bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cursed
Authors: Tokarska-Bakir Joanna
Published: May 2024

This book investigates the July 4, 1946, Kielce pogrom, a milestone in the periodization of the Jewish diaspora. This massacre compelled thousands of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust to flee postwar Poland. It remains a negative reference point in the Polish historical narrative and represents a lack of reckoning with the role of antisemitism in postwar Polish society and identity politics. The book weaves together the voices of the Kielce pogrom survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators with a myriad of other archival sources. In doing so, it exposes wartime and postwar biographies of local factory workers, city and church officials, local police officers, and members of the security service, some of whom participated in the Holocaust and then directly or indirectly participated in the Kielce pogrom. The book paints a social portrait that explores people's behavior in light of forces and emotions greater than themselves. It reconstructs a postwar communist system that, despite promises to combat deeply rooted antisemitism, not only failed to prevent its spread but turned a blind eye to it and eventually used it to legitimize itself. Cursed is a microhistory that recreates the events of the Kielce pogrom step by step and examines the dominant hypotheses about the pogrom through the prism of previously classified archival evidence. It offers readers a nuanced analysis that cuts across social and ideological divisions. The resulting narrative is filled with new discoveries not only about the Kielce pogrom but about the nature of antisemitism, hostility toward minorities, and collective violence.
Voices
Authors: Tokarska-Bakir Joanna
Published: May 2024

This chapter presents testimonies and accounts by the survivors of the Kielce pogrom. On the morning of July 4, 1946, a rumor spread in Kielce that Jews murdered Polish children. Jakub Aleksandrowicz, a tailor who had come to Kielce on business and was staying at the Hotel Polski, just a few hundred meters from the Jewish shelter, saw crowds making their way toward Planty Street. People in the crowd were carrying wooden posts, chains, canes, and stones in their hands. However, he saw neither government nor local authorities. Meanwhile, a small crowd started to gather in front of the building of the Jewish Committee located at 7 Planty Street. Policemen and officers of the Polish Army entered the building and forced the residents of the Ichud kibbutz to get out. As soon as they took the weapons of the residents, they started shooting. The chapter details the stories of other survivors and witnesses to the pogrom.
The Kielce Police (MO)
Authors: Tokarska-Bakir Joanna
Published: May 2024

This chapter studies the role of the Kielce police (MO) in the pogrom. Many Kielce functionaries invoked a patriotism that reconciled antisemitism with service to communism. Among them was the provincial commander of the police, Wiktor Kuźnicki. Before becoming a police commander, he was director of police operational groups, following in the footsteps of the Red Army offensive and preparing the ground for the sowing of communism. The chapter looks at a few select persons from Kuźnicki's circle to reveal the quasi-prewar structure of the provincial headquarters of the MO in Kielce. These include Stefan Sędek, Antoni Jarosz, Major Stefan Dobraczyński, Second Lieutenant Bronisław Kurczyński, Sergeant Zdzisław Domagała, and Tadeusz Majewski-Laske.
Resisting Anti-Asian Racism in Public-Facing Work and Teaching
Authors: Kim Joey S.
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about the author, a scholar trained in British romanticism. It describes the author's experience as an East Asian woman of assumed Chinese descent who must balance the real threat of violence against her body while also navigating both demands from outside academia for public engagement and her transition onto the tenure track. The chapter reflects on the historical patterns of Orientalism and Asian exclusion that have given rise to anti-Asian sentiment and violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. The author shares how this experience influenced her teaching and motivated her move into more publicly engaged scholarship. It uses “Oriental” and “Orientalism” to describe a public-facing discourse of East/West binary thinking that pivots between imaginative idea and historical and political reality.
Teaching German in the Settler Colonial University
Authors: Gallagher Maureen O.
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on the author's story as a German studies scholar who was hired to teach remotely at an Australian university. It explores the way that dislocation inspired the author to think about land acknowledgements and settler colonialism in higher education. It also argues for the importance of a decolonialization of universities that centers indigenous lives and thought to think critically about the intersecting and interconnected histories of colonization that underlie modern academic work. The pandemic's disruption to normal scholarly mobility revealed the spatial dimension of colonization and the interconnected histories of colonialism that enable higher education in North America and elsewhere. The chapter discusses how listening to the multiple land acknowledgements throughout the Women in German conference clarified for Gallagher a personal discomfort she felt with her own institution's land acknowledgement during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Crafting the Legislation
Authors: Hart Judy
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about William J. Whalen, who was the first director to work with a congressional mandate to annually set the agenda for consideration of new national parks by Congress. Director Whalen was an intelligent and bold visionary and would have observed that the Park Service had slighted women's history. The chapter details how Director Whalen overruled his Denver planning managers and added the Women's Rights study to the package to be forwarded to Congress. The chapter reviews the draft legislation directing that the Stanton house and the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls be acquired and preserved, managed, and interpreted, the traditional model for a national park. The draft legislation also included an advisory commission of eighteen members intended to raise awareness for the new park and to support and continue the collaboration among the nonprofits in Seneca Falls.
