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This chapter looks at the reception of Edwards among self-professed “experimental Calvinists” such as Richard Lovelace, John Piper, Tim Keller, John Gerstner, and the Banner of Truth Trust. It also contrasts this theological and devotional use of Edwards to the scholarship produced by evangelical academics on Edwards and his followers, such as Mark Noll, Allen Guelzo, George Marsden, and Douglas Sweeney. Although the religious and scholarly uses of the New England theology differed, they also reveal how Edwards continued to sustain certain evangelical hearts and minds.

Born an impoverished ethnic Manchu in the declining days of the Qing dynasty, Lao She grew up at a time when anti-Manchu resentment from Han Chinese nationalists was rife. In the course of the 1911 Revolution thousands of Banner people fell victim to the xenophobia that had been a defining element of revolutionary rhetoric for a decade. Nevertheless Lao She was very much part of the May Fourth Movement and its brief flowering of utopian and cosmopolitan ideals. As a schoolmaster he was involved in the pedagogic applicationof diverse models of meaningful citizenship. The schools under his jurisdiction served as experimental workshops, testing a variety of borrowed foreign and retooled indigenous ideas and practices in order to educate the New China. This chapter outlines the place of Christian thinking among radical Chinese nationalists at this time in order to understand Lao She's attraction to the Christian Church, his practical involvement at grass-roots level in building the New China, and his move to London in 1924. It also accounts for the negative portrayals of missionary officials in his fiction which have led some readers to the erroneous conclusion that Lao She must have been a ‘rice Christian’.

Cui Zhilu's actions and attitudes raise a number of questions regarding the operation of categories of identity in the Eight Banners, questions that form the subject of this chapter: How should one understand such categories as “Manchu,” “Mongol,” and “Hanjun”? Did they signify modes of identity we might understand as “ethnic”? The importance of the Eight Banners was not limited to what they represented in terms of military force. In administering for over three centuries the coalition of various northern frontier populations that brought off the Qing conquest in 1644, the banners played a central part both in constructing Qing identities and in maintaining Qing power into the twentieth century.

This chapter analyzes the construction of the Qing conquest elite in the early seventeenth century out of multiethnic coalitions formed with Mongols, Manchus, and northeastern “transfrontiersmen.” The rulers incorporated these diverse subjects into a military-civilian organization called the banners and created a banner nobility to lead them. The imperial lineage, the Aisin Gioro, claimed descent from the Jurchen Jin who ruled North China and Northeast Asia in the twelfth century and constituted an “inner circle” of support for the throne. Qing rulers severely limited the number of imperial princes whose titles could be passed on without reduction in rank. The regulations governing hereditary transmission of titles produced a highly stratified imperial lineage.

This chapter examines the internal rivalries among the imperial kinsmen. Manchu rulers had to eliminate the autonomous powers of their brothers and close kinsmen before they could wield centralized authority over the state. The “domestication” of the banner princes, and the concomitant transition from collegial to one-person rule, was accomplished by the 1730s. Although the sibling politics set off by the Qing refusal to adopt the Chinese dynastic principle of eldest-son succession continued until the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial princes also reverted to earlier patterns of fraternal solidarity and support. The late Qing prominence of princes Gong and Chun in governance thus paralleled earlier political structures.

Reads and translates the throng of revolutionary banners and signs whose visual immediacy both established the demands of protesters and responded to the emerging political discourse as it unfolded thereby becoming, in and of themselves, a translation of the awakening of public consciousness and a remarkable and fearless articulation of the right to language. The authors trace how these visual public signs inscribed a narrative of resistance that drew on various symbols and layers of historical, cultural, and political memory to write the story of a people in revolt. As the authors correctly point out, “a palpable sense of guilt, responsibility and complicity underwrote many of these banners, drawing on a collective memory of censorship and participation in silence, and paving the way for a new moral economy.” Through a translation of the unprecedented politics of display in Tahrir that combined humor, satire, and creative energy, the authors show how Egyptians used their individual and collective bodies as canvases to represent the demands of the revolution, to dismantle and expose a history of empire and global complicities, and to celebrate solidarities, exceptional valor, and enormously tragic sacrifice.

