bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Splendor and Opulence of the Past
Authors: Freedman Paul
Published: May 2024

This book traces the career of Jaume Caresmar (1717–1791), a church historian and a key figure of the Catalan Enlightenment who transcribed tens of thousands of parchments to preserve and glorify Catalonia’s medieval past in the face of its diminishing autonomy. As the book shows, Caresmar’s books, essays, and transcriptions provide fresh insights into the Middle Ages as remembered in modern Catalonia and illustrate how a nation’s past glories and humiliations can inform contemporary politics and culture. From the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, Catalonia was a thriving, independent set of principalities within what would become modern Spain. In the wake of the dismantling of its autonomy by the eighteenth-century Spanish state, Catalan scholars looked to the region’s medieval independence and wealth as a means of maintaining a distinct Catalan identity and resisting Castilian hegemony. Through their writings and archival investigations, Caresmar and the canons at Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes, where Caresmar was abbot, laid the foundations for not only the scholarly exploration of the Middle Ages but also the development of Catalan national sentiment. Although the eighteenth century is often regarded as a low point for the Catalan language and culture, the book emphasizes the importance of this period’s antiquarians to Catalan projects of modernization and economic progress and links their historiography of the Middle Ages to struggles over Catalonia’s relationship to the Spanish state over two centuries.
Bellpuig de les Avellanes before Caresmar’s Era
Authors: Freedman Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter describes Bellpuig de les Avellanes before Jaume Caresmar’s era. Caresmar belonged to the Order of Premonstratensian canons, whose rule was followed at Bellpuig de les Avellanes. For over two centuries after its foundation in 1167, the chapter was favored by the counts of Urgell, two of whom were buried there. During the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Bellpuig was at the height of its wealth and influence. Its canons held castles, vineyards, mills, water rights, and extensive cultivated lands. Bellpuig never attained the prominence of the Cistercian foundations of Poblet and Santes Creus, favored by the count-kings of Aragon-Catalonia, nor was it endowed with the traditions of learning and liturgy enjoyed by the Benedictine monasteries of Montserrat and Ripoll. Nevertheless, Bellpuig exercised a quite respectable lordship over a substantial part of northwestern Catalonia and experienced a resurgence of energy and intellectual distinction in the eighteenth century. The chapter differentiates between the Order of Premonstratensians and the Augustinian Order, before detailing the foundation and expansion of Bellpuig.
Animated Writing
Authors: Johnson Daniel
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the notion of animation in correlation with the expressive dimensions of electronic text in Japanese language social media. It discusses the aesthetic interface of danmaku-style video sites, such as Niconico, where users employ figural modes of writing in a media architecture of anonymity and asynchronicity. Animation provides a conceptual frame for considering how issues of agency and expression in anonymous media coincide with asymmetrical experiences of time. The chapter then covers the elaborate forms of wordplay appearing on Niconico that are produced through the orthographic manipulations of character input systems. It also elaborates on the dynamics of opacity and recognition common in many forms of subcultural media.
Repertoire and Accumulation
Authors: Johnson Daniel
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the issues of repetition in impermanent media forms. It primarily focuses on prevalent copypasta aesthetics on the now-defunct web bulletin board 2channel and the diminished status of originality in digital media forms. The frame of cacophony as an analytic device correlates to the aesthetics of obscurity and mixing of sonic with visual cues producing an intense sensory stimulation. The chapter overviews the aesthetics of writing on 2channel and Niconico in terms of accumulation of text, acceleration of activity, and foregrounding of the experience of time. It also looks into the notion of continuous citation of the past, which is a key element of curation.
History Matters
Authors: Fisher Damany Morris
Published: May 2024

