Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes textual and iconographic documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

This double volume includes: The value of forgery, Jonathan Hay; Affective operations of art and literature, Ernst van Alphen; Betty’s Turn, Stephen Melville; Richard Serra in Germany, Magdalena Nieslony; Beheadings and massacres, Federico Navarrete; Pliny the Elder and the identity of Roman art, Francesco de Angelis; Between nature and artifice, Francesca Dell’Acqua; Narrative cartographies, Gerald Guest; The artist and the icon, Alexander Nagel; Preliminary thoughts on Piranesi and Vico, Erika Naginski; Portable ruins, Alina Payne; Istanbul: The palimpsest city in search of its archi-text, Nebahat Avcioglu; The iconicity of Islamic calligraphy in Turkey, Irvin Cemil Schick; The Buddha’s house, Kazi Khalid Ashraf; A flash of recognition into how not to be governed, Natasha Eaton; Hasegawa’s fairy tales, Christine Guth; The paradox of the ethnographic-superaltern, Anna Brzyski, and contributions to “Lectures, Documents and Discussions” by Karen Kurczyncki, Mary Dumett, Emmanuel Alloa, Francesco Pellizzi, and Boris Groys.

This volume includes the editorial “The absconded subject of Pop,” by Thomas Crow; “Enlivening the soul in Chinese tombs,” by Wu Hung; “On the ‘true body’ of Huineng,” by Michele Matteini; “Apparition painting,” by Yukio Lippit; “Immanence out of sight,” by Joyce Cheng; “Absconding in plain sight,” by Roberta Bonetti; “Ancient Maya sculptures of Tikal, seen and unseen,” by Megan E. O’Neil; “Style and substance, or why the Cacaxtla paintings were buried,” by Claudia Brittenham; “The Parthenon frieze,” by Clemente Marconi; “Roma sotterranea and the biogenesis of New Jerusalem,” by Irina Oryshkevich; “Out of sight, yet still in place,” by Minou Schraven; “Behind closed doors,” by Melissa R. Katz; “Moving eyes,” by Bissera V. Pentcheva; “‘A secret kind of charm not to be expressed or discerned,’” by Rebecca Zorach; “Ivory towers,” by Richard Taws; “Boxed in,” by Miranda Lash; “A concrete experience of nothing,” by William S. Smith; “Believing in art,” by Irene V. Small; “Repositories of the unconditional,” by Gabriele Guercio; “From micro/macrocosm to the aesthetics of ruins and waste-bodies,” by Jeanette Zwingenberger; “Are shadows transparent?” by Roberto Casati; “Invisibility of the digital,” by Boris Groys; “Des formes et des catégories,” by Remo Guidieri; and “Further comments on ‘Absconding,’” by Francesco Pellizzi.

Res 61/62, Sarcophagi, is guest edited by Wu Hung and Jas Elsner. It includes “Chinese coffins from the first millennium b.c. and early images of the afterworld” by Alain Thote; “Art and personhood” by Björn Ewald; “Western Han sarcophagi and the transformation of Chinese funerary art” by Zheng Yan; “Reading identity on Roman strigillated sarcophagi” by Janet Huskinson; “‘A Tomb Both Great and Blameless’” by Richard Neer; “Funerary Spatiality” by Lillian Lan-ying Tseng; “‘Nero’s Tomb’ and the crisis of the third century” by Edmund Thomas; “Jouissance of death?” by Eugene Wang; “Reading images without texts on Roman sarcophagi” by Paul Zanker; “Decorative imperatives between concealment and display” by Jas Elsner; “Han sarcophagi” by Wu Hung; “Framing the dead on Roman sarcophagi” by Verity Platt; “Presentation, (re)animation, and the enchantments of technology” by Finbarr Barry Flood; “Death panels” by T. J. Clark; and contributions to Documents and Discussions by Andrew Scherer and Roberta Bonetti. Also included are contributions to Lectures—Color by Alexandre Tokovinine, Cameron L. McNeil, Timothy W. Pugh and Leslie G. Cecil, Leonardo Lopez Lujàn, Douglas K. Charles, and Warren R. DeBoer.

To celebrate the acquisition of the archive of distinguished artist Tom Phillips, the Bodleian Library asked the artist to assemble and design a series of books drawing on his themed collection of over 50,000 photographic postcards. These encompass the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, ordinary people could afford to own portraits of themselves. Each book in the series contains two hundred images chosen from a visually rich vein of social history. Their covers also feature thematically linked paintings, specially created for each title, from Phillips’s signature work, A Humument.

Readers, as its title suggests, shows people reading (or pretending to read) a wide variety of material, from the Bible to Film Fun, either in the photographer’s studio, in their own home, or on vacation on the beach. Each of these unique and visually stunning books give a rich glimpse of forgotten times and will be greatly valued by art and history lovers alike.

With a specific focus on travel narratives, this collection looks at how various Islamic and eastern cultural threads weaved themselves, through travel and trading networks, into Western European/Christian visual culture and discourse and, ultimately, into the artistic explosion which has been labeled the "Renaissance."  Scholars from across humanities disciplines examine Islamic, Jewish, Spanish, Italian, and English works from a truly comparative and non-parochial perspective, to explore the transfer through travel of cultural and religious values and artistic and scientific practices, from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries.

A memoir of addiction, body image, and healing, through the lens of a long-distance runner.
 
Emily Pifer’s debut memoir, The Running Body, wrestles and reckons with power and agency, language and story, body dysphoria and beauty standards, desire and addiction, loss and healing. Pifer employs multiple modes of storytelling—memoir, meditation, and cultural analysis—interweaving research, argument, and experience as she describes how, during her time as a collegiate distance runner, she began to run more while eating less. Many around her, including her coaches, praised her for these practices. But as she became faster, and as her body began to resemble the bodies that she had seen across start-lines and on the covers of running magazines, her bones began to fracture. Pifer tells her story alongside the stories of her teammates, competitors, and others as they all face trouble regarding their bodies.

Through the lens of long-distance running, Pifer examines the effects of idolization and obsession, revealing the porous boundaries between what counts as success and what is considered failure. While grounded in truth, The Running Body interrogates its relationship to magical thinking, the stories we tell ourselves, and the faultiness of memory. Fractures, figurative and literal, run through the narrative as Pifer explores the ways bodies become entangled in stories.
 
