Various cities across the world have been engaging in smart city projects, seeking effective solutions to various urban issues (such as traffic, waste, and housing) as well as global issues (energy, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic). This chapter explores Asian models of smart cities by analyzing how Japan and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are engaging in smart city projects. In particular, this chapter highlights the role of Japan in shaping the ideas and norms of smart cities by exporting smart solutions. Exporting the ideas of smart cities can eventually affect urban governance, including legal infrastructures. This chapter also looks at China’s smart city model, associated with large-scale overseas capacity building, as a rival of Japan. Several methods of interaction exist via exporting smart solutions, including development cooperation, diffusion of ideas, and regulatory competition, and this chapter examines strategic differences among countries engaging in Asian smart city projects.

This chapter explores the mechanics of commentary and the processes of canonisation for two of the ‘crowns’ of Italian literature, Dante and Petrarch, from Boccaccio’s foundational editorial work in the mid-Trecento upto the mid-Quattrocento. Both these authors’ works were extensively copied and discussed in various media over this period, and the chapter explores topics such as the early Dante commentary tradition, interlocutors such as Boccaccio and Bruni, and the material dimensions of their commentarial traditions in manuscript and print. Commentary and canonisation are shown to be historically contingent and constantly evolving concepts. Dante and Petrarch are increasingly discussed in direct relation to each other as time goes on, culminating in Bembo’s definitive canonisation of Petrarch as the vernacular poet par excellence. Throughout, the chapter considers how agents and readers materially construct and authorise interpretation, and how this intersects with wider cultural debates around the legitimacy and value of the vernacular.

Chinese and European maps displayed divergent and sometimes overlapping mathematical, visual and functional aspects. European maps continued the tradition of Ptolemy, applying the mathematics of heavenly bodies to the Earth’s surface. Each point on Earth was made to correspond with an overlapped grid of latitude and longitude coordinates. In China, while the idea of a spherical Earth and the notions of latitude and longitude (the warp and the wheft) were used in astronomy and astrology, cartographers operated with different notions. Chinese maps assumed the Earth to be square and flat, covered by the canopy of heaven. Respecting certain principles of cartographic drawing, maps ensured accuracy by overlaying a grid specifying distances between points.

This chapter focuses on how Native Americans have understood and purposed the Declaration. By asserting tribal sovereignty, Native American nations have been declaring independence since 1776. Cast as “merciless Indian savages” in the Declaration of Independence, Native Americans have cited the document in speeches, published writings, and legal briefs since the founding of the United States. They did so not to claim national belonging, but to argue that in its dealings with Native Nations, the United States should honor its founding document’s principles of self-determination and natural rights. Divided paths through the American Revolution, nineteenth-century disputes about responding to US territorial and cultural pressure, and twentieth-century efforts to balance tribal citizenship, US citizenship, and intertribal advocacy show how the citizens of tribal nations have consistently debated and adapted strategies for maintaining tribal sovereignty. Especially among Native American leaders subjected to assimilative schooling, the Declaration of Independence was a consistent feature of Indigenous arguments for independence from the United States.

This chapter discusses the information design of early Italian lyric as it is produced and transmitted in multiple media formats, including manuscript, early print and the twenty-first-century digital artefact. Storey critiques the distinct methodological approaches of authorial textual genetics, traditional Italian literary philology and largely Anglo-American material-textual theory in the context of producing a digital textual edition of Petrarch’s partially authorial manuscript MS Vaticano Latino 3195 for the Petrarchive at Indiana University. He stresses throughout the desirability of acknowledging and recording the individual stages in a text’s life, including but not limited to authorial manuscripts. The chapter stresses the function of visual cognition in the apprehension of meaning from the designed page, a feature of reading which has been prioritised in the visual display of the individual leaves of the manuscript in the Petrarchive, and which facilitates apprehension of the shapes of the individual verse types on the page.

