bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
’Tis Eighty Years Since
Authors: Sobol Valeria
Published: May 2021

This chapter gives voice to Ukraine by focusing on the Ukrainian writer and scholar Panteleimon Kulish's historical novel Mikhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago published in Russian in 1843. The chapter shows that multiple Gothic tropes employed in the novel — from “medieval” ruins and towers to exotic demonic villains and supernatural phantoms — produce an intricate play of temporalities. Moreover, they create an ambivalent vision of the Ukrainian heroic past, as both an object of Romantic nostalgia and a dangerous period of chaos overcome by the country's incorporation into the Russian Empire. Kulish's extensive use of the Gothic mode, when analyzed closely, reveals his profound ambiguity about Ukraine's imperial present haunted by the ghosts of its autonomous heroic past.
Civilizational Imperatives
Authors: Charbonneau Oliver
Published: May 2021

This book reveals the little-known history of the United States' colonization of the Philippines' Muslim South in the early twentieth century. Often referred to as Moroland, the Sulu Archipelago and the island of Mindanao were sites of intense US engagement and laboratories of colonial modernity during an age of global imperialism. Exploring the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized from the late nineteenth century until the eve of the Second World War, the book argues that American power in the Islamic Philippines rested upon a transformative vision of colonial rule. Civilization, protection, and instruction became watchwords for U.S. military officers and civilian administrators, who enacted fantasies of racial reform among the diverse societies of the region. Violence saturated their efforts to remake indigenous politics and culture, embedding itself into governance strategies used across four decades. Although it took place on the edges of the Philippine colonial state, this fraught civilizing mission did not occur in isolation. It shared structural and ideological connections to U.S. settler conquest in North America and also borrowed liberally from European and Islamic empires. These circuits of cultural, political, and institutional exchange — accessed by colonial and anticolonial actors alike — gave empire in the Southern Philippines its hybrid character. This book is a story of colonization and connection, reaching across nations and empires in its examination of a Southeast Asian space under US sovereignty. It presents an innovative new portrait of the American empire's global dimensions and the many ways they shaped the colonial encounter in the Southern Philippines.
Introduction
Authors: Charbonneau Oliver
Published: May 2021

This chapter recounts the story of Americans and Moros in colonial Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. It ranges from 1899, when U.S. military forces relieved the Spanish garrison at Zamboanga, to 1941, when Japan invaded the Commonwealth of the Philippines. It also considers the Spanish legacy in Mindanao-Sulu and American precolonial contacts with the region. The chapter elaborates the minor role of Muslim-majority areas in many histories of the American Philippines and explains the historiographical absence that perpetuates trends originating in American and Christian Filipino colonial imaginaries. It points out how the South's position as a politically and culturally subordinate space in an emerging nation-state created the preconditions for its marginalization in the literature on the U.S. colonial empire.
Courtrooms, Clinics, and Colonies
Authors: Charbonneau Oliver
Published: May 2021

This chapter cites civilizing fantasies that became civilizational imperatives through a spectrum of state-building projects that were aimed at refashioning the Southern Philippines. It mentions that Governor Tasker gave rhetorical justification to the erasure of tradition resulting from a new status quo by reducing the heterogeneous cultures of the South into a single debased scape. It also describes the precolonial Moro as a pirate, slaver, polygamist, gambler, thief, religious fanatic, and murderer who was averse to productive labor, disinclined to sanitary living, and indifferent to the public good. The chapter investigates how the civilizing mission was practiced in the colonized spaces of Mindanao-Sulu. It discusses the colonial mind that standardized notions of progress and modernity, which mapped gradients of civilization across time and space.
Corrective Violence
Authors: Charbonneau Oliver
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses how military and civilian officials folded massacre and confinement into the pedagogical language of the civilizing mission, which parses the violence that accompanied and facilitated colonial modernization schemes. It describes communities like Zamboanga and Dansalan wherein Moro Province officials engaged in urban planning and reproduced leisure norms found elsewhere in the colonized world. It also looks at the Moros's resentment of their exclusion from regional politics and their threat to destroy communications infrastructure and burn schoolhouses if the exclusionary practices continued. The chapter recalls Governor-General Leonard Wood's own experiences leading the Moro Province two decades prior as he took special interest in the uprising. It recounts the confrontation in Lanao that typified long-established patterns of violence between Moros and the colonial state.
Imperial Interactivities
Authors: Charbonneau Oliver
Published: May 2021

