Hard Women, Hard War establishes a new interpretation of Southern women's wartime behavior by examining their interactions with the Federal army. From the very beginning of the war to the bitter end of the conflict, women negotiated military policy toward civilians, motivated by their political loyalties, which were grounded in their ideas of home. Free and enslaved Black women encouraged Federals to destroy the plantation household to make way for homes built in freedom, pushing the military to make hard war on unrepentant rebels. White Unionist enslavers' loyalty to the United States was predicated on protection of their homes and human property, and when the army moved toward harsher war policies, these women emulated the defiance of elite Confederate ladies. White women's treason spurred the army to collaborate with loyal Black women while visiting destruction on disloyal enslaving women. Even as the war became more destructive, Southern women refused to stay on the sidelines, insisting that war compelled them to move outside their homes to defend their homes. Women's very existence-as wealthy enslavers or someone else's property-hung in the balance, and these hard women waged a hard war to secure future privilege or future freedom.

This book explores and analyzes the dynamic and multifaceted roles that forests play in supporting and accelerating progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development positions forests at the heart of efforts to eradicate poverty, ensure food and water security, combat climate change, and conserve biodiversity. Forests are not only integral to Sustainable Development Goal 15 (Life on Land) but also provide cross-cutting contributions to the other SDGs, making them indispensable in the broader landscape of global sustainability. The book emphasizes not only conservation or productivity, but also a holistic understanding of forests as agents of change, ecologically, economically, and socially.

This book features 24 chapters organized around thematic areas including forest-based climate solutions, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, community livelihoods, forest governance, the green economy, and forest health and education linkages. The chapters examine cases, trends, and region-specific challenges while offering practical pathways and recommendations aligned with the SDGs.

This book examines the incompatibility of Western democratic models within African socio-political contexts. The book explores historical, cultural, and structural factors that make the wholesale adoption of Western democracy problematic for African nations. It argues that democracy, as practiced in the West, often overlooks indigenous governance systems and traditional values, leading to political instability and governance failures. The work proposes alternative frameworks rooted in African realities, aiming to foster sustainable governance and development. This book's focus is on whether Western liberal democracy is fundamentally incompatible with the historical, sociocultural, and cultural conditions of Africa. Critics contend that Africa's community ethos and spiritual traditions are incompatible with Western democracy's emphasis on individualism, adversarial politics, and secularism.

This book traces the modern history of ineffability, the idea that mystical experience lies beyond the reach of language, across twentieth-century scholarship on mysticism. Moving from William James to W.T. Stace and beyond, it examines how theories of ineffability were shaped not only by philosophical commitments but also by rhetorical strategies and disciplinary politics within the academic study of religion. Through close readings of major figures including James, Underhill, Otto, Zaehner, Stace, Smith, Hick, Forman, d'Aquili, and Sells, the book uncovers a crucial historical shift: from early understandings of ineffability as relative, what cannot be fully but can still be partially expressed, to later claims that mystical experience or its source is absolutely ineffable, wholly beyond conceptual mediation. This "absolutization" of ineffability, the book argues, served to defend a perennialist vision of religion's universal core and to shield it from contextual critique. Concluding with a semiotic "meta-argument" against absolute ineffability, the study proposes that a theory of relative ineffability better accounts for both mystical discourse and ordinary experiences of the unsayable. In doing so, it reorients the study of mysticism toward a more nuanced understanding of how language, experience, and meaning continually shape one another. It is an important read in the study of mysticism.

This book presents an exploration of the methodologies and theoretical frameworks involved in the analysis of commingled human remains, featuring twelve case studies (plus an introduction and conclusion) that highlight the complexities of these assemblages. Both intentional and unintentional commingling present significant challenges and opportunities within bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology, making this topic increasingly relevant in contemporary research.

Building on previous works, Commingled and Disarticulated Human Remains (2014) and Theoretical Approaches to Analysis and Interpretation of Commingled Human Remains (2016) (both published with Springer), this updated work serves as a critical resource for scholars, offering insights into the application of methodologies and theoretical models explored in earlier volumes. The case studies not only reflect current practices but also project future directions for the analysis of commingled remains over the next decade. This book, like those that came before it on this topic, will be an excellent reference for researchers and practitioners seeking to deepen their understanding of the intricacies of commingled remains and their implications in both academic and applied settings.

Environmental and occupational toxic exposures rarely leave a single, unmistakable mark on the brain. Instead, they quietly, cumulatively, and often invisibly alter cognition, emotion, and behavior. Neuropsychology of Toxic Exposure brings clarity to this complex terrain, offering a comprehensive framework for understanding how toxic agents disrupt brain-behavior relationships across the lifespan and how those effects can be assessed, treated, and prevented.

