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This chapter begins with a dramatic account of a buck dance challenge between Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson and Harry Swinton at Brooklyn’s Bijou Theatre, on March 30, 1900, and describes such early percussive dance forms as buck, buck-and-wing, Lancashire clog hornpipe, and ragtime stepping at the turn of the century. Progenitors of Afro-Irish styles of buck–and-wing dancing include Bill Robinson, Harry Swinton, Lotta Crabtree, Katie Carter, King Rastus Brown, Billy Lynch, Nellie DeVeau, George and Josephine Cohan, Barney Fagan, Ned Wayburn, and Bert Williams, as well as George and Ada Overton Walker, whose supreme style of ragtime stepping informed the “class act” stepping of Charles Johnson and Dora Dean, who insisted on the absolute perfection of sound, step, and manner.

This chapter discusses the death and funeral of Lawrence. The rapidity with which Lawrence was buried meant that there was no opportunity for members of his family, or for his friends from England, to attend the funeral. This particularly distressed his younger sister Ada, who had nursed her brother through several serious illnesses, lent him money during the war, and was the family member best equipped, through educational training and intelligence, to understand and follow his literary career. But some of Lawrence's friends came to attend the funeral especially Jessie Chambers. After his death Frieda brought back involuntary memories on him and looked forward with optimism to the future.

This chapter explores urban debates on the American city following World War II. In response to the extraordinary transformations of the built environment, some called for order and control through modern urban planning while others advocated that the unplanned city should be allowed to develop “on its own” as a form of self-organization. We examine the critique of “Man Made America” (1950), by the Architectural Review editors, along with criticism by Lewis Mumford, William H. Whyte, Christopher Tunnard, and Peter Blake. In contrast, it considers Louis Kahn’s theory of the American city as fluid space and Jean Gottmann’s notion of megalopolis, while reflecting on the evolution of a new sensibility in the 1960s generation of Anglo-American designers and critics that embraced a non-design philosophy. Unlike modern urban planners who believed that design should be employed as a means of controlling the “exploding metropolis,” Charles Moore, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, Reyner Banham, and others argued for non-design strategies in support of the complexity and spontaneity of the unplanned American city as a means of challenging modernist notions of architecture and urban planning. We conclude by examining Ada Louise Huxtable’s critique of chaos and the “new aesthetic.”

This chapter provides the obituary for Ada Rapoport-Albert, who died on 18 June 2020 in London, surrounded by the love and admiration of friends far and near. It describes Ada as tall and beautiful, wise, witty, an exceptional scholar, critical, and meticulous, who loved people and knowledge. Ada was the author of outstanding and trail-blazing books and the model and exemplar for leading and experienced scholars, as well as those just setting out on their path. Ada lived in London from 1965 onwards, but her heart was very much in Israel — with the scenes of her childhood in Tel Aviv. The chapter also elaborates how Ada suffered a long series of illnesses that drained her strength until she finally succumbed.

The origins of erotic love can be traced back to the essential union of infant and mother. This chapter follows love’s evolution, meandering through sensuous detours to discover the beloved’s unfolding and often unexpected forms, the diversity betraying some basic unity or at least continuity in multiplicity. Psychoanalysts note the similarities in the infinite variety of vital pleasures with terms such as the ‘the primary object’, ‘libido’, and the ‘interdependence of representations of self and other’. Although these unifying drives, objects, and images have been with us all our lives, we continue to uncover or discover their power again and again, continually taking us by surprise. For the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov, life is love that haunts our sensibilities from cradle to grave. Nabokov has given us a narrative and a body of words which make the ontogeny of love come to brilliant life. This chapter deals with the ontogeny of love, sexual passion, Oedipus complex, and incest, focusing on Nabokov's works Lolita, Speak Memory, and Ada.

In this chapter, the author talks about his unique association with Vladimir Nabokov. He recalls reading the Nabokov novel Lolita for the first time and how it has mystified him. He also read Pale Fire, Ada, and the autobiography Speak, Memory. By the time he was seventeen and writing on Pale Fire the author says he was already growing a patchy beard. Twenty-five years later, he decided to shave it off and was surprised to see in the mirror what seemed to be his father's face looking back in surprise at the resemblance. John Shade in the poem “Pale Fire” writes about the inspiration that comes to him as he shaves, and as the author now shaves each morning, that passage from canto 4 will be more likely than not to spring to his mind. That's how close his Nabokov can be.

