Academic literature on the topic 'Volga River Region (Russia) – History – 19th century'

The Volga Travelogue is a large layer of travel essays in the 19th-century Russian literature. This layer has not become a subject of special research in literature studies. The “journey along the Volga” is distinguished by the wide diversity of issues and themes it discusses: the economic and industrial activities of the region, its cultural and historical sights, the uniqueness of the Volga region in an ethnographic perspective – of the multifaceted “Volga region resident”. One of the structural components of the travelogue is the Volga mythology and folklore: historical-geographical and cultural-ethnic information is supplemented with legends of the ancient Volga, Russian and non- Russian (Tatar, Mordovian, German, Kalmyk) legends. Describing the “non-Russian Volga”, writers refer to the national aspects of the life of different nationalities, the most important archetypes of their consciousness. A characteristic feature of N.P. Bogolyubov’s travelogue The Volga from Tver to Astrakhan is the non-Russian word as a marker of cultural identity: it is invariably present in the description of national customs. Telling about the “Mordovian places” of the Volga region, Bogolyubov describes specific rituals associated with the birth of a baby and with burials. The Muslim as a different national and cultural tradition of the Volga region particularly attracts writers’ attention. M.I. Nevzorov, in his Journey to Kazan, Vyatka and Orenburg in 1800, tells about the spiritual and religious experience of the Tatar people: writes about the ontological constants, acquaints the reader with epigraphic culture representing Muslims’ existential ideas about people and the universe. S. Monastyrsky, in his Illustrated companion along the Volga, presents Tatar legends about the winged snake Jilantau, about the “Black Chamber” and the khan’s daughter. These legends express the religious and poetic ideas of the people. Telling about the local cultural and mythological tradition is a characteristic feature of the Russian travelogue: an autochthon is represented by its ethnocultural identity. Folklore material functions in structural parallels – multilingual sources: V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, in his travelogue The Great River: Pictures from the Life and Nature on the Volga, gives two – Russian and Mordovian – versions of the legend about “Polonyanka”, and notes the particular poetry of the non-Russian text. In the combination of various – Tatar, Russian, Kalmyk – cultural and national constants of the lower Volga. German characterology is particularly expressed. A German legend associated with biblical material about the history of the prophet Elijah’s wandering through the desert to Sarepta of Sidon is fixed in the travelogues of Ya.P. Kuchin, S. Monastyrsky, and A.P. Valueva. The legend conveys the historical “memory of the place” – the foundation of the Sarepta colony. In the travelogues of V. Sidorov, N. Bogolyubov, descriptions of Buddhist Kalmyks, with their way of life, khuruls and gelyungs, are supplemented with Kalmyk legends about the Bogdo-Ola mountain. Folklore and mythology as categories of a non-native cultural text complicate the artistic system of the travelogue and contribute to the poetic comprehension of the poly-ethnic and poly-confessional Volga region.

The history of the development of the biological resources of the Volga River is reflected from the first records until 1917. The Neolithic period is described in detail, based on archaeological researches in the Upper Volga region. The ancient Slavs especially valued sturgeons. The main fishing centers were located in the area of the current city Rybinsk. During the Mongol-Tatar yoke, bread and fish were the main items of domestic trade. After the capture of Astrakhan in 1554, control over the fisheries on the Volga River was completely transferred to the Russian state. In 1660, they began to legislatively regulate the relations between fishery and treasury. Since 1721, many ukases and decrees have been issued with the aim of restoring order in the fisheries of the Volga-Caspian basin. In 1768–1774, a large expedition of the Russian Academy of Sciences was organized to study “all three kingdoms of nature”, including regions along the Volga River and the Caspian Sea. From the twenties of the 19th century, the period of industrial development of the biological resources of the Volga and the Caspian began and as a result, by the end of the century, the industrial fishing zone was rolling down from the upper river to the orifice, and also a quantitative reduction in fish production was observed, including a decrease in the number of large fish in catches. In 1862, according to the results of the expedition 1853–1858 N. Ya. Danilevsky compiled a project for the construction of the Caspian and Volga fisheries. The review includes data on the formation of the legislative framework for fisheries and the first attempts to preserve and restore stocks of aquatic biological resources in the Volga basin.