This chapter considers the role of diverse interactivities in shaping the encounter in Mindanao-Sulu. It recounts how the region maintained its own culturally hybrid character despite its portrayal as a colonial backwater as it was facilitated by links to maritime Southeast Asia and the wider Muslim world. U.S. actors moved within European colonial circles. It also cites multiscalar connections that underwrote imperial power in the Southern Philippines beyond the obscuring language of American exceptionalism. The chapter highlights how the United States took possession of the Philippines from Spain during a period of rapid Euro-American territorial expansion, where imperial formations simultaneously competed with and drew from one another. It details the interaction of U.S. colonials in Mindanao-Sulu with other imperial powers as it encountered preexisting connections that stretched between and through localities, colonies, regions, and empires.
Introduction
Authors: Keeley Theresa
Published: May 2021

This chapter reviews the Reagan administration's linkage of Nicaragua to El Salvador and its critiques of Maryknollers' influence on Tip O'Neill in the Contra aid debate. It brings together the most scandalous comments made about the murdered women, especially Alexander Haig's false charge that the women died in a shoot-out. It also stresses how entangled Catholic debates are about the meaning of Catholic identity about U.S.–Central America policy. The chapter analyses the image of a nun as a violent revolutionary that challenged the murdered churchwomen's status as victims. It reveals the conservative Catholics' objections to nuns' and priests' social activism.
Religious or Political Activists for Nicaragua?
Authors: Keeley Theresa
Published: May 2021

This chapter shows how the Maryknollers' leadership that oppose Nicaraguan president Somoza led conservative American non-Catholics to adopt conservative Catholics' concerns about Maryknoll by the late 1970s. It talks about conservative U.S. Catholics that bemoaned some Maryknollers' opposition to Latin American governments and support for socialist ideas. It also marks the shift from the 1960s and early 1970s when the Melvilles or Charles Curry took controversial stances. The chapter explores the Maryknollers' involvement in Nicaragua debates that reflected larger shifts in what it meant to be a Catholic missionary and showed the growing strength of religious witness in the name of human rights. It refers to Father Miguel d'Escoto who proposed the creation of Maryknoll's Orbis Books, which are the bane of conservative U.S. Catholics.
Maryknoll and Iran-Contra
Authors: Keeley Theresa
Published: May 2021

This chapter highlights how the conservative U.S. Catholics held up catholic William Casey and former catholic Oliver North as symbols of true Catholics and patriots, not Maryknollers, whom they blamed for Iran-Contra. It talks about missionaries that condemned the Contras' human rights abuses and argued it was U.S. influence Nicaraguans needed saving from. It also mentions Henry Hyde, who was part of the joint Senate House congressional efforts to investigate Iran-Contra. The chapter investigates Iran-Contra as the scheme to sell arms to Iran in exchange for U.S. hostages and to transfer the excess funds to the Contras. It recounts how the Reagan administration still pursued a take-no-prisoners approach when it came to its Contra policy despite the Iran-Contra revelations.
Epilogue
Authors: Keeley Theresa
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyses health-care disagreements that reveal the continuing debates over women's role in the church but lacked the focus on Maryknoll. It discusses the Vatican's response to Central America and liberation theology that showed a marked changed from the 1980s just as U.S. domestic debates focused less on Maryknoll. It also recounts how Miguel d'Escoto successfully petitioned Pope Francis to reinstate him as an active priest in 2014 after being suspended in 1985 for refusing to give up his post as Nicaragua's foreign minister. The chapter mentions Maryknoller Roy Bourgeois that remained excommunicated for participating in a ceremony in which a woman was ordained. It investigates how the United States repudiated the human rights abuses of the Salvadoran civil war under Barack Obama.
Conclusion
Authors: Hodge Thomas P.
Published: May 2021

This final chapter, the conclusion, reflects on the treatment of nature and hunting themes in the last two decades of Ivan Turgenev's life, when, though his passion for the chase persisted, palpable doubts about its freshness and moral legitimacy appeared with greater force and frequency. In this late period, Turgenev gravitated toward the paranormal in his short stories. His last two novels, Smoke and Virgin Soil, continue to use nature as a touchstone in ideologically charged settings, though Virgin Soil does so with considerably more finesse. The chapter explains that the appendices provide translations of four source documents vital to any understanding of Turgenev's nature philosophy: a chronology of his references to nature's indifference, his two reviews of Sergei Aksakov's hunting treatise, and his codified precepts for hunters and their dogs.
The Lure of Bureaucracy
Authors: Yahaya Nurfadzilah
Published: May 2021

