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 African child soldier narrative is a dystopic sub-genre, underscoring the futility of war. Its origins can be traced back to the 1985 publication of Ken Saro-wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. Subsequently, many novels, memoirs, and films about African children brutalized by war, were created. These narratives included magical elements in which the speaking voices are cynical and unreliable. Single-author memoirs like China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier (2004) or Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (2007) reveal how the child soldier, horrified by war, comes to terms with the sociocultural forces arrayed against her. Collaborative memoirs, such as Emmanuel Jal’s and Meghan Lloyd Davies’ War Child (2009), or Grace Akallo and Faith McDonnell’s Girl Soldier (2007), feature survival strategies that assume greater importance than the war itself. Novels about child soldiers, such as Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog (2015) and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2015), contain graphic accounts of war, filled with unresolved contradictions. Other fiction, such as Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen, and Me (2005) and Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2007) contain magical apparitions and mutilated bodies framed within wars that appear endless. These variations highlight the complexities within this sub-genre.

Live Aid was the singular event that made humanitarianism fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s. In the United Kingdom, it was Comic Relief that sustained and institutionalised this new form of mass giving on a regular basis. In 1988, the comedian Lenny Henry hosted the Red Nose Day telethon which became a regular event and raised £1 billion over the next thirty years. Comic Relief symbolised a new era of humanitarian giving in a televisual age. It shifted attitudes to poverty overseas which then constrained prior government intentions to reduce aid and development spending. And it also helped change public attitudes to charity more generally. Surveys of public opinion evidenced continued high levels of support for overseas aid, and the scepticism towards charity observed at the expansion of the post-war welfare state dissipated. Respondents expressed their views no longer in terms of charity versus the state but in terms of the importance of both public and voluntary provision in the relief of poverty, at home and overseas. The popularity of humanitarianism had increased the acceptability of charity as a solution to poverty more generally.

According to Dazai Shundai, the provision of food and goods to all the people is an essential element of good government. Wealth as measured in food and goods will then lead to a strong military. Some have considered the ideal of “enriching the country and strengthening the military” to be contrary to Confucian teachings, but this is mistaken. Currency should be seen as secondary to food and goods and does not in itself represent true wealth, a fact that many have lost sight of in Edo and other urban centers of Tokugawa Japan. In farming, it is crucial to extract the full productive potential of the land, which requires an understanding of the different types of land and the uses that each of these serves; an ignorance of these different uses has led to harmful policies that try to convert all land into paddies. The stabilization of prices is another important role for government and helps prevent merchants from exploiting price fluctuations for private gain. A system of government-managed granaries can be used to stabilize rice prices, provide relief in times of famine, and provide low-interest loans to samurai in times of need.

Chapter 3 develops the general theory of the book, namely that homesteading was used to quickly occupy lands where the federal government had weak economic property rights (for one reason or another). The chapter begins with a discussion of the American frontier prior and up to 1862, and explains how rapid occupation solved a particular type of problem for the state.

This chapter formulates the research question and clarifies the critical methodological issues pertaining to the analysis. This is important because the book aims to bring together science and technology studies, sociological systems theory and jurisprudence The topic of the book is then introduced by giving an overview of all the chapters, making clear that a common thread runs throughout the book and that the argument addresses all of the theoretical, empirical and practical aspects of the research question posed at the beginning.

In this chapter, legendary artist Peggy Seeger draws together, in characteristically virtuosic fashion, the themes of this book as a whole through the trio of song, singer, and community. Communities, she argues, are the social soil upon which human cultures germinate. They breed and support singers who make, sing, and pass on songs, which in turn act as a group glue, thus creating new communities. She portrays herself as a ‘song-carrier’ and a storyteller, pointing out that folk songs provide us with great templates – opportunities for everyone to narrate their own story in their own way.

According to Dazai Shundai, establishing institutions to handle various affairs is the foremost task of government. These should be fixed in place for a long period of time and be strictly upheld. In earlier times, Japan had proper institutions based on models learned from China, but with the advent of government by warriors, such institutions fell into disuse and have been replaced by provisional measures. Tokugawa Japan lacks proper institutions for a wide range of matters, a key example of which is the absence of institutions to regulate kinship relations.

This volume challenges conventional interpretations by demonstrating that Hans Kelsen was far from being a purely formalist thinker. Instead, it highlights his profound and enduring engagement with the threats facing constitutional democracies. The political and institutional upheavals of interwar Europe significantly influenced Kelsen’s evolving vision of democracy, as this volume shows. His contributions to twentieth-century democratic theory include groundbreaking insights into multiparty systems, mechanisms of moderation, minority protections, and judicial review. Furthermore, Kelsen’s reflections on the crises and collapses of democracies during the 1930s remain strikingly relevant, offering valuable perspectives on contemporary challenges such as polarisation and populism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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 vast Prose Brut tradition, derived as it is from Galfridian pseudo-history, but with the continuations found in the Anglo-Norman, Latin and then Middle English chronicles, benefits from the integration of Arthurian pseudo-history and some elements of romance into the history of the ‘English nation’. It becomes the bestselling English history in the Middle Ages, attesting to the enormous popularity of Arthur’s reign not just among those interested in the chivalric ethos and courtly love, but in how the land was governed through the centuries. The Prose Brut was copied anonymously for the vast majority of the extant corpus across the three languages of medieval England, but even more importantly, was owned and read by a cross-section in society, enjoyed among the middle classes, and clearly produced, at least in part, commercially. It was one of the first texts printed by William Caxton and went through seventeen editions in the first few decades of the printing press in England.