The Bush administration’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was marked by unprecedented criticism of Israel’s settlement policies and a shift in US diplomatic tone. Secretary of State James Baker’s 1989 AIPAC speech, urging Israel to ‘lay aside … the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel’, signaled a turning point in US-Israel relations. The speech drew a mixed reaction from American Jews, exposing growing divisions over Israel’s territorial policies. Some welcomed it as reaffirming longstanding US positions; others saw it as unfairly demanding Israeli concessions without matching Arab commitments. The administration’s stance intersected with broader geopolitical concerns, including Soviet Jewish immigration to Israel and US loan guarantees, complicating negotiations. This chapter explores the internal and external pressures shaping US policy during the late 1980s and early 1990s, focusing on Bush-era diplomacy, Israeli responses, and evolving dynamics within the American Jewish community. It highlights a pivotal moment in US-Israel relations and its impact on the peace process.

Geomorphology is the study of landforms – their evolution, shape (morphology), and composition. The word comes from the Greek (geo, Earth, morphos, referring to form, and ology, a branch of knowledge). Landforms come in all types, shapes, sizes, compositions, and ages. There is a landform for everyone, and no two are exactly alike. Understanding Earth’s landforms – how they are formed, altered, destroyed, and/or buried by various geologic processes – is at the core of geomorphology. This textbook will teach you the language and concepts that will help you to understand the workings of many of Earth’s physical systems. Our goal is to equip you with the vocabulary and toolkit for understanding why Earth’s physical landscapes look the way they do. This knowledge will help us all to better manage our fragile natural resources.

Chapter 2 turns to loco-descriptive lyric poetry, read in the context of expanding highway infrastructure. It opens with a consideration of oil maps deposited in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, some of which critique the expropriation of former Ottoman territories by Anglo-American cartels. At that very locus, the Iraqi modernist poet Nazik al-Malā’ikah envisioned a very different kind of energy poetics, where the dividing line between oil’s extractive and consumptive spheres is decidedly smudged. In postcolonial counterpoint, the chapter closes by reading the automotive aesthetics in Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. The US highway system provides them with a conflicted linguistic resource, where the trace of oil’s violent extraction is smeared by the exhilarations of their lyrics.

In this chapter we explore concepts and practices related to diversity. This is a complex terrain to navigate as we are all ‘diverse.’ However, diversity (or our differences) have personal, social and political effects; many of which involve power and engender various forms of inequality, privilege and oppression. Critical social workers have been considering the ‘dilemma of difference’ for decades. In 1985, for example, Martha Minow observed that, rather than avoiding this dilemma, we should ‘immerse ourselves in it’, not necessarily to seek a final resolution, but to engage in a ‘more productive struggle’ for equitable processes and outcomes’. Challenging privilege and oppression is at the heart of critical social work and our journey is both personal and professional as we grapple with how to respectfully listen, learn and engage in mutual consciousness-raising across difference, while advocating for social and systemic change to address inequality.

Positive functionals arising from causal variational principles are derived and discussed.

Expanding our analytical scope beyond states’ aggregate size, Chapter 6 offers a more general analysis of border change that fully endogenizes the shape of states since the late nineteenth century. Taking the partitioning of the European landmass into states as the main outcome, we directly test the overarching argument that nationalism creates pressures to redraw political borders along ethnic lines, ultimately making states more congruent with ethnic groups. Based on an innovative probabilistic spatial partition model, we conceive of state territories as partitions of a planar spatial graph. Encoding data derived from historical ethnic maps on a graph as the main explanatory factor, the analysis shows that ethnic boundaries increased the conditional probability that the two locations they separate are, or will become, divided by a state border. As before, we substantiate the finding that secession is an important mechanism driving this result. Moving beyond Europe, we find similar dynamics of border change in Asia, but not in Africa or the Americas.

Chapter 1 takes stock of, and criticizes, the literature on nationalism, discussing four gaps in the literature: nonspatial theorizing, methodological statism, ahistorical modernism, and incomplete empirical validation.

The epilogue begins with the reversion of the Bonin Islands to Japan in 1968, after twenty-three years of US postwar occupation. Reflecting on imperial nostalgia and the meanings attributed to a rising Pacific for the future of Japan, it returns to the book’s initial question about the Pacific’s place in the archipelago’s history. It argues that the ocean today is an “unending frontier,” a cognitive mode engraved in both the promise of continued economic expansion and in the hopes for a more sustainable economy. The effects of climate change raise new questions about the origins of industrial modernity. The epilogue suggests conceptual models inspired at ocean currents to rethink diachronic historical causations and challenge teleology. With the first industrial revolution in Asia, Japan’s imperial emergence lives in the upstream of present ecological transformations. Studying the historical processes that direct state and industry interests to specific places within the dynamic seascapes of currents, habitats, and mineral deposits, embed the human relationship with the ocean in its historically grown, volumetric dimension.