This chapter evaluates how the Arab elite in Southeast Asia played an outsized role in the development of Islamic law in the British Straits Settlements (Penang, Malacca, and Singapore) and, to a smaller extent, the Netherlands Indies. It presents how the Arabs of the Straits Settlements had already allowed the British government to regulate their intimate lives through the administration of Islamic law, four decades before the First World War. The chapter also explains the clustering around state institutions and reliance on state bureaucracy, and how it went beyond a view toward future litigation and eventual accounting. It investigates how the clustering held government authorities responsible for enforcing terms in waqf deeds, maintaining waqfs, and disciplining errant trustees. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates how members of the Arab elite successfully persuaded colonial leaders to take on the mantle of administration of Islamic law in 1880 because they wished for the presence of a strong state regulatory agency in the form of a strong judicial system.
Introduction
Authors: McRae Calista
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores mid-century and contemporary poems that work within and against their status as lyrics, which rustle against the “fiction of quality” that has become intertwined with poetry in the twentieth century. The chapter discusses how poetry begins to be idealized and more vulnerable to abjection. It also highlights postwar poems about the self that cannot cast off all ties to the elevated critical discourses around them. The chapter explains how literary criticism of the last fifty years has tended to assume that poetry must avoid lyric in order to be funny. It describes humor as the territory of avant-garde projects or other kinds of poems that are expected to have more distance from personal feeling.
Comrades Betrayed
Authors: Geheran Michael
Published: May 2021

At the end of 1941, six weeks after the mass deportations of Jews from Nazi Germany had begun, Gestapo offices across the Reich received an urgent telex from Adolf Eichmann, decreeing that all war-wounded and decorated Jewish veterans of World War I be exempted from upcoming “evacuations.” Why this was so, and how Jewish veterans at least initially were able to avoid the fate of ordinary Jews under the Nazis, is the subject of this book. The same values that compelled Jewish soldiers to demonstrate bravery in the front lines in World War I made it impossible for them to accept passively, persecution under Hitler. They upheld the ideal of the German fighting man, embraced the fatherland, and cherished the bonds that had developed in military service. Through their diaries and private letters, as well as interviews with eyewitnesses and surviving family members and records from the police, Gestapo, and military, this book challenges the prevailing view that Jewish veterans were left isolated, neighborless, and having suffered a social death by 1938. Tracing the path from the trenches of the Great War to the extermination camps of the Third Reich, the book exposes a painful dichotomy: while many Jewish former combatants believed that Germany would never betray them, the Holocaust was nonetheless a horrific reality. In chronicling Jewish veterans' appeal to older, traditional notions of comradeship and national belonging, the book forces reflection on how this group made use of scant opportunities to defy Nazi persecution and, for some, to evade becoming victims of the Final Solution.
Histories, Assemblages, and the City
Authors: Erickson Jennifer
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses the histories of North Dakota, Bosnia Herzegovina, and South Sudan. It talks about the North Europeans that settled in the region in the 1860s, how the Dakota territory was formed, the Dakota War of 1862, how Fargo turned into a settlement in 1871, the Dawes General Allotment Act, and how North Dakota turned into a state. It also talks about the Balkan Peninsula and how the region changed throughout history. The chapter discusses how Western Europeans portrayed Balkans as having a handicap of heterogeneity. It also talks about the former Yugoslavia, how it was formed, how it was able to recognize ethnic and religious diversity by downplaying social factors such as gender, ethnicity, religion, level of wealth, and age in political identity and in participation of “Yugoslav identity,” the slow end of the socialist state, the wars the ensued after the death of Josip Broz Tito, and how this divided the country. The chapter also discusses Sudan and how the British tried to control anticolonial sentiments through the policies they implemented and by encouraging missionary work. It talks about refugees, its definition given by the United Nations, the Refugee Act of 1980 signed by President Carter, refugee resettlement and how it brought post-socialist and post-colonial people and practices to Fargo. Finally, the chapter talks about how the surge in refugee resettlement at the turn of the century made refugees more visible and shed light on these global assemblages.
The NGOization of Refugee Resettlement
Authors: Erickson Jennifer
Published: May 2021

This chapter explains the policies, politics, and everyday practices of the New American Services. It highlights the tensions surrounding citizenship and the role that nongovernmental (or nonprofit) organizations play in Fargo under neoliberalism by analyzing these practices in terms of the “NGOization” of refugee resettlement. The chapter defines NGOization as the proliferation of NGOs under neoliberalism as extensions, or new faces, of the state. It views NGOs from a feminist's lens, and challenges the master narrative that refugee resettlement was purely humanitarian or simply unaccountable. The chapter provides an overview of everyday resettlement practices and beliefs about resettlement staff, and how their work can be interpreted in regard to the larger social issues laid out in this book: race, citizenship, and diversity. It also talks about the Cooperative Agreement between the Government of the United States (the State Department and the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration) and VOLAGS or voluntary agencies.
Baseline
Authors: Lutz Amy S. F.
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) that stabilized Jonah's rapid-cycling bipolar disorder in 2010 after exhaustive medication trials, elaborate behavior plans, and a ten-month hospitalization failed. It details how Jonah experiences mild episodes of agitation with no obvious environmental triggers toward the end of the treatment interval. It also analyses the term “baseline,” which refers to an original, predisease state. The chapter describes Jonah's treatments that were therapeutic to the extent they restored optimal, baseline functioning. It discusses opponents of medicating children that are fierce and pervasive, such as in books with ominous titles like The Silenced Child and Suffer the Children, and certain articles featured on well-respected platforms.
I Am Murdered
Authors: Miller Julie
Published: May 2021

