This chapter explores the oscillations of political power and the “revolutions” – both violent and subtle – that appeared on the US stage throughout the nineteenth century. While many dramatists sought to avoid political debate, all too aware of the potential consequences (from boycotts to riots), timely issues of the day, including the abolition of slavery, the eradication of Indigenous populations, temperance, and women’s suffrage, inevitably made their way onto the stage. Some playwrights struck out boldly, naming issues of substance misuse and miscegenation in dramas such as The Drunkard or The Octoroon. Others infused politics into their depictions of everyday life, including Ossawattomie Brown (which retells John Brown’s history as a romantic family plot) and the labor melodrama Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl. These homely narratives reminded viewers of how inescapable these issues had become. But whether starkly challenging or subtly questioning, nineteenth-century US theater never escaped the pressing political issues of the day.

This chapter of the handbook proposes a developmental ethics, an organic moral theory grounded in (1) humanity’s deep evolutionary history, (2) the malleability of the child’s neurobiological structures that undergird moral functioning, and (3) the influence of cultural practices on neurobiological development. The chapter addresses the following questions: What kind of creature are we? What qualities do we need to live a full life? What kinds of capacities make each a proper member of the species? What influences our development? Answers center around perhaps the most critical influence on human development, our species’ evolved nest. In humanity’s ancestral context, nestedness is a lifelong experience with particular import in early life. Moral virtue emerges from holistically coordinated physiological, psychological, spiritual systems oriented toward holistic communal harmony, social attunement, receptivity, and interpersonal flexibility. Understanding how the evolved nest scaffolds biopsychosocial and moral development reveals why antisocial behavior is so pervasive in modern Western culture – and it provides a baseline for redesigning society to promote prosociality.

Although rarely at the center of the most influential human historical narratives, the stories of human-plant interaction are nonetheless sporadically recorded in a variety of literary genres and other cultural media across nearly five centuries. This chapter aims to provide a contextual outline of our present human–plant culture as it developed in North America through the early nineteenth century, and to orient readers to the most frequently discussed texts, questions, and resources in the field. It introduces the early modern history of settler cash crops – cotton, sugar, and tobacco – and the longer history of changing agricultural practice during the early contact period. Early American literature in English – poetry, herbals, prose tracts, and instructional writing – was deeply engaged with the movement of indigenous and imported plant species as they flowed in and out of North America as rapidly as humans moved into the region from the rest of the globe.

This chapter explores developments in hemispheric and transamerican studies by grounding discussions of colonialism and incommensurability in narrations of place-names. It moves from the Pacific to the Midwest, using Commodore David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean, from the War of 1812, as a case study. Porter is of note not only because he was an important source for Herman Melville’s Pacific writings but also because his military travel writings sought to make the Marquesas part of the US political and popular imaginary. In renaming-to-claim the islands, Porter worked to undermine Indigenous epistemologies and histories. The chapter then turns to the Midwest, examining the Latin American place-names across the region – names that offer a nineteenth-century prehistory to accounts of widespread Midwestern Latinx presence. Surprisingly, stories of Porter’s battle off the coast of Chile in Journal of a Cruise have fed an imperialist “Latin American mapping” of Indiana through the naming of the city of Valparaiso, in Porter County. Using stories of place naming from the Indigenous Pacific and Latinx Midwest, the chapter highlights the vital necessity of hemispheric and transamerican literary studies for the nineteenth century.

This chapter surveys queer theoretical investigations of nineteenth-century American literature while turning an eye to its future potential. Since the 1990s, the emergence of queer studies shifted focus away from the identitarian scope of lesbian and gay studies to one that engages queer acts, desires, objects, and temporality, to name a few. Queer offers a way out of that Foucaultian maxim, by which in the late nineteenth century the “homosexual became a species.” No longer needing to “know” if one was gay, the rest of the nineteenth century became ripe for a capacious engagement with bodies, affects, and desires. Despite this prominence in queer studies, trans studies is largely absent from early American literary studies. I argue that scholarly pushback on nineteenth-century sexology and its problematic theory of “inverts” has all but left the actual embodiments of those who thwarted gender to the wayside. Neither has the field confronted how nonwhite, brown, and Black people were marked via inversion, such as female hypermasculinity and male effeminacy. If queer studies revisited nineteenth-century literary texts with new vigor, this paper proposes the same through a trans studies reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Archibald Clavering Gunter’s A Florida Enchantment, and Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland.

Epilepsy remains the most common neurologic disorder in childhood and adolescence, with certain epilepsy syndromes such as childhood absence epilepsy (CAE) and juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) being more common in girls. Psychiatric disorders are a common comorbidity in children with epilepsy, especially two behavioral conditions: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder. In addition, psychosocial issues of stigma, bullying and violence remain potent disruptors of patients’ development at this stage in their lives. Emerging information on how cultural, ethnical and gender diversity may affect care should also be taken into consideration and proactively addressed. As the care of children and adolescents with epilepsy has grown more complex over the past decades, the transition from pediatric to adult care systems needs to become purposeful, such as the medical, psychosocial, educational and vocational needs of young adults with long-term medical conditions are actively

There is an enduring tradition that the first Europeans in the Americas and Hawai’i were perceived as gods, a phenomenon known as “apotheosis” or “the act of turning men into gods.” The tradition is especially strong in relation to two historical figures: the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in Mexico and the British navigator Captain James Cook in Hawai’i. It is, however, by no means confined to these two figures. Furthermore, considerable explanatory power is attributed to this divine identification: indigenous peoples apparently submitted before the demonstration of godly power. In the heyday of European imperialism – the nineteenth century and early twentieth century – this tradition was accepted uncritically by western historians. In the wake of decolonization, from the 1950s and 1960s, increasing interest in non-European perspectives on these early encounters caused historians to call this interpretation into question. Three key issues emerge: what evidence is there that such an apotheosis took place? If it did not, how did the tradition arise? And how did native peoples in fact perceive Europeans?