The Sacred Laundromat
Authors: Hart Judy
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the Wesleyan Chapel, which was the site of the 1848 convention for women's rights and among the most important buildings in America for women's history. The laundromat was one of the largest, tallest, and most imposing structures on Fall Street and it told too many stories to be an easy fit for the National Park Service. The chapter points out that how the Wesleyan Chapel's nationally significant story of the 1848 women's rights convention had been thoroughly buried behind and under so many other stories. The chapter highlights the historic structure of the Wesleyan Chapel, making it the centerpiece of the proposed Women's Rights National Historical Park. The work of fifteen-year-old Hanns Kuttner and historical society director Anne Ackerson made it plausible to include the laundromat in the proposed Women's Rights Park.
He Feeds the Sparrow
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins with a thank-you letter from a flyspeck hamlet in the Adirondack Mountains given to Gerrit Smith, a radical reformer in upstate New York. The thank-you note was from one of Smith's three thousand Black beneficiaries that remained up in the North Country and still farming as Smith had hoped. With the 120,000 acres that Smith gifted, he gave as many as three thousand Black New Yorkers a reason to leave the city, remake themselves as yeoman farmers, and enjoy the fruits of citizenship when they gained the right to vote. The chapter considers land reform as the other great goal of Smith's giveaway, which Smith deemed quite as urgent as racial justice at the polls. Smith believed that city Blacks would benefit the most from his land gifts in the woods.
Trailblazers
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses Gerrit Smith's land agent in Syracuse, Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen, who packed up his conveyance and set out for the long trip to the Black Woods. Loguen sent his specific findings on Black Woods to his fellow agent James McCune Smith, who shared them with Smith and the North Star. Some white folks were playing a highhanded game on their colored brethren and led grantees to worthless lots and charged them royally for the deception, urging them to sell their gift deeds for pennies. The chapter details how grantees who could not read or write risked getting fleeced if their paperwork was not in order. Loguen had procured the names of nine right-thinking White Adirondackers who could be local allies that were literate and sympathetic and could keep the sharks at bay.
If You Only Knew How Poor I Am
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses John Brown's travel to the west after the enactment of the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the eruption of that violent, episodic, unnamed war to win Kansas for free soil or slavery. John Brown and his hand-built company of antislavery guerrillas had gained a national reputation for their fleet, aggressive tactics. The chapter describes Brown's Adirondack neighbors, who were willing to risk life and family in the effort to resist the slave power in the half decade before the Civil War. The chapter looks at the Kansas Territory, which promised the New England Emigrant Aid Company that it would be seeded with ballot-hungry pioneers primed to vote the antislavery ticket. Proslavery homesteaders on the east side of the Missouri saw antislavery arrivals as land-lusting, big-talking interlopers backed by citified political insiders and the eastern press.
The Muriel Rukeyser Era
Authors: Rukeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This book makes available for the first time a range of Muriel Rukeyser's prose, a rich and diverse archive of political, social, and aesthetic writings. The book is an assembled selection of unpublished and out-of-print texts, demonstrating the diversity, brilliance, and possibilities of mid-twentieth-century women's intellectual life and sociopolitical engagement. Although primarily known as a poet, Rukeyser produced an expansive and influential body of nonfiction and critical writings. Reflective of a deeply committed thinker, her accessible but philosophically complex prose—including essays, lectures, radio scripts, stories, and reviews—addresses issues related to racial, gender, and class justice, war and war crimes; the prison-industrial complex, Jewish culture and diaspora, motherhood, literature, music, cinema, and translation. Many of the selected texts have been forgotten, have fallen out of print, or were never previously published because of conservative Cold War political and gender orthodoxies. The book offers new insight into Rukeyser's radical and strikingly contemporary vision for the role of the writer—especially the woman writer. This selection reveals the centrality of feminism, antifascism, and antiracism to her thinking and thus affirms the resonance and urgency of her work today.
Communication and Poetry (1940)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins by looking at two figures of communication: John Brown and Hans Carossa. Carossa the poet is passive compared with the figure of Brown, a furious prophetic old man. However, the gesture is part of the same pattern as Brown's. It is the communication that is not prophecy at all, for it is concerned with the present and the past, too, as much as it is concerned with the possible future. That is the gesture of poetry. The chapter then assesses the problem of communication, considering the debasers of values and words who break meaning down. It also discusses poetic drama and its extreme lack of action. Another great hindrance, which has been true of all poetry and not only the poetry of the theatre, has been its inconclusive search for a tradition.