Bridging neurotoxicology, neuroscience, and clinical neuropsychology, this volume translates biological injury into functional meaning. It examines how metals, pesticides, solvents, gases, biological toxins, and extreme exposures affect attention, memory, executive functioning, and emotional regulation. The emphasis is on subtle neurocognitive change, longitudinal assessment, and the integration of neuropsychological data with neuroimaging, biomarkers, and exposure history.

Written for clinicians, researchers, and policy professionals, the book goes beyond mechanisms of injury to address rehabilitation, recovery, forensic evaluation, and public health implications. Case examples illustrate diagnostic challenges and differential considerations, and later chapters explore lifespan vulnerability, environmental justice, and the role of neuropsychology in litigation and policy development.

At its core, Neuropsychology of Toxic Exposure argues that brain health is a shared responsibility-one that requires scientific rigor, clinical precision, and informed policy. By integrating science, practice, and prevention, this book offers essential guidance for protecting cognitive function in an increasingly toxic world.

This book provides in-depth coverage of:
* Neuropsychological principles for assessing toxic exposure
* Brain-behavior effects of metals, pesticides, solvents, gases, and biological toxins
* Acute versus chronic exposure and cumulative neurotoxicity
* Developmental and lifespan vulnerability, from prenatal exposure to aging
* Neuroimaging and biomarker integration in exposure assessment
* Cognitive rehabilitation and recovery following toxic injury
* Occupational and environmental health considerations
* Forensic neuropsychology and toxic exposure litigation
* Environmental justice, prevention, and public policy implications

Neuropsychology of Toxic Exposure is an essential resource for professionals seeking to understand, assess, and respond to the cognitive and emotional consequences of toxic exposure in humans.

This book brings together scholars and practitioners to examine research, training, and clinical practice aimed at improving first responders' mental health. Police officers, firefighters, correctional personnel, emergency dispatchers, and crime scene investigators face mental health challenges at rates far exceeding those of the general population. Continuous exposure to trauma, high-stakes decision-making, and organizational stressors contribute to elevated risks of anxiety, depression, substance use, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The book is organized into three major sections: Mental Health Research, presenting recent studies on occupational stress, help-seeking behaviors, and innovative interventions such as Virtual Reality therapy and specialized assessment tools; First Responder Training, detailing evidence-based programs including Crisis Intervention Teams, Co-Responder models, and specialized curricula for responding to individuals with severe mental illness, dementia, or communication barriers; and Clinical Practice, offering guidance on culturally competent care, technology-enhanced wellness strategies, and ethical considerations in therapeutic work with first responders.

By integrating empirical findings with practical applications, Advances in First Responder Mental Health: Volume 1 will serve as an essential resource for psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, public safety administrators, and policy makers committed to safeguarding the mental health of those who protect our communities.

This book offers an interdisciplinary, historically grounded analysis of competing visions of the bioeconomy and argues for their reconciliation through the concept of oikos: responsible yet adaptive economic stewardship under conditions of ecological constraint and uncertainty. Drawing on political economy, economic history, and anthropology, it proposes a holistic policy perspective that moves beyond the antagonistic imperatives often implicit in the terms "bio" and "economy." By reframing the bioeconomy as a socio-ecological project rather than a narrowly technocratic one, the book highlights the need to align economic activity with long-term ecological sustainability and social responsibility.

Placing biotechnology at the centre of this discussion, the volume shows how biotechnological practices have long contributed to the sustainable use of biological resources, well before the molecular biology revolution of the 1970s. It examines contemporary strategies that integrate New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) and AI into national and supranational bioeconomy agendas addressing climate change, resource scarcity, and food insecurity. Increased confidence in the precautionary use of NGTs is linked to their continuity with classical mutagenesis and to growing biosafety knowledge and practical experience. Engaging debates on precaution, innovation, and sustainability, the book surveys enabling policy frameworks that support the safe use of biotechnology in pursuit of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It will be a valuable resource for scholars, policymakers, regulators, and professionals working at the interface of science, technology, and sustainability governance.

How Indigenous communities are transforming the idea and practice of reparations through their laws and leadership

In recent decades, a growing number of Indigenous groups across Canada have initiated movements for colonial reparations. Too often, the settler state has responded by attempting to enfold their work into a narrative of reconciliation that consigns colonialism to "sad chapters" of history. In this book, Pauline Wakeham calls attention to the ways that Indigenous reparations movements exceed state reconciliatory frameworks and prompt a deeper reckoning with the enduring structures of settler colonialism.

To expose and redress colonial injustices, Indigenous reparations movements draw upon long local traditions of political organizing as well as transformations on the global stage since World War II. As international law formulated new instruments regarding gross human rights violations, atrocity crimes, and the reparative obligations of states, colonized peoples across the world have sought to mobilize these mechanisms in their struggles for decolonization and reparations. While international law has provided strategic tools for this work, the colonial foundations of the field continue to limit how it conceptualizes and shapes access to justice. Indigenous Reparations and Settler Colonial Reckoning traces the specific implications for Indigenous nations whose land is occupied by settler states-nations whose legal orders remain subordinated to both settler "domestic" and international legal systems.

