Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.

When British troops entered Germany, they found ‘well dressed and well fed’ Germans, showing how much the Nazi state had plundered from occupied nations and camp inmates. Soon, however, prominent British opinion-shapers arrived at a new appreciation of German victimhood. Millions of ethnic German ‘expellees’ created a constituency of displaced persons whose basic needs had to be met. Central to this story is British publisher, humanitarian and activist Victor Gollancz, the force behind ‘Save Europe Now’ (SEN). Gollancz’s polemical interventions used ‘kaput’ shoes as emblems of German immiseration, evoking the footwear stripped from victims of Nazi genocide. While SEN encouraged Britons to send clothing and food parcels to Germans, British occupation authorities revised their understandings of former enemies and allies. The chapter concludes with the International Military Tribunal convened in Nuremberg to try leading Nazi war criminals in 1945–6. Noting the ‘deflation’ of Nazi leaders stripped of uniforms and insignia, British and US observers also remarked on poor Soviet apparel. Western attempts to kindle consumerist aspirations behind the Iron Curtain soon became prominent.

Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.

In the Rich Man and Lazarus parable, a privileged rich man suffers after death while the suffering Lazarus, after death, is comforted in heaven. The tale conveys the urgent necessity of repentance. The parable portrays a form of divine justice not available to Esau in Genesis 25, who, when in a reduced state, had to beg his brother Jacob for food for which the deceived Esau, under duress, exchanged his birthright.

Chapter 3 focuses on the kinds of domestic duties expected of women in gentle, noble, and royal establishments and thus offers an understanding of everyday life in a late medieval elite household. The range of activities required of highborn household servants was broad, encompassing both public and private obligations. They saw to their queens’ or noblewomen’s personal needs in terms of apparel, entertainment, and piety. They traveled when duties demanded it and assisted their queens and ladies with medical care. To perform these tasks, they were entrusted with significant household resources and also, sometimes, care and custody of royal and noble children. Over years of service, through daily serving the needs of their employers, some serving women and their mistresses developed affectionate relationships as they shared literary tastes and devotional practices. Their employment provided opportunities for elite female servants to live a sumptuous lifestyle surrounded by luxury and entertainments, and also to network with other courtiers. I argue that investigating the domestic duties and daily lives of these often-overlooked women completes our understanding of courts and great households by showing the importance of female employment in the Middle Ages.

Children’s first words are remarkably consistent over languages and over time: They first talk about people (dada, mama), food (juice), body-parts (eye), clothing (sock), animals (dog), vehicles (car), toys (ball), household objects (key), routines (bye), and activities (uhoh, up). Their first productions emerge between 12 months and 24 months, and they attain some 50 words in production about 6 months later. Earlier claims about a vocabulary spurt may rather reflect increased motor skill that aids production. Do children learn to produce nouns before verbs? The proportions of nouns and verbs differ by context, e.g., toy play versus book reading. Spontaneous speech samples and parental checklists of vocabulary often differ. Overall, production lags behind comprehension. This leads to communicatively driven overextensions in production until 2;6 or so, as well as reliance on general purpose terms (do, go, that). As children add more words, they stop using earlier overextensions. Early word meanings are based on children’s existing conceptual and perceptual categories, based on their experience of the world so far. And as they take different perspectives, they begin to use of different words for the same referent (animal, dog, pug; do, mend).

Using consumption data, this chapter profiles in detail the arrival of China’s age of abundance, from improvements in diet, to clothing, housing, and transportation. It documents and establishes the arrival of China’s age of material abundance.

This section contains examples of four wills made by members of the laity, both men and women, at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries. This is a genre of which many examples survive in local records and in episcopal registers. Here one can see the kind of things that people would leave to their relatives or to the poor, from domestic articles, often associated with their profession, and clothes, to sums of money.

Clothing and style are important aspects of heavy metal culture, used by musicians and fans to identify with the broader values and norms of the subculture, and to communicate difference from mainstream culture. Denim and leather garments are fundamental to metal wardrobes, with band t-shirts worn nearly universally to signify particular metal preferences. For serious metal fans, battle jackets offer a unique way to demonstrate musical taste and dedication to metal. A battle jacket is a customised denim jacket (usually with the sleeves removed) embellished with band patches, badges, studs, hand-painting and other additions. Jacket customisation has been practised by fans for nearly as long as heavy metal has existed, and thrives in contemporary metal subcultures, bolstered by online jacket forums and patch trading opportunities. Historically, battle jackets can be connected with WW2 bomber jackets and custom motorcycle patch vests. For fans, battle jackets offer a way to externalise their allegiance to metal and to reinforce a sense of ‘outsider’ status. The jackets also carry highly personal meanings for their wearers and help to articulate a sense of self that extends beyond recreational fandom.

