Numerous bands and their fans see themselves as having revolutionised rock music in the late 1960s and the early 1970s and given birth to a harder style that was to become known as heavy metal. British bands Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and The Kinks are considered pioneers within the two countries of metal’s origin; their counterparts in the US were Steppenwolf, Iron Butterfly and Blue Cheer. Although it is safe to say that these bands were among those that gave the initial spark for a musical genre that has taken hold around the globe in the more than fifty years of its existence, this introduction is not meant to debate the origins of metal.

Today, metal music is a genre popular with fans worldwide, facilitated by a vast industry with specialised professions, such as journalists, artist and repertoire managers, record producers, concert promoters and stage crews.

As popular print ephemera, comics hold a complex and precarious relationship to preservation and duration, which has marked their status as “archivable” (or “non-archivable”) materials. This chapter sketches some of the different ways that institutions, producers, and audiences have coped with this fragility and have defined practices of preservation and collection. The chapter subsequently analyzes comics in libraries and archives, collecting practices by readers and fans, uses of archives in comics production. At each step, it pays particular attention to the importance of materiality, senses, formats, manipulation in the preservation of comics, connecting them to matters of copyright, library policies, and commercial interests. The importance of these parameters is set out against changing notions of archives and archival practice, especially under the impulse of their digital transformation. The broader picture considers the importance of medium specificity in an age of online archival plenitude.

The European quest for a passage by water across North America long pre-dates the nineteenth century, but it was to be then that it took on the urgency of national achievement, and it was to be one man – Sir John Franklin (1786–1847) – whose career came to symbolize the entire era. It may seem an ironic honour, given the disaster that his final expedition of 1845 became, but it must be remembered that the search for his ships was the spur for many more expeditions than had been launched before him. As Joseph Conrad noted in his 1924 essay “Geography and Some Explorers”, ‘This great navigator, who never returned home, served geography even in his death. The persistent efforts, extending over ten years, to ascertain his fate advanced greatly our knowledge of the polar regions.’

I establish conceptual connections between food, the senses, and political life by drawing upon examples of gastropolitical moments which comprise charged meanings that may be unveiled through a closer inspection of the sensible. They reveal different power dynamics of cohesion and tension between varying sets of political actors. The senses aid in exemplifying political relationships and connections, directing us to particular aspects of political form and practice. This chapter therefore serves as a critical instigation of combining analytical approaches from sociology, anthropology, diplomacy, and food and foodways in appraising the importance of culinary–political encounters both within and between nations. Through such interdisciplinary conversations, it adopts a sensory reading and discussion of gastropolitical exchanges. Subsequently, my analysis is geared towards developing a political life of sensation that builds a theoretical and empirical connection between the political and the sensible. Such a sensory perspective explores the sociopolitical metaphors of taste and other accompanying sense experience. These are addressed through my proposed notion of political gustemology which I utilise in this chapter to illustrate the deployment of sensory knowledge and power in both actual sensorial exchanges and metaphorical takes on the sensory.

This chapter discusses how literary heritage and authorial legacies are addressed, reflected on and performed in reconfigurations of Shakespeare. It reads the encounter of Beckett’s aesthetics with Shakespeare by way of Joyce’s use of language and his performative reworking of literary heritage. Interacting with Joyce, Beckett also found an early model of how to engage with literary history in a way that is both creative and destructive. The chapter focuses on the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of Ulysses, which inquires into notions of authorship, national heritage and identity. With regard to Shakespeare, and particularly Hamlet, the chapter records various received paradigms of literary lineage and reception. The second part of this chapter traces Beckett’s inversions of Joycean and Shakespearean paradigms. Shakespeare becomes part of the creative matrix of Beckett’s works where the very richness of his material emerges in his use of minute details and his attention to the mole-cular level of languages and ideas that form the minimal components of his work.

