Among the many, many transitions in American literature that have been attributed to the US Civil War, one of the less often noted is that the war years coincided with a decisive shift away from authorial anonymity. This transition can be observed in the publication practices of the day’s leading magazines. Harper’s, which had been started in 1850, began naming authors in the index to its twentieth volume (1860), while the Atlantic Monthly, introduced in 1857, began publishing the names of its authors in the index to its tenth volume (1862). The first series of Putnam’s, which ran in the 1850s, did not identify authors in either its issues or its volume indices, but the second series, begun in 1868, did, a distinction that holds when comparing the Continental Monthly, which ran during the war (1862–64) and never identified authors, with the Galaxy, which debuted in 1866 and always did. Even the hoary North American Review got into the act, and started attributing its authors with the January issue of 1868, after more than fifty years of never doing so. There were, of course, exceptions to this trend; antebellum periodicals like Graham’s Magazine or the Broadway Journal sometimes identified the more famous authors who contributed to their pages, while reprint journals like Littell’s Living Age (1844–96) attributed only the original publication sources of its contents, never the individual authors, even at the end of the century. In general, though, postbellum readers of American magazines would be much more likely than their antebellum forebears to know the name of the person who had written whichever article they were reading.

Our knowledge of dementia stigma is still fairly limited, especially in comparison to stigma relating to mental illnesses. This chapter surveys existing scholarship and explores the historical roots of the concept of stigma and of the way different conceptions (biomedical, biopsychosocial, sociocultural and relational) of dementia generate and/or address stigma. It further identifies language, media and sociocultural structures as mechanisms that perpetuate public dementia stigma, before it turns to a number of domains in which dementia stigma can be addressed. In the domain of literature, destigmatizing efforts have attempted to generate empathy, an appreciation of complexity and insight into the condition of people living with dementia. Apart from contact-based and educational interventions, the chapter asserts that it is especially the development of 'counter-frames' that has the potential to unsettle negative perceptions of dementia. The chapter concludes by recognizing a number of methodological, conceptual and strategic challenges that complicate our evaluation of such strategies, or indeed our understanding of the complex phenomenon of dementia stigma itself.

Using a synthesis of personal experience and references to the existing literature, this chapter explores the impact of stigmatizing attitudes and structures and outlines possible solutions. Examples are given of employment and media stigma and the challenges these pose to recovery. However, there are grounds for optimism that lived-experience peer involvement can make positive impacts across all of the domains of stigmatization, helping to tackle shame and to promote recovery. Specifically, this can be done through the introduction of hope, through advocacy and campaigning, the sharing of narratives, the integration of peers into treatment and support settings, and assertive referral to mutual aid of those seeking help. The chapter weaves a deeply personal narrative, illustrating a journey from stigmatization and shame to self-respect and dignity aided by the powerful influence of peers with lived experience of substance use disorder and recovery from it.

This epilogue concludes the volume with an investigation of the legacy of William the Conqueror and his age in public culture, international politics, media, and social memory.

What people know and how they think about drug use, consumption practices, and addiction is considerably influenced by the way the topic is talked about and framed in the media. Problems associated with the stigma of substance use disorders (SUDs) point to the need to identify factors that contribute to stigmatization and the urgency to outline courses of action to combat the stigma of addiction and other SUDs. The chapter first lays out the role the media take regarding the stigmatization of people with SUDs and refers to theoretical approaches in communication science. Findings on the coverage of people with SUDs in the media and mechanisms that lead to stigmatizing portrayals are delineated. In a second step, media guidelines as a possible means to strengthen the destigmatizing role of the media are described and discussed. Against this background, the media’s role in reporting for substance use stigma is discussed.

Don DeLillo’s novelistic imagination has been inspired by and intertwined with film. This chapter discusses the roles of film across many of DeLillo's novels, but also examines DeLillo's filmic approach to literature and narrative.

Reading DeLillo’s work as a whole, readers can trace the trends that shape internet culture: from the very beginning, DeLillo has concerned himself with the connectiveness, surveillance, and information overload that characterize the contemporary Internet. While the Internet provides only a small role in a few of DeLillo's novels, the idea of the Internet, and its various ways of creating both connection and distance, loom large throughout DeLillo's fiction.

Critiques of NATO’s involvement in the Libyan crisis have argued that a sober understanding of the intervention in Libya will only come to light through future studies on those that manipulated information about the conflict. However, no empirical evidence exists on the actual textual structures and strategies brought to bear by journalists in the discursive reproduction of the framework that allegedly guided the involvement of Western powers in the uprising in Libya that eventually led to a civil war in 2011. This chapter examines textual structures and discourse strategies used by CNN between February 14, 2011 and October 31, 2011 – the period General Muammar Gadhafi was killed. The authors propose new questions that may inspire arguments on whether semantic, narrative, and pragmatic acts had impacted on attitudes that validated and inspired the war in Libya.

