In August 1914, when the First World War broke out in Europe, the Indian Branch of the St. John Ambulance Association (ISJAA) immediately started to organise relief provisions for the British Indian Army troops. With the sizable expansion of its pre-war ambulance and first aid agenda during the war, this non-state organisation ventured into various fields of humanitarian war work in the following four years; these fields were usually linked to, or seen as, ‘Red Cross work’. In colonial India, where until 1920 no ‘national’ Red Cross society formally existed, the ISJAA strikingly decided to fill the void. In 1914, it identified itself as the Red Cross representative in India.

This chapter shifts the focus to the humanitarian work undertaken by the ISJAA, calling for a more nuanced examination of the historical contexts surrounding the so-called Red Cross humanitarianism. Existing research has emphasised the global reach and significant impact of the Red Cross movement during the First World War, while often failing to acknowledge the contributions of other humanitarian actors who played a crucial role in providing relief.1 Historian Rebecca Gill has powerfully reminded us to ‘acknowledge the relevance of a multi-levelled history of the local, national, imperial, and international’ when it comes to understanding humanitarianism. However, she erroneously refers to the war participation of a Red Cross society in India when she actually means the ISJAA.2 By focusing on the latter's relief work, the chapter illustrates the existence of alternative humanitarian actors of significance in the provision of relief to soldiers during wartime in the British Empire.

The biblical encounter examined in this chapter takes place in littera, initiated by New Testament allusions, quotations, and exegesis, a rhetorical move that entails a certain conception of historical time unrolled through narrative. From Christian credos to anti-Jewish vitriol, that textual encounter resonates through characters, speech, and plot, and ultimately encompasses the unfinished work as a whole. By his unexpected insertion of religious matter into the territory occupied by the matter of Britain, Chrétien de Troyes effectively reimagines Arthurian romance as he invented it. I will argue that the particular character of Grail romances within the larger field of this most protean genre follows from that incongruous meeting of courtly and Christian discourses, combined for the first time in Le Conte du Graal (c. 1181–91), the last of Chrétien's five romances. The romancer's unsettling inclusion of religious issues within Arthurian narrative occurs during a period when biblical exegesis in both Christian and Jewish traditions takes a new turn, more focused on the Bible's literal and historical sense.

Chapter 7 investigates how mental models shape Americans’ attitudes toward globalization, focusing on trade and immigration against a backdrop of growing economic nationalism under both the Trump and Biden administrations. Using survey data and conjoint experiments, the chapter reveals that individuals who think like economists (i.e., high economic knowledge) view trade and immigration more favorably. To address the concentrated harms of globalization they prefer strategies such as unemployment benefits and retraining programs rather than protectionist measures. By contrast, those with Alternative Mental Models tend to support protectionist measures that promise immediate relief but undermine long-term welfare. Crucially, people aligned with the Economist Mental Model are more responsive to new economic information; when presented with evidence of net gains, they adjust their stance in favor of globalization, and vice versa. This responsiveness underscores that their support for free trade and immigration is not blind but rooted in systematic cost–benefit analysis.

This chapter traces the process by which villages became cities and city-states, which grew in some places into larger-scale states and empires, with a focus on the social institutions and cultural norms that facilitated these developments, including hereditary dynasties, hierarchical families, and notions of ethnicity. Writing and other means of recording information were invented to serve the needs of people who lived close to one another in cities and states. Oral rituals of worship, healing, and celebration in which everyone participated grew into religions, philosophies, and branches of knowledge presided over by specialists, including Judaism and Confucian thought. Social differences became formalized in systems that divided enslaved and free, or that grouped people into castes or orders, distinctions that were maintained through marriage and cultural ideologies. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity were created and then expanded in the cosmopolitan worlds of classical empires, shaping family life and social practices.

Between 639 and the nineteenth century the Basilica of Saint-Denis was the burial place of forty-three kings and thirty-two queens of France. Cavaillé- Coll's initial proposal was for an organ of eighty-four stops, to be built over three years at a cost of 80,000 francs. Delays in the rebuilding of the cathedral allowed him time to reduce the stops to seventy-one.

The magnificent instrument M. Cavaillé has installed in the Église Saint-Denis has received unanimous approval. Even the maker's rivals are agreed in praising it, and organists can't stifle the regret that such a fine piece of work does emphatically not belong to Paris. It is indeed an admirable organ which combines, together with the finest qualities of the best organs of its kind, others which are unique to itself, thanks to details invented beyond doubt by M. Cavaillé. Its diapasons are very powerful, the reeds very strong and sonorous, and the cor anglais stop has a delightful timbre. There is a slight fault in the sixteen-foot stops in that the pedals are slow to speak. A remarkable new effect is that of the crescendo achieved by a mechanism placed under the feet but above the pedals, and which allows the organist to add as many stops as he likes without taking his hands off the keyboard. This is truly splendid, and you have to hear the build-up of these choruses, these accumulating orchestras, to have a real idea of this invention's merits. The vox humana, which seems to have been made in imitation of that in Fribourg, is far from being as perfect.