Sometime around 1593, William Claxton (d. 1597) gathered memories of Durham cathedral in a scroll. Although he titled it Discription or Breef Declaracion of all the Auncyent Monuments, Rytes and Customs Belonging or Beinge within the Monasticall Church of Durham before the Suppression, it has come to be known as The Rites of Durham, reflecting its primary interest for scholars. It is one of the earliest testimonies to the conceptual shift Evangelicals effected. Individuals remembered specific altars, windows, chapels – discrete things. The “church” had become a box containing objects and dead bodies, within which the faithful gathered. It was no longer a place of worship. It was no longer a made world. In Part II, we turn to the acts that sundered. Here let me simply underline, Evangelicals did not simply recast altarpieces and eternal lamps as mere matter, “objects.” They tore apart the fabric of what Durand and medieval European Christians understood ecclesia to be. Far more than altar or vestment, the word – ecclesia, iglesia, église, Kirche, kerk, kirk, church – altered irrevocably in its content in the sixteenth century.

The second chapter of Invisible Fatherland examines how the Weimar National Assembly asserted and projected its political legitimacy while addressing broader struggles over gender, class, and heritage. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from key political speeches and figures to the spatial arrangements of furniture and decorative choices, the chapter outlines the republic’s emergent symbolic order and emotional tone. In this context, the mediated presence of female delegates in the national assembly revealed the challenge of creating a more inclusive political order in a society still deeply shaped by tradition. The assembly’s negotiation of competing visions of community reflects the difficulty of establishing an open and inclusive democratic order in the aftermath of war and defeat.

The sixth chapter of Invisible Fatherland builds on the analysis of Rathenau’s assassination by examining the wide range of eulogies and obituaries published in its aftermath. These texts served as memory sites, in Pierre Nora’s sense, where Rathenau’s life and death were appraised alongside broader questions about the state and nation. While the many expressions of solidarity revealed gaps and contradictions in the republican imaginary, they also demonstrate that Rathenau’s death gave new momentum to the republican cause. Four weeks after the murder, the federal parliament passed the “Law for the Protection of the Republic” with the required two-third majority. Shortly after, President Friedrich Ebert declared Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s Deutschlandlied the German national anthem, reclaiming a liberal democratic tradition that had been monopolized by German nationalists. The proclamation coincided with the republic’s Constitution Day on August 11, which is the focus of the following chapter.

The introduction of Invisible Fatherland lays the historiographical and conceptual groundwork for the book’s empirical chapters. The literature review traces the shift in Weimar studies from teleological narratives of inevitable collapse to a more balanced view of the first German democracy. Drawing on Jan-Werner Müller and Jürgen Habermas, the author clarifies the concept of constitutional patriotism by distinguishing it from civic and ethnic nationalism. She critiques the homogenizing tendencies of Weimar political thought, particularly Rudolf Smend’s influential theory of symbolic integration, for limiting our understanding of the republic’s original and innovative political culture. Finally, the introduction engages the work of scholars such as David Kertzer, Michael Walzer, and William Reddy to prepare for an empirical study of the republic’s symbolic style and emotional tone. Altogether, the introduction establishes an analytical framework for recovering Weimar’s constitutional patriotism and its relevance to contemporary debates on democratic resilience.

The contemporary expansion of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in Asia has been unparalleled in the world. While London and other traditional forums remain a vital jurisdiction for Asian parties, those constructing ADR regimes in Asian jurisdictions increasingly turn to their neighbors – other Asian jurisdictions. This chapter analyzes the interactions between the prominent ADR hubs in Asia and their neighboring jurisdictions. Topics include the race between Singapore and Hong Kong for the crown, Singapore’s impact on Vietnam, and the implications of Singaporean promotion of mediation on the practice of ADR in Asia. The chapter argues that ADR centers, viewed from the perspective of legal transplantation, provide successful models for secondary markets, although such transplantation is far from seamless. This chapter suggests that Singapore and Hong Kong, as established hubs, will remain influential and play a critical role in shaping ADR legal developments in Asia, although competition may result in disparate effects.