Guillaume Apollinaire is without doubt the most prolific French poet of the Great War. In addition to his major poetry collection, Calligrammes (1918), he wrote and published plays, stories, journalism, and criticism during the conflict. His writing is nothing if not wide ranging. He considered poetry a spiritual activity and an escape from the traditional classification of genre. He also believed there was no boundary between art and life – the two are inextricably linked – and, further, that art and life transform one another. This porous nature, not without its ambivalences and paradoxes, constitutes a major key to the interpretation of his work. The diversity and originality of his oeuvre, the trajectory of the author and the importance of his legacy help to explain how and why he became a poet of war in France, a country that ignored the tradition of 'war poets' that had developed in Great Britain.

Business impacts the world we live in by affecting our environment, living creatures, and our heritage. Often these costs are externalized onto remote populations or future generations. This chapter begins with an emblematic case about rare earth minerals that are vital to modern technology but which, despite “green” initiatives, are also difficult to refine or recycle, and therefore create pollution. The term “sustainability” is closely analyzed, as it conflates the senses of “maintaining our current production and consumption levels” with “maintaining resources in the face of rising prosperity and consequent depletion,” each with widely divergent implications. Arguments promoting intrinsic value of the biosphere are assessed, as are conservation claims about the broad “web of being” and potential climate change. Monetization, the technique that asks hypothetical questions to assess environmental preferences, is presented and critiqued. Triple bottom line accounting is outlined, and the amount of waste we produce is also discussed. The final case looks at the potential effects of large-scale industrial farming and its implications for the environment and the global food chain.

Arctic mining towns are vulnerable to de-industrialization, as most jobs are in a single industry, with long distances to other employers or business opportunities. Other challenges are the legacies of mining that companies leave behind. Research has shown that such legacies can be used for sustaining industrial settlements beyond the end of the industries that supported them. This chapter seeks to understand under what circumstances legacies of mining can contribute to the long-term sustainability of Arctic mining towns in crisis. It explores the history of two Arctic mining towns, Kiruna in Sweden and Schefferville in Canada, and how actors there dealt with the crisis, how they used legacies from the past in this process, and what the outcomes were, after both towns were hit by economic crisis in the 1970s. By using the concepts of re-use and heritagization we show that the possibilities to sustain Arctic mining towns in crisis by creating new values out of mining legacies, depends on several factors: institutions, perceptions of values, and the momentum embedded in socio-technical systems for mining. Local initiatives for sustaining Arctic mining towns in crisis are discussed.

Historic places are vulnerable to a wide variety of threats: neglect, lack of maintenance, demolition, war, and, of course, time itself. No physical or legal intervention will ever be able to make them last forever. Yet, laws can help make historic sites more resilient to the avoidable consequences of obvious threats. This chapter focuses on the legal framework in the United States for fortifying heritage against one particular threat: disasters resulting from natural hazards. Natural hazards include large-scale meteorological and geological events such as hurricanes, tropical storms, tornadoes, floods, blizzards, wildfires, earthquakes, extreme heat, and drought. Climate change has made many of these events more frequent and more intense. Given the increasing risks to historic sites, one might think that planning, mitigation, and recovery efforts are being undertaken with increased urgency. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Without adequate planning and protection, some of our cultural heritage has already been lost or will be lost imminently. This chapter begins by identifying and assessing current policies regarding the protection of historic resources before, during, and after a disaster. It highlights key elements for successful legal protection at each of these three stages. Then it describes our multi-governmental, federalist framework for heritage-related disaster policy. This policymaking takes place at the federal, state, and local levels, mostly through the legislative process and action by executive agencies. Each level of government plays overlapping roles in planning for, mitigating, and recovering from disaster. As the scale of government gets smaller, coordination among historic preservation authorities becomes either less effective or non-existent. This chapter covers each level of government in turn by first describing federal disaster planning and historic preservation requirements. Next, the chapter explores how two states and four local governments have integrated disaster mitigation and historic preservation considerations.