Psychic Investigators examines British anthropology’s engagement with the modern spiritualist movement during the late Victorian era. Efram Sera-Shriar argues that debates over the existence of ghosts and psychical powers were at the center of anthropological discussions on human beliefs. He focuses on the importance of establishing credible witnesses of spirit and psychic phenomena in the writings of anthropologists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Edward Burnett Tylor, Andrew Lang, and Edward Clodd. The book draws on major themes, such as the historical relationship between science and religion, the history of scientific observation, and the emergence of the subfield of anthropology of religion in the second half of the nineteenth century. For secularists such as Tylor and Clodd, spiritualism posed a major obstacle in establishing the legitimacy of the theory of animism: a core theoretical principle of anthropology founded in the belief of "primitive cultures" that spirits animated the world, and that this belief represented the foundation of all religious paradigms. What becomes clear through this nuanced examination of Victorian anthropology is that arguments involving spirits or psychic forces usually revolved around issues of evidence, or lack of it, rather than faith or beliefs or disbeliefs.

"Campbell takes the concept of regional identity and blows it up, showing that regional concerns were always mediated by national and international dynamics. This rich cultural history exposes the symbolic shorthand used to depict the Northeast and grants fresh insight into how actors constructed a regional identity with a variety of audiences in mind. The case studies presented here should interest students and tap into complex debates about representation and authenticity. Region Out of Place reveals that the local concerns of northeasterners in Brazil were far from provincial, and exposes how deeply modern Brazil, even in its farthest regions, remained integrated within larger world currents." --Anadelia Romo, Texas State University "Students of regionalism have long acknowledged the impossibility of analyzing a region's history, politics, and culture apart from the nation. What is strikingly new and significant in Courtney J. Campbell's fascinating study of the Brazilian Northeast is her emphasis on the way the world beyond the nation served as a site for regional identity formation and as a resource for regionalists eager to demonstrate the centrality of the Northeast to the Brazilian nation and its vibrant culture. With chapters that explore such intriguing topics as wartime romances, World Cup soccer matches, and Miss Universe Pageants, Region out of Place offers not just an innovative perspective on the Brazilian Northeast but on the very question of how to understand regional identity." --Barbara Weinstein, New York University

From the anti-segregation sit-ins of the 1960s to the protests in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor, the rest of the nation - and often the world - has watched as Kentuckians boldly fought against instances of injustice. In Resistance in the Bluegrass, Farrah Alexander outlines the ways in which Kentucky's citizens have been models in the fight against intersectional issues of racial injustice, economic inequality, education, climate change, immigration, political representation, LGBTQ+ rights, and women's rights, while exploring and celebrating decades of Kentucky's contributions to social justice movements and the names behind them. Resistance in the Bluegrass gives engaged citizens-or those wishing to become more engaged-both inspiration and guidance on how they too can make a difference across the commonwealth. Together with interviews and issue-by-issue action items, Alexander reminds her readers that at the heart of all social change are everyday citizens who step up to make a difference. Optimistic and accessible, this people's history and guide calls Kentuckians of all backgrounds to action.

Much of the American South, especially its small towns and rural areas, is connected not by interstate highways but through a web-like network of country roads, many of which appear only on the most detailed of maps. These are the backroads that most Southerners drive on every day. Unlike the interstates, whose roadsides have been largely scrubbed clean of regional character, these smaller roads travel through unplanned, vernacular landscapes that tell much about local life, both past and present, and suggest that we make connections between the two. David Wharton has been traveling throughout the American South since 1999, resulting in his first two books - Small Town South (2012) and The Power of Belief: Spiritual Landscapes from the Rural South (2016). As he journeyed, he often paused to make pictures of hamlets and the countryside he was driving through that did not fit the themes of those earlier books. These are scenes that speak to a sense of wonderment, or curiosity, about how those landscapes came to be and how they reflect a complex past with a modern-day world in which the urban competes with the rural in nearly every way. In Roadside South, the third book in Wharton's magical Trilogy of the American South, the photographer captures the quirky and the humorous, the sometimes sad and sometimes ironic scenes that are commonplace along the local, county, and state roads of the South. No artist has revealed the on-the-ground truth of the South as Wharton has, giving rise to a new understanding of and appreciation for a distinctive regional culture that all too frequently, and sometimes mistakenly, is imagined as a bastion of rural and small-town virtue.

