bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Inhibition of Smurf2 translation by miR-322/503 modulates TGF-β/Smad2 signaling and intestinal epithelial homeostasis
Authors: Cao Shan , Xiao Lan , Rao Jaladanki N. , Zou Tongtong , Liu Lan , Zhang Dee , Turner Douglas J. , Gorospe Myriam , Wang Jian-Ying
Published: February 2014

Smad ubiquitin regulatory factor 2 (Smurf2) is an E3 ubiquitin ligase that regulates transforming growth factor β (TGF-β)/Smad signaling and is implicated in a wide variety of cellular responses, but the exact mechanisms that control Smurf2 abundance are largely unknown. Here we identify microRNA-322 (miR-322) and miR-503 as novel factors that regulate Smurf2 expression posttranscriptionally. Both miR-322 and miR-503 interact with Smurf2 mRNA via its 3′-untranslated region (UTR) and repress Smurf2 translation but do not affect total Smurf2 mRNA levels. Studies using heterologous reporter constructs reveal a greater repressive effect of miR-322/503 through a single binding site in the Smurf2 3′-UTR, whereas point mutation of this site prevents miR-322/503–induced repression of Smurf2 translation. Increased levels of endogenous Smurf2 via antagonism of miR-322/503 inhibits TGF-β–induced Smad2 activation by increasing degradation of phosphorylated Smad2. Furthermore, the increase in Smurf2 in intestinal epithelial cells (IECs) expressing lower levels of miR-322/503 is associated with increased resistance to apoptosis, which is abolished by Smurf2 silencing. These findings indicate that miR-322/503 represses Smurf2 translation, in turn affecting intestinal epithelial homeostasis by altering TGF-β/Smad2 signaling and IEC apoptosis.
Dynamo action in thick discs around Kerr black holes: high-order resistive GRMHD simulations
Authors: Bugli M. , Del Zanna L. , Bucciantini N.
Published: February 2014

We present the first kinematic study of an αΩ-dynamo in the general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics regime, applied to thick discs orbiting around Kerr black holes and using a fully covariant mean-field dynamo closure for the Ohm law. We show that the αΩ-dynamo mechanism leads to a continuous exponential growth of the magnetic field within the disc and to the formation of dynamo waves drifting away or towards the equatorial plane. Since the evolution of the magnetic field occurs qualitatively in the same fashion as in the Sun, we present also butterfly diagrams that characterize our models and show the establishment of an additional time-scale, which depends on the microscopic properties of the turbulent motions, possibly providing an alternative explanation to periodicities observed in many high-energy astrophysical sources where accretion on to a rotating black hole is believed to operate.
Greek Historiography
Authors: Baron Christopher A.
Published: February 2014

The writing of history in ancient Greece, an activity which occurred over a period of one thousand years (500 bce–500 ce), is a subject of great interest to modern scholars for a number of reasons. First, the very term “history” derives from the Greek word historiê (“inquiry”) which Herodotus uses to describe his work, and the subject of historical inquiry decided upon by Herodotus and his successor Thucydides—description and explanation of political and military events in the past—remained standard for many centuries. Though the fundamental differences between the activity, methodology, and expectations of the ancient Greek historians and ourselves has been increasingly highlighted in recent years, we are still in many ways the inheritors of their achievement. Secondly, the writings of the Greek historians represent one of the basic sources of our knowledge of what happened in the ancient world. As with any historical document, then, it is important for scholars to examine the nature of this evidence and the circumstances of its production. Finally, Greek historians aimed both to relate the past and to produce works of literary merit. While some have been reluctant to admit this fact, it is no longer a controversial claim, and scholars have largely moved past arguments over whether Greek historians were writing history or fiction and begun to apply techniques of literary analysis to their works. Of course, this recognition has raised questions about whether some notions central to modern historical writing—truth, accuracy, proper use of sources—operated in the same way in ancient Greek historiography. As with any field of study, the shape of scholarship has been determined by the available evidence. We can examine the texts of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon in their entirety; for other authors we have substantial amounts of continuous narrative (Polybius, Dionysius, Arrian, and others). The last three decades have seen increasing work on the hundreds of Greek historians whose works are known only in fragmentary form, through the quotations, paraphrases, and references in later, extant authors; and more attention has been given to the methodological difficulties posed by the nature of this evidence. The loss of so much historical writing contributes to the ongoing debates over the origins of Greek historiography, its development through the centuries, its essential nature and methodology, and its relationship to other forms of literary production.
Jacques Derrida
Authors: Reynolds Jack , Gratton Peter
Published: February 2014

