A Journal of the Plague Year defeats any attempt at generic classification. It is a scientific survey of the plague’s possible physical causes but it includes considerations of the plague’s allegorical significance; the story interweaves the prose forms of history, journalism and anecdote with governmental proclamations and astrological predictions; and the main narrative constitutes a fictional memoir, spiced with eyewitness narrative and logical argument, documents, religious adjuration, and practical advice. Throughout, the perspective of a frightened but acute observer lends it a remarkable verisimilitude that challenges modern readers to expand their idea of what a novel actually does – or is. This chapter maps Defoe’s remarkable generic mixture in a gripping story both ’Publick’ and ’Private’ that is still relevant today.

This chapter considers the emotional registers of Mohamed Ali Jauhar’s periodicals The Comrade (f. 1911) and Hamdard (f. 1913) around Delhi’s urban pasts during the first few years of the construction of New Delhi. The two papers successfully mobilised Delhi’s Muslim population on the issue of urban demolition works. The emotional expression of grief took an anti-colonial turn with the Kanpur mosque incident in 1913 when authorities denied the sincerity of Muslims’ feelings. Grief was no longer turned inwards as in previous reformist movements but decried as the result of colonial oppression. Much of the agitation thereafter aimed at displaying grief to pressurise the colonial state. It claimed the right to patriotic feelings, cultivating an emotional identification between memorials of past Muslim power and a pan-Indian Muslim identity in the making.

Better redress programmes demand local ownership and participation. Redress programmes always involve trade-offs between competing values; therefore, decisions about programme design and operations are likely to be better made when those decisions include those most closely affected. This concluding chapter underlines the argument for flexible programmes that enable survivors to control their journeys through the redress process. In closing, I outline the potential benefits of providing monetary redress as part of a holistic suite of remedial policies.

This chapter takes a break from ICJ proceedings and turns to international trade litigation. In Brussels, Commission lawyers Jasper Schoonraad and Duncan Doyle are preparing the European Union’s defence in a WTO dispute about imports of palm oil. The chapter is devoted to the difficult business of making a persuasive case before an international court, and reviews the building blocks of a good written brief. The skilful collection and organization of factual evidence, the ability to formulate legal arguments that resonate with the judges’ sensibilities, and the reputation of counsel in their professional environment are the elusive hallmarks of success as an international litigator. However, what distinguishes an excellent brief is its internal logic. To make a truly strong case, the counsel must develop a tight and coherent narrative that provides the court with the means to comfortably rule in their client’s favour.

“Graignes in Historical Memory,” explains why little was known about the meaning of Graignes for more than four decades. The villagers and the paratroopers pursued their own lives. Both groups were curious about the fate of the other, but contact between the veterans and the villagers was largely non-existent. Memorials were dedicated in Graignes. After the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, however, the ordinary people who did extraordinary things began to reach out to one another. Veterans of Graignes, Colonel Frank Naughton and Lt. Colonel Earcle Reed, who had been career military officers, lobbied the Department of the Army to honor the civilians who had aided the paratroopers in 1944. In June 1986, in a grand ceremony, the Secretary of the Army awarded Distinguished Civilian Service Medals to eleven residents of Graignes. Since then, there have been numerous reunions between the villagers and their descendants and the paratroopers and their descendants.

Thomas Browne’s curious A Letter to a Friend (op. post. 1690) is an ars moriendi tract organized on early modern medical ideas about consumption, a disease understood as virtually pyral, a metabolic combustion of the body. Browne’s framing of mortality is more elaborately developed in his celebrated Urne-Buriall (1658), a virtuoso’s survey of worldwide mortuary custom throughout history, and a commentary on the impersonal state of human remains in cremation, inhumation, and other styles of corporeal disposal. Composed in the mid-1650s, these two works on the dust and ashes of mortal relics attend to humans' origin in dust in cognate varieties of burning: the reduction of flesh to dust by pyral and febrile flame, and the apocalyptic fires that will consume the world in ashes on the last day. Ash and dust represent the resistless anonymity of people's particulate fate, and produce anomalies of memory: in Urne-Buriall Browne is absorbed by the vagaries of identifiable remains, their random survival or effacement; in the Letter, however, although the disease itself leaves only wasted bodily fragments, the patient’s exemplary life is recorded and memorialized by Browne as a textual monument.

Increasingly scholars engage with the role of the material world in relation to social movements and the importance of the material world in limiting and expanding efforts for social justice. Regulation of space, use of objects to uphold or erode bias, and construction of objects as political tools are but some of the relationships outlined by scholars who position the material world as more than a backdrop to social change, but inherent to political and social actions.