This chapter refers to Joel Behrend, Amelia Norman's employer in his household who testified on her attempted murder case, claiming that her actions before the attempted murder made her seem crazy. It analyses how Amelia's case brought temptation and danger to all who strolled down Broadway during the Panic of 1837, a financial depression that lingered into the first half of the 1840s. It also mentions Samuel Floyd and William Crummie, who stopped Amelia when she attacked her former lover, Henry Ballard, at the hotel entrance of the Astor House steps. The chapter discusses the cab ride when William took Amelia to the police himself, in which she revealed her murder weapon and her regret that she did not use a larger knife. It recounts the sentiment Amelia expressed when she saw Henry bleeding but alive near the Astor House bar.
Jersey Maid and Damn Yankee
Authors: Miller Julie
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on Amelia Norman, who was born around 1818 in a troubled household near the village of Sparta in Sussex County in New Jersey's mountainous northwest. It mentions two of Amelia's brothers, Oliver and Charles Norman, who within days of her attack on Henry Ballard, were raising hell at home in New Jersey. It also talks about how Norman and Charles robbed their neighbors of a few bee skeps, poultry animals, and several gallons of whiskey. The chapter cites how Oliver developed a full-fledged criminal career, engaging in assault, housebreaking, jailbreaking, attempted rape, and theft of more liquor and farm products. It elaborates how Amelia and her siblings could have been affected by the wave of religious fervor and the new ideas about education that pulsed through their village during their childhood.
An Awful Place
Authors: Miller Julie
Published: May 2021

This chapter highlights the city jail, where William Crummie took Amelia Norman on the night she attacked Henry Ballard. It describes the city jail as a massive, gloomy, stone structure known popularly as “the Tombs,” which had been encroached upon by city streets and gradually ruined by the waste emitted by tanneries, slaughterhouses, and breweries. It also talks about novelist Ned Buntline, who described the effect that the the Tombs' solemn stone assemblage of steps, columns, palm leaves, and winged, snake-surrounded sphere had on one of his characters. The chapter looks at the Dickensian rhetoric, which was part of the melodramatic nineteenth-century literary and journalistic style that celebrated the titillating horrors of the slum. It cites the Tombs's multiple official names that expressed its various functions, such as City Prison, Halls of Justice, and House of Detention.
Verdict
Authors: Miller Julie
Published: May 2021

This chapter looks at Recorder Frederick Augustus Tallmadge's opinion about how Henry Ballard's behavior toward Amelia Norman during the two years of their acquaintance could not be admitted as evidence. It mentions Amelia's defense, who worked to prove that her encounter with Henry Ballard had changed her from a virtuous, happy young woman to one who was in desperate trouble, miserable, and out of her mind. It also refers to defense witness John K. Liston, who described Amelia after stabbed Ballard, emphasizing how she appeared very pale and languid, and prostrate from some cause. The chapter talks about Madame Restell, the trial's celebrity witness, who caused excitement in the courtroom due to the notoriety she acquired as a target for opponents of abortion. It discusses American midwives that had long provided abortions or abortifacients to women without attention from the law.
Ways of the World
Authors: Rosenthal Laura J.
Published: May 2021

This book explores cosmopolitanism as it emerged during the Restoration and the role theater played in both memorializing and satirizing its implications and consequences. Rooted in the Stuart ambition to raise the status of England through two crucial investments — global traffic, including the slave trade, and cultural sophistication — this intensified global orientation led to the creation of global mercantile networks and to the rise of an urban British elite who drank Ethiopian coffee out of Asian porcelain at Ottoman-inspired coffeehouses. Restoration drama exposed cosmopolitanism's most embarrassing and troubling aspects, with such writers as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and William Wycherley dramatizing the emotional and ethical dilemmas that imperial and commercial expansion brought to light. Altering standard narratives about Restoration drama, the book shows how the reinvention of theater in this period helped make possible performances that held the actions of the nation up for scrutiny, simultaneously indulging and ridiculing the violence and exploitation being perpetuated. In doing so, it reveals an otherwise elusive consistency between Restoration genres (comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, and tragicomedy), disrupts conventional understandings of the rise and reception of early capitalism, and offers a fresh perspective on theatrical culture in the context of the shifting political realities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.
Engaging the Evil Empire
Authors: Miles Simon
Published: May 2021

