bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Turkishness of the Community: From Religious to Ethnic-National Identity
Authors: Karpat Kemal H
Published: October 2023

Turkish nationalism remains a little understood political phenomenon because it has been studied out of its historical, social, and cultural context as just another imitation of its Western or Balkan counterparts. A particular difficulty in properly understanding Turkish nationalism derives also from the way its birth and evolution was perceived and presented by the two ideologues of Turkish nationalism. Indeed, the last version of Ziya Gökalp’s ideas on the origin of Turkish nationalism, which appeared in Türkçülüğün Esaslari in 1923, and Yusuf Akçura’s interpretation, published in Türk Yili in 1928, were framed to serve the policies of the government in power. There are of course fundamental differences between the two, as shall be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. Briefly, Gökalp envisioned a national Turkish elite that would turn the disparate ethnic categories of Turks into a homogeneous ethnic community—or nation—based on culture and language, while Akçura regarded the Ottoman Turks as already part of a political Turkish nation embracing all Turks in the world. The “them” for Turkish nationalists was not a foreign oppressor but the dynasty—and the dark forces of ignorance—that is, the religious establishment, and even the faith itself—that prevented the Turks from marching in tandem with contemporary civilization. Antihistoricism eventually became one of the key features of Turkish nationalism. The ideologues of Turkish nationalism, including Gökalp, as well as the early Turkish republican government, purposely denied the Selçuki and Ottoman historical roots of the emerging Turkish nation, to avoid the stigma Europeans put on everything “Ottoman,” “Turkish,” or “Muslim” and keep the nation from being identified with the dynasty-monarchy, and to eradicate the roots of irredentism and orient the nation toward the future. The state thus deprived the nation of its history or, in George Orwell’s terms, erased history in order to control the present.
Gold, Prophecy, and the Steal Treaty
Authors: West Elliott
Published: October 2023

In the early fall of 1860, as Americans approached the most consequential election of their history, Washington Territory had its own excitement. The previous spring, a trader with Indians, Elias D. Pierce, had panned some gold along the Clearwater River in the northern part of the Nez Perce reservation. He found only a few flecks of dust, hinting of much richer deposits higher in the mountains. In mid-August, Pierce and ten others set off for a closer look.
Toward the Medicine Line
Authors: West Elliott
Published: October 2023

It was September 11 when Sturgis and Howard finally linked up on Clark’s Fork. Four days earlier, they had had the Nez Perces trapped between them. Now the Nez Perces were fifty miles ahead. Howard assumed command and the two men “entered into mutual explanations,” Sturgis wrote dryly, “and had the poor satisfaction of exchanging regrets over the untoward course events had taken.” A year after its tragedy on the Little Big Horn, the Seventh Cavalry had managed a farce, and Sturgis, clearly embarrassed, was determined to make it up. His horses’ “elastic tread” contrasted with Howard’s tired mounts, and Sturgis proposed a series of forced marches to try to catch the Nez Perces. Howard agreed and contributed fifty of his freshest cavalry and two mountain howitzers on mule- back; the command set off before dawn on September 12. The weather was miserable: cold, wet, and windy. “I’ll sure never forget that . . . day’s march,” a trooper recalled: “For breakfast we just sinched [sic] our belts one hole tighter.” By late evening, they had covered more than fifty miles.
Housing as a Key Economic Sector
Authors: Angel Shlomo
Published: October 2023

Comprehensiveness, insofar as it stands for the development of a policy and an institutional framework for managing the housing sector as a whole, is an essential feature of an enabling housing policy environment. It stands in sharp contrast to housing policies that focus, for example, only on the public provision of housing while neglecting the private sector and the informal sector; or to policies that focus on one or another component of housing policy-say housing finance or housing subsidies-while neglecting others.
Housing in Global Perspective
Authors: Angel Shlomo
Published: October 2023

In any given country, let alone in a single city, it is extremely difficult to compare housing policies or judge their effects, because there is usually only one policy in operation at any given time. This limits individual cities and countries to “before-and-after” comparisons of their own performance over time, a practice that usually hides the inherent structural weaknesses of their housing sectors. To move beyond these limitations, we must embark on a global analysis of the sector, comparing among different cities and countries with different policy regimes. Previously, in the absence of reliable international comparative statistics, this was impossible to do.
The Availability of Land
Authors: Angel Shlomo
Published: October 2023

The first essential condition for a vibrant and well-functioning housing sector is the availability of residential land, in ample supply and at affordable prices. For example, throughout the twentieth, when land in the rapidly urbanizing developing countries was available and affordable, poor migrants to the cities could and did house themselves—gradually building houses and communities through self-help and mutual aid-without government aid, without access to mortgage credit, and without entering the formal housing market. Access to land in these cities was indeed the key to affordable housing, and in many places it still is.
Housing Conditions and the “Quantity” of Housing
Authors: Angel Shlomo
Published: October 2023

