This chapter examines the impact of the emergence of a unified empire on the ideas about honor and shame that defined the social elite that filled state offices, and distinguished them from elite competitors. First, scholars redefined the relation between the ruler and his officials, trying to forge them into a united body where the honor of each party depended on the honor of the other. Second, people increasingly granted status to several forms of intellectual expertise. Masters of the classical language received positions and increasing prestige for their skills. Similarly, titularly low officials who mastered legal texts secured considerable power, and claimed a higher status. Finally, Sima Qian claimed the right, patterned on Confucius, to pass judgments that honored or shamed those about whom he wrote. This developed the tension between scholars and the ruler that had emerged in the Warring States. The chapter also examines how the increasing merger of intellectuals and powerful families was reflected in tensions between the claims of scholarship and careers, and devotion to the family. Han authors carried forward the Warring States discourse distinguishing a true elite that worked for honor or morality, while rejecting conventional devotion to material wealth.

The Introduction traces the traditions, institutions, prerogatives, and entailments of poetry as they shape and impinge upon the work of the present. It also tracks the ways that contemporary social, political, and technological developments have radically altered the place of poetry in culture. It situates the book’s argument within the lines of thinking about poetry that are woven into Western thought since Plato. It does this quite selectively, and rather than provide a synthetic account of Western poetics, the goal is to articulate how several key ideas about poetry have been taken up by different writers across cultures and historical moments. The Introduction also outlines the historical scope of this book, which, while deeply invested in a longer history of poetry, will focus primarily on textual examples from the past forty (or so) years.

This chapter reroutes Wordsworth’s description of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility” so as to consider a poem’s recollective potential from another angle. How might poems recollect both the past and their own historical moments? One of the most crucial activities that poets undertake is that of remembrance and memorialization, and part of this chapter focuses on forms of contemporary elegy. For a great many poets across the aesthetic spectrum, “recollection” isn’t primarily concerned with personal emotion or feeling, but rather with an attempt to account for past and present, often intertwining acts of personal memory and public history. Such poems aren’t simply “about” historical topics or reflections on the past. They also provide an alternate way of sifting, gathering, constellating, and presenting the materials of the past, not as stylized historiography but as a mode of counterhistorical writing. This chapter examines poetry’s abilities to recollect, as both a compositional spur and as a set of readerly affordances. It suggests the ways in which the notion of recollection might be expanded well beyond its Wordsworthian remit. Practices of recollection are vital both to the composition and reception of poetry, and in several ways this chapter cinches the concerns of the previous three. It focuses on texts by Denise Riley, Mary Jo Bang, Geoffrey Hill, Rita Dove, Caroline Bergvall, Natalie Harkin, and M. NourbeSe Philip.

The basic biological principles of human development, history of growth studies as examples of social concerns related to health, education, politics and human “race” biology are all examined. Important technological and statistical developments to better measure and interpret growth and development are covered.

Discusses the development of Sustainable Finance and its context, and the failure of orthodox economics to properly address the issues.

Chapter 11 introduces the main features of investor–State arbitration from a threefold perspective: historical, institutional and procedural. For the history, it examines the origin of international arbitration and then focuses in succession on the emergence and consolidation of investor–State arbitration and the growing criticism it has been facing since the turn of the last century. With regards to institutional and procedural aspects, this chapter introduces the main dispute settlement centres operating in investor–State arbitration and the main arbitration rules that can be availed of, prior to analysing the key procedural features and phases of investor–State arbitration. More specifically, it examines in detail the proceedings that lead to the deliberation and award as well as post-award proceedings and enforcement, focusing on the ICSID Convention Arbitration Rules, the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules and the SCC Arbitration Rules. Attention is also paid to the main features of treaty practice, which increasingly regulates the settlement of investor–State disputes. The following chapters delve into salient aspects of these proceedings in more detail.