This chapter shows how history matters by tracing the history of racist policies in real estate and housing that contributed to the current problems in the Black community in Sacramento, which was once referred as a utopia for Black people. The chapter explores Sacramento County's disproportionately high rate of Black child deaths that can be traced to the city's historic practice of residential segregation and redlining. It also describes the institutionalized racism in Sacramento's housing market, which made it difficult for many Black families to accumulate generational wealth. The chapter describes communities, such as Del Paso Heights, Oak Park, and Meadowview, that are among those with the highest African American child mortality rates in Sacramento County. It concludes with portraits of seven Sacramento Black communities.
Black Education Matters
Authors: Winn Lawrence “Torry”
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights the Black educational initiatives and schools aimed at creating pride and instilling Black values in Black children. It looks at how legal decisions and heroic actions led to educational opportunities for some students but have failed the vast majority of Black students. Black students have experienced harm, harassment, and mediocre teaching in school districts controlled by predominantly white school boards and educators. The chapter details how Black communities have demanded that public schools change their curricula, hire more Black teachers, and teach culturally relevant pedagogy. The sense of urgency to radically transform education is best expressed by Cheryl Ann Fisher, the cofounder of Shule Jumamose, an African-centered Saturday school for children in Sacramento.
Patterns of Possibility
Authors: Montgomery-Block Kindra F.
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights some of the elders who inspired the work in Sacramento and others who guided a common narrative around collective goals. The Black Child Legacy Campaign (BCLC) seemed to have stopped gun violence through a combination of collective impact strategies, coordinated program alignment, narrative change, neighborhood partnerships, funding, and faith. The chapter details the connection and importance of the prophetic messages that facilitated BCLC's formation and early efforts, advancing change and building a common narrative around collective goals. The chapter focuses on Rev. Janet Wolf, director of the Children's Defense Fund Haley Farm and Nonviolent Organizing, who is a God-given force for justice and action. Wolf's guidance is one of the main reasons for the early success of the BCLC.
The Fire This Time
Authors: Obolu Adiyah Ma’at
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about Adiyah Ma'at Obolu, a poet in Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (SAYS) that performs on national stages to engage, inspire, and educate listeners. It explores how Adiyah finds the fire inside herself through poems, which she writes at a time when she felt a loss of hope for the world. Adiyah's poem, Forest Fire, questions the status quo and what true justice looks like. Adiyah describes a fire that spreads light, decolonizes minds, and dreams drastically and unapologetically. The chapter also mentions Adiyah's podcast, Our Justice Journey, which is a series of conversations with social justice warriors giving advice to youth on how to make change.
A Reopening
Authors: Watson Vajra M.
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins with the South African word ubuntu, which reflects the idea that humanity is bound together in ways that are invisible to the eye yet are gripping to the soul. Intentional integrity demands a reckoning with the present reality and the tensions between ethics and actuality. It emphasizes that society must be courageous enough to honestly reflect on histories and the deleterious epigenetics of white supremacy. The chapter reviews a nuanced, multidimensional portrait of Sacramento told through the individuals on the frontlines of the Black Child Legacy Campaign (BCLC). It concludes with a reminder that improving the world is everyone's sacred birthright.
Urdu Ethics Literature in Colonial India
Authors: Mir Farina
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides an overview of Urdu ethics literature in colonial India. It focuses in particular on akhlāq in the vernacular circulation in late-colonial India. Akhlaq literature, as a genre and as represented in philosopher Ibn Miskawayh's text, is a specific Islamic tradition of philosophical ethics that can help reconstruct a more popular history of Islam. The chapter explains that Muhammad Farooq's 1910 publication, Mehboob al-Akhlaq (Beloved ethics), reflects the popular print culture of the era and the capacious forms of Islamic knowledge in colonial India. It cites how Islamic and colonial knowledge production were co-constitutive in correlation with popular Urdu akhlaq literature.
Religious Routes to Racial Progress in West Africa
Authors: Ray Carina
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on Edward Blyden, Islam and the Gold Coast press to elaborate on religious routes and racial progress in West Africa. During the twentieth century, Islam found a powerful advocate in Edward Wilmot Blyden, whose work triggered a debate over whether Islam offered an alternative to Christianity and a more appropriate path to racial progress for Gold Coasters. The chapter looks into further debates on the matter as printed in the colony's leading African-owned newspapers, Gold Coast Leader and the Gold Coast Nation. It cites the power of the Gold Coast press to challenge colonial rule and to carve out alternative spheres of power and influence. After World War I was over, debates about the racial and cultural appropriateness of Christianity for Africans emerged once again, but rarely did they consider Islam as an alternative.
​Alevi Cemevis and “Mosque Culture” in Turkey
Authors: Andersen Angela
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the interplay between the Alevi population, mosque culture, and architecture in Turkey. Turkish policy continues to restrict the right of Alevis to construct, license, and operate their places of worship, often referred to as cemevis. The chapter then examines the Turkish Republic's restrictive policy on cemevis and the impact of this policy on Alevi architecture. Architecture communicates authoritative messages about identity and Islam, and architectural siting, scale, materials, and historical references are used to promote Turkish political ideologies. The chapter explains that mosque culture signals the power imbalance and marginalization of Alevis and their beliefs, practices, and ceremonial spaces.
A Russian Columbus
Authors: Banerjee Anindita
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the inaugural cinematic collaboration between Soviet and Indian filmmakers in 1957. Khozhdenie za tri moria (subtitled in English as The Journey beyond Three Seas) serves as an archival project that purports to reconstruct the legendary journey of a fifteenth-century merchant known as the “Russian Columbus.” The cinematic rendition of the text, which consists of a heterogeneous amalgam of language, represents the formalization of the phenomenon of the Soviet Union as an early field for the globalization of the Indian film industry. The chapter notes that the selective translation began by Christianizing the Islamic components of Khozhdenie and culminates in the complete aphasia of the narrator. It discusses the spectralization of Islam that connects the English translation and screen adaptation of the Russian Columbus' journey.
Ottoman Modernization and the Translation Bureau
Authors: Darakcioglu Mehmet
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the correlation between Ottoman modernization and the Translation Bureau of the Sublime Porte (Bâb-ı Âli Tercüme Odası). It explains how the Translation Bureau served as a launch pad for high-ranking statesmen. Moreover, the Translation Bureau created a cadre of learned bureaucrats whose ideas paved the way for larger political changes in the Ottoman Empire. Knowledge of European languages and the West was a recipe for success for aspiring Ottoman clerks in an era when the survival of the empire was highly dependent on diplomacy. The chapter argues that the contributions of the Translation Bureau played a pivotal role in the transformation and modernization of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century.
Jean Paul’s Paper Festivals
Authors: Franzel Sean
Published: May 2024