What finally matters in the conduct of housing policy is the reality of housing conditions-the actual houses, apartments, and other forms of shelter in which people live-even though housing policy must remain quite removed from this reality. The basic objective of housing policy is to meet real housing needs. It is therefore the quantity and quality of the material places we inhabit, as well as their suitability to our needs, that are the ultimate measures of the success or failure of housing policy. But housing policy, by its very nature, is and must be sweeping rather than particular. It cannot and should not attend to the form and function of every single house even though it is precisely the conditions of every single house that are its ultimate concerns. It must of necessity care for the state of the housing sector as a whole. This raises serious conceptual and practical difficulties, because it is not at all clear that the collection of houses as a whole can be grasped by housing policy makers as a single entity, and whether it can be measured in a manner that preserves and highlights the essential characteristics that matter to dwellers.
The Evolution of the Prevailing Interpretation
Authors: Mcguire Robert A
Published: October 2023

If the evidence presented here so thoroughly challenges and overturns the prevailing interpretation of the design and adoption of the Constitution, how could so many scholars be so wrong? Or are they? Do earlier studies merely approach and interpret the issues differently? Or are there some inherent biases in the earlier interpretations? A critical examination of the historiography of the making of the Constitution not only addresses these issues but also provides an essential introduction to a new economic interpretation.
Economics and the Constitution
Authors: Mcguire Robert A
Published: October 2023

Economics is a way of thinking about the choices individuals make. It presumes that individuals are motivated by self-interest to maximize the satisfaction received from their choices, given their preferences and constraints. This is the concept of economic rationality. But neither self interest nor rationality implies that individuals are concerned only with their financial or material well-being. Self-interest is applicable to choices over the entire range of human activities. More precisely, economics presumes that individuals take into account the benefits and the costs of their actions, making choices that are in their self-interest, broadly defined.
The Overall Ratification Vote in the Nation
Authors: Mcguire Robert A
Published: October 2023

The present chapter offers a test of an economic interpretation of the Constitution employing a statistical analysis of the overall ratification vote in the nation, an examination that employs a sample of 1,212 delegates from the thirteen state ratifying conventions. There are several good reasons to argue that the contest over ratification represents the ultimate test of an economic interpretation of the Constitution. First, representatives from all thirteen states were given an opportunity to voice not only their support for the Constitution but also their opposition to it. Second, the eligible citizens of the thirteen states directly elected delegates to represent them at their state ratifying conventions.
Ends and means: the goals of health care
Authors: Callahan Daniel
Published: October 2023

Pluralistic societies, reflecting diversity and a love of freedom, have characteristically been wary of efforts to achieve agreement on goals and ends. Often enough, this wariness occurs even in ethics. Yet if ethics is to make a serious contribution to health policy, it must focus its attention as much on the substantive ends of medicine and health care as on the moral means of attaining them. The current ends of medicine and health care ensure not only that health policy will face intractable resource dilemmas and economic unsustainability, they ensure no less that the prevention of illness and the care of the sick will have no reflective goals. In particular, if justice is a primary aspiration for health care, then what kind of health care will be most conducive to making that possible? A health policy such as we have now, which has indiscriminately declared all-out war on death and disease, cannot be a sustainable policy.
Central Nervous System Regulation of the Heart
Authors: Andresen Michael c. , Kunze, Diana L , mendelowitz david
Published: October 2023

The neural mechanisms that control cardiac function have attracted considerable research interest over the past century, starting with the discoveries of the first neurotransmitter by Otto Loewi103 and the earliest electroneurograms recording the discharge of single baroreceptor afferent axons by Lord Adrian.1 Despite this long and distinguished history, fundamental gaps in our understanding persist-gaps that, if filled, might hold valuable keys to the development of important new therapeutic ap­ proaches to cardiovascular diseases.
Neuronal Modulation of Atrial and Ventricular Electrical Properties
Authors: Cardinal Rene , Page Pierre L
Published: October 2023