The Running Body was selected by Steve Almond as the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize.
 

This account of the “laboratory of radical democracy” in the months before East Germany’s absorption in the West challenges memories of Germany’s reunification.

For many, 1989 is an iconic date, one we associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The year prompts some to rue the defeat of socialism in the East, while others celebrate a victory for democracy and capitalism in the reunified Germany. Remembering 1989 focuses on a largely forgotten “interregnum”: the months between the outbreak of protests in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 and its absorption by the West in 1990. Anke Pinkert, who herself participated in those protests, recalls these months as a volatile but joyous “laboratory of radical democracy,” and tells the story of how and why this “time out of joint” has been erased from Germany’s national memory.

Remembering 1989 argues that in order to truly understand Germany’s historic transformation, we must revisit protesters’ actions across a wide range of minor, vernacular, and often transient sources. Drawing on rich archives including videotapes of untelevised protests, illegally printed petitions by Church leaders, audio recordings of dissident meetings, and interview footage with military troops, Pinkert opens the discarded history of East European social uprisings to new interpretations and imagines alternatives to Germany’s neoliberal status quo. The result is a vivid, unexpected contribution to memory studies and European history.

Archaeologists working in northwest Europe have long remarked on the sheer quantity and standardisation of objects unearthed from the Roman period, especially compared with earlier eras. What was the historical significance of this boom in standardised objects? With a wide and ever-changing spectrum of innovative objects and styles to choose from, to what extent did the choices made by people in the past really matter? To answer these questions, this book sheds new light on the make-up of late Iron Age and early Roman ‘objectscapes’, through an examination of the circulation and selections of thousands of standardised pots, brooches, and other objects, with emphasis on funerary repertoires, c. 100 bc-ad 100. Breaking with the national frameworks that inform artefact research in much ‘provincial’ Roman archaeology, the book tests the idea that marked increases in the movement of people and objects fostered pan-regional culture(s) and transformed societies. Using a rich database of cemeteries and settlements spanning a swathe of northwest Europe, including southern Britannia, Gallia Belgica, and Germania Inferior, the study extensively applies multivariate statistics (such as Correspondence Analysis) to examine the roles of objects in an ever-changing and richly complex cultural milieu.

Plato, the great philosopher of Athens, was born in 427 BCE. In early manhood an admirer of Socrates, he later founded the famous school of philosophy in the grove Academus. Much else recorded of his life is uncertain; that he left Athens for a time after Socrates' execution is probable; that later he went to Cyrene, Egypt, and Sicily is possible; that he was wealthy is likely; that he was critical of 'advanced' democracy is obvious. He lived to be 80 years old. Linguistic tests including those of computer science still try to establish the order of his extant philosophical dialogues, written in splendid prose and revealing Socrates' mind fused with Plato's thought.

In Laches, Charmides, and Lysis, Socrates and others discuss separate ethical conceptions. Protagoras, Ion, and Meno discuss whether righteousness can be taught. In Gorgias, Socrates is estranged from his city's thought, and his fate is impending. The Apology (not a dialogue), Crito, Euthyphro, and the unforgettable Phaedo relate the trial and death of Socrates and propound the immortality of the soul. In the famous Symposium and Phaedrus, written when Socrates was still alive, we find the origin and meaning of love. Cratylus discusses the nature of language. The great masterpiece in ten books, the Republic, concerns righteousness (and involves education, equality of the sexes, the structure of society, and abolition of slavery). Of the six so-called dialectical dialogues Euthydemus deals with philosophy; metaphysical Parmenides is about general concepts and absolute being; Theaetetus reasons about the theory of knowledge. Of its sequels, Sophist deals with not-being; Politicus with good and bad statesmanship and governments; Philebus with what is good. The Timaeus seeks the origin of the visible universe out of abstract geometrical elements. The unfinished Critias treats of lost Atlantis. Unfinished also is Plato's last work of the twelve books of Laws (Socrates is absent from it), a critical discussion of principles of law which Plato thought the Greeks might accept.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plato is in twelve volumes.

Plato, the great philosopher of Athens, was born in 427 BCE. In early manhood an admirer of Socrates, he later founded the famous school of philosophy in the grove Academus. Much else recorded of his life is uncertain; that he left Athens for a time after Socrates' execution is probable; that later he went to Cyrene, Egypt, and Sicily is possible; that he was wealthy is likely; that he was critical of 'advanced' democracy is obvious. He lived to be 80 years old. Linguistic tests including those of computer science still try to establish the order of his extant philosophical dialogues, written in splendid prose and revealing Socrates' mind fused with Plato's thought.

In Laches, Charmides, and Lysis, Socrates and others discuss separate ethical conceptions. Protagoras, Ion, and Meno discuss whether righteousness can be taught. In Gorgias, Socrates is estranged from his city's thought, and his fate is impending. The Apology (not a dialogue), Crito, Euthyphro, and the unforgettable Phaedo relate the trial and death of Socrates and propound the immortality of the soul. In the famous Symposium and Phaedrus, written when Socrates was still alive, we find the origin and meaning of love. Cratylus discusses the nature of language. The great masterpiece in ten books, the Republic, concerns righteousness (and involves education, equality of the sexes, the structure of society, and abolition of slavery). Of the six so-called dialectical dialogues Euthydemus deals with philosophy; metaphysical Parmenides is about general concepts and absolute being; Theaetetus reasons about the theory of knowledge. Of its sequels, Sophist deals with not-being; Politicus with good and bad statesmanship and governments; Philebus with what is good. The Timaeus seeks the origin of the visible universe out of abstract geometrical elements. The unfinished Critias treats of lost Atlantis. Unfinished also is Plato's last work of the twelve books of Laws (Socrates is absent from it), a critical discussion of principles of law which Plato thought the Greeks might accept.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plato is in twelve volumes.

