A cultural and legal history intertwined with a deeply emotional meditation on the course of life, memory, and the documents that define us.

During the 1940s and 1950s, an untold number of American children suffered devastating injuries when the fur-like fabric on the chaps of their Gene Autry-branded cowboy playsuits exploded into flame. Barbara Young Welke was researching this history when her teenage daughter unexpectedly died.

The shock of Welke's loss transformed her understanding of the children and their families. Her experience also led her to question the norms of scholarship and of writing. Historians are trained to separate the personal from the intellectual, to be suspicious of emotion. These and other norms are embedded in and reinforced by the calling card of academics, the curriculum vitae. Welke wondered how that cold document-with its literal meaning, "the course of life"-had become a form that excludes so much of what gives life meaning. What impact did that have on what we know, how we know it, and how we understand ourselves? Similarly, Welke wondered, what might we see if we looked at the history of the cowboy suit tragedy as more than a matter of lawsuits brought by grieving families? Here, Welke traces the making, marketing, and selling of the cowboy suits; the lengths the defendants went to avoid and limit liability; and the meaning of the injuries, deaths, and legal settlements in the course of these children's and families' lives.

Writing with Fire interweaves the histories of the cowboy suit tragedy and the curriculum vitae. Grounded in archival and legal research, oral histories, and letters Welke wrote her daughter following her death, Welke offers an inimitable examination of trauma, law, autobiography, and identity. The result is revelatory and unforgettable: a provocative historical reflection on life and death, depression and war, markets and families, law, power, and precarity in modern America.

What happens when the West interferes in the sexual politics of nations in the postcolonial Global South

Since the end of the Cold War, many Western nations have increasingly sought to integrate gay rights into their diplomacy, foreign policy, and international development programs. In The Great Refusal, Jason Ferguson examines what happens when pro-gay Western forces intervene in the sexual politics of countries around the world, especially in the postcolonial Global South. He finds that these interventions have unintended consequences, as the global clashes with the local. They create tension and divide nation-states from within, undermine local democratic structures and the collective conscience, and, paradoxically, fan the flames of resentment against the West, against gay rights, and against gay people.

Ferguson's mixed-method and multiscalar account of what he terms the "geopoliticization of homosexuality and gay rights" offers an in-depth analysis of a single case: Senegal, where attempted global intervention exacerbated the very problem it meant to solve. Drawing on a wide range of data, including ethnographies, archival materials, and literature, and moving among global, national, and subnational levels, Ferguson demonstrates how such uninvited interventions ultimately turn homosexuality into a vector through which local populations express their broader resentments against the West. Global interventionism, he argues, has turned same-sex loving people into scapegoats of the twenty-first century.

Ogling, catcalling, wolf-whistling: such everyday intrusions from male strangers greeted American women from their first forays into urban space. Watching the Girls Go By is the first book-length history of the phenomenon we know today as street harassment. Spanning more than a century, from the 1860s to the 1980s, this book reveals how street harassment became normalized as part of urban life and restricted women's freedom of movement through the city.

Historian Molly M. Brookfield charts how American social and cultural discourses cast behaviors like catcalling as the natural entitlement of white, middle-class men, while scapegoating and punishing men of color and working-class men as the stereotypical-and supposedly more dangerous-harassers. She mines a rich archive of newspaper reports, popular culture, women's writings, public policy, and more to uncover how class, race, and gender shaped Americans' experiences of public space, including who claimed a "right" to women's bodies, who was seen as a sexual threat, and how women fought back against harassment. Watching the Girls Go By challenges readers to reckon with how the long history and lasting impact of the seemingly trivial intrusions that constitute street harassment continue to shape public space today.

A vivid portrait of rural and working-class life that links the dynamics of social ties to far-right political alignments

Rural and working-class voters in France have increasingly supported the politics-and the worldview-of the country's far right. What accounts for this realignment? In Those Who Remain, sociologist Benoit Coquard immerses himself in working class life in the rural and industrialized northeast areas of France, exploring the political allegiances of those left behind after the rural exodus of the last century. Coquard-himself a native of this social milieu-documents the intense friendships and family ties that cement social bonds. He shows how competition for employment, gender discrimination, and the relationships between whites and descendants of immigrants shape new forms of collective consciousness that have found expression in right-wing ideologies.