As reviewed in Chapter 4, anatomically and functionally complex neuronal aggregates that are involved in coordinating regional cardiac function exist in intrathoracic extracardiac as well as intrinsic cardiac ganglia. It has been proposed that the intrinsic cardiac nervous system represents the final common pathway for the control of regional cardiac function. This system integrates afferent neuronal information arising from the heart to exert spatial and temporal control over cardiac efferent neurons regulating different cardiac regions. As such, it forms part of a hierarchy of intrathoracic and central neuronal feedback loops involved in regulating regional cardiac dynamics.6 In this scheme, neurons located in the various intrinsic cardiac ganglionated plexuses play a major role in beat­ to-beat regulation of regional cardiac function, a role that has traditionally been minimized to the benefit of local mechanical interactions (the Frank-Starling hypothesis). One outstanding issue in the field of neurocardiology concerns the patterns of efferent neuronal projections to various cardiac regions arising from the different ganglionated plexuses located in divergent atrial and ventricular regions. At present, this is a subject of considerable controversy. Some authors believe that neurons in the right atrial ganglionated plexus, for instance, subserve solely sinus nodal function whereas those in the inferior vena cavalinferior left ventricular ganglionated plexus exert predominant control over the atrioventricular node. In contrast, it has been our contention that the multiple neurons existing within a given ganglionated plexus modulate divergent car­ diac regions while displaying preferential control over regional cardiac function.
Highway Federalism
Authors: Gutfreund Owen D
Published: October 2023

On January 15, 1953, Charles E. Wilson, President and Chief Executive Officer of General Motors testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in connection with his nomination as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense. When one of the Senators on the panel suggested that Wilson’s extensive holdings of GM stock might present a conflict of interest, the auto executive responded thus: “For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist.” This statement was—and remains—controversial, not just because it was arrogant but also because it rang shockingly true. By the early 1950s, even before the Interstate Highway legislation was passed, the automobile industry had, for decades, participated in a loosely organized but politically powerful group that could be known as “the highway lobby.” By the time of Wilson’s inflammatory utterance, carefully orchestrated efforts had already achieved long-lasting success, with the political and social consequences that we live with today. In the preceding half-century the United States had made crucial policy decisions about how to adapt to the new automotive technology, while the American public remained mostly unaware of the stakes.
Automobiles and a Small Town
Authors: Gutfreund Owen D
Published: October 2023

The relentless growth of motor vehicle use has created highway needs that constantly exceed the money available. These problems resolve themselves into a simple business question of how to spend the public money so that it will give the greatest benefit to the most traffic. —Biennial Report of the Vermont State Highway Board, 1940 Background Middlebury is in the Champlain Valley, next to the western slope of the Green Mountains. Permanently settled in 1783, the community depended first on farming wheat. By 1800, when local leaders started Middlebury College, the town had grown to a population of one thousand and was the Addison County seat. The state’s renowned marble industry was born in Middlebury in 1802, attracting a steady flow of new settlers. By 1820 the population had doubled, and the 1830 census counted 3,468 residents, making Middlebury the largest town in the state. In 1832 the Village of Middlebury (within the larger Town of Middlebury) was incorporated, in order to provide public utilities in the more densely settled central areas. Consisting of about three hundred buildings, the village was clustered near the Otter Creek Falls, on both sides of the river.
The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperour
Authors: Hutner Heidi
Published: October 2023

John Dryden’s collaboration with Robert Howard on The Indian Queen (1664) and its sequel, The Indian Emperour (1665), by Dryden alone, project the politics of imperialism and colonial discourse onto late seventeenth-century dramatic constructions of sex, love, and honor. Like The Tempest and its seventeenth-century redactions, The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperour appropriate Indian culture as a strategy for overcoming political and ideological instability in England. Dryden’s representation of the colonization of the Native American land and culture dramatizes the need to eradicate or at least control the wildness within the English man. During the Restoration, foreign expansion and trade held the promise of strengthening and unifying the English nation by increasing its economic as well as military power.1 Significantly, Dryden portrays the destruction of native culture ambivalently: Montezuma is no monstrous or barbaric Caliban, but a mimic of the qualities of an idealized English nobility. Other than his heroic son, Guyomar, however, Montezuma’s Indian subjects are rebellious and self-serving. And, with the exception of Cortes,2 the Spanish conquerors are portrayed as greedy, ambitious, and inhumane. Nevertheless, it is the Spanish Cortes who ultimately represents the ideal ruler in the play, and the colonization of the New World is presented as politically necessary and morally correct. The crucial difference between the two heroes lies in their relationships to the native woman: Cortes is able to resist her powers and to maintain self-control, while Montezuma is obsessed by his desire for the Indian Princess, and this passion causes him to lose his head and his kingdom. In this respect, the blame for the fall of Mexico is deflected from the colonizers and Montezuma onto the Indian Princess.
The Theory and Practice of Democratic Tragedy (1): Melville’s Metaphysics of Democracy: “Hawthorne and His Mosses”
Authors: Milder Robert
Published: October 2023