This chapter assesses how Jean Paul responds to the chaos of Napoleonic occupation through writings in journals, anthologies, and pamphlets, contributing to a boom in topical publications. It begins by looking at several basic metaphors that orient Jean Paul's approach to time and the metaphors' role in his characterization of his topical writings as sermons and temporal thresholds, or “twilights.” Jean Paul seeks to relativize the upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars, adopting a future vantage point from which to cast present suffering as fleeting. In envisioning possible futures, he also embraces logics of publication and republication, playfully staging the reencounter with past works. His characterizations of miscellaneous writings as festivals and commemorative monuments function not only as ironic meditations on the repeated reencounters of works in the future but also as a deliberate attempt to craft a successful authorial brand. Though Jean Paul's miscellanies on time and the times might not have had the political afterlives he intended, they represent important reflections on the potential and peril of serial formats for modeling cultural permanence.
Women’s Wealth and Matriarchal Strategies
Authors: Seng Guo-Quan
Published: May 2024

This chapter assesses how wealthy matriarchs, usually widows, exercised their “bilateralized” patrilineal authority through colonial legal instruments in a way that made the colonial state clamp down on their contractual freedom. The chapter begins by locating matriarchal interest in between patrilineal family alliances. In a strictly patrilineal setting, women, exchanged by exogamous lineage groups in marriage, became permanently alienated from their natal families. In the colonial context, the chapter shows that matriarchs manipulated wills and contracts to help further the wealth succession goals of both their husbands and their brothers. From the 1850s, colonial legal authorities began to treat such bilaterally oriented modes of wealth transmission with suspicion. This orientalist approach to Chinese family law brought an end to married Chinese women's autonomy to contract in the 1890s. The chapter then reveals how the creole matriarchs continued to find new ways to circumvent colonial legal strictures in the interests of their bilaterally descended patrilineal kin.
Registering Births, Racializing Illegitimacy
Authors: Seng Guo-Quan
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores how customary Chinese notions of patrilineal descent overlapped with new civil law categories of illegitimacy to fortify the sense of a racial boundary between Chinese and Indonesians in late colonial and early postcolonial Java. Along with monogamy, family law reform introduced compulsory birth registration for the Chinese in Java as of May 1919. Birth registration strengthened the Chinese patrilineal notion of race, even if most Chinese continued to have unregistered customary marriages. Beginning to accumulate concomitantly within these registries were records of “illegitimate” mixed-race children born to Indonesian mothers that the Chinese continued to exclude, by Confucian custom, from ritual marriage. Racial difference was experienced through morally judgmental views on extramarital sexuality, as colonial reformers and a younger generation of Dutch-educated Indonesians came to see enduring extramarital relationships between less wealthy and polygamous Chinese men as immoral.
Muslim Organizations
Authors: Mietzner Marcus
Published: May 2024

This chapter analyzes the importance of Muslim organizations for presidential coalitions in Indonesia by first sketching the growth of religious piety in society as the main power resource Islamic groups can leverage in political negotiations. Ironically or otherwise, this growth began at the height of the New Order's rule, despite Suharto's well-established preference for limiting the role of religion. By the 1980s, he had to respond to this societal trend, creating a more Islamic image for himself and inviting Muslim groups to play a bigger role in his regime. After 1998, conservative forms of Islam spread further, and faith became a key component of political competition. The chapter highlights the powers that presidents can mobilize to win over Muslim groups and limit their ambitions. It looks at how the interaction between presidents and Muslim groups functions in the daily operations of coalitional presidentialism, with cabinet allocations at the center of the negotiations. Finally, the chapter discusses the banning of two radical Islamic groups by President Widodo, and how this inter-related with the vested interests of Nahdlatul Ulama.
Drivers and Contexts
Authors: Mietzner Marcus
Published: May 2024

