This chapter introduces readers to the county Republican Party chairs surveyed and interviewed, explaining why these particular party figures are important and should be listened to. We see survey evidence demonstrating that Trump was definitely not their first choice in early 2023, and roughly half were undecided at that point. Nor was Trump necessarily the favorite of campaign donors. The chapter examines the differences between early Trump supporters and other Republican chairs, and competing beliefs about electability and Trump’s own chances as a third-time candidate. Republican voters, meanwhile, were pulling for him throughout this time. Over the course of 2023, party chairs came to follow the voters and slowly closed ranks behind Trump.

This chapter examines the rise of government-run pharmacies during the Song dynasty as a lens through which to explore the state’s active role in shaping the healing marketplace and medical literature. These pharmacies not only sold pre-prepared prescriptions but also published self-help manuals. These manuals cataloged the full range of prescriptions available at the government-sponsored drugstores, along with the symptoms they were intended to treat. By promoting ready-made, prepackaged medications accessible directly to the public, the Pharmacy Formulary helped pioneer a new genre of self-help medical treatises. This development enabled patients to bypass physicians altogether, threatening physicians’ livelihoods and intensifying competition in an already crowded medical marketplace. In response, many learned physicians sought to defend the value of their expertise by emphasizing the nuanced skill required to match even standardized drugs to individual patients’ bodily conditions and disease progressions. This emphasis on diagnostic and therapeutic sophistication became a recurring theme in medical writings for centuries to come.

This chapter focuses on evaluations of persons as a lens into scientific data production and its ethics. That humans are fundamentally evaluative is a basic tenet of social interaction and social life. People are concerned that others understand their intentions adequately, knowing that their actions are being evaluated, and they examine others’ actions and intentions likewise. In many sciences, data production has become a service, with technicians generating data in the absence of researchers. Such new arrangements of data production come with numerical and social accountabilities as well as ethical evaluations. Focusing on data production in astronomy, this chapter traces these through several contexts. Joining data-producing technicians and data-using scientists as an ethnographer reveals that both are themselves exploring the epistemic and social accountabilities they face. Their way of “doing ethnography” is an ordinary social competence. The chapter argues that such ethnographic practices support and enable scientific data production as a service while also revealing its ethical tensions.

This chapter establishes the relation between pseudorandom graphs and Ramsey theory, using a variety of constructions, including superline graphs and random block constructions. A particular focus is on off-diagonal Ramsey numbers, and the asymptotics of the Ramsey number r (4, t), as well as the general transference theorem from extremal graph theory to Ramsey numbers r (F, t).

The biggest problem that the vote threw up was precisely the lack of clarity about what would come next; what unexpected surprises were to come next? What would the UK’s departure mean for Britain and for the European Union; what, indeed, would it mean for countries in other parts of the world? Would Brexit start a domino effect in Europe; might it even start a chain reaction elsewhere too, as countries stepped back from international commitments and out of regional or global institutions – and turned their backs on former partners and allies? In the days after the vote, press commentaries around the world began to harden. On 24 June 2016, for example, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that it respected the results and hoped for early agreements between London and Brussels to help clear up uncertainty. Three weeks later, voices in Beijing had a better grasp on what had happened – and in particular realised that the promises given by Brexit’s chief cheerleaders were hopelessly naïve at best and downright dissimulations at worst.

Languages can develop different dialects in different regions. Then, as further changes accumulate, speakers of the different dialects may no longer be able to understand one another. When that happens, these formerly different dialects become distinct but related languages, members of a language family. Linguistic classification is about these relationships among languages. This chapter is about the world’s language families, and about how languages are classified. It delves into the questions of what it takes to show that languages are related to one another and belong to the same language family. The major language families of the world are introduced. The comparative method is introduced and illustrated, and its huge role in explaining language history is revealed. Some of the better-known but nevertheless controversial proposals of distant linguistic kinship are also evaluated.

The fourth chapter examines an important way that Trump has consolidated power among the Republican Party’s elected officials: his control over nominations, with a particular focus on the midterm elections of 2022. Nomination control is a tool used by party bosses for centuries, from William Tweed to Richard Daley to Edward Crump to Richard Croker, although rarely has something like this been attempted at the national level. As with other bosses, Trump is more concerned with the nomination than with the general election, as it enables him to determine who is in the party and who is not, and thus what the party stands for. This control stems in large part from Trump’s unusually effective endorsements and his willingness to use those endorsements in a way presidents almost never do. He has shown an interest in and ability to build up careers and to end them, creating a cadre of elected officials, especially in Congress, who are directly indebted to him for their seats.

