At the macroscale, thermodynamics rules the balances of energy and entropy. In nonisolated systems, the entropy changes due to the contributions from the internal entropy production, which is always nonnegative according to the second law, and the exchange of entropy with the environment. The entropy production is equal to zero at equilibrium and positive out of equilibrium. Thermodynamics can be formulated either locally for continuous media or globally for systems in contact with several reservoirs. Accordingly, the entropy production is expressed in terms of either the local or the global affinities and currents, the affinities being the thermodynamic forces driving the system away from equilibrium. Depending on the boundary and initial conditions, the system can undergo relaxation towards equilibrium or nonequilibrium stationary or time-dependent macrostates. As examples, thermodynamics is applied to diffusion, electric circuits, reaction networks, and engines.

The German emigrant nation proved strikingly resilient despite the Allies’ global efforts to undermine it. The leadership in many of those states confused the presence of Germans all over the world with a German presence somehow beholden to and shaped by the German nation-state. That was their great miscalculation. The demise of Imperial Germany did not dramatically undermine these communities or undercut their soft forms of power because neither had been Imperial Germany’s creations. As a result, Germans quickly returned to being the United States’ greatest rivals in Latin America and their businesses and communities again were flourishing by the middle of the 1920s. At the same time, however, the creation of German minorities across central and eastern Europe mattered a great deal; contributing to the rise of virulent ethno-nationalism, particularly among a younger generation. Within those new contexts, the global flows of people were now channeled and shaped by ever-more stringent immigration laws in the United States and elsewhere as well as ever-more political refugees from the USSR and the nationalizing Central and Eastern European states.

How can we judiciously tell the many continuous, discontinuous, overlapping, persistent, and simultaneous, tales that constitute German history? Taking as an example James J. Sheehan’s engagement with the question: “what is German history?”, the introduction argues that the conceit inherent in the question is the belief that a unitary history must exist, even when the decades of scholarship Sheehan inspired indicated that it does not. In actuality, German history can only ever be regarded as an aggregate of Germans’ histories, and it is critical that we begin by recognizing that a great many of the people who lived those histories did so without regarding difference and unity as antinomies or hybridities as problems. Adopting that position has a number of advantages. It not only allows us to better understand the actions of the great variety of people who thought of themselves and were regarded by others as German during the modern era, it also helps us to gain a better understanding of the roles Germans and German things have played in the history of the modern world.

Aristotle represents many of his predecessors as having arrived at their views about psuchē from reflection on the fact that knowledge is of beings; it is this fact, together with the principle that knowledge is “like by like,” which led them to the view that psuchē is an amalgam of the elements of all beings. But though Aristotle thinks little of this view, he accepts the considerations (duly qualified) from which it is derived. Now, the principle that knowledge is “like by like” is an explanatory principle; it locates the “cause” of knowledge in an antecedent likeness between its subjects and objects. Moreover, analogous principles have been offered to explain analogous facts, and they too are principles which (duly qualified) Aristotle accepts. But though we might expect the qualifications to vary from case to case, still we might wonder whether there isn’t some point they all enforce. In this chapter I argue there is such a point: that the explanatory “likeness” between the parties in question is never just any likeness, such as obtains “as it happened” or by chance, but is always an antecedent likeness in some form common and natural to all parties involved.

From a numerical perspective, ecclesiastical court activity in Catalonia aligns well with the Italian evidence. What distinguishes pastoral intervention is the abundance of surviving visitation registers. Beginning soon after 1300, diocesan prelates toured their parishes and had juries of clergy and laymen respond to questionnaires itemizing sinful behavior. Against Northern convention, they did not probe into mere episodes of intercourse and concentrated on sustained sexual partnerships like concubinage. Disciplinary measures were usually of a spiritual kind and depended for implementation on voluntary submission or neighborhood pressure. Two levels of excommunication could be inflicted on those unwilling to adjust their domestic situation to canonical demands. If absolution was granted, the commutation of penances into monetary payment only applied as elsewhere in the South to laity living under the bishop’s secular lordship. Adherence to the injunctions of visiting clerics appears to have been lackluster, unless hearsay about the impediments of consanguinity and affinity triggered judicial scrutiny, created demand for papal dispensations, or necessitated their formal execution.

Medieval Karaite commentaries on incest prohibitions serve in this chapter as a lens for analyzing how notions of kinship and kin belonging developed in that setting. By examining what is required to become a relative with consanguineal or affinal kin belonging, the chapter explores the different notions of kinship and selfness that inform these legal trends and approaches. An innovative account is provided of the legal change that took place among the Karaites though the former half of the eleventh century as an outcome of changing perceptions of kinship, and shines a light on Karaite texts that have been largely ignored in modern scholarship, some printed here for the first time. Karaite authors discussed in the essay include Anan ben David, Ya’qub al-Qirqisani, Leṿi ben Yefet, Yeshu’ah ben Yehudah, Shelomoh ben David, and Yehudah Hadassi.