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's findings, emphasizing the strategies both presidents and their partners use to sustain their coalition. The treatment of the various actors differs somewhat based on their respective powers vis-à-vis the president, but it is possible to identify a set of common approaches. The chapter offers a comparative perspective, revisiting the question of how the Indonesian case fits into the larger framework of global coalitional presidentialism studies. It also analyzes the drivers behind the specific format of Indonesia's coalitional presidentialism, before assessing its impact on the quality of democracy in the country. Overall, the discussion finds that coalitional presidentialism is behind Indonesia's remarkable political stability since 2004 as well as its later illiberal tendencies. The fact that most citizens appear to approve of these trends is further testimony of coalitional presidentialism's deep entrenchment in post-Suharto Indonesia.
The Arc of History
Authors: McGillen Michael
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines Franz Rosenzweig's dual-aspect theory of history. Rosenzweig argues that the present contains a moment of eternity that exceeds the narrative flow of history and points to the end of days. As a form of constructivism, Rosenzweig's geometrical imagination of history contributes to the production of spatial figures that are conceived as Gestalten. The chapter then explains how Rosenzweig used geometrical figures to represent Judaism and Christianity as embodiments of different spatializations of time. It cites that geometry, mathematics, and a unique mode of figural thinking are central to Rosenzweig's critique of nineteenth-century historicism and philosophies of history.
Introduction
Authors: Capuano Peter J.
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how Charles Dickens developed a unique idiomatic style, deeply rooted in bodily expression, which eventually emerges as a fundamental dimension to the way he imagines his most mature and iconic fictional worlds. What is astonishing is the extent to which Dickens is truly “inimitable” in comparison to his peers when it comes to his use of idiomatic language involving the body. It is not simply a matter of Dickens using a lot of body idioms; it is that he uses, by far, the greatest variety of them as well. The chapter then addresses why bodily derived idiomatic expressions matter in Dickens's fiction as a vital but yet unremarked-upon dimension of his imagination. The book triangulates Dickens's idiomatic distinctiveness in relation to the social history of language alteration in nineteenth-century Britain more broadly and in relation to thousands of other Victorian novelists.
The Beginnings of Dickens’s Idiomatic Imagination
Authors: Capuano Peter J.
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses how Dombey and Son (1846–48) constitutes a decisive moment in Charles Dickens's career for a particular set of reasons. Dickens does not suddenly start using bodily derived idiomatic expressions only with this novel. Quite the contrary: he uses hundreds of them in each of his previous novels. The point of the chapter is to demonstrate how he starts pressing certain idioms into a more unified thematic service with Dombey and Son. In that novel, the seemingly obscure idiomatic expression “right-hand man” occurs four times. This particular idiomatic expression operates as a varied but surprisingly cohesive unifying force in Dombey—a force that radiates outward to how Dickens imagines characterization, narrative voice, plotting, and most importantly, thematic schema. In terms of the last of these, the multiple meanings bound up in this bodily idiom influence the subtle ways in which Dombey and Son forges the exploration of its deepest and most interrelated themes: surrogacy and succession, commerce and commitment, care and neglect, ability and disability.
Sweat Work and Nose Grinding in Our Mutual Friend
Authors: Capuano Peter J.
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores how Charles Dickens brings “idiomatic mockery” to new heights in his final novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). Considering all the juxtapositions between London's financially speculating nouveau riche and Dickens's laborious contemporary circumstances, it should be unsurprising that Dickens invokes different variants of the idiomatic expression derived from the primeval curse pronounced on the labor of mankind—“by the sweat of the brow shalt thou eat bread”—twenty-four times in Our Mutual Friend. A lack of sincerity in and dedication to work was always anathema to Dickens, but it was especially so at this juncture in his life when he was pushing himself to labor on through significant pain and exhaustion. Ultimately, the idiomatic intensification Dickens achieves in his last novel involves his imaginative orchestration of not just one but two principal body idioms. The chapter then assesses how nineteen variants of a second idiom used only in Our Mutual Friend and in no other novel—“nose to the grindstone”—links up with the former, first as an expression describing one hard at work and then eventually in terms of the idiom's wider association with coercion, deception, and social mastery.
Letter Six
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter showcases Plato's letter to Hermias, Erastus, and Coriscus. Plato encourages Hermias, Erastus, and Corsicus to acknowledge each other and benefit each other in the greatest things. Hermias was told that he is expected to benefit the most from steadfast friends with healthy character instead of relying simply on military alliance or gold. Coriscus and Erastus are strongly urged to support Hermias and should they have a conflict, they should write to Plato. The chapter cites that Plato seemed optimistic about the relationship between Hermias, Erastus, and Coriscus as they are expected to do good things if a god should be willing.
Letter Eight
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter presents Plato's letter to the intimates and comrades of Dion. Plato offers advice for Dion's comrades and intimates while acknowledging the dissolving tyranny in Sicily and the other people's wish to either rule again or just completely escape from tyranny. Plato primarily aims to provide advice that would be advantageous for the counsel and all of the people living in Syracuse. The chapter then showcases the speech Plato suggested for Dion's counsel, which addresses the ongoing issues concerned with the law and freedom under the kingly rule. Plato's speech urges people aiming for tyranny to turn away and escape purported happiness.
Letter Nine
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter overviews Plato's letter to Archytas the Tarentine. It starts with Archippus and Philondes' report on how Archytas was restless since he was incapable of being released from the lack of leisure connected with the common things. Plato acknowledges the pleasure of doing one's own thing, but Archytas needs to be mindful of his people and this fatherland. Moreover, Archytas is advised to listen to the fatherland to leave a space for paltry human beings, especially those who do not come from the best to the common things. The chapter also mentions the care needed for Echecrates, which is alluded to as a youth.
Letter Ten
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on the letter of Plato to Aristodorus. In the letter, Plato indicates that Dion introduced Aristordous as a special comrade of his after coming through everything. According to Dion, Aristodorus exhibits a character with the wisest view on a philosophy that is to be considered steadfast, faithful, and healthy enough to be acknowledged as true philosophy. Additionally, Plato refers to Aristorodus' other valuable traits of other wisdoms and cleverness that extend to other things as niceties. Moreover, Plato encourages Aristodorus to be strong and remain in the character that he has now in the times to come.
The Retrospective Muse
Authors: Zeitlin Froma I. , Goldhill Simon
Published: May 2024

