This chapter bridges environmental humanities and Black humanities by examining a figure largely, if curiously, excluded from the “ecocritical” canon: Charles Chesnutt, the first African American writer of commercially successful fiction. Reading literary environmentalism beyond the lenses of Romanticism or transcendentalism, Forbes finds in Chesnutt’s late nineteenth-century conjure tales a richly imagined Black environmental heritage that connected race and nature. Chesnutt’s short fiction featuring metamorphoses of humans into plants and animals represents a key node in an alternate, and nonlinear, Black environmentalist timeline. In contrast to environmentalisms that pit nature’s interests against humans’, the insights we see at flashpoints across this tradition, and crucially in Chesnutt’s conjure tales, belie narratives of human/nature separation that underpin most “white” environmentalisms. Moreover, his marshaling of racialized nonhuman agencies also helps us address persistent difficulties associated with new materialist theorizing. Fusing human/plant/animal agencies to frameworks of care and nurturance, characters in Chesnutt’s conjure tales weaponize “waste” against enslavement’s inhuman valuation systems.

Introduction

The date of discovery of the quantum Hall effect (QHE) is known pretty accurately. It occurred at 2:00 a.m. on 5 February 1980 at the high magnetic lab in Grenoble, France (see Fig. 1.1). There was an ongoing research on the transport properties of silicon field-effect transistors (FETs). The main motive was to improve the mobility of these FET devices. The devices that were provided by Dorda and Pepper allowed direct measurement of the resistivity tensor. The system is a highly degenerate two-dimensional (2D) electron gas contained in the inversion layer of a metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) operated at low temperatures and strong magnetic fields. The original notes appear in Fig. 1.1, where it is clearly stated that the Hall resistivity involves universal constants and hence signals towards the involvement of a very fundamental phenomenon.

In the classical version of the phenomenon discovered by E. Hall in 1879, just over a hundred years before the discovery of its quantum analogue, one may consider a sample with a planar geometry so as to restrict the carriers to move in a 2D plane. Next, turn on a bias voltage so that a current flows in one of the longitudinal directions and a strong magnetic field perpendicular to the plane of the gas (see Fig. 1.2). Because of the Lorentz force, the carriers drift towards a direction transverse to the direction of the current flowing in the sample. At equilibrium, a voltage develops in the transverse direction, which is known as the Hall voltage. The Hall resistivity, R, defined as the Hall voltage divided by the longitudinal current, is found to linearly depend on the magnetic field, B, and inversely on the carrier density, n, through R = B/nq (q is the charge). A related and possibly more familiar quantity is the Hall coefficient, denoted by RH = R/B, which via its sign yields information on the type of the majority carriers, that is, whether they are electrons or holes.

At very low temperature or at very high values of the magnetic field (or at both), the resistivity of the sample assumes quantized values of the form rxy = h/ne2. Initially, n was found to be an integer with extraordinary precession (one part in ∼ 108). This is shown in Fig. 1.3.

This chapter begins with the First World War, when camels were used in unprecedented numbers by fighting armies. The First World War was the first step in the gradual transformation of the economic and political geography of the Middle East. It had deep influence on caravan trade and, following the caravans during the war and in the midst of borders negotiations, one can see how transnational and national form in parallel through overland mobility. With the following one, this chapter benefits from a dense and heterogeneous source base, which allows for the inclusion of lively narratives in order to give a full extent to Middle Eastern experiences of these transformations.

The close parallels – duality – between category and measure go back to Sierpiński in the 1920s. The Sierpiński–Erdős duality principle (see Oxtoby, Ch. 19) gives full duality under the Continuum Hypothesis, CH (see Chapter 16). An unconditional example of duality is the Poincaré recurrence theorem from statistical mechanics. So is the zero–one law of probability theory; duality does not extend as far as its quantitative versions, the strong law of large numbers and the ergodic theorem. Also discussed are: uniqueness theorems for trigonometric series; the Cauchy functional equation; the Steinhaus dichotomy – for S Baire and non-meagre (or measurable and non-null), the difference set S - S contains an interval around the origin (the dichotomy being that this may fail for meagre/null sets). Combinatorial principles are relevant here – Jensen’s Diamond and Ostaszewski’s Club are here augmented by a third, No Trumps, NT, a common generalization of the Baire and measurable cases.

