This chapter reprises the arguments advanced in the first four chapters of the book, and assesses the question of what “lessons” history can teach on that basis. It argues that the habits and methods of analysis, interpretation, open-ended inquiry, and intellectual flexibility that study in History cultivates are uniquely valuable in the specific circumstances of our own time, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It argues that it is these habits, rather than any specific political values, that make History uniquely valuable as a form of education for citizenship. It argues, finally, that this is the only approach to the civic value of history education that is compatible with the ethical principles foundational to the discipline of History. In closing, it presents the case for viewing the understanding that history offers us no lessons as the most important lesson history can teach us. This is a lesson that can teach us to think and act with due deliberation, to inquire more deeply before acting, and to act in full confidence that our actions will have unintended consequences.

Camille's Inspiration and Anchor

During his lifetime, Camille Bulcke appeared to be an enigma, leaving several of his acquaintances nonplussed to see a devout Christian, an ardent missionary and an ordained priest with such inherent and infinite reverence for Tulsidas and his Rama bhakti. Indeed, Indian spirituality and religious traditions have attracted a fair share of Westerners, who left their homes to adopt India and embrace its religious and cultural practices. This illustrious list includes luminaries such as Annie Besant (England-born Annie Wood), a renowned Theosophist and a prominent campaigner for Indian independence; Sister Nivedita (Irish-born Margaret Noble), who became the disciple of Swami Vivekananda; Mirra Alfassa, or the ‘Mother’ of Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry; and Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade), a follower of Mahatma Gandhi. Undoubtedly, for these foreigners, India's cultural and spiritual values were the initial attractions, though most of them ended up participating in the independence movement that was pursuing self-respect, self-rule and anti-colonial nationalism. Camille was an exception; he joined the anti-colonial nationalist struggle but not as a political activist. Instead, he participated as a cultural campaigner seeking the respect and restoration of Hindi to its rightful place, by challenging the hegemony of English well beyond the formal end of British colonial rule. Unlike Sister Nivedita, Mirra Alfassa and Mirabehn, Camille came to India as a Christian missionary, and did not have a living person as his guide, mentor or patron; instead, he chose Tulsidas, a sixteenth-century Hindu devotional poet as his anchor.

Tulsidas as the core of Camille's personal, literary and spiritual life is all the more puzzling given that the Indian poet did not figure even remotely in Camille's world when he took the life-changing decision to renounce and become a Christian priest and later to take up missionary work in India. He considered it a divine command to give up worldly affairs and take his priestly vows, drawing inspiration from Father Constant Lievens, the wellknown Belgian missionary who served in the Chhota Nagpur region in India. It was only upon reaching India that Camille witnessed the hegemony of the colonial language, English, over the indigenous Indian languages.

In this chapter, I describe my path from adolescent musing about the dialectical processes in historical materialism to a theoretical framework for understanding human development. I moved from a search for single factors in the individual or the context to an appreciation of the multiple influences that come into play during the course of time. I found a home in the burgeoning field of developmental psychopathology that integrated developmental approaches and the study of mental illness to reveal the complexity of transactional influences from the child and the social environment that produce health or illness. I found that despite an emphasis on fostering resilience in children, environmental risk factors seem to undermine child competence at every age. The burden of multiple risk factors in the family, peer group, schools, and neighborhoods overcome child competencies. Contemporary systems approaches have proven that dialectical processes were the answer all along.

Nepal is one of the few contemporary contexts where blood sacrifice is still a common, authorised and official practice, one which is closely associated with political power. As such, it forms an ideal framework for studying the relationship between sacrifice and violence, which is here considered in terms of a relationship between legitimate violence and transgressive violence.

In a stroke of fortuitous timing, my first visits to Nepal took place during the great buffalo sacrifices of the autumn. I thus found myself, due to politeness, unable to decline invitations and having to stand as close as possible to the scene, holding my camera close to my face like a screen to protect me from the violence of the spectacle and the spurts of blood which resulted from it.

Sacrifice and violence operate in this context in their most absolute form – killing – thereby diminishing the importance of the usual care needed in the use of these categories for wider meanings. Killing constitutes the core of violence, hiṃsā, for speakers of Indo-Aryan languages, who see in it its primary definition. It also forms the constituent act of blood sacrifice, bali dān, regardless of the intentions or logic behind it, the context in which it is performed or any practices which may come to take its place.

In the pages that follow, we shall reconsider the sacrificial device by considering it from its core trait of violence, which is so visible in the unfolding of the ritual itself and yet so hidden in the texts devoted to it. In order to do so, we will attempt to tread the tightrope between an analytical distance, which has often denied the violent nature of such rituals, and a sensitive proximity, which enables one to measure their importance but does not allow understanding the mindsets of those who perform them. One way of getting around these two pitfalls is to consider the sacrifice in terms of its framing and acting out of violence, how violence is transformed by the sacrificial rituals, but also how they themselves are transformed, either when caught up in a violent movement or, alternatively, when the legitimacy of their violence is contested. Nepal offers all of these possibilities.