Jacques Derrida (b. 1930–d. 2004) was one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century, and he has remained so since his death in 2004. Derrida’s work was described by Hélène Cixous as the greatest ethico-political warning of our time, and he was remarkably prolific. It is unlikely that anyone has read all of Derrida’s work, and there are around fifty books still to be published in both French and English from his lecture notes, which are almost all completed prose of philosophical subtlety (for more on this, see the Derrida Seminars Translation Project). He was especially indebted to philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas, along with various literary figures (e.g., Mallarmé, Joyce, Celan, etc.), and he developed a manner of reading and engaging with texts and ideas that came to be known as “deconstruction,” which was infamous throughout the 1980s and 1990s, especially in Anglo-American countries, where Derrida was arguably most influential. Derrida deliberately resisted any simple definition of deconstruction, instead preferring pithy and enigmatic remarks such as “deconstruction is justice.” Nonetheless, deconstruction is standardly thought to involve a scholarly reading of texts according to traditional standards, while also attempting to reveal dimensions of the text that resist or problematize the overt argument. These points may occur in apparently marginal and peripheral places but still destabilize both the author’s stated intentions and the textual system in question. The singularity of each text, however, precludes deconstruction being a neutral “method” that might be taken up and robotically deployed upon any and all texts. Derrida’s later philosophy is less textually embedded, instead becoming increasingly concerned with ethico-political concepts, such as democracy, responsibility, justice, friendship, forgiveness, hospitality, and the gift. Here his concern was with an aporetic or paradoxical logic to these concepts and to the experience of them, which leaves them open and incomplete. Without doing the disservice of offering further such short and ultimately unsatisfactory summaries of Derrida’s immense corpus, this bibliography aims to introduce the reader to some of the most influential of Derrida’s own texts, as well as provide a means for navigating the vast secondary literature that is out there. With regard to Derrida’s own texts, it has not been possible to provide summaries of all of them. Instead, this bibliography highlights just some of the most significant of those texts in regard to a given area or theme with which Derrida was concerned, while also having annotated entries on some of the most significant secondary literature that is about Derrida’s work, even if it extends or transforms it. While this article is primarily focused on texts in the English language, also included are some of the most significant writings on Derrida in French.
Michel Foucault
Authors: Peters Michael A. , Tesar Marek , Locke Kirsten
Published: February 2014

Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers in 1926 and died of AIDS in 1984 at the age of 57. In his short life span Foucault became an emblem for a generation of intellectuals: someone who embodied in his work the most-pressing intellectual issues of his time. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, he named as his closest supports and models Georges Dumèzil, Georges Canguilhem (the philosopher of biology who succeeded Gaston Bachelard at the Sorbonne), and Jean Hyppolite. He was a student both of Louis Althusser and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He grew up in the tradition of a history of philosophy that dominated the French university, a history that gave pride of place to Hegel and helped to legitimate the contemporaneous emphases on phenomenology and existentialism, especially as it developed in the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre. He was classified by the popular press as a member of the structuralist Gang of Four, along with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes. Foucault in 1964 indicated his intellectual debts in an early essay titled “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” yet his relationship to Marx and Marxism was more complex and problematic than his engagement with Nietzsche, whose Genealogy of Morals (originally published in 1887) provided a model for historical study. He came to Nietzsche through the writings of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, both of whom exercised tremendous influence on his work. Yet, it was Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger who helped Foucault to frame up his life’s work as the history by which human beings become subjects and to change the emphasis of his early work from political subjugation of “docile bodies” to individuals as self-determining beings continually in the process of constituting themselves as ethical subjects. In this article we focus on internationally published English editions to avoid confusion and to provide readers a balanced overview of top-quality sources currently available.
Truth and the Aim of Belief
Authors: Fassio Davide
Published: February 2014

With the claim that “belief aims at truth,” philosophers designate a specific feature of belief according to which believing a proposition carries with it some sort of commitment or teleological directedness toward the truth of the believed proposition. The hypothesis that beliefs involve an aim at truth has been used by philosophers to explain a number of features specific to this type of mental state, such as the impossibility of believing at will, the absurdity of asserting Moorean sentences (e.g., “I believe that it is raining, but it is not raining”), and the normative dimension of evidential considerations in the processes of belief-formation. Many consider aiming at truth constitutive of belief, individuating belief as that type of mental state and distinguishing beliefs from other mental attitudes. In the contemporary debate there is disagreement over how to interpret the claim that belief aims at truth. Different accounts of the aim have been suggested in normative, teleological, and minimalist terms. Some philosophers even deny that beliefs involve an aim in any interesting sense. A view that has recently gained popularity is that beliefs do not aim at mere truth, but at knowledge. Although the two issues may be related, questions about the aim of belief must be distinguished from questions concerning whether having true beliefs is valuable, and whether truth is the ultimate goal of inquiry.
Legal Philosophy
Authors: Brooks Thom
Published: February 2014