In a narrative-redefining approach, this book dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US–Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, the book shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. The book details the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the Soviet system and building up US military capabilities. The received wisdom in diplomatic circles is that the beginning of the end of the Cold War came from changing policy preferences and that President Reagan, in particular, opted for a more conciliatory and less bellicose diplomatic approach. In reality, the book demonstrates, Reagan and ranking officials in the National Security Council had determined that the United States enjoyed a strategic margin of error that permitted it to engage Moscow overtly. As US grand strategy developed, so did that of the Soviet Union. This book covers five critical years of Cold War history when Soviet leaders tried to reduce tensions between the two nations in order to gain economic breathing room and, to ensure domestic political stability, prioritize expenditures on butter over those on guns. The book shifts the focus of Cold War historians away from exclusive attention on Washington by focusing on the years of back-channel communiqués and internal strategy debates in Moscow as well as Prague and East Berlin.
Confronting Desire
Authors: Kapoor Ilan
Published: May 2021

By applying psychoanalytic perspectives to key themes, concepts, and practices underlying the development enterprise, this book offers a new way of analyzing the problems, challenges, and potentialities of international development. The book makes a compelling case for examining development's unconscious desires and in the process inaugurates a new field of study: psychoanalytic development studies. The book analyzes how development's unconscious desires “speak out,” most often in excessive and unpredictable ways that contradict the outwardly rational declarations of its practitioners. It investigates development's many irrationalities — from obsessions about growth and poverty to the perverse seductions of racism and over-consumption. By deploying key psychoanalytic concepts — enjoyment, fantasy, antagonism, fetishism, envy, drive, perversion, and hysteria — the book critically analyzes important issues in development — growth, poverty, inequality, participation, consumption, corruption, gender, “race,” LGBTQ politics, universality, and revolution. The book offers prescriptions for applying psychoanalysis to development theory and practice and demonstrates how psychoanalysis can provide fertile ground for radical politics and the transformation of international development.
Psychoanalysis and International Development
Authors: Kapoor Ilan
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the contributions of psychoanalysis to international development, illustrating ways in which thinking and practice in this field are psychoanalytically structured. Drawing mainly on the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, it emphasizes three key points. First, psychoanalysis can help uncover the unconscious of development — its gaps, dislocations, blind spots — thereby elucidating the latter's contradictory and seemingly “irrational” practices. Second, the important psychoanalytic notion of jouissance (enjoyment) can help explain why development discourse endures, that is, why it has such sustained appeal, and why we continue to invest in it despite its many problems. Third, psychoanalysis can serve as an important tool for ideology critique, helping to expose the socioeconomic contradictions and antagonisms that development persistently disavows. The chapter then reflects on the limits of psychoanalysis — the extent to which it is gendered and, given its Western origins, universalizable.
What “Drives” Capitalist Development?
Authors: Kapoor Ilan
Published: May 2021

This chapter highlights the importance of (unconscious) social passions in the socioeconomic system so central to development — capitalism. It focuses on the Lacanian notion of “drive,” a compulsion that stems from our ontological loss as linguistic beings, to suggest that capitalist development is propelled by an accumulation drive. Unlike desire, which capitalism manipulates at the level of consumption, drive involves the more fundamental compulsion to repeat endlessly, which manifests as the circular drive to accumulate for the sake of accumulation. In late capitalism, such a drive has resulted in a crisis of overaccumulation, which results in imperialism and “accumulation by dispossession,” especially in the global South. The capitalist development drive thus turns crisis into triumph, generating enjoyment, not from success, but from repeated failure. It is this libidinal kick (jouissance) which accompanies drive that helps explain capitalism's continued obstinacy and endurance. The chapter then reflects on the possibilities of disrupting capitalist development through drive.
The Politics of Perversion and Hysteria in the Tunisian Revolution and Its Aftermath
Authors: Kapoor Ilan
Published: May 2021