Coquard moves beyond conventional explanations for the rise of the far right, describing working-class cultural models that run counter to the values of schooling, formal credentials, and idealized visions of social harmony. In this society, reputation is paramount; you may compete with your peers, but you must also help those you think of as your real friends. Central to this world is not "we, the workers" or "we, the locals" but "us first," a claim of precedence over others that echoes the far right's historic slogan "the French first."

Coquard's analysis sheds light on the perennial dilemma-not limited to French politics-of whether it is possible for the left to win back the rural working classes. His account suggests that the problem goes deeper than policy positions and party platforms.

In the second edition of Higher Education Finance Research: Policy, Politics, and Practice readers will find a coherent presentation of the history, definitions of terms, sources of data, and applicable research methods. While maintaining the core concepts of the First Edition, this new edition augments discussions with advancements in policy and practice over the past decade. Chapters introduce new topics such as the value of higher education, dual enrolment and workforce training funding models, free college, and consumer perspectives on the price of college. Additionally, it expands the exploration of accountability in higher education to include college closures.

New features include 3 to 5 questions at the end of each chapter to support faculty. Chapters 8 and 9 have been completely revised to focus on the concepts of "value" in higher education and a student's view on affordability, respectively. Other chapters have been updated to reflect new approaches to funding and changes in understanding since the first edition.

Higher Education Finance Research: Policy, Politics, and Practice, Second Edition is designed to benefit not only students, professors, and practitioners but also policy analysts, legislative analysts, and others engaged in higher education finance at the state level.

From Serving to Thriving: Our Journey to Becoming a Student-Thriving Institution outlines the Hispanic-Serving institution's strategic serving-to-thriving plan and pathways implemented to create Student Thriving environments and support Latina/o/x student success. Each chapter provides information, lessons learned, and key takeaways or action steps others can apply in their setting. The developed Thrive framework includes ecological considerations, key responsible stakeholders in decision making roles, actions-in-activity, and student voices in defining what thriving means on a HSI campus.

This book provides a context for where to begin; providing a demographic presentation of the authors, their students, and what they have in place. Data is presented to illustrate graduation trends and historical progress, acknowledging that despite progress, there are still equity gaps to address. The authors place emphasis on student thriving as a pathway to become Hispanic thriving.

This text also provides implemented strategies and lessons learned so that others can find advantage from the author experience as they take a deeper look to who they are as they address the HSI integrated space from serving to thriving within a social community that is designed for success and leadership.

A provocative account of how empire and absolutism institutionalized slavery in America

The original draft of the Declaration of Independence condemned British kings for supporting slavery in their empire. England's two seventeenth-century revolutions were in part a reaction to the crown's proslavery policies, with politicians such as John Locke arguing that all people were born equal and that government should be based on consent. But while these principles would underpin the American Revolution, the treaty that ended that war protected the legal foundations of the plantation system in the new republic. The King's Slaves untangles this thorny history, arguing that American slavery was borne from authoritarian rule.

In this incisive and thought-provoking book, Holly Brewer challenges the notion that slavery arose naturally in the colonies through the interests of merchants and planters, showing how behind them lay a British crown that believed in absolute power over subjects and granted similar powers to proprietors and masters. British kings used their authority over navies and armies, judges and royal governors to create an elaborate plantation system that produced more crops for export and greater wealth from tariffs. Royal propaganda supported claims that some peoples had no rights while edicts and proclamations circumvented the legislative process. Brewer describes how African and Indigenous peoples resisted the king's slavery, as did some colonists, English politicians, and reformers. Yet slavery persisted, becoming enshrined after independence as a dehumanizing legal foundation of American capitalism.

A bold work of scholarship by a historian at the height of her powers, The King's Slaves shares new perspectives on America's founding, exposing empire's pervasive role in spreading and justifying slavery in the new world.

From the acclaimed author of The Fate of Rome and Plagues upon the Earth, a monumental history of the world that lays bare the devastating human toll on animal life

Humans are a force of nature like no other animal on the planet. For thousands of years, we have radically altered the destiny of other species. Today, we do so at such an accelerating rate that it is widely proposed that we live on the brink of a Sixth Extinction, comparable to the most destructive moments in the fossil record. The Last Animal provides the first historical account of humanity's impact on animal biodiversity, taking readers from the megafaunal extinctions of the Ice Age to the planetwide perils of the present.