This book showcases the author's celebrated work. Over many decades, the author's innovative studies have changed the field of classics. Her instantly recognizable work brings together anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, and an acute literary sensibility to open ancient texts and ideas to new forms of understanding. A selection of her essays on topics still timely today are collected for the first time in this book, showing the full range and flair of her remarkable intellect. Together, these analyses show why the author's work on ancient Greek culture has had an enduring impact on scholars around the world, not just in classics but across multiple fields. From Homer to the Greek novel, from religion to erotics, from myth and ritual to theatrical performance, the author expounds on some of the most important works of ancient writing and some of modernity's most significant critical questions. The writing still sheds light on the durable aspects of classics as a discipline, and the book encapsulates the author's achievement.
Apollo and Dionysus
Authors: Zeitlin Froma I.
Published: May 2024

This chapter addresses the myths and function of two deities, Apollo and Dionysus, through exploration of the natal myths of their births. As anthropomorphic figures, gods have a life story, one that brings them into being, establishes their individual identities and prerogatives, and allots them a place in a system of divinities that is organized along family lines. Although gods, of course, are exempt from death or extinction, they resemble mortals in that they too are subject to rules of genealogy and laws of procreation. Like mortals, they are engaged in matters of sex, parentage, and the processes of generation. However, the mythological imagination is free to explore a range of reproductive strategies not available in the human sphere. These can recompose the biological facts of human sex and birth into fantastic patterns of substitutes, surrogates, and other fictive arrangements. More generally, Greek mythology is unusually preoccupied with stories of origins, an interest that extends to historiography, medicine, science, and philosophy.
Domestic Workers in a Changing City
Authors: Rahnama Sara
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the visibility and mobility of Muslim domestic workers. It explains that Muslim women’s mobility depended on a variety of factors, including location and class, before considering the safety and shame of domestic work. The economic crisis created the conditions, such as the lack of male income providers, for women’s dramatic entry into the labor force in the interwar years. As a communist paper that occupied an important space in the settler intellectual landscape, Oran républicain sought to foster an understanding of Muslim society for their European audience. The chapter provides an overview of how women’s work transformed family life and the optics and dynamics of urban life.
Introduction
Authors: Lynch Christopher
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the life and writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, which constitute a call to arms. In calling a wide array of audiences to arms, he sheds revealing light on the nature of war and warfighting, their relation to politics and human life, and the nature of things in general. For Machiavelli, the most urgent or important fact about human beings is that they can be made into soldiers, any place, any time; the most urgent or important task is to make them so. Such sayings suggest that he asserts the primacy of war over peace. The chapter makes the case that Machiavelli wrote of both types of warfare, military and intellectual, physical and spiritual, usually at one and the same time, and always with an eye to the reestablishment of human excellence on new and firmer foundations. The book looks at his engagement with war during his many years of government service; his assessment of both the ineluctably political purpose of military operations and strategy; and the philosophical motivation for the pervasive military emphasis of his writings and thought.
Prince’s Dilemma
Authors: Lynch Christopher
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, according to which the excellent captain, the excellent prince, and the excellent human being are one and the same. The first part of The Prince treats the different types of states, entities that are presumably political rather than military units, and includes a story from Machiavelli's own government service suggesting it is more important to understand politics than war. The second part is devoted to military and foreign affairs, while the most famous and longest part is devoted to how a prince should govern friends and subjects as distinct from enemies, that is, to domestic rather than foreign and defense policy. It begins with Machiavelli's bold statement of his radical break with all previous philosophy and morality and includes his most often quoted passage regarding the primacy of fear over love. The last part contains his infamous metaphor of fortune as a woman who must be beaten down, as well as a concluding patriotic cry to free Italy from foreign rule.
Conclusion
Authors: Lynch Christopher
Published: May 2024