In the 21st century, governments around the globe are faced with the question on how to tackle new migratory mobilities. Governments increasingly become aware of irregular immigration and are forced to re-negotiate the dilemma of open but secure borders. Rethinking Authority in China’s Border Regime: Regulating the Irregular investigates the Chinese government’s response to this phenomenon. Hence, this book presents a comprehensive analysis of the Chinese border regime. It explores the regulatory framework of border mobility in China by analysing laws, institutions, and discourses as part of an ethnographic border regime analysis. It argues that the Chinese state deliberately creates ‘zones of exception’ along its border. In these zones, local governments function as ‘scalar managers’ that establish cross-border relations to facilitate cross-border mobility and create local migration systems that build on their own notion of legality by issuing locally valid border documents. The book presents an empirically rich story of how border politics are implemented and theoretically contributes to debates on territoriality and sovereignty as well as to the question of how authority is exerted through border management. Empirically, the analysis builds on two case studies at the Sino-Myanmar and Sino-North Korean borders to illustrate how local practices are embedded in multiscalar mobility regulation including regional organizations such as the Greater Mekong Subregion and the Greater Tumen Initiative.

An analytical exploration of what it means to live a good life.

Ever since Adam Smith’s musings on “the invisible hand” became more famous than his work on moral sentiments, social theorists started to pay less attention to everyday ethics and aesthetics. Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand posits that social outcomes emerge by dint of the behaviors of individuals rather than their intentions or virtues.

Modernist and scientific approaches to determining the common good or good forms of governance have increasingly relied on techniques of generalization, rationalization, and universalization. Everyday ethics and aesthetics—and recently also matters of truth—came to be regarded as individual matters of taste. This shift, however, has meant that we no longer comprehend why and how people display a deep concern with everyday life values in their social practices. People continue to enact these values and live by them while academics lack the vocabulary and methods to grasp them.

By reconstructing the history of ideas about everyday-life values, and by analyzing the role of such values in contemporary care practices for patients with chronic disease in the Netherlands, Reinventing the Good Life seeks to explore new ways to study the values of everyday life, particularly in situations where the achievement of a clear-cut or uniform good is unlikely. The book presents a practice-based epistemology and methodology for studying everyday care practices and supporting their goodness. This analytical approach ultimately aims to generate ideas that will allow us to relate in more imaginative ways to the many pressing concerns that we are forced to live with today.
 

The notorious Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson made state-sanctioned racial segregation the law of the land in the United States in 1896. While the Civil Rights movement and subsequent Supreme Court decisions in the twentieth century did much to mitigate its effects, its consequences reverberate in ways large and small today. This special volume of RSF revisits the legacy of the decision on its 125th anniversary to consider the connection between constitutionally imposed segregation, institutionalized white supremacy, and enduring racial inequality. Edited by john a. powell, Samuel L. Myers, and Susan T. Gooden – eminent scholars in constitutional law, economics, and public administration respectively – the volume includes contributions from an interdisciplinary roster of experts, each offering fresh insights on the doctrine of “Separate but Equal” as it relates to citizenship, colorism, and civil rights in the United States.
 
The contributors grapple with a central overarching question: How is it that a court decision from 125 years ago still has such an enduring impact on racial disparities? john a. powell provides a nuanced overview of the legal context of the case to show that segregation was not only about separating people by race but was primarily about preserving White supremacy. The wide latitude for judicial interpretation granted to judges means that who decides matters, and today, just as much as in 1896, the justices sitting on the Supreme Court matter. If the views of Justice Harlan – the lone dissenter in Plessy – had prevailed, U.S. jurisprudence would look very different today. 
 
Thomas J. Davis discusses how control over personal identity lay at the heart of Plessy, and how its denial of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms reverberates today. From sex and marriage to adoption, gender recognition, employment, and voting, persistent discrimination turns in various degrees on state authority to define, categorize, and deny freedom of personal identity. To ensure personal autonomy in such domains requires the continual reevaluation of U.S. law to recognize the freedom of individuals to define and express their own identities.
 
Looking at enduring educational impact of “Separate but Equal,” which was not entirely rectified by the 1954 decision outlawing school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, Dania V. Francis and William A. Darity, Jr., link today’s ongoing within-school segregation to the legacy of racialized tracking born from White resistance to desegregation. They demonstrate how a short-term, concerted effort to increase the number of Black high school students taking advanced courses could lead to long-term benefits in closing the educational achievement gap and eliminating institutionalized segregation within our schools.
 
Plessy rightfully stands as one of the continuing stains on the history of our country in its ambivalence and unwillingness to address White dominance. This issue of RSF both corrects and expands the narrative around the Plessy decision, and provides important lessons for addressing the nation’s continuing racial travails. It is ideal for use by scholars, community leaders, and policy makers alike.
 
 

A visionary reexamination of the value of privacy in today’s hypermediated world—not just as a political right but as the key to a life worth living.

The parts of our lives that are not being surveilled and turned into data diminish each day. We are able to configure privacy settings on our devices and social media platforms, but we know our efforts pale in comparison to the scale of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic manipulation. In our hyperconnected era, many have begun to wonder whether it is still possible to live a private life, or whether it is no longer worth fighting for.

The Right to Oblivion argues incisively and persuasively that we still can and should strive for privacy, though for different reasons than we might think. Recent years have seen heated debate in the realm of law and technology about why privacy matters, often focusing on how personal data breaches amount to violations of individual freedom. Yet as Lowry Pressly shows, the very terms of this debate have undermined our understanding of privacy’s real value. In a novel philosophical account, Pressly insists that privacy isn’t simply a right to be protected but a tool for making life meaningful.

Privacy deepens our relationships with others as well as ourselves, reinforcing our capacities for agency, trust, play, self-discovery, and growth. Without privacy, the world would grow shallow, lonely, and inhospitable. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Hannah Arendt, Jorge Luis Borges, and a range of contemporary artists, Pressly shows why we all need a refuge from the world: not a place to hide, but a psychic space beyond the confines of a digital world in which the individual is treated as mere data.

A revelatory critique of public display in the United States.
 
In Religion in Plain View, Sally M. Promey analyzes religion’s visible saturation of American public space and the histories that shaped this exhibitionary aesthetics. In street art, vehicle décor, signs, monuments, architecture, zoning policy, and more, Promey exposes American display’s merger of evangelicalism, capitalism, and imperialism. From this convergence, display materializes a distinctly American drive to advertise, claim territory, invalidate competitors, and fabricate a tractable national heritage. Charting this aesthetics’ strategic work as a Protestant technology of White nation formation, Religion in Plain View offers a dynamic critique of the ways public display perpetuates deeply ingrained assumptions about the proper shape of life and land in the United States.

Provides commentary on prominent philosophers on important philosophical themes. "These unusual and exquisiteessays focus on a problem or a text with extraordinary acuity".