In a masterful blend of global history with the latest discoveries in ecology, evolution, and Earth system science, Kyle Harper casts the Sixth Extinction in a new light. He meticulously documents the long history of human-driven biodiversity loss, insisting that both species extinctions and ecosystem simplification are essential to measuring humanity's impact, which is more profound than recognized. The Last Animal reenvisions the human story by highlighting a wondrous range of extinct creatures and the webs of life they inhabited. Set against a backdrop of migrations and empires, wars and revolutions, and the inexorable march of technological progress, Harper's epic narrative demonstrates how our ability to manipulate nature is a fundamental yet increasingly dangerous element of our success.

Putting the grand sweep of world history into geological perspective, Harper argues that the long view is essential to confronting the urgent challenges we face. A startling account of how much biodiversity has already been lost, The Last Animal is also a poignant call to protect what remains.

This book examines the development of statehood and symbolic representations of power amongst the Bulgar people from approximately 350 through 900 CE. This volume fills a gap in English-language medieval studies and historiography, considering Bulgar society in a modern anthropological way. This book argues that the Bulgar(ian) statehood before the mid-ninth century cannot be considered a 'barbarian' one; instead, the process of Christianization led Bulgaria to be a fully developed 'barbarian' state via a synthesis of Northern Iranian and Turkic steppe and Roman traditions by 900.

A richly illustrated history that reveals how the peoples living along the Danube frontier helped transform the Roman Empire

Crossing the Danube offers a new account of the peoples who lived along Europe's greatest river-the nearly 2,000-mile-long Danube-during the dramatic centuries leading up to the end of the Roman Empire in the West. Written sources of this period are dominated by accounts of Rome's struggle against the "barbarians" along the Danube, which marked the border between the empire and the lands beyond, and the crossing of the river by Gothic refugees escaping the Huns in 376 CE was long seen as a catalyst of Rome's fall. But, as Susanne Hakenbeck shows, that is not the whole story. The Danube was not only a political boundary, but a living landscape. Using archaeological evidence, she traces four tumultuous centuries along the river through the material world of the people who lived there.

Crossing the Danube describes how ordinary people and local elites navigated, exploited, and ultimately transformed the Roman frontier. It tells how generations of interactions-through diplomacy, trading, raiding, and recruitment into the Roman army-bound the empire and the people beyond the frontier together. By the fifth century, former "barbarians" embraced the trappings of Roman imperial power and moved toward full political participation. In doing so, the people from beyond the Danube ended up fracturing the empire.

Sweeping in scope yet rich in detail, Crossing the Danube overturns longstanding myths about the role of the so-called barbarians in Rome's collapse.

Ceausescu's Children examines the remembered experiences, institutional structures, and ambivalent ideologies of childhood under Nicolae Ceauescu (1965-1989), reconsidering dominant narratives of state socialism in Eastern Europe and histories of childhood in contemporary Europe through the lens of Romania's last socialist generation. Juxtaposing previously unexplored archives against personal recollections, Diana Georgescu argues that children and teens led normal lives in extraordinary times. They attended schools and afterschool clubs, cultivating ideological skills alongside cultured behaviors, playing expert roles of historians and ethnographers of their motherland on scientific expeditions, or serving as cultural ambassadors in international camps in the Soviet bloc and Western Europe.

Georgescu investigates how children performed daily practices of socialist patriotism and internationalism under the guidance of teachers, youth activists, and parents, emerging as socialist-cum-national subjects. Ceauescu's Children challenges the notion that late socialist education and state children's organizations were exclusively collectivist and homogenizing. Moving beyond binary representations of complicity or resistance, Georgescu argues that children, parents, and educators often met the socialist regime halfway, adapting its policies and ideologies to their interests, needs, and aspirations.

Today, half of Texas's expanding population, including the cities of Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, depends on the Trinity River, a river that has shaped the state's politics, economy, and environment for centuries. From the prairies of North Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, the Trinity established Native nations, foiled Spanish and French imperialism, stood at the center of the Texas plantation system, and fueled the growth of the state's largest cities.