This concluding chapter begins by looking at two declarations from Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince and Discourses on Livy which imply that the single most needful thing is knowledge of how to shape human beings for, direct humam beings to, and guide human beings in war. Machiavelli's call to arms was meant to transform Florence, Tuscany, Italy, Europe, and the world. Central to his call was the idea of being the full possessor of one's own arms, an idea whose development made Machiavelli the chief harbinger of modern military thought. Ultimately, the identity of commanders as thinkers is the linchpin of Machiavelli's understanding of the relationship between war and politics. The identity of commanders as thinkers is also the conceptual linchpin between actual and spiritual warfare; Machiavelli sought through spiritual warfare to effect a fundamental transformation of human life. The chapter then briefly considers how Machiavelli's teachings helped establish the terms and framework of American constitutionalism.
Conclusion
Authors: Griffith Luke
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights how the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty improved Western security for thirty years. It elaborates on how the Carter administration and Reagan administration of the United States, its NATO allies, and the Soviet Union played unique roles in unveiling the gray area problem. The United States developed and deployed the Euromissiles, which encouraged the Kremlin to engage in disarmament talks and simplified negotiations about ground-based intermediate-range missiles. The chapter also considers how the US theater nuclear statecraft was influenced by politics. It mentions that the Carter and Reagan administrations tended to be effective leaders of the North Atlantic Alliance.
The Forgotten Mysterious Killings
Authors: Drexler Elizabeth F.
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines how the violence and brutality of extrajudicial killings renewed the terror of the regime. It reviews how it became socially acceptable to kill people who disturbed stability, a move that implicitly justified past killings of communists and renewed the power of the state to eliminate people seen as traitors to the nation. It also looks at surreal short fiction written in the mid-1980s about the killings as an archive of affect that highlights complicity and ambiguity, and inversions of state narratives that justify the killings. The chapter reviews how impunity undermines truth. It highlights how the archive of fiction tells the truth of the killings and public complicity more than official narratives or archives.
Resist Forgetting
Authors: Drexler Elizabeth F.
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the powerful hope that documenting state violence might lead to justice and accountability. It shows how official investigations, policy, and institutional reforms have failed to produce a sense of justice in the decades following the official end of authoritarian rule. The advocacy organization KontraS and its allies initially produced, cited, and circulated documents and attempted to use new institutions to make the state liable for what it knows. The chapter recounts early documentary victories, such as investigations that implicated the Special Forces in the rape of women who appeared to be of Chinese descent during the May 1998 riots. It looks at truth in its documentary form and the information disclosed and how it can or cannot be used by activists, depending on its provenance.
The U.S. and the Rest
Authors: Dixon John M.
Published: May 2024

This chapter shows how the field of American Jewish history has ended up where it is today. It draws on an array of scholarly conversations that challenge the national paradigm and argues that what has come to dominate the specialization is a linear and nationalistic metanarrative that celebrates American exceptionalism. It also explains how writing about Jewish history in early America was purified of elements that were not North American. By the mid-twentieth century, demographic factors worked against a more capacious view of the past, as most American Jews had been born in the United States at the same time that their community had become the largest Jewish population in the world. Instead of a more entangled vision, what historians continued to depict was a North American Jewish community marked by longevity and continuity.
Tea
Authors: Fichter James R.
Published: May 2024