The right to rebel against an authoritarian power is part of liberal and democratic culture. As early as the late seventeenth century, John Locke theorised that if a state abuses its citizens, they have the right to revolt. Nowadays, information and communication technologies can help the early stages of revolt. However, at the same time they also seem to offer the threatened autocrats powerful tools. Failed revolutions that have unfolded in our digital age in countries such as Myanmar, Ukraine, Iran, Egypt, Hong Kong and Belarus, bring to light the great and often successful efforts of authoritarian regimes to use new technologies for surveillance, oppression, propaganda, censorship, and the suppression of fundamental rights. The risk of a drift towards despotism, from which even long-established democracies are not immune, prompts us to ask what skills, rules and institutions might help citizens to defend their freedom when it is under threat, including in the digital sphere.

The financial markets have become more and more important in modern society. Their behaviour and impact relies crucially on the behaviour of market participants, aka the investors of different types. Although descriptions of the financial markets on the macro level have caught the attention of investors, regulators, and the ordinary people, how the market participants interact with each other in the financial market may provide deeper insights on how and why the financial markets behave. This book explores the micro level of financial market behaviour. The author has been undertaking financial research, especially on the micro level, during the past two decades. The academic research on this broad area has undergone a rapid growth, with new results, methods, theories, and even paradigms, emerging and burogeoning almost every year. As a financial researcher in one of China’s top universities, the author has kept monitoring, digesting, and synthesising the research articles in the area. This book is the outcome of this decades-long routine research work of the author, covering the fundamental economic theories of how different investors receive and interpret information. The empirical results of investors' behaviour are also discussed in depth, along with the basic academic techniques of modelling investors' behaviour.

Research on gender inequality uses limited and sectoral areas as a reference. A team of scholars, academics and researchers from fourteen different countries – Cuba, Haiti, India, Iraq, Iran, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Tunisia, United States and Venezuela – bring out instead in a synchronous and transversal way the gender discrimination for women’s experiences at work, in family, for education. Results show that in the varied landscape of countries considered over 50 percent believe it is still difficult to be a woman in their own country today. Only one third of respondents believe women’s policies in their country are right and less than the majority believe there’s a possibility of having support to balance and reconcile family and work. At the same time, the tragedy of domestic violence – worsened in the Covid period – crosses borders and refers to that culture of machismo that still characterizes genderinequality. Why? For the atavistic presumption of superiority of one sex over the other so difficult to eradicate from culture, education and stereotypes still existing today. On the contrary, certainty is rather that “donnons le monde aux femmes, elles en feront un paradis!” (“Give the world to women, they will make it a paradise”), as an interviewee from Haiti wrote.

The City of McKeesport in southwestern Pennsylvania once had a population of more than fifty thousand people and a newspaper that dated back to the nineteenth century. Technology has caused massive disruption to American journalism, throwing thousands of reporters out of work, closing newsrooms, and leaving vast areas with few traditional news sources – including McKeesport. With the loss of their local paper in 2015, residents now struggle to make sense of what goes on in their community and to separate facts from gossip – often driven by social media. The changes taking place in this one Pennsylvania community are being repeated across the United States as hundreds of local newspapers close, creating news deserts and leaving citizens with little access to reliable local journalism. The obituary for local news, however, does not have to read all bad: Even in the bleakest places, citizens are discovering what happens in their communities and becoming gatekeepers to information for the people around them. In McKeesport, citizens are attempting to make sense of the news on their own, for better and worse. This experiment not only offers clues about what happens after a local newspaper dies, but also provides guidance to the way forward.