In the first history of this vital river, historian Scot McFarlane illuminates how the Trinity has defined Texas history. Its floods enriched the soil and destroyed crops, its channel served as both a route and barrier to freedom, and its once-polluted waters now sustain a significant portion of the state. McFarlane's captivating narrative brims with stories of the people who called the Trinity home over the centuries: the Comanche, steamboat pilots, enslaved and freed people, sharecroppers, inmates, and millions of urban residents. The result is a fresh perspective on economic development, slavery, and the environment-revealing the Trinity not as a backdrop to Texas history but as a force that shaped it.

Teacher Dialogical Self: Professional development dynamics offers a profound and intimate exploration of teacher identity, delving into the intricate interplay between personal and professional dimensions. By providing a deep, reflective perspective on how internal experiences-such as emotions, self-awareness, and inner dialogues-shape and are shaped by the teaching role, it seeks to enhance overall effectiveness and well-being within the educational environment. This book equips educators with a nuanced understanding of their own identities, enabling them to navigate their roles with greater authenticity and resilience. Through this introspective journey, the book aspires to foster a more supportive, engaged, and balanced teaching practice that benefits both educators and their students.

Positive and healthy work environments enhance job satisfaction and workplace engagement and play a significant role in the healthy functioning of library organizations. Higher levels of workplace satisfaction and engagement also contribute to increased productivity, creativity, and performance, and by extension improved services and organizational culture. But how do we define, cultivate, and sustain positive and healthy work environments, particularly in libraries, which are often under-resourced, unappreciated or devalued, or even toxic?

Building and Sustaining Positive and Healthy Work Environments examines the opportunities, challenges, and successes of fostering and nurturing workplace environments that enhance job satisfaction, engagement, and success.

This volume revisits the role of religion in the public square with a focus on the unprecedented work of Pope Francis. As a continuation of their 2018 volume, Pope Francis as a Global Actor, the editors bring together interdisciplinary scholars to explore the myriad of ways that politics, theology, and dramatic social change met under the papacy of Francis I. Global challenges and social questions only increased in urgency since the first volume and Pope Francis continued to play an active role in many of these issues (including climate, gender, immigration, war and conflict). The volume explores the transformative moral authority that Pope Francis brought to his papacy through his thoughts, words, and deeds and how the theological foundations of Pope Francis translated into moral authority and even activism in the public sphere. Organized around the Four Bergoglian Priorities (time is greater than space, unity prevails over conflict, realities are more important than ideas, and the whole is greater than the part), this volume bridges several fields and approaches to properly situate Francis's engagement in public narratives and to understand his role as a key 21st century global leader.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online.

Focusing on significant issues affecting young people in educational contexts, and using an inclusivity lens, Educating Young People for a Sustainable Future delves into causes, consequences and proposed interventions of inequalities and exclusions. How can education contribute to securing a more socially just future and a more sustainable world?

Adopting a broad, complex understanding of sustainability, chapters cohere around the key concepts underpinning the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations - those of inclusivity, combating inequality and promoting resilience and sustainability. The collection showcases cutting-edge research considering disadvantages, challenges, opportunities and strategies for educating young people from early years to adulthood, and for those who work with, and care for, them. Under a social justice lens, the chapters cover topics such as institutional racism and strategies to effectively challenge this, issues of disability and adaptive teaching and learning strategies for teachers and students, the problem of monolingualism for inclusive learning, the promotion of health and the challenge to promote learner wellbeing by understanding the causes of 'illbeing', and more. Considering young people of all ages - both within and outside the context of formal education and the transition from formal education into the workplace - the authors collectively demonstrate that educational institutions, practices and practitioners are key to realising more equitable outcomes and inclusive experiences for young people.

Providing insight on a variety of methods, from surveys, interviews and policy analysis to visual and creative methods, participatory action research and co-creation, this content is relevant for a variety of disciplines in social sciences and humanities.