The Flown Arrow: The Aftermath of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case (1932)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter assesses the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were killed in the electric chair in Massachusetts on August 23, 1927. There were those who believed during the seven years of trial and imprisonment that the accused were innocent. There were others who were convinced when the court records, the testimony of psychologists, and the letters of Sacco and Vanzetti themselves were made public. As such, the execution set loose a volley of condemning comments that riddled the pride of Massachusetts. There was even an anthology of poems for Sacco and Vanzetti compiled, which included the opinions of the strongest of living poets in a volume called America Arraigned! Ultimately, the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti mean the continuance of the existence of foreign prejudice. It is not that these men were ever unpatriotic. They always were disappointed that they hoped too high for America, expected too much of a land that promised freedom. They were for something that was a generalization of American principles, basically American idealism. However, their beliefs do not enter into any discussion of the merits of their case.
Barcelona on the Barricades (1936)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter shows how the author was sent to cover the first People's Olympiad in Barcelona by the London magazine Life and Letters To-Day. It was to be the great anti-Nazi celebration of the workers' sports clubs of Europe and America, the retort to Hitler Olympics, a week of united front games, theater, festival. However, while the author was still on the train, a Communist uprising began in Barcelona. The generals, the priests, the wealth of the country, had risen against the people and a people's left-wing government, uniting with the Carlists in a savage attempt to make a fascist, if not a monarchist, Spain. The author was then taken to the Hotel Olympic, which had been requisitioned for people connected with the Workers' Olympiad. Mattresses were put down on the floor for the two thousand athletes and the hotel was converted into a refuge for foreigners. The chapter describes how the athletes and the groups with them marched halfway through Barcelona in a tremendous demonstration with the people's army. Eventually, the foreign nationals were asked to go back to their countries to spread the news of what they have witnessed in Spain.
Barcelona, 1936 (1936)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter presents the author's experiences in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Sent to cover the first People's Olympiad, the author was in the last train to enter Spain after fighting began. There had been a tremendous battle in Barcelona and many were dead and wounded, but the generals were beginning to be beaten. Cars began to appear in the town with the initials of the united trade union groups which formed a strong part of the Popular Front. The town was warned that the fascists were retreating through the roads. The chapter details how the author arrived at the Hotel Olympic.
She Came to Us (1958)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on Minnijean Brown, a sixteen-year-old student expelled from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. She was one of the nine Black students who had been going to Central High since September. Their first day there was a storm of feeling at riot pitch, with the National Guard trying to make a wall behind which these students could go to school. Minnijean then came to New Lincoln School in New York City, where she was offered a scholarship. In Little Rock, when the nine Black students were admitted, the school authorities pledged them never to “retaliate to verbal or physical harassment regardless of circumstance or degree.” That meant, according to the local secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, that Minnijean “could not raise a voice or a hand in defense of her very life without jeopardizing her future at Central. Yet those who contrived this agreement did nothing to deter her tormentors, who increased day by day.” The author explains that the duty of the school is now as large as is the life of the child who is to live in the democratic society of the future.
The Killing of the Children (1973)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses how the author spent time in jail following the peace action of Redress on June 27, 1972, in the Senate building. Redress, a grassroots anti-war organization, presented a citizens' petition calling for a redress of grievances, asking the Senate to suspend all its other business and devote itself to the most urgent question of stopping the war in Vietnam. They were greeted by Senator Gravel and met with senators Javits and Kennedy. Then came their first choice: whether they would wait outside the Senate chamber, in the corridor, for an answer or not; and then, whether they would wait standing, or leave if they were asked to, or in a gesture of grief and protest, lie down on the cool mosaic floor. The chapter recounts the author's visit to the prisoners of war in their camp in Hanoi. She was also asked to speak in Hanoi on American writing and literature.
The Uses of Fear (1978)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines how the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg reveals the ramification of the 1947 Truman Doctrine. The Truman Doctrine initiated US cold war containment policy by establishing a global sphere of influence to stop the spread of Soviet communism. What was the climate in which they were killed? Men and women were haunted by the mushroom cloud, not understanding either the science or politics of the atomic age, and feeling that doom hung over them. The nervousness and hysteria of any of these people could be worked on, in terms of anti-communism. It is clear that if the Rosenbergs were innocent, they were being pushed to their death to make them lie. Their refusal to lie and their sacrifice was a gift to many Americans.