This chapter proposes to approach the Tunisian Revolution psychoanalytically. Rather than studying the revolution in a more conventional way, by examining only its socioeconomic and political ingredients, causes, and impacts, the chapter probes its underlying politics of desire — how subjects can follow the master's Law, despite misgivings about it (a politics of perversion), or choose instead to resist and transgress it, refusing to compromise on their desire for change (a politics of hysteria). Indeed, the “Jasmine Revolution” saw the overthrow of Ben Ali's despotic rule by broad-based social protest. But while the country subsequently witnessed the establishment of liberal democracy, the two main political forces (the liberal Nidaa Tounes and the Islamic Ennahda) have ended up pursuing many of the same socioeconomic policies of Ben Ali, which have in turn been met with popular opposition. The chapter then compares the Tunisian to the Egyptian revolution, reflecting on the broader psychoanalytic possibilities and perils of popular uprisings, including the risk that a politics of hysteria may transform into a politics of perversion.
Laura Nader
Authors: Nader Laura
Published: May 2021

This book documents decades of letters written, received, and archived by the book's author. The author revisits her correspondence with academic colleagues, lawyers, politicians, military officers, and many others, all with unique and insightful perspectives on a variety of social and political issues. She uses personal and professional correspondence as a way of examining complex issues and dialogues that might not be available by other means. By compiling these letters, the author allows us to take an intimate look at how she interacts with people across multiple fields, disciplines, and outlooks. Arranged chronologically by decade, the book follows the author from her early career and efforts to change patriarchal policies at UC, Berkeley, to her efforts to fight against climate change and minimize environmental degradation. The letters act as snapshots, giving us glimpses of the lives and issues that dominated culture at the time of their writing. Among the many issues that the correspondence in the book explores are how a man on death row sees things, how scientists are concerned about and approach their subject matter, and how an anthropologist ponders issues of American survival. The result is an intriguing and comprehensive history of energy, physics, law, anthropology, feminism and legal anthropology in the United States, as well as a reflection of a lifelong career in legal scholarship.
The Many-Minded Man
Authors: Christensen Joel P.
Published: May 2021

This book explores the content, character, and structure of the Homeric Odyssey through a modern psychological lens, focusing on how the epic both represents the workings of the human mind and provides for its audiences — both ancient and modern — a therapeutic model for coping with the exigencies of chance and fate. By reading the Odyssey as an exploration of the constitutive elements of human identity, the function of narrative in defining the self, and the interaction between the individual and their social context, the book addresses enduring questions about the poem, such as the importance of Telemachus's role, why Odysseus must tell his own tale, and the epic's sudden and unexpected closure. Through these dynamics, the book reasons, the Odyssey not only instructs readers about how narrative shapes a sense of agency but also offers solutions for avoiding dangerous stories and destructive patterns of thought.
China and the End of Global Silver, 1873-1937
Authors: Dean Austin
Published: May 2021

In the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using silver. Yet China had no unified national currency; there was not one monetary standard but many. Silver coins circulated alongside chunks of silver and every transaction became an “encounter of wits.” This book focuses on how officials, policy makers, bankers, merchants, academics, and journalists in China and around the world answered a simple question: how should China change its monetary system? Far from a narrow, technical issue, Chinese monetary reform is a dramatic story full of political revolutions, economic depressions, chance, and contingency. As different governments in China attempted to create a unified monetary standard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States, England, and Japan tried to shape the direction of Chinese monetary reform for their own benefit. This book argues convincingly that the silver era in world history ended owing to the interaction of imperial competition in East Asia and the state-building projects of different governments in China. When the Nationalist government of China went off the silver standard in 1935, it marked a key moment not just in Chinese history but in world history.
A Primer on the Qing Dynasty Monetary System
Authors: Dean Austin
Published: May 2021

This chapter highlights the relationship between copper and silver and stresses the decentralized nature of Qing dynasty monetary institutions and practices in the middle of the nineteenth century. It introduces how and why monetary arrangements began to be questioned in the late Qing. It also explains the contours of the currency, credit, and payment ecosystem in the middle of the nineteenth century in order to understand debates and conflicts about Chinese monetary reform from the 1870s to the 1930s. The chapter describes the Chinese currency system that is filled with different “ghost money” units of account, copper coins of varying quality, silver in the form of ingots and coins from Latin America, and notes from various financial institutions. It talks about the decentralized nature of the Qing monetary system that presented political and institutional challenges.
Money and Power on the World’s Last “Silver Frontier”
Authors: Dean Austin
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses the negotiations of the Qing dynasty on loan contracts with a banking consortium in the spring of 1911 that included firms from Britain, the United States, France, and Germany. It mentions the signing of the Bizhi shiye jiekuan or currency reform and industrial development loan among bankers and Qing officials to provide funds to unify the Chinese currency system on the silver standard and develop Manchuria. It also cites the diplomatic controversy about the currency loan and Chinese monetary reform that played out in the context of the rapidly changing money markets during the First World War. The chapter points out how China saw the rise of silver as an opportunity to consolidate its debts and move to a gold standard. It points out the significant rise of silver that set the scene for its later decline in the 1920s.
The Fabi and the End of the Global Silver Era, 1933–1937
Authors: Dean Austin
Published: May 2021

