The book’s thesis is that although the doctrine devised by airmen at the Air Corps Tactical School was significant in determining Air Corps force structure, it was far less important than other factors. Army doctrine, which trumped air theory, emphasized the use of aircraft to support the ground battle. This meant the Air Corps was compelled to buy observation aircraft, pursuit, attack aircraft, and medium bombers; large, strategic bombers were specifically rejected. As a consequence, when war broke out in Europe, there were only two dozen heavy bombers in the entire Air Corps inventory. This warped force structure would have a significant and detrimental impact on national strategy at the outset of World War II. Fortunately, inspired leadership, both in the Army as a whole and within the air arm, mitigated two decades of short-sightedness and allowed the Army Air Forces to play a decisive role in victory.

This chapter traces the alignment between the Victorian novel, the articulation of geological, or “deep” time, and the emergence of the Anthropocene. The Victorian era is usually understood in terms of “uniformitarian” geology, in which Earth changes slowly and gradually, an understanding that has also informed understandings of the novel in the period. By contrast, this chapter unearths a latent “catastrophism” in Victorian fiction, examining geological events and underground spaces that reconfigure the conditions of possibility in works by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and Thomas Hardy.

The interplay of life, form, and power is central to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay, “Experience.” It also comes to mark his mature articulations of metaphysics and philosophy, nature and history, and politics and ethics in essays like “Power,” “Success,” or his lecture “Powers of the Mind.” Power is a key theme across Emerson’s relentlessly eclectic thinking – from the creative potentialities of the imagination and the intellect, and the deforming forces of love and loss, to the conditions that embolden individual selves to mastery, invention, and success. The impulsive, circulatory, transitory, depersonalizing, and yet aggrandizing modes of power that emerge in Emerson’s thinking – the powers of the heart and the powers of the mind – point to a vitality that not only appears as the content of his essays and lectures but is at once stylistically performed by them.

British colonial invasion of the Australian continent has had a substantial and often devastating impact on the lives and livelihoods of the original inhabitants. The story of survival is therefore partly one of linguistic adaptation and innovation. For as invasion, displacement and forced relocation rolled across the continent, the language ecologies were also invaded, disturbed and displaced. English has been inserted into the linguistic landscape and contact with its speakers has seeded many new varieties. This chapter surveys the literature that captures this spectacular proliferation of English-influenced varieties; their linguistic structures and the sociolinguistic contexts that make them unique. The chapter ends by focusing on one of the key issues in the study of contact Englishes in Australia: the relationship between individual and community multilingualism.

This chapter begins by describing the pre-history of southern China and the origins of colonial Hong Kong. It then proceeds to a discussion of English in the late nineteenth century and the formation of an English-speaking Chinese elite in colonial Hong Kong. Since the resumption of Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the government has promoted a policy of “trilingualism” (Cantonese, English, and Putonghua) and “biliteracy” (written Chinese and English). Recently, the national government has moved to assert tighter control over the territory, and there has been increasing importance placed on the learning and use of the national language, Putonghua. At present, English continues to be widely used in key domains of Hong Kong society, including government, law and many areas of employment. This is likely to continue in the future, despite Hong Kong’s increasing integration economically, politically, socially, and linguistically into mainland China.

This chapter first discusses the label ‘English as a second and foreign language’ and then gives a brief selective account of how English arrived in Africa and Asia and how it was initially taught and to whom. The work of three influential language teachers who worked in Asia – Palmer in Japan, Faucett in China and West in Bengal - is reviewed. The chapter then illustrates how local varieties of English have developed in postcolonial settings and how the use of English as a lingua franca has increased in countries that were not colonies of Britain or the United States. The current relevance of the terms English as a second or as a foreign language is questioned as it is argued that English now comprises a multitude of new varieties and plays a major role as the international lingua franca.

This chapter explores the chamber music of Maconchy, delving into her creative process, influences, and the socio-political context in which she worked and highlighting her commitment to chamber music – especially the string quartet – as a medium for personal expression and intellectual discourse. The paper situates her work within the broader landscape, drawing connections to Bartók and Brahms. It discusses the challenges Maconchy faced as a woman in a male-dominated field, including limited performance opportunities and the perception of her music as elitist. Through case studies of key works, such as her Oboe and String Quintet and Fourth String Quartet, it illustrates her innovative use of instrumentation and thematic development. Ultimately, it argues that Maconchy’s chamber music is a vital contribution to the cultural and political dialogues of her time and calls for a re-evaluation of her music in light of its technical rigour and expressive depth.