This book reveals that despite the so-called Boston Tea Party in 1773, two large shipments of tea from the East India Company survived and were ultimately drunk in North America. Their survival shaped the politics of the years ahead, impeded efforts to reimburse the company for the tea lost in Boston Harbor, and hinted at the enduring potency of consumerism in revolutionary politics. Tea protests were widespread in 1774, but so were tea advertisements and tea sales, the book argues. The protests were noisy and sometimes misleading performances, not clear signs that tea consumption was unpopular. Revolutionaries vilified tea in their propaganda and prohibited the importation and consumption of tea and British goods. Yet merchant ledgers reveal these goods were still widely sold and consumed in 1775. Colonists supported Patriots more than they abided by non-consumption. When Congress ended its prohibition against tea in 1776, it reasoned that the ban was too widely violated to enforce. War was a more effective means than boycott for resisting Parliament, after all, and as rebel arms advanced, Patriots seized tea and other goods Britons left behind. By 1776, protesters sought tea and, objecting to its high price, redistributed rather than destroyed it. Yet, the book demonstrates that by then, the commodity was not a symbol of the British state, but of American consumerism.
Tea Politics
Authors: Fichter James R.
Published: May 2024

This chapter elaborates on the extent of tea politics. It cites that tea became a symbol of the colonies' political transformation in 1774, referencing how tea symbolized East India Company monopoly, unrepresentative taxation, and parliamentary infringement on colonists' constitutional rights. In Boston, destroying the Company's tea was a way for colonists to defend their rights at a time when they had only symbolic ways to do so. Radicals' response to the Company's tea varied across North America and was initially confined to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, the four cities receiving that tea. The chapter explains how the ministry's response to the Boston Tea Party, the Coercive Acts, escalated the conflict.
Empire of Responsibility
Authors: Moran Ryan
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on colonial Korea, beginning with the Government General of Korea establishing its own version of kanpo geared toward colonial Koreans in 1929. While the post office in mainland Japan had created kanpo to address the problem of labor and urban unrest, the Korean post office established its system to shore up its rural revitalization policies. The chapter explores how bureaucrats worked to convince Koreans to give up local mutual assistance associations and to become modern consumer-subjects of insurance. The chapter describes the profits gleaned from the insurance system that became an important source of funds for social welfare projects in colonial Korea. It interrogates how the colonial state used discourses of security, responsibility, and social welfare to try to stabilize and remold the population in colonial Korea.
The European Exception
Authors: Ewing Christopher
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks into how international solidarity affected gay liberation and the Iranian Revolution. It explains how Islam was marshaled as a repressive force threatening women and gays. The efflorescence of gay liberation in 1971 and the Iranian Revolution in 1979 bore the fruit of the consequences of wider claims that Islam was incompatible with Europe. The 1970s marked the concerted efforts on the part of queer activists to push back against persistent legal and societal homophobia in the Federal Republic after activists developed transnational networks. The internationalization of West German queer politics in the 1970s was crucial to how white, queer West Germans racialized Islam.
Old Norse Folklore
Authors: Mitchell Stephen A.
Published: May 2024

The medieval northern world consisted of a vast and culturally diverse region both geographically, from roughly Greenland to Novgorod, and culturally, as one of the last areas of Europe to be converted to Christianity. This book explores the complexities of this fascinating world in case studies and theoretical essays that connect orality and performance theory to memory studies, and myths relating to pre-Christian Nordic religion to innovations within late medieval pilgrimage song culture. The book provides critical new perspectives on the Old Norse world, some of which appear in this volume for the first time in English. It presents emerging methodologies by analyzing Old Norse materials to offer a better understandings of understanding of Old Norse materials. The book examines, interprets, and re-interprets the medieval data bequeathed to us by posterity—myths, legends, riddles, charms, court culture, conversion narratives, landscapes, and mindscapes—targeting largely overlooked, yet important sources of cultural insights.
Introduction
Authors: Hellebust Rolf
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of one of the foundations of modern Russian culture: the idea of literature’s special function not only in formulating national identity but in revealing national destiny. Like modern nation-building in general, this special emphasis on literature was inspired by the German romantics and has its historiographic echoes outside of Russia as well. The book focuses on a self-image of Russian culture, created primarily by writers, critics, and literary historians. Specifically, it studies the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition and its place in Russian culture. The uniqueness of the Tradition is a pledge of Russia’s distinct identity; its greatness—however measured—is the nation’s greatness; its unity is likewise that of Russian culture. While critics explicitly treat the Tradition as a hierarchy of works and authors united by abstract ideas, its implicit role within the larger process of literary evolution is not that of an idea. The record of the Tradition’s construction and reception, especially in the texts of comprehensive narrative literary histories, tells a far different story, one that turns on the following questions: What is the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition? Where does it exist? And how does it communicate its values and manifest its essential unity?
Geoffroy of Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne
Authors: Evergates Theodore
Published: May 2024