Mental health difficulties bring us face to face with our vulnerability as human beings, and after two years of struggling with the effects of Covid-19 concerns about mental health worldwide have never been higher. But our discussions are still fraught with issues of language and understanding. Are we all on a ‘spectrum’ of mental wellness? Is ‘well-being’ about ‘being well’ or about coping? Mental health problems can be frightening when we experience them ourselves, or see them in others. And despite all the talk, most of us find it hard to decide when or where to seek help. What is often missing from these discussions is the most valuable resource of all – the personal accounts of those with lived experience of mental health difficulties. Making Sense of Mental Health is centred on hours of in-depth interviews with adults coping with mental health issues. The author follows their journeys from the origin of their distress to their lowest moments to eventual recovery and a sense of moving on. These lived experiences show how in times of crisis people can move forward amidst the chaos, vulnerability and uncertainty brought on by mental health problems. There are no quick fixes or miracle cures to serious mental health issues. This book shows that ‘what works’ is whatever helps an individual make sense of what is happening to them. A problem entwined with the human condition, mental health difficulties can best be treated by understanding the experiences of those who have lived through them, and as a society by finding a way to ascribe meaning to the complex reality of mental health.

The volume consists of a collection of fifteen contributions to Political Theory, the focuses of which represent an interaction between different themes and perspectives. The collection brings together a series of philosophical, moral, political, psychological, medical, anthropological and mytho-symbolical issues, divided into three main sections. A first section concerns ethical, moral and jurisdictional constitutional issues of Political Theory, including contributions by Fabrizio Sciacca, Cassandra Basile, Andrea Germani and Paola Russo. A second section is devoted to the analysis of political myths and representations, including contributions by Giangiacomo Vale, Viviana Faschi, Giada Fiorese, Raffaella Sabra Palmisano, Alessandra Spano and Giuseppe d’Ambrosio. A third and final section focuses on the analysis of political dynamics specific to modernity, with contributions from Michele Lanna, Federica Rauso, Cornelia Stefan, Michele Olzi and Maria Rosaria Vitale.

One of the defining features of United States foreign policy since World War II has been the nation's special relationship with Israel. This informal alliance, rooted in shared values and culture, grew out of a moral obligation to promote Israel's survival in the aftermath of the Holocaust as US policymakers provided military aid, weapons, and political protection. In return, Israel served American interests through efforts to contain communism and terrorism in the region. Today, the US provides almost four billion dollars in military aid per year, which raises questions regarding interest and propriety: At what point does US support for Israel exceed the boundaries of the countries' unconventional relationship and become counterproductive to other national interests, including the pursuit of peace in the Middle East? Kenneth Kolander provides a vital new perspective on the US-Israel bond by focusing on Congress's role in developing and maintaining the special relationship during a crucial period. Previous studies have focused on the executive branch, but Kolander demonstrates that US-Israel relations did not follow a course preferred by successive presidential administrations, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, he illuminates how influential lobbyists, America's affinity for Israel and antipathy towards Arabs, and economic pressures influenced legislators and inspired congressional action in support of Israel. In doing so, he presents an essential investigation of the ways in which legislators exert influence in foreign policy and adds new depth to the historiography of an important dynamic in postwar world politics.

John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina. Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, this biography explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina's most influential black power broker. After graduating from Morehouse College, Wheeler returned to Durham and began a decades-long career at Mechanics and Farmers (M&F) Bank. He started as a teller and rose to become bank president in 1952. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Wheeler to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a position in which he championed equal rights for African Americans and worked with Vice President Johnson to draft civil rights legislation. One of the first blacks to attain a high position in the state's Democratic Party, Wheeler became the state party's treasurer in 1968, and then its financial director. Wheeler urged North Carolina's white financial advisors to steer the region toward the end of Jim Crow segregation for economic reasons. Straddling the line between confrontation and negotiation, Wheeler pushed for increased economic opportunity for African Americans while reminding the white South that its future was linked to the plight of black southerners.

How many lives can one man save? Never enough, Horton realized. As his ship backed away from Smyrna’s wharf, he could better see the helpless, teeming crowd on the waterfront trapped between the sea and a raging inferno. He was not consoled by rescuing his shipload of refugees, nor by the many other Christian, Jewish, and Muslim lives he had saved during his service as American consul. His focus was on the people before him threatened with fire, rape, and massacre. Their persecution, he later said, made him ashamed he “belonged to the human race.” Helping them would not be easy, however. His superiors were blocking humanitarian aid and covering up atrocities with fake news and disinformation to win Turkish approval for American access to oil. When Horton decried their duplicity and hard-heartedness, they conspired to destroy his reputation. Undaunted, Horton pursued his cause until it went to the President and then Congress for decisions that would set the course for America’s emergence as a world power. At stake was the outcome of WWI, the stability and liberality of the Middle East, and the likelihood of more genocide.