Legal philosophy is about the analytical and normative study of law and legal concepts. This includes questions of “what is law?” concerning the nature of law and fundamental questions about the law’s reach and authority. Legal philosophers critique the standard assumptions made by many legal practitioners to move beyond doctrinal legal analysis to reveal new insights and how potential problems might be resolved. This article surveys the major approaches in legal philosophy, such as natural law theory, legal positivism, legal realism, the economic analysis of law, and alternative approaches. The entry then provides an overview of important issues in legal philosophy, such as adjudication, legal reasoning, and the philosophy of criminal law.
Plotinus
Authors: Gerson Lloyd P.
Published: February 2014

After Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus (b. 204/5–d. 270 ce) stands out as the most accomplished and influential philosopher of Antiquity. He is also the only philosopher from this period, other than Plato, whose works are all extant. In his writings, collectively known by the name given to them by his student and editor, Porphyry, as Enneads (“nines” in Greek, for the six groups of nine “treatises”), he engages with the entire history of philosophy up to that time, systematizing Plato and defending that system against all comers, especially Peripatetics, Skeptics, and Stoics. For the next three hundred or so years, philosophy in Late Antiquity took Plotinus as its starting point. Proclus (b. 412–d. 485 ce) thought of him as the principal “exegete of the Platonic revelation.” Philosophy in Late Antiquity was essentially Platonism as constructed by Plotinus, and it is this philosophy that Christians, Muslims, and Jews appropriated and struggled to fit within their theological frameworks.
Medieval Music Theory
Authors: Herlinger Jan
Published: February 2014

Medieval music theory encompasses technical writing on music from roughly 500 to 1450 ce—from the transmission to the West of ancient Greek music theory via the writings of Boethius and his contemporaries to the development of printing. It was disseminated principally in Latin (the primary language of intellectual discourse in the West) through handwritten documents, which remain its principal witnesses. The subjects of medieval music theory include fundamentals of music, notation of both pitch and rhythm, counterpoint, musica ficta, and modes. Medieval music theory has strong relations to other disciplines of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy); to the institutions within which it flourished (church, monastic and cathedral schools, and—during the later Middle Ages—universities). It has strong ties to philosophy and theology and, of course, to music in practice. During the later Middle Ages, English, German, French, Italian, and other vernaculars became increasingly common in discourse on music, but they never overtook Latin.
Giannozzo Manetti
Authors: Kallendorf Craig
Published: February 2014

Giannozzo Manetti (b. 1396–d. 1459) was a man in whom the currents of his time flowed together—an intellectual who participated fully and successfully in economic and political life, an accomplished scholar with strong religious convictions, and a humanist who retained roots in the medieval past. His studies were shaped by Ambrogio Traversari in the Camaldolensian convent of Sta. Maria degli Angeli, where he learned Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin. Manetti held a series of increasingly important offices in his native Florence, including his service abroad as provincial governor and ambassador. In 1454 he left Florence, first serving Pope Nicholas V, who was a school friend from his youth, then Alfonso of Aragon, King of Naples. As a member of one of Florence’s richest families, Manetti had the resources to build a large library, which he used to write works in a number of areas, including biographies, speeches, one of the first humanist defenses of the dignity of man, and a wide-ranging apology for Christianity. Much work remains to be done on Manetti: many of his writings are unedited, there is no full-length modern intellectual biography, and many areas of his scholarship remain largely unexplored with not much available in English.
Ivan IV the Terrible, Tsar of Russia
Authors: Halperin Charles J.
Published: February 2014

Ivan IV (Ivan Vasil’evich, Ivan the Terrible, Ivan Groznyi [the Awe-Inspiring]) was born in 1530 and ruled from 1533 to 1547 as Grand Prince of Moscow and All Russia and from 1547 to 1584 as Tsar and Grand Prince of All Russia. Ivan is among the most controversial rulers in all of Russian history. Everything significant about his life is contested. Controversy has endured partially because Ivan’s reign was politicized in his own lifetime. Anti-Russian propaganda during the Livonian War (1558–1582), in which Russia sought to acquire an outlet on the Baltic Sea, portrayed Ivan as a sadistic oriental despot. It also persists partially because Russia was a manuscript culture virtually bereft of printing, and the surviving sources, while ample in quantity, are often problematic in quality. During his minority, which marked the first phase of Ivan’s reign, first, his mother, Grand Princess Elena, and, then, after her death in 1538, various boyar (aristocratic) cliques vied for power. Ivan’s minority continued until he was crowned tsar and married in 1547, inaugurating the so-called long 1550s in which Russia undertook major domestic and foreign policy initiatives. Russia successfully expanded down the Volga River by conquering the Tatar khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan and launched the ultimately unsuccessful Livonian War. The purpose of the Livonian War may have been strategic, economic, or ideological. For reasons that are still debated, in 1564 Ivan established the oprichnina (an untranslatable word for his separate “court”) against real or imaginary enemies. The oprichniki (members of the oprichnina) imposed a reign of terror on the country, culminating in a massive assault on the city of Novgorod for “treason” and the torture and execution of hundreds of Muscovites of various classes. For equally unknown reasons, in 1572 Ivan abolished the oprichnina. Ivan was the first Russian ruler to employ mass terror for political purposes. In 1575–1576 Ivan abdicated in favor of a puppet Christian, Chingissid (descendent of Chinggis Khan), Simeon Bekbulatovich, who “reigned” as Grand Prince, not tsar, of Muscovy. The failure of Russia’s Livonian War induced Ivan to seek arbitration from the papacy to make peace with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1582; Russia lost all its territorial acquisitions in the war. After the death in 1581 of Ivan’s eldest son and heir, Tsarevich Ivan, Ivan sank into despair. The story that Ivan was responsible for his son’s death cannot be accepted as reliable. Economic collapse characterized Russia during Ivan’s remaining years. Ivan’s reign began in glory and ended in disaster at home and abroad, leaving a confused legacy for modern historians to try to sort out.
Ethnic Diasporas and US Foreign Policy
Authors: Haglund David G. , Stein Elizabeth
Published: February 2014