This chapter explores how fashion journalism shaped the development of the realist novel in nineteenth-century France. Drawing on scholarship that explores the interdependence of these forms of writing, it notes that both fashion journalists and novelists including Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Emile Zola seek to create what Roland Barthes described as the “reality effect” – in which the inclusion of particular details generates in the reader the sense that a text describes the real world. Ultimately, this chapter argues, the fantasy of fashion lies at the heart of the fantasy of realism as a way of representing the word, from fictional depictions of the values and mores of different social worlds to attempts to capture the experience of urban modernity. Hence fashion and femininity – though often dismissed or diminished by male realist novels – are at the heart of their literary innovations.

Young people are often excluded from placemaking decisions, despite being among the most affected by changes to local environments. This chapter examines Design Your Neighborhood (DYN), a place-based action civics curriculum implemented in middle schools in Nashville, Tennessee. DYN introduces students to urban design and engages them in participatory community development and decision-making. Drawing on qualitative data from eight focus groups across seven schools, the chapter explores how young people perceive and relate to their communities. Guided by sense of place theory, the analysis highlights students’ values, including community connectedness, safety, inclusivity, accessibility, and housing security. Students also identified ideas for improving their neighbourhoods, reflecting their aspirations in the context of Nashville’s rapidly changing built environment. The findings suggest that incorporating young people’s perspectives not only strengthens their sense of place but also provides valuable insights for cities seeking more inclusive, resilient, and equitable approaches to urban development.

This chapter satisfies curiosities about exceptions and why things don’t fit expected patterns by explaining the sound changes which resulted in such examples as goose/geese, wife/wives, child/children, holy but holiday and how verbs such as sing/sang/sung got to be that way. Addressing these irregularities explains in a straightforward way what sound change is, how it produced these oddities. The examples provide an understanding of the major sound changes that affect the history of English – Grimm’s Law, the Great Vowel Shift, umlaut, and others. The question of whether sound change is good or bad is answered.

This chapter examines the evolution of cross-border mobility of companies within the EU, tracing its development from foundational CJEU case law to recent statutory reforms. It explores landmark judgments that established principles allowing companies to transfer their registered office or seat across Member States without losing legal personality. The chapter then analyses legislative responses, including the Cross-Border Mergers Directive and Company Mobility Directive, aimed at codifying and clarifying these rights. Challenges related to national sovereignty, regulatory divergence and enforcement are discussed, highlighting ongoing efforts to balance corporate freedom with legal certainty and market integration.

This chapter theorizes and puts into practice the use of fashion in feminist historiography. It does so by charting two histories of the modernist poet and artist Mina Loy. One is narrated via Loy’s 1940s designs for a “corselet,” intended to correct curvature of the spine in a woman’s middle age. The other is via the poetic series Loy wrote at the same time, “Compensations of Poverty,” in which she identifies with a group of outcast people in fashion contexts. These histories augur different versions of Loy, with different temporalities: one capitalist, teleological and individualist, based on the opportunities offered by new plastic materials; the other intersubjective, cyclical and, this chapter argues, sustainable. Ultimately the chapter asks: which of these Loys do we want, now, in the context of climate catastrophe and persistent sexism? How can fashion help us write the feminist history we need?

Between 2010 and 2012, a catastrophic earthquake sequence devastated Christchurch, a colonial city built on Ngāi Tahu ancestral land in Canterbury, New Zealand. This chapter explores how government agencies, including public health services, collaborated with mana whenua (Ngāi Tahu, the local Māori tribe) to rebuild Ōtautahi Christchurch in ways that respect its colonial past while looking to a climate-challenged future. The rebuild sought to integrate natural environmental features and symbolic markers significant to mana whenua, while also promoting health, wellbeing, and a renewed sense of place for all residents. Writing as three Tangata Tiriti (settler-colonial) women, we draw on our professional roles in public health, urban design, landscape architecture, and strategic planning. We reflect on our involvement in planning and policy implementation, considering what worked well, what fell short, and our hopes for a future city that fosters resilience, inclusivity, and belonging.