Abstract We trace the history of the uses of the alcoholic drink known as kumyshka among the Udmurt. Our focus is on kumyshka’s ritual uses both in public and domestic contexts in the second half of the 19th century, the early 20th century as well as the early 21st century. We suggest that kumyshka not only represents a site of resistance to the dominant religious regime, i.e. Russian Orthodoxy, but is also a tool for self-enhancement and identity making for this indigenous people in the Volga River basin in Central Russia. The consumption of kumyshka has been a frequent object of criticism in the accounts of Orthodox clergy, scholars, doctors, travellers and administrators. Most accounts show a moralising stance, which only occasionally reflects the local understandings behind its uses. As anthropologists working in the region, we compare these historical sources with the current practices. We discuss changes in the religious sphere as well as in gender roles related to the uses of kumyshka.

Goals. The article publishes and analyzes archaeological materials of the modern period found at Pervomaisky-1 site discovered in foothill-steppe areas of the Southern Trans-Urals (a high plateau 14 km west of the right bank of the Ural River, Abzelilovsky District, Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia) in 2019. Materials. The collection includes three groups of pottery (coarse, gray-clay and red-clay), porcelain and earthenware dishes, various iron products (knives, harrow teeth, fragments of a cast-iron pot, horseshoes, etc., and no weapons traced), pieces of iron ore, animal bones, etc. Results. The source analysis of the finds and analogies from the rest of the Urals, Volga Region and Western Siberia made it possible to date the site to the mid — late 19th century and typologically classify it a short-term sedentary agricultural settlement. The paper establishes a relative synchronicity of all types of pottery (including impurities to clay dough), porcelain and earthenware, showing a high proportion of tableware and ‘tea’ utensils, which may be associated with the type of the site. The absence of large cast-iron cauldrons is defined as a marker of some agricultural (not nomadic) population. The involvement of historical data and cartographic materials deepened the analysis and made it possible to determine the site is a field camp of Cossacks from Magnitnaya stanitsa (Orenburg Cossack Host) that emerged after the establishment of Novolineiny District and the 200 km eastward transfer of Russia’s national frontier. This resulted in the territory turned into a deep rear area. So, the former fortress became a rich village where trade was developing and the population was rapidly increasing. Cartographic data show the object was located in the center of a narrow (5-6 km) arable land strip bounded by the main transport artery of the region — Orenburg Post Road — in the east, and by the border of Cossack and Bashkir lands in the west. The conducted comprehensive studies substantiate dating parameters of the archaeological complex which is of great importance for further development of modern history-related archeology in the entire Ural–West Siberian Region, and show the likely abundance of agricultural field camps across the territory that can be viewed as a separate type of archaeological objects.

The article focuses on the analysis of glazed ware imported into the southern regions of Russia from the Early Middle Ages to the Golden Horde period. The author studied most common types of glazed ware and their sources. In order to compare, the paper considers the groups of ware brought to the Pontic and the Volga River regions. From the 7th century in the northern Pontic region, vessels produced in Constantinople appeared. Various groups of Byzantine pottery were recorded there till the beginning of the Golden Horde period. In the Caspian region, glazed ware appeared not earlier than the middle-late 9th – early 10th century coming there from Central Asia and the Middle East. In the 11th century, there were no significant changes in the sources and number of imported products in the Pontic, while the Volga River region falls under the influence of the North-Eastern Caucasus, Transcaucasia and the Middle East (mainly Iran). In the second half – end of the 12th century, the Volga region was becoming one of the key areas points in the trade of kashi ware of Middle Eastern origin. In the 14th century, Byzantine ware first appeared there. The same period was marked with the rise in local pottery production in the Pontic and Azov littoral which contributed to the spread of these products throughout Eastern Europe.

History of literary criticism of various nations of Russia in the 19th century is many-sided and is important both for further development of literature and for the process of mutual enrichment, addition of literatures and literary studies. A special place in this context belongs to the Kazan province which has always been characterized by ethnic diversity an multinational structure and to the University of Kazan which is the acknowledged center for studying traditional ways of life, folklore and literature of the Volga region. In the formation of literary criticism and the development of literature of the Volga region in general and Chuvash literature in particular, the activities of the Chuvash writers, actors, artists, composers (I. Yurkin, G. Timofeev, M. Akimov, K. Ivanov, N. Shubossinni, M. Trubina, F. Pavlov, P. Pazukhin, etc.) and researchers (A.A. Fuchs, V.A. Sboev, S.M. Mikhailov, P. Malkhov, I.Ya. Yakovlev, N.M. Ashmarin, etc.) are of special importance.