This chapter studies norm contestation that led to norm clarification (frame and claim agreement). It compares the United States’s (US) contestation of the right to self-defense with its contestation of the prohibition of torture in the context of international terrorism. These episodes of contestation weakened the contested norms while ongoing. However, they eventually led to norm clarification through widespread acceptance of the US’s broadening of the right to self-defense and through widespread rejection of a narrowing of the torture prohibition. This norm clarification respectively increased or affirmed social and relative strength of the contested norms. The variation in outcome indicates that the preferred norm interpretations of materially powerful states do not always prevail. In this chapter, I engage in a fine-grained discourse analysis. Among others, this illustrates that whether proponents of norm change seek generally applicable norm change or covert exceptionalism affects argumentation, and that in-group reactions to norm interpretations are consequential.

Against the ‘Current’

On a train from Calcutta (Howrah) to Allahabad, a tall, lanky European with blue eyes and an auburn beard, clad in the white robe of a Christian priest, sat, immersed in a book. In India, during the 1960s and 1970s, the train-running schedule had enough stoppages at major stations to allow a thorough inspection and recharge–refuel of the engines. At the Asansol station, the train took that extra halt; the European priest put his book down and got off the train to stretch his long limbs. Upon his return to the seat, he found the gentleman sitting next to him reading his book; his fellow passenger wore an expression of sheer amazement as he flipped through the pages. Seeing that the book's owner was back, the gentleman hurriedly put the book back and blurted, ‘I did not know that you knew Hindi’ (Ponette 1987, p. 69). The European priest nodded his head in affirmation, and the two started talking; it soon became apparent that the foreigner-looking clergyman was exceptionally proficient in Hindi. The two talked non-stop for several hours until the train reached Allahabad. As the tall priest prepared to leave the train, his fellow passenger said, ‘What a loss for me; I missed the chance to converse with you in Hindi for the first three hours of our journey between Calcutta and Asansol’ (ibid.). As the two passengers bid adieu, the one on the platform started walking towards the exit door of the Allahabad railway station. He was Reverend Father Camille Bulcke, also known as Baba Bulcke by then.

Camille’s appearance, dress and demeanour all marked him as a foreigner, yet his sense of belonging to India held great significance for him throughout his life. He spent most of his life in Ranchi, Jharkhand (erstwhile Bihar), where he taught Hindi and Sanskrit at St Xavier's College. Manresa House, the residential compound of the Jesuits in Ranchi, proudly displays his statue in his white priestly robe. In more recent times, St Xavier's College has installed a bust of the legendary Christian priest on its premises, with his favourite words from the Ramcharitmanas (Divine Lake of Ram's Deeds) inscribed underneath.

In this autobiographical statement, the author conveys several lessons learned over the course of developmental research on social cognition, moral commitment, character, and purpose. The lessons include: (1) always check theoretical claims against real-world observations and intuitions; (2) always start a research program with deep attention to the field’s past achievements, including those made decades ago; (3) employ available insights from humanities domains such as literature, philosophy, and theology; and (4) approach any new research topic with both small-scale idiographic methods in addition to larger-scale nomothetic study methods. The chapter closes with an explanation of the author’s choice to focus on problem-centered research rather than general theory-building, with the hope that studying specific problems would inform theory-building, so that the research benefits would flow both ways, from theory to real-life problems and back again.

Large Language Models can be used to summarize and simplify complex texts. In this study, we investigate the extent to which state-of-the-art models can reliably operate as “smart readers”: applications that empower consumers to tackle lengthy, difficult-to-read, and inaccessible standard form contracts and privacy policies.

Based on all the specifics teased out in Chapter 15, this chapter takes a wide view. While the narrative arc focuses on the general contours of the biblical account and the chapter retells the narrative of the United Monarchy from beginning to end, it is the archaeological and historical reality that is the driving explanatory force. Thus many aspects of the biblical account (especially those that relate to the relationship between Saul and David) are presented very differently than the traditional model, as we retell the biblical story as we think it really happened.

Of the numerous scholars of Hindi among the British administrators and European missionaries who came to India over the last two hundred years – most notably John Gilchrist, George Grierson, F. W. Keay and Edwin Greaves – and lately among the post-colonial ‘South Asianists’, only Camille Bulcke seems to have the distinction of becoming a household name in the extensive Hindi-speaking areas of the country.

