This chapter traces the early life of Louis Bieral, born in 1814 in Valparaíso, Chile, amid revolutionary upheaval. It explores his ambiguous racial and familial origins and the violent political culture of post-independence Chile, which shaped his understanding of masculinity and authority. Bieral’s exposure to maritime life and urban vice in Valparaíso foreshadowed his later immersion in New York’s underworld. His alleged kidnapping by a whaling captain and subsequent servitude in Brooklyn illustrate the porous boundaries between freedom and coercion in antebellum America. The chapter situates Bieral’s formative years within broader themes of race, labor, and violence, emphasizing the social structures that normalized physical domination and racial ambiguity.

Moving to California during the Gold Rush, Bieral found himself in a frontier society defined by lawlessness, racial tension, and economic ambition. The chapter examines his possible involvement in violent incidents and his association with notorious figures in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. Bieral’s return to Boston and legal name change reflected his desire for reinvention and racial reclassification amid rising nativism and the Fugitive Slave Act. His story illustrates the fluidity of identity and the strategic use of whiteness in navigating legal and social hierarchies. California’s chaotic environment provides an extreme example of a society run by bullies in antebellum America.

This chapter analyses the Ocean Acidification Alliance (OAA) against five elements of global experimentalist governance. The OAA, launched in 2016 by Pacific Coast governments, comprises over 145 members addressing ocean acidification. Evaluating the five elements reveals: (1) A shared problem exists – members agree on OA definition and causes; (2) Open-ended goals are present – six framework objectives like ‘reduce CO2 emissions’ with provisional, loosely worded targets; (3) Delegation occurs – members create Action Plans with discretion to experiment, although delegation is not solely to lower levels; (4) Feedback and peer review are limited – information sharing occurs through webinars and meetings but lacks systematic reporting on specific metrics; (5) Goal adjustment is possible – goals and metrics can evolve based on scientific findings and member experiences. A key limitation is that metrics lack specificity, undermining systematic reporting and peer-review cycles essential to experimentalist governance. No penalty default exists due to voluntary membership. While the OAA exhibits features of experimentalist governance, the absence of concrete metrics weakens the recursive learning process. Future metric development could enhance the implementation of experimentalist governance within this voluntary, multilevel climate coalition.

Chapter 1 offers an overview of the larger themes addressed by the book, focusing on the question of contingency and how letters can be considered as literary ‘works’. The chapter argues that chance or happenstance itself governs letters and letter-writing both in material and in affective or conceptual ways. It proposes that the ‘radical contingency’ of letters can be said to set them apart from literary works more specifically conceived, in the sense that the latter do not generally and in principle hold a primary or formative connection with the specific events surrounding their composition. The chapter argues that the question of contingency connects with Keats’s governing ideas about life – with what he repeatedly refers to in his letters as life’s ‘circumstances’, ‘chance’, or ‘accidents’.

The final chapter summarizes, offers concluding remarks, and suggests some challenges that worldview studies will face in the future. It also suggests how we, as reflective individuals, can develop an intellectually and existentially satisfying worldview.

We begin this chapter with a simple homological argument which severely restricts the abelian possibilities for πX. Homology 3-spheres have essentially unique abelian embeddings (although they may have other embeddings).

How people learn a second language is a topic of long-standing human curiosity as well as prime educational and social importance. The mid twentieth century is the conventional starting point for recounting the history of the modern discipline of second language (L2) acquisition. However, although this chapter focuses on that interval, it recognizes that much older ideas and texts provide a context for understanding contemporary and near-contemporary treatment of the topic. To illustrate the scope of reflection on L2 acquisition, Chapter 1 narrates the historical backdrop to three themes, all of which are salient to the recent history of the field, while they have also appeared in various guises over the full-length history of Western reflection on language: (1) the role a learner’s first language plays in the acquisition of an L2; (2) capacities that are imputed to be inherent to learners, and which bear on the task of L2 acquisition; and (3) the function of the social environment in which learning takes place. These three themes provide a basis for appreciating continuities and discontinuities across the full history of L2 acquisition, a history that vastly predates the twentieth-century focus in this chapter.