In his preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass Whitman likened America assuming its literary inheritance to an incoming tenant supplanting a deceased one, waiting patiently while “the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house,” honoring the deceased as “fittest for its days” even as he knows that “he shall be fittest for his days.” Although America, Whitman claimed, did “not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the ideas of castes or the old religions” (Preface 1855, 150), it did tend to regard Old World achievements as time-bound and ideologically suspect. Among the outworn glories of the past was the tradition of high tragedy, which not only dealt with “splendid exceptional characters and affairs” more appropriate to aristocratic than to egalitarian times but which seemed antithetical in spirit to the cosmic affirmation that progressive Americans saw as correlative to or foundational for the republic’s political affirmation. Democracy, proclaimed the Democratic Review in 1837, is “a cheerful creed ... of high hope and universal love” buoyed by faith in human nature and in divine nature, while tragedy, despite its ultimate vindication of Law, radiated terror and gloom. “Perverse solicitors of woe,’’ Emerson called the admirers of tragedy, ascribing their fascination to a morbid “appetite for grier’ and voicing a widespread impatience among contemporary Americans that was only superficially at odds with the stage and schoolroom popularity of Shakespeare.
Exiled Royalties
Authors: Milder Robert
Published: October 2023

In the chapter “Moby Dick,” having established Ahab’s hunt as a surrogate action drawing on “the general rage and hate” of the human race “from Adam down” (MD184), having speculated, too, on the process of develop ment that generated and sustains Ahab’s monomania, Ishmael reaches the limits of all but his most searching imagination. “This is much,” he says, “yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted” (MD185). What follows is as close as Ishmael will come to excavating the lowest layer of Ahab’s hunt: Winding far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we stand-however grand and wonderful, now quit it; and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic towers of man’s upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablature of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! a family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.
Unworldly Yearners: Agnostic Spirituality in Clarel
Authors: Milder Robert
Published: October 2023

At once an epigraph and an epitaph, the passage is curious in several respects. It seems the voice of Melville’s narrator and only later is described as the “exhalings ... of one” (almost certainly Rolfe) standing by “the moundless bed” of the dead Nehemiah (C 3, I: 25, 27). Without undercutting the authority of the lines-the reader’s initial response survives largely intact-the belated attribution identifies them with one of the characters to whom they most fittingly apply. What Rolfe asks about others, Claretasks about Rolfe himself and about kindred ‘‘yearners,” “unworldly” not in their innocence like Nehemiah, a holy fool, but in what the Franciscan monk Salvaterra calls “The pure disdain / Of life, or holding the real, / Still subject to a brave ideal” (C 4, 14: 34-36). Fidelity to the ideal is what the poem means by “earnestness,” its touchstone for spiritual merit. Situationally, Rolfe’s musing looks back to the death of Nehemiah, which ended part ; figuratively, it looks ahead to the death of Mortmain, the most painfully earnest of Claret’spilgrims, which will end part 3. “Tried” suggests the probational agony of searching for God and ascertaining a ground for belief: “hard task Thou settest man / To know Thee,” the Syrian monk laments (C2, 18: 134-35); “God, my God, ISorely thou triest me the clod!” Clare! will exclaim (C 3, 21: 226---27). “Ransomed” would seem to imply the Atonement, but in Clare!the inconclusive process of trial is itself the vehicle for whatever ransoming occurs, if only by raising the sufferer above the profane and certifying a worthiness of immortality. If, as Mortmain says, “Religion ... / Is man’s appeal from fellow-clay” (C 3, 3: 54-55), then the idealistic doubter like Leopardi or Obermann may be as much the child of God as the orthodox believer.
To Try Her Fortune In London
Authors: Woollacott Angela
Published: October 2023

Between 1870 and 1940, tens of thousands of Australian women were drawn to London, their imperial metropolis and the center of the publishing, art, musical, theatrical, and educational worlds. Even more Australian women than men made the pilgrimage “home,” seeking opportunities beyond those available to them in the Australian colonies or dominion. In tracing the experiences of these women, this volume reveals hitherto unexamined connections between whiteness, colonial status, gender, and modernity.
Australian Women’s Voyages “Home” White Colonialness, Privilege,
And Modernity
Authors: Woollacott Angela
Published: October 2023

Australian women viewed and reconstructed their own status in the British Empire through the knowledge they gleaned of the empire’s constituent parts on their passages “home,” as they often called England. The voyage from Australia to England was crucially different from travel undertaken at will to a chosen itinerary of destinations, and while it bore some of the cultural valences of tourism (such as the group experience of visiting known tourist sites), in its relatively fixed route and the powerful historical and cultural significance of the ultimate destination, it resembled a secular pilgrimage. Nancy Phelan’s father commented at her departure for England in 1938 that she was off “to Mecca.”
Modernity, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Lives
Authors: Woollacott Angela
Published: October 2023