So Easy to See (1946)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter presents a version of the author's introduction to her photo–text collaboration with photographer Berenice Abbott. This project was based around Abbott's Supersight photographs. Invented, built, and patented by Abbott, Supersight technology became the basis for later scientific photography. The attempt to break down barriers that were walls between truth and reality, artificial and political in their origins and meaning led Abbott past laboratories and classrooms to photography of scientific process. More basic is the photographer's attitude toward realism. Her work was part of a wide attempt to bring to spiritual life, and physical and intellectual life, this realism.
From Sunday at Nine (1949)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter details the first and final episodes' scripts for Sunday at Nine (1949), where the author talks about Emily Dickinson and the blues. Emily Dickinson was a recluse. She lived in her house and her garden, locked away after an extremely social youth; and her queer concern, even for New England in her time, was truth. Ultimately, the base of poets like Emily Dickinson is in the familiar hymns of their youth and their churchgoing families. The author discusses the blues. She describes how, in the last few years, the attitudes toward jazz and toward the blues had split sharply, and there was no longer a small, isolated audience to listen to these penetrating and native songs. Instead, there were two groups: one group stayed away from everything connected with jazz and thought of literature, and music, only in relation to what was known as art forms. The other group was devoted to jazz.
The Classic Ground (1941)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter studies Marya Zaturenska's The Listening Landscape (1941). With this third book of poems, Zaturenska established a direction which was traceable in the difference between Cold Morning Sky (1937) and Threshold and Hearth (1934). In those earlier volumes, the lyric form she made her home was developing: lucid and musical, and obliquely lit by the application of formal symbols to complex emotion. To Zaturenska, the form of her work had not arrived as a compromise or a late choice: The Listening Landscape carries on the style of ten years prior in what may now be seen as an even growth. This poetry has lyrics sealed in their transparency, through which may be seen the amazing and troubled images of the world.
Nearer to the Well-Spring (1943)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter reviews Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. The first sequence, of twenty-six, was written after Rilke's letters had complained continually of his inability to concentrate, because of the effect of the war. In the grip of this crisis, Rilke broke through his isolation. Speaking in the Elegies for angels in their full height and menace, he speaks for the root, the shadow, the transience, for the song which visits death, visits the gleaming earth, can pass only as song, only as Orpheus. For Eurydice, pure and unconscious, is human to the end, even in afterlife. But the poet, the wound, Rilke-Orpheus, rent and scattered, cannot be destroyed; in the end, he can only be heard, heard everywhere. Rilke's definition of religion, as “a direction of the heart,” surely applies to poetry; and a “literal rendering” can as surely ignore the direction of a poem as a statement about the “facts” of war can ignore the issues of the war, when “facts” and “literalness” depend on relationship.
A Lorca Evening (1951)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights Spanish modernist poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was murdered by fascist paramilitary in 1936. Lorca's theatre is close to the classic theatre of Greece in form as well as in theme. The daughters, the maid of Bernarda Alba in Lorca's final play, The House of Bernarda Alba, do more than serve the purpose of the Greek chorus. They are the chorus and leader. The passion and clarity of that theatre is in Lorca's scenes, a combination of purity and violence which emerges, not as brutality but as form. A control and sense of law in which denial and repression are the worst violence, and can lead only to doom.
A Crystal for the Metaphysical (1966)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on Marianne Moore's Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics (1966). The book performs a rare act: these poems and brief essays supply another part in the definition of a structure, accurate and personal. In this, her fourteenth book, the objects appear to face each other; forms that had seemed crystals, twin crystals, take on a further growth. The polarity is clearer and greater than one had guessed. Many of her poems are “metaphysical newmown hay”; and Marianne Moore has offered the charge against herself with gallantry, answering it with the crystal structure, the delicate, courageous wit of poems.
Faith, Ritual, and the Manuscripts
Authors: Cooper David L.
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the ritual and commemoration practices that brought people in touch with the Czech manuscripts. It highlights how the practices with the manuscripts instilled deeply personal faith in their authenticity and a cult-like attachment to them. Czech nationalism is strikingly different from that of many of its neighbors since religion plays a prominent role as a marker of national identity. The manuscripts, with their image of the pagan Czechs resisting outside domination and religious influence, may have offered a neutral ground for common identification, without actually requiring Czech patriots to drop their religious affiliations. The chapter explores the status of the manuscripts as cult objects and their central place in the national faith.
