This chapter provides an overview of Tehran’s urban development and shows how the city’s growth has been influenced by natural settings, cultural ideals, and economic and political processes. I explain the class structure of the city (moving from the north to the south, one perceives a gradual shift from wealthier neighborhoods to poorer ones) and its historical and geographical evolution. With an emphasis on grand urban visions, I discuss how natural, historical, and political forces have contributed to the unequal structure of the city.

The contrast between the glory and splendor of King Solomon’s succession and reign at the beginning of the book of Kings and the “exile” or captivity of King Jehoiachin by the Babylonians at the end points to one of the central themes of the book: the collapse of the monarchy descended from the line of David.

The third chapter builds on an increase in Arabic manuscript circulation from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries in the Deccan to demonstrate how Arabic philology became a significant intellectual pursuit for a growing learned community. My research on manuscript notes traces textual practices and how they changed over time, and how this contributed to a localisation of Arabic learning across the multilingual landscape of the subcontinent. It zooms in on scholar-scribes, copyist-scribes, and owners of manuscripts. It highlights ‘definitive texts’ in the fields of Arabic grammar, rhetoric, and lexicography and what we know about their circulation across the Deccan and beyond based on two manuscript collections from Hyderabad, and the Bijapur collection. Book exchanges and the emergence of ‘commonplace notebooks’ as a multi-layered intertextual product of intellectual engagements with a scholarly text make plain the social and cultural dynamisms of this field of learning. The formation of cultural tastes in Arabic philology, new studying enactments of manuscripts, and a socially more diverse community shaped the significances of reading and writing Arabic in South Asia.

When remembering America’s first ladies, there is a general assumption that these women were the wives of the presidents. This is not surprising since, with the exception of James Buchanan, all the presidents have been married men. However, several presidents were widowers or husbands of women who could not assume their duties. These men had to rely on women who were neither their wives nor their companions as stand-in first ladies with the primary duty of entertaining visitors to the White House. They included daughters Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph, Martha Johnson Patterson, and Margaret Woodrow Wilson; nieces Emily Tennessee Donelson and Harriet Lane Johnston; daughters-in-law Angelica Singleton Van Buren and Priscilla Cooper Tyler; and sisters Mary Arthur McElroy and Rose Cleveland. They were real persons who each brought a unique experience to their work, which, unlike the service of their more famous married counterparts, has long been forgotten.

Genealogically rooted in the Gothic, melodrama, and prose romance of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sensationalism proliferated and even intensified throughout the 1870s as authors sought new forms of emotional and visceral connection with their increasingly desensitized readers. This essay recovers this somewhat more knowing second decade as the ‘post-sensational seventies,’ wherein the ‘post’ is understood in the same way that it might be if conjoined within other more familiar compounds, such as ‘post-colonial’ or ‘post-feminist,’ not as beyond a phenomenon that is past but rather as grappling self-consciously with the legacies, internal contradictions, possibilities, and pervasiveness of a set of practices that are still very much present. Ultimately, recognizing the 1870s as post-sensational means acknowledging that novelistic representations shifted decisively to accommodate the coincidental, the criminal, the nonrational, and the scandalous, as well as structurally resistant forms of gender and class, as constituent fractions of the real.

Diplomatic images are not mere visual archives of past encounters; they are complicit in how the past is framed, memorialized, and reproduced in the service of contemporary raison d’état. This chapter is about one such instance of complicity. It tracks the afterlife of an image of five ministers from Cold War Southeast Asia – all male, in Western business suits, and bespectacled – signing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) into existence in Bangkok in 1967. More than any other, this image has been reproduced and disseminated to symbolize ASEAN: from book covers and commemorative stamps to television reports and even a commissioned painting. This image gives contemporary ASEAN a satisfying origin myth – of five ‘founding fathers’ forging diplomatic reconciliation in the aftermath of militarized inter-state conflict in a region marked as exceptionally diverse along racial, religious, cultural, and linguistic registers. But the image – and the props and performance it captures – contains within it the seeds of an alternative reading that puts this origin myth to lie. The chapter argues that far from embodying such exceptional and heroic diversity, the image tells us what was profoundly (and problematically) similar among these diplomatic performers than what the contemporary discourse on ASEAN reveals.

“Trendsetter” first ladies show new ways of modeling femininity in a given era, often through attention to the visual. Because women in public long have been expected to be seen and not heard, fashion and image historically have provided a way of communicating nonverbally. Thus, first ladies who were considered trendsetters typically circulated new “looks” or images to a given public, drawing from the culture in which they operated to influence norms around femininity, beauty, and celebrity. This chapter assesses seven first ladies for their visual influence. Dolley Madison (1809-1817), Julia Tyler (1844-1845), and Frances Cleveland (1886-89, 1893-97) were the most notable of the nineteenth-century first ladies who found themselves positioned as style icons. Following in their footsteps were Mamie Eisenhower (1952-1960), Jacqueline Kennedy (1960-1963), Nancy Reagan (1980-1988), and Michelle Obama (2008-2016), who each leveraged the trendsetter role during their time in the White House.

Literary historians have long envisioned the 1870s as a turning point in the invention of a specifically Victorian literary age only because they have taken American Edmund Clarence Stedman at his word. Treating his Victorian Poets (1875) as an unprecedented critical project responsible for popularizing, even introducing, the very adjective Victorian, such historians have — by extension — interpreted the latter as a primarily literary term always already suggesting inadequacy and obsolescence. Considering the evolution of Stedman’s work over time and for different audiences, and in relation to earlier and later critical efforts including George L. Craik’s Compendious History of English Literature (1861) and Alfred Austin’s The Poetry of the Period (1870), this chapter offers a fuller, more nuanced account of the role of the 1870s in consolidating a Victorian age and a Victorian literature, partly by demonstrating how Stedman’s account worked to assert America’s primacy in a contested transatlantic field.

This appendix summarizes all of the known fixed point theorems used in the book. In addition to the best known results of this type, it also contains Markowsky’s characterization of directed-complete partial orders, Iwamura’s Lemma, and Pataraia’s ordinal-free version of Zermelo’s Theorem (see Chapter 6). It also mentions induction principles related to these fixed point theorems.