bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Options Trading and Earnings Management
Authors: Dai Xin , Qiao Zheng , Xia Chongwu
Published: September 2023

SYNOPSIS

This study examines how options trading plays a unique role in curbing firms’ earnings management. We find that options trading volume deters managers’ earnings manipulations, and the effect can be explained by unique characteristics of the options markets. Our results remain unchanged when using both an instrumental variable approach and difference-in-differences analyses to mitigate endogeneity concerns, and after controlling for investors’ short-selling activities. This study adds to the literature by documenting a real impact of options trading on financial reporting. Our results suggest that the options markets promote price efficiency not only by incorporating private information from informed traders, but also by incentivizing managers to disseminate less manipulated information.

Data Availability: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the second author upon request.

JEL Classifications: E44; G3; M41.
Evaluating Transition Readiness in Older Adolescents and Young Adults With Type 1 Diabetes
Authors: Bryant Breana L. , Wang Christine H. , Streisand Randi , Monaghan Maureen
Published: September 2023

For older adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with type 1 diabetes, successful transition from pediatric to adult diabetes care requires ongoing planning and support. Yet, the transition to adult care is not always smooth. Some AYAs struggle to leave pediatric care or experience significant gaps between pediatric and adult diabetes care. The use of diabetes-specific transition readiness assessments can inform transition planning and support successful preparation for adult care. This study evaluated transition readiness in a diverse sample of AYAs nearing transition to adult diabetes care. Findings suggest that AYAs may benefit from additional preparation and education related to sexual health, tobacco use, and diabetes complications.
Impact of Type 2 Diabetes on the Outcomes of Solid Organ Transplantations in the U.S.: Data From a National Registry
Authors: Stepanova Maria , Kumar Ameeta , Brandt Pamela , Gundurao Nagashree , Cusi Kenneth , Al Qahtani Saleh , Younossi Zobair M.
Published: September 2023

OBJECTIVE

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a major driver of chronic diseases around the globe. The aim was to assess the impact of T2D on the outcomes of solid organ transplantations.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS

We used the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients from 2006 to 2021 to collect data for all patients age ≥18 years who received a lung, heart, liver, or kidney transplant in the U.S.

RESULTS

We included 462,692 solid organ transplant recipients: 31,503 lung, 38,004 heart, 106,639 liver, and 286,440 kidney transplantations. The prevalence of pretransplantation T2D was 15% in lung, 26% in heart, 25% in liver, and 30% in kidney transplant recipients, increasing over time. Posttransplantation mortality was significantly higher among transplant recipients with T2D versus those without T2D (lung 32.1% vs. 29.3% [3 years], 46.4% vs. 42.6% [5 years]; P < 0.01; heart 11.2% vs. 9.1% [1 year], 24.4% vs. 20.6% [5 years]; P < 0.0001; liver 10.6% vs. 8.9% [1 year], 26.2% vs. 22.0% [5 years]; P < 0.0001; kidney 5.3% vs. 2.5% [1 year], 20.8% vs. 10.1% [5 years]; P < 0.0001). Independent association of pretransplantation T2D with higher posttransplantation mortality was significant after adjustment for clinicodemographic confounders (adjusted hazard ratio in lung transplant recipients 1.08 [95% CI 1.03–1.13]; heart 1.26 [1.20–1.32]; liver 1.25 [1.21–1.28]; kidney 1.65 [1.62–1.68]; P < 0.01).

CONCLUSIONS

The prevalence of T2D in solid organ transplantation candidates is increasing. In all solid organ transplantations, pretransplantation T2D was independently associated with higher posttransplantation mortality, most profoundly in kidney transplantations.
Outcome of patients with osteoarthritis aged 90 to 101 years after cemented total hip arthroplasty: 1,385 patients from the Swedish Arthroplasty Register
Authors: Schaufelberger Mattias , Rolfson Ola , Kärrholm Johan
Published: September 2023