Revolutionary Worlds looks at the Indonesian revolution (1945-1949) from a local and regional perspective. With seventeen contributions, Indonesian and Dutch researchers bring to life the revolutionary world from widely differing perspectives. The authors explain how Indonesian, Chinese, Indian and Eurasian civilians, fighters, farmers and officials experienced and shaped the often volatile period between 1945 and 1950. The book focuses on different ideas of independence, survival strategies, mobilization, minorities, contestation of authority and the use of force against the backdrop of Indonesian and Dutch authorities’ efforts to gain or maintain control.

Bringing together two national historiographical traditions which have long remained largely separate, Revolutionary Worlds is the result of a collaboration between the Indonesian research project Proklamasi Kemerdekaan, Revolusi dan Perang di Indonesia ('Proclamation of Independence, Revolution and War in Indonesia', Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta) and the Dutch research group of the Regional Studies project, under the umbrella of the research programme Independence, Decolonization, Violence and War in Indonesia, 1945-1950.

The authors of this book – Taufik Ahmad, Galuh Ambar Sasi, Maarten van der Bent, Martijn Eickhoff, Farabi Fakih, Roel Frakking, Apriani Harahap, Anne-Lot Hoek, Sarkawi B. Husain, Julianto Ibrahim, Gerry van Klinken, Erniwati, Mawardi Umar, Anne van der Veer, Abdul Wahid, Tri Wahyuning M. Irsyam, and Muhammad Yuanda Zara – work with various universities and research institutes in Indonesia and the Netherlands.

On September 10, 1960, Venezuela spearheaded the formation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (other original members included Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait). However, in a world abundantly supplied with oil, the United States could and did ignore Venezuelan suggestions that OPEC and the consuming nations work together to control production and to increase prices. Then, in late 1973, OPEC sent shudders throughout the world economy, and an energy crisis struck with full force. Emboldened by the power of their oil cartel, Venezuelan leaders denounced the old economic relationship with the United States, nationalized U.S. oil and steel holdings, and fashioned a foreign economic policy that differed sharply from Washington's.

The Road to OPEC is the story of the fiery debates among U.S. oil companies, the Department of State, and the Venezuelan government over oil policies—clashes that led Venezuela to establish OPEC and to nationalize U.S.-owned properties. In addition, this is the first study of twentieth-century Venezuelan-U.S. relations. Its focus on oil diplomacy is placed within the context of key U.S. policies toward Latin America and such programs as the Open Door, the Good Neighbor, and the Alliance for Progress. The author also provides insight into both the politics of the contemporary energy crisis and the growing split between raw-material producers and their industrial customers.

The Road to OPEC is based on extensive archival research, as well as the author's successful use of the Freedom of Information Act to declassify files of such agencies as the National Security Council and the CIA.

A new history of the Kyivan Rus, a medieval dynastic state in eastern Europe.
 
Kyivan Rus’ was a state in northeastern Europe from the late ninth to the mid-sixteenth century that encompassed a variety of peoples, including Lithuanians, Polish, and Ottomans. The Ruling Families of Rus explores the region’s history through local families, revealing how the concept of family rule developed over the centuries into what we understand as dynasties today. Examining a broad range of archival sources, the authors examine the development of Rus, Lithuania, Muscovy, and Tver and their relationships with the Mongols, Byzantines, and others. The Ruling Families of Rus will appeal to scholars interested in the medieval history of eastern Europe.
 

This work of historical sociology revisits and analyses the earlier part of the Third Republic (1870-1914), when France granted citizenship rights to Indians in Pondicherry. It explores the nature of this colonial citizenship and enables comparisons with British India, especially the Madras Presidency, as well as the rest of the French empire, as a means of demonstrating how unique the practice of granting such rights was. The difficulties of implementing a new political culture based on the language of rights and participatory political institutions were not so much rooted in a lack of assimilation into the French culture on the part of the Indian population; rather, they were the result of political infighting and long-term conflicts over status, both in relation to caste and class, and between inclusive and exclusive visions of French citizenship.

This issue highlights recent RAND research on suicide prevention; on the scope of the humanitarian and security crisis in the Mediterranean region; and on what RAND is doing to improve the security and well-being of people throughout the Middle East.

This issue highlights recent RAND research on the prevalence and burden of chronic health conditions; on the economic benefits of U.S. overseas security commitments; and on what RAND is doing to anticipate emerging global security challenges.

This issue features a Q&A with Michael Rich, Soledad O’Brien, and Francis Fukuyama on the perils of truth decay, and a story on the trend toward unretirement among U.S. workers. The Voices column features Gulrez Shah Azhar on environmental refugees.

This issue features research on preventing child abuse and neglect and improving outcomes for children in the U.S. child-welfare system; a look back on RAND’s 70 years of innovation; and an exploration of the human side of artificial intelligence.

This issue spotlights RAND’s Gun Policy in America initiative and RAND’s evaluation of Housing for Health, a Los Angeles County program that has moved some of its most chronically homeless and vulnerable residents into permanent housing.

This issue spotlights RAND’s research on social and emotional learning; workforce development in Appalachia; and the effects of marijuana ads on adolescents and young adults.

This issue spotlights a wargame designed for young women interested in national security; ethics in scientific research, particularly in areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning; and community citizen science.

This issue explores resilience and adaptation strategies researchers can pursue to address the impacts of climate change; security challenges posed by artificial intelligence and the speed at which technology is transforming society; and more.

This issue describes RAND research efforts to help schoolkids suffering from trauma; to help health care providers get better, more meaningful feedback; and to use technology to improve the lives of displaced people throughout the world.

This issue spotlights research on veteran suicide; liability implications of driverless cars; and new approaches to improving the post-incarceration experience. The Giving column highlights a million-dollar gift to fund research on homeless veterans.

A beautifully crafted novel set in the late 1960s and 1970s Italy, a tempestuous period that shaped the lives of generations to come in many countries.

What was it really like to be a teenager growing up in Italy in the 1970s, during a time it has become all too easy to file away under “years of lead,” as the fathers’ betrayed ideals came face to face with the sons’ and daughters’ rebellions? What was happening in schools, in assemblies, social centers, and occupied factories as the postwar “economic miracle” was being dismantled from within? What moved the foremost French intellectuals of the time to sign an appeal against the repression of the student and workers’ movement in Italy? What did the bullets and heroin bring to a halt, and where did they come from? How does it feel when strategies of terror and police brutality become as ordinary as a TV dinner and as eerie as the plots of the science fiction novels you are plagiarizing to impress a girl? How are metropolitan geographies alchemized in the muscles of a young body crossing the shady lines between ages and sexes?  
 