Resource Nationalism in Indonesia
Authors: Warburton Eve
Published: May 2024

This book traces nationalist policy trajectories in Indonesia back to the preferences of big local business interests. Commodity booms often prompt more nationalist policy styles in resource-rich countries. Usually, this nationalist push weakens once a boom is over. But in Indonesia, a major global exporter of coal, palm oil, nickel, and other minerals, the intensity of nationalist policy interventions increased after the early twenty-first-century commodity boom came to an end. Equally puzzling, the state applied nationalist policies unevenly across the land and resource sectors. This book explains these trends by examining the economic and political benefits that accrue to domestic business actors when commodity prices soar. The book shows how the centrality of patronage to Indonesia's democratic political economy, and the growing importance of mining and palm oil as drivers of export earnings, enhanced both the instrumental and structural power of major domestic companies, giving them new influence over the direction of nationalist change.
Judicial Procedure as Countermagic in Malleus Maleficarum
Authors: Levine Laura
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the section on judicial procedure in Malleus Maleficarum. In the middle of part 3, question 16 of Malleus Maleficarum, the inquisitors Kramer and Sprenger spell out a kind of theatrical finale in which the judge manages to expose the witch as a witch. Why do the inquisitors conceive of judicial procedure in such highly theatricalized terms? The chapter examines three possible answers to this question. The first considers judicial theatricality as a series of tricks, in effect, bad-faith deceptions. The second explanation looks at the inquisitors' conception of judicial process as a response to a kind of “workload” problem—what they call the arduousness of examining witches. The third explanation looks at judicial theatricality as a counterperformance. The chapter suggests that the inquisitors conceive of judicial process as a performance because they implicitly envision judicial process as compensatory—an attempt to neutralize the deeper and less visible performance of witchcraft itself.
Spenser’s False Shewes
Authors: Levine Laura
Published: May 2024

This chapter addresses Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. At the end of canto 8 of book 1 of The Faerie Queene, Spenser has Una strip the witch Duessa so Red Cross Knight can see who he has been consorting with. The stripping of Duessa belongs to the long historical tradition in which justice searches and strips the witch to establish that she is, in fact, a witch. What does looking at Duessa's naked body “do” or accomplish for Red Cross Knight? Does Spenser luxuriate in or incriminate the kinds of practices operative in Newes from Scotland? The chapter argues that while Spenser exposes the fantasy of certainty at work in the witch-stripping tradition as just that—fantasy—the scene is nonetheless implicated in the kinds of sexual violence against women endemic to that tradition. It suggests that looking at Duessa's naked body serves as much as an attempt to reconstitute Red Cross's masculinity as it does to expose Duessa's falsehood.
Danger in Words
Authors: Levine Laura
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores Christopher Marlowe's Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus. In act 2, scene 3 of Faustus, Mephistopheles seeks to disabuse Faustus of the notion that the words he uses in conjuring have magical power. However, Faustus's central act in the play, his promise of his soul to the devil, would seem to offer the consummate example of words which do something simply by being uttered. The question of whether words are efficacious is complicated by a peculiar feature of Faustus's promise, the feature of repetition. Faustus does not promise his soul once in the play but over and over again. What is the performative power of a promise if it has to be repeated again and again? Does repetition suggest a prior iteration has been ineffective? One answer to these questions lies in the legal tensions surrounding the notion of promises themselves during the period, tensions that had been building up since the middle of the sixteenth century but ultimately came to a head in what has come to be known as Slade's Case.
The French Antarctic
Authors: Martin-Nielsen Janet
Published: May 2024

This chapter analyzes Terre Adélie's place in evolving political contexts, from imperial expansion to postwar reconstruction and from the Cold War to the environmental turn. It shows how France became and has remained an Antarctic power malgré soi despite only intermittent political and cultural interest at home. Each stage in France's journey to its present position as a claimant state and Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) power was propelled less by internal desire or motivation than by a deep need to respond to an adversary. The chapter details the pattern of French involvement with Terre Adélie that is representative of the territory's outlier status in broader French conceptions of colonialism and empire. It also looks at France's sub-Antarctic possessions, scattered islands, and archipelagos whose history is entwined with Terre Adélie.
Russian Liberalism under Yeltsin
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter describes the newly independent Russian Federation under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin following the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. The Russian Federation embarked on a program of radical liberal economic reform known as “shock therapy.” Russia surrendered its control over prices and foreign trade, removed restrictions on private business, and privatized the majority of state-owned enterprises. The chapter outlines elements of Russian society that turned against the reforms and demanded that they be slowed down or halted. Liberal rule in the 1990s helped to discredit liberalism in the eyes of the Russian population as liberalism's triumph proved to be the cause of its own demise.
