This chapter discusses IST itself as well as the research design of the book. It provides a detailed exposition of the key variables of the theory: the status-seeking strategies of rising powers, institutional openness, and procedural fairness. It discusses the causal mechanism that explains the impact of openness and fairness on a rising power’s status and corresponding choice of strategy. It generates four possible strategies a state may follow: cooperate, challenge, expand, and reframe. On research design, the chapter describes the scope conditions of the theory, definitions of key concepts, case selection, research methodology and sources, and the observable implications of the theory and how they differ from the observable implications of alternative (materialist) explanations.

This essay offers an overview of major themes, texts, and critical approaches to early African American print culture. It traces movements in early nineteenth-century African American print culture from the founding of Freedom’s Journal and publication of David Walker’s Appeal through the proliferation of pseudonymous writing in Frederick Douglass’s Paper and the work of the colored conventions movement. In addition, this essay examines the ethics animating the field itself with special attention to new digital humanities projects.

With the rise of digital technologies the number and diversity of related tools (such as phones, computers, 3-D printers, etc.) have markedly increased. This chapter examines how digital objects and other new technologies alter human experiences with the material world.

If Underworld was primarily responsible for bringing DeLillo into worldwide critical consideration, his new global audiences have not stopped reading him. Once the darling of a coterie of American academics, DeLillo now belongs to the world.

This chapter shows how biographical research can lead us to better understand the legal and political dynamics that prevailed in the court during the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter presents an innovative use of biographies in the sense that they are not a goal in themselves, but a means to create primary sources to study the court's institutional behaviour and its power struggle with national governments. This biographical methodology uncovered that the bench of judges which ‘revolutionized’ European law in the 1960s and 1970s was not as isolated and apolitical as existing literature had portrayed as so far. The judges could rely on a vast political network, which not only helped them in assessing how far they could push the integration process further in their rulings, but which was also useful when it came to persuading national decision-makers of the fact that the court’s rulings were in their interest. The chapter further addresses the challenges raised by the biographical approach and gives an account of the research strategies adopted to unearth empirical material on mostly unknown judges coming from different national, legal and professional backgrounds.

Computational information processing has gradually supplanted traditional records and recordkeeping for the physical record, undermining practices centered on the “moral defense” of the record and supplanting them with practices centred on datafication. Prioritizing data malleability rather than the defense of information from manipulation and corruption has, this chapter argues, contributed to the current diminution of the trustworthiness of information and an unravelling of society’s evidentiary foundations. Fields such as archival science and the law have long considered questions of how records may testify to the events and actions of which they form a part – serving as proofs of claims, that is, as evidentials – but research in the field of computing has only relatively recently focused on these issues. Despite its roots in computing culture, blockchain technology offers the promise of an immutable ledger that may halt the processes of datafication contributing to the current widespread potential for manipulation of records. The design and spirit of blockchains – offering the ability to cryptographically “fix” the record, chaining it in place so that any tampering is extremely difficult and immediately evident – harks back to a pre-digital past when the materiality of paper records more readily fixed in place transactional “facts” and protected their integrity from manipulation.

This chapter examines how and why Black dramatists and dramas of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) were forgotten and the role of the Black Arts Movement in recovering the repertoire of Black federal theatre. Only a fraction of the Black plays held in the FTP archives have been anthologized or staged since the 1930s. This chapter examines the broad range of Black dramas developed on the project and still waiting to be surfaced. It focuses in particular on two neglected Black folk dramas: Did Adam Sin? and Cinda, alongside Theodore Ward’s better known social protest drama Big White Fog. Black playwrights and Negro Units dramatized the Depression as it unfolded. The chapter also roots the Black family drama within a longer Black dramatic tradition. Rather than see August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle plays as stretching back to a tradition beginning with Richard Wright’s collaboration with Paul Green on the stage play of Native Son (1941) or Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun (1959), sourcing contemporary Black drama to the Black federal theatre suggests that the staging of contemporary gender roles and race relations has a much longer and richer theatre history.

The discipline of “diplomatics” – originating in the seventeenth century to systematically test the authenticity of medieval documents – has more recently been adapted to the study of digital records and their systems. In establishing the necessary elements for the long-term preservation of authentic records, archival diplomatics provides one possible (and powerful) analytic framework and methodology for analyzing the trustworthiness of records, including those to be found in blockchain and distributed ledgers. Regardless of the type of blockchain and distributed ledger system under examination, each relies upon trust in the ledger and in the records the ledger contains. Yet each type of blockchain and distributed ledger system still has limitations when judged against archival diplomatic standards of records’ trustworthiness, which demands the accuracy, reliability, and authenticity of records. By gaining an understanding of the elemental requirements for trust in records (and in record systems), there is hope that the designers of blockchain and distributed ledger systems might continue to improve the evidentiary quality of blockchain records and recordkeeping.

“Dear John” letters have loomed large in American war-lore ever since GIs first coined the phrase in World War II. Receiving a break-up note from a wife, fiancée, or girlfriend has come to appear a rite of passage for men in uniform. The motif of female treachery and male tragedy circulates both in the stories servicemen and veterans tell one another and in US culture more broadly – in pop music, movies, and novels. Yet no prior author has devoted a book to the “Dear John” phenomenon. That virtually no bona fide specimens exist in archival collections helps explain this lacuna. But the fact that so many “Dear Johns” were physically destroyed soon after receipt doesn‘t make these letters impossible to study. Instead of regarding Dear Johns as a female-authored epistolary genre, we should conceive these letters as the product of a male vernacular tradition. Men have told us most of what we know about how and why women composed these letters, and the effects they‘ve had on recipients. This book explores the interplay between letter-writing and story-telling, inviting readers to contemplate why love is so hard to sustain in wartime.

Who was ‘Mrs Valentine’? The prologue takes an archival deep dive to investigate whether the unsigned Chandos Shakespeare, published by Frederick Warne in 1868, was edited by a woman, Laura Jewry Valentine. This exploration establishes the gaps and misunderstandings surrounding women’s involvement in Shakespearean editorial history.

Chapter 1 examines the process of suppression in the 1530s, using memory as a tool for rethinking our approach to this episode. With sensitivity to the language employed by the Henrician government, it characterises the dissolution as a long and uncertain process that can be separated into two main phases: the ‘reformation of the monasteries’ and the ‘surrender of the monasteries’. It pays particular attention to the emergence of narratives of monastic corruption and the expediency of suppression because, it argues, these are the themes that modern scholarship has inherited from its largely Henrician source base. It is the success and longevity of this triumphalist narrative that the remainder of the book sets out to test, complicate, and unravel. This chapter also notes the emergence of early critiques of the dissolution – Catholic, conservative, and evangelical – which are traced alongside the narratives propagated and perpetuated by Tudor governments with a view to highlighting the complexity and diversity of the early modern memory of the dissolution. Crucially, the chapter highlights the prevalence and persistence of the idea that the monasteries were irredeemably corrupt across different confessional perspectives, as well as across time and space.