Whereas Bach’s Violin Solos are preserved in a calligraphic autograph manuscript, the lack of a surviving autograph of the Cello Suites has long been a problem for performers and critical editors alike. The Cello Suites survive in four manuscript copies, which musicians consult in facsimile copies to guide their choices about discrepant articulations, ornaments, and notes. For some 150 years, most cellists and editors have taken the manuscript copied by the composer’s second wife, Anna Magdalena Bach (Source A), to be a kind of surrogate for the lost autograph, despite the fact that it contains numerous inconsistencies as well as slur markings that are ambiguous or apparently inaccurate. A recent edition by Andrew Talle (2018) has reevaluated the four sources, drawing particular attention to Sources C and D, which had long been disregarded due to their geographical and temporal distance from the composer. However, these manuscripts were copied by excellent professional scribes working from another (now lost) manuscript in the possession of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. They moreover preserve various details, clarifications, and embellishments that were added through the composer’s initiative, probably in the context of lessons or music making, and which are not preserved in Anna Magdalena Bach’s copy.

The introduction outlines the geographies of slavery and black freedom in eighteenth-century Colombia, the significance of region and race in Colombian history, and the importance of the mobilities of black people, their labour, and their culture in traversing and connecting New Granada’s Caribbean and Pacific worlds. Fisk argues for the centrality of geography, in particular place and mobilities, for shaping black religious knowledge and practice in a period (1690–1790) rarely studied by historians of African diasporic cultural history. After a historiographical and theoretical examination of how African diasporic religious formation has been studied, Fisk explores the variety of regimes of slavery and sites in which people of African descent resided in colonial Colombia – from cities, haciendas, and mines to maroon communities. She argues that place fundamentally shaped how people of African descent engaged with Catholicism. She conceptualises black Catholic practice in eighteenth-century New Granada as an “interstitial religion,” born of the physical and metaphorical interstices in a colonial society governed through slavery and introduces a methodology of religious geographies for the study of black religious knowledge where there is no written canon.

This chapter considers more platform-specific forms, exploiting possibilities such as the ready integration of emoji on X/Twitter or the integration with audio and video on TikTok. We focus on the expression of emotional meanings and stance, and also pay attention to the co-construction of memetic discourse by multiple discourse participants in online exchanges. Overall, we suggest that the easy transfer across platforms and modes reveals a kind of memetic mindset in which discourse takes shape online, even where this does not necessarily involve fully formed or identifiable memes in a strict sense.

The Introduction begins with a description of the final days in the life of Sofia’s main thermal bath that in 1913 stood in the city’s historic center as the last representative of the Ottoman approach to place-making. I show how the decision to demolish one of the structures most characteristic of Sofia’s Ottoman experience cleared the path for the formulation of the national narrative of Sofia’s history. The narrative that still dominates both the scholarly and popular ideas of Sofia’s urbanistic identity is based on an ideologically biased interpretation of the Ottoman understanding of urban space, natural resource management, and public works. In the Introduction, I argue that Sofia’s key position within the Ottoman political and institutional landscapes as well as its role as a hub of cultural and technological exchange make the study of its history a good vantage point for overcoming the artificial spatial boundaries that still divide the research of the European, Asian, and African provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The Introduction shows how the environmental characteristics of Sofia and the Sofia plain make water the most natural and effective thematic pivot for the study of the construction and historical evolution of space and place.

The federal courts ultimately came to the nation’s rescue. In 1794, the Supreme Court abruptly reversed course and decided that federal judges could adjudicate cases arising from captures made by French privateers operating from the United States. British officials were initially skeptical about vindicating their sovereign’s rights through the courts, but they came to embrace litigation as a useful weapon in their global struggle with revolutionary France. French diplomats resented judicial interference with privateering, and they demanded that executive branch officers intervene in proceedings to defend France’s prerogatives under treaty and international law. But the Washington administration refused. The courts, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, were “liable neither to controul nor opposition from any other branch of the Government.” Judges continued to have doubts about their role in resolving international legal disputes, but they came to accept responsibility for establishing American sovereignty. This tale of judicial ascendancy might seem at odds with our usual understanding of the courts as the “least dangerous branch” of the early federal government, but the truth is that American policymakers deliberately sought to make the courts supreme, at least at sea.

The introduction makes the case that while theatre has tended to be ignored or marginalised in modernist studies, it deserves a central place in accounts of modernism alongside poetry, prose, cinema, and the visual arts. It further contends that while there is an impressive variety amongst its practitioners, the hallmarks of modernist theatre are antagonism and provocation. Indeed, modernist theatre-makers rebelled against dominant genres, conventions, institutions, and audiences by creating new artistic forms and advocating for different values and worldviews. In so doing, this chapter argues that scholars need to go beyond the usual Euro-American cultures to consider how modernist theatre was manifested in the wider world and to recalibrate the historical trajectory of modernism that such broader geographies demand.

Recounting the experiences of Wu Ruyin and his son, Wu Weiying, who between them held the title of Marquis of Gongshun in succession from 1599 to 1643, this chapter and the next address two overarching issues. First, they explore how institutions and administrators persevere amidst crisis. It may be tempting to caricature late Ming bureaucrats as obdurately clinging to the past, but men like Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying adapted to new demands by incorporating new technologies and new ways within established frameworks. Few felt the need to abandon the “institutions of the imperial forefathers.” Second, these chapters examine the place of merit nobles in late Ming society. Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying were not men of the people, but by function of their social circles, they actively engaged in the capital’s broader cultural activities, and by virtue of their jobs as senior military administrators, they commanded surprisingly detailed information about common soldiers and officers, war captives and refugees, and even rumors circulating through Beijing. This chapter first examines Wu Ruyin’s role as the emperor’s representative in ceremony, which included officiating at rituals, offering prayers, and hosting banquets, and second, considers his experiences as a military administrator in a time of acute challenges.

1. How can conflict be solved when the participants’ stories are coloured by turbulence and uncertainty? 2. Can a researcher contribute to change ongoing stories? If yes, in what way? 3. In the end of this story, we do not see any solutions for the participants in the study. How can we deal with situations like this, as researchers or practitioners of social work?