In their 1936 book, Negro Folk Songs as Sung By Lead Belly, folklorists John Lomax and his son Alan presented a section, “Lead Belly Tells His Story,” as reliable autobiography. Research has demonstrated that the words presented as Huddie Ledbetter’s (Lead Belly’s) were not transcribed from speech, but written and edited by the Lomaxes, building on and augmenting stories Ledbetter allegedly told them. This book sets out to explore, through primary source research, a more accurate story of Ledbetter’s early life up through his months spent traveling and working with the Lomaxes.

On 2 December, Sigmund Romberg and Dorothy Donnelly’s The Student Prince in Heidelberg (or The Student Prince), a romance-filled operetta that does not have a happy ending, opened on Broadway, later becoming the longest-running musical of any sort to open on Broadway in the 1920s. Set in nineteenth-century Heidelberg, its tale of a prince who must leave behind his young love, a waitress at the inn he frequents, is set to an expansive musical score that features waltzes, marches, a buoyant drinking song and more. Other musicals that followed later in the month included Betty Lee, set in Southern California with a plot concerning a footrace in which a phonograph is the prize. Revues also appeared as the year drew to a close, further emphasizing the ubiquity of the genre.

John and Alan Lomax first encountered Huddie Ledbetter at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in the summer of 1933, while they were recording songs for a book eventually titled American Ballads and Folk Songs. A year later, they recorded him again, including an appeal he made to Louisiana governor O.K. Allen. This chapter explores the history of Angola, conditions there during Ledbetter’s incarceration, and Ledbetter’s extensive efforts to achieve his own early release.

Future highlights of the careers of many who appeared on stage in 1924, including Evelyn Laye, Florence Mills and Adele and Fred Astaire, are summarized, as are the legacies of musicals such as Kid Boots, Il paese dei campenelli, Madame Pompadour, Gräfin Mariza, Rose-Marie and The Student Prince on stage and screen.

Moving into New York City, the Lomaxes and Ledbetter are eager to cash in on the interest in the performer. Everyone from Macmillan publishing to The March of Time (the radio show and its brand-new newsreel) seek to engage in contracts with Lomax on Ledbetter’s behalf. Fearful that Ledbetter will find his own opportunities in Harlem, the Lomaxes relocate to a borrowed farmhouse in Connecticut, 50 miles from the city, and John has Ledbetter sign a management agreement. In exchange, Ledbetter’s fiancée Martha Promise is brought north from Shreveport for a well-publicized wedding. Amidst the chaos of the March of Time film shoot, Lomax has Ledbetter sign a revised management contract, adding a cut for Alan and reducing Ledbetter’s share.

Many of the musicals that opened in 1923 and played into 1924 hearkened back, somewhat nostalgically, for simpler times, though the stories were often fraught with deceit and sometimes could be a bit salacious. The lead female characters in such works ranged from a young waif who ends up travelling with a circus (Poppy) to a Russian empress (Catherine), a royal mistress (Madame Pompadour) and a young Spanish woman who finds herself in a complex labyrinth of romantic entailments (Doña Francisquita).

The historiography on South Asian overseas migration in the colonial era has focused extensively on the history of indentured labour. This was a system of recruitment of workers on a fixed contract of three to five years with a single employer, at the end of which they could re-indenture, find other employment or have their passage paid home. These contracts were prominently used by private employers to hire plantation labour in sugar, rubber, tea and coffee plantations following the abolition of slavery and by rural Indians to escape from poverty and/ or discrimination. They were also used in government public works departments, in railway construction and in the military. Those who signed such an agreement (known as a girmit in north India) described themselves as girmitiyas. Although guaranteed food, shelter and employment, and subject to periodic inspections, those in the hands of private employers overseas could be exploited as they were often working in remote locations and were legally not free to leave until their contract had expired or they (or their family) had bought their way out of it. Although never allowed in Sri Lanka or Myanmar, and superseded by other forms of migration by the beginning of the twentieth century, more has been written about South Asian indentured labour than any other form of historical migration from India, partly because it was subject to government regulation and is therefore unusually well documented in colonial archives.

Within the literature on indentured labour, most of the writing has revolved around migration statistics and the debates between anti-slavery campaigners, planters, British imperial officials and, latterly, the complaints of Indian nationalist politicians, leading up to the effective abolition of indentured overseas labour contracts by 1920. The voices of the migrants themselves are not so often heard, nor those of the many other Indians who were not on contracts of indenture who migrated at the same time. A classic text, Hugh Tinker’s A New System of Slavery, drew its inspiration from the early campaigns against indentured migration launched by the anti-slavery movement in Britain. However, in recent years, a new scholarship has been emerging, especially from within the diaspora – most prominently in South Africa – which sheds light on the highly varied social lives of migrants.