This chapter outlines the governance landscape of ocean acidification (OA), identifying thirty-one actors and twenty-seven instruments at the international, regional, local, and transnational levels. The map indicates that no single institution leads OA governance; rather, multiple institutions address different aspects through implicit mandates rather than explicit ones. Only the Ocean Acidification Alliance has a clear OA mission. Most institutions operate across various fields such as climate, biodiversity, and marine protection, resulting in functional overlaps without a clear hierarchy. Applying regime complex theory, the chapter contends that OA governance constitutes a regime complex – partially overlapping, likely non-hierarchical institutions governing the same issue area. Three factors affirm this classification: divergent interests (economic vs. environmental), high uncertainty (scientific complexity and multiple actors), and limited linkages between institutions. The regime complex is situated at the intersection of climate, marine, and atmospheric governance systems. This characterisation is vital, as it implies that global experimentalist governance could effectively utilise these existing institutional arrangements rather than supplanting them, laying the groundwork for selecting suitable governance approaches in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 8 explores specifically anti-religious propaganda, arguing that initially this was relatively unfocused. The Great Leap Forward saw an attempt to propagate atheism through peasant philosophy teams and a mass campaign to get workers, peasants, and soldiers to write poems and songs discrediting belief in supernatural agency. The chapter explores the CCP’s appropriation of traditional cultural forms to erode popular belief in the agency of non-visible entities, focusing on long-form storytelling, revolutionary opera, and use of cinema for the same end. It briefly explores the onset of the Mao cult and the turn to small groups as a way of undermining folk religion, concentrating on a discussion among women in industry and a discussion in a village, again largely involving women, and suggests how taken-for-granted knowledge had become a terrain for different views.

Romanticism Bewitched concludes with a discussion of Joanna Baillie’s Gothic tragedy, Witchcraft, written as a response to what she believed to be a missed opportunity by Scott in his novel, The Bride of Lammermoor, to explore the psychological and social dimensions of the rise of witchcraft. The first section outlines the similarities between Scott’s novel and Macbeth. Both Scott’s novel and Shakespeare’s tragedy take place in Scotland in a politically precarious moment with squabbling factions and dwindling confidence in the central authority of the government. In the second section, Baillie argues that the decidedly unsympathetic treatment of the female supernatural by Scott and others perpetuates damaging stereotypes and diverts our attention from the real problem – a social structure founded on inequity. Baillie’s tragedy explores the outbreak of accusations of witchcraft as the consequence of a diseased patriarchy and the abdication of the responsibilities of fathers, literally within the family unit and figuratively as the representatives of the authority of church and state.

The afterword explains why Louis Bieral’s life matters. He had an almost unique set of experiences. He illustrates the importance of violence to the operation of nineteenth-century American society. He also suggests the difficulty of establishing the rule of law, replacing the veneration of physical might with the celebration of persuasion.

Although our main interest is in the topological case, as outlined in the Preface, the results of Donald, Issa and McCoy on smooth embeddings of Seifert 3-manifolds are a natural complement to our material.

This chapter examines the core convictions of the New Spirituality, the worldview of individuals often referred to as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). The SBNR would maintain they are nonreligious, although they tend to believe in the divine or our inner divinity and that we have an inborn capacity to know the divine or the deeper spiritual realities of the cosmos.

This chapter provides an overview of the current state of research on the role of writing in second language (L2) learning. For many years L2 writing and second language acquisition (SLA) research developed independently. However, recent interest in the learning potential of writing and writing-related processes has led to a prolific area of research investigating L2 writing from a writing-to-learn perspective. This chapter, a novel addition to the second edition of the handbook, acknowledges this research and responds to calls for a more central role of L2 writing in SLA research agendas. Scholarly work on the learning affordances of L2 writing has examined both individual and collaborative writing, as well as the use and processing of written corrective feedback. The chapter discusses the theoretical underpinnings of research in each of these areas and provides a summary of key issues and findings. It reviews selected empirical studies, involving a range of learner populations and L2s, that have contributed to our understanding of how and why writing and writing-related processes facilitate L2 learning. The chapter concludes with a forward look, pointing out directions for future research.