Comedy is the least considered aspect of modernist theatre – commonly framed as formally conservative and crowd-pleasing, leading towards harmony and continuity rather than rupture. However, comedy’s distinguishing features ally it to core modernist techniques and concerns: metatheatrical self-consciousness, disjunctions, disruptions, repetitions, and anarchic pleasures. Comic structures from farce and the comedy of manners to jokes, sketches, knockabout, and punchlines are central to a wide range of modernist plays. From Ibsen and Chekhov onward, the tragicomic mode is a common keynote of modernist theatre with the balance between comedy and tragedy dependent on the choices of the performer or the sensibilities of the viewer. Far from being inherently conventional, comedy can be viewed as modernist in its impulse to satirise and destabilise. Comedy is perhaps where the distinction between modernist and simply modern, between oppositional avant-garde and popular mainstream, is least identifiable and most intriguing.

The War of 1812’s end heralded a new era for the courts, and for the nation. Political leaders emboldened by having fought Great Britain to a standstill were eager to lay the groundwork for a new American empire. But adventurous Americans had their own priorities, and privateering on behalf of South American revolutionary governments offered new opportunities for wartime profit. Like the British in the 1790s, Spanish and Portuguese officials demanded that the federal government suppress such freelancing. To preserve relations, the Madison and Monroe administrations dusted off a tool for suppressing maritime violence that previous administrations had largely eschewed – criminal prosecutions for piracy. But a patchwork statutory regime and popular support for South American rebels made convictions difficult to secure. At a deeper level, privateering cases raised thorny questions about the sovereign status of former colonies seeking autonomy. As Congress and the executive branch struggled to adapt to the rapidly shifting political context in the Americas, federal judges expressed renewed doubts about extending their authority onto the high seas. The renaissance of privateering threatened to derail the American imperial project just as it was getting started.

This chapter introduces the distinction between entrenched images or Image Macros (IMs) and Non-Entrenched Images (NEIs), and focuses most of its discussion on examples involving IMs that feature the characteristic ‘Top Text’ (TT) and ‘Bottom Text’ (BT), such as the One Does Not Simply and Good Girl Gina memes (ODNS and GGG). It shows how these IM memes allow Meme Makers to categorize experiences very quickly, efficiently and (if successful) humorously, adding further examples to such categories as ‘futile undertakings that are impossible to achieve’ (ODNS) or ‘virtuous behaviour of highly considerate women’ (GGG), thanks in large part to the frames evoked visually. It also discusses aspects of the construction grammar approach to language, as applicable to these meme constructions, including specific constructional properties of GGG memes and the constructional networks they fit into.

The Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, reputed to have “discovered” J. S. Bach’s Cello Suites, is better understood as their most influential popularizer. Through his extensive concert tours in the early twentieth century and culminating in his complete recording of the cycle in the 1930s, he solidified their place in concert life and established paradigms that remain influential today. Among these are the practice of only performing complete suites, with all repeats and without piano accompaniment. Casals’s exile to Prades, France, in protest of Franco’s dictatorship, abruptly ended his concert career and established Casals as a humanitarian figure, inspiring later generations of cellists who used the Cello Suites to advocate for peace and an end to human suffering. Examples include Mstislav Rostropovich’s impromptu performance after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yo-Yo Ma’s performance at the US-Mexico border and outside the Russian embassy, and Denys Karachevtsev’s performance on the heavily bombed-out streets of Kharkiv. Cellists have recently experimented with playing the Cello Suites in unusual venues such as subways, mountaintops, and in community settings worldwide. The Cello Suites’ global resonance is evinced by the wide range of art and popular media they have inspired.

This chapter explores the career of Wu Kezhong from 1418, the year he succeeded his father’s investiture as Marquis of Gongshun, to 1449, the year he fell in combat. Like his father, Wu Kezhong served the Ming throne as a Mongolian specialist and military commander. Batu-Temür had offered his loyalty to the Ming throne at the head of some 5,000 supporters, and Wu Kezhong too acted as a patron and protector for the Mongolian community. Despite such similarities, both the dynasty and the place of Mongols in the polity were changing. Wu Kezhong was among the first generation of his family to live through imperial successions as first the Yongle and then Xuande emperor died, leaving the throne to new sovereigns who actively sought the support of proven commanders such as Wu Kezhong. The new sovereigns, especially the man for whom Wu Kezhong and his brother died, differed importantly from their forefathers not only in their styles of rulership but also in their policies. That mattered because, even more than his father, Wu Kezhong pursued patronage through imperial institutions, which required knowledge of salary structures, commutation rates, and the shifting balance of power at court.