Amid this complex multijurisdictional terrain, how are Indigenous peoples carving out space to articulate their own visions of justice? To answer this question, Wakeham learns from the Inuit-led Qikiqtani Truth Commission as well as reparations movements for residential schools and the High Arctic Relocations of 1953 and 1955. These movements offer powerful lessons about the importance of centering Indigenous leadership and laws in redress processes, thereby connecting reparations to the living enactment of Indigenous rights.

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A stolen child returns home, revealing colonial violence and the enduring power of Indigenous historiesMore than a century after her death at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Sophia-an Unangax? child taken from her home on Saint Paul Island, Alaska-finally returned to her community. This powerful book tells the story of that return and the histories it reveals. Centered on the rematriation of the author's great-aunt from Carlisle's cemetery to her homeland, the narrative traces the colonial systems that removed Indigenous children from their families and confined them in church- and government-run boarding schools.

Weaving archival research, family history, and community knowledge, Lauren M. Ayagakuchax? Peters demonstrates how Unangax? ways of doing history reshape the telling of the past. Rather than presenting a distant academic account, she foregrounds storytelling, Indigenous ethics, and relationships to land, family, and ancestors. Through these approaches, she exposes the structural inequities that enabled the seizure, incarceration, and burial of Indigenous children far from their homes.

At the same time, Sophia's Return offers a guide for communities seeking to bring their own children home from boarding school cemeteries. It documents the first rematriation project carried out with, by, and for Alaska Native communities connected to Carlisle, while situating that effort within longer histories of colonialism and Indigenous resilience.

Ultimately, the story of Sophia's return affirms a future grounded in cultural resurgence, community survival, and the enduring power of Indigenous knowledge.

This edited volume examines the intersection of research and practice in STEM education by presenting empirically grounded examples developed by research groups across Europe. Bringing together contributions from researchers and practitioners, the book investigates how STEM approaches can be meaningfully integrated into diverse educational contexts. The chapters address critical gaps in research-based evidence on STEM pedagogy, the epistemological underpinnings of STEM education, and the design of innovative curricula and pedagogical models that support teacher professional development. Collectively, the volume offers a comprehensive resource that advances scholarly understanding of STEM education while providing educators with research-informed insights to enhance student engagement and learning in real-world settings.

This monograph develops the concept of anti-hermeneutics and diagnoses the age of COVID-19 as one marked by anti-hermeneutics. Crist describes and defines the concept of anti-hermeneutics as constituting an active resistance to many of the hermeneutic principles or virtues that Gadamer has affirmed throughout his life and works. This includes an emphasis on conversation or dialogue for genuine interpretation and understanding, the cultivation of practical and social reason, and the call for solidarity in the world with others. Furthermore, anti-hermeneutics promotes the outsourcing of individual decision and judgment, encourages conformism, and participates in the corruption of language as the medium of hermeneutic experience. Ultimately, anti-hermeneutics marks the condition for the impossibility of a community's collective ability to interpret, understand, and come into agreement with one another.

After developing this account of anti-hermeneutics, the author discusses in specific terms how the age of COVID-19 is profoundly anti-hermeneutical. The latter part of this book focuses on how anti-hermeneutics has played a significant role in how we have collectively approached, and continue to approach, pandemic lockdowns, masks, COVID-19 vaccines, and censorship. While these topics are still considered by many to be controversial, the claim is that avoiding these discussions is itself an anti-hermeneutical gesture, and in doing so, will only exacerbate the modern hermeneutical crisis. The concept of anti-hermeneutics will be of scholarly interest for those who are familiar with or actively research Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics. However, this book will be accessible and of interest to any generally educated person with an interest in philosophical approaches to COVID-19.

The story of generations of Ojibwe women who built a thriving Indigenous home in the urban heart of Minneapolis

Minneapolis became home to White Earth Ojibwe people not through a centralized movement but through generations of determined, behind-the-scenes work by Ojibwe women. These women were organizing not in the streets, but in sewing clubs, churches, classrooms, and kitchens to bring people together and form interconnected communities. Rooted in care, tradition, and persistence, their labor laid the foundation for a thriving urban Indigenous population that continues to shape the city today.

An Ojibwe Home in the City tells the histories of Louise and Emily Peake, Winnie Jourdain, Ignatia Broker, and other Ojibwe women who endeavored to make space for Native families in South Minneapolis. From the 1930s through the 1970s, these women built institutions, secured services, and fought for culturally grounded education - all while working inside systems never intended for them. Their efforts led to the creation of vital community hubs such as the Division of Indian Work and the Minneapolis American Indian Center and helped ensure that future generations would stay connected to their culture, even in an urban setting.