This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of English in Ghana. The absence of a sizable number of settlers, different language and education policies and sociodemographic developments have shaped the variety considerably. Real-time analyses of sociolinguistic and structural developments in the nativisation phase have become possible with the Historical Corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana), a 600,000-word corpus of Ghanaian English from the early stages of the nativisation phase. The Ghanaian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) represents the late stages. Many lexical innovations were already deeply entrenched in the older data and Ghanaian English noun phrases have become more complex in line with predictions made by the Dynamic Model. The paper is rounded off with an outline of new diachronic approaches to Ghanaian English based on a corpus of material from the archives of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and an idea for a diachronic corpus of African newspapers.

Elizabeth Maconchy became Chair of the Composers’ Guild in 1959 and oversaw important diplomatic visits to Canada and the Soviet Union during her tenure. The Guild was ostensibly a professional organisation representing composers’ interests in such matters as BBC opportunities, performing rights’ payments, and film composing. However, as this chapter outlines, its early years up to Maconchy’s tenure were characterised by a concerted effort in diplomacy with countries of the emerging Communist Bloc, particularly under the Chairmanship of Alan Bush from 1947. While Bush’s efforts to align the Guild with similar organisations east of the Iron Curtain were ultimately rejected by the membership, his efforts paved the way for Maconchy’s 1960 visit, and constituted an important example of ‘unofficial’ cultural diplomacy with the Eastern Bloc preceding the more famous state-sponsored visits of Benjamin Britten to the Soviet Union.

This chapter covers the recent history of plantation archaeology in the Caribbean as it intersects with the discourse of race, ethnicity, and capitalism. Analysis of the artifacts and landscapes in relation to the Caribbean plantation complex allows for renewed questions about the development of race and capital in places where the written record is insufficient. Particularly as it pertains to studies of race, ethnicity, and capital, plantation archaeology in the Caribbean has coalesced around three major themes: (1) African cultural retentions; (2) trade, consumption, and access; and (3) landscapes and social relations.

This chapter traces the historical development of English in South Korea, which despite its long isolation and late contact with the language has turned into a fervent adopter of English as linguistic, symbolic, and economic capital. Particular focus lies on the history of English in the South Korean education system and the outcomes of the contact between Korean and English (i.e., Englishized Korean and Korean(ized) English). The United States Army Military Government in Korea (1945–1948) set the foundation for the compelling status of English in South Korea and the current chapter presents a case study of the language ideologies represented in three Korean English textbooks published during this period. While rudimentary notions of the ideologies of necessitation and externalization can already be found in the examined textbooks from the 1940s, all of the material was firmly grounded in the Korean context and clearly reflected the pro-American sentiments of the era.

Emerson’s poetry has been somewhat of an enigma for readers and critics alike, who have often found it thematically opaque and stylistically unwieldy. Many have concluded that he was incapable of writing “better” verse, a conclusion predicated upon the assumption that he intended to do otherwise but couldn’t. This essay takes as a starting point the idea that the roughness of Emerson’s poetic style was intentional and that his metric irregularities are not accidents. After analyzing the style, rhetoric, and prosody of the poems, this essay contextualizes these elements within Emerson’s metaphysics. It argues that Emerson’s poetry reveals the crumbling of meter that led to the modernist revolution and free verse; poetic style did not suddenly jump from Longfellow to Whitman, but rather meter was stretched and strained before it was broken.

In this chapter we examine multi-equation models for stationary data – vector autoregression. We describe a general system of equations in which each variable is allowed to be a function of contemporaneous values of all other variables, as well as lags of itself, and all other variables in the system. We explain the estimation problem inherent in a system with contemporaneous relationships and show how this estimation problem is solved by rewriting the system in reduced form. While this system can be estimated, writing the system in reduced form trades the estimation problem for an identification problem. We then describe how to build a reduced form VAR and discuss the interpretational tools widely used in VAR analysis. We cover some extensions of the VAR model and discuss the role of Granger causality in VAR analysis. We offer a practical guide to VAR analysis, including the basic steps in the framework, and provide an example using a five-variable system of attention allocation using Twitter data.

Maududi articulated a deep critique of nationalism, and this section details some of his concerns about the possibility of majoritarian oppression and legitimate exclusion built into democratic nationalism. Written between the 1930s and mid 1940s the essays selected detail Maududi’s critique of nationalism. In the highly charged context of declining but violent colonial power and increasing enthusiasm for anti-colonial nationalism, Maududi made his arguments against Muslim nationalists who supported the formation of a separate nation-state for Muslims, as well as nationalist Muslims, those who supported the formation of an Indian nation-state after independence from British rule.