The article discusses the birth of a national historical discourse in Central Asia at the turn of the 20th century with special reference to the Taranchi Turks of Russian Semirech’ye (Zhetissu) and early example of Uyghur national history written by the Taranchi intellectual Näzärγoja Abdusemätov (d. 1951). The article shows how intellectuals among the Taranchi Turks, an ethnic group who settled in the Semirech’ye oblast of the Russian Empire in late 19th century, became involved in debates on nations and national history organized on the pages of the Tatar newspapers and journals in the Volga region of Russia. Näzärγoja Abdusemätov’s published workIli Taranchi Türklirining tarihi(‘History of the Taranchi Turks of Ili’) receives particular attention as part of an examination of the evolution of the author’s ideas about an Uyghur nation.

The article examines the views and the work of S. A. Rachinsky and N. I. Ilminsky, the prominent religious enlightenment fi gures in the second half of the 19th century. The former had created a network of church schools for the common people in his estate Tatevo in Smolensk province and its environs, and spent a number of years teaching there. The latter in 1872–1891 held the position of a Director in Kazan Seminary for Teachers of Non-Russian Origin — the central educational institution of the missionary type in the Volga region, aimed at maintaining Orthodoxy among the Christianized peoples of the area. Both educators received the support of K. P. Pobedonostsev, the prominent statesman, publicist and notionalist, one of the leaders of the conservative camp and the chief prosecutor of the Holy Synod. The activists of the religion-based primary education shared the views of specifi c conservative populism based on the idea of common people possessing a set of values that could potentially prevent the society from social upheavals (such as simplicity, patriarchal relations, loyalty to traditions, true religiosity). Rachinsky’s and Ilminsky’s initiatives were aimed at preserving such qualities among the Russian peasantry and the “smaller” nations of the Volga region — social groups that, according to the educators, had managed to stay most aloof from the destructive tendencies of ideological and political development of the second half of the 19th century. Such views in many respects corresponded to the ideas of Pobedonostsev. The famous conservative shared the belief of Rachinsky and Ilminsky that the cause of upheavals that engulfed the post-reform Russia had been the excessive development of individualism and the desire to reconstruct the historically established way of life according to abstract theoretical principles, and that the counterbalance to these phenomena could only be found in the moods of the common people. Rachinsky’s and Ilminsky’s work became a noticeable phenomenon of public life in Russia in the second half of the 19th — early 20th century, and refl ected its important features.

The madrasah in the village of Satyshevo, Mamadyshsky district of Kazan province (modern Sabinsky district of the Republic of Tatarstan) was one of the oldest rural madrasas in the province. The activity of the Satyshevsky madrasah begins no later than the middle of the 18th century (after the 1750s). In the 19th – early 20th centuries it was one of the largest rural madrasas in Russia. At the beginning of the 19th century, the training center consisted of 3 wooden buildings, and by the beginning of the 20th century, a complex of mektebe and madrasah of 7 buildings was being created. At the beginning of the 20th century, a second parish was allocated in the village and another mosque was being built. The teachers and students of the madrasah were famous imams and recognized theologians in the Volga-Ural region. The madrasah in Satyshevo village had extensive educational ties with the Muslims of the main educational centers of Kazan, Orenburg, Troitsk, Bukhara and Dagestan. The founder of the madrasah should be considered Imam Abdurrashid bin Kadermukhammad. The next famous imam and mudarris was Ibrahim bin Jagfar as-Satyshi. After him, Mukmin ben Budach continued his spiritual path in Satyshevo. One of the famous imams and mudarris of the Satyshev madrasah was Yarulla bin Bikmukhammad (1794–1869). His son Mubaraksha continued his spiritual ministry at the Satyshevo Mosque. One of the students of Yarulla hazrat was Muhammad bin Ali (Mukhammet Mukhammetgaleev), his name is associated with the further development of teaching in the Satyshev madrasah. After his death in 1902, the position of the first imam passed to his son – Abdrakhman Mukhametov, and the second imam in the documents is indicated by the son of Mubaraksha hazrat – Gabdulla. The teaching program at the madrasah was old-fashioned, classical. It is known from the preserved description of the library of the madrasah that there were a large number of manuscripts and books published in Russia and Turkey.