The life and works of Oscar Wilde, the epitome of decadence, were shaped by Jews. This chapter looks not so much at Wilde himself as at the multiple and contradictory affiliations between Wilde and Jews, who included visual artists like William Rothenstein, gay littérateurs like Marc-André Raffalovich and Reggie Turner, and women writers like Ada Leverson, Amy Levy, and Julia Frankau. In their rich and multifarious relationships with Wilde and with his rehabilitated posthumous reputation, Jewish writers, artists, and critics negotiated their relations to the gentile-dominated but increasingly open English public sphere, forming a cultural space for Jews where even after his death, the prophetic Wilde was taken as a social rebel, believer in art-for-art’s sake, and representative of queerness.

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music owes its origin to a talented, determined, and energetic woman who, for a half decade in the 1920s, subjugated her own ambitions to those of a famous yet eccentric dreamer. Although she hardly knew him, Ada Clement found in this dreamer a mentor to whom she entrusted the artistic direction of a school she had nurtured for the previous eight years. The conservatory's story is also, in part, the story of that dreamer—who envisioned a world unified through music, religious differences nullified through art, and the country brought together under a national anthem that would celebrate peace rather than glorifying war. When he left the city after five years to return to the imposing solitude of his native Alps, Ernest Bloch left behind a legacy of students, a philosophy of teaching grounded in works rather than in theory, and a devotion to scholarship. One of his most enduring compositions arose from his dream of interfaith cooperation, with which he inspired his fellow San Franciscans during the late 1920s.

This chapter concerns the role of women in Hasidism and in Habad, which is considered pivotal in terms of the relation of Hasidism to modernity. It discusses how Hasidism is openly premodern with its rigorous modesty rules and other strictures that limit female public participation in religious life. It also outlines modernistic elements that recognize and empower womanhood. The chapter focuses on Ada Rapoport-Albert's famous article in 1988 entitled On Women in Hasidism: S. A. Horodecky and the Maid of Ludmir Tradition, which debunked the significance of the Maid of Ludmir as a female rebbe and Horodecky's belief that 'the woman was given complete equality in the hasidic movement'. It presents the idea of a dialectic of spirituality in Hasidism.

The previous chapter focused on changes in the education and roles of women in early twentieth-century eastern Europe and on later developments in the West. We considered the women and girls of Satmar, Bais Yaakov, and Habad, with some attention to the Habad sheluḥah, the empowered woman who, with her husband, was sent by Rabbi Menachem Mendel to strengthen Judaism and create a Habad outpost in a locale often far from the organized hasidic or haredi community where she was brought up. In this chapter I examine some of the details of this process, in which young hasidic women are transformed into charismatic sources of Jewish inspiration for their communities and sometimes further afield.

This chapter talks about the influence of scholars' general worldview on how they see social work. Turning its gaze to the past, the chapter briefly demonstrates how the ways scholars write and speak about research have changed, giving significant space to the role of experimentation in social work. The chapter examines the idea of the experimenting society, especially through the work of Ada Sheffield; at the success story of evidence based practice; and at a forgotten strand of experimental sociology. It then moves to consider the emergence of innovations in social work, taking task-centred social work as a main example. The ground covered in this chapter distinctively exemplifies the point regarding the synthesis of scepticism and practicality.

The life insurance industry that emerged in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century encouraged the public to regard human life as contingent. Charles Babbage’s early work as an actuary and his 1826 volume on life insurance, often overlooked, in fact informed his later efforts. His turn from his plans for the Difference Engine, whose calculations plotted a linear future, toward his more complex Analytical Engine, registered his ambitions to construct a machine capable of responding to a contingent future. His later writings on natural theology and his personal scrapbook analyzed the ways contingency might be encoded in material records, in newspaper fragments, the natural world, or in a computing engine’s numerical output.

This chapter contextualizes Loy's readings of Futurist ideas and aesthetics within the specificity of the Florentine avant-garde; it analyzes Loy’s responses to the writings and ideas on sexuality, sexual morality, feminism, motherhood, genius, autobiographism and avant-garde art, published in the magazines Lacerba (1913–1915) and La Voce (1908–1916), which have so far been neglected by scholarship. The chapter shows that the reception of Otto Weininger's and Karl Kraus’s works in Lacerba at the hand of Giovanni Papini infiltrated Loy's early texts, together with the debates on similar questions in the expatriate community. It analyzes the echoes between Loy's poems and the writings of Ada Negri, Sibilla Aleramo and Enif Robert. The author here argues that Loy’s aesthetics began to crystallize as a form of critique of the fundamental categories pertaining to the definition of art, artwork and author, as well as of gender identity, on the basis of the Florentine sources and debates that she incorporated into her writing. The chapter thus contributes to a necessary decentering and regionalizing of modernism, complicating the picture of modernist internationalism.