In early August 1933 Dorothy Wright, from Sydney, committed suicide by shooting herself in Paris in “the sumptuous flat of Roland Coty, son of the perfume magnate.” According to “An Intimate Friend” who narrated Wright’s story for the press, her death was “the inevitable end” of her attempt “to conquer a world of glamor and luxury.” Wright had apparently become famous for her crossChannel social and sexual success, a popularity that had begun when she appeared in the chorus of a revue at His Majesty’s Theatre in London. She had sought theatrical work of some kind soon after her arrival from Australia in 1927 at age seventeen, hoping for precisely the kind of exposure she found. She soon left the revue chorus, as she began to move in social circles, and was in demand as an artist’s model. But the “greatest of her triumphs” had occurred in 1931 during an Indian Round Table Conference held in London, when she had become “a friend of half the Indian princes who were in Town.” If Wright’s suicide was “inevitable” because it was still impossible in the 1930s for a woman to survive social and sexual notoriety with her respectability intact, her story nevertheless provides clues about the significance of colonialism for changes in white women’s sexuality in the period of accelerated modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Introduction (1977/2001—Still Going Strong)
Authors: Shadoian Jack
Published: October 2023

Gangster/crime films continue to be made and hold their own in the market-place. The genre remains a viable framework for getting something important said. Its basic material continues to attract talented people who give it expressive force and creative shape. Its durability attests to its cultural importance. The genre has survived because the issues it addresses have always been central to the American experience, because its formal properties have given them a clarity of outline and lucidity of exposition, and because it has been infinitely flexible in adapting itself to shifting social and cultural conditions. It has played an important role in both forming and reflecting the American imagination.

Despite the excellence and popularity of its films, the genre has been generally held in low esteem. Critics and reviewers, high of tone and brow, have in the main been hostile. Even within the industry, until very recently, its prestige has not run parallel to its proven effectiveness. The reaction seems illogical. It is perhaps the danger of the gangster/crime film that has enforced a defensive distance and a refusal to acknowledge it. It has been troubled by censorship, a sure sign that people have been afraid of what it aims to accomplish and of its power.
The Golden Age: The “Classic” Gangster Film
Authors: Shadoian Jack
Published: October 2023

The gangster-crime film took root as long ago as Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and then struggled in unfertilized soil through to the end of the twenties. It took a combination of the sound film, Capone’s Chicago, Prohibition, and the mood of the depression to inaugurate the first distinct phase of the genre. It begins with Little Caesar (1930) and ends with Scarface (1932), and it is the source and example of all the phases that follow.

In general, the dynamics of gangster films of the thirties are simplistic, relying on the public’s fascination with actual criminals and their exciting, if alarming, exploits, and in tune with the rhythms of an industry approaching high gear. The gangster’s fizzy spirits, classy lifestyle, and amoral daring were something like an Alka-Seltzer for the headaches of the depression. In the ruined hopes of that period, the gangster’s grand designs were part of a dialectic of the audience’s fantasies and dreams and a rote Christian morality. Characters like Edward G. Robinson’s Rico, James Cagney’s Tom Powers, and Paul Muni’s Tony Camonte succumb to a combination of hubris, social fate, and moral reckoning in plots resembling those of classical tragedy.
Focus on Feeling
Authors: Shadoian Jack
Published: October 2023

On the surface the genre’s treatment of crime and gangsters in the fifties is relatively simple when compared to the complicated views induced by noir’s psychological malaise. The genre assumed some new and fairly consistent characteristics. A quick review, heedless for the time being of implications, may isolate the following:

For much of the fifties criminal heroes are few and far between. The cop or citizen, moved by obsessive personal reasons, takes over as hero in films of criminal action. They become the agents by which public paranoia about organized crime can be momentarily dissipated. Crime becomes disgusting; it is pictured as powerful, settled, cool, on a comfortable plateau of semirespectability. While the criminal is restrained and businesslike, the hero who opposes him gets overheated and frustrated. He has played by the rules and gotten nowhere for too long, and so, like the gangster before him, he now takes out his aggression, not only against crime but against the world. If the forties was full of characters who were deluded into thinking that action was meaningful, the fifties action hero, fighting for the “right side” and getting some-where, reveals the ugliness of his distress and his envy, hatred, and blindness.
Contemporary Colorations
Authors: Shadoian Jack
Published: October 2023

Kiss Me Deadly was noir’s belated climax and, as well, a film in which the moral fervor of the early fifties gasped its last gasp and gave up. After Kiss Me Deadly, the genre enters its modernist phase. In the late fifties and early sixties the genre makes fresh starts and explorations and strikes new attitudes, how-ever tentatively. Burdened by cheap production and by the obligation to break new ground, the films are often not as confident as one might wish, but they supply the artistic and tonal foundations for the more popular, surefooted, lavish, and ceremonious (though not necessarily superior) genre films of the late sixties and early seventies.