Background and purpose: Few studies have focused on nonagenarians treated with total hip arthroplasty (THA). We investigated 30- and 90-day postoperative mortality, patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), reoperation rate, risk factors for reoperation, and relative patient survival in nonagenarians or older.Patients and methods: 167,091 patients with primary cemented THA performed for osteoarthritis between 1992 and 2019 were identified in the Swedish Arthroplasty Register. Patients were divided into age groups based on age at time of surgery: 60–74 (n = 90,285), 75–89 (n = 75,421), and > 90 years (n = 1,385). Mortality rate, PROMs (pain–Likert scale, satisfaction–Likert scale, EQ-VAS, n = 67,553), reoperation rate, risk factors for reoperation, and relative patient survival were studied.Results: The nonagenarians had the highest postoperative mortality rate, 1.7% and 2.6% at 30 and 90 days, respectively. Nonagenarian females reported significantly lower pre- and postoperative EQ-VAS compared with patients aged 60–89 years but reported least pain and highest patient satisfaction 1 year after surgery. At 2 years the nonagenarians had highest reoperation frequency—2.7%—due to infection (1.5%), dislocation (0.8%), and periprosthetic fracture (0.4%). Increasing age, male sex, and polished stem were associated with higher risk of reoperation within 2 years. 8-year age- and sex-matched relative survival was highest among nonagenarians (study group/matched population: ≥ 90 years 3.4, 95% confidence interval [CI] 3.0–3.8; 75–89 years: 1.4, CI 1.4–1.4, and 60–74 years: 1.1, CI 1.1–1.1).Conclusion: 30- and 90-day postoperative mortality and reoperation rates were higher in nonagenarians but PROM data showed least pain and highest patient satisfaction 1 year after surgery with THA among female nonagenarians with primary osteoarthritis.
Poverty and Commercial Surrogacy in India: An Intersectional Analytical Approach
Authors:   University of Hyderabad, India, Suryanarayanan Sheela
Published: September 2023

The destination and source countries for commercial surrogacy match world patterns of inequality. India, Nepal, Thailand, Mexico, and Cambodia banned commercial surrogacy, moving the market to other less-developed countries in South Africa and South America. India had a commercial surrogacy boom until exploitative factors led to the passage of the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill in 2019, which banned the practice. This paper examines surrogacy's monetary, health, and emotional effects on 45 surrogate mothers in Gujarat State, India. The study revealed that a majority (63%) of the very poor women remained very poor post-surgery. Surrogate mothers in poor households had to do at least two surrogacies to be able to buy a property. After surrogacy, some poor households (16%) slipped deeper into poverty and became destitute. The physical effects of surrogacy on the women's bodies were multiple. One-third of the very poor women's health was severely affected. All surrogate mothers reported emotional problems post-surrogacy, and their family members experienced them as well. The poorest of the poor suffered the worst physical effects of surrogacy. This study reveals that the assumption that surrogacy provides income for the very poor surrogate mothers is false.
Association between Progesterone-Only Emergency Contraceptive Pill and Ectopic Pregnancy
Authors: MW Maina
Published: September 2023

Context: Ectopic pregnancy remains a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in the developing countries, where mortality rates are 10 times higher than in the developed countries. In Kenya, there is however no recent data on ectopic pregnancy. Objective: We sought to identify if using an emergency contraceptive pill predisposes to ectopic pregnancy and assess other risk factors for ectopic pregnancy at the Kenyatta National Hospital. Methods: We conducted a case-control study of 120 consecutively sampled women matched for age diagnosed with ectopic pregnancy. Data were analyzed using a statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS software) [version 18.0]. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was performed to calculate the odds ratios (OR) and the corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CI). Results: Of the 120 cases and 120 controls recruited, 27.5% of the cases and 2.5% of the controls had taken Levonogesterol emergency contraceptive (LNG-EC) pill during the menstrual cycle leading to the current pregnancy. Of the cases, 72.7% took the LNG-EC within 24hrs after coitus, while all the controls took the pill within 24-48 hrs. The risk of ectopic pregnancy (EP) increased 12-fold in women who had used LNG-EC (OR=12.44, 95% CI 3.1-49.84) after adjusting for other confounders. EP was associated with an early sexual debut (p= 0.039), and a history of subfertility/infertility (OR=6.87, 95% CI 2.14-22.03). Conclusions: Progesterone only emergency contraceptive pill is as a risk factor for ectopic pregnancy and should be included in the client information leaflet in the drug package insert.
Saneamento e gênero
Authors: Sugahara Cibele Roberta , Guedes Walef Pena , Ferreira Denise Helena Lombardo
Published: September 2023