Chapter 6 examines how veterans responded to Vietnamese war memory at four key sites: the War Remnants Museum, Hỏa Lò Prison Museum, Sơn Mỹ Memorial and Museum, and Long Tân. When veterans returned to Việt Nam, they discovered that the Vietnamese narrative of the “American War” rendered them perpetrators of atrocities or, at best, passive victims of imperialist warmongering nations. While some returnees embraced Vietnamese war memory, others rejected or challenged it, and many struggled with the tensions and contradictions between different versions of the war. Across national and ideological lines, veterans displayed a selective acceptance of Vietnamese war memory, isolating elements that corroborated their memories of war and rejecting the legitimacy of others. This chapter also considers varied response to the Vietnamese erasure of veterans’ wartime allies and concludes by examining how Australian returnees increasingly approached the site of Long Tân through the Australian tradition of “Anzac” pilgrimage.

This final chapter explores the aesthetics and materiality of stone, water and air. Theories of assemblage, non-human agency and differential time show how innovative was Scott’s approach to the relationships between people and the environments in which they live. Time frames are a key theme throughout the book: here, Jeffrey Cohen’s theory of lithic (stone) time, Rob Nixon’s account of the ‘slow time’ of many forms of environmental violence and Donna Haraway’s investigation into how animals over time became ‘companion’ species raise questions about permanence, solidity, transformation and modes of perception. Weather, seascapes and night skies are explored. Case studies compare Scott’s poetry and fiction with writing from American transcendentalism. Geographically, the chapter ranges from Scotland’s Borders, the Solway Firth, Shetland Isles and deeper Atlantic Ocean towards Iceland and Greenland. The chapter ends with episodes from Redgauntlet and Guy Mannering that look to the night sky, space and the stars.

In the deeply divided political environment of interwar Central Europe, memories of the 1919 revolutions were fitted into preexisting cognitive frameworks of both political Left and Right. My focus is on certain “acts” of remembering, such as the writing of memoirs, the celebration and memorialization of the dead, and debates about the past. This chapter focuses on the two main political “communities of remembering” which developed in the postrevolutionary period in Bavaria and Hungary, the Right and the Left. It in some ways leaves aside the majority of the population, for whom the 1919 revolutions often were simply rolled into the story of the many horrors of the time: war, hunger, displacement, personal loss, inflation, and disease. Perhaps partly because the events of 1919 were not universally viewed as pivotal, even at the time, and often were relegated to a minor role compared with the events of the world war, those with a strong political commitment on the Left or the Right fought not only for their interpretation but also for the historical significance of the revolutions.

World War I triggered a memorial boom unparalleled in US history as constituencies of every stripe rushed to commemorate the role of “their boys” in the conflict. The memorials, numbering in the thousands, assumed both traditional forms and myriad new guises, including the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a host of unprecedented “useful memorials”—such as bridges, community centers, and football stadiums—whose commemorative suitability was hotly debated. “Great men” sculptures were eschewed while honor rolls of the dead became ubiquitous. Well-known artists created powerful sculptural memorials, including some that evinced disillusionment with the war, but most memorial sculpture—to the chagrin of the art world—comprised commercially produced doughboys, often in heroic poses. Despite their omnipresence, the memorials largely failed to fix the war’s place in American memory: No commemorative form could sufficiently compensate for the war’s ambiguous narrative and unsettled meaning, especially in the wake of US participation in the Second World War. The centennial period has brought renewed attention to World War I memorials and has catalyzed an effort to erect a national World War I memorial in Washington, DC.

Chapter 8 investigates postwar partisanship, first in enduring postwar election effects from local casualties, then in war memorialization, and finally in the partisan dynamics of Union veterans’ organizations. I describe the political aftermath of the war and test whether wartime voting patterns – including casualty effects – persisted after the fighting and dying ended. I find the massive scale of wartime death continued to shape local political voting patterns in postwar presidential elections for decades, a first in casualty-opinion studies. The chapter also shows how partisanship predicted which states were first to commemorate their dead on Decoration Day, to document their state’s war service in bureaucratic records, and to honor their veterans and the dead with local monuments. Chapter 8 also finds more chapters of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) veteran’s group in prewar Republican places, along with evidence of the GAR’s indirect impact on General Ulysses S. Grant’s 1868 election, when veterans organized actively to boost Republicans.