The period between the 19th – early 20th century witnessed waves of actively forming Polish communities in Russia’s rural areas. A major factor that contributed to the process was the repressive policy by the Russian Empire towards those involved in the Polish national liberation and revolutionary movement. Large communities were founded in Siberia, the Volga region, Caucasus, and European North of Russia (Arkhangelsk). One of the largest communities emerged in Siberia. By the early 20th century, the Polonia in the region consisted of tens of thousands of people. The Polish population was engaged in Siberia’s economic life and was an important stakeholder in business. Among the most well-known Polish-Siberian entrepreneurs was Alfons Poklewski-Koziell who was called the “Vodka King of Siberia” by his contemporaries. Poles, who returned from Siberian exile and penal labor, left recollections of their staying in Siberia or notes on the region starting already from the middle of the 19th century. It was this literature that was the main source of information about the life of the Siberian full for a long time. Exile undoubtedly became a significant factor that was responsible for Russia’s negative image in the historical memory of Poles. This was reflected in publications based on the martyrological approach in the Polish historiography. Glorification of the struggle of Poles to restore their statehood was a central standpoint adopted not only in memoirs, but also in scientific studies that appeared the second half of the 19th – early 20th century. The martyrological approach dominated the Polish historiography until 1970s. It was not until the late 20th century that serious scientific research started utilizing the civilizational approach, which broke the mold of the Polish historical science. This is currently a leading approach. This enables us to objectively reconstruct the history of the Siberian Polonia in the imperial period of the Russian history. The article is intended to analyze publications by Polish authors on the history of the Polish community in Siberia the 19th – early 20th century. It focuses on memoirs and research works, which had an impact on the reconstruction of the Siberian Polonia’s history. The paper is written using the retrospective, genetic, and comparative methods.re.

Defence date: 13 January 2014
Examining Board: Professor Stephen Anthony Smith, University of Oxford /EUI (Supervisor); Professor Alexander Etkind, EUI Professor; Alexei Miller, CEU Budapest; Professor Boris Kolonitskii, European University in St. Petersburg.
First made available online on 26 February 2015.
The dissertation investigates the Russification policy of the late-imperial Russian state, as it related to educational policy in the Middle Volga region. It seeks to understand how the tsarist authorities sought to define Russianness and how they sought to craft relations with pagan minorities and Muslims in a region where the Slavic-Orthodox, the Turkic-Islamic and the Finno-pagan worlds interacted. It asks how far the educational projects of the Orthodox missions and the secular authorities brought about Russification. The analysis of the changes in imperial policy in the period between the 1860s to 1914 allows for the conclusion that the methods, instruments and aims of Russification policy continually changed and that policy was applied quite differently vis-à-vis the Muslim and pagan, or in most cases only superficially Orthodox , population of the region. When dealing with the educational project for the non-Muslim population in the region, also known as the project of N.Ilminskii, the dissertation aims to understand how the russifying and missionary components related to each other. Furthermore, it studies the alternative educational projects aiming at Russification of the non-Russian population of the region that the Ilminskii system had to compete with. A considerable amount of the dissertation is devoted the discussion of the Muslim reform movement and emergence of Jadidism. By analyzing and comparing the curricula of old-method madrasahs and the new-methods ones, the dissertation demonstrates the evolution that the Middle Volga Muslims underwent under the influence of both inner reforms and the actions of the authorities.

In my master thesis I deal with the issue of the identity of 19th century Russian society and the role of the Volga River in it. I focus on the characterization of Russian identity in the broadest sense, on the relationship of human society to nature, and on two case studies from the Upper Volga region. In the theory of Russian identity I consider four of its characteristic features - ambivalence, patriotism, spirituality and sentimentalism - to be crucial. The analysis of the relationship between human society and nature includes a section devoted to the reasons for human attachment to landscape, discusses the concept of national landscapes, and presents the dominant idea of the Russian landscape at the end of the 19th century. The last section is devoted to research on the role of the Volga River in the self-identification of the inhabitants of the Upper Volga region. In a study of the worship of the source of the Volga and in research on folklore, I note the attitude of various influences towards this river and, on this basis, define the place of the Volga River in the life of different social classes. The conclusion of my study is that the role of the Volga River in the life of the Upper Volga inhabitants was in many ways the same as its role in the national social discourse, but quite out of...

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.