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.

This chapter explores the dynamic nature of African online creative writing, focusing on short digital forms that include flash fiction, social media poetry, and short stories. These forms – characterized by brevity, accessibility, and experimentation – challenge traditional literary conventions; they serve as platforms for diverse voices that extend the nature and identity of African literature. The chapter also traces the evolution of scholarship on African online creative writing, highlighting debates on creativity, authenticity, and the potential of new media technology. Further, the chapter identifies platforms that maintain different editorial standards while catering to various audiences. It includes a discussion of the influence of oral tradition, the use of African and non-African languages, the role of social media, and the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on literary events and publishing. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the democratization of African creative expression through digital platforms that include Jalada, ebonystory, and Flash Fiction Ghana, while acknowledging challenges posed by internet access, resources, and infrastructure. By undertaking an overview of this rapidly evolving genre, this chapter highlights the modes through which African online creative writing is shaping the future of African literature.

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.

Chapter 9 continues to explicate Machiavelli’s theory of the state in the Discorsi, showing how he avails himself of many of the conceptual materials whose place in his earlier thinking has now been observed. It illustrates how Machiavelli continues to conceptualize the state as a body and to understand the work of state formation as an aesthetic process which involves carefully shaping its human material, although he now tracks that process across the course of centuries in a complex account of the phenomenon of corruption within the career of the Roman state. The chapter also underlines how Machiavelli continues to insist that benefits are a powerful way of generating obligations to the state, although he is now noticeably more concerned about the effects of ingratitude upon beneficiaries who are prone to forget or renege upon their debts. And, as the chapter further emphasizes, he continues to maintain that those who hold office within the state should not be mistaken for representative figures in any capacity whatsoever. This point raises a fundamental problem in how to construe his overall theory: is the state a person as well as a body? The chapter culminates in an attempt to resolve this complex question.

The Soviet annexation of Bessarabia in 1940 thrust its Jewish population into a radically different political and social order. This chapter examines how Bessarabian Jews adapted to Soviet rule, focusing on their professional trajectories and the risks of expressing nostalgia for the pre-Soviet past. While Soviet policies created new avenues for social mobility, they also imposed ideological constraints, making comparisons with Romanian rule dangerous. Complaints about economic hardships or lost freedoms could be framed as anti-Soviet agitation, leading to persecution. The Holocaust, which devastated Bessarabian Jewry, shaped Jewish attitudes toward the Soviet state – deepening both gratitude for liberation and wariness about new uncertainties. Despite professional successes, Jewish elites faced scrutiny, their pasts and foreign ties fueling political suspicion. Meanwhile, younger generations, raised within Soviet institutions, integrated more seamlessly, benefiting from opportunities unavailable under Romanian rule. Using personal testimonies, investigations, and security archives, this chapter explores the shifting allegiances and survival strategies of Bessarabian Jews under Stalinism.

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 this chapter, Jon Boden of the band Bellowhead confronts a pervasive element of folk performance that affects reception and yet often escapes notice: spoken introductions. He points out that as a conversational and informal art, folk music shares much with humour. Introductions, he argues, can serve several important purposes, including framing narratives, providing historical context, distancing, and offering a partisan viewpoint. Folk performers often have to balance an audience’s desire for a sense of personal accessibility and communality with the equally necessary demands of entertainment professionalism.

A key challenge in addressing race ideas and racialisation today lies in educating the public about race-related structural inequalities and exclusionary ideologies. Anti-racist educators employing Critical Race Pedagogy (CRP) are increasingly rejecting so-called ‘colourblind’ and universalist views of racial harmony, to instead argue that racial inequality is rooted in institutions, ideologies, and norms, and possesses a certain permanence. From a critical realist perspective, the chapter argues that such explanations may overlook certain aspects of racism, overlooking the complex interplay between systems and lifeworld phenomena (Layder, 2018) in relation to global and transnational racial dynamics. Drawing from Layder’s Domain Theory, the chapter presents a CR-based alternative for the conceptualisation, design, and delivery of an English for Liberal Arts Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) course in Japan created to raise awareness of the global sociology of race ideas and racialisation. The benefits of this critical realist-informed, well-situated, and culturally responsive course design are highlighted.

While the rest of the book takes the form of a constitutional law text largely based on discussion of theory and court precedent, the prologue provides the lived, empirical day-to-day context out of which the project arose by sharing the stories of the ordinary people on whom the topics discussed have primary bearing. Moreover, given the grounded, ethnographic method from which the prologue’s scene-setting stories draw and the ‘constitutional ethnography’ to be applied more broadly as a methodology throughout the book, the prologue draws inspiration from qualitative scholarship’s emphasis on the need for researchers to state their positionality vis-à-vis the research. The prologue therefore describes the global transdisciplinary approach adopted in and through the book project which primarily builds upon critical Black, Indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial scholarship developed in the Global South and by marginalised communities in the Global North.

This chapter serves as an introduction to African Literature in Transition. The edited volume is intended to function as a compendium of histories of selected genres that have emerged in the written literature and other verbal arts of the African continent from at least the beginning of the twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. The introduction analyzes the role of genre as organizing principle for African literary history writ large both in the popular arts and in high literary forms. The primary argument of the chapter is that understanding African literary histories is not simply a matter of creating a record of what has been written and performed, but also a matter of surveying how and why particular types of African-authored texts have become more or less visible at different points in time through an examination of the role of genres. To advance this argument, the introduction focuses on the sub-categories of genre in African literature rather than the broad generic classifications of African literature such as the African novel, African poetry, or African drama. Equally, the chapter juxtaposes genres that are read mainly locally with those that are read both locally and outside Africa.

Describes the British government’s ‘Meade Mission’ to the island of Mauritius and its subsequent report.

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.