This chapter interrogates how local memory was mobilized and militarized by the viceroyalty to legitimize its authority in the face of growing popular resistance. It centers on the reuse of the Norman imperial palace, the Palazzo Reale, at mid-century and its protracted modernization, which, in turn, paved the way for the rebuilding of the Porta d’Africa and the Porta Nuova, two centuries-old city gates closely associated with contemporary Habsburg campaigns in North Africa. In Palermo, appropriation laid the foundations of a new architecture of power: one built on an emergent ideology of empire that balanced the rhetoric of triumphalism with the recognition of local mythography. Looking to local political discourse that claimed the city’s historical autonomy, the chapter contrasts these projects with contemporary acts of colonial foundation in the Crown’s American viceroyalties. In doing so, it situates Palermo within a newly global Habsburg imperial imaginary.

Between December 1671 and the summer of 1672, the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) addressed what amounted to a call for a new crusade against Egypt to the French king, Louis XIV. Leibniz’s Projet de conquête de l’Egypte deliberately situated its appeal in the history of French crusading, played upon the king’s piety and evoked the defeat of St Louis IX’s Egyptian crusade (1248–54) as a failure to be redressed. Devised partly as an attempt to divert the French from war in the Netherlands and partly as a call to unify Western Christian monarchs against a common foe on behalf of his employer, the Elector of Mainz, Leibniz’s plan seems never to have reached the French king.

Chapter 2 asks how archaeology can illuminate epic traditions about heroes and places. Using case studies such as Mycenae, Tiryns, Troy, Pylos, Iklaina, Sparta, Phthia, and Ithaca, it explores what material evidence can and cannot confirm. The chapter emphasizes monuments and landscapes as anchors of cultural memory, shaping how communities remembered a heroic past.

The prologue frames the Iliad and the Odyssey as poems that speak to the aftermath of violence. Rather than treating war as an episode that ends when fighting stops, it introduces the book’s central claim: Homeric epic preserves the textures of lived experience, including silence, grief, and the long work of rebuilding. It also explains the book’s approach, combining archaeology and close reading for general readers and students.

Chapter 10 draws the book’s themes together by returning to the problem of how the past persists. It reflects on the endurance of trauma, the struggle to reintegrate after catastrophe, and the ways communities rebuild meaning from ruins. Bringing archaeology and epic memory into a single perspective, it argues that Homer remains powerful because the poems preserve recognizably human experiences across time.

‘A Splintered Past: History in the Irish Novel since 1990’ considers the ways in which contemporary Irish novelists have represented three phases of modern Irish history: the Famine; the revolutionary period; social liberalisation since the 1960s. Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002), in its relative optimism about the contribution of the catastrophe to national self-consciousness, is contrasted with Paul Lynch’s Grace (2017) and Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder (2016). Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999) provides a child’s-eye view of the Easter Rising, while Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (2005) witnesses the Rising from the perspective of a soldier returned from the Second World War, and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996) filters partition through childhood memories. As we reach Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster (2014) or Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2021), historical traumas become comprehensible only in personal terms, and the capacity for collective narrativisation is less prevalent or accessible.

Chapter 1 argues that thinking about boxes will allow us to comprehend the reparative work that comics can do in approaching transgenerational Holocaust memory and trauma. What would it mean to read Maus as a Jewish text in our moment of global attention to Jewish identity and Holocaust memory? Building upon Hillary Chute’s landmark scholarship on Spiegelman’s Maus and comics and/as archives, I show how Spiegelman’s slippery, evocative metaphor of comics panels as built boxes links his magnum opus to Jewish traditions surrounding the material preservation and transmission of historical texts. Reconsidering Maus together with boxes, in light of what can – and can’t – be enclosed and contained, illuminates formal congruences between Maus, the architected space of the Mishkan, and the textual practice of Midrash. Unpacking these congruences in turn reveals Spiegelman’s survivor’s “tale” as a text, commentary, object, memorial, testimony, even a kind of secular phylactery or reliquary, through which the son of survivors negotiates his inherited trauma and his own Jewishness.

The conclusion, titled “Meaning and Memory,” considers the underlying strands of community, nature, and memory as we work to better understand not only the history of Camp Ford but captivity and the Civil War as a whole.

Most of the shooting stopped in 1865, but the war did not fully end. Indeed, as a generation of scholars have shown, the Civil War continued in many ways throughout the rest of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. This ongoing debate about how we might remember the conflict raged into the twenty-first century with destructive protests across the South, including debates in Tyler, Texas, very near where Camp Ford is memorialized today. “Camp Ford’s New Civil War, 1865–2025” situates Camp Ford’s ongoing war in this important timeline and tells the story of how the space and its meaning has been used and misused and interpreted and misinterpreted from the war’s official end in 1865 to the present.

