This Part introduces the argument that the Declaration created an American nation – the United States of America – that became a distinct juridical entity in the world community as of July 4, 1776. That is, the states entered into the world confederated with each other. The United States had a constitution as of July 4, 1776, but it was an unwritten constitution based on tacit popular consent. The Articles of Confederation would later specify much of the internal structure of that confederation, but the Articles did not form the confederation – there was already a de facto confederation at the time of the Declaration. This nationalist reading of the Declaration of Independence is far more consistent with text, history, law, and popular understandings than the view that the Declaration created thirteen completely independent nations.

Edward A. Ross (1866–1951), a prominent American sociologist, believed immigrants coming into the United States in the early twentieth century were members of the ‘lower races,’ barely human. Ross popularized the phrase ‘race suicide,’ the idea that the reproductive deficiency of Americans of Northwestern European origin would doom an America that would be overtaken by the “beaten men of beaten races” of Southeastern Europe. Ross grouped people according to racial categories that were based on his own subjective contemporaneous and historical analyses of ‘types’ he identifies, such as Hindus, Jews, Chinese, Mediterraneans, Japanese, Celtics, Teutons, and others. As was the case with many of his contemporaries in the academy, he understood his views to be ‘commonsense’ knowledge, not subject to any serious scrutiny or challenge. We can gain insight into the mindset of social scientists at the turn of the twentieth century by examining Ross’ methodology of categorizing and ranking human groups in order to better understand the bases upon which Ross confidently proclaimed that “there is at the present moment no people in the world that is, man for man, equal to the Americans in capacity and efficiency.”

The passing of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807 represented a hard-won victory, but its monumentalizing can obscure the complex time of abolition. Temporal complexity defines British literary and material–cultural representations of abolition, from the testimonies of formerly enslaved people (Cugoano and Prince), to the writings of prominent white abolitionists (Clarkson and Wilberforce), to work by ‘canonical’ Romantic-era writers (Wordsworth, Austen, and Coleridge). Through readings of key texts and artefacts around 1807, this chapter considers how the literature and material cultures of the era configure the spaces and temporalities of abolition. It argues that abolitionist arguments and sentiment depended on shifting notions of time and space in the age of interconnected global revolutions, producing abolitionist materials that worked upon the spatial and temporal gaps between the metropole and the colonies, and in many cases deliberately obscured the connections between the two.

This chapter focuses on larger syntactic units, primarily sentences. It first discusses major sentence types in Mandarin (simple vs. complex sentences). Then it describes four types of sentences based on communicative functions, and the modal particles which are attached to different types of sentences. The chapter also describes the syntactic, semantic and discourse features of the bǎ and bèi constructions, and their socio-pragmatic functions.

Most often the foreign policy of the leaders aligned with the foreign ministers but not always. Many governments in Europe were and are coalitions – some more cohesive than others. It was not unusual for new prime ministers to offer the foreign office role to their greatest rival, in the hope, I assumed, that they would spend their time out of the way. From my point of view, it meant keeping track of the politics in each country – there was always an election somewhere in the EU, and I dealt with ministers from al the political parties and occasionally saw policy shift overnight as a new minister arrived, most often on the Middle East or towards Moscow. Each new minister appearing for their first FAC was subject to a charm offensive from the others, especially those from the same political groupings. It was pretty irresistible to have seven or eight ministers giving a new arrival such attention. Combined with invitations to visit, offers to travel together in a group, it was the perfect example of the EU working as it should.

It was during the Northern Song era that the Yellow River, the dominant landscape feature of North China, began to flood frequently and catastrophically. Yellow River floods confounded the regime, immiserated and uprooted residents of the North China Plain, and marked a turning point in relations between Chinese people and the natural world that they inhabited. This chapter locates the origins of the flooding crisis in rapidly increasing erosion on the Loess Plateau, hundreds of miles upstream from the floodplain on the Song northwestern frontier, where the edge of the Yellow River watershed was also an ecologically fragile and highly militarized borderland. It also explains responses to flooding by engineers, officials, artists, and the people of the floodplain.

Disciplines grow at their boundaries. The interdisciplinary topics considered here fall into three groups. One is mainly concerned with liquids: paramagnetic liquids, ferrofluids, magnetic levitation and confinement, and magnetoelectrochemistry. The second relates to life sciences: magnetism in biology and medicine, magnetic imaging and magnetically aided diagnostics. Finally there is planetary and stellar magnetism, covering the magnetism of rocks and the Earth’s magnetic field, as well as and those of other planets, the Sun and stars.

The Leave vote gave voice to those whose dissatisfaction had been muted by the rules of UK electoral politics. It represented, amongst other things, a howl of protest from people who had given up on the political process and who turned out to demand that they should no longer be overlooked. In so doing, they transformed our politics. The referendum catalysed a division in British politics which, while not new, had hitherto not structured party competition decisively. That role had been played by class. As Peter Pulzer famously put it, ‘class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail’. However, the 2016 vote saw similar proportions of left- and right-wing voters opt for Leave (52% and 48%, respectively). People were divided not by class but by social outlook, with 72% of social conservatives but only 21% of social liberals voting to leave.

Critical thinking on the relationship between fashion and ideas of personhood tends to fall into two approaches: (1) the violation or diminishing of persons by fashion as an oppressive expression of gender expectations and base commercialism; (2) the celebration of fashion as an agential mode of performance and resignification. Both leave uncontested a set of mutually imbricated oppositions between persons versus nonpersons, interiority versus exteriority, essence versus surface, organic body versus synthetic dress. What happens to how we think about fashion and beauty when they take place on the denigrated, racialized, and gendered body? The woman of color presents a provocation about the toggle between personhood and objecthood. What if race is fashion (that is, stylized, transferable, synthetic), and what are the political implications of posing such a question?

This chapter studies the 2020 photo-essay “A Primordial Culture” by Sri Lankan Canadian multidisciplinary artist Rajni Perera. It centers Perera’s work as the basis of a theory of divine adornment as a creative response to climate catastrophe. Such a theory is derived from an investment in thinking alongside Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ornamentalism and demonstrates how forms of ornament might be complicated and utilized differently in response to Perera’s lone figure roaming unknown terrain following planetary collapse. The chapter weaves in discussions of both the photographs of Perera’s adorned traveler figure and her writing as a mode of describing a future world deeply rooted in, and indebted to, Indigenous, ancient, and anti-colonial feminist cosmologies.

I present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Iran, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, I reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

I offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

The rise of social media as big social data offers opportunities for behavioural science and Behavioural Data Science researchers. The availability of large volumes of data generated by users of social media opens up the possibility of being able to study human behaviour in detail, at scale and in real-time. Stimulated in part by such opportunities, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) techniques have advanced rapidly. Applications of social media analytics now range from attitude extraction, sentiment analysis and behavioural monitoring, to rumour verification, event prediction, detection and tracking. However, the challenges have also grown and opinions on the value of social media analytics remain divided, with some seeing great potential while others express concerns about, for example, the absence of transparency in machine learning and NLP models and problems of bias in – and ethics of – harvesting social media data. Some are also concerned about the lack of methodological rigour and even question whether social media analytics is capable of delivering meaningful and robust insights into human behaviour. If they are to address these issues, then behavioural science researchers will need to master the skills and knowledge that will be needed to choose and apply machine learning and NLP techniques in ways that can guarantee robust and scientifically valid findings.