The Afterword recalls the importance of “emphatic experiences” throughout Emerson’s thought, especially in Nature, “The Over-Soul,” “Circles,” and “Spiritual Laws.” It also registers the many oppositions discussed in Emerson, the Philosopher of Oppositions: Reality and Illusion in “Experience,” “Unity” and “Variety,” “rest” and “motion,” in “Plato”; dead language and living poetry in “The Poet,” nominalism and realism in “Nominalist and Realist,” fate and freedom in “Fate.” Emerson “accepts” his “contrary tendencies” by building them into his essays, one after the other: “‘Your turn now, my turn next,’ is the rule of the game.” Skepticism pervades Emerson’s thought, as he registers doubts about knowledge, other minds, freedom, or meaning. But skepticism can also be understood as a way of life, as in ancient Greek philosophy and in Montaigne’s Essays, and Goodman argues for the attractions of Emerson’s own version of the skeptical life, what he calls a “wise skepticism.”

This chapter consider a selection of authors usually known for their contributions to the visual arts rather than their writing. Framed via the long-standing simile ‘ut pictura poesis’ [as is painting, so is poetry], it provides not only a critical reflection on the relationships between the ‘sister arts’, but also a historicised overview of the poetic writings of a number of Quattro- and Cinquecento Italian artists, including Raphael’s father Giovanni Santi. The chapter explores Michelangelo as poet, then Raphael’s work, first addressing the relationship between the verbal and the visual in drafts of poems that appeared alongside sketches for his frescos in the Stanza della Segnatura, and then his visual depictions of poetry in the Parnassus fresco and the figure of Poetry in that room. The comparison of written word and visual image illuminates the dialogue between word and image during the Italian Renaissance, and within the works of a single artist.

This chapter considers the status and achievements of Giovanni Boccaccio as lyric poet, problematising the historiographical biases which have historically relegated him to third place among the tre corone and reassessing the breadth of his poetic experimentation in the vernacular and in Latin. The first section surveys the polycentric and partial editorial and transmission history of his Rime, while the second considers those poems which reprocess and recombine the words of other texts, i.e. the Argomenti to Dante’s Commedia and the Amorosa visione’s acrostic sonnets. The third section considers lyrics which are embedded in other texts, such as the Decameron’s songs, and the chapter concludes with his Latin poetry, including his Carmina and Buccolicum carmen, which demonstrate his equal facility in Latin composition. Boccaccio’s lyrics are shown to be woven throughout his vast corpus, while his relentless experiments in poetic form provide an under-recognised model for subsequent generations of poets.

Preparing the ground for a broadly contextualize study of Weimar constitutional patriotism, the first chapter of Invisible Fatherland examines the symbolic forms and practices of the German Kaiserreich from its foundation in 1871 through World War I to the November Revolution of 1918. The analysis highlights the progressive nationalization of imperial symbols and their ability to resonate beyond social, political, and regional divides. The chapter concludes with a detailed examination of the return of German troops to Berlin at the end of the war. The official welcome parades in the German capital, marked by symbolic openness and ambiguity, reveal the tension between imperial continuity and revolutionary transformation. By focusing on the emerging republic’s shifting symbolic order during this liminal moment between war and peace, the chapter illuminates the persistence of imperial legacies alongside the possibilities for new, democratic forms of political belonging.

Chapter 7 examines the construction of a stereotype of a different nature from those studied in the book. The discovery of a portrait of Bernardo de Monteagudo allowed a reflection on the theoretical impossibility of a descendant of enslaved Africans to be part of the pantheon of national heroes. It is a different image from that which was and continues to be widely disseminated, in which the face of the Tucumán hero was represented with undeniably “White” features. Comparing both portraits demonstrates an extreme case of whitening that enabled deploying a reverse stereotype.