The label “modernist” is somewhat voguish and unsatisfactory, but may serve to cover the strategies of films as distinct as Bonnie and Clyde, Point Blank, The Godfather, and The Godfather II. The term signifies, in the main, an articulate and consciously conceived nonillusionistic cinema. The genre from the late sixties on is marked by films that prevent the audience from nursing the illusion that they are watching a real world.
Toward the 21st Century
Authors: Shadoian Jack
Published: October 2023

This would be the right place and moment to say there isn’t much difference between our latest underworld films and those powerful early talkies that elicited such censorious tremors of apprehension throughout a concerned, law-abiding citizenry, at the same time thrilling them with bold gestures of social defiance and raking in big dough during hard times. The conditions now are different, and we’ve seen many a criminal type come, momentarily hold sway, and then be given the choice of a ticket out of town or a bullet in the head. Films have fictionally documented, investigated, and taken positions on these real-life turnovers and their surrounding political contexts. Yet the kinds of stories they typically tell tend to simplify often messy issues by a fierce attention to emotions and by adhering to the clean, noble, time-tested patterns and structures of literary forms—tragedy, comedy, satire, romance—but adding their own appropriate variations and, it must be said, exercising all manner of expressive license. What works (i.e., makes money) gets repeated. The gangster, a fascinating public figure, was the subject of more than fifty films from 1930 to 1932, which suggested that he was plenty fascinating on the screen too, hence this period of his greatest popularity. He never had it so good again, but he has continued to sell tickets to this day—has, in fact, never been off the screen since his spectacular debut—and I’d guess that he makes some kind of appearance in probably 80 percent of American films. When he’s not up front, he’s lurking somewhere, and films will acknowledge his criminal and sinister presence within both law-breaking and law-abiding communities.
The Volatility Machine
Authors: Pettis Michael
Published: October 2023

This book presents a radically different argument for what has caused, and likely will continue to cause, the collapse of emerging market economies. Pettis combines the insights of economic history, economic theory, and finance theory into a comprehensive model for understanding sovereign liability management and the causes of financial crises. He examines recent financial crises in emerging market countries along with the history of international lending since the 1820s to argue that the process of international lending is driven primarily by external events and not by local politics and/or economic policies. He draws out the corporate finance implications of this approach to argue that most of the current analyses of the recent financial crises suffered by Latin America, Asia, and Russia have largely missed the point. He then develops a sovereign finance model, analogous to corporate finance, to understand the capital structure needs of emerging market countries. Using this model, he finally puts into perspective the recent crises, a new sovereign liability management theory, the implications of the model for sovereign debt restructurings, and the new financial architecture. Bridging the gap between finance specialists and traders, on the one hand, and economists and policy-makers on the other, The Volatility Machine is critical reading for anyone interested in where the international economy is going over the next several years.
Market Structure Issues
Authors: Pettis Michael
Published: October 2023

Before going on to discuss how changes in global liquidity conditions affect LDC borrowers, there are a few market structure issues worth discussing. First of all, we should make the standard distinction between liquidity crises and solvency crises. A liquidity crisis is analogous to a bank run, in which the bank may well be solvent—and even very profitable—before the onset of the crisis. However, because it normally mismatches its long-term assets and short-term liabilities, when depositors come clamoring for their money the bank may be forced to liquidate illiquid but healthy assets in order to meet the cash needs of depositors. A liquidity crisis, then, is one in which although the value of assets may exceed the value of liabilities when the crisis begins, the liabilities cannot be repaid as they come due by the normal cash flows generated by the assets. If the assets cannot be monetized—or converted into cash—quickly enough to meet liabilities as they come due, the borrower faces a liquidity crisis.
The Capital Structure Trap
Authors: Pettis Michael
Published: October 2023

To return, for a moment, to the chapters on history and the liquidity model: in those chapters I argued that there are, broadly speaking, four stages to the long-term international lending financial cycle. First, some displacement causes a rapid liquidity expansion in the major global financial centers. Second, there is a sudden outpouring of capital flows to LDCs. Third, a second exogenous shock results in a rapid collapse of liquidity in the rich-country financial center. And fourth, the international loan crisis begins.
The Indo-Europeans: A Common Mythology?
Authors: Leeming David
Published: October 2023

By the middle of the sixth millennium b.c.e. European peoples, especially in the more temperate southeast region, had become established villagers, skilled both in agriculture and the domestication of animals. Their pottery, copper, bone, and stone work had developed considerably, and they had learned to use sailing craft for trade. In fact, the southern European cultures were well on their way to becoming what the great city cultures of the Near East and Crete would become in the third and second millennia. But beginning in the late fourth millennium or early third millennium b.c.e. Europe was gradually overrun and radically changed by people from the north, who also made their way into India and Iran to the east and eventually to Crete. By the end of the second millennium, all of Europe, much of Anatolia, the Fertile Crescent, Iran, and much of India were dominated by people most of whom we now refer to collectively as Indo-Europeans—or, in the case of the Fertile Crescent, Semites, who possessed qualities similar to the Indo-Europeans and who had replaced older cultures such as the Sumerian (see Mallory, 149–50).
The European Mythic Hero
Authors: Leeming David
Published: October 2023

