Abraham Lincoln's role in the 1858 senate campaign and his performance before an east coast audience in New York city's cooper institute in 1860 have him the necessary boost to the republican party's nomination of him for the presidency in 1860. Lincoln sought to present the least offensive profile possible -- opposed to slavery and slavery's extension into the territories, but not favoring the outright abolition of slavery, or even dealing with slavery directly in the southern states where it was legal. Notwithstanding, he was elected president in November largely because the opposing democratic party had split into competing factions, with competing candidates. Although Lincoln polled a minority of the Nation's popular votes, he won a decisive victory in the electoral college. Despite repeated assurances that he had no intention of striking at slavery in the southern states, seven of those states swiftly declared that they were seceding from the national union.

Abraham Lincoln entered onto the presidency even as the breakaway southern confederacy was in the process of detaching itself from the union. Lincoln undestood this as a defiance of the constitution and an undermining of democracy (as represented by the election of 1860) and he initiated war measures to suppress what he would recognize only as a rebellion. He was careful not to agitate public opposition by billing this suppression as an abolition campaign. Nevertheless, union forces met with repeated defeats, and Lincoln was frustrated by over-mighty generals who believed that they knew better than he what was at stake. This frustration nudged him further toward incorporating some form of abolition into his war plans.

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.

Describes Meade’s family background and education at preparatory and public schools.

Arthur emerges into history in the Historia Brittonum, written in North Wales in the ninth century. That is, though, a problematic work as regards establishing the ‘original’ text, its author’s purpose and its claim to historicity. Arthur’s inclusion as a ‘British’ hero who defeated the Saxons twelve times is compared to other war-leaders this author included, with attention drawn additionally to the geographical spread of these conflicts, likely borrowings from earlier works and the (probable) ‘Roman’ origin of the name. Overall, it is suggested that Arthur’s portrayal herein was, at best, heavily fictionalised. He emerges as a primarily literary figure, rather than historical, who was developed as a means of asserting the Britons had shown courage and military prowess, and received divine support, in their long struggle with the Anglo-Saxons, pushing back against their negative stereotyping in influential works by both Gildas and Bede, which were both still circulating.

In this chapter, we summarize experimental results from the English, French and Tulu research reported in the previous chapters. We explicate commonalities and language-specific differences which have been discovered across these studies. We recognize the linguistic knowledge that is evident in the child across languages throughout development, but return to a leading question: Why are headless relatives precursors across languages in acquisition? Why are headed forms particularly delayed? We confront the essential problem: reconciling the strong linguistic knowledge continually present in the child with the evidence of developmental delays in relativization. We introduce the need to compose a more refined approach to a theory of language acquisition.

Folk dance remains a diffuse and contested concept and yet its performances and meanings retain contemporary saliency to many people across the world. This chapter reflects on definitional issues, the relationship of folk dance to ritual and folk dance’s embodied ideology in Europe and beyond. Given that nineteenth-century thinking haunts the later literature and manifestations of folk dance, I re-visit Felix Hoerburger’s concepts of ‘first existence’ and ‘second existence’ folk dance, together with their critique and key modifications by Andriy Nahachewsky and Anthony Shay. I consider contemporary ritual folk dancing that draws upon evolutionist theory for inspiration and discuss examples of folk dance as cultural heritage that bear performative testimony to perceived unbroken connections between land, people, gender, race and nation. I conclude by urging both persistent critical interrogation of folk dance as ideology in a global frame and further investigation of the choreographic and artistic relevance of folk dance to its widespread practitioners and audiences.

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.

A pervasive assumption in game theory is that players’ utilities are concave, or at least quasiconcave, with respect to their own strategies. While mathematically instrumental, enabling the existence of many kinds of equilibria in many kinds of settings, (quasi)concavity of payoffs is too restrictive an assumption. For the same reasons that (quasi)concave utilities can only go so far in capturing single-agent optimization problems, they can only go so far in modeling the considerations of an agent in a strategic interaction. Besides, the study of games with nonconcave utilities is increasingly coming to the fore as deep learning ventures into multiagent learning applications. This chapter studies whcih types of equilibria exist in such games, and whether they are computationally tractable, proposing paths for game theory and multiagent learning in the next 100 years.

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 essay explores William James’s debt to Charles Peirce, arguing that this debt is integral to pragmatism’s historical use-value for studies of race and racism. Scholars of race have historically found pragmatism useful because of its anti-foundationalism. A philosophical stance resistant to abstraction and ossification, pragmatism’s emphasis on continuity through adaptation makes it useful for dismantling racial essentialism while preserving the experience of social and historical continuity necessary for the ongoing recognition of disenfranchised groups. In the late nineteenth century, however, pragmatism failed to reckon with the systematic denial of power and representation to racialized subjects. I argue that this failure is inseparable from pragmatism’s weddedness to the concept of experience and that a deep dive into how pragmatists have relied on this concept to negotiate the relationship between mind and body reveals the racial contours of its genealogy. Transforming what for Peirce was a methodological rule for scientific investigation into a theory of Truth, James imagined a world made entirely of subjects rather than objects. In so doing, he also dismantled the dialectical aspect of Peirce’s principle and the semiotics on which it depends. As this essay argues, James’s pragmatism does have potential for interpreting the history and significance of race. This potential, though, lies less in its anti-foundationalism than in its materialism and a reclamation of Peirce’s more dialectical model of embodied consciousness.

This chapter discusses the sympathetic relationship between the gothic and sublimity regarding their serving similar social and political functions, emphasising their adaptability to the rhetorical interests of those in power in a given place and time. It then goes on to clarify their differences and consider whether they have a more ‘universal’ application than typically understood by taking a broadly historical approach, to examine the xenophobic and gendered origins of the sublime, and the ideological changes that come with the post-Kantian tradition. Rethinking the sublime as the differend identified by Jean-François Lyotard alerts us to imbalanced power relations and the demand for new idioms that give voice to the silenced, thus avoiding the sublime’s traditional claim to transcendence and therefore Western humanism. Similarly, a world-gothic sublime serves to witness the differend, the power imbalance between the ‘normal,’ who sets the terms of any tribunal, and the Other, who is silenced.

This introduction frames Soviet Moldavia as a revealing case for examining the social and political dimensions of postwar Jewish life under late Stalinism. It situates the republic’s Holocaust survivors within the broader Soviet landscape and explains how its dual Romanian?Soviet heritage shaped postwar trajectories. The chapter details the book?s extensive archival base – spanning Moldovan, Russian, and Ukrainian repositories – and its reliance on oral histories to recover individual voices. It also addresses methodological challenges in using Stalinist investigation files and evaluates their evidentiary value alongside survivor testimony. Engaging with current historiography on Soviet Jews and post-Holocaust Europe, the introduction argues for a shift away from center-focused and repression-centered narratives toward a view that highlights Jewish initiative, adaptation, and participation in the reconstruction of Soviet society. By outlining these goals and methodological commitments, the introduction establishes the conceptual and evidentiary foundations for reinterpreting Jewish life in the postwar Soviet borderlands.

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.