For a group of Spanish Gitano families, who now refer to themselves as American Gitanos, the reproduction of a cosmopolitan habitus has a social and historical basis. Transnational mobility is a key aspect of identity, whereby cosmopolitanism is the translation of internationality as an emic discourse. The migration of this network of families in the late 1950s provides the starting point for an analysis of the cultural mechanisms of this new cultural style and self-identification. The interface of cosmopolitanism, transnational migration and social mobility is shown through the protagonists’ narratives about migratory trajectories and their implantation in America.

In the Philippines, the Catholic Church’s high levels of “moral authority” facilitated its local protective interventions. This chapter tests the generalizability of community protection to Brazil and the US, unique cases that nonetheless share key characteristics of populist state violence with Duterte’s Philippines. However, original data analysis replicating, as closely as possible, the analysis in the Philippines does not reveal strong protective effects. Neither is police violence in Rio de Janeiro related to the location of Catholic infrastructure, nor does clergy inclusion in police reform build support among American audiences. The chapter then explains this divergence with the Philippines by turning to lower levels of “moral authority” for religious leaders in Brazil and the US. Crucially, moral authority in those two cases is tied to powerful social cleavages (socioeconomics and race in Brazil, and partisanship in the US). In such environments, religious leaders may possess opportunities for narrower intervention, but will struggle to generate broader community protection.

Race had a key role in the construction of madness and literary value and thus in periodical production in asylums, especially in the United States. Contributing to a periodical enabled educated white patients not only to express their creativity, enlightenment, and agency, but to reclaim their citizenship, at least figuratively. The launch of the Meteor in 1872 by a former plantation owner and patient at the Alabama Insane Hospital, Joseph Alexander Goree, was an act of rebellion against the irony of losing his own liberty and rights once he was certified as insane. The periodical was part of a larger campaign of literary activity through which he demonstrated his erudition, high taste, and reason. Recasting himself as an ally and collaborator to the superintendent, Goree found empowerment in maintaining the high literary quality of his publication and keeping madness out of it. Yet, the Meteor was far from a homogeneous polished account of the asylum: during its irregular run, it embodied different viewpoints as well as Goree’s declining enthusiasm and growing discontent, as he realised that his project of self-empowerment would fail to earn him his freedom and rights.

Asylums’ adoption of printing and periodical publishing from the late 1830s was related to two major developments on both sides of the Atlantic: the growing accessibility of print and printing presses and the spread of the moral treatment of insanity. As the periodical press permeated daily life, and printing equipment became cheaper and easier to use, the introduction of presses into asylums was a practical move. The presses served multiple purposes: recreational, therapeutic, as well as administrative. This chapter identifies various factors that contributed to the introduction of printing in asylums and addresses concerns about the exploitation of patients’ labour hidden behind the theory of moral therapeutics. It also reflects on the symbolic meaning of the press, its association with civilizational progress, and the influence of such ideas on the early adoption of periodical publishing in America and Scotland. While presses were almost never bought solely for patients’ benefits, they offered novel opportunities for inmates to exercise initiative and agency as partners in the development of early psychiatry, as well as civilization.

The chapter completes my discussion of the inception of periodical publishing in asylums, by examining the histories of two of the first asylum periodicals published in America and Britain and their patient-founders: Barber Badger’s Retreat Gazette (Hartford Retreat in Connecticut, 1837) and John Reid Adam’s Chronicles of the Monastery (Glasgow Royal Asylum, 1842). It shows that the histories of early asylum periodicals were tightly intertwined with their founders’ fates, which was the major reason for the publications’ comparatively short runs. Furthermore, these founders were all patients with printing skills or, in the case of Adam, literary aspirations and willingness to learn, and the opportunity to print in the asylum played an important role in their lives and professional careers: for Badger, it was a way to continue providing for his family, while for Adam, institutionalisation constituted an apprenticeship that eventually enabled them to pursue a career in publishing beyond their discharge. Asylum periodicals allowed patients to apply their existing skills or gain new ones in the pursuit of their own aspirations and personal interests.

This introduction presents a historical and conceptual overview of the monograph, particularly the longer history of discourses connecting Italian opera, Italy and italianità, and ideas surrounding the Old World and the New World. Milan and Liberal Italy (1861/70–1922) are introduced first in the context of Italy’s unification and the wider social and technological transformations that defined the Second Industrial Revolution. New York and Buenos Aires are then considered together, exploring their changing position in the global operatic circuit from the 1870s onwards and the theatrical infrastructure in both cities, before the methodological approach of the monograph and an overview of the individual chapters are outlined.

