Whereas it had taken colonizers more than two centuries to dislodge Indigenous powers from the East, major campaigns against Native nations in the West were over in a few decades. What explains the United States’ rapid conquest of some of the mightiest powers on the continent? And how did the U.S. Army manage this feat with a dwindling and scattered force? The answers lay beyond conventional military theaters. The campaign against the Native West was a war on Indigenous society itself. Farmers transformed Indigenous land, hunters obliterated Indigenous resources, teachers curtailed Indigenous languages, federal agents withheld Indigenous annuities, politicians denied Indigenous rights, and soldiers deported Indigenous people. Yet many tools used to conquer Native people – reservations, railroads, the English language, the federal Indian school system – became, in time, instruments of resistance and revival. Native people rode trains to build intertribal connections. They spoke English to bridge divides between ethno-linguistic groups. And they drew on common educational experiences to craft a shared history – a history of oppression and dispossession but also remarkable resilience.

Gender identity, sexuality and sexual orientation are often not well understood, creating confusion, prejudice and ignorance among some populations. To change societal views, various individuals and groups have provided education and shared their own personal journeys about gender identity, sexuality and sexual orientation. Although there have been some positive changes for the LGBTTQIA+ population, there is still much to be done to change attitudes, beliefs and values to improve how those who identify as LGBTTQIA+ are accepted and valued within society.

This chapter offers readers perspective on ideals and practices that shaped health-related treatment of former service members from the Revolutionary period through the end of the Cold War. Studying how veterans fought for and accessed health services over two centuries offers a compelling view of the wide-ranging impacts of military endeavors on policy and politics and on the individual lives of service members and civilians. It also brings into sharp relief the extent to which norms of civilian society – for example, changing perceptions of how diseases are classified and what constitutes proper care – influence wars and perceptions of them. Broadly, the chapter shows that, while veterans’ care became more bureaucratized and institutionalized over time, some realities were constant: the nature and extent of available services, and the ways people interpreted them, were dictated by former service members’ advocacy, as well as prevailing notions about governmental responsibility, illness and disease, disability, and medical practice. Most broadly, the history of veterans’ experiences related to health care reveals that war and society are inextricably and intricately linked.

This chapter provides an overview of the types of inference problems we address and the different approaches to solving them. We focus on risky inference: drawing conclusions, learning and making predictions in situations where certainty is impossible. Predicting a response from one or more predictors using past data is called supervised learning. When the response is continuous, the task is regression; when it is categorical, the task is classification. In unsupervised learning, there is no response variable. Instead, the goal is to find patterns or structure in data, as in density estimation, clustering and dimensionality reduction. In both supervised and unsupervised contexts, overfitting occurs when we model data in excessive detail and fail to distinguish systematic patterns from noise; underfitting occurs when our models are too simple to capture systematic patterns. Probability is a key tool for tackling risky inference, with frequentist and Bayesian interpretations motivating distinct approaches. Finally, large neural networks have proven remarkably effective in both supervised and unsupervised tasks, often avoiding overfitting despite containing billions of parameters.

Chapter 1 traces a chronology from earlier, second-generation post-Holocaust texts to memory stories in the form of absence or antimemory, using examples of fiction by Thomas Bernhard and W. G. Sebald. Memory stories that diverge from mainstream historical discourse move toward transgenerational and post-postmemory, as indicated in texts by third- to fourth-generation writers such as Benjamin Stein and Mirna Funk. It is noteworthy that Edgar Hilsenrath, already juxtaposes African American racism with antisemitism, in what can be called an early form of multidirectional memory in literature, another form of the divergent memory. All examples from Chapter 1 show that our conceptions of Holocaust memory do not follow linear pathways, and that the different forms of divergent memory can be seen as a counternarrative in literature to the official memory discourse of Germany with its public Holocaust memorials and sites. In outlining four instantiations of Holocaust memory that diverge from official discourse, Chapter 1 offers a genealogy of the different memory discourses since German unification, highlighting early moments of migration in Holocaust memory literature.

Chapter 5 opens with a comparison between stimulus–response (habit) controls and cognitive controls. It draws a distinction between wanting something and wanting not to want it; for example, a smoker who wants cigarettes (low level, attribution of incentive salience) but wants not to want them (high level, conscious, rational decision-making). Goal direction is associated with the prefrontal cortex and a move to automaticity is associated with a lowering of prefrontal control. The chapter draws a distinction between goal trackers and sign trackers. The discussion then turns to decision-making in humans describing a hot system versus cool system and the role of stress. Examples are given of bottom-up and top-down factors in cooperation or competition (e.g. the marshmallow effect).

There is likely no American writer who has directly impacted so many diverse cultural histories as William S. Burroughs (1914–1997), and this volume aims to chart his most prominent identities: founding member of the Beat Generation, expatriate writer, “obscene” novelist, experimental avant-garde artist, patron saint of heavy metal, early postmodernist, and godfather of punk and cyberpunk.

Chapter 2 explores multiple conceptions of rights and provides a brief history of human rights and some of the arguments they evoke: they are arbitrary, demand changes to cultures, assume all humans are the same regardless of cultural and other differences, attempt to impose a Western regard for the individual over community, and responses to these criticisms. The chapter provides a short history of Amnesty International, its organizational structure, and its current “Priority Campaigns.” It provides a rationale for the ideological study of Amnesty documents and preliminary analyses of an Amnesty appeal letter, the webpage and email in which the appeal is embedded, and the report on the situation that the documents are concerned with. It provides a description of these documents, paying particular attention to the linguistic and visual resonances occasioned by their mutual contextualizations and proposes a Relevance Theory explanation for the intricate relations between the documents' linguistic and visual modes and argues for the ideological study of AI documents, particularly of the appeal letters.

This chapter investigates the acquisition of sentence-final particles (SFPs) by L2 and L3 Mandarin Chinese learners. It reveals that L2 learners can, with relative ease, acquire some SFPs (e.g. the yes–no question SFP ma) due to their high saliency and typological contrast with learners’ L1. However, learners at different proficiency levels demonstrate varying degrees of difficulty in acquiring other types of SFPs, which are attributed to degrees of the transparency and detectability of relevant cues in the input. The chapter further examines features attached to de in L2 Chinese shi …de constructions, revealing that the feature attachment to the SFP de develops in an uneven manner in English speakers’ L2 Mandarin, with the greatest challenges being those features involving cross-domain feature reassembly and those requiring sensitivity to pragmatically subtle cues in the input. The chapter also investigates ways in which SFPs in L3 Mandarin interact in learners’ minds with previously acquired languages (e.g. English and Cantonese), showing that the existence of an SFP counterpart in a previously acquired language does not necessarily facilitate L3 acquisition of the feature attached to the SFP and that transfer from a previously acquired language can be detrimental as well as facilitative.

This single case study of INSTINCT3, a Germany-based video game influencer management agency, investigates how its employees (influencers) and external stakeholders (followers) operate as polycentric communities in two interconnected action arenas: an offline arena of intra-organizational interactions between employees, and an online arena in which influencer channels mediate interactions between influencers and followers. The study relies on the governing knowledge commons (GKC) framework to examine the transfer of organizational values between offline and online communities. In-depth interviews are used to identify the resources, community attributes, and rules-in-use that are essential in developing a value-driven and responsible employee communityship. Additionally, the study investigates if and how organizationally relevant rules-in-use are transferred by influencers through communicative practices in their online communities to their followers. Relying on comparative analysis, it identifies how INSTINCT3 governs the two action arenas as part of a dynamic and multilayered process.