This chapter contributes a decolonising analysis of tax primarily in the Canadian settler colonial context. I examine the legal constitution of the First Nations Financial Transparency Act in relation to its attempts to reform First Nations’ governance. I demonstrate how the federal government looked to organise a ‘taxpayer’ ethos amongst First Nations citizens through publicising First Nations band salary details and audits. This taxpayer ethos was meant to simultaneously encourage citizens to critique their governments rather than the Canadian federal government, but also to promote private property on reserves. I make a theoretical argument for the necessity of thinking through tax with a decolonising lens that both specifically respects the sovereignty of Indigenous nations and offers a critique of how tax operates to erode that very sovereignty.

The chapter examines the distinctiveness of this composite freedom suit; the unorthodox Afro descendant community that took it to the highest imperial tribunal in Madrid; and the larger historical context that triggered the legal action in the early 1780s. It lays out the significance of the notions of “collective freedom” and “natives of a pueblo” deriving from colonial customary practices and from political, social, and juridical discourses rooted in the Spanish Atlantic world here reworked into novel proposals that challenged the approaching tsunami of slavery expansion in Cuba and the Atlantic world amid the Age of Revolutions, and it even presented a colonial alternative to slave-based plantation and extractive regimes. Linkages are made between the local, colonial, and imperial levels in which legal and political mobilizations unfolded. The chapter also surveys the various historiographies of slavery, race, Afro descendants, Indians, and law, politics and society that intersect in this study and discusses the sources and archives on which the study is based.

Chapter 4 focuses on the meaning and deployment of the novel (and controversial) category of “natives” of a pueblo, widespread throughout the Spanish Atlantic world, to bolster the plaintiffs’ claims to freedom and other rights. The chapter explores both the Spanish and Indigenous traditions that informed the category of nativeness (naturaleza) used in the court briefs and examines their implications for a community of Afro descendant and other racially mixed subjects. The chapter compares the unconventional standing of El Cobre with that of the Indian pueblos of El Caney and Jiguaní in the island’s eastern region to explore the controversial claims to Indian ancestry.

This chapter discusses how historical exchanges with Makassan and other seafaring peoples from beyond the Arafura Sea remain a profound influence on Yolŋu music and culture that endures to this day. We explore how Yolŋu people, through their enduring ceremonial traditions, elaborately integrate song, dance and design elements to recount exchanges with Makassan seafarers, the boats in which they sailed, and the goods they carried. We also discuss how, since the mid-1980s, this autonomous history of Yolŋu exchanges with foreigners has been remembered and continues to inspire new forms of Yolŋu cultural expression that overtly reach out across cultures. Our approach is informed by our long history of researching Yolŋu song in all its forms and working together to document the Yolŋu public ceremonial song tradition known as manikay. Garawirrtja’s expertise is further grounded in his extensive training and practice as a Yolŋu elder and ceremonial singer of the manikay tradition, who maintains hereditary songs that recount Yolŋu contact histories with Makassan and other seafarers.

Anger and frustration over Indigenous ethnic identity fraud have reached fever pitch across social and official media, within cultural and political institutions, and in Indigenous communities. It seems a day doesn’t pass without new revelations of people who have lied about and capitalized on Indigenous identity. Joy Harjo decried such “identity crimes,” saying that “Some claim identity by tenuous family story and some are perpetrating outright fraud.” These arguments go beyond simply outing individuals; increasingly, they call for publishers, universities, and other institutions to do a better job of verifying Indian identity claims. In doing so, however, many are pulling toward a problematic benchmark: enrollment in a federally recognized tribe. I respond to this with a reading of two urban intertribal newspapers – Los Angeles’ Talking Leaf and Boston’s The Circle – published before many tribes achieved their federal recognition. For Native nations that have experienced ethnocide, state detribalization, and rejection of their federal recognition claims, such newspapers have helped tribal members find each other, remember their histories and collectively imagine their futures

Taking seriously other ways that languages can be understood is of significance for both practical and political reasons. If language revival or other applied projects need practical theories of language, they need to be drawn from concerned communities rather than imported from elsewhere. For many Indigenous people, language is deeply connected to land, or what is commonly known as Country in Australia, which can include not only earth, dwellings and place but also water, animals, wind and other beings. Language within these ways of thinking is not connected primarily to people but to land or Country. It is because these ways of thinking about language are so different from a consideration of language as structure, as object, as separate from people and the world, that many language revival projects have struggled. As long as Indigenous languages are thought of in terms of non-Indigenous ontologies, there will always be at best misunderstanding. On these grounds, Indigenous language activists have called for local control of language reclamation projects and the need to decolonize what is meant by language.

Momentum is building for epidemiological research undertaken with, for, and by Indigenous peoples. This work often follows a strength-based approach, emphasising the inherent assets and resilience of Indigenous communities and the role of culture as the foundation of our individual, social, ecological, and spiritual health and well-being. This chapter provides an overview of current discourses around centring Indigenous ontologies (ways of being), epistemologies (ways of knowing), and axiologies (ways of doing), also known as Indigenous ‘lifeworlds’, in epidemiology with a particular focus on Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) perspectives. Mayi Kuwayu: The National Study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing is used as a key example illustrating how epidemiological research may be led, owned, and governed by Indigenous peoples to produce rigorous and meaningful data that reflect Indigenous lifeworlds, known as ‘good data’. Applying an Indigenous lens to epidemiological research generates valuable lessons for the development of the DOHaD lifecourse framework and future studies that seek to address holistic determinants of intergenerational health and well-being.