The past two decades have witnessed a growing scholarly interest in the role that “ethnic diasporas” play in the formulation of America’s foreign policy. While the connection between these ethnic groupings and the policy process is not anything new in American political life, the systematic study of that connection is of relatively recent vintage. There are two chief reasons for this. First, changes in American demography since the 1970s have led to a fascination with issues related to “multiculturalism” and ethnic “identity”—in the context not only of domestic public policy, but also of foreign policy. In the case of the latter, an outpouring of articles and books has appeared dedicated to the phenomenon of ethnic “lobbying,” construed widely enough so as to include discussions of the “ethnic vote.” In addition, changes in the external environment set in motion by the ending of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union have put a premium upon such new relatively new categories of analysis as “ethnic conflict” and diasporas. Widespread stories about its “decline” to the contrary notwithstanding, America remains the most powerful state in the international system; thus, it offers ethnic diasporas the promise of exerting outsized influence should they be able to make their preferences become Washington’s preferences. This article surveys leading bibliographical sources pertaining to these various themes, embracing as well the normative debates they have engendered. Also included in this article are a set of references to a trio of very significant historical cases of ethnic “politicking” in US foreign policy, for, although the systematized study of the phenomenon may be fairly recent, the phenomenon is nearly as old as American foreign policy itself. Accordingly, three “classical cases” will be discussed: the Irish Americans, the German Americans, and the Anglo-Americans. Finally, the article surveys recent writings on contemporary cases in which ethnic diasporic activism has been said to have influenced the shaping of American foreign policy toward one region in particular (the “greater” Middle East) as well as toward regional dilemmas elsewhere (including Europe, Africa, and Latin America).
Culturally Responsive Pedagogies
Authors: Faircloth Susan C.
Published: February 2014

Historically, the academic performance of many culturally and linguistically diverse students has tended to lag behind that of their peers. This has been attributed by some as a failure of the educational system to meet these students’ academic, social, and emotional needs. Increasing diversity within the school-aged population demands that schools respond to the needs and abilities of these students. Central to these efforts is a commitment to the preparation, recruitment, and retention of a teaching force capable of acknowledging and respecting the unique learning abilities and needs of their students. Emerging in the1990s, the term “culturally responsive pedagogies” (CRP), often interchanged with the term “culturally relevant pedagogies,” has been used to describe the knowledge, skills, and dispositions characteristic of teachers who embrace the role of cultural and linguistic diversity within the teaching and learning environment. Teachers who engage in culturally responsive practices view their students’ cultural and linguistic diversity as strengths rather than deficits. Culturally responsive teachers build on their students’, and their families’/communities’ unique strengths as they work to develop effective educational practices for students from diverse backgrounds. Although hailed as a marker of effective teaching for culturally and linguistically diverse students, there is limited large-scale empirical evidence documenting the actual impact of CRP on students’ academic performance, leading some to question the utility of such practices. Given the highly contentious nature of the early-21st-century educational system it is imperative that increased research be conducted to document the impact of CRP on students’ academic experiences and subsequent outcomes.
Reflexives and Reflexivity
Authors: Cohen Dana , Zribi-Hertz Anne
Published: February 2014