This chapter traces the history of the essay against the backdrop of changing theories of distraction in the long eighteenth century. As the population of urban centres grew, readers’ seemingly waning attention spans had to counter a barrage of auditory and visual stimuli. Everyday diversions were compounded by literary ones: falling paper costs led to an explosion of print material, forcing the periodical essay to compete with a dizzying array of prose fiction, poems, sermons, and histories. Focusing on a series of prominent eighteenth-century and Romantic essayists, particularly Samuel Johnson, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb, we argue that the essay form is powerfully shaped by its engagement with the wandering mind. Debates over distraction that began in the Enlightenment continue to shape the genre today, as modern essay forms – New York Times essays, blogs, Twitter feeds – continue to structure themselves around assumptions about short attention spans.

This chapter traces the rigorous intellectual work of philosopher-pedagogues José de la Luz y Caballero, Félix Varela y Morales, and Enrique José Varona, demonstrating their shared anti-authoritarian pedagogy, exemplified not only in how they transformed the teaching of philosophy and science at the University of Havana, but also in their liberal and republican views of politics and their model roles as public intellectuals engaged in the righting of social ills. The analysis demonstrates that the three men’s philosophical and pedagogical arguments were modernizing and progressive for their time and might therefore appear to challenge the class and racial interests supporting the tyrannical regime imposed by Spain on the island. At the same time, the chapter complicates this view of their contributions to education and philosophy with examples of their periodic blind spots with regard to authoritarian abuses around them or their failures to speak out against such abuses.

A graph superimposes the growth–decline curves of major Stirrup Rider Empires, from 600 to 1200. While being a major advance in horse riding, the stirrup just offers a short term for the intermediary phase of Rider Empires. Expansion of Islamic Caliphate was the towering event. It surpassed the Xiongnu area record. Apart from Tang, Tufan in Tibet, Liao, and Seljuk, all other medieval empires remained of modest size. In population, Song in 1125 briefly reached 38% of the world population – the largest percentage any empire has ever reached. The Caliphate altered the language mix throughout North Africa, introducing the Arabic. The Seljuks did so from Central Asia to Anatolia, introducing Turkic. The Caliphate clashed with Tang in Central Asia in 751. The forces of an empire reaching to the Atlantic Ocean confronted for the first time those of an empire that reached to the Pacific. Neither realized the momentousness of this skirmish. Western Europe developed feudalism, a maddeningly complex multistranded hierarchical order, which does away with single territorial authority.

In their report on the ‘social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in India’, the Sachar Committee (2004–2006) noted:

The members of the committee thus hinted at the importance of context in defining women's role vis-à-vis their community. They suggested that Muslim women are more likely to act as guardians of community identity—either out ‘of their own volition’ or ‘because of community pressure'—at a time when large sections of India's Muslim population feel discriminated against. By adopting ‘visible markers’, women come to embody a community identity to be protected from external interference. In this type of context, any attack against women's visibly Muslim markers quickly comes to be seen as an attack upon the entire community. The recent row on the hijab ban in Karnataka (2022) is a good case in point.

Projecting women as guardians of community identity reinforces, in turn, the notion of the ‘Muslim woman’. Be it in the media or in political discourses, Muslim women in India and elsewhere are often projected as a homogeneous category—‘oppressed and often shrouded in a stifling burqa’. These images then feed into equally homogenising notions of Islam. To counter these (mis)representations, scholars have for a long time challenged the monolithic conception of the Muslim woman. In her anthropological study in Delhi's Zakir Nagar (near Jamia), Nida Kirmani stresses the need to examine how gender and religious identity ‘continuously form and re-form along with various other identities’, thus highlighting the ‘contextual nature’ of these identities. Before her, already, several scholars insisted on the need to take into account socio-economic factors, such as education or employment, in order to understand the living conditions of Muslim women in India.

Although LGBTQ+ affirmative counseling is promoted through mental health professional guidelines, standards for training counselors in affirmative practice remain inconsistent and underdeveloped. In this chapter, we propose an adaptive strategies model for LGBTQ+ responsive counselor training and supervision, along with practice guidelines for educators that are grounded in professional standards, current research, and allyship development. Additionally, we review common training challenges and best practices to support LGBTQ+ trainees and promote allyship behaviors among all trainees.