Thirty galloping horses at Astley’s Circus in 1824 underpinned the presentation of the Battle of Waterloo, which subsequently became a staple circus act during the first half of the nineteenth century. Military action was imbedded in the early circus, indicative of both an increased number of soldiers in nineteenth-century society and its ensuing militarisation. This chapter explores the use of horses and other animals in the re-enactment of war in the nineteenth-century circus. War re-enactments expanded to encompass colonial conflicts, so circus became complicit in colonising practices and attitudes to colonised peoples in the British colonies and towards exotic animals that were shipped in increasing numbers. In the 1880s a distinctive war-re-enactment genre emerged, exemplified by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which toured internationally and was integrated back into circus. This chapter argues that it was the action of horses and other nonhuman animals that instigated and made battle re-enactment seem authentic but that circus war action replicated the pattern of actual war in which animals went unnoticed. This pattern was reversed with the Boer War re-enactment. Directed by circus entrepreneur Frank Fillis for the 1904 St Louis Exposition, it sought authenticity by featuring the death of fifty horses on the battlefield.

Popularised in the late twentieth century, by the second decade of the new millennium well over 350 social circus programmes around the world had begun to offer classes in the circus arts free of charge, with the expressed aim of bringing about some form of social transformation. Typically boasting an ‘inclusive’ approach, goals range from fighting social stigma, alienation, and stereotypes, to bridging cultural communities, to building self-esteem, community capacity, and breaking cycles of poverty. This chapter explores the social and cultural conditions that have led to the rise of this movement and the kinds of impacts that are being observed among programme participants. It further offers an introduction to the pedagogical approaches typical of social circus programmes as well as the institutional structures they tend to adopt.Particular focus is placed on programmes operating in the Americas, placing these within the context of the global social circus movement.By offering a sketch of how social circus programmes function, the chapter demonstrates the ways in which social circus practices embody particular social values and promote particular forms of kinaesthetic sociality.

The American railroad circus during the Gilded Age (1865–1900) and the Progressive Era (1900–1920) experienced a vibrant and hugely successful golden age. During that time of tremendous national growth, the circus industry reached its highest number of touring companies, boasted the largest number and variety of acts, and made the industry’s most significant number of advancements in technology and management. It connected urban and rural areas, rich and poor, and national and international audiences of all colours and races. However, this was the height of the Jim Crow era in which racial minorities, especially African Americans, experienced legal forms of discrimination and brutal violence. All aspects of American life were affected by strict racial limitations as citizenship was irrevocably linked to whiteness. This chapter argues that the American railroad circus of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era embodied the budding imperialistic spirit of the nation and reflected, supported, and challenged the race norms of the age. It reveals how African Americans, a large American minority racial group, used the circus to advance their own careers and goals in an everchanging cultural landscape. These challenges often took the forms of economic and cultural independence.

In 1966, Catholic philosopher Michael Novak published a story on the “New Nuns” in the popular American magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, that portrayed a new image of Catholic sisterhood. The new fresh face of American sisters, or Catholic women religious, sported a modified habit that altered the veil to expose a sister’s hair (her bangs) and a shortened skirt that may have revealed that nuns did have legs, but also allowed for freer movement.1 Sisters appeared to be on the move by the mid-1960s, leaving behind traditional ministries such as parish schools. This first modification of religious life was followed by another, as many congregations shed their religious habits for secular dress by the 1970s.

In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh sets out to explore how literary forms and conventions have contributed to a ‘narrative imagination’ that is ill-equipped to grapple with climate change. He claims in passing that in comparison with the novel, which is his primary generic focus, literary non-fiction has been better able to circumvent culturally embedded ‘modes of concealment’ that prevent us from thinking the ‘unthinkable’. Yet, Ghosh does not explore how and why creative non-fiction might be more amenable to addressing climate change. Through a reading of The Great Derangement as creative non-fiction, as well as other examples of the genre, this chapter examines the genre’s potential benefits and limitations for shaping a ‘narrative imagination’ that disrupts the ‘modes of concealment’ bequeathed by colonial modernity.

When discussing diversity among early Christians, one can point to both geographic dispersion and to doctrinal difference. The first kind, geographic diversity, can be treated briefly, since its contours have been catalogued in detail by other scholars. The larger task for this essay is to reassess various doctrinally distinct groups in light of recent scholarly debates to see what conclusions can be drawn for the second century, with special reference to the corpus known as the Apostolic Fathers.

