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How can Romantic poetry, motivated by the poet’s intense yearning to impart his thoughts and feelings, be so often difficult and the cause of readerly misunderstanding? How did it come to be that a poet can compose a verbal artwork, carefully and lovingly put together, and send it out into the world at the same time that he is adopting a stance against communication? This book addresses these questions by showing that the period’s writers were responding to the beginnings of our networked world of rampant mediated communication. The Connected Condition reveals that major Romantic poets shared a great attraction and skepticism toward the dream of perfectible, efficient connectivity that has driven the modern culture of communication. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and John Keats all experimented with their artistic medium of poetry to pursue such ideals of speedy, transparent communication at the same time that they tried out contrarian literary strategies: writing excessively ornate verse, prolonging literary reading with tedious writing, being obscure, and questioning the allure of quickly delivered information. This book shows that the Romantic poets have much to teach us about living in—and living with—the connected condition, as well as the fortunes of literature in it.

This book is about the role of education in shaping rates and patterns of intergenerational social mobility among men and women during the twentieth century. It examines intergenerational class mobility in the United States and seven European countries during this period. Class mobility compares the social class position of men and women with the class of the family they were born into. Mobility trends have been similar in all these countries, with increasing upward mobility among people born up to about 1950 and increasing downward mobility for those born later. The major driver of upward mobility was the massive changes in the occupational structure that took place in the thirty years after the end of World War II. Education was also important in promoting greater openness, not only through the growth of higher education, but also because, in many cases, the relationship between social background and educational attainment weakened.

Does leadership targeting work? This question lies at the heart of studies on the efficacy of counterterrorism policy. This book examines whether killing or arresting terrorists is an effective means by which to weaken and degrade a group’s operational capacity. It aims to identify and explain why decapitation works in some cases and not in others. In order to determine whether decapitation is an effective strategy, this project examines nearly one thousand instances of leadership targeting. A group’s susceptibility to leadership targeting is a function of three factors: organizational structure, communal support, and group type or ideology. Leadership decapitation is unlikely to result in the demise of groups that are highly bureaucratized, have high levels of communal support, or are driven by a religious or separatist ideology. Leaders matter less under these conditions, and their removal can have adverse consequences, such as retaliatory attacks or an overall increase in the frequency of attacks. The data reveals that the largest and oldest organizations are highly resistant to destabilization after targeting. Separatist, religious, and especially Islamist groups are unlikely to weaken after the removal of their leaders. In order to develop counterterrorism policies that will degrade and weaken terrorist organizations, it is essential to identify whether our policies are likely to be effective or to have adverse consequences. The book examines the cases of Hamas, al-Qaeda, Shining Path, and ISIS to understand how organizational structure, local support, and ideology contributes to their resilience in the face of repeated leadership attacks.

This work is focused on the abolitionist movement in Rio de Janeiro. It offers a careful reconstruction of the movement’s context and evolution in Rio, and the related formal parliamentary history. An understanding of the nature of the political parties of the Brazilian monarchy, the role of the crown, and the significance of ideology and individual statesmen has been brought to bear in order to comprehend how the regime actually interacted with abolitionism and how both the movement and the regime shaped each other as a consequence. One cannot understand the movement’s history as something apart from the elite political world that it challenged and changed. A central element in this study is an examination of the role of racial identity and racial solidarity in the abolitionist movement’s history. Previous analyses of the movement have always argued that the movement was an urban, middle-class, white movement (with a few significant Afro-Brazilian leaders), one that only gathered Afro-Brazilian mass support over time. A more careful analysis of the evidence transforms our understanding, disclosing Afro-Brazilian middle-class membership and the Afro-Brazilian masses present and mobilized in the movement from its beginning to its end. This study interweaves the imperial capital’s Afro-Brazilian components, its parliament and monarchy, and the nature and evolution of a reformist movement. It explains how the seemingly impossible was made possible: how an urban political movement ended slavery and did so within the confines of a monarchy dominated and maintained by elite

The master narrative of Cold War sports describes a two-sided surrogate war, measurable by falsely objective medal counts every four years at the Olympic Games. This approach is as inadequate for sports as it is for the Cold War. Rather than a bipolar, superpower conflict, the Cold War was a competition between the dueling globalization projects of capitalism and Communism composed of far-from-monolithic blocs. While a fragile, fearful peace took shape in the Northern Hemisphere, both sides waged proxy wars that killed tens of millions in the Global South. Alongside other forms of popular culture, sports were deployed to win the sympathies of the world’s citizens, many of them from nations that had emerged in the wake of European decolonization. Sport was the most conspicuous form of popular culture in the period. It offered millions around the world the opportunity to forge identities that both supported and undermined dominant ideologies—racial, gender, local, regional, national, and international. Sport crossed rather than created borders and identities—and it did so in myriad and intricate ways. This book brings together experts working on sports in the United States, USSR, German Democratic Republic, Asia, and the postcolonial world. Their work is theoretically aware and underpinned by extensive archival research. Taken together, they go beyond simple notions of bipolarity and present new insights that should invigorate the study of both international systems and of culture in the Cold War period.