That is because one can find in countless Hindi homes a copy of his Angreji–Hindi Kosh (English–Hindi Dictionary), first published in 1968, in its third revised edition by 1981, and reprinted altogether 19 times already by 1991 when I belatedly acquired my copy. As Bulcke explained in his preface, he intended it for the use of those who already had English but wished to learn Hindi (like himself) and hoped that it might prove useful ‘also to those whose mother tongue is Hindi, especially those engaged in translation work’ (like myself). But he also added a third category of people to whom this work might be of help: ‘Indian students who wish to improve their knowledge of English’. One may suspect that it is this last category which has benefitted the most from Bulcke's triple-function dictionary, for it nicely supplements or even supersedes the usual English–English dictionaries, where the explanation given is, for many early learners, nearly as challenging as the words they look up.

Bulcke also provided the correct pronunciation of each word in the Devanagari script, which is incomparably more phonetic than the Roman script. Moreover, he cut out the frills which needlessly complicate the life of a language learner. For example, the title of his work has for its first word not the English word ‘English’ but the Hindi word ‘Angreji’, which is here spelt not as ‘Angrezi’ with a z but as ‘Angreji’ with a j, the common pronunciation of the word without the non-native sound z. Bulcke had obviously learnt his Hindi well enough to know what is indigenous to it and what is not (Bulcke 1968, vii).

Good knowledge of immunophenotypic features of normal cells in various compartments is important when potentially pathological specimen are sent for examination in the flow cytometry platform. This chapter proposes a comprehensive description of these features, together with some functional and/or maturation characteristics of some cell types. Blood and bone marrow are considered, but also body fluids and, briefly, some tissues.

Edward Said (1978) introduced the notion of imaginative geography: Groups with a hunger for land essentially reimagine the landscapes they desire, elevating the notion of themselves as the owners of the land they seek, a process of reinventing the meaning of territorial landscapes as ‘imagined geography’. This would help them frame arguments justifying why they are entitled to take possession of the landscapes they desire. Before the actors themselves see and conquer the land, they entertain themselves under a discursive understanding that they are the owners of the landscapes that they covet. Hence, this imaginative geography is a theory of human action deriving from the interplay of material impulses and human consciousness (Gregory 1999); it is ‘performative’. Reimagining landscapes is the first step to acting upon them and creating the very outcomes on the land being imagined (Gregory 2004: 17–20). In this process, hegemonic forces with territorial ambitions refashion themselves as owners of the territory they desire by asserting themselves as masters and sovereign of the land.

Here, one wonders, what is the landscape that has emerged as part of the subaltern project of the imagined geographies? This entails the counterimagination and a contra-discourse of the imaginative geographies by the oppressed, intertwined with the notion of egalitarianism and justice, which could be realized through ecospatial struggles. If this imagined landscape and the struggle for the same is for livelihood and basic human and ‘post-human’ survival, the struggling poor would be forced to follow the logic of their own ‘moral economy’ that historically protected their rights to subsistence (Thompson 1991). The large number of ‘land-wars’ (Levien 2013) that have been taking place in Latin America and Asia, particularly in India, offers how the subalterns imagine their struggles as part of their livelihood and citizenship rights. If it was Muthanga in Kerala in 2003, it was Chengara in 2007. If Muthanga was occupied by the Adivasis, it was the Dalits – formerly the agrestic slaves and the most marginalized of all the outcastes of the Hindus – that occupied the Chengara part of the colonially evolved Harrisons Malayalam plantations. Even after three and a half decades of land reform experimentation how does one explain the Dalit land struggles in Kerala? Can Chengara replace Occupy Muthanga in terms of strategies, struggles, and outcomes? How far did the state succeed or fail in addressing the Dalit land question, their resource endowments, and livelihood?

Recent years have seen new technologies disrupt many established industries and institutions, continually testing our imaginations and expectations. Accordingly, it is no surprise that technology is disrupting the law. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic generated new disputes and a need for expanded access to online means for resolving those disputes, especially for consumers. As a result, lawyers, judges, software developers, and policymakers have been exploring ways to utilize technology in expanding access to the courts and dispute resolution. With this in mind, scholars and policymakers have argued for “online dispute resolution” (ODR) to expand access to justice (A2J). This chapter discusses the evolution of ODR in recent years, as well as emerging issues in ODR that deserve attention in order to craft ODR that lives up to the promise in advancing A2J.

The chapter provides an in-depth examination of the Christian community in Cuicul (now Djémila, Algeria), with a focus on its baptismal complex dating from the late Roman Empire. The study explores the complex’s architectural layout, including a double church and baptistery, as a reflection of the community’s strong Nicene-Catholic identity. It argues that the adoption of Roman imagery, honorary titles, and even a pre-baptismal washing ritual indicates a conscious melding of Roman tradition with Christian practice. This fusion served to deepen the community’s identity, especially against the backdrop of religious dissension during the Donatist conflict. The chapter also raises questions about the limitations of allegorical interpretations of art and architecture, advocating for a nuanced approach that incorporates literal, cultural, and socio-political meanings. It concludes that Cuicul’s Christian community effectively harnessed the unifying power of Roman culture to reinforce its Nicene identity during a period of intense theological strife.