Taking up the framework established by recent scholarship that Beethoven was not only a solitary hero but also an empathetic and communicative composer, this paper argues that Beethoven’s composing was, among other things, significantly embedded in the multifaceted culture of friendship of the late Enlightenment.

In his Elegischer Gesang, Op. 118 of 1814, dedicated to his friend Johann Freyherr von Pasqualati, Beethoven used an elevated text rich in associations and tailored the piece specifically to the dedicatee in setting a public memorial to his deceased wife. This piece, like the piano sonata op. 90 of the same year for his friend Moritz Lichnowsky, expresses not only private friendship (as we understand it today) but rather a broader idea of friendship encompassing both “friendship of virtue” and “friendship of utility” as described by Aristotle, which was prevalent in the eighteenth century.

When the Elegischer Gesang was finally published in August 1827, it took on a new meaning: It was taken (because of to its high opus number and its posthumous publication) as Beethoven’s swan song in the expectation of his own death.

The history of Black poetry in New Orleans is so vast and complex that no one has yet undertaken a comprehensive study of its history. Such a history would sort out its origins in the Spirituals sung by those trafficked in and out of the city’s antebellum commerce in the enslaved and in the very different Afro-Creole poetry of the 1840s and 1860s; would grapple with the ways the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance shaped careers in poetry associated with the city, pulling some away and but also inspiring others to cultivate a keen pride in the deep cultural roots of Black America in the city; it would explore the meaning of the Black Arts Movement here as well as the central theme of memory-work in the generations that followed, especially as post-Katrina gentrification continues to change the city’s complexion.

Chapter 4 examines how consumers acquire knowledge from both marketplace information and personal experience. It contrasts behavioral learning theory, which explains learning through conditioning, reinforcement, and stimulus–response patterns, with cognitive learning theory, which focuses on how consumers store, retain, and retrieve information. The chapter also addresses the growing challenge of information overload, particularly in digital contexts where consumers continually encounter abundant stimuli. Rather than emphasizing the accumulation of data, it introduces the concept of insight – a deeper, integrative understanding that emerges through reflection and mental clarity. By encouraging consumers to be still, release, and relax, the chapter suggests that mindful learning arises when the mind is calm, allowing information to evolve into meaningful understanding and repose.

This chapter examines one of the most distinctive features of Bishop’s work: her frequent use of correctio. When using this rhetorical scheme, writers will correct, question, rephrase or offer alternatives to their words and phrases in the body of the text itself (rather than, say, in the process of redrafting). The first part of this chapter gives an account of: correctio’s history; its characterisation in early-modern and twentieth-century rhetorical manuals; its risks and rewards; and its indiscriminate approval by Bishop’s critics. The chapter then analyses its frequent use by three major influences on Bishop: George Herbert, William Wordsworth and Marianne Moore. The main part of this chapter then examines Bishop’s use of correctio in relation to visual art, nature writing, memory, the representation of consciousness, scepticism, and elegy.

In this chapter, you will learn how Ethereum expanded the vision of blockchains beyond cryptocurrencies by introducing smart contracts and decentralized applications. We begin by exploring Ethereum's motivation and architecture, especially its support for storing and executing Turing-complete code on-chain. You will understand the role of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, the structure and function of smart contracts, and the transaction types specific to Ethereum, including contract creation and internal transactions. We examine how Ethereum handles gas costs, gas limits, and storage operations, with a focus on optimizing efficiency and preventing abuse. You will also learn how Ethereum transactions trigger computation and how message calls allow contracts to interact. Technical details such as OpCodes, memory types (stack, memory, storage), calldata, and the Application Binary Interface are covered to help you understand contract execution. We discuss Ethereum’s consensus mechanisms, including the transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, and the use of Merkle Patricia Tries to store state and transaction data. Finally, the chapter introduces concepts such as upgradable contracts, node types, event logging, and the Web3 ecosystem of decentralized applications.

This chapter examines a remarkable effort to memorialize ‘Alamgir in the decades after his death. This enterprise is noteworthy because it was unprecedented in Mughal history: no other emperor, not even ‘Alamgir’s much-admired great-grandfather Akbar (r. 1556–1605), was eulogized with the same intensity and for so many decades after his death. In its early stages this project was led by a small group of noble ‘Alamgir loyalists. In time, however, the effort extended to other parts of the rapidly disintegrating empire as well as, unexpectedly, to groups that had either been only nominally under Mughal rule or had actively opposed it. The end product was a trove of histories, administrative manuals, collections of orders and correspondence, and miniatures depicting ‘Alamgir. Although the participants’ motivations for eulogizing ‘Alamgir varied, the results point to a broad consensus about his greatness, among both Muslims and Hindus, across much of northern and central India that lasted until the late eighteenth century and the onset of British colonial rule.