Chapter 2 discuss the roles that rituals, gatherings, and confrontation played in the rising popularity of these groups during the mid-twentieth century. Through analyzing multiple rituals, ranging from a protest on the streets to a Ping-Pong tournament at the group headquarters, I argue that through gathering, these groups produced a space – symbolic and physical – within the public sphere to practice their identity and recruit new members. However, autonomy was not easily won, as organizations were the site of surveillance and repression by the Ottoman, French colonial, and early independence state. After analyzing multiple types of gatherings and state control over them, Chapter 2 focuses on two episodes of street and state violence: one in the 1930s between the Kataʾib and French security forces, and one in the 1950s between the Progressive Socialist Party and Lebanese security forces. Following these clashes, these groups mobilized a history of violence in yearly events commemorating the battles. All popular organizations had confrontation narratives and rituals, and as a by-product, embedded violence – or at least struggle – within group culture. While being mindful not to essentialize violence within these groups, this point helps to foreshadow how they could conceive violent practices under extreme circumstances and threats.

Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry V, and 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI might be thought to be nostalgic simply because they are history plays, reimagining and restaging a past that is, by definition, lost. Loss is certainly one of their central concerns: the loss of France, of land, of friends and family, and of identity, especially kingly identity. Versions of a lost and longed-for Eden can be found in all of these plays, and the heroes of the past are always greater than the protagonists (and actors, and audiences) of today. But as history plays, their nostalgia is also aesthetic, both cultivating and fulfilling a desire for a consistent, coherent vocabulary of symbols, discernible, stable points of origin, intelligible relationships of cause and effect, and even readily comprehensible design choices: the histories very often come to us in red and white, blue and gold. Perhaps above all, the histories feed our nostalgia for a past that is vivid, fixed, and whole, and therefore able to be understood.

Chapter 1 introduces the broad objective of the book. This is to show how history can be used to understand why biophysical shocks and hazards, sometimes leading to disasters, push societies in different directions – creating a diversity of possible social and economic outcomes. In order to understand this diversity, we need to look not only at institutional responses but also at the social actors behind these responses, who may have very different goals, not always equivalent to the ‘common good’. We illustrate how shocks and hazards, and the disasters that sometimes ensued, could thus have very diverse consequences not only between societies, but also within the same societies, between social groups, and across wealth, ethnic, and gender lines. In discussing these issues, the book goes back in time further than the modern period. Although the Industrial Revolution and associated new technologies brought momentous changes, these did not create a fundamental rift between the period before and after the Industrial Revolution, and we argue that the underlying mechanisms remained similar. After the outline of the intentions of this book, the chapter concludes with a survey of the fields of disaster studies, disaster history, and the relevant interpretative frameworks in historical research.

Chapter 3 explores the expansion of membership beyond the core demographics of these groups during the 1940s and 1950s. I argue that these groups encouraged the political socialization of new groups and categories of people in new places. By setting up organizational outposts throughout the country, establishing wings for marginalized populations, and connecting the group with relevant populations outside Lebanon, these organizations started to incorporate the countryside, young women, and émigrés into national and regional politics. In turn, this chapter finds that these groups expand the notion of who constituted “youth,” and accordingly, they played a significant, albeit not exclusive, role in solidifying mass, youth politics in Lebanon and the broader Middle East. And although these groups were building a cosmopolitan base in many ways, they were circumscribed by the national, sociopolitical system (whereby sect determined how, or if, people could participate in official politics) in Lebanon, and linked class, gender, and regional inequalities. In turn, contradictions emerged within groups, including membership distinctions between the middle-class, male, urban ideal, and everyone else. Furthermore, competition between these groups played out in terms of overlapping claims of who was – and was not – deemed as backward, or in some cases, “sectarian.”

The introduction to Victorian Women and Wayward Reading traces the vexed literary and philosophical history of identification as a feminized reading response and uncovers a concurrent history of wayward reading in the Victorian era. The eponymous heroine of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) embodied identification as a feminine mode of delusional and egoistic reading, in contrast to the philosophically valorized response of sympathy. Through her fictional heroine, Lennox created a convenient archetype for female susceptibility that would recur over the next 150 years in criticism, cartoons, and novels, from Northanger Abbey to Madame Bovary and beyond. The introduction explicates how various modern conceptions and critiques of literary identification possess nineteenth-century forebears in explicit disapproval and tacit endorsement of stereotypically feminine reading practices. While Victorian critics and modern scholars alike have concentrated on sympathy and empathy as redemptive readerly affects, the introduction shifts focus to Victorian women’s intentional identification, beyond the stereotypically feminine arenas of emotion and interpersonal relationships. This introduction refines and clarifies an active definition of literary identification based in cognitive psychology, to demonstrate how identification can be intentionally directed by the reader and illuminate possibilities for wayward reading in the past and present.