One of Valencia's most spectacular and sometimes lucrative periods of literary production spanned the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century. The burgeoning literary industry was kindled by the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the consolidation of the city's professional managers, such as physicians, lawyers, and religious personnel, individuals who were frequently multi-vocational, as in the case of Jaume Roig. The new technology and frequent multi-professionalism of writers at the time were of fundamental importance to the Espill's print history, since the bound text was often accompanied by a select number of other titles in the same volume, several of which were written collaboratively by multi-professional men like Roig. To my knowledge, no scholar has speculated about how many copies of the Espill might have been printed in the sixteenth century, although 54 extant volumes have been catalogued so far. This extraordinary number of printed copies of the Espill has only been widely brought to light in the last two to three decades, thanks to the efforts of the following scholars and academic teams: the monumental article of 2004 by Joan Mahiques Climent about the book's wide availability in print; an important article, although more limited in scope, by Josep Lluís Martos in 2014; Antònia Carré's summary of the topic in the introduction to her edition of 2014; and the ongoing cataloguing efforts over the last two to three decades of the scholarly teams at BITECA / PhiloBiblon and Iberian Books.

The individuals entitled to bounty or prize money were not likely to be able to take their cases to court. It was essential that an agent be appointed to work on the behalf of men still at sea, turned over into another ship, or who had died since the capture. The appointment was probably the captain's decision alone, but every member of the crew had to signify his agreement for this to provide maximum benefit to all. The importance of this legal document can be seen in the meticulous copy made for the use of the court, carefully filed and indexed. These documents do not make clear the status of the individual. That happened later.

• • The identity of the vessel and the date of the document is made clear

• • The identity of the agent and his address is established

• • The prize is named, together with any other vessels involved in the capture

• • The agent is instructed to act on behalf of the captor to receive the bounty or Head Money, sell the prize and everything pertaining to her, before distributing the prize money to the officers and crew

• • The agent is entitled to retain five per cent of the proceeds of the capture

• • This Power of Attorney is dated 7 February 1758

• • A note on the cover of the document adds the information that the prize was condemned on 18 March 1758

• James Henshaw's form contains the same instructions but without the visual effect of the Dispatch's brilliantly decorated legal document.

The court records compiled by William Burrell are indispensable to a researcher into the legal world of naval prizes in the eighteenth century. He provides the barest outline of the cases he quotes, but for each example there is just enough to give a flavour of the legal point at issue, and the justification behind the judgement.

In this case the master of the merchant vessel Pompey, smuggling goods from Monte Christi to Philadelphia, needed to conceal the fact that she was carrying contraband. He had made an agreement with the master of the privateer Charming Sally, to pretend that she had been taken, and was a prize. As a prize the Pompey would normally have been exempt from search by the small British squadron in the West Indies. John Lindsay, Trent (28), was suspicious and took possession of both vessels. He returned to Jamaica with Pompey and declared her his prize for having broken the law.

The law in this case was clear. The Pompey had colluded with the Charming Sally and had pretended to have been captured. The evidence that emerged in the interrogation of the master was damning. Pompey had been provided with a copy of Charming Sally's commission. This however did not protect her, but was the evidence of her collusion.

The monition for John Lindsay's case to be heard in Jamaica was dated 21 December 1761. On 19 March 1762, only three months later, the vessel was confiscated and declared a Droit, with one half of the value of her sale going to the King, the other half to John Lindsay.

The Admiralty's standing exhortation to its captains, incorporated in every commission, was to ‘protect the trade and annoy the enemy’, and with a little help from private enterprise, they did succeed in annoying the enemy. This book is not about privateering activities. These were a way of employing private enterprise to assist in the reduction of the enemy's trade, as every prize taken by a privateer weakened the trading wealth of the enemy and reduced the number of men available to the French navy, at no cost to the naval administration. Instead the focus has been on the activities of the young men who were captains of sloops and frigates, and so involved in individual captures, rather than those in the larger ships, highly enough rated to fight in the line of battle as ‘ships of the line’. There were fleet actions during the war, and they play their part in the story, but John Elliot was not the only captain content to stay in a sixth rate frigate rather than receive the higher pay due to a captain in a larger ship. He was much more likely to win prize money. In the time of Queen Anne there had been restrictions on the behaviour of the captors, and these restrictions still applied. Furthermore, British ships of war or privateers were expressly forbidden to ransom any ship taken as prize, in order to reduce the men available to the French. The commander of a privateer who did so ‘shall forfeit his commission to all intents and purposes and shall, together with his bail, be proceeded against according to the Law, and be condemned in costs and damages’.

I had left Columbia assuming I would never be a professor. Eight years later, I was one, although at a progressive college that doesn't use the term.

I used to say that I was “Half of Vivian,” since she was now half-time and we taught in the same classroom. I also told her that I thought we had been “married in a previous life.”

What was literally true was that my father remembered seeing her at the piano during the 1930s, when he had briefly composed for musical theatre and for the dance duo Gluck Sandor and Felicia Sorel. He and Vivian had both come from Chicago to New York, seeking a life in its artistic community. My father had even once brought some of his music to show to Aaron Copland, a mentor figure of Vivian's during the years she was a sought-after pianist, expert in new music.

While I felt a strong human connection to her, I was not yet able to entirely connect with her music; its language held me at arm's length. It was only many years later, when I taught classes about her music, that I began to fully appreciate what she had achieved and better understand her unique evolution. At this time, I identified most easily with Lionel's compositional world—rooted in his pianism, eccentric, personal, and temperamentally dark—and there was a kind of symbiotic connection between us.

I had not known him before his stroke. By some accounts, the man I encountered in the summer of 1983 and got to know so well after 1985 was warmer and more emotionally available than he had been earlier in life.