In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

Arthurian tourist sites create what Stijn Reijnders, adapting Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux mémoire, calls lieux d’imagination: places that may or may not have their origins in history, but are compelling precisely because they join the real with a desired imaginary. We offer a tour of Tintagel Castle and Glastonbury Abbey in the UK, surveying the development of these sites from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1136) through the nineteenth-century Medieval Revival to today’s New Age religions and media tourism. We argue that Arthurian places are continually co-produced in processes far from finished; moreover, diverse groups have their own investments in such places – and are sometimes in conflict with each other. Thus we conclude with a discussion of two Arthurian sites outside the UK that exemplify how Arthuricity flourishes in unlikely places: the Excalibur Hotel and Casino, and Wewelsburg Castle, Himmler’s homage to the knights of the Round Table.

According to Dazai Shundai, the government of the sages uses laws and punishments with reluctance, but these still do play a necessary role. Laws are most effective when they are concise, easy for the people to understand, not frequently changed, and strictly and reliably enforced with appropriate punishments. Tokugawa Japan, however, lacks a proper system of laws.

Describes first two years as Fellow, including postgraduate year in Cambridge.

According to Dazai Shundai, when the government of a country has deteriorated to the point that it can no longer be revived, it is best to follow the “non-action” promoted by Laozi and simply let things run their course. In order to understand the course of events and the times that one lives in, one needs to understand the system of divination represented by the Way of Changes, which shows that all things, including ruling dynasties, go through cycles of flourishing and decay. The non-action of Laozi is not an ideal method for governing, but like other non-Confucian methods of governing, it has its uses in times of crisis. These non-Confucian methods can be compared to medicines, which contain poison but can be used to treat someone who is ill.

Written into the Versailles Treaty fifteen years earlier, the Saar plebiscite of 1935 asked the inhabitants of this important German industrial region whether they wished to return to Germany, join France, or remain under the existing League of Nations administration. As technical advisor and deputy member of the plebiscite commission, Sarah Wambaugh would play the leading role in organising the vote and in shaping public perceptions of its efficacy. As a pathbreaking woman playing a masterful role in a sensitive political question, Wambaugh would become an international news story in her own right. Although the plebiscite was widely seen as a successful example of the peaceful settlement of disputes, its electoral outcome was an overwhelming triumph for Nazi Germany. The chapter concludes with a comparison of Wambaugh’s positive appraisal of the Saar plebiscite to British journalist Elizabeth Wiskemann’s dissenting view, which came to diametrically opposite conclusions.

Explores various Jewish conceptions of an afterlife: immortality of the soul; resurrection; reincarnation; and the legacy concept—that immortality consists in one’s impact on the future. Working through a wide range of reasons for and against each position, the chapter notes the variety that exists in the kinds of reasons advanced. It then discusses whether an afterlife has value and why there is death.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

Between 1858 and 1862, the African Civilization Society, led by Henry Highland Garnet and Martin Delany, sought to reorient the Atlantic cotton economy and undermine American slavery by planting a Black emigrant cotton-producing colony in the Niger Delta. They insisted that trade with cotton-hungry Great Britain would release Britain from its shameful complicity as the globe’s dominant consumer of slave cotton and help Britain pay down its debt to Africa and people of African descent. To these Afro-pragmatists, this new Black market, harnessing the very market mechanisms that constrained Black life under US slavery, would fund the development of a commercially sovereign Black nation, launching Black commercial modernity and, with it, Black cultural ascendence and geopolitical respect. This chapter traces the interwoven economic, moral, religious, racial, and imperial matrices of this Black market. While this book’s other chapters focus on complicity as a moral problem, this chapter examines complicity as a racial, political economic, and rhetorical resource.

This final chapter addresses the loaded question of gothic naming, considering how and why it remains valuable to understand fiction with diverse regional and cultural roots within a (world-)gothic horizon. First we will briefly rehearse the argument that underpins one of this volume’s claim: namely, that to extricate gothic studies from the taxonomic bind in which it is placed concerning fiction from beyond the so-called West, the origin story of the gothic needs to be reconceived. Second we build on and draw together world-cultural and postcolonial theorisations of catachresis to conceptualise the categorisation and linking of discrete world-cultural forms as world-gothic. For ‘the gothic’ to remain useful as a way of designating fiction, we suggest that the term should be understood as just one possible name, which catachrestically – imperfectly and partially – describes heterogeneous and always situated cultural, folk and spiritual responses to the socio-ecological changes wrought in uneven ways by the capitalist world-system.

Describes Meade’s highly productive years as a senior research fellow at Christs College, including several major public lectures and the completion of his Principles of Political Economy.

This chapter reevaluates the origins and political significance of the “neoconservative turn” in American politics. Focusing on prominent Cold War liberals such as Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Norman Podhoretz, Eugene V. Rostow, and Charles Tyroler, it challenges the prevailing view that these figures merely shifted rightward in response to the Democratic Party’s leftward turn and the radicalism of the 1960s. Instead, it argues that their transition to neoconservatism was rooted in the conservative elements intrinsic to Cold War liberalism itself, particularly its emphasis on national security, military power, and global hegemony. By tracing the networks and institutions – both political and literary – that sustained the influence of these individuals, the chapter reveals how Cold War liberals reshaped their ideology to accommodate the changing political landscape of the 1970s, without, however, abandoning their core principles. Central to this transformation were organizations such as the Democratic National Committee and publications such as Commentary and The Public Interest, which provided platforms for these figures to align with conservatives while preserving their liberal heritage. This reinterpretation underscores the continuity between Cold War liberalism and neoconservatism, reframing the latter as an adaptive evolution rather than a radical departure.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In Parts of Animals II.10, Aristotle introduces an approach to studying the nonuniform parts of animals: “to speak about the human kind first” (656a10). This chapter asks why Aristotle adopts this strategy and how he goes about implementing it. I argue that he selects it because he holds that human bodies offer particularly clear illustrations of some of his scientific concepts, including the relationship between parts and the ends they are for the sake of. As a result, he thinks that beginning with the causal explanations of human parts helps us to develop such explanations for the parts of other animals, especially when it is difficult to do so.