The term reflexive is applied by traditional grammarians to an event or situation that “reflects” (“rebounds”) upon its initiator, typically when some internal argument of the predicate co-refers with its subject (e.g., English John pinched himself or John saw himself in the mirror). In a slightly broader sense, reflexivity is a type of interpretation wherein two arguments of the same predicate co-refer, regardless of their structural positions in their clause; thus, I spoke to John about himself is viewed as semantically reflexive. From a cross-linguistic perspective, expressions used to express reflexive interpretations—reflexivity markers—typically include nominals denoting the human person or body, or inalienable parts of it (for example, Haitian Jan renyen tèt li, lit. “John hates his head” = “John hates himself”), and specialized reflexive pronouns (e.g., English himself, Russian sebja: Ivan ljubit sebja “Ivan loves himself”), which may grammaticalize into verbal affixes deriving reflexive verbs (for example, Russian myt’-sja, French se laver “to wash (oneself)”). Finally, reflexive interpretations, as defined above, may also be available with some ordinary personal pronouns (e.g., French Jean est fier de lui = “John is proud of him” or “of himself”). A crucial cross-linguistic generalization brought out by works on reflexivity is that the forms that may correlate in some contexts with reflexive readings, in the narrower sense defined above, are often associated, in other contexts, with interpretive effects distinct from reflexivity, such as valency or aspectual changes, intensification, subject affectedness, or subjective discourse perspective. Two approaches may thus be considered for the study of reflexives and reflexivity in one or several languages: (i) the research may focus on the expression of reflexivity in its narrowest semantic sense: how are reflexive interpretations signaled in a given language or in natural languages? (ii) the research may aim at identifying and linking together the different uses of forms available, among other things, as reflexivity markers. Option (i) leads us to consider reflexivity as a special case of co-referential or anaphoric relations. Option (ii) leads us to consider reflexivity as one among a set of semantic effects associated with a common “reflexive” morpology, and to try and understand how these different effects can arise from the same forms.
Childcare Manuals
Authors: Davis Angela
Published: February 2014

There have always been experts advising parents how to raise their children: community elders, religious leaders, and medical men and women, among others. In most cultures, though, childrearing advice has been passed on by word of mouth, often among neighbors and kin. Even in modern developed societies oral transmission continues, with knowledge and information about childrearing practices passed down the generations and between peers. However, a significant change occurred in the 18th century with the proliferation of printed material. Coupled with demographic changes such as smaller families and increased social and geographical mobility, the availability of childcare literature encouraged parents to turn to this new source of advice. Advice manuals have been written by a range of experts, from physicians and philosophers to educators and psychologists, and their authors have also included parents themselves. Underlying themes present within the manuals selected here are the tension between “scientific” and “natural” approaches to childrearing, and the degree to which parents should try to meet or anticipate their children’s needs and wants. However, when reading advice literature we need to remain cautious about the picture of childrearing such manuals present. While we have evidence that manuals were written, and even that they were read, we know far less about if and how parents actually followed the advice they contained. Just because mothers had “the book” it did not mean they used it. Differences occurred in how parents accessed, received, and applied the advice on the grounds of gender, class, region, and ethnicity. Parents’ accessibility to other sources of advice, whether in the form of kin, professionals, or new technologies such as the Internet, has also varied. This article focuses on childcare manuals and books written or popular in translation in the English-speaking world, although reference is also made to cultures of childrearing in comparative perspective.
American Independent Cinema
Authors: Sterritt David
Published: February 2014

American independent cinema, often called “indie cinema,” has no clear historical starting point and no single definition. Most broadly, the term refers to films made outside the Hollywood system, although some scholars date independent cinema from 1908, when enterprising filmmakers defied the near-monopoly of the Motion Picture Patents Company, formed by Thomas A. Edison and others hoping to control the rapidly expanding industry. The creation of United Artists in 1919 established a nominally independent studio within Hollywood, although its founders—Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, and Mary Pickford—were celebrated movie stars. The advent of cheap, flexible equipment facilitated truly independent filmmaking during and after World War II, and the prolific producer-director Roger Corman gave the movement a major boost in the 1950s and 1960s. Another pivotal moment came when actor John Cassavetes wrote and directed Shadows (1957, revised 1959), the first of many profoundly personal films (e.g., Faces in 1968 and A Woman under the Influence in 1974) financed in part by his earnings as a top Hollywood star. Subsequent critical and/or commercial successes brought heightened attention to indie cinema, which then entered a New Hollywood period in which a gifted “film-school” or “movie-brat” generation blurred the lines between independent and Hollywood production by drawing on industry resources or setting up alternative studios, even as quasi-independents such as Robert Altman made both Hollywood and non-Hollywood films. In the same era, the “midnight movie” scene began with such radically distinctive pictures as John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), a scatological satire of middle-class Americana, and David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), described by the filmmaker as a “dream of dark and troubling things.” More recent developments include film/video hybrids and “postcinema” films (e.g., The Blair Witch Project in 1999) that extend their fictions into neighboring media such as websites and video games; all the while, drastically individualistic moving-image artists have created avant-garde and “experimental” works ranging from Maya Deren’s oneiric Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) to Stan Brakhage’s dazzling Commingled Containers (1996).
Walt Disney
Authors: Von Mueller Eddy
Published: February 2014