Similarities in the imagery of Etruscan and Western Anatolian dress fashions, such as pointed shoes and Ionic chitons, indicate an obvious connection between the clothing systems of the two cultures. Indeed, Larissa Bonfante (2003) in her groundbreaking book Etruscan Dress classifies an “Ionian Phase” (550–475 BCE) in the development of the Etruscan clothing system. This chapter investigates the adaptation of Ionian dress items into the Etruscan dress repertoire through a comparative iconographic study of dress fashions in western Anatolia and Etruscan funerary art of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. After an overview of prevailing dress fashions in both cultures, it explores the specific case of shoes with upturned toes (Etruscan/Hittite shoes, as they are commonly known) to show the changing meanings and cultural connections the adopted dress items conveyed.

When we think of Tolstoy we picture a man who looks as far from a typical Russian nobleman as possible: bearded and wearing peasant-style clothes. This chapter examines the clothing choices Tolstoy made throughout his life and sets them in the contexts of imperial dress codes and his own thinking about Christianity and his place in the world. After Peter the Great introduced European dress for the nobility in the early eighteenth century, a large cultural divide developed between peasants and nobles. Tolstoy grew up wearing the clothing of the European elite while the peasants on his family estate wore more traditional Russian dress. However, in the 1860s Tolstoy began to wear a peasant-style beard and long, loose shirts, albeit made from more luxurious materials than were worn by the peasants themselves. Then, in the 1880s he began to make his own leather boots. This was all part of his broader philosophical project and attempt to lead a simpler, more Christian life. Though Tolstoy’s lifestyle choices often made things more difficult for his family, he nonetheless inspired many followers who imitated his dress style.

This chapter examines the relationship between Wallace’s writing and works of visual art. Beginning with the many moments of ekphrasis that punctuate the writing, ranging from myths of tapestry-weaving to Leutze’s mural of Manifest Destiny, encompassing Bernini and Escher in Infinite Jest alone, this chapter explores the ways in which Wallace makes use of the language of images in his writing, situating narrative in conversation with visual culture and reaching beyond language to image, color and texture. Reflecting on prior scholarly attention to art positioned in Wallace’s writing, the chapter explores the connections between attention and aesthetic. The chapter also examines the ways in which visual cues appear in other ways in Wallace’s work, from the defecatory art of Brint Moltke in “The Suffering Channel” to the incidence of color as a motif throughout the work, specifically Wallace’s insistent references to clothing. The chapter highlights the materiality of these instances, attending to both the visual and the haptic elements of his narrative deployment of art in fictional worlds. This chapter works in concert with the next, delineating the intermediate nature of Wallace’s writing, poised between language, sense and image, and how his inclusion and occlusion of art recalibrate and reflect the relationships between author and reader.

Through an examination of scraps of clothing collected from the sites of lynching, this chapter theorizes the persistence of the reliquary object into the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. The chapter focuses on the particularity of clothing as material objects capable of holding sensory and conceptual memories of the human body. This comes as part of a larger discussion of relics and reliquary cultures and builds on discourses on the Black male body from history, African American studies, and visual culture studies.

In these articles Black writers addressed the perceived need to create stable families and the consequences of not doing so.Most contributors to the Black press shared their larger societies' conviction that orderly, disciplined families were foundational to orderly, disciplined nations.They deemed efforts to reform sexual behavior and family relations even more essential for the Black population, who because of the vicissitudes of slavery and poverty found it especially difficult to constitute family units that fit the national ideal.The Black press included articles asserting that women and children should be governed by male patriarchs and calls for Black people to work toward racial improvement by investment in hygienic families.While some criticized the ways that conventions about honor and legitimacy harmed women who became pregnant outside of wedlock and illegitimate children, others condemned women who handed their children over to be servants in wealthy White households.Writers similarly debated whether Black parents (and by extension the Black community) had dedicated themselves sufficiently or correctly to the project of educating children.Some argued for limiting education to training in manual trades.Others complained that criticisms of the supposed failings of Black morality and education failed to recognize the great progress made by the community.

The Conradian fauna range from the albatross to the yearling and contain more than 150 different species of nonhuman animal. Despite the biodiversity, it is easy to overlook Conrad’s animals because they most frequently appear in metaphors and similes: at first sight, they lack agency, physical presence and independent meaning. But contrary to an articulated evaluative ideal of animal studies, Conrad’s animal metaphors invite reflection on human–animal relations, and demonstrate that an author can write attentively, sympathetically and thoughtfully on animals, despite primarily mentioning them in metaphors. The unreality effect, which I argue unites Conrad’s unconventional animal metaphors, confronts the reader to question the reality of the fictional construct. The unconventional sayings that produce this unreality effect all say: we have the appearance of a marginal, incidental detail but we are one of the most complicated structures in the text.