The title of this essay assumes that “church” was an operative category for those second-century Christian authors whose writings are included in the collection called “the Apostolic Fathers.” Such an assumption is valid, provided that it is accompanied with the caveat that the Greek noun ekklēsia, which is typically rendered with the English word “church,” is but one image among many used to describe communities of Christ-followers in these writings, even as ekklēsia is of particular importance because it is found as a designation for these groups in each of the documents under consideration in this essay. Another necessary qualification is that statements about and reflections on Christ-following ekklēsiai (“churches, assemblies”) in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers are contingent and not systematic. The modern theological discipline of “ecclesiology” tends to frame its considerations of the identity and mission of the church in conversation with Scripture (especially the New Testament) and tradition. Yet the second-century writings known as the Apostolic Fathers were penned before there was a New Testament as such and at a time when Christian tradition was yet in its infancy. Thus, we find in these important nascent witnesses snapshots of early Christ-followers debating and defining the identity, mission, and organization of their groups. In order to manage the disparate available evidence from 1 Clement, 2 Clement, the Letters of Ignatius, the Letter of Polycarp to the Philippians, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Epistle to Diognetus, this essay concentrates on three separate but related questions: (1) How is the identity of the church presented? (2) What is the work of the church? (3) What, if anything, is said about the ordering and structures of the church?

The Catholic Church in the United States includes among its institutions a vast social welfare network that has been important for countless individuals, including the Catholics who support it, the Catholics who benefit from it, and the non-Catholics who have been recipients of its services. This essay provides a narrative of that development, identifying the key characters and turning points from the eighteenth century to the present day. It explores the intersection of “American” and “Catholic”: what the church learned from the American culture around it, and what the church contributed to it through its teachings about charity and its example of putting those teachings into action.

We investigate the most critical personal and musical competencies associated with successful drum kit playing. Invoking our combined teaching and performance experiences, we identify a set of interpersonal, aesthetic, and performance competencies, apply them to profiles of successful drummers, and situate them as instructional objectives for novice drummers. We analyse musical expression as personal interpretative response, isolation of temporal elements, expressive use of the drum kit, and perspectives of expert drummers. Popular music performers clearly use signature techniques and gestures to extend their personalities through performance. We review the creative competencies in this process, then focus on techniques: swing, groove, and pocket, the overlapping 'feel'-based constructs that invoke beat subdivision, beat centredness, elasticity in interpretation of time, and dynamic balance among voices on the drum kit; centredness, indicating how 'on top' of the beat drummers play; elasticity, the dynamic manipulation of time when entering or exiting phrases, playing fills, set-ups, or ensemble hits; and dynamic balance in the drum kit, the distribution of timekeeping in the hi-hat in relation to the kick and snare drum. We consider these various personal and musical competencies in the social context of ensemble music making, and make recommendations for future instruction and critical discourse.

The definition of the drum kit – and consensus regarding its appropriate study – have changed dramatically over the course of the instrument’s history. This chapter is a rough guide to unpacking that history, and in doing so it treats the drum kit not as a fixed object, but a theoretical concept. What follows is a discussion of the drum kit in theory divided into three parts: (1) the invention and changing status of the instrument; (2) the trajectory of drum kit studies within the wider field of musical instrument scholarship; and (3) a discussion of the ‘drumscape’ as a theoretical tool. Building on Kevin Dawe’s concept of the ‘guitarscape’, the drumscape is a lens through which to consider how the drum kit has been written about, thought about and talked about; the power and agency of the drum kit in culture and society; and what kind of experience it is to play the drum kit (an experience involving both the mind and the body). Viewed through the lens of the drumscape, the seemingly simple term ‘drum kit’ can be understood from at least four different but related perspectives: the drum kit is a technology, an ideological object, a material object, and a social relationship.

On Easter Sunday in 2010, nineteen elementary and middle school students in the District of Columbia awoke to find themselves featured in The Washington Post.1 These children had captured the newspaper’s attention because the previous night they became members of the Catholic Church. During the Easter Vigil at St. Augustine’s, “the mother church of Black Catholics” in the nation’s capital, these girls and boys received the sacraments of baptism and holy communion. All of these new Catholics attended St. Augustine parochial school where non-Catholic children constituted the majority. However, on their first day back at school after the Easter Vigil, the number of Catholic students enrolled at St. Augustine’s rose from 51 to 70 out of a total of 185.

The perception of Roman Catholic faith, practice, and polity as being either corrupt, superstitious, undemocratic, or somehow “un-American,” dates back to the arrival of British Protestants in New England in the seventeenth century, and has morphed into newer shapes more recently in social media. It has been labeled “the deepest bias in the history of the American people” by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; others have termed it the “anti-Semitism of the intellectuals” and “the last acceptable prejudice.”1