Often regarded as comprehensive, impartial and authoritative works, monolingual dictionaries of the standard variety of English have never been neutral repositories of vocabulary. Instead, they have acted as vehicles for ideologies of one sort or another, transmitting societal values as well as linguistic information. All dictionary-makers make decisions on whose and which words to include and to exclude; equally all gather and process these words in ways that influence their presentation to the dictionary-user, employing editorial methods and technological means that have varied from one period to another. This chapter focuses on Johnson’s Dictionary and successive versions of the Oxford English Dictionary in an historically organised account of dictionaries to the present day, noting the under-representation in these two works of women as language-producers. It also discusses editions of the Webster dictionaries, of twentieth-century desk dictionaries before and after the introduction of corpus-based lexicography, and online dictionaries.

Finally, Chapter 9 uses the gradual expansion of the European railway network 1816–1945 to investigate how this key technological driver of modernization affected ethnic separatism. Combining new historical data on ethnic settlement areas, conflict, and railway construction, we test how railroads affected separatist conflict and successful secession as well as independence claims among peripheral ethnic groups. Difference-in-differences, event study, and instrumental variable models show that, on average, railway-based modernization increased separatist mobilization and secession. These effects concentrate in countries with small groups in power, weak state capacity, and low levels of economic development, as well as in large ethnic minority regions. Exploring causal mechanisms, we show how railway networks can facilitate mobilization by increasing the internal connectivity of ethnic regions or hamper it by boosting state reach. Overall, our findings call for a more nuanced understanding of the effects of European modernization on nation building.

Chapter 6 discusses the colonization of the Bonin Islands under the Tokugawa shogunate in 1862–1863. It shows how the steamboat Kanrin-maru’s venture to the Pacific archipelago offered an opportunity to develop and display national symbols of sovereignty, progress, and power vis-à-vis the islanders, just nine years after the arrival of Perry’s black ships. The subsequent occupation of territory under the hinomaru flag and the mapping and labeling of landmarks with Japanese toponyms was an attempt at harmonizing early modern conceptions of climate, subjecthood, and benevolent governance with the exigencies of administrative control over a stateless immigrant community in a colonial competition against Western empires. The chapter argues that the Bonin Islands figured as an experimental colony through which shogunal scholars and officials encountered foreign plants, technologies, and bodies of knowledge at a formative time of Japan’s imperial reinvention. Though upended prematurely in the summer of 1863, this colonial experiment offers a rare window on the possibilities of an imperial modernity under the Tokugawa that never materialized.

This chapter addresses the diverse modes in which poetry is found in and around Bloomsbury by focusing on three different aspects. First, it charts the presence of poetry and poets across different Hogarth Press series (the Hogarth Essays, the Hogarth Lectures on Literature, and Hogarth Living Poets). Second, it considers poetry both as a genre and as a critical issue in the debate on form in art, for example in Woolf’s numerous essays on prose and on the novel, in which her discourse on the subject is inextricably linked to her reflections on poetry, or in the work of Roger Fry, Charles Mauron, and Julian Bell on Mallarmé. Third, it focuses on Julian Bell’s practice of and critical discourse on poetry as they develop in crucial moments for the Bloomsbury group more at large. By addressing these points, the chapter outlines a network of people across generations whose discourse on, or writing of, poetry intersected in one way or another with the cultural and aesthetic practices of the group, thus illuminating some of the fertile tensions and contradictions within it.

This chapter considers a fundamental question about how the mind works: Are the algorithms of cognition specifically implemented by the nervous system, with a unique role played by representations and processes internal to the brain? Alternatively, is cognition better understood as a product of the brain and body—or perhaps the result of the entire organism interacting with its environment? The first part focuses on the theoretical shift from mental representation and mind–brain identity to the embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive mind, approaches collectively known as 4E, distributed, or situated cognition. In the second part, 4E concepts such as epistemic action are applied to aspects of art and music, specifically the creation of visual depictions, the invention of musical notation, and the use of musical instruments. In the third part, the scope widens to the interdisciplinary exchange itself. Consistent with the themes of this book, I suggest that expanding the concept of cognition benefits from bringing the empirical sciences in closer dialogue with philosophy and the humanities. Specifically, the distributed perspective strengthens the interdisciplinary framework of naturalized aesthetics by drawing increased attention to the conceptual rigour valued by philosophers and to the cultural–historical contingencies emphasized by scholars of the humanities.