Worship is typically understood as an act of religious reverence and devotion to a deity, usually involving some ritual. I aim here to explore whether, and how far, we might make sense of the idea of worship even on robust atheistic assumptions, according to which there is good reason to believe that there is no deity, nor supernatural beings of any kind, so that the only live beings in the world are humans, animals, plants and the like. We shall call this Atheist Worship (AW). Beyond that, I wish to explore the possible value of such practice. If there is no God, then in some sense AW is normatively the only possible form of worship that is not based on error or pretence. But as we shall see, there is no reason why theists cannot also engage in many forms of “AW” (in the sense of engaging in practices expressing attitudes of reverence and devotion towards something held to be of great value and importance, without theistic assumptions), so the value of this project does not depend upon atheism.

Various factors affecting language learning are introduced, including demographic variables, and learners’ L1, cultural background and the context of language use, noting that the analysis of learner corpora can enable the exploration of language-learning processes during SLA and across different contexts. Practical challenges involved in building extensive learner corpora, especially spoken learner corpora, are discussed (e.g. variable constraints, scale of data, availability of data). The Trinity Lancaster Corpus (TLC), a spoken corpus based upon a language proficiency test, and two other corpora, are then introduced. The chapter then discusses MDA and its adaptation for short texts (short-text MDA). The chapter describes the challenges of analysing short texts within corpora and explains how short-text MDA may make it possible to explore discourse at both the micro-structural (turn) and macro-structural (discourse units) levels. The chapter concludes by noting that this exploration will lead to a deeper analysis of narrative structures as a result of the findings from the corpora studied in the book using short-text MDA.

Does the conception of worship – in expressing, as it does, a direct relationship with God – prevent an understanding of love for God as mediated by love for humans? Taking the latter to be an existential model of one’s relationship with God, in this chapter I answer in the negative to the above question by demonstrating the role that worship plays in such a model. To do so, I turn to Kierkegaard’s image of “resting transparently” in God. For Kierkegaard, this image represents what he perceives as the highest possible state of the believer’s relationship with God; a state that is achieved, according to Kierkegaard, when one becomes the self – the individual – that God intends one to be. And how does one become this self? By loving properly the neighbour (that is, another individual). The suggestion I develop in this chapter is that it is the worshipping of God – that is, by being in a state of respect and attendance to God’s will – that directs one in loving properly the neighbour. Hence, it is worship of God that paves the way to fully loving the neighbour and thus to fully loving God.

One trend in recent nineteenth-century American studies has been the rising critical status of poetry, which has gone from being widely neglected by C19 scholars to being a vibrant and diverse field of scholarship. Yet, while this scholarship has recovered major authors and recuperated long-derided aspects of nineteenth-century poetics, it has also maintained an old narrative about C19 poetry, namely that the status of poetry declined during the postbellum period. The career of William Cullen Bryant is emblematic of these trends: while there has been some fascinating recent work on his poetry, it has been informed exclusively by his early poetry of the 1810s and 1820s. This essay argues that Bryant’s career looks different when viewed from the end, rather than the beginning. In so doing, it revises recent critical accounts of Bryant, and C19 American poetry more broadly, by examining his translation of the Iliad, which he published in 1870. Bryant’s Iliad was one of the most celebrated poems of the postbellum era and was considered his masterpiece by contemporary readers. This essay examines the translation and discuss some of the ways in which it engages the politics and poetics of the Reconstruction period

The issue of mass disinformation on the Internet is a long-standing concern for policymakers, legislators, academics and the wider public. Disinformation is believed to have had a significant impact on the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. Concern about the threat of foreign – mainly Russian – interference in the democratic process is also growing. The COVID-19 pandemic, which reached global proportions in 2020, gave new impetus to the spread of disinformation, which even put lives at risk. The problem is real and serious enough to force all parties concerned to reassess the previous European understanding of the proper regulation of freedom of expression.

Finally, Chapter 6 reads the main findings about trilogues in the light of the democratic principles set out in the Treaties. In particular, the chapter argues that trilogues offer an important democratic contribution because they put compromise at the very heart of the European legislative process. Compromise, through its practice of mutual concessions, is arguably the best means to approximate two constitutional requirements: equality and representation – or, better put, the aspiration to democratic equality in a system of representative institutions. Furthermore, the chapter argues that the existence and prevalence of trilogues reveal the EU’s structural closeness to those polities that belong to the model of “negotiation democracy.” This model was developed by Gerhard Lehmbruch with special reference to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The chapter argues that Lehmbruch’s model provides a fruitful basis for comparative research and a solid foundation for understanding the EU.