This chapter recounts the Nationalist government's announcement that it was going off the silver standard and onto a managed currency called the fabi in November 1935. It mentions how the government nationalized silver stocks, limited the note issued to several banks, and promised to buy and sell fabi without limit at certain exchange rates against the U.S. dollar and British pound. It also talks about members of the Silver Bloc in the United States who believed the falling price of silver in the late 1920s and early 1930s caused the Great Depression by taking away the purchasing power of Chinese consumers and contracting U.S. exports. The chapter analyses the Silver Purchase Act, which according to economist Milton Friedman harmed the U.S. silver producers as it destroyed what had been a major market for their output. It tackles the central question in China on how to change the monetary system and how to defend fabi as a new currency.
Ideal Minds
Authors: Trask Michael
Published: May 2021

Following the 1960s, the decade's focus on consciousness-raising transformed into an array of intellectual projects far afield of movement politics. The mind's powers came to preoccupy a range of thinkers and writers: ethicists pursuing contractual theories of justice, radical ecologists interested in the paleolithic brain, cultists, and the devout of both evangelical and New Age persuasions. This book presents a boldly revisionist argument about the revival of subjectivity in postmodern American culture, connecting familiar figures within the intellectual landscape of the 1970s who share a commitment to what the book calls “neo-idealism” as a weapon in the struggle against discredited materialist and behaviorist worldviews. In a heterodox intellectual and literary history of the 1970s, the book mixes ideas from cognitive science, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, deep ecology, political theory, science fiction, neoclassical economics, and the sociology of religion. It also delves into the decade's more esoteric branches of learning, including Scientology, anarchist theory, rapture prophesies, psychic channeling, and neo-Malthusianism. Through this investigation, the book argues that a dramatic inflation in the value of consciousness and autonomy beginning in the 1970s accompanied a growing argument about the state's inability to safeguard such values. Ultimately, the thinkers who the book analyses found alternatives to statism in conditions that would lend intellectual support to the consolidation of these concepts in the radical free market ideologies of the 1980s.
Lawmaking under Pressure
Authors: Mantilla Giovanni
Published: May 2021

This book analyzes the origins and development of the international humanitarian treaty rules that now exist to regulate internal armed conflict. Until well into the twentieth century, states allowed atrocious violence as an acceptable product of internal conflict. Why have states created international laws to control internal armed conflict? Why did states compromise their national security by accepting these international humanitarian constraints? Why did they create these rules at improbable moments, as European empires cracked, freedom fighters emerged, and fears of communist rebellion spread? The book explores the global politics and diplomatic dynamics that led to the creation of such laws in 1949 and in the 1970s. By the 1949 Diplomatic Conference that revised the Geneva Conventions, most countries supported legislation committing states and rebels to humane principles of wartime behavior and to the avoidance of abhorrent atrocities, including torture and the murder of non-combatants. However, for decades, states had long refused to codify similar regulations concerning violence within their own borders. Diplomatic conferences in Geneva twice channeled humanitarian attitudes alongside Cold War and decolonization politics, even compelling reluctant European empires Britain and France to accept them. This book documents the tense politics behind the making of humanitarian laws that have become touchstones of the contemporary international normative order. The book not only explains the pressures that resulted in constraints on national sovereignty but also uncovers the fascinating international politics of shame, status, and hypocrisy that helped to produce the humanitarian rules now governing internal conflict.
Custom and Socially Pressured Codification
Authors: Mantilla Giovanni
Published: May 2021

This chapter demonstrates how the processes and outcomes of multilateral lawmaking are better captured by histories, concepts, and theories that denote political struggle and degrees of contestation, face-saving, compromise, and contingency. It discusses global governance and the operation of international law and society that demands accounting for the combined integration and discord and characterize most international associations and interactions. It also reviews the wide expansion of the international humanitarian law (IHL) for internal conflict and the post-1977 legal revolution. The chapter traces the origins and theorizes the making of the codified IHL and provides an empirical assessment of its influence in internal conflict. It discusses that the construction of IHL remains a contested process underpinned by social pressure, face-saving, and strategic compromise.
Chicago's Industrial Decline
Authors: Lewis Robert
Published: May 2021