Heroes become important to cultures particularly when deities no longer come down to interact with us. Heroes—usually male in patriarchal cultures such as those of Europe—are often the offspring of the union of deities and mortals. To varying degrees they possess superhuman qualities, but they are also genuinely human like us. Achilles, Herakles, Odysseus, Cúchulainn, Sigurd, Lemminkäinen, and Beowulf are all heroes of European mythology whose powers come from some connection with divinity but who suffer the agonies and joys of human life. Heroes are our personae in the world of myth, expressions of our collective psyches, first as cultures and then as a species. Cúchulainn reflects the Irish physical and psychological experience and Achilles could not be anything else but Archaic Greek. But when we compare the heroes of these various cultures, Joseph Campbell’s monomyth pattern emerges, and we discover a hero who belongs to the Indo-European tradition, to Europe, and ultimately to all of humanity.
European Philosophical Myths and the Modern World
Authors: Leeming David
Published: October 2023

An important type of myth since Plato’s time has been the metaphorical tale used to explain realities that are beyond simple logic. These “philosophical myths,” of which Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is one, differ radically from most of the myths discussed earlier in this book, because they are constructs of individuals rather than of collective entities such as cultures, nations, movements, and the species. Several European philosophical myths should be mentioned here as they have profoundly affected the way Europeans and others see themselves in relation to the world they inhabit.
I I I
Authors: Villaverde Cirilo
Published: October 2023

With more calculated displays of affection and shrewdness than were natural in a girl of her age, Cecilia embraced and kissed her grandmother, whom she addressed as Chepilla (a whimsical derivation of Josefa), the name most people called her. That was enough to placate her, and there is nothing surprising about that, for, as we shall see later, that woman had been so unhappy, had felt such a need to be loved by the only being in the world who genuinely concerned her, that continuing to be stern with her granddaughter would have been the same as prolonging her own martyrdom. She naturally fell silent all of a sudden and simply sat there contemplating Cecilia, just as moments before she had been contemplating, in fervent prayer, the sweet face of the Blessed Virgin.
V I I
Authors: Villaverde Cirilo
Published: October 2023

In the barrio of San Francisco and in one of its less crooked streets, with sidewalks or flagstones along one or two blocks, among other houses, there was one with a roof terrace that stood out because it had an upper floor above the arch of the front door, and a little balcony to the west. The common entrance, for the owners, servants, draft animals, and carriages, two of which were ordinarily stationed there, was, like that of almost all the houses in the country, through the zaguán, a sort of gatehouse or coach house that led to the dining room, the courtyard and the rooms known as studies.
V I I I
Authors: Villaverde Cirilo
Published: October 2023

The student looked down the Calle de San Ignacio toward the Plaza Vieja. On the corner of the Calle de Sol he spied two other students more or less his age, who to all appearances were waiting for him. One of them is not unknown to the reader, for he has been seen at the cuna on the Calle de San José. We are referring to Diego Meneses. The other was of less elegant and slender build, for in addition to his short stature he had a very short neck and rather hunched shoulders, between which a tiny round head was more or less buried. There was a certain disharmony about his forehead, narrower than it was tall; he had little piercing eyes, a slightly turned-up nose, a pointed beard, and a fresh, moist mouth, surely the most expressive of his unimpressive facial features, and kinky hair; in his face as well as in his body, the great slyness that animated his mischievous spirit was immediately evident.
X I
Authors: Villaverde Cirilo
Published: October 2023

When he leapt out of the volante onto the sidewalk, Leonardo thought he noticed that a military officer, in full uniform, who was walking at a fast gait toward the Plaza Vieja, had moved away from the second window of his house, and that at the very same time there had come away from a shutter of that same window the familiar face of one of his sisters. He stepped up his pace and in fact, through another opening in the grating of the zaguán, he saw his elder sister Antonia raising the curtain so as to enter the nearest room through the door that led to the drawing room. This unexpected discovery upset him more than we can imagine because by putting two and two together he convinced himself, beyond a doubt, that while he had been wooing the mulatto girl there in the barrio of El Angel, a Spanish army captain, in the clear light of an October morning, had been courting his sister here in the barrio of San Francisco.
X I I
Authors: Villaverde Cirilo
Published: October 2023