Caresmar’s Works
Authors: Freedman Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores Jaume Caresmar’s works. At his death, Caresmar left an immense collection of finished and unfinished manuscripts and a small number of actual publications. Most of his plans were never realized, and only ten short works appeared in print during his lifetime. Seven were devoted to hagiography, broadly defined: three sermons; one tract each on two local saints, Severus and Eulalia; a partial history of outstanding members of the Premonstratensian Order; and a disquisition on an inscription from the church of Sant Medir. Moreover, there were multiple works on the same subject: concerning Àger, for example, or Catalan monastic documents, and also on the history of Bellpuig. The chapter then looks at Caresmar’s short description of Catalonia’s past prosperity and present impoverishment written in 1780, which is known to posterity as the “Letter to the Baron de la Linde.” It also considers his defense of the claims of Tarragona to ecclesiastical preference, as well as his biography of Bernat Boïl and his work on the records from the Cathedral of Barcelona.
Revolutionary Relations
Authors: Watson Vajra M.
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about the Rose Family Creative Empowerment Center (RFCE), which was founded as a nonprofit organization in 2013 and has been serving the South Sacramento area for several decades. It focuses on RFCE's founder and executive director, Jackie Rose, whose work revolves around reclaiming and rebuilding a sense of a community village. The chapter also mentions Mr. Echols, a former custodian at Grant High School, who encouraged Jackie to get involved in the community and shaped her trajectory of service. Observation, discernment, intentionality, and activism are cornerstones of Jackie's lifelong work, and she remains a consistent force for change throughout Sacramento because of them. Jackie has discovered that many people who work with the most disenfranchised populations provide a horrifically low quality of services and get away with it.
Transformative Justice Community
Authors: Winn Lawrence “Torry” , Watson Vajra M.
Published: May 2024

This chapter reviews the Black Child Legacy Campaign's (BCLC) plan to reduce deaths of African American children in Sacramento County. It outlines strategies to transform public systems and increase community engagement with and by local families and communities and to guide the path to reduce Black child deaths. It also looks at questions that were guided by the five pedagogical stances of engaging transformative justice in order to gain a deeper understanding of BCLC: history matters, race matters, justice matters, language matters, and futures matter. The chapter analyzes findings drawn from interviews, archival data, and participant observations that provide insights for communities considering implementing frameworks to improve the life chances of Black families and youth. The partnership between BCLC and Sacramento County provides Community Incubator Leads (CIL) with human capital, making it possible for them to deliver the services and resources needed by the most vulnerable and under-resourced.
The Mandate of Heaven in Indochina, 1884–1930
Authors: Slobodkin Yan
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers the extent of famine in Indochina. It starts with how the French believed famine was a tragedy of nature that correlates with improvident races and inhospitable environments instead of a government problem. French colonialism had an ambivalent relationship with the Vietnamese tradition of famine management. Meanwhile, French racial and environmental determinism was tempered ethically and politically by Confucianism and Vietnamese traditions of civil engineering and grain distribution. The chapter then looks into the period from the invasion of Tonkin and Annam, when anticolonial resistance and reformist colonial humanism ushered in a new phase in French thinking about famine.
Kenyan Muslims and the Political Imagination of Space on the Indian Ocean Rim
Authors: Prestholdt Jeremy
Published: May 2024

This chapter covers Kenyan Muslims and the political imagination of space on the Indian Ocean Rim. It focuses on the political imagination of space as a response to questions of citizenship and belonging. In coastal Kenya, alienation and historical injustices have engendered multiple political responses shaped by national and international interpretive frames. The chapter discusses the politics of territoriality across several periods of political tension to demonstrate its recurrence and its flexibility, while also considering the articulations of autochthony. It explains that concepts of the coast as a discrete geography have served as a catalyst for political imagination and collective action.
Muslim Devotional Singing in Two Bengals
Authors: McDermott Rachel Fell
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on Muslim devotional singing. It discusses the history of the songs in Bengali on patriotism, love, nature, and Hindu devotionalism before considering the surprising aftereffects of Kazi Nazrul Islam's newly created genre. As a genre, the lyrics brought a Bengali sensibility and intimacy to Islamic themes. The chapter looks into the Hindu and Hindu-connoting elements within Nazrul's songs before considering why most people did not realize them as such. It cites that Bengali Hindus have been singing love songs to their deities since the twelfth century, but because of the dubious status of music in Islamic contexts, such songs came very late to Bengali Muslims.