O adensamento populacional associado à demanda de água impõe desafios de alcançar níveis satisfatórios de eficiência no acesso à água e saneamento equânime. Justifica-se essa pesquisa tendo como base a necessidade de estabelecer medidas que permitam associar o saneamento às novas demandas e contextos da sociedade. Portanto, o objetivo é analisar o saneamento segundo gênero, dos municípios da Bacia do Alto Tietê, a fim de retratar as condições de desigualdade de gênero. Trata-se de uma pesquisa exploratória e quantitativa, com procedimento de coleta de dados realizado nas bases públicas do Sistema Nacional de Informações sobre Saneamento e do Painel do Saneamento Brasil, para o ano de 2020. As oito variáveis selecionadas são relacionadas às dimensões de saneamento, eficiência e gênero. A partir das técnicas multivariadas de Análise Fatorial por Componentes Principais e, foi possível condensar as variáveis em fatores (novas dimensões) para os municípios da Bacia do Alto Tietê. A Análise de Cluster permitiu verificar o nível de similaridade dos municípios. Observou-se que os parâmetros mais expressivos com relação ao saneamento e gênero dos municípios da Bacia do Alto Tietê estão associados à Cobertura de água e esgoto e Internações por gênero (Fator 1). Por outro lado, a Análise de Cluster permitiu verificar que os municípios que integram o Grupo 3 enfrentam os maiores desafios do saneamento considerados nesse estudo, e no Grupo 2 concentram os municípios onde o número de internações de mulheres se sobressai em relação aos homens.
capsuled approach to analysis of the profitability of digitalization of business processes of telecommunications companies in Ukraine
Authors: Klymenko Olena , Lehominova Svitlana , Goloborodko Alona
Published: September 2023

Digital progress fundamentally transforms social reality, changing not only the key principles of social life but also all social institutions and spheres in which social interaction takes place, without neglecting the fundamental basis of the world's existence – the economy. Therefore, the problem of digitalization of the enterprise's business processes in the conditions of the digital economy becomes extremely urgent, given the need for high-quality management of the development of private capital.

The purpose of the article is a multi-aspect system modeling of the encapsulated approach of the enterprise's business processes to find adequate justified management of flow processes in the conditions of digitalization of the economy. Research methodology – methods of digital analytics, based on the analysis of financial statements of enterprises and mathematical modeling of investment flows, including comparative analysis of indicators of comprehensive diagnostics of the effectiveness of digitalization of telecommunications enterprises. Findings - the key flows of business processes of enterprises are defined: material, innovative-intellectual, information-marketing, financial, the effectiveness of which management consists in the synchronization of flows with the possible assumption of temporary variations in the investment of one or another flow. Modeling made it possible to recognize the dominant flows – financial and innovative-intellectual, which allowed the authors to scientifically substantiate the need for systematic balanced management of the enterprise's business processes depending on the changing external environment, which is forced to transform intensively under the influence of the realities of the digital society. The theoretical constructs applied by the authors using the general and innovative theory of systems, the process approach of managing the quality of flows in combination with an interdisciplinary approach and analytical methodology made it possible to highlight the peculiarities of business processes in the conditions of digitalization as a general complex system that can be effectively managed using modern digital technologies.

The study of key indicators and analysis of flow management is proposed to be carried out with the help of an encapsulated approach, which provides scientists with the basis for analytical analysis of the effectiveness of business processes at a modern enterprise in the conditions of a digital society. Research limitations – obtaining the analytical dependence of the key flows of the enterprise's business processes is a platform for making management decisions but requires the use of a more modern methodology using digital tools.
Vertical Farming
Authors: Faraji Amir , Hosseini Ali , Zeinali Kermani Mahdiyehi , Mashatan Negin , Ardestani Shafiee
Published: September 2023

