Two years after Hurricane Hugo, which in 1989 devastated the unincorporated US territory St. Croix, and one year prior to her death from cancer, African Caribbean American poet Audre Lorde wrote a poem called “Restoration: A Memorial – 9/18/91.” The poem grew partly out of a series of journal entries that Lorde made in the wake of Hugo on St. Croix, her home at the time, and bears witness to the storm’s catastrophic aftermath, which, in Lorde’s view, was “man-made.” In her journal Lorde suggests that the Caribbean island had been made sick by the capitalist US government, which exploited it for its resources and then neglected it after the disaster – just as her own body had been made sick by pollution from US industry on the mainland and then sicker by the profit-driven “Cancer Establishment.” In this chapter, I will explore Lorde’s concept of restoration in both her poem and her journals. The concept empowered her to confront and resist the environmental injustice she saw affecting the environment around her along with her individual body.

This chapter addresses efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity on US public lands and in US outdoor recreation through a case study of the organization Latino Outdoors. It argues that Latino Outdoors works to upend the exclusion of Latinx peoples from outdoor recreation and public lands through constructing and disseminating a Latinx Outdoor Recreation Identity. In doing so, Latino Outdoors disrupts a US cultural logic which incorporates the labor of Latinx peoples while denying their substantive citizenship as well as their political and ecological belonging. In contrast to legacies of Latinx outdoor labor, Latino Outdoors embraces Latinx leisure, and specifically Latinx outdoor leisure. Furthermore, the organization emphasizes historical forms of Latinx environmental knowledge, and thus environmental belonging. Latino Outdoors creates new forms of Latinx environmental belonging founded on leisure rather than labor. These forms of environmental belonging operate within Latino Outdoors as a proxy for political belonging and the grounds for political action.

From its foundation in the fourth century, to its fall to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century, the name “Constantinople” not only identified a geographical location, but also summoned an idea. On the one hand, there was the fact of Constantinople, the city of brick, mortar, and marble that rose to preeminence as the capital of the Roman Empire on a hilly peninsula jutting into the waters at the confluence of the Sea of Marmora, the Golden Horn, and the Bosporos. On the other hand, there was the city of the imagination. To pronounce the name Constantinople conjured a vision of wealth and splendor unrivalled by any of the great medieval cities, east or west. The commanding geographical location together with the city’s status as an imperial capital, the correspondingly monumental scale of its built environment, the richness of its sacred spaces, and the power of the rituals that enlivened them drove this idea, as its urban fortunes waxed and waned in the course of its millennial history. The devastations of earthquakes, fire, plague, and pillage notwithstanding, the idea of Constantinopolitan greatness prevailed. If there was one thing about which the diverse and often quarrelsome populations of the Middle Ages could agree, it was on Constantinople’s status as the “Queen of Cities.”

Chapter 11, “Sacred Dimensions: Church Building and Ecclesiastical Practice,” examines the relationship between church building and ecclesiastical practice in Byzantine Constantinople. It outlines the ways in which architecture accommodates and responds to the exigencies of ritual both on a practical, and on a symbolic level to reveal how church buildings were understood symbolically as worship spaces, manifestations of piety, wealth, power, and prestige, and places of perpetual commemoration.

This chapter explores a variety of philosophical engagements with Cicero in the long eighteenth century, with particular attention to the varied, and at times contradictory, purposes that Cicero might serve. Following an introductory discussion of Cicero and John Locke, the chapter proceeds thematically, turning first to Cicero and eighteenth-century ethics, then to eloquence, civil religion, and law, and finally to Cicero’s status as an exemplar of the active life. In exploring these themes, the chapter deals with the Earl of Shaftesbury Anthony Ashley-Cooper, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, John Adams, James Wilson, and Immanuel Kant.

This chapter assess the philosophical foundation for Cicero’s views on human social relationships and community in the Roman Republic. Starting from De officiis 1.153, I argue that such a foundation is provided by the specifically Stoic notion of the community of gods and human beings, and of human beings as sharing rationality. The De officiis is then assessed on the basis of Cicero’s emphasis on the social aspect of virtue. The remainder of the chapter traces this same theme throughout Cicero’s theoretical writings (including his works on rhetoric), first in the earlier De inventione, De legibus, and De republica, and second in the De finibus and the Tusculanae Disputationes. Hence the commitment to this Stoic foundation for sociability is a constant in Cicero’s oeuvre.

“We think back through our mothers if we are women” Virginia Woolf famously declared in A Room of One’s Own, and she relished rescuing from obscurity women of earlier generations who had been lost to history, lost to memory. This chapter addresses the more complex relationship of Virginia Woolf with her own mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Drawing on Woolf’s diaries and letters, her unfinished memoir, her great autobiographical novel To the Lighthouse – and on Julia Duckworth Stephen’s own extant writings – the author explores Virginia Woolf’s lifelong, evolving relationship with what she called the “invisible presence” of her mother, who had died when she was a girl of thirteen.