Luca Rastello raises these and other questions in an astonishing novel that splices chunks of plot and historical reconstruction into the free flow of memory and dream. Rain’s Falling Up tracks the trajectory of a generation while refusing to romanticize its protagonists or resolve the tensions that powered its volatile energy.

This volume of interdisciplinary essays examines the intersection of religion and literature in medieval China, focusing on the impact of Buddhism and Daoism on a wide range of elite and popular literary texts and religious practices in the 3rd-11th centuries CE. Drawing on the work of the interdisciplinary scholar Stephen Bokenkamp, the essays weave together the many cross-currents of religious, intellectual, and literary traditions in medieval China to provide vivid pictures of medieval Chinese religion and culture as it was lived and practiced. The contributors to the volume are all highly regarded experts in the fields of Chinese poetry, Daoism, Buddhism, popular religion, and literature. Their research papers cut across imagined disciplinary boundaries to show that the culture of medieval China can only be understood by close reading of texts from multiple genres, traditions, and approaches.

In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic created large-scale disruptions in American society almost overnight. Yet the federal government provided little coordination or guidance in the face of the crisis. State and local governments found themselves primarily responsible for enacting policies and communicating information about the virus with the public,resulting in a wide variety of responses to the pandemic, including in public health recommendations and mandates. In this issue of RSF sociologist Beth Redbird, political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong, communications expert Rachel Davis Mersey, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors explore how social and political factors shaped the initial responses to the pandemic and how this impacted individuals and communities.
 
The 11 articles in this issue examine how information about the pandemic was disseminated, the disparate impacts of COVID-19 on different groups, and the government’s response to the pandemic. Courtney Page-Tan and colleagues find that people who relied on information from close social networks and trusted formal institutions, such as the CDC, were more likely to engage in behavior aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19, such as staying home and avoiding crowded areas. Laura E. Evans and colleagues find that while Native Americans were disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, states in which Native Americans had greater representation and political power in state politics saw fewer COVID-19 cases on tribal lands. They also find that there were fewer COVID-19 cases on tribal lands with strong networks of community-based and tribally controlled health facilities. Claire Kamp Dush and colleagues find that individuals who identify as non-White or non-heterosexual experienced higher levels of COVID-19 stress and racial trauma stress, both of which are associated with poorer mental health outcomes. Sarah James and colleagues find that state variation in the collection and publication of COVID-19 data reflected state capacity. Yet the main driver of variation in state policy response and implementation of mitigation measures was primarily partisanship. Elizabeth Suhay and colleagues find that trust in federal, state, and local government all fell during the first year of the pandemic. However, individuals with more trust in state government and local health officials were more likely to engage in protective health behaviors, while those with higher trust in the federal government were less likely to engage in such behaviors.
 
While the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will continue for years to come, this volume of RSF begins the investigation into how the pandemic has altered social, cultural, and political dynamics in American society.
 

The subject of regulation is one of the most vital and troublesome in our system of government. In this detailed study of early and mid-twentieth-century regulation of commercial aviation Emmette S. Redford illustrates what happens when government regulates a particular industry.

He first sets forth the perspectives for a study of an area of regulation and develops an argument for eclectic perspectives in the study of selected systems, or universes, of social action, such as the performance of an economic function under government regulation.

These perspectives are illustrated in the following series of case studies on regulation of commercial aviation:

1. The significance of belief patterns on the content of the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938.
2. The role of Congress in the regulation of commercial aviation in a two-year period.
3. The interactions of Congress, the president, and the regulated industry in strengthening safety regulation through passage of the Federal Aviation Act of 1958.
4. The actions of the Civil Aeronautics Board on a set of complicated economic issues in the General Passenger Fare Investigation.
5. The position of the Air Transport Association in the regulatory pattern.

In "An Essay on Evaluation" Redford summarizes what is revealed in the case studies that is significant with respect to the system of government regulation. He searches for standards for evaluating a system of social control, or for evaluating parts of it, and relates his conclusions to issues regarding the beneficence of a system of regulated private supply of a service.

The Regulatory Process is a study of interest to the aviation industry, to students of regulation of the economy, and to those who seek an understanding of social systems.

Is it possible to be religiously exclusive and socially inclusive? How do we deal with those outside of our own religious community who have completely different and sometimes conflicting views on what should be considered true and right behaviour? What if a religious tradition orders the expulsion or killing of those who leave the faith community and adopt another worldview? This book focuses on biblical texts concerning exclusivity and apostasy, studying different interpretations of such texts. It starts with the Jewish and Christian tradition of the Hebrew Bible, continues with texts from the New Testament, and explores diverse social studies to find ways of understanding the relationship between exclusion and inclusion today. Part of this exploration is the interaction with Jewish and Islamic voices. The collection ends with a systematic and missiological reflection on the issues Christian churches and other religious communities must address today.

Reassessing educational assessment: how the way we talk about exams and grades exacerbates the problems of pressure, anxiety, and expectation.

Educational assessment is important. Yet it is easy to feel that schooling and other phases of education are shaped entirely by certain assessments and that assessment is only about exam results. The idea that grades can accurately describe the aims and outcomes of education is both reductive and pervasive. This book is about the stories we tell each other about educational assessment and how they impact public trust and confidence in educational assessment. It explains the roots and nature of assessment discourses and proposes a restructuring of the debate to rebuild public confidence. It aims to challenge dominant assessment discourses and demands a more nuanced, informed debate about what happens in and beyond schools, and how this influences public thinking. Using examples from international settings to explore the nature of trust in assessment discourses, this book shows how these discourses can be reframed so that all aspects of the assessment system—policymaking, school planning, home practice with students—can be delivered with confidence.

Note the copy pertains to two issues of RSF:

Status – a form of inequality based on esteem, respect, and honor – affects how people are treated in all aspects of their lives, including in schools, workplaces, politics, and even the family. It shapes people’s access to valued outcomes in life, such as income, education, and health. However, status is poorly understood and its significance in the construction of inequality is often underestimated. In this special double issue of RSF, sociologist Cecilia L. Ridgeway, social psychologist Hazel Rose Markus, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how status functions in society and its role in inequality.
 