Far broader than a local history, this book challenges what we think we know about Native activism in the twentieth century, shifting the focus from protest to perseverance and steady commitment. Intimate, compelling, and deeply grounded in community, An Ojibwe Home in the City is both a tribute and a revelation - an essential and personal account of how Indigenous women made a place for their people in a changing world.

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This book explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is empowering China's educational reform and development from a policy perspective. It examines policies and practices shaping digital transformation across all levels and types of education in China in the AI era. By drawing on practical experiences, representative case studies, implementation pathways, and emerging trends, this book provides a systematic examination of how AI is advancing educational development in China. It serves as a valuable reference for policymakers, educational administrators, researchers, and practitioners seeking guidance on planning, implementing, and governing AI-driven educational transformation.

This book makes available for the first time in English Klaus Holzkamp's ground-breaking book on learning Lernen: Subjektwissenschaftliche Grundlegung. It offers fresh perspectives for today's international debates about how to re-imagine learning and education for future society. Current debates in psychology, educational sciences as well educational politics go beyond the transmission model of education and the traditional short-cut between teaching and learning and are oriented either toward student-centred learning or world-centred education. Holzkamp's book is the first to systematically bridge these approaches and offer a rigorous subject- and world-centred theory of learning.

Divided into 2 volumes, this book presents the first half of the original in which Holzkamp outlines his psychological theory of learning; the need for this understanding within education and how it differs from conventional behaviourist, cognitivist and action-theory-based learning models. This book will appeal to students, psychologists and practitioners with an interest in educational psychology, critical psychology and educational science.

In the face of increasing climate disruption, this book provides a design-centered investigation of how cities might adapt, recover, and prosper. It positions resilience not as a technical add-on, but as a fundamentally social, ecological, and spatial practice that must be embedded across scales, from materials and buildings to neighbourhoods, infrastructures, and urban systems.

The chapters show how climatic threats including heat, flooding, water scarcity, and catastrophic shocks are changing our conception of urban space in a variety of worldwide situations. The contributions demonstrate how nature-based solutions, water-sensitive planning, circular construction, and regenerative urbanism are now inextricably linked to resilient design. They also show how new technologies like geographic simulation, XR environments, and digital twins are increasing the designer's ability to foresee unpredictability and test flexible solutions before putting them into practice.

The main issue addressed is evident: urban development practice still has difficulty converting resilience concepts into spatial, material, and community-grounded design activity, even in the face of increased awareness of climate risk. In response, this book compiles experimental techniques, conceptual developments, and empirical research that show how resilience may be operationalized in actual projects and locations. It focuses on transferable tactics that can influence professional practice, education, and policy, such as regenerative neighbourhood models, nature-based drainage, climate-responsive public spaces, and circular recovery.

Resilient by Design ultimately argues that the future of cities depends on re-aligning ecological systems, technological innovation, and social inclusion through design thinking. It provides an interdisciplinary knowledge base and a forward-looking agenda for shaping climate-ready urban environments. The book is intended for researchers, urban designers, architects, planners, landscape architects, and policymakers engaged in climate-resilient and sustainable urban development.

This research examines how students at the German Jordanian University (GJU) imagine their futures, particularly in the context of the German Year program, which involves a semester abroad and an internship in Germany. Since young adults -and especially youth in Jordan's crisis-affected region - are underrepresented in future-oriented studies, the project fills an important gap. Using a one-year, multi-sited ethnographic case study, it explores how students negotiate and reshape their imagined futures over time and across borders. The study introduces the concept of doing future, emphasizing that the future is not a distant horizon but an ongoing, everyday practice actively shaped by individuals within social structures.

A unique look at Washington's landmark hotels and its cultural history

Any large city's marquee hotels are a great barometer of its social and cultural life. Washington DC, is exceptional in this regard, because visitors-from officials, diplomats, and lobbyists to everyday tourists-are so critical to the city's essential purpose as the nation's capital. The city's hotels have also been residences for locals and have served as important social centers, hosting events ranging from weddings and concerts to inaugural balls and the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Palaces of the Public is a lively, in-depth, highly illustrated, history and architectural tour of the city's hotels, past and present. John DeFerrari explores the fascinating evolution of hostelries, from the taverns of the eighteenth century, to the boarding houses of the pre-Civil War era, to the creation of the modern hotel. Special chapters address the history of hotels for women, tourist hotels, and hotels run by and for African Americans in the days of segregation. Later chapters highlight the rise of motels in the mid-twentieth century, boutique hotels in recent years, and the impact of historic preservation on saving old hotel buildings.

Readers interested in Washington's history, architecture, and historic preservation will be drawn to this book, with its unique perspective on how the city's culture and society developed over time.