1. What characterizes decolonial social work? 2. How can cultural practices and sociocultural relationships among different caste and ethnic groups be valued through acts of storytelling? 3. Social work’s promotion of human rights and social justice can be challenging in everyday practice in Nepal. How can you as a social worker, living somewhere else, contribute to support colleagues living in these areas?

This chapter discusses a variety of presentation formats involving grids, which we tend to scan left to right, top to bottom. Some grids are scalar, structuring a graded sequence of experiences (for instance, formality of language, in Tuxedo Winnie the Pooh memes), or even correlating two scales as in the Political Compass meme we discuss. Others involve contrasts (as in Drake vertical grids), or structure discourse exchanges and narrative sequences in grids (among our examples here is the Anakin and Padmé meme). These different uses of grids allow Meme Makers to present and confront different behaviours, stances and attitudes which Meme Viewers take as prompts to construe a coherent, typically ironic, viewpoint from.

In a familiar pattern, federal judges ultimately embraced their role as the architects of American sovereignty on the water. As the Monroe administration redoubled its prosecutions of South American privateers, Congress left it to judges to define the legitimate boundaries of maritime violence. The Supreme Court responded by casting doubt on the claims to sovereignty advanced by revolutionary polities, and declaring that privateers were merely pirates, and therefore subject to punishment by all – including the United States. This judicial assertion of legal authority to police the waters of the revolutionary Atlantic was transformative. It helped secure approval of a treaty with Spain that paved the way for decades of territorial expansion in North America, and it presaged increasingly expansive American claims to hemispherical preeminence. Even when federal judges denied their own power to discipline a different category of “pirates” – those who engaged in the slave trade – they did so to uphold sovereign rights that Americans had been asserting since independence. If a nineteenth century American empire was ultimately realized on land, some of its first stirrings were at sea.

After President Lydon Johnson announces a massive increase in US troop levels in South Vietnam, American Catholics become more deeply engaged in debating the war, particularly in terms of morality. The radical Baltimore protest attracts attention to the Catholic antiwar movement.

1. How can de facto social work be supported in the fight for human rights? 2. As the author writes in this story, working in conflict areas might be dangerous. Think of how social workers can help to secure people in situations where they are threatened because of their engagement or political opinions. How do you think social workers can become a part of changing the everyday life of people in these situations? 3. In what way can de facto social work lead to collaborative support from a community in danger?

Part I is an eclectic collection of social work stories from the field. It seeks to show how important stories are, as they fundamentally tell of situated experiences and how these shape our relationships towards others. Part I shows the different ways that stories might be told, and that every story has multiple threads, is told from a particular point of view, and is not always linear and with an ending. In other words, many stories are unfinished and therefore are partial stories. Part I helps us reflect deeply on social work practices that may have the potential to “give life” to others by creating an environment that supports and encourages individuals to-be and to-share aspects of themselves. Additionally, to disclose those thoughts, feelings, and actions that matter to them to significant others, especially in times of change. Part I suggests that an appropriate social work mindset is to try to see the true and the good, the better and the possible in each practice relationship and situation. This is undeniably challenging. More broadly, this part of the book illuminates social work in uncertain, ambiguous, chaotic, disrupted, and volatile times.

This chapter explores the making of Sofia as an Ottoman city. The central thread in the narrative is the functioning of the system of pious foundations, which played the most decisive role in the expansion and transformation of the built fabric and the provisioning of public services. The main theme is the city’s relationship with the natural environment and the construction, functioning, and maintenance of its water supply system. The chapter specifically aims at bringing attention to the fact that the upsurge of building activity and the Ottomanization of the built environment that were experienced since the mid-fifteenth century, and especially in the sixteenth century, were accompanied by the establishment of a water infrastructure. Yahya Pasha’s water supply system was established at the turn of the sixteenth century, the beginning of a period that witnessed the biggest advances of the Ottomans both in the construction of water facilities and in the institutionalization of water management. Chronologically, the narrative encompasses the entire early modern period in Sofia’s history, shedding light on Ottoman water supply both in terms of its technical aspects and in terms of the role that it played in the construction of the local eco-community.