The first Americans to identify as artistic bohemians gathered at a Manhattan beer cellar in the 1850s. They counted Walt Whitman as one of their number, and considered Edgar Allan Poe a bohemian avant la letter. But New York’s first bohemians were not displaced Parisians living in a section of the Latin Quarter magically transplanted to the United States. Rather, bohemianism in the United States has roots in Charleston, South Carolina, the hometown of both Ada Clare (the “Queen of Bohemia” and host of a weekly literary salon) and Edward Howland (the financial backer for the bohemians’ literary weekly, The New York Saturday Press), as well as in the setting of Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843), which influenced the first literary representation of American bohemianism in Fitz-James O’Brien’s short story “The Bohemian” (1855). Charleston’s cotton plantations provided Howland and Clare with the money to fund the institutions that were essential for bohemianism to flourish: the periodical and the salon. With Poe at the imaginative center of American bohemia and Clare and Howland at its financial center, U.S. bohemianism emerges as a complex network of people, money, and ideas circulating between the North and the South as well as New York and Paris.

This chapter is the author's keynote delivered in 2000 for a small conference on Vladimir Nabokov's metaphysics at the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The author reflects on the novelty and excitement of discovering Nabokov's metaphysics; the suspicion that it could become a routine key to the work of someone who always hated the routine; and the questions that he felt needed to be asked both within Nabokov's framework and outside it. The author wrote his M.A. thesis between November 1973 and January 1974 at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, on what were then Nabokov's last three novels, Pale Fire, Ada, and Transparent Things. He sent his thesis to Nabokov, and received it back in 1974. This time he focused on Ada, annotating it line by line but also examining it in the context of Nabokov's work and thought. He argues that Nabokov's own image in Speak, Memory and elsewhere of a kind of Hegelian spiral of being provides the basic framework of Nabokov's metaphysics.

This chapter focuses on Vladimir Nabokov's psychology as it relates to his literature. Nabokov once dismissed as “preposterous” Alain Robbe-Grillet's claims that his novels eliminated psychology. When asked if he is a psychological novelist, Nabokov replied: “All novelists of any worth are psychological novelists.” Since he evidently did not consider himself a novelist of no worth, we can infer he saw himself as a psychological novelist. Psychology fills vastly wider channels now than when Nabokov, in the mid-twentieth century, refused to sail between the Scylla of behaviorism and the Charybdis of Sigmund Freud. Nabokov treasured critical independence, but he did not merely resist others: he happily imbibed as much psychology as he could from the art of Leo Tolstoy and the science of William James. This chapter offers a reading of Ada to understand how the psychology Nabokov observes and experiments with in his fiction is intertwined with the modern psychology about whose possibilities he was so skeptical.

This chapter examines the precision of Vladimir Nabokov's allusions and patterns in Ada, along with their ethical, psychological, and epistemological implications. It discusses three unlikely pieces of fluff and straw, whose appeal lay partly in their unlikeliness and whose dates belong to the years immediately before Nabokov began writing Ada. In particular, it considers Nabokov's discovery of the Dutch meaning of “veen” and rediscovery of the Dutch surnames Veen and Van Veen in Double-Barrel, a 1964 detective novel by Nicolas Freeling, as well as his establishment of Van and Ada Veen as “children of Venus.” It also looks at the motif of peat, bog, marsh in the name of Villa Venus and especially in the Dutch name of the Veens. Finally, the chapter analyzes the doubling and imitation that pervade Ada and the way this complicates the novel's myths of love.

Chapter 3 tells the story of the visionaries that first imagined the computer. In the 19^th century, Charles Babbage invented a mechanical computer but failed in his attempts to build it. He and Ada Lovelace wrote a series of programs for the proposed machine. These programs were the first transcriptions of algorithms into sequences of machine executable instructions. After Babbage’s failure, the idea of building a real computer was abandoned for fifty years. As a young PhD student, Alan Turing forever defined the relationship between algorithms and computers. According to his definition, a computer is a machine that performs algorithms. He devised a theoretical computer that allowed him to investigate the limits of computation. This, before a single computer was ever built. Turing went on to work as a cryptographer during World War II. Turing outlined the future of computing but tragically died at the age of 41.