This book traces the remarkable life of Geoffroy of Villehardouin (c. 1148–c. 1217) from his earliest years in Champagne through his last years in Greece after the crusade. The fourth son of a knight, Geoffroy became marshal of Champagne, principal negotiator in organizing the Fourth Crusade, chief of staff of the expedition to and conquest of Constantinople, garrison commander of Constantinople and, in his late fifties, field commander defending the Latin settlement in the Byzantine empire against invading Bulgarian armies and revolting Greek cities. Known for his diplomatic skills and rectitude, he served as the chief military advisor to Count Thibaut III of Champagne and later to Emperor Henry of Constantinople. Geoffroy is remarkable as well for dictating the earliest war memoir in medieval Europe, which is also the earliest prose narrative in Old French. Addressed to a home audience in Champagne, he described what he did, what he saw, and what he heard during his eight years on crusade and especially during the fraught period after the conquest of Constantinople. His memoir, The Book of the Conquest of Constantinople, furnishes a commander's retrospective account of the main events and inner workings of the crusade—the innumerable meetings and speeches, the conduct (not always commendable) of the barons, and the persistent discontent within the army—as well as a celebration of his own deeds as a diplomat and a military commander.
Constantinople
Authors: Evergates Theodore
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the fleet that sailed from Abydos to the monastery of Saint Stephen, just southwest of the sea walls of Constantinople on 23 June 1203. The fleet sailed past the high walls of Constantinople and landed on the opposite shore in front of the imperial palace at Chalcedon, where the entire army and its support personnel came ashore. The chapter provides Geoffroy of Villehardouin's detailed description of the army's movements and the baronial deliberations in which he participated as chief of staff during the assault on Constantinople. It also highlights the doge and Boniface of Montferrat, who were tasked to take the Byzantine prince, Alexios, and present him to the people of Constantinople as their true emperor. The chapter takes note of Hugh of Saint-Pol, who described the conquering of Constantinople by only 500 knights together with an equal number of mounted sergeants and 2,000 foot soldiers as a stunning feat.
Colonial Secularism and the Making of Scriptural Traditionalism in British India
Authors: Khan Arsalan
Published: May 2024

This chapter outlines how British colonialism created the conditions for the rise of the scriptural traditionalism of the Deobandi ulama out of which Tablighi Jamaat emerges. Specifically, it shows how the British efforts to codify Islamic law in the nineteenth century sharpened the distinction between “religious” (dini) and “worldly” (dunyavi) domains and reconfigured the domain of religion around scriptural authority, displacing the emphasis on sacred genealogy that had been central to religious authority in South Asian Islam. The distinction between religious and customary law created the conditions for the rise of a broad project of Islamic reform that aims to purify Islam of customary practices, particularly those associated with the Sufi emphasis on the intercessory powers of saints. Moreover, colonial modernity and specifically the wide availability of print created new possibilities for the creation of Islamic authority and thus opened a field of possibilities for mediating a relationship to God and creating Islamic authority. In this contested Islamic public sphere, the Tablighi Jamaat takes up this project of Islamic reform by emphasizing dawat as an embodied means for the realization of a direct relationship to God.
Introduction
Authors: Raeymaekers Timothy
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of an ethnographic inquiry in a turbulent territory of agrarian extraction at the borders of the Mediterranean. The territory is actively made from mobile infrastructures that mobilize, channel, and segregate human and natural resources, which then enable the expansion of capitalist operations across space. The infrastructures remain a terrain of active struggle and contestation as they form the backbone of profound socioecological transformations that characterize the history of Mediterranean supply chain capitalism. The chapter considers the paradox of extractive operations before discussing the focus on natural racialization and bordering infrastructures. It looks into the key context of Black Mediterranean under the notion of racial capitalism.
Energetic Flows in Fedorov, Gorky, and Bogdanov
Authors: Vinokour Maya
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins by examining Nikolai Fedorov's project of universal, cosmic resurrection which he promulgated in a series of essays collectively known as The Philosophy of the Common Task. According to Fedorov, every particle in the universe betrays its origins through some feature of its material form. Identifying those markers in order to reassemble everyone's ancestors, for Fedorov, is the job of a unified global Science dedicated to promoting the Common Task over scientific or commercial aims. Rejecting all that was spontaneous or merely gifted to humanity through nature's largesse, he instead emphasized intentionality and labor as sources of value. Whereas Tolstoy dealt in energetic and thermodynamic metaphors, Fedorov's program of regulating nature invoked the principle of fluid channeling. His intellectual legacy permeates Maxim Gorky's critical writing and fiction, dovetailing with the author's interest in the science of energetics and his belief in the perfectibility of man through labor. The chapter then looks at the works of Alexander Bogdanov and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. It also considers how the biocentricity of Soviet labor culture developed over the course of the late 1920s and early 1930s in a shift called the “organic turn,” which reconceived the human body as a primarily biological, rather than mechanical, entity—in particular, as a collection of flows.