Few figures of the 20th century have made so deep and indelible an impact on world culture as Walt Disney. Few people have direct knowledge of Walter Elias Disney’s life, his precise contributions to cinema, or the television programs, toys, and attractions that bear his name, but Disney is nevertheless a name familiar to hundreds of millions. Since the early 1920s, Disney, his companies, and his collaborators have been at the forefront of many cinematic and industrial innovations, including synchronized (and later stereophonic) sound, Technicolor, television, and computer-generated animation. Disney expanded into animated features, fiction and documentary live-action filmmaking, self-distribution, and theme parks. Today, the Disney organization stands alone among the few survivors of the studio era with much of its core business and its brand still intact, a brand constantly renewed, vigorously policed, and sometimes aggressively protected. The Disney Company preserves, shapes, and profits by its own history and that of its celebrated founding father-figure. While Disney artifacts can be found in many a middle-class home, the principal archives of Disney materials are curated and controlled either by the company itself or by his heirs through the Disney Family Foundation, and the company and foundation’s various publishing imprints add more than any university press to the ever-growing Disney literature. With Disney’s nominal oeuvre constantly expanding on screens big and small, this bibliography is, of course, anything but complete. Rather, it is a sampling of the historical, critical, theoretical, and aesthetic perspectives on the man, his times, his company, and the motion pictures and places he helped to create. Many more critiques of individual films have been published than could be included here, but you will find examples of most of the prevalent methodologies and approaches used in such critiques. The selected pieces of certain particularly prolific scholars are representative of their scholarship and style as a whole. Likewise, only a fraction of the mammoth resources available online are included here—Cartoon Brew, edited by Amid Amidi, and Dan Sarto’s Animation World Network, are both excellent jumping-off points into that vast terrain. Some readers will no doubt find cause to disagree with some of those selections. Finally, the author is deeply indebted to Dr. Richard Neupert, who began this expedition and contributed much to it.
Biblical Law
Authors: Barmash Pamela
Published: February 2014

Law plays a major role in the Hebrew Bible, and biblical law, whether appearing as formal statutes or as motifs embedded in other genres, has served as a source and inspiration for later Jewish culture. The bulk of the Pentateuch is devoted to legal material, and biblical narrative often invokes legal matters. The prophets refer to law and use legal idioms and literary expressions. The major theological and literary structure of the Hebrew Bible is the covenant between God and the Israelites, a relationship based on legal concepts and requirements. Most legal sources assent to this concept, but the Priestly (P) source in the Pentateuch bases the relationship between God and the Israelites on a pact, with obligations for the Israelites, rather than the bilateral agreement of a covenant, with obligations for both sides. The study of biblical law is closely tied to major issues in the critical study of the Bible: source criticism of the Pentateuch; the social and economic development of ancient Israel; form criticism and the literary characteristics of the Bible; the comparative method and the relationship between ancient Israel and the influential cultures of the ancient Near East.
Gambia
Authors: Sarr Assan , Wright Donald R.
Published: February 2014

The Gambia River, which enters the Atlantic Ocean 115 miles south of Cape Verde, Africa’s western tip, was long a major artery for commerce between the Atlantic and West Africa’s interior. Europeans referred to land along the river as “Gambia” or “the Gambia,” part of “Senegambia,” the region between the Senegal River on the north and the Gambia River on the south. Gambia’s population consists of several ethnic groups: Serer and Jola, early occupants of coastal regions; Mandinka (the largest), and Serahuli (Serrawooli, Soninke), migrants from the east; Fula (Fulbe, Peul), herders from the north, bringing cattle and Islam; Wolof from Senegal, accompanying British traders and officials; and Aku, descendants of liberated slaves from Sierra Leone. Before rapid urban growth in the last half of the 20th century, most Gambians were farmers (millet, sorghum, rice), herders, craftsmen, merchants, or Islamic holy men, residing in small villages. Riverine trade, for centuries involving salt moving upriver, increased after the mid-15th century with the arrival of Portuguese seamen, and again after the mid-17th century with the establishment of English and French outposts. Exports were gold, slaves, and cowhides; imports included cloth, beads, iron bars, metalware, weaponry (swords and cutlasses, firearms and gunpowder), spirits, and paper. Beginning in the early 19th century, after Great Britain established a permanent settlement at Bathurst (now Banjul) near the river’s mouth, closing the river to slave trading, British merchants steadily garnered more Gambia trade. Peanuts dominated exports from the 1840s through the 20th century. In 1893, Britain claimed a narrow strip along two hundred miles of the lower Gambia River, surrounded by French Senegal, as its Gambia Colony and Protectorate. British rule was noteworthy for lack of expenditure and development. Thus, when The Republic of The Gambia (commonly “The Gambia”) gained independence in 1965, it was one of the world’s poorest nations. The Gambia’s government was a democracy known for respecting human rights until a military coup in 1994 brought to power Lieutenant (later Colonel, and then President) Yahya A. J. J. Jammeh. His two decades of increasing authoritarian rule, which saw declining respect for the law, illegal detention, torture, and murder, ended in the surprising 2016 election of coalition candidate Adama Barrow, hopeful of leading the nation toward recovery from two decades of tyranny. Because Senegal surrounds The Gambia, overviews and bibliographies of Senegal can be informative about Gambia, as are works on Senegalese history, culture, religion, language, and the arts. In this article, because they are difficult to access, government and private publications from Gambia are rarely included. For these, see Gamble 1988, cited under Bibliographies, and supplements in Gamble’s Gambia Studies Series, cited under General Overviews.
History of Cartography
Authors: Edney Matthew H.
Published: February 2014