Cultural differences are often the trigger for conflict – whether politically motivated or arising from dissonant understandings of national culture. But what we regard as distinctive today in our cultural heritage or day-to-day cultural experience is deeply rooted in the rich diversity of the national currents of the nineteenth century. Culture and Conflict: Nation-Building in Denmark and Scandinavia, 1800–1930 explores the many strands of Danish and Scandinavian culture that helped to shape these cultural identities. The sixteen contributions in this volume analyse how competing national agendas influenced the development of political life as well as literature, the visual arts, and music. A central theme is the cultural conflicts that formed an essential part of nineteenth-century nation-building. Culturally as well as politically, boundaries were drawn up, ideologies were formulated and discussed, and determined attempts were made to suppress divergent cultural voices in the drive to forge strong national or Scandinavian narratives. The results of these conflicts were the enduring cultural struggles that form the subject of this volume. The contributions at hand, by scholars from Denmark, Britain, Norway, the United States, and Germany, bring a broad and interdisciplinary perspective to bear on these distinctively Nordic themes. Aimed both at students and at established scholars, the chapters discuss the many facets of nationalism, its cultures, and its countercultures, as well as revisiting the historiography of the 1800–1930 period with a more pluralistic approach.

#NiUnaMenos#Aufschrei#LoSHA Before #MeToo became the massive global movement we know today, these were the hashtags that represented mobilisations from Ukraine to Latin America that demanded accountability for the intersecting experiences of sexual violence and racism, xenophobia, and misogyny inflicted on women, transgender people, and girls. Lead by activists such as Tarana Burke, who coined the phrase "me too," the movement provided a call to action for survivors across the world to speak out about their experiences. In #MeToo and Beyond, M. Cristina Alcalde and Paula-Irene Villa bring together scholars and activists from various backgrounds to approach #MeToo from multiple spaces, positionalities, and areas of expertise, many from regions and contexts often overlooked and understudied in the mediascapes of the Global North. This volume includes perspectives from around the world and covers research spanning masculinity, to trans issues, to Jewish communities. The editors and contributors heed Tarana Burke's call to center marginalised voices and experiences so that instead of becoming a footnote, these experiences guide activists to frame polyphony as central to understanding past, current, and future forms of gendered violence and resistance. The goal of #MeToo and Beyond is to examine both the profoundly universal and familiar experiences of sexual violence, and the specificity of these forms of violence and mobilisation against them across place, space, and experiences of participants. Activists and scholars will find this an important and necessary contribution to current and future discussions on sexual violence and global movements.

More than 2.7 million post-9/11 veterans served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their homecomings didn't include parades or national celebrations, but civilians regard them with reverence and pride. Veterans' benefits are comprehensive. The phrase "thank you for your service" is ubiquitous. Yet, one in ten post-9/11 veterans struggle with substance abuse. Fifteen to twenty veterans die by suicide every day, with 18-34-year-olds dying at the highest rates. These veterans carry intractable mental and physical wounds, leading advocates to focus on concepts like moral injury and collective belonging. In War and Homecoming: Veteran Identity and the Post-9/11 Generation, Travis Martin, a scholar, teacher, and former veteran himself, argues that post-9/11 veterans struggle with homecoming because of decades of stereotyping and a lack of healthy models of veteran identity. In the American unconscious, veterans are the superficially praised ‘hero’, the victimised ‘wounded warrior’, forever defined by past accomplishments. They are appropriated as symbols in competing narratives of national identity. War and Homecoming explores past and current stereotypes often found in patriotic rhetoric, popular media, literature, and veterans' lives. Luckily, a third type of post-9/11 veteran has emerged, the veteran ‘storyteller’ who recognises stereotypes, claims their symbolic authority, and defines who they are through literature, art, and service. This identity allows for continued growth, and these ‘storytellers’ provide examples of identity rooted in agency, individuality, and resilience for other veterans to model. New creative communities, service organisations, and the growing academic field of Veterans Studies suggest post-9/11 veterans are redefining what it means to be a veteran.