This chapter considers the popularity of the genre of the short story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores, in particular, a class of magazine stories for which the terms of approval followed the lines of reading for amusement and entertainment. Surveying critical accounts of the short story, and the burgeoning interest in anthologies and handbooks for aspiring writers, the chapter considers what follows if we not only accept but accentuate the notion of the genre as an artistic commodity in a gendered marketplace defined by overabundance. Special consideration is given to the subgenre of “storiettes” published alongside a column covering “the latest fads” in Munsey’s magazine. The essay argues that the style of the period’s short story developed in tandem with ideas about it as a fashionable and consumable commodity, and even as something of a fad.

Polar history can be seen through four different temporal lenses. There is Deep Time with its geological timescales against which to interpret and understand change. There is the ‘golden age’ of polar history, approximately 1800 to 1930, which orients the significance of the poles through the perspective of colonial exploration. There is the Anthropocene, our post-Holocene human-dominated epoch, which scholars have dated (not without controversy) to the 1950s and after. The Anthropocene is part of the geological timescale, but in the polar regions it corresponds to a temporality traditionally rooted in geopolitics: the Cold War era of militarization and intensified scientific interest in the polar regions.

Of all the north circumpolar lands, only Greenland extends farther towards the top of the globe than the uppermost reaches of the Arctic Archipelago. Politicians and media commentators regularly extol Canada’s identity as a northern nation, yet this area’s official name since 1954 – the Queen Elizabeth Islands – is not widely known or often used, and most citizens’ knowledge of High Arctic geography is rather vague. Only the military station at Alert on the north coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 km from the pole, stands out clearly amid the general blur.

The High Arctic region’s southern boundary is Parry Channel, the major east–west waterway through the archipelago, in latitude 74° north. Parry Channel also divides the islands where Indigenous people have lived continuously for millennia from those that were abandoned during the harsh climatic conditions of the Little Ice Age (which lasted roughly from 1300 to 1850 ad).

Compared with many other regions of the world, the polar regions have not been areas with much industry. The few exceptions, both north and south, have mostly been associated with resource exploitation: fur-hunting, sealing, whaling, mining – and also tourism. Therefore, in economic-geographical publications, the polar regions have usually been described as Resource Frontier Regions.1 Considering both the Arctic and the Antarctic, whaling stands out in terms of the very long time period in which it has continuously been undertaken – and in terms of its scale.

George Angohiatok (pronounced ‘ano-HI-tok’) is a keen observer of Arctic landscapes, animals, and peoples. Raised on the land by his parents and grandparents in the western Canadian Arctic, George talks easily about his deep appreciation for the land and his significant concerns for the future of the Arctic and Inuit. George shares his observations of changes to the physical and social environments – changes he calls overwhelming – through richly detailed personal narratives. In the conversations presented in this chapter, George deftly weaves together changes to both settings, and illustrates the importance of considering our two worlds holistically. George’s story and words are transcribed here with minimal interruption from the other authors. Conventional academic reflections on methodology and literature are found within George’s story and afterwards.

While the warriors of India through the centuries have been primarily male, the great deities of war have been female. This chapter examines two of the most important war goddesses of India: Durga and Kali.

This chapter examines the evolution of attitudes to war in religious Zionism, beginning with the moderate approach to war in religious Zionism before the creation of the state of Israel and proceeding to the more radical approach that developed after the Six-Day War in 1967. It also examines the roots of these approaches in medieval Jewish sources, particularly those of Maimonides and Nahmanides.

There is a problem fermenting in the frigid waters of the Beaufort Sea, a portion of the Arctic Ocean north of Canada and the United States. The trouble has its roots in an 1825 treaty signed between Great Britain and Russia, which divided their North American territories into what are now Alaska and Yukon. In that treaty, the two empires drew a north–south boundary along the ‘Meridian Line of the 141st degree’ that ‘in its prolongation as far as the Frozen Ocean, shall form the limit between the Russian and British Possessions’.1 Nearly 200 years later the inheritors of this agreement, the United States and Canada, are interpreting the phrase ‘as far as the Frozen Ocean’ in contrasting ways. Canada understands this sentence to mean that the boundary between the two nations extends past the shoreline and into the Beaufort Sea, while the United States argues that the border ends at the coastline where the ‘Frozen Ocean’ begins.