Of those issues that have concerned the government, academics and the public throughout the world, urban sprawl is one of the most prominent. There are conflicting views toward this growing trend. While it has been taken as a positive development in many newly emerging cities, it is increasingly perceived as a threat to the urban environment and considered as a trigger for numerous social problems, such as food shortages, increasing energy usage, global warming and deterioration of environment and urban areas. one feasible solution which can tackle this issue is vertical farming (VF). Promoting vertical farms in the cities can affect urban areas at the environmental, social and economic levels. Vertical farms do indeed have many advantages. A combination of new technologies in the fields of architecture, engineering and agriculture is needed to achieve maximum yield in this approach. therefore, this study is aimed to evaluate the advantages and possibility of vertical farming by reviewing existing and researched VF projects worldwide from 2005 to 2022. The aspects and phenomenon are derived from literature. The aspects offered can be a guide for implementation development and planning for innovative and farming industries of Vertical Farming in undeveloped countries.
On Sense-Perception and Memory
Authors: Kalligas Paul , Koutras Nickolaos
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses Plotinus' revisit of the issue of sense-perception and memory in his treatise. It explores how the soul apprehends sensible objects through the sensory organs and then belief occurs, while on the other hand intellection of intelligible occurs through the intellect. It points out that any impressions formed on the soul lack material subsistence and are not the soul's affections. The chapter includes Longinus' brief treatise On Memory, which represented a rather different conception of Platonism and treated the matter of memory from a perspective that emphasizes the quasi-material dimension of its operation. It explains certain philosophical views on the moral advantages memory affords, examining memory from an epistemological perspective.
On the Immortality of the Soul
Authors: Kalligas Paul , Koutras Nickolaos
Published: September 2023

This chapter considers “On the Immortality of the Soul” as Plotinus' first treatment of the subject of the soul and the first treatise to circulate among members of an inner circle. It discusses central issues pertaining to the nature and the chief characteristics of the soul and criticisms that are leveled against alternative conceptions. It also explores the question of the soul's immortality that contributes to highlighting the distinctiveness of Plato's positions vis-à-vis those of the other philosophical schools, mainly the Epicureans, the Peripatetics, and the Stoics. The chapter covers Plotinus' interest in discerning a unitary doctrine that can preserve the soul's eidetic character and its fundamental kinship to the intelligible beings. It looks at the doctrine that rests mainly on the determination of the soul as a distinct substance and as a predominantly intellective entity that shares all of the main characteristics of intelligible beings.
On the Three Primary Hypostases
Authors: Kalligas Paul , Koutras Nickolaos
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses Plotinus' treatise “On the Three Primary Hypostases,” which represents a turning point in his authorial labors as he appears for the first time ready to present the basic metaphysical structure of his philosophical system in its entirety. It points out how Plotnius' treatise marks the incipience of what later came to be described as Neoplatonism. It also explores the intellective nature of the soul and its concomitant character as something divine and completely independent and impervious to the manifold bodily affections. The chapter explores the approach to the One-Good that is couched in uniquely solemn and ritualistic terms. It addresses the question of whether a person is conscious of the constant presence of the higher hyspostases.
That the Intelligibles Are Not outside the Intellect, and On the Good
Authors: Kalligas Paul , Koutras Nickolaos
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses the late work of Plato, wherein the divine Intellect is revealed as the main agent in the arrangement of the world that takes action to ensure that the world will be good in accordance with divine will. It highlights the benevolent Demiurge in Timaeus, who is depicted administering the universe and imposing through the power of persuasion the mandates of intellect on the inherently irrational physical necessity. It also looks at the precise nature of the relationship between the Demiurge and the model under which he labors. The chapter determines whether the evolutionary cosmogony in the Timaeus is a mythological representation of a synchronic reality and whether the Demiurge possesses any ontological subsistence of any kind or not. It describes the impact of the tendency to identify the Creator god with the intelligible model of his creation, which can be discerned in the manuscript tradition of the Timaeus.
On the Fact That That Which Is beyond Being Does Not Think, and On What Is the Primary and What the Secondary Thinking Principles
Authors: Kalligas Paul , Koutras Nickolaos
Published: September 2023

