The five years or so after World War II saw a wave of novels dealing centrally with male homosexuality. They fall roughly into two groups. First, a group of novels about military life, including Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951), covered homosexuality as an important component of their gritty realism. Second, a group of novels set during or after the war, including Charles Jackson’s The Fall of Valor (1946), Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), and James Barr’s Quatrefoil (1950), featured gay protagonists and explicitly engaged the plight of the gay minority. The social mobilizations and disruptions of the war and its aftermath enabled new gay visibility and nascent pro-homosexual politics—but also the deepening stigmatization and surveillance of homosexuality. I argue that the novels named above, among others, attempt to work through the ambiguous social position of homosexual identity produced by the war. Oscillating between pathologization and affirmation, these novels typically prove unable to imagine the integration of gay men into society, even as they are energized by a discourse of liberal tolerance.

Systems approaches were an early part of the development of norms research as a subfield of International Relations but have been eclipsed by approaches which emphasise the role of actors, processes, and relationships. However, with new scholarship beginning to explore complex interactions of different norms and their relationship to the structure of the international system, the time to reassess existing systemic theories of international norms is now. This chapter traces the use of different types of systemic norms theory, including the norm life cycle, norms-as-structure, biological and ecological understandings of norm interaction and evolution, and complex systems theory (including regime complexes). By understanding international norms as emergent properties of a complex international system, we focus scholars’ attention on how the international system itself can affect the emergence, diffusion, contestation, and evolution of international norms and vice versa. The chapter finishes by employing a systems approach to understanding norm challenges regarding the rule of law.

The globalisation of advocacy and policy networks, including the dynamics of power that shape them, is integral to the emergence and evolution of norms. Yet the relationship between norms and networks remains undertheorised. How far and in what ways do changes in network structures affect the dynamism and diffusion of norms? Despite the cross-over empirically, and early scholarship on the role of advocacy networks in diffusing norms, the scholarship on international norms and that on transnational networks have subsequently developed on their own. This chapter explores the missing link between transnational networks and norm contestation by studying the spread and localisation of the ‘women, peace and security’ norm bundle. Networks do not merely serve to spread norms aka transmission belts. Rather, they are mechanisms of norm emergence, contestation, and transformation as well as diffusion. The transnational network spawned by UN Security Council resolution 1325 established a process to keep building the norm (bundle) and dialogue about it. Just as ‘norms’ are works in progress so too are the networks that support them. More attention needs to be focused on the changing nature of the agents and on the content of the evolving norms in discerning legitimacy or success of norms.

Many recent books, including the present one, aim to identify and destroy dozens of myths in the history of science. This destruction is only too easy for a “myth” that is just an enduring mistake. To qualify as a bona fide myth a false claim should be persistent and widespread and have a plausible and assignable reason for its endurance and cultural relevance. The most interesting myths for historians have an additional attribute: they transmit a useful caricature or an inspiring allusion. Although erroneous or fabulous, such myths are not entirely wrong, and their exaggerations bring out aspects of history that might otherwise be ignored.

Chapter 4 fundamentally rethinks the identity of “composite” or “hybrid” creatures as they were embodied and experienced in Crete and the southern Cyclades from the late third to mid-second millennium BCE. I argue that, when pondered closely and in their contexts, many of the creatures to which we apply this label in fact would have been experienced not as counterintuitive compounds of body parts stemming from other species, but, instead, as whole beings that were perceived as being similar to a range of other creatures. These lines of similitude could concern matters of form as well as other aspects of the creatures’ natures (e.g., color, efficacies). With this, the traditional category of the “composite” being is set aside as a larger swath of interconnected creatures comes into view. These remarkable creatures share amongst them the quality of having apparent connections both beyond the Aegean, with thingly embodiments of beasts from overseas, and more locally, with other Aegean fabricated and biological animals. An iconic creature of the Aegean Bronze Age, the griffin, provides a jumping off point for different parts of this discussion, as we reconsider the creativity realized in such beasts.

This chapter explores the role of Antioch as a military base for centuries, from the days of the Seleucid kings to the campaigns against the Persians.

This chapter examines the print cultural history of queer pulp fiction in the 1950s, paying special attention to obscenity challenges as well as to the cultural afterlives of pulps in contemporary queer culture.

The 1830s were dominated by the cholera pandemic (1826−37) and epidemics of influenza, typhus, and typhoid (1836−42). These events were so important at the time that the discourse of popular protest became interwoven with the language of contagion and of sanitary reform. The reformist unrest of the 1830s was recast in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841) as the 1780 Gordon riots. This chapter explores the extent to which the political and religious unrest in Barnaby Rudge mimics epidemic transmission by placing the novel alongside modern epidemiological studies of urban riots. Further, Dickens connects the 1830s discourses of epidemic and riot with madness, focussing on the problem of the undiagnosability of madness. Barnaby Rudge raises important questions about the transmission of dangerous ideas. Moreover, it connects these to the problem of individual culpability in the case of intellectual disability.