This chapter focuses on Pater as a classicist, placing his writings on the classical world and mythology in the context of the changing face of classical education at his contemporary Oxford, under Benjamin Jowett. It illustrates that Pater was sympathetic to dominant understandings of the classical world, but, beginning in the mid-1870s, began to explore darker and more subversive aspects of ancient Greek culture, including the myths of Demeter and Dionysus. It provides guidance on how to read and understand Pater’s representation of the classical world, in the context of classical education at Oxford, with examples from works including ‘The Marbles of Aegina’ (1880) and Plato and Platonism (1893).

This chapter discusses the origins of modern climate science in nineteenth-century projects of empire, and shows how literature both promoted and contested the imperial impulses of emerging climate science. The chapter examines, first, how imperialism – the enlargement of a single country’s jurisdiction across large tracts of land and sea – facilitated scientific methods and data. It then turns to literary justifications of imperial and scientific expansion, with accounts of the Arctic expeditions of John Franklin – Franklin’s narratives, the poetry of Eleanor Anne Porden (who became Franklin’s wife), elegies, and ballads – providing a case study. Staying with the mythologization of the explorer as a conqueror of climate, the chapter takes up the question of climate determinism (the idea of climate’s agency in shaping physiology and psychology, and the attendant myth of British colonizers’ resistance to such agency). Yet, from Richard Burton’s travels to Rudyard Kipling’s fiction, Victorian literature reveals, sometimes unwittingly, that the imperial explorer did not remain untouched by climate.

The avowed aim of this chapter is to provide suggestions for a critical approach when evaluating (and producing) social theory related to ethnicity, racism, and nationalism. The chapter explores the histories of the careers and thought of early ethnologists (including Fernando Ortiz, Arthur Ramos, Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, and Jean Price-Mars) of the African diaspora in the Americas to call for critical reflexivity to understand theoretical production and the consumption thereof. This includes a call to the chapter’s readers to engage in critical reflexivity as they evaluate the theoretical production of others as well as their own position-taking. Critical reflexivity entails an understanding of the dialectics of historicity.

We provide a practical guide to applied time series analysis using ordinary least squares. In our opening chapter we discuss the ways in which time series data are different than cross-sectional data and then introduce the statistical consequences for those differences. We provide guidelines for assembling a time series dataset – including discussions of sampling windows, sampling intervals, data length, and operationalizing variables. We then provide a brief outline of the remainder of the book.