This book charts the city's decline since the 1920s and describes the early development of Chicago's famed (and reviled) growth machine. Beginning in the 1940s and led by local politicians, downtown business interest, financial institutions, and real estate groups, place-dependent organizations in Chicago implemented several industrial renewal initiatives with the dual purpose of stopping factory closings and attracting new firms in order to turn blighted property into modern industrial sites. At the same time, a more powerful coalition sought to adapt the urban fabric to appeal to middle-class consumption and residential living. As the book shows, the two aims were never well integrated, and the result was on-going disinvestment and the inexorable decline of Chicago's industrial space. By the 1950s, the book argues, it was evident that the early incarnation of the growth machine had failed to maintain Chicago's economic center in industry. Although larger economic and social forces — specifically, competition for business and for residential development from the suburbs in the Chicagoland region and across the whole United States — played a role in the city's industrial decline, the book stresses the deep incoherence of post-World War II economic policy and urban planning that hoped to square the circle by supporting both heavy industry and middle- to upper-class amenities in downtown Chicago.
Fulfilling the Sacred Trust
Authors: Heiss Mary Ann
Published: May 2021

This book explores the implementation of international accountability for dependent territories under the United Nations during the early Cold War era. Although the Western nations that drafted the UN Charter saw the organization as a means of maintaining the international status quo they controlled, newly independent nations saw the UN as an instrument of decolonization and an agent of change disrupting global political norms. The book documents the unprecedented process through which these new nations came to wrest control of the United Nations from the World War II victors that founded it, allowing the UN to become a vehicle for global reform. It examines the consequences of these early changes on the global political landscape in the midst of heightened international tensions playing out in Europe, the developing world, and the UN General Assembly. The book puts this anti-colonial advocacy for accountability into perspective by making connections between the campaign for international accountability in the United Nations and other postwar international reform efforts such as the anti-apartheid movement, Pan-Africanism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the drive for global human rights. Chronicling the combative history of this campaign, the book details the global impact of the larger UN reformist effort. It demonstrates the unintended impact of decolonization on the United Nations and its agenda, as well as the shift in global influence from the developed to the developing world.
Decolonizing Palestine
Authors: Sen Somdeep
Published: May 2021

This book rejects the notion that liberation from colonialization exists as a singular moment in history when the colonizer is ousted by the colonized. Instead, it considers the case of the Palestinian struggle for liberation from its settler colonial condition as a complex psychological and empirical mix of the colonial and the postcolonial. Specifically, the book examines the two seemingly contradictory, yet coexistent, anticolonial and postcolonial modes of politics adopted by Hamas following the organization's unexpected victory in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council election. Despite the expectations of experts, Hamas has persisted as both an armed resistance to Israeli settler colonial rule and as a governing body. Based on ethnographic material collected in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Israel, and Egypt, the book argues that the puzzle Hamas presents is not rooted in predicting the timing or process of its abandonment of either role. The challenge instead lies in explaining how and why it maintains both, and what this implies for the study of liberation movements and postcolonial studies more generally.
When Spaces of Transit Fail Their Designers
Authors: Golubev Alexey
Published: May 2021

This chapter looks at the mass housing program launched by the Soviet leadership in the late 1950s from the perspective of urban planning and management. It looks into the transit spaces of new socialist neighborhoods, focusing on the stairwells of Soviet apartment blocks. Designed as utilitarian spaces for the fast passage of people from home to work to leisure activities, they revealed an ability to accumulate people and connect them in various ways, which Soviet authorities and intellectuals often interpreted as threatening to the public good. The Soviet stairwell established different affective regimes of Soviet people's interactions with urban space and provoked some of the hidden social conflicts of late socialism that became reflected in socially dominant structures of the Soviet self. The communities discussed in the chapter are predominantly male. The material and social conditions of late socialism provoked different regimes and forms of masculinity, which is another important topic of this book.
More Than Medals
Authors: Frost Dennis J.
Published: May 2021

How does a small provincial city in southern Japan become the site of a world-famous wheelchair marathon that has been attracting the best international athletes since 1981? This book answers the question and addresses the histories of individuals, institutions, and events — the 1964 Paralympics, the FESPIC Games, the Ōita International Wheelchair Marathon, the Nagano Winter Paralympics, and the 2021 Tokyo Summer Games that played important roles in the development of disability sports in Japan. Sporting events in the postwar era, the book shows, have repeatedly served as forums for addressing the concerns of individuals with disabilities. The book provides new insights on the cultural and historical nature of disability and demonstrates how sporting events have challenged some stigmas associated with disability, while reinforcing or generating others. The book analyzes institutional materials and uses close readings of media, biographical sources, and interviews with Japanese athletes to highlight the profound — though often ambiguous — ways in which sports have shaped how postwar Japan has perceived and addressed disability. The book's novel approach highlights the importance of the Paralympics and the impact that disability sports have had on Japanese society.