Issue 1 demonstrates that status is fundamental to inequality and shows that it is different from other forms of inequality. Tali Mendelberg presents a theory of how status functions in politics and differentiates the potent symbolic value of achieving greater esteem from status-seeking as a means to obtain resources, such as income, assets, or property. Biko Koeing finds that Trump voters were motivated not only by a perceived loss of status, but by the belief that this loss was unjust. Fabien Accominotti and colleagues assess the characteristics of status hierarchies and find that those with greater clarity, rigidity, and order have greater inequality between high and low status members.
 
Issue 2 examines how status is created and reinforced through cultural norms and in our relationships with one another. Hilary Holbrow finds that the gender pay gap is nearly three times greater in companies where low-status support roles are held primarily by females. Natasha Quadlin finds that college graduates who are perceived to be wealthy are also perceived to be more intelligent than they would be if they were perceived to be members of a lower socioeconomic group. Annette Lareau finds that married women often behave in ways – such as disengagement from financial matters or downplaying their own financial knowledge – that sustain their husband’s status as economic expert of the family. Bianca Manago and colleagues find that prior contact and group interaction between Whites, Blacks, and Mexican Americans decreases Whites’ anxiety about working with Blacks and Mexican Americans, but does not increase Whites’ perceptions of Blacks’ and Mexican Americans’ competence. Status interventions during interaction, however, do increase Whites’ perceptions of Mexican Americans’ competence and their influence in the group.  Lehn Benjamin finds that staff at nonprofit organizations who share control and establish common ground with their clients reduce status hierarchies between staff and clients.
 
This volume of RSF sheds light on status as a powerful social force which pervades our lives, and demonstrates its role in creating and preserving inequality.

Note the copy pertains to two issues of RSF:

Status – a form of inequality based on esteem, respect, and honor – affects how people are treated in all aspects of their lives, including in schools, workplaces, politics, and even the family. It shapes people’s access to valued outcomes in life, such as income, education, and health. However, status is poorly understood and its significance in the construction of inequality is often underestimated. In this special double issue of RSF, sociologist Cecilia L. Ridgeway, social psychologist Hazel Rose Markus, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how status functions in society and its role in inequality.
 
Issue 1 demonstrates that status is fundamental to inequality and shows that it is different from other forms of inequality. Tali Mendelberg presents a theory of how status functions in politics and differentiates the potent symbolic value of achieving greater esteem from status-seeking as a means to obtain resources, such as income, assets, or property. Biko Koeing finds that Trump voters were motivated not only by a perceived loss of status, but by the belief that this loss was unjust. Fabien Accominotti and colleagues assess the characteristics of status hierarchies and find that those with greater clarity, rigidity, and order have greater inequality between high and low status members.
 
Issue 2 examines how status is created and reinforced through cultural norms and in our relationships with one another. Hilary Holbrow finds that the gender pay gap is nearly three times greater in companies where low-status support roles are held primarily by females. Natasha Quadlin finds that college graduates who are perceived to be wealthy are also perceived to be more intelligent than they would be if they were perceived to be members of a lower socioeconomic group. Annette Lareau finds that married women often behave in ways – such as disengagement from financial matters or downplaying their own financial knowledge – that sustain their husband’s status as economic expert of the family. Bianca Manago and colleagues find that prior contact and group interaction between Whites, Blacks, and Mexican Americans decreases Whites’ anxiety about working with Blacks and Mexican Americans, but does not increase Whites’ perceptions of Blacks’ and Mexican Americans’ competence. Status interventions during interaction, however, do increase Whites’ perceptions of Mexican Americans’ competence and their influence in the group.  Lehn Benjamin finds that staff at nonprofit organizations who share control and establish common ground with their clients reduce status hierarchies between staff and clients.
 
This volume of RSF sheds light on status as a powerful social force which pervades our lives, and demonstrates its role in creating and preserving inequality.
 

In A Resonant Ecology, Max Ritts traces how sound’s integration into the environmental politics of Canada’s North Coast has paved the way for massive industrial expansion. While conservationists hope that the dissemination of whale songs and other nature sounds will showcase the beauty of local wildlife for people around the world, Ritts reveals how colonial capitalism can co-opt sonic efforts to protect the coast. He demonstrates how digital technologies allow industry to sonically map new shipping lanes and facilitate new ways of experiencing sound—premised not on listening, but on sound’s exploitable status as a data resource. By outlining how sound can both perpetuate and refuse capitalist colonialism, Ritts challenges the idea that the sonic realm is inherently liberatory and reveals sound to be a powerfully uncertain object. Through a situated geographical approach, he makes the case that only a decolonial and multigenerational environmental politics can counter the false promise of “sustainable marine development” held up by industry and the state.

An investigation of Paris as an urban space and a poetic site of remembrance. 

Experiencing urban space conjures visions of the past alongside contemplation of the present. This edited volume investigates this feeling of seeing double by investigating Paris—a city that has come to embody the tension of this sensation—through a dual lens of nostalgia and modernity. 

Contributors survey Paris in film, poetry, and prose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, presenting the city as both a concrete reality and as a collection of the myths associated with it. Interdisciplinary and deeply researched, the essays distill complex concepts of the urban, the textual, and the modern for a wide readership.

"A solid contribution to Rousseau studies. It has the special merit of carefully and thoroughly analyzing several important writings of Rousseau on war and on international relations." --Hilail Gildin, Queens College, C.U.N.Y. For more than two centuries, the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have helped shape many different responses to historical experience. While today's readers are aware of Rousseau's contemporary significance, his writings on war and peace have been almost completely ignored. This book offers a fresh interpretation of two of Rousseau's little-known works: his unfinished "The State of War" and his summary and critique of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre's Project for Perpetual Peace. Starting with an account of her discovery of the original page sequence of Rousseau's manuscript on "The State of War," Grace G. Roosevelt explores his theory of international conflict and explains his alternative approaches to the problem of securing peace. She brings out the important connections between Rousseau's theory of international politics and his principles of education, arguing throughout for the continuing relevance of his ideas. Roosevelt's main contention is that, when studied in relation to his works on politics and education, Rousseau's writings on war and peace provide the modern reader with a realistic analysis of the war system and a normative vision of the possibilities for peace. In discussing his principles of education, Roosevelt suggests that Rousseau's writings challenge us to confront the question of whether educational systems should aim to create citizens of a particular state or citizens of the world. The book includes full translations, by the author, of Rousseau's unpublished manuscript on "The State of War" and of his forty-page "Summary" and "Critique" of the Project for Perpetual Peace.