Finally only DoÑa Rosa Sandoval de Gamboa and her beloved son Leonardo were left at table.He had not inherited his father’s talent for business. Nor did he give evidence of an aptitude for the literary career that he had been encouraged to pursue, although he did write poetry and short articles for the Diario de la Habana and other newspapers. His mother, however, wanted him to become an attorney, with a doctorate from the University of Havana, cherishing the hope that by following this path he could one day be appointed a judge of the Royal Tribunal of Puerto PrÍncipe, and even a lieutenant governor, as learned judges appointed by the king were called in those days. She had good reason to believe that through money and her husband’s relations at court, he might well secure for his firstborn son some special favor, honor, or title among the many that, motivated by such considerations, it is the custom of the Crown to grant.
I
Authors: Villaverde Cirilo
Published: October 2023

We must leave these characters for a short time in order to occupy ourselves with others who, though in no way inferior, play a less important role in our true story. We are referring at present to the renowned clarinet player, José Dolores Pimienta.To see him, needle in hand, sitting crosslegged along with the other assistant tailors on a low wooden platform, basting a dark green wool dress coat, still missing its sleeves and coattails, we must go inside master tailor Uribe’s shop, on the Calle de la Muralla, the first door after the corner of the Calle de Villegas, on which there stood a drygoods store called El Sol.
I I
Authors: Villaverde Cirilo
Published: October 2023

The sudden arrival of the young man mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, even though it was expected, surprised Uribe, all the more so in that his assistant had been waiting for that very moment to throw his arms back and let the garment that was ready to be tried on fall in the master tailor’s hands.This, however, was no reason for him to fail to go out to meet Leonardo Gamboa and receive him with many smiles and flattering remarks.Whether or not the young man who had just arrived noticed Pimienta’s hasty retreat, or whether he realized the motive behind it is more than can be stated with any degree of certainty. It must be said, however, that up until then Leonardo had not been aware that the musician was a rabid enemy of his; and that, furthermore, he considered himself too superior to concern himself with the sympathies or antipathies of a man of lower station, and a mulatto besides.
I X
Authors: Villaverde Cirilo
Published: October 2023

In the Gamboa household its steward, Don Melitón Reventos, was a person of more importance that anyone could imagine. In the management of its general economy he had more of a say than his master, and at the same time he tried to keep up with DoÑa Rosa in that domain. But where he had powerful authority was among the slaves. He was responsible for keeping both the domestic servants in Havana and those of the rural estates fed and clothed. With the former, above all, he put on the airs of a lord and master, and more than that, of a despot. The fierce steward made two exceptions in their case. In the first place, he did not like to be harsh with Aponte, the carriage driver. Not only was Aponte a stern and fearful man, but he belonged to the spoiled son of the house-hold, who was unwilling to delegate the right to punish him to anyone.
X I I
Authors: Villaverde Cirilo
Published: October 2023

May the days be holy here,” a smiling Nemesia said as she entered without knocking.But she stood silent and motionless at the door once she saw the face and mood of her two friends. The grandmother had again collapsed into the armchair, her favorite place; the granddaughter was still standing alongside the table, on which she was leaning one hand, visibly wavering between grief and despair.The appearance of this friend in those circumstances could not have been more timely. The old woman had said more than what prudence counseled, and the young one was afraid to delve into the innermost meaning of her grandmother’s last words. What was it she knew? Why use such veiled language? Was it hiding well-founded suspicions or was it merely meant to be intimidating?
X V
Authors: Villaverde Cirilo
Published: October 2023

The hours, the days, and the weeks went by and neither letters nor news of Isabel Ilincheta arrived in the city following her departure for AlquÍzar. It was true that communications in the capital, even with towns in the same jurisdiction, were difficult at times. But there was no shortage of private couriers, freight haulers, or itinerant peddlers who consented to take letters and parcels back and forth without charging a fee. And Isabel was in the habit of using them in order to keep up a correspondence with her cousins the Gámez girls and with Leonardo.
V I I I
Authors: Villaverde Cirilo
Published: October 2023

The Gamboa family, along with their guests, spent the greater part of the night of the second day of Christmas in the boiler house.Fires were burning in the sugar mill, lighted by the blacks not so much to shed light in that vast pitch-dark building as to warm themselves, for an unpleasantly chilly breeze could be felt and they lacked warm outer garments save for the wool cap that some of them were wearing. Various noises and a deafening din reigned everywhere. Male and female blacks passed back and forth from the feed panel of the sugar mill to the piles of cane stalks, now with armloads of stalks on their head, now carrying no load, depending on the direction in which they were heading; all of them continually at a run, urged on by the whip of the assistant overseer, who did not allow them a moment’s rest or time out for a breath of air.
V II
Authors: Villaverde Cirilo
Published: October 2023

How are you involved with a girl from the outskirts of the city?”DoÑa Rosa asked her husband while they were still in bed. “Tell me,” she added, poking her elbow into his back because she thought he was playing dumb or pretending to be asleep.“I don’t have any involvement with anyone, Rosa,” Don Cándido answered, half asleep.