This book provides a systemic functional perspective of special lexicogrammatical phenomena in Chinese, including serial verb constructions, bi-functional constituent constructions, Subject-Predicate Predicate sentences, Subject in existential constructions, ba-constructions, and post-nominal monosyllabic localizers. These special phenomena have been the subject of ongoing debate within the Chinese linguistic community and beyond, with no clear consensus reached about their semantic functions and syntactic functions. Analysing them through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics might provide an alternative way to address these contested issues, since this approach highlights function-based linguistic descriptions, and Chinese is a language that prioritizes parataxis. The studies in this book can also help advance theorectical linguistics by offering evidence on longstanding debated issues within a particular language. The explorations in this book indicate that they are distinctive in form when compared to related typical phenomena, yet they exhibit similarities in semantic and syntactic functions from certain perspectives. Their occurrences are precipitated by specific contextual factors. In summary, regardless of the specific nature of various unique linguistic phenomena, approaching their examination from a functional perspective is feasible and desirable. This book could serve as a reference to be intended for researchers and postgraduate students in the field of Chinese linguistics, English linguistics, and theoretical linguistics.

An essential guide to giving effective and engaging talks for academics at all career stages, across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences

This book is for anyone in academia who will ever have to give a talk-which is just about everyone in academia. Presenting research is one of the most important tasks academics undertake, but few receive formal training in effective public speaking. In How to Give a Good Academic Talk, Sharon Marcus fills this gap, offering a practical, research-informed guide to an activity that can challenge even seasoned scholars. Marcus, who has given many academic talks in her career-and listened to even more-blends insights from learning and cognitive science, communications, rhetoric, and performance theory with her own seasoned judgment and firsthand observation to provide a pragmatic repertoire of dos and don'ts.

Each chapter addresses a central component of successful presentations, illustrated with examples drawn from a wide variety of academic talks, many available online. Marcus's cross-disciplinary perspective allows her to identify elements that all good academic talks have in common, while remaining attentive to field-specific norms. She defines what an academic talk is and isn't, and identifies its most important and challenging task: engaging the audience. How to Give a Good Academic Talk covers the beginnings and endings of talks, Q&A sessions, the design and use of slides, delivery, rehearsals, video conferencing platforms-and even offers wardrobe advice. Marcus's essential guide equips academics to communicate their ideas with confidence, precision, and intellectual generosity.

Everyone Asks What Will Happen to Us traces how Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto wrestled with questions that had troubled them since the occupation began: when will the war end, and what will become of us?

In examining the production and spread of knowledge in the Warsaw Ghetto, Maria Ferenc returns the point of view of the victims to its rightful place. She reveals illusions, imagination, and the social reception of a constructed image of events taking place on the other side of the Ghetto walls.

Individually and together, ghetto inhabitants created a picture of the outside world shaped by access to information and meanings attributed to news from different places. Yet the true fate of those deported "to the East" defied comprehension for most ghetto inhabitants as they desperately navigated the space between information and rumors. In Everyone Asks What Will Happen to Us, Ferenc illuminates the victims' painstaking efforts to uncover the truth, as well as, paradoxically, their own resistance to the growing body of knowledge about the Holocaust.

The story of the scandal in the LBJ administration that first brought queer life into the national political conversation in the 1960s.

In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson's longest-serving and most trusted advisor, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for soliciting sex in a YMCA bathroom near the White House. The scandal blasted across the front pages of major US newspapers, was dissected and analyzed by the FBI, and became a watershed in making straight America aware of queer life. In Outed, historian Timothy Stewart-Winter reveals that the effects of antigay policing were felt not only by the men but by their colleagues, families, and, in this case, the First Family.

Walter Jenkins's political banishment had long-ranging effects, from how Johnson conducted the remainder of his presidency to how media coverage of political and sexual scandals became more explicit and salacious. Stewart-Winter reveals Jenkins's influence and legacy, encompassing but also looking beyond the scandal. Jenkins had a significant impact on Johnson's career and how it is remembered, including both his signal accomplishment-the programs and laws that constituted the Great Society-and his signal failure: his catastrophic judgment, after Jenkins's exile, regarding the Vietnam War.

Drawing on Jenkins's previously unexamined personal papers, including hundreds of letters he received in the aftermath from ordinary Americans and government officials alike, Stewart-Winter shows how antigay policies and the revelations around them continue to reverberate today.