The long history of research at the Jornada Basin (through the Agricultural Research Service [ARS] since 1912, New Mexico State University in the late 1920s, and joined by the Long-Term Ecological Research [LTER] program in 1981) has provided a wealth of information on the dynamics of arid and semiarid ecosystems. However, gaps in our knowledge still remain. One of the most perplexing issues is the variation in ecosystem dynamics across landscapes. In this concluding chapter to this volume, we propose a new conceptual model of arid and semiarid landscapes that focuses explicitly on the processes and properties that generate spatial variation in ecosystem dynamics. We also describe how our framework leads to future research directions. Many studies have documented variable rates and patterns of shrub invasion at the Jornada as well as at other semiarid and arid regions of the world, including the Western United States, northern Mexico, southern Africa, South America, New Zealand, Australia, and China (York and Dick-Peddie 1969; Grover and Musick 1990; McPherson 1997; Scholes and Archer 1997; see also chapter 10). In some cases, shrub invasion occurred very rapidly: At the Jornada, areas dominated by perennial grasses decreased from 25% to < 7% from 1915 to 1998 with most of this conversion occurring prior to 1950 (Gibbens et al. 2005; Yao et al. 2002a). In other cases, shrub invasion occurred slowly, and sites were very resistant to invasion; for example, perennial grasses still dominate on 12 out of 57 research quadrats originally established in black grama (Bouteloua eropoda) grasslands in the early twentieth century (Yao et al. 2002b). Soil texture, grazing history, and precipitation patterns are insufficient to account for this variation in grass persistence through time (Yao et al. 2002a). It is equally perplexing that although many attempts to remediate these shrublands back to perennial grasses have led to failure, some methods worked well, albeit with long (> 50 year) time lags (Rango et al. 2002; see also chapter 14). Although variations in vegetation dynamics and shrub invasion are the most well known, other lesser known aspects of arid and semiarid systems have been found to be quite variable as well.

This chapter chronicles the beginning of Modern American Spiritualism in the Burned-over District. In 1848 the young Fox sisters declare their ability to communicate with the dead through a system of raps and a type of telegraphic code. The success of the sisters in a series of public and private séances developed into a flourishing Spiritualist movement that spread from New York throughout the North, and to a much lesser extent the South. The chapter examines antecedents to the mid-nineteenth century Spiritualism such as mesmerism, A.J. Davis’s Harmonial philosophy, and Emanuel Swedenborg’s cosmos cartography. On the local level, Joseph Barthet in the 1840s provided leadership in mesmerism and later transformed into an ardent supporter of Spiritualism and published Le Spiritualiste. In 1858, the Banner of Light, a Boston spiritualist periodical, sent their two editors, Thomas Gaines Foster and J. Rollin Squire, to New Orleans to expand the reach of Spiritualism.

This chapter explores how the Marīnid sultans expressed their authority to their subjects, especially those living beyond Fes, their capital city, during their first century of rule. The construction of palatine cities and madrasas were important marks of Marīnid authority in urban space but, as a dynasty ruling over a large rural tribal population, the Marīnids also needed to express their power and authority beyond the city. The chapter begins with analysis of the textual image of kingship presented in Marīnid chronicles and then considers how that image was disseminated to the population. It looks at Marīnid military progresses (ḥarakāt) between their fortresses and towns and Marīnid military engagements in the rural environment and shows how they used a number of symbols of monarchy, from the historically resonant Qurʾān of ʿUthmān to generic items such as drums and banners to make their power manifest.

This chapter explores the extent of Scottish and Irish involvement in the pastoral geographies that were the mainstay of the Australian economy until the gold rushes of the 1850s and which remained of considerable importance thereafter. It compares the legislative framework that provided the basis for this pastoral exploitation with contemporary Scottish and Irish land legislation. The triumph of pastoralism in south-east Australia appeared complete by the 1840s. The major Irish Land Acts of 1870, 1881, 1885 and 1903, undermined the economic basis of the landlord class. The Banner maintained its qualified support for Charles Gavin Duffy's Land Act in the face of mounting press criticism of the Act's failure to prevent squatters from consolidating their existing runs in the areas opened for selection, or speculators from amassing lands there. In Ireland and Scotland, similar legislation invoked differing claims to ethnic authenticity and political legitimacy.