The first maritime surveillance radars in World War II quickly discovered that returns from the sea, soon to be known as sea clutter, were often the limiting factor when attempting to detect small targets while controlling false alarms. This remains true for modern radars, where the detection of small, slow moving targets on a rough sea surface remains one of the main drivers for maritime radar design, particularly in the development of detection processing.

Rapid technological advances since the 1980s have revolutionized data gathering and changed the nature of many day-to-day transactions. Today, nearly every economic and financial transaction is recorded and can be linked to the individuals involved. This proliferation of “big data” makes it possible for economists and political scientists to empirically analyze the spending behavior of far greater numbers of individuals and firms, over much longer periods of time, than ever before. In “Big Data in Political Economy,” edited by Atif Mian and Howard Rosenthal, a group of quantitative researchers explore the possibilities and challenges of this data boom for the social sciences, focusing on how big data can help us gain new insights into such issues as social inequality, political polarization, and the influence of money in politics.
 
Among other topics, the articles in this issue demonstrate how large-scale data sources can be used to analyze campaign contributions and political participation. Adam Bonica outlines the development of a comprehensive “map” of the American political system that collects, processes, and organizes data on politicians’ campaign finances, policy positions, and voting records, and makes such information available to voters. Drew Dimmery and Andrew Peterson show how web-based data-gathering techniques can augment such a map to include political contributions made by nonprofits, which are often overlooked or not fully transparent. Deniz Igan links campaign contribution data to both policymakers’ voting records and financial institutions’ lending behavior and shows that legislators who were heavily lobbied by institutions engaging in risky lending, such as subprime lenders, were more likely to vote for deregulation. Chris Tausanovitch connects big data on voters’ income and policy preferences to the voting records of their congressional representatives in order to study how effectively the political system represents voters of different income levels. And Sharyn O’Halloran and coauthors discuss how big data can augment traditional observational research by replacing tedious hand coding of volumes of text with automated procedures.
 
As research in political economy increasingly focuses on the role of money in shaping the outcomes of elections and policymaking, new methods of aggregating and examining financial data have become central. Together, the papers in this volume show how big data provides unprecedented opportunities for social scientists to better understand the links between politics and markets.

This first comprehensive and thoroughly documented study of the political development of two of the newly formed nations of Central Africa presents the full story of the successful efforts of the people of Malawi and Zambia to achieve self-government. Following a detailed examination of the impact of British colonial rule, the author provides a new interpretation of the earliest demonstrations of native discontent and he explains how the forces of protest found expression through proto-political parties and the formation of religious sects and millennial movements. He also interprets the objectives and tactics of the ruling white settlers in their abortive effort to establish the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Basing his analysis on archival and other primary sources, including interviews with leading figures, Robert Rotberg traces the origins of the full-fledged political parties in both countries and describes the early congresses which were to become the dominant movements during the struggle for independence in Central Africa. He ends with an analysis of that struggle, bringing the story to its successful conclusion in late 1964. A postscript discusses the important changes of 1965.

The Russia-Ukraine war is a multifaceted beast. It ranges from fighting on the ground to high diplomacy, from domestic anti-war protests to international weapon supplies, from justification through sham referenda to coercion via economic sabotage, and from operational misdirection to covering up war crimes. There are close connections between these facets: the collapse of a front leads to the discovery of mass graves; the delivery of weapon systems depends on Zelensky’s appeal to the international community; sham referenda followed by annexation enable accusations of unwillingly mobilized soldiers who refuse to defend the motherland. The volume sheds light on the Russia-Ukraine war, exploring this multitude of facets and their interconnections. Bringing together the expertise of our colleagues at the Netherlands Defense Academy (NLDA) allows us to adopt a distinctively interdisciplinary approach, offering uniquely comprehensive and timely reflections on this armed conflict. The 27 chapters in this volume are centered around five themes. The first section covers historical and contemporary narratives, intelligence, digital technologies, and communication strategies. The second provides in-depth analyses of the operational aspects of the war, including warfighting on land, at sea, in the air, as well as in the space and cyber domains. The third section on international involvement covers topics such as sanctions, burden sharing, arms support and implications of the war on international institutions and the world order. The fourth provides analyses of the normative framework that applies to the Russia-Ukraine war. Finally, the fifth section deals with the way armed forces can transform their organizations and learn from this war, and concludes with questions on how and when the Russia-Ukriane war might end.

The Palestine Liberation Organization is now almost a government in Gaza and the West Bank. In this in-depth account of its ideology, strategy, and tactics, its relationship to other Arab states, and its confrontations with Israel, Barry Rubin documents how the PLO was transformed from revolutionary organization into the administrator of its own territory.

A cross-disciplinary study on Russian diaspora writing.

Since the start of the massive post-revolutionary exodus, Russian literature has thrived in multiple locations around the globe—but what happens to cultural vocabularies, politics of identity, literary canon, and language when writers transcend the metropolitan and national boundaries? This volume sets a new agenda for the study of Russian diaspora writing, reorienting the field from an excessive emphasis on the homeland to an analysis of transnational circulations that shape extraterritorial cultural practices. Integrating a variety of conceptual perspectives, ranging from diaspora and postcolonial studies to the theories of translation and self-translation, world literature, and evolutionary literary criticism, the contributors argue for a distinct nature of diasporic literary expression predicated on hybridity, ambivalence, and a sense of multiple belonging. As the complementary case studies demonstrate, diaspora narratives consistently recode historical memory, contest the mainstream discourses of Russianness, rewrite received cultural tropes, and explore topics that have remained marginal or taboo in the homeland.
 

Red Sun and Merlin Unchained are the most recent original stage works by one of the most accomplished yet neglected dramatists of our time. Red Sun is a two-hander, tightly tethered within the classical unities of theme and space and the span of a single day. Merlin Unchained is an explosive, multitudinous epic, crossing continents and centuries and passing between worlds. Yet though technically so different, both works speak with the same distinctive voice, offering an exhilarating—and sometimes disturbing— challenge to the cultural and political perceptions of the contemporary audience, and exploring alien worlds that, alarmingly, begin to become recognizable as our own.
 