Chapter 4 examines what transformed popular organizations from allies to enemies in the late 1950s. On one side of the conflict were those groups against the government and Lebanese President Camille Chamoun. They included the Progressive Socialist Party, Najjadeh, Lebanese Communist Party, and the Arab Nationalist Youth. In speeches, petitions, and articles, these groups claimed that Chamoun’s recent actions in domestic and foreign policy were authoritarian, represented a threat to sovereign Lebanon, and were grounds for armed revolution. On the other side were the Kataʾib and Syrian Social Nationalist Party. They made the point that foreign interference from Syria and Egypt, and its leftist sponsors in Lebanon (most notably, the Progressive Socialist Party), challenged Lebanon’s sovereignty, the constitution, and their group. Given that defending Lebanon and its sovereignty was not, at least in the eyes of multiple popular organizations, sectarian, Chapter 4 represents a need to rethink sectarianism among sociopolitical actors in and beyond 1958. Indeed, whether groups had clear sect majorities (the Kataʾib and Najjadeh) or not (the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and Lebanese Communist Party), I argue that their perspectives before the conflict were quite complex, linked to multiple factors, and cannot be reduced to sectarianism alone.

The introduction sketches the history of youth politics and youth-centric organizations in modern Lebanon (what I refer to as “popular organizations”), and the fields of study that they are linked to, including popular politics, populism, young people, and sectarianism.

Chapter 5 analyzes the dynamics of the fighting itself, starting in the summer months of 1958. First, it takes up the place of ritual in the 1958 War. By focusing on the Kataʾib’s shift, from the sidelines to frontlines, I argue that routine practices linked to youth belonging, play, and order were mobilized to perform violence. More broadly, whether it was singing a group anthem at an initiation ceremony before battle or marching in a funeral procession for a fallen fighter, popular organizations of all shades mobilized the youth cultures that were cultivated over past decades to win Lebanon. Chapter 5 also discusses several fronts of the war, including the final battle in Beirut between the Kataʾib and Najjadeh. While some scholars contend this phase was one of sectarian bloodletting, the reality was more complex. Neither side used exclusively sectarian discourse to describe other popular organizations. Instead, they deployed coded language, describing their enemies as maddened punks. This reality leads to Winning Lebanon’s main conclusion on sectarianism and sectarian violence. In the course of this conflict, youth, or youthfulness, terms with little connection to sect, became linked to sectarian violence, in practice and discursively, a trend that continued beyond 1958.

Chapter 1 explores the architecture and architects of youth politics in mid-twentieth-century Lebanon. It moves chronologically from the 1920s to 1950s, describing the historical background of multiple popular organizations, and taking an individual group as a means to explore one theme in the construction of youth politics – that is, building a group culture, flair and feel, and organizational capacity among youth-centric organizations. I argue that these groups were collectively the shapers of a distinct manifestation of popular politics in the Middle East, what I refer to as populism. This trend found its earliest expression with the Lebanese People’s Party in the 1920s, continued with youth organizations like the Najjadeh in the 1930s, and culminated with transnational student groups like the Arab Nationalist Youth in the 1950s. Using the source material of these groups, I find that although they were deploying radically different worldviews to win Lebanon, based on the different, competing ideologies of the time – Arab nationalism, Lebanese nationalism, international socialism – there was more continuity than difference between these groups in their early years. They all channeled anger with colonial rule, the complicity of Lebanese elites in this subjugation, and used a discourse of populism to launch public awareness and protest.

The epilogue of the book explores this legacy and makes a call for more research on the 1958 War, both as a rupture point in modern Middle East history, and as a site for understanding global, disruptive, youth politics.

The Introduction explains what we are doing when we claim to write American puritan literary history. It shows the development of that field – particularly as it was rooted in American exceptionalism and guided the construction of American literature anthologies – then explains the turn away from exceptionalism and the current state of the field. In the process we define each of the key terms in the title of this book: “American,” “puritan,” “literary,” and “history,” offering a general overview and summary of puritanism. Finally, the introduction lays out the three broader goals of the volume: (1) to introduce teachers, scholars, and new students to the complicated and nuanced tradition of puritan literature in America, set within broad historical, methodological, and geographical contexts; (2) to bring together new methodologies for, approaches to, and analyses of this literature; and (3) to suggest new directions and next steps in the field, including what the contours of such a field ought to include.