This chapter surveys the fields of musicology and dance studies, examining some of the most influential historically themed scholarship that has emerged within the two disciplines – and echoed across their own disciplinary histories – since the early twentieth century. Paying particular attention to the work of towering musicologist Richard Taruskin and dance expert Lynn Garafola, the chapter provides a useful account of the ballet’s scholarly legacy and the principal themes that have arisen across what has been a stupendous (and seemingly endless) volume of literature. Of these themes, race, gender and national identity prove particularly enduring, as generations of scholars seek to situate the ballet within coterminous histories of rupture and continuity.

History tells us that the broader values of society can be just as important as those of psychiatry itself in shaping the way people with mental illness are treated. Historical scholarship also alerts us to the need to be circumspect about taking society’s self-declared values at face value, an example being the humanitarian reform of the care system for the mentally ill during the Victorian era where harsh and discriminating morality and a growing intolerance of society towards the marginal have also been demonstrated. Historically, in the UK, doctors have repeatedly found themselves limited in their ability to build a person-centred, therapeutic relationship with their patients by circumstances that were beyond their control, for example the overcrowding and strict legalism of the asylum system.

From the twentieth century onwards, there have been periods when society turned to psychiatry for advice about normal life. Anti-psychiatry emerged during a period when the idea that psychiatry could be a tool for social adjustment was under growing criticism; individual freedom began to be prized over conformity; and the service user movement started. One important legacy of the anti-psychiatry criticism is that psychiatry has become much more cautious about taking a public role on values.

This chapter discusses Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust as a distinctive form of literary production practiced by Jewish adults, youth, and children across Europe. Jewisih diaries took on particular significance in the context of the Holocaust. They open a window on the cultural, social, and political history of the Holocaust. By preserving victims’ voices, diaries contribute to the writing of new histories of the Holocaust, in particular because of the attention to gender and social relations among victims.

This book explores what Europeans in the twentieth century understood by individual freedom and how they endeavored to achieve it, often against the odds. The Introduction lays out its conceptual bases, arguing that the quest was multi-faceted and unfolded in nonlinear ways, which jars with teleological narratives of the rise and decline of “the individual.” It disputes Annelien de Dijn’s recent account of one dominant concept of modern liberty and is attentive to mainstream as well as marginalized versions of individual freedom, questioning Michel Foucault’s idea that the former were “imposed on us” through disciplinary power. Instead, the book borrows from sociologist Georg Simmel and political philosopher Isaiah Berlin to stress the subjective, gradual, and unpredictable character of individual freedom and the fact that it was pursued against a range of obstacles and constraints. It tells a story of conflict-ridden expansion. Men and women had to claim their personal freedom in a context marked by world wars, the expanding power of the state, the constraints of work life, pre-established moral norms, the growing influence of America, and the uncertain future of colonial rule.

The Introduction provides an overview of the central questions raised in the book, the arguments presented, and the methodology employed. It frames key questions about the shifting meanings of childhood pain and its implications for the construction of adult worlds. Additionally, it highlights the interplay between the child as an object of clinical observation and as a symbolic figure within cultural and scientific narratives. Through this lens, it contributes to broader debates on the intersections of science, emotion, and society. The methodology used is one of interdisciplinary history, drawn largely from the history of medicine and cultural history, which assesses visual as well as written material.

A great deal of figurative decoration on Greek painted pottery relates to mythology. But what made particular painters choose to paint particular scenes at particular times? This chapter assembles the evidence for what was painted on Athenian painted pottery from the seventh to the fourth century, showing how different scenes peaked in popularity at different periods, and how although some scenes were perennial favourites, others attracted interest only briefly. The chapter then explores the implications of the patterns both for changing degrees of engagement with one particular set of texts, the Homeric epics, and for the way in which changing values affected the myths, and the literary instantiations of those myths, that were in vogue at any one time. While the questions of what it is to be human, how men relate to women, and how to behave at a party are of lasting interest to users of pottery, engaging with issues of divine power is popular in the sixth century, with issues of sexual relations and extreme situations arising from war popular around 500, and issues about decision-making as popular in the fifth century.

Martial Poirson foregrounds France’s greatest writer of comedy and the most widely read, performed and translated French-language playwright in the world, Molière. Highlighting the myths that have thrived around this national treasure, Poirson notes that almost nothing is known about the biography and history of this national treasure. Inseparable from the nation’s narration of itself and of its status at the centre of colonial empire, Molière has been celebrated for his supposedly republican values, and his language – ‘la langue de Molière’ – has become foundational in France and exported, sometimes aggressively, across la francophonie, or the French-speaking world. Notably, Poirson provides insights into how Molière’s language and oeuvre fared in colonized Indochina. With astonishing constancy and unparalleled resilience, Molière has persisted in the French and international cultural subconscious for over four centuries.

Country music is one of Australia’s oldest popular music forms, stretching from the 1920s (when it was known as hillbilly) to today. It also shows a remarkable continuity of tradition. Despite country music’s reputation as being politically conservative and white, in Australia country has often pursued a progressive agenda and has featured many Aboriginal and women artists. Songwriters have used country music’s robust musical forms to tell richly detailed and diverse stories about life in Australia, from rural labour, to urbanization, to sexual and racial double standards, to economic woes, to familial bonds, to the ravages of the climate. Despite this rich history, and the genre’s rootedness in place, there remain many anxieties surrounding country music to do with its perceived ‘Americanness’, itself symptomatic of larger anxieties around national identity. While hillbilly music originated in America, musically, lyrically and culturally it has developed in new and fascinating ways in Australia.

The Poet’s Voice is an intervention in the field of classics and is committed to the slow, close reading of Greek texts. The testing of how critical activity could be transformed by theoretical reflection is to be found in how the texts of antiquity were opened to a transformative exploration of their meaning. The practice of the discipline – how texts are read and understood, what questions are authorized, what sorts of answers countenanced – is what is at stake in such an enterprise. The Poet’s Voice is written from within the discipline of classics, to transform it from within, and hence its focus is on critically reading the texts of the discipline, both the ancient literature and its modern critics. That is how its theoretical commitment is embodied and enacted.

Historical revivalism has proved to be an ever-constant thread in the reception of Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries. Question of cultural heritage and national history were pressing ones during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime, both as topics of academic study and subjects of popular appeal. England in this period drew enormous pride from its literary and artistic history, and this history in turn fuelled a national image that helped create a sense of a unique national destiny. For the period’s perceived musical ‘renaissance’, similarly, the important influence of English heritage and the nation’s historical musical canon on new English works was a persistent trope.

It is important, however, to create more nuanced accounts of how historical revivalism figured in English musical modernism. In this chapter, I focus on three main elements in English musical revivalism during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime. First, I explore contemporary attitudes towards history, English musicological writing during the period, and new attitudes towards manuscripts and archival research. I then outline how the products of music historians and archival researchers created actual performances of early music via editions and concerts. Finally, I note the expansion of this ‘sounding’ early music into spaces where historical music could be marketed as an element of mass culture.

In Chapter 5, the focus is on the development of arithmetical operations. I review empirical literature and argue that addition has plausibly developed as a direct continuation of counting procedures, which in turn made it possible to develop other arithmetical operations (multiplication, subtraction, and division). After that, reviewing literature on different cultures, I show the importance of arithmetical applications for the development of arithmetic – or the lack of it. While arithmetical operations have developed in similar ways in different cultures (when arithmetic was indeed developed), in the final section I show how some aspects of Western arithmetic – for example, proofs, axiomatisations and infinity – are more culturally specific.