prior to this.
‘Sermons in Stones’
Authors: Dooley Terence
Published: May 2023

This chapter highlights the ongoing difficulties that Irish country house owners faced in search of compensation for the loss of their homes and contents in the courts. In the long term, Big House owners could argue they were not adequately compensated, but so too could all other sections of rural and urban society. However, as might be expected, given the scale of the physical destruction, the aristocracy's individual claims for their Big Houses were amongst the highest made. The chapter takes a look at a number of government attempts to provide adequate compensation for the destruction of the Big Houses, such as the Shaw Commission and the Irish Distress Committee, and the historical forces that have helped and hindered the compensation process. In addition, the chapter briefly explores the little-known process of rebuilding a Big House in the mid-1920s and its impacts on a local community's history.
The End of Revolution?
Authors: Dooley Terence
Published: May 2023

This chapter argues that the story of the Irish aristocracy illustrates how the social ambitions of revolutionaries eventually played out in the longer term. One of the central arguments has been that the British Land Acts passed for Ireland (1870–1909) failed to address rural inequalities. The chapter contends that the burning of almost 300 Big Houses in 1920–23 was as symptomatic of the continued land question as it was of the aristocracy's continued loyalism. The chapter also addresses some remaining loose ends to story of the house burnings, such as government redistribution schemes post-1923. It also includes the story of Edward John Beaumont-Nesbitt, who had inherited an 8,000-acre estate upon which his house, Tubberdaly, sat. Beaumont-Nesbitt was well regarded as a landlord but at the same time there were local tensions coincident with the rise of the land and national movements from the 1880s. Finally, the chapter explores the question as to why many more Big Houses were not destroyed.
Introduction
Authors: Mackenzie John M.
Published: May 2023

This introductory chapter argues that the cultural exports of the British Empire were seized upon by both indigenous peoples and settlers, which were then adapted and converted to their own ends. Moreover, in many societies it was the adoption, adaptation, and conversion of cultural forms to the ends of new national identities and the forces of nationalism that served to break up that empire. Imperial cultural phenomena, often hybridised with indigenous equivalents, became vital emblems of a new nation-state international order. The chapter briefly explores how certain imperial cultural forms and expressions have served to establish the empire's idea of modernity. It also examines the literature surrounding British imperial cultural history and reveals the gaps in the research regarding this aspect of British culture and history.
Imperial Ceremonial
Authors: Mackenzie John M.
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the manner in which imperial acquisitions often started and ended with ceremonies. There were overt expressions of imperial ideology, performances of hegemony and power relations, as well as efforts to impress, entertain, and overawe the populace. How far or how rapidly such ideals began to fade is a matter of debate for individual colonies. Yet it is apparent that the tradition of the ceremonial was taken over by the settler colonies in symbolising new national loyalties and, later, even by independent Asian and African states in proclaiming their independence, search for national unity, and often maintenance in power of specific elites. It may be that this continuity resulted from the capacity of colonial authorities to appropriate and perhaps pervert the indigenous ceremonial.
Team Sports
Authors: Mackenzie John M.
Published: May 2023

This chapter shows how team sports were taken over by the indigenous peoples of empire in many strikingly important ways. During the heyday of empire, the British imagined that team sports could constitute a prime vehicle for disseminating imperial ideologies. But if imperial rulers thought such sports would transform the consciousness of indigenous peoples, transmit forms of discipline, and even create a means of surveillance, all on their terms, they actually became more significant in creating national identities and contributing to the development of cultural and political nationalisms. Moreover, sports played a key role in inter-colonial relations and in the international connections that served to erode the notion that the relationships of empire were paramount. They consequently served to lubricate the transition from the network of empire into that of international diplomacy.
Photography
Authors: Mackenzie John M.
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the ways in which the camera became an instrument of globalisation, a creator of commercial opportunities, and an aesthetic form stimulating theoretical debate. It shows how the camera became one of the key technologies of the century, as significant in its own way as steam power, the telegraph, and more accurate weaponry. Indeed, the art of photography seemed ideally suited to the conditions of empire and the ideology of imperialism. The chapter thus considers the extent to which the camera became another weapon of imperialism, the images conveying political, social, religious, and gender biases of the time, as well as promoting the objectification and subjugation of indigenous peoples. But the camera also unveiled the emotional narratives of empire, including empathetic and humanitarian concerns.
The Press
Authors: Mackenzie John M.
Published: May 2023

This chapter assesses the extent to which the non-political columns of selected newspapers revealed an emphasis on the cultural unity of the empire or served to underpin growing local affinities and forms of consciousness. The latter became increasingly prominent, for example as sporting encounters became more common between metropolitan and colonial teams, as well as among fixtures in neighbouring territories or on an international basis. These certainly aroused as much passion and adherence to newly formed identities as national politics. In short, the press has a role in developing cultural forms promoting local and national identities. The chapter also examines the phases in the development of a colonial press.
Theatre
Authors: Mackenzie John M.
Published: May 2023

This chapter turns to theatrical performances — whether plays, variety shows, or musicals — which were among the flagship cultural events of the British Empire from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. It considers both amateur performers as well as professionals who travel from Britain to perform in the colonies. The flourishing of theatre in colonial military garrisons is also studied. Theatre travelled with the earliest settlers, with theatrical events becoming significant cultural moments in all settlement territories in the British Empire. Amidst the flourishing of colonial British theatre during this period, the chapter also explores indigenous theatre, as almost all indigenous peoples have such traditions. Finally, the chapter takes a look into the significance of amateur performances as well as professional companies within the British colonial sphere.
From Physics to Biology
Authors: Summers William C.
Published: May 2023

This chapter describes the “target theory.” This theory refers to a model for the way radiation interacts with cells. The two basic features of this model are that radiation is considered to behave as random projectiles, and that the components of the cell are considered as the targets to be bombarded (and inactivated or otherwise modified in some observable way) by these projectiles. From the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, the target theory and its applications were a major preoccupation of the field that became known as biophysics. Here, the chapter illustrates the role that radiation biology and various versions of the target theory played in the origins of molecular biology and of phage research in particular.
The Challenge of Lysogeny
Authors: Summers William C.
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the problem of lysogeny as a challenge to the American Phage Group's framework of shared commitments. The phenomenon of lysogeny occupies a special chapter in the early history of phage. Both the complexity and confusion it generated and the decision by Delbrück to eliminate lysogeny as a central problem for American Phage Group attention require careful examination. On one hand, the study of lysogeny was initially excluded from the research program of the American Phage Group because it seemed to complicate and compete with the consensus that the central problem of phage biology was to understand phage reproduction. On the other hand, the study of lysogeny provided deep insights into mechanisms of gene regulation and eventually provided much of the mechanistic understanding that united gene reproduction with gene function, and transmission genetics with physiological genetics.
The Challenge of Phage Diversity
Authors: Summers William C.
Published: May 2023

This chapter reveals how the growing diversity with respect to experimental material that was accepted by the American Phage Group was an indication of increasing scientific maturity. Indeed, it was a forerunner of the evolution of phage biology into a foundation of molecular biology. At the beginning, the “Phage Treaty” of 1944 was essential to impose some order on the individuality of each investigator so that, in the fact-collecting phase of the research program, the various results could contribute to a common, universally relevant body of knowledge. This practice worked well at first, but as the field grew both in size and in understanding of phage biology, the list of acceptable phages as standard increased. Later, this knowledge became sufficiently detailed and robust that researchers were confident in extending and extrapolating it to new phage types that had useful, and perhaps novel, specific properties.