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 contributes to the rich vein of scholarly literature around the relationship between William and Henry James in his exploration of the latter’s presentation of consciousness – and attempts to probe it – in Washington Square. Drawing on William’s “conception of truth as matter of inductive fallibilism” as well as his psychology of religious belief, this essay uncovers the dynamic at the center of the novel: The struggle between the overbearing Dr. Sloper and his daughter Catherine, whose consciousness moves, through the course of the novel, out of the reach of his ability to probe and thus control it. Concluding with an articulation of the novel’s “ethics of opacity” – its refusal of our urge toward the fixation of belief – this reading of the Jameses provides a granular case study of the deep resonance between the brothers’ thinking and writing.

By 1230, with the Lancelot-Graal Cycle, the contours of the Arthurian universe and the chronology of events leading from the invention of the Grail to the disappearance of the emblematic king were given their first definitive form. However, in French, other medieval works continue to use the same characters and events to recount what happens after, before or elsewhere. With the Prose Tristan, the Cycle of Guiron le Courtois and Prophéties de Merlin, Arthurian prose romance enters a new phase, characterised by complex rewriting and a multiplication of versions and particular redactions. This chapter offers an assessment of the three works, taking into account the most recent critical debate.

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.

The focus is on four important and prolific figures in the mélodie repertoire: Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns, Georges Bizet, and Jules Massenet.  The mid-nineteenth century mélodie emerged in close association with the romance and in response to the impact of the German Lied on the French scene.  Gounod was a key figure in this development, cultivating a new style through flexible shaping of melodic lines within symmetrical phrases.  Saint-Saëns followed closely in these footsteps, with more elaborate piano writing and looser phrase structure.  Bizet and Massenet did as well, injecting greater theatrical flair and a larger harmonic palette.  That Gounod, Saint-Saëns, and Massenet all began their careers perceived as progressives and ended as musical conservatives accounts in part for their eclipse by the generation of mélodie composers born after 1850, notwithstanding a repertory of over 700 mélodies that contains many pearls.

Modern complicity studies examine harms generated or perpetuated by entrenched social structures and vast economic systems. The Epilogue suggests that moral shame, an affect central to antebellum complicity critique, might promote the sociomoral attentiveness required for individuals to recognize otherwise opaque moral demands made on them by their placement or participation in broad social structures and systems.

At points in the Dialogues Philo appears to favor the Stratonian theory that matter is endued with an inherent principle of self-organization—the hypothesis that order is endogenous to matter, and need not be imposed by any external organizing principle such as thought, design, cosmological pollination or insemination. Moreover, on two occasions Philo seems to say that it is “plausible” or even “probable” that the self-organization of matter proceeds by absolute necessity, such that if we could “penetrate into the intimate nature of bodies”, we would be able to see that it “was absolutely impossible, they could ever admit of any other disposition.” (DNR 6.12, 9.10) I first consider Philo’s purposes in advancing the Stratonian hypothesis, and in framing this theory in the language of absolute necessity. I show that Philo’s reasoning here is ad hominem, and proceeds upon a number of methodological assumptions that Philo himself does not share. I also consider Hume’s own purposes in having Philo feint in this way, and suggest that Hume intends to deliver a message about the pointlessness of hankering after ultimate explanations in natural theology and philosophy.

The emergence of vernacular French prose at the dawn of the thirteenth century gave rise to a new form of Arthurian romance. Prose allowed the development of lengthy cycles of interconnected romances that functioned autonomously while also forming an overarching story. The most popular of these cycles, the Vulgate or Lancelot-Grail Cycle, became the canonical version of the Arthurian narrative for the rest of the medieval period, influencing subsequent texts in the French-speaking world (Guiron le Courtois, the Prose Tristan, etc.) and beyond (the Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation, Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, etc.). This chapter details the circumstances that made the Vulgate Cycle possible, its inner workings and dynamics, popularity, audience and legacy. It ends with a survey of the Post-Vulgate texts that were composed shortly after the initial cycle and examines the hypothesis of a ‘Post-Vulgate Cycle’ that may have connected them.

What is Buddhist monastic law? How should one think about its key texts, institutions and principles? This chapter answers these questions in the context of Sri Lanka and other parts of South and Southeast Asia, focusing especially on ideas of unity and diversity in law. The first part of this chapter summarises key ideas and principles found in the ancient code of monastic law, the Vinaya Piṭaka, which is thought to be the cornerstone of monastic legal texts and practices. The second (longer) part of this chapter introduces readers to a range of monastic legal sources outside the Vinaya Piṭaka, which also play key roles in the practice of monastic law in contemporary Sri Lanka. These sources include commentaries, constitutions, handbooks, judicial manuals, statutes, case law, social expectations and other normative sources produced by monks, state officials and Buddhist laypersons.

This chapter explores how Cold War liberalism’s emphasis on individualism ultimately led architects to reject an alternative vision of American modernity centered on public housing. Through a case study of Pueblo del Rio, a 1940s Los Angeles housing project designed by Paul R. Williams, the chapter reveals how progressive architects merged New Deal planning with racial uplift ideology in ways that could have complemented Cold War liberalism’s faith in expertise and managed democracy. While these California modernist architects believed government-funded, communal housing would become the template for postwar city building, McCarthyism and an emphasis on private property derailed their vision. The case of public housing demonstrates how social democratic policies in postwar America often depended on wartime imperatives. Initially legitimized as essential for housing defense workers, public housing projects became politically untenable once they became associated with socialism during the Red Scare. By the mid-1950s, modernist architects who began their careers devoted to public housing ended them building private homes for the wealthy, as the “midcentury modern” aesthetic was stripped of its progressive political vision and incorporated into a Cold War liberalism that accepted social inequality as inevitable.

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 2 provides a series of methods for understanding the overall facts regarding homesteading and how they related to land sales over the period of western settlement. This chapter defines the various features of homesteading, explains its critical logistics, examines the broad distribution of homesteads across space and through time, and shows their general relationship to land characteristics.

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 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.

Positing the question concerning the meaning of life in terms of "how should one live so that the value of life be accessible to one," my claim is that Kierkegaard’s answer to this question is "by loving." To explain this answer, I focus on the idea of "God as a middle term" that Kierkegaard presents in Works of Love. Further to interpreting this as saying that one’s relationship with God provides a deeper basis for loving, I claim that one’s relationship with God provides a deeper basis also for living. Having God as "the middle" in love, I suggest, is in fact to experience goodness, and by this to affirm one’s existence as valuable. Experiencing this goodness, however, depends on becoming oneself, which, for its part, depends on loving another. Thus, in the context of loving, one in fact sustains three sets of relationships: with God, with the beloved, and with oneself. In the chapter I demonstrate the interdependency of these relationships, and how they constitute a meaningful life.