Caricature and Ephemeral Print in London und Paris
Authors: Franzel Sean
Published: May 2024

This chapter evaluates the place of ephemeral print and caricature in Friedrich Justin Bertuch's journals, particularly looking at London und Paris. It examines the journals' critique of the cultural politics of the Napoleonic era. The chapter considers caricature as both a type of printed image and, more broadly, a mode of cultural journalism. Caricature mobilizes a variety of shapes of time, including fleeting public interest and the subversion of self-serious claims to monumental timelessness. Although associated with the history of ancient satire and classicizing line drawing, caricature diminishes neoclassical forms. Exploring Bertuch's journals' satirical treatment of recurring popular festivities, the chapter shows how his journals remained skeptical of the historical vision of revolutionary cultural politics, even while helping readers orient themselves historically.
Nyai Liminality
Authors: Seng Guo-Quan
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the historical agency of the nyai, the Chinese male settler's native concubine, in the formative years of creole Chinese society on the northern coast of Java between the 1750s and the 1850s. It traces the nyai's origins to the system of slavery in island Southeast Asia. The nyai in this period were the fortunate minority of indigenous women who had enduring relationships with their Chinese partners. They acquired respectability from Chinese society for having brought up their mestizo children as Chinese, and from everyone else for their relative wealth. Yet the nyai remained throughout this period a liminal ethno-gendered figure. She was central to the creation and reproduction of creolized Chinese communities but remained structurally excluded from Confucian marriage. Her historical role was to raise the next generation of mestizo children as Chinese, who could then claim descent from their fathers for the purpose of customary marriage.
“When Time Shall End”
Authors: Brown Laura
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks at the 1755 Lisbon earthquake to analyze the literary representation, in the contemporary poetry, of a specific and singular geologic event. On the one hand, these poems can be described as “interchangeable,” in that their use of tropes of “disaster discourse”—lists of innumerable human victims—seems to offer only convention, instead of a specific attention to this distinctive event: the other-than-human realm seems to escape human representation. However, the evocation of multiplicity itself in these poems offers a starting point for a counterhuman explication. And then, the turn in these poems from a diffuse multiplicity to a powerful, immediate singularity points to an other-than-human power that links the earthquake poetry with the coming of “chaos” of The Dunciad. The ultimate moment of counterhuman uncreation in Alexander Pope's poem offers a model for the turn from the many to the momentous in the poetry of the Lisbon earthquake.
Storms and Torrents
Authors: Brown Laura
Published: May 2024

This chapter describes the impact of innumerability and impossibility in Jonathan Swift's “A Description of a City Shower” (1710) and Daniel Defoe's The Storm; or, A Collection of the Most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters Which Happen'd in the Late Dreadful Tempest Both by Sea and Land (1704). It explores the vast impossibility of the human representation of climate to discover an ongoing crossfire between human authority and unpredictable other-than-human vitality. Well beyond and long predating “A City Shower” and The Storm, the representation of the weather has been used as a tool to shape, manage, and understand human being, consistently invoking a premise of human priority. From the classical period onward, and even to the present day, accounts of climate have focused on the equation of human ailments or character traits with climatic events. Though the representation of climate is conventionally framed around its impact on human “nature,” the “City Shower” and The Storm project the experience of weather through forms of confluence and turbulence that move all things and beings indiscriminately, reflecting an agency beyond any human certainty.
The President
Authors: Mietzner Marcus
Published: May 2024

This chapter traces the historical origins and development of the presidency in Indonesia. It begins by providing sketches of the discussions on the 1945 constitution; the changes to presidential power made in late 1945 and again in 1949 and 1950; the rise of autocratic presidentialism in 1959; its further consolidation under Suharto; and the adaptation of the presidential system to the new democratic context after 1998. The chapter then explains the current powers of post-authoritarian presidents as enshrined in the constitution, which was amended through four rounds of revisions between 1998 and 2002. It also illustrates the organizational arrangements that guide the operations of the presidency. This discussion explains the inner workings of the palace administration itself as well as the political and formal functions of its three main support bodies: the state secretariat, the office of the cabinet secretary, and the office of the chief of staff of the president. Finally, the chapter highlights some of the main approaches through which post-2004 Indonesian presidents have built coalitions to stabilize their rule.
Conclusion
Authors: Capuano Peter J.
Published: May 2024

This concluding chapter shows how the bodily oriented idiomatic dimension to Charles Dickens's imagination eventually proves so generative and pervasive that it ends up affecting not only the prose of the modern novelists who come after him but also the criticism of those who continue to analyze his life and work today. Indeed, Dickens helped pave the way for late-Victorian and modernist novelists to write about “serious” and “sophisticated” topics using everyday idiomatic language. The chapter begins by looking at Henry James's use of body idioms in his fiction. It then considers James Joyce's experimental use of language. One of the most specific ways that Dickens entered Joyce's artistic language was through the creation of an urban, informal, and modernist vernacular. Like Dickens, much of Joyce's most imaginative language emerges from bodily wordplay that constantly shifts between the literal and the figurative. Finally, the chapter assesses how Virginia Woolf used an inordinate number of body idioms in her essay on David Copperfield.