This chapter examines the New York Times’ representation of the Elián González custody case in 1999 within the broader context of the conflict between the United States and Cuba. The central question that frames this work is the extent to which the ideas that underpin the conflict can be shown to influence the Times’ coverage of this specific episode – i.e., the extent to which the coverage of an episode can be influential on the broader conflict. The results point to support for the hypotheses that the discourses represented by the New York Times in its coverage of the González case corresponded with the themes of the broader conflict between the United States and Cuba and that American sources represented in the coverage exemplified predictable attitudes about Cuba and Communism.

Mainstream pro-war news media reporting of the 2003 Iraq War was highly sanitized in a way that reduced war coverage to a cinematic spectacle. The picture that was painted by the coalition mainstream media reporters was of a war free of images of suffering, destruction, dissent, and diplomacy, but full of sophisticated US weaponry, chivalrous “heroism” and militarist “humanitarianism.” The US control of news media framing (through censorship and embedding systems) shielded viewers from the “realities” of the battlefield through recourse to maneuvering “avoidance” strategies, such as the “dehistorization,” “depersonalization,” and “decontextualization” of the unfolding conflict. By muting dissenting voices, the pro-war coalition media frames manufactured an “interpretive dominance” that was inextricably structured in hegemony and social control.

This chapter argues that the discursive construction of the herders as terrorists exacerbates suspicion and fear in herder–farmer relations and further destroys the prospect of peace in Nigeria. Applying a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to analyze the representations of the main actors in the conflict, 175 news headlines of seven popular Nigerian broadsheet newspapers were studied. The study reveals that the herdsmen are consistently constructed as terrorists, as violent actions such as unprovoked attacks and killings are attributed to them. However, the farmers are constructed as non-violent and as the victims. Hence, the press explicitly constructs the herder–farmer conflict in terms of the “killer-herdsmen” script with which the herders are generally evaluated.

Chapter 7 shows how diaspora activists’ interventions in the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni Arab Spring were shaped by the relative degree of geopolitical support for the cause from their host-country governments and influential third parties, including states bordering the home-country, international institutions, and the media.

The writ of habeas corpus is a legal tool with a complex relationship to carceral practices. The writ has functioned both to liberate illegally-detained individuals and to affirm the validity of underlying systems of legally-authorized incarceration. The so-called “Great Writ of Liberty” has thus survived and even thrived in a number of contexts where liberty interests have been systematically denied. Advocacy surrounding the use of the writ on behalf of non-human animals in U.S. courts has, however, tended toward aspirational, sometimes bordering on fantastical, accounts of the writ’s achievements in human justice contexts.

This chapter will introduce a corrective to this superlative vision of habeas corpus, its achievements in human justice contexts, and its potential for animal liberation. This study will argue that one well-publicized advocacy approach, taken most notably by Steven Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project, overstates the writ’s accomplishments, often relying on an incomplete account of the writ’s history to do so. In particular, this account of the writ’s successes tends to paint struggles against racial violence and inequality as complete, thus minimizing the import of urgent ongoing justice projects. Next, a historical corrective is offered, demonstrating how closer attention to the writ’s actual role in human carceral systems can enrich our understanding of the writ’s limits and potential. This account will emphasize that the writ of habeas corpus operates only to challenge illegal (rather than unjust) detention; that it operates only at the margins of legal confinement systems to contain rather than eliminate carceral practices; and that it therefore serves a role not only in challenging individual instances of confinement, but also in sustaining and validating ongoing carceral practices.

This more critical picture of habeas corpus, however, does not strip the writ of its potential as an advocacy tool for the interests of non-human animals. This chapter will argue that animal advocates might join other social justice movements in adopting a more ambivalent embrace of rights litigation. It is possible, often necessary, for advocates to turn to legal tools without adopting an uncritical posture toward law. Indeed, as with other ambivalent embraces of rights—including historical uses of habeas corpus—litigation is often a critical tool in bringing political attention to social injustices. This chapter will propose that the greatest potential offered by the writ of habeas corpus is a focus on liberty that invites advocacy spotlighting the experiences of animals living within human systems of violence and confinement. It is this prospect of exposing and exploring the harms of human domination of other species—not any fantastical account of the writ’s human achievements—that gives habeas corpus its most meaningful transformative potential.

The Introduction situates the reader in our present social and environmental era, specifically in a globally enmeshed United States. It explains our conception of the book’s three central terms: America, Environment, and Literature. It gives an overview of the history of ecocriticism, especially pertaining to North America, and how our authors contribute to, and innovate, that tradition. It ends with a summary of each chapter.

This chapter discusses how news contributes to informed citizenship by reviewing the different approaches adopted in the literature to understanding how individuals learn from the news. After reviewing the main theoretical and empirical perspectives on how news contributes to citizens’ ‘knowledge’, we advance the hypothesis that adopting a self-regulated learning perspective might provide a more comprehensive theoretical framework for this type of research. We therefore propose a GAMES approach (Goal-Oriented, Active, Motivated, Emotion-Laden, Situated), derived from a synthesis of the literature on self-regulated learning in the field of educational psychology.