Why is it that in the ’90s, business in California’s Silicon Valley flourished, while along Route 128 in Massachusetts it declined? The answer, Annalee Saxenian suggests, has to do with the fact that despite similar histories and technologies, Silicon Valley developed a decentralized but cooperative industrial system while Route 128 came to be dominated by independent, self-sufficient corporations. The result of more than one hundred interviews, this compelling analysis highlights the importance of local sources of competitive advantage in a volatile world economy.

A raucous cultural history of rock’s relationship with the moving image.
 
When rock ’n’ roll burst into life in the 1950s, the shockwaves echoed around the world, amplified by images of untamed youth projected on cinema screens. But for the performers themselves, corporate showbusiness remained very much in control, contriving a series of cash-in movies to exploit the new musical fad.
 
In this riveting cultural history, John Scanlan explores rock’s relationship with the moving image over seven decades in cinema, television, music videos, advertising, and YouTube. Along the way, he shows how rock was exploited, how it inspired film pioneers, and, not least, the film transformations it caused over more than half a century.
 
From Elvis Presley to David Bowie, and from Scorpio Rising to the films of Scorsese and DIY documentarists like Don Letts, this is a unique retelling of the story of rock—from birth to old age—through its onscreen life.

In the winter of 1818, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft set out from Potosi, Missouri, to document lead mines in the interior of the Ozarks. Intending only to make his fortune by publishing an account of the area's mineral resources, he became the first skilled observer to witness and record frontier life in the Ozarks.

The journal kept by Schoolcraft as he traveled ninety days in the rugged terrain of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas was originally published in 1821 and has become an essential record of Ozark territorial society and natural history documenting some of the earliest American settlers in the region, the power and beauty of many lost portions of the White River, the majesty of the open prairies, and the wealth of wildlife once found in the Ozarks.

In this book, Reiner Schürmann argues that what is most original about Marx is his philosophical axis. Extending his highly original engagement with the history of philosophy, Schürmann draws out this axis, which determines and localizes his theories of history, social relations, and economy. Whereas Marxist readings of Marx conceive history, classes, and social relations as primary realities, Schürmann brings out a radically immanent understanding of praxis that introduces multiplicity. This edition is complemented by a reprinting of Schürmann’s Anti-Humanism essay, in which he reads Marx alongside Nietzsche and Heidegger as spelling out the dissociation of being and action. Reading Marx showcases underappreciated facets of Schürmann’s work and offers an interpretation of Marx that resonates with the readings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, Antonio Negri, and François Laruelle.

On the Argentine pampas, between the years 1860 and 1910, a dramatic social and agricultural revolution took place. The haunts of wild cattle, native peoples, and gauchos were transformed into cultivated fields and rich pastures. A land that had produced only scrawny sheep and cattle became one of the world’s leading exporters of wheat, corn, beef, mutton, and wool. A country that had had only a sparse and scattered Spanish and mestizo population now boasted a metropolis of one and a half million, and a national population of eight million people, nearly a third of whom were born in Europe. These were significant changes, and wheat growing played a major role in all of them. This study traces the development of the Argentine wheat zone, focusing on the part wheat played in forming the Argentina of today.

James R. Scobie begins his account with the first settlers who colonized Santa Fe in the 1850s and shows how they and thousands of other European immigrants converted this vast grassland into a world breadbasket. He explains why these small farmer-owners soon gave way to tenant farmers, and how crop farming developed primarily as servant to the predominant sheep and cattle interests. He expands on several factors responsible for this evolvement: the elimination of indigenous threat, the coming of the railroad, the agricultural policy—or lack of policy—of the Argentine government, and the urban orientation of the Argentine people.

The railroads, by suppressing the building of other roads through the pampas, had the effect of isolating the wheatgrowers. By making the products of the pampas available to world markets, the railroads opened up new trade, which helped the growth of cities tremendously; but this very prosperity pushed the cost of land far beyond the wheatgrower’s ability to buy it. The result was a pampas without settlers, a frontier filled with migrant sharecroppers and tenant farmers, a land exploited but not possessed. Transiency as well as isolation became the common denominators of these families, who were forced to move every few years to make way for more valued tenants—sheep and cattle. They left behind them no schools, no churches, no roads, no villages. Immigrants came to labor but not to sink their roots in the pampas.

Without sentimentality but with understanding and compassion, Scobie explores every facet of the lives of these laborers who created Argentina’s agricultural greatness. His examination of Argentina’s broad policies toward land, immigration, and tariffs shows that the national government had little lasting or effective interest in the country’s agricultural development. In a social sense, the thousands of immigrants who toiled the pampas were looked upon as the wild cattle or fertile soil—blessings which neither needed nor warranted official attention. Scobie’s conclusion is that Argentina got better than it deserved.

Alexander Sedgwick presents an intensive examination of the political problems confronting French Royalists, Catholics, and conservative Republicans in their attempt to form a conservative party, within the framework of the Republic, in the decade dominated by the Panama Scandal and the Dreyfus Affair. Basing his analysis on unpublished papers and contemporary newspapers, pamphlets, and reviews often neglected in studies of the period, the author demonstrates that the failure of the movement can be traced to endemic French political attitudes, and that the Ralliement has significant historical implications which have not been generally recognized.

This multidisciplinary collective volume advances the scholarly discussion on the origins of Islam. It simultaneously focuses on three domains: texts, social contexts, and ideological developments relevant for the study of Islam’s beginnings -- taking the latter expression in its broadest possible sense. The intersections of these domains need to be examined afresh in order to obtain a clear picture of the concurrent phenomena that collectively enabled both the gradual emergence of a new religious identity and the progressive delimitation of its initially fuzzy boundaries.

The creative reuse of materials, texts, and ideas was a common phenomenon in the medieval world. The seven chapters offer here a synchronic and diachronic consideration of the receptions and meanings of events and artifacts, analyzing the processes that allowed medieval works to remain relevant in sociocultural contexts far removed from those in which they originated. In the process, they elucidate the global valences of recycling, revision, and relocation throughout the interconnected Middle Ages, and their continued relevance for the shaping of modernity. The essays examine cases in the Arab and Muslim world, China and Mongolia, and the Prussian-Lithuanian frontier of eastern Europe.