An integrated quantitative framework for understanding the dynamics of collective action

Collective action has been a fundamental aspect of human societies throughout history, from building irrigation systems and defenses in Neolithic times to coordinated disaster relief and scientific collaborations today. In this book, Sergey Gavrilets explains when and why groups of people cooperate, presenting a quantitative framework that unifies game theory with models of social influence, cognition, and individual and cultural variation. He shows how humans' deep susceptibility to social influence-grounded in evolutionary need to cooperate and learn from peers, reinforced by deference to parents and elders, and extended to cultural, religious, and political leaders-shapes norms, beliefs, and collective outcomes.

Integrating previously separate literatures, Gavrilets introduces explicit dynamics for norms and beliefs, quantifies the effects of individual and cultural differences, and tests predictions across societies. Drawing on formal, data-based mathematical modeling supported by behavioral experiments and studies of online behavior, he concludes that successful collective action depends on six interacting forces: material payoffs, personal norms and attitudes, social influence, cognition, evolving social norms and beliefs about others, and individual and cultural differences. Lasting cultural change, he argues, depends on norms and institutions that shape behavior through persuasion, nudging, and enforcement. Gavrilets translates this theory into practical, testable strategies for policy and design, including targeted messaging, dynamic norms, and culturally sensitive approaches, and connects it to broader theories of behavior change.

Experience a year in Los Angeles County, in all its glitter and grit, through a unique anthology that pairs essays by acclaimed writers and historians with custom maps.

When many of us picture Los Angeles, we're actually thinking of LA County. Home to roughly ten million people, the county alone is more populous than forty-two US states. Its eighty-eight cities include places made famous by Hollywood glamor and California dreaming-Beverly Hills, Malibu, and Santa Monica-but also working-class municipalities and the self-explanatory City of Industry. With a territory that includes the Pacific coastline, mountain ranges, and the high Mojave Desert, the county's landscapes have been touched by earthquakes, droughts, and, of course, devastating fires. LA County is a place of extremes: progress and injustice, innovation and stagnation.

Visions of the Southland collects essays by writers, journalists, and historians to create a nuanced portrait of LA that's grounded in the county itself-its sites, structures, and stories. Contributors-including Gustavo Arellano, Keri Blakinger, Lynell George, Christopher Hawthorne, Michael Hiltzik, Greg Hise, Carolina Miranda, Becky Nicolaides, Susan Straight, and David L. Ulin-delve into LA's infamous air pollution, movie ranches, prisons, aqueducts, urban forests, SoCal Bohemianism, and more. A custom map by Ezra Rawitsch enriches each piece and grounds the reader in specific locations throughout the county. Unfolding over the course of a year, the book traces the rhythms of politics, sports, weather, and wildlife across this sprawling and enigmatic place.

Sweeping in its scope and gorgeous in its design, Visions of the Southland will delight Angelenos, history buffs, urbanists, and map enthusiasts alike.

Public toilets determine who gets everyday dignity, freedom of movement, and civic belonging-and who doesn't.

Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

For Customers Only is the first book to tell the larger history of public bathrooms in the United States, a fascinating story characterized by persistent discrimination, squeamishness about unknown bodies, and disinvestment in public amenities. Acclaimed writer and historian Bryant Simon argues that restrooms aren't only an architectural feature, but an emblem of control and inequality. In the late nineteenth century, cities vied for the newest and biggest comfort stations to meet the demands of their bustling economies and accommodate a broad and growing public. They built restrooms with gold-domed entrances and ornamented stall doors to inspire cleanliness and order.

But officials soon grew anxious about who might take advantage of this privacy: gay men, the unhoused, and eventually drug users. And as the civil rights movement challenged segregation, officials in the north and south closed public toilets rather than integrate them. By the end of the twentieth century, only people with means could use private bathrooms while out and about-provided they made a purchase at a business. Today, as the fights over trans rights reveal, bathroom access remains a flash point across the country. Meanwhile, some municipalities are again calling for widely available public toilets, but as a tool for economic revitalization, not a public necessity.

The political and cultural history of a squirm-inducing subject, For Customers Only reveals the real and symbolic power of the most ordinary of things. Bathrooms, Simon shows, have always reflected our fragmented national values. Whether these spaces will ever become more accessible and inclusive is ultimately up to us.