This chapter discusses the importance of the construction of common institutions in the unification and consolidation of disparate communities under a single Isma'ili banner. These institutions provide the basis for a shared experience despite diverse cultural backgrounds and help develop a sense of commonality or “simultaneity.” They also provide a set of “publicly shared symbols” around which the community can rally. Beyond this, the institutions provide a vehicle to bring those distant communities into the fold of the imamate; to socialize them to ideologies of modernity and capitalism; to teach them how to be Isma'ili in a modern way, or modern in an Isma'ili way; to ensure their active, loyal, and enthusiastic participation; and to produce from a fragmentary constellation a unitary ecumene or polity. In these global institutions, in part, Isma'ili subjects are made Isma'ili.

This chapter introduces the methodological and historical background that supports the narrative presented in the rest of the book. The Shuangcheng settlement is a case of state-initiated projects of social engineering by which the state used policies to proactively plan or design social orders. Thus, the case offers an opportunity for exploring the mechanisms through which the state-designated social hierarchy played out on the ground. After introducing the Banner system and the settings of Shuangcheng, the chapter integrates theories in state-building and social stratification to provide a conceptual framework surrounding the question: how a state-dominated system of social formation influences life opportunities. Within the framework, state registration and resource allocation created the structural inequality; customary practices made possible local agency; and the interplay of local agency with the multiple structures – economic conditions, state entitlements, and family demography – eventually constructed and sustained the boundaries between social categories.

Despite popular claims to the contrary, Israel’s feminist movement is not foreign based but a reflection of the country’s vibrant civil society. It has drawn on feminist theory, including that which developed within the Middle East, especially since the late 1960’s. In order to avoid being coopted by national interests, Israeli feminists have engaged in grassroots activities, often with substantial success. However, inter-ethnic tensions have led the movement to fracture, as anticipated by recent feminist theorists.

This chapter presents historian James M. Banner Jr.'s memoirs, which trace how he became interested in history. Banner came from circumstances possessing a history that no family members considered to be of much interest. History was something his family possessed but not something it had lived. Banner believes that history came to him from outside his own origins. His introduction to history came in 1935 wartime dispatches from Europe and the Pacific.

This chapter describes the relationship between Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, with a focus on the development of a post-9/11 strategy, by examining al-Zawahiri's brief strategic template, which he offers in his post-9/11 book Knights Under the Prophet's Banner. Osama Bin Laden founded al-Qaeda, the first organization dedicated to global jihad, in 1988, with the help of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Together they began a series of bombings in U.S. embassies, which eventually culminated in the 9/11 attack. The success of al-Qaeda efforts can be attributed to the organization's ideology and strategy. They believe they could defeat the U.S. using the same strategy they have used in defeating the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The first task in their strategy was to convince their own members and allies that the United States was not all-powerful and impossible to defeat.

By the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, there had been plenty of Mormons prominently displayed before the public eye—almost a parade of them in the 1990s and 2000s. Name almost any arena of American life, and Mormons could point to recognizable co-religionists. Mormons made their marks in business, literature, sports, journalism, government and politics—even on reality television. On the whole, Mormons were satisfied with the treatment their fellow Saints received. They were portrayed as different, yet respected—even accepted. There were signs that a growing number of Americans saw Mormons as one more intriguing piece of the nation’s pluralistic puzzle, as Mormon peculiarities seemed more interesting than threatening. Even when they were the targets of comedians, Mormons recognized that this too was somehow a cultural status symbol. This chapter considers examples of that phenomenon.

This chapter discusses the celebrations of conquest of Ciudad Vieja: the Paseo del Pendón Real (Procession of the Royal Banner) and the Fiesta del Volcán. It presents the earliest descriptions of Mexicanos' participation in these celebrations. The militias of Ciudad Vieja customarily marched in Paseo del Pendón Real every year to celebrate Ciudad Vieja's conquistador heritage.