Introduction
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter introduces the distinct and essential feature of Plato's political philosophy that revolves around the relationship between philosophy and politics. It primarily revolves around Letters, which are Platonic letters that can be used as evidence of Plato's true views concerning philosophy and politics. In 1697, Richard Bentley made crucial contributions to the critical study of ancient epistolography in correlation to the spuriousness of the collection of letters traditionally ascribed to Phalaris. The chapter elaborates on the prominent arguments surrounding the notion of provenance and authenticity. It also discusses the work of Franz Dornseiff and the notion of literary unity.
Letter Three
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter overviews Plato's letter to Dionysus. It notes Dionysus' assumption of Dion and Plato taking away his rule after preventing the colonization of Greek cities in Sicily. Plato wishes Dionysus to stop saying such things since he was slandered enough by Philistides and many others on the account of his stay in the acropolis. The chapter looks into the concerning political things within the partnership of Plato and Dionysus. Plato warns Dionysus against slandering him about disallowing colonization of Greek cities and replacing tyranny with kingship since he already faced his penalty so Dionysus should speak the truth instead of lying.
Letter Thirteen
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides an overview of a letter to Dionysus, tyrant of Syracuse, that was not alleged to be written by Plato. Plato introduces Helicon as a person who could be of use to Dionysus but warns him to judge Helicon himself while learning and philosophizing with him. Moreover, Plato points out how he uses Dionysus' money as little as he can before detailing his family affairs. The chapter also looks at how Plato encouraged Dionysus to be strong, philosophize, and encourage other youths while offering fond greetings to fellow-spherists and commanding others, especially Aristocritus. Moreover, Plato reminds Dionysus to take care of returning the money to Leptines.
Political Counsel in Plato’s Letters
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on the political counsel present across Plato's Letters. It acknowledges the strange treatment of Socrates in Letters, especially since Plato acknowledged that Socrates was the hero of the Platonic dialogues. The unifying theme of Letters revolves around Plato's fame as a political philosopher that includes the responsibility of being a political counsel to famous and powerful men across the Greek world of his day. The chapter then discusses the interrelation between Plato's view of freedom and Dion's view of philosophy. It also considers Plato's concern for the reputation of philosophy and Plato's proposal of oligarchy and its subsequent issue of foundings.
The Presentation and Substance of Platonic Philosophy
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the presentation and substance of Platonic philosophy in accordance with Letters. Plato presents philosophy as the key to humanity's political salvation, and as a means to a political end. In Letter Six, philosophy is presented as the ideal source of stability and prosperity for a political ruler, but also as a theoretical activity lacking political applicability. The chapter looks into the philosophic riddles of Letter Two before providing an interpretative analysis of the philosophic digression present in Letter Seven of Letters. It also explains the interplay of Plato's writings on laws and regimes with the proper relationship between seriousness and playfulness.
Conclusion
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This conclusive chapter explains that Letters revolves around Plato's promotion and defense of philosophy. It cites how Plato made an earnest attempt to make Syracuse a comfortable place for philosophers. Additionally, Plato's establishment of diplomatic relations between Dionysius and Archytas may have been his most important political achievement in the whole Syracusan affair. The chapter also covers Dion's relationship with Plato before he invited Dionysus as a prospective student for Plato. It highlights how Letters is Plato's attempt to clarify his involvement in Syracuse and salvage the reputation of Platonic philosophy from the wreckage of this dark period in Syracusan history.
Configurations of Rape in Greek Myth
Authors: Zeitlin Froma I.
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the motif of sexual assault or rape in texts and iconography, particularly in Greek myth. It begins by considering three favorite mythological themes: “amorous pursuits” by gods of mortals; the centaurs who shamelessly attack Greek women; and, more incidentally, the case of the Amazons, who put Greek men in the position of combat with alien women. The chapter then looks at Aeschylus' Suppliants, the play which opens his Danaid trilogy and treats that band of fifty girls, descendants of Io (herself the target of Zeus' desire), who, in having been forced to marry against their will, slay all but one of their husbands on their wedding night. It also evaluates the obsessive concern of myth with the topic of sexual violence as it relates to the issue of eros itself and its vicissitudes. Finally, the chapter explores some significant Greek notions of sexuality to situate the physical assault upon the feminine body within a wider imaginative range, one that will prove to include the masculine as well as the feminine and will counter the facile ideology of active men and passive women.