The torpedoing of the troop transport SS Tuscania on February 5, 1918, was the U.S. Army’s first mass-casualty event of World War I. Along with dozens of British crew members, 215 American soldiers perished. The disaster sent shockwaves across the United States and led to a scandal in the War Department, as angry families demanded more accurate lists of the living and the dead. Several important reforms came in the wake of the tragedy, including the addition of serial numbers to U.S. Army identification discs (or “dog tags”) and new guidelines for the proper care of personnel rosters. While the military struggled to meet the public’s expectations, propagandists responded to the sinking energetically. “Remember the Tuscania!” instantly became a ubiquitous war cry on the American home front. At the same time, visual messaging linked the Tuscania’s fatalities to a new symbology of wartime death, one built around the motivational figure of the Spartan Mother and the icon of the Gold Star. Largely forgotten today, the sinking of the Tuscania offers a revealing case study in the evolving relationship between the U.S. government and the families from which citizen-soldiers are drawn.

The story of American literature and empire is vast and complex, its boundaries as hard to draw and as continuously disputed as the historical borders of the US nation-state itself. Historians of US empire tend to periodize their field into three broad eras of imperial formation: (1) continental expansion under the aegis of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century; (2) the emergence of overseas empire with the Spanish-American War in 1898, when the US first acquired formal territories abroad; and (3) and the rise to globalism after World War II, when US military policing in the interests of global capitalism created an empire of military bases around the world while rebranding US imperialism and neocolonialism as embodiments of democracy and freedom, in part through a series of “endless” wars spanning the Cold War through the post-9/11 War on Terror. But for literary scholars, this broad historical periodization of empire loses coherence in the face of literature’s persistent ability to reimagine history, to make counterfactual claims, to invent new worlds, to change the experience of time, and to speculate and counter-speculate about the grounds of reality.

More than any other of Emerson’s essays, “Experience” shows us a succession of states, moods, and “regions” of human life. It is not a “carpet” essay in Adorno’s sense, in which a set of themes is woven into a core idea, but a journey essay, which moves from region to region, and portrays life as a set of moods through which we pass. Like a piece of music, “Experience” is in motion. It provides an exemplary case of the essay as Montaigne describes the form: “something which cannot be said at once all in one piece.” Chapter 7 considers whether “Experience" is to be seen as what Cavell calls a “journey of ascent” – as in the journey up and out of the cave in Plato’s Republic; as a version of Plato’s myth of Er; or, with its praise of “the midworld,” as a return to the ordinary as Wittgenstein thinks of it.

The American war, as the War of American Independence was known in Britain, was a highly misleading description; it was much more than just a bilateral struggle between Britain and the rebel colonies that became the United States. Though the conflict began in North America, from when the French intervened in 1778 to support the new states, the war spread to the West Indies, West Africa, South Asia, and the waters off the British Isles. When the Spanish became belligerents in 1779, the geographical reach of the struggle expanded still further, taking in Central America and Britain’s Mediterranean outposts of Gibraltar and Minorca. At the end of 1780, the list of Britain’s enemies extended when the British (rather quixotically) declared war on the Dutch. Dutch possessions in the Caribbean, West Africa and South Asia were drawn into a truly worldwide contest. In all theaters of the war, including in North America, the European belligerents called on the military support of local manpower and the services of other Europeans, making it a transnational as well as a global conflict.

Voyages of discovery and their accounts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have rarely been considered in the context of periodising ideas of ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’. Though once such voyages are read not with the hindsight of the twenty-first century but from within the tradition of prior travel, the newness of the New World emerges as a modern construct with limited historical purchase. Texts and maps that verbalise voyages beyond the boundaries of what was known are situated as much in individual experience as in collective perspective; they are often more invested in their own reception than in measurable objects and dateable events.

Following his studies in philosophy and literature, MacCormick won a Snell Exhibition to study in Balliol College, Oxford (1963–65). He studied law, and this chapter explores both his studies – including the teachers who influenced him, such as Donald Harris and Alan Watson – as well as the influence of Richard Hare, whose work on moral reasoning was important for MacCormick. Alongside this, MacCormick participated in student politics at the time: he became President of the Oxford Union and, as he did in Glasgow, participated in the Union’s debates. Following his studies, in the summer of 1965, thanks to a Balliol Pathfinder Scholarship, MacCormick toured the USA, and recorded his observations, especially with relation to race and civil rights issues. This chapter thus discusses both the legal and the political formation MacCormick received in and thanks to Oxford and considers what impact this had on his character.