Until the 1980s, the study of the history of cartography was defined by two idealizations: (1) that maps are strictly factual statements and (2) that cartography is an innately progressive science that serves as a surrogate for Western civilization as a whole. Then, the recognition that maps are actually cultural texts made for specific functions transformed map history into an exciting, interdisciplinary field of study. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences now seek to understand how past peoples thought about and acted in their particular worlds. The result is a substantial literature, which in many respects resembles a multifaceted iceberg: each disciplinary perspective reveals only the tip. In taking a series of selective and topical cuts through the recent literature, this bibliography cannot take every new perspective into account. Necessarily excluded are the older literature, which despite its conceptual flaws, contains a wealth of important information; narratives of the development of maps of specific regions (“The Mapping of X”); and cartobibliographies (mostly regional in scope).
Buddhist Monasticism
Authors: Heirman Ann
Published: February 2014

In symbiosis with the laity, Buddhist monasticism has played a major role in the development of Buddhism in China. Starting shortly after the beginning of the Common Era, in the Later Han Dynasty, monasteries developed to become an essential part of Chinese society. Even today, although monastics are less numerous than they used to be throughout most of Chinese history, Buddhist monasteries still have an influential voice. The first monastic activities that scholars focused on were the translation efforts conducted by prominent masters and the pilgrimages undertaken by famous Chinese Buddhist monks. In their travel accounts, monks described the roads both to India and to Southeast Asia and the way they saw the land of the Buddha. The institutionalization of Buddhist monasteries also became an important topic. In historical research, the political and social role of monasteries attracted growing attention. These first studies were very text-oriented. Gradually, other materials were also analyzed, such as archaeological findings, architectural layout, inscriptions, murals, musical instruments, and other artifacts. Over recent years, interdisciplinary research combining data and studies of different fields has been published, and the study of Buddhist monasticism has expanded. It now analyzes the role of Buddhist monastics over a wide area of fields, discussing the impact of monasteries in many, often interacting, contexts: religious, historical, social, political, economic, ethical, and so on. A very new approach, still to be expanded, is based on anthropological fieldwork. The study of monasticism is relatively complex and broad, and source materials are scattered but often pertinent to the particular monastic feature one wishes to study. As far as possible, they have been included in the relevant sections of this article.
Tetrapod Evolution
Authors: Laurin Michel
Published: February 2014

Tetrapods include all extant limbed vertebrates (and those that lost limbs, such as gymnophionans and snakes) and many or all extinct ones (depending on the adopted definition). This large clade is represented by over 21,000 extant species: more than 7,000 species of extant amphibians and more than 13,000 species of amniotes, which include mammals and reptiles, the latter also including birds in many recent taxonomies. The origin of tetrapods can be followed back into the Early Devonian (419–393 million years ago), shortly after tetrapodomorphs (as stem-tetrapods are called) diverged from dipnomorphs (the largest clade that includes lungfishes but not tetrapods). The first tetrapodomorphs retained paired fins, but by the Middle Devonian (393–383 million years ago), the first limbed vertebrates had appeared. The tetrapod crown (the smallest clade that includes lissamphibians and amniotes) first appears in the fossil record in the Early Carboniferous. The group subsequently diversified fairly quickly and occupied a diversity of habitats (saltwater, freshwater, and terrestrial) by the Early Carboniferous. Amniotes appeared no later than about 317 million years ago (Ma), although they remained a minor component of the terrestrial biota until the Early Permian. The origin of turtles remains contentious, but the first undisputed stem-turtle and lepidosauromorphs (squamates, Sphenodon, and extinct relatives) are known from the Triassic, whereas archosauromorphs (which include birds and crocodiles) can be traced back to the Late Permian. Much of what we know about early tetrapod evolution is based on the fossil record, but our understanding of the subsequent evolution of the group has progressed tremendously in recent years through molecular phylogenetics. This article is organized into thematic sections, such as tetrapod origins, biodiversity evolution, and mass extinction events, as well as systematic sections that deal with various clades, especially (but not only) extant ones. Throughout, the emphasis has been on recent papers because their bibliographies usually include references to older, influential publications, although some older, very important papers are covered too.
The Evidence of Evolution
Authors: Olsen Kenneth
Published: February 2014

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” This statement, the title of a 1973 essay by the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (b. 1900–d. 1975), encapsulates the central position that evolution holds in biology. While public understanding and acceptance of evolution is notoriously low, with fewer than half of adults in countries such as the United States and Turkey accepting evolution as fact (J. D. Miller, E. C. Scott, and S. Okamoto, Public acceptance of evolution, Science 313 (2006): 765–766), the overwhelming scientific consensus is that evolution is an incontrovertible component of our planet’s history and ongoing biology. Indeed, virtually all aspects of biology can be viewed in one way or another as providing evidence of evolution. Evolution is what accounts for the signs of shared biological ancestry that appear throughout our natural world, ranging from anatomy and development, to fossils, to genome structure and gene sequences. Evolution also explains the vast number of living species on the planet, as well as their adaptations into different ecological niches. Evolution can be defined as changes in lineages of organisms over successive generations. These changes may be described at the level of genes and genetic variation, or at the level of observable traits (phenotypes). Because evolution is a process that has both shaped the history of life on Earth and continues to operate today, the lines of evidence for evolution outlined in the sections below fall into two general categories: those documenting ongoing or very recent evolution (Evolution Caused by Human Activity, Evolution in Wild Species, Human Evolution), and those documenting shared ancestral origins of now-diverged lineages (Evolution in the Fossil Record, Evidence of Shared Ancestry).
Darwinism
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: February 2014

The modern usage of the term Darwinism dates from the publication of On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, in which he argued for evolution through natural selection. Very soon after the appearance of the Origin (in 1859), Darwin’s great supporter Thomas Henry Huxley introduced the term Darwinism. The term—together with the related terms Darwinian and Darwinist—took root. The codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, used the term as the title of a book expounding evolution: Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, with Some of Its Applications. Note that there seems to be a fuzziness about the term. Some identify Darwinism with evolution through natural selection. Others suggest that the essence of Darwinism is not selection per se but change or variation. Late in the 19th century, George Romanes coined the term neo-Darwinism to cover those for whom natural selection is basically the only significant cause of change. In 1930 Ronald A. Fisher, in his Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, argued that the newly developed theory of Mendelian genetics offered the required foundation for a perspective that made natural selection the central force of evolutionary change. Although the British were happy to call the Darwin-Mendel synthesis neo-Darwinism, in America the synthesis was known as the synthetic theory of evolution. This reflects that in the New World it was Sewall Wright who did the foundational work in bringing Mendelian genetics into the evolutionary picture and that he never thought of natural selection as being the force that Fisher took it to be. For Wright and his followers, especially Theodosius Dobzhansky, genetic drift was always a major component of the evolutionary picture, and as Fisher pointed out nonstop, this is about as non-Darwinian a notion as it is possible to have. By 1959 professional evolutionists (on both sides of the Atlantic) agreed that Darwin had been right about natural selection: it is the major cause of evolutionary change. Neo-Darwinism fell into disuse, as everyone now used the term Darwinism for evolution through natural selection. Mention should also be made of so-called social Darwinism, the application of Darwinism to persons and groups within society. The earliest use apparently was during Darwin’s own lifetime, by a historian discussing land tenure in Ireland. However, it was not a popular or general term, coming into widespread use only in the 1940s, with the publication of the American historian Richard Hofstadter’s book Social Darwinism in American Thought.
Origin and Early Evolution of Animals
Authors: Peterson Kevin J.
Published: February 2014

Coming at the end of one of the most intensive glaciation periods in Earth history (glaciers at sea level on the equator!), the explosive rise of animals 530 million years ago is one of the few major events in the history of life that combines the evolution of novel developmental regulatory circuitry with the emergence of unique environmental circumstances. This “Cambrian explosion” is truly a remarkable event in the history of life, as the Earth’s biota went from an essentially static system billions of years in existence to the one we enjoy today, a dynamic and awesomely complex system that forever changed the Earth’s biota, and ultimately the Earth itself. Part of the intrigue with the Cambrian explosion is that numerous phyla with very distinct body plans (whether arthropod, annelid, mollusk, echinoderm, or chordate) arrive on the scene in a geological blink of the eye, with little or no warning of what is to come in rocks that predate this interval of time. The abruptness of the transition between the “Precambrian” to the Cambrian was apparent early on with the publication of Murchison’s The Silurian System (1839), and is still apparent today. Indeed, the abruptness of the explosion has only gotten more pronounced since Murchison’s time as more and more of the Earth’s geological record has been explored, and accurate and precise dates have been placed on many of these outcrops. The books and papers in this article highlight the multifarious nature of the origin and early evolution of animals, ranging from morphology, to phylogeny, to paleontology, to developmental biology, and even to geochemistry and molecular biology.