This chapter covers the treatise that was composed shortly after Porphyry's arrival in Rome, immediately after the extensive treatise “On the Presence of Being, One and the Same, Everywhere as a Whole.” It seeks to reaffirm Plotinus' insistence on his relevant teaching that was central to his philosophy and to rebut Aristotle's identification of the first principle with an Intellect that is thinking itself. It also talks about Bréhier's “Notice,” which focuses criticism on the main points of the Stagirite's theory and provides an apt presentation of the basic directions of Plotinus' strategy. The chapter highlights Plotinus' argument that any intellection, even self-intellection, presupposes some manner of plurality, and any plurality necessarily comes after something prior and unitary. It implies how Intellect needs the Good so that it can constitute itself into what it is.
“Our Fears That the Cofradías Will Disappear Are Not Unfounded”
Authors: Chowning Margaret
Published: September 2023

This chapter covers the aftermath of the crisis of the independence wars beginning in 1810 concerning gender, lay associations, and priests. Due to the war, the post-1810 depression, and the cholera epidemic, many cofradías had lost economic power because they had been forced to sell off some of their property. The withdrawal of men from cofradías posed an issue to the operation of traditional cofradías since it was allegedly unthinkable for women to assume duties as deputies, treasurers, or legal representatives. Meanwhile, the emergence of the separate spheres ideology and republicanism strongly influenced the Mexican political culture, which unified in its embrace of republicanism and exclusion of women from politics. The chapter explains how priests began to shed their old ideas about women's roles in cofradías when the future of priests did not look hopeful for personal reasons, their churches, and their communities.
“The Intervention of the Faithful was an Unavoidable Necessity”
Authors: Chowning Margaret
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the emergence of lay associations in the post-Reform period. It explains how women founded the majority of all new associations and women's lay associations. Since Catholic associations had a great deal to offer women like leadership and prestige, nonreligious associations for women failed to gain traction in Mexico. As women's Catholic association goals enlarged to a national level, these associations also filled the gaps left by failing male-led cofradías to defend the church against triumphant liberalism. The chapter acknowledges the period of 1856 to 1875 as the golden age of local organizing and local autonomy of women-led lay associations.
Introduction
Authors: Winkler John J.
Published: September 2023

This introductory chapter briefly argues that Athenian dramatic festivals were the occasion for elaborate symbolic play on themes of proper and improper civic behavior on the part of men. This was predicated on the assumption that the principal component of proper male citizenship was military. At those festivals, just as at private symposia, such play with embodied definitions of good and bad masculinity occurred in both serious and facetious formats: tragedy and comedy alike were built on contrasts of behavior (and physique) represented in terms of the taut and the slack. A central reference point for these representations—the notional targets of their lessons (paideia) about the trials of manhood (andreia)—were the young men of the city. These young men were also the choral performers of tragedy at least, and perhaps of comedy as well.
Hippokleides Dances
Authors: Winkler John J.
Published: September 2023

This chapter offer a performance-based hypothesis about the early character of Athenian tragedy. It does so by sketching the two sides from which the behavior of Hippokleides, an early-sixth-century-BCE figure, could be evaluated, since he is located at a sort of cultural balance point where an idealized military manhood momentarily risks tipping over into its opposite. Here, the chapter takes a look at the moment when Hippokleides is dancing upside down on a table with his legs moving like arms. In striving to outdo his competitors with an untoppable performance in Kleisthenes' theater of excellence, Hippokleides boldly and deliberately played with the boundaries of his own dignity. His initial dancing, for all that it did not suit Kleisthenes' idea of decorum, might have been well within the range of competitive display tolerable at a drinking party, but in upending himself and using his feet as hands he certainly went one step too far. One can take the measure of its lack of social gravity by noting that, at least in later times, such a performance is attested only for acrobatic call-girls, performing for hire and for the pleasure of men.
Phallic Theatrics
Authors: Winkler John J.
Published: September 2023

This chapter questions the two assumptions that are usually made about phallic imagery in ancient Athens generally and in the dramatic performances staged by the Athenians particularly—namely, that it is “primitive” and that it is bound up with fertility. Instead, the chapter distinguishes and specifies two different significations, or fields of meaning, of the phallos in ancient Athens. The first is an elitist or hierarchical signification, in which the obtrusiveness or unobtrusiveness of the represented phallos is correlated, respectively, with excess and restraint, grotesque abandon and manly control, unmilitary slackness and heroic discipline, comedy and tragedy. And, by contrast, there is a democratic or egalitarian signification, visible in the herm, in which the phallos serves as a marker of the notional equality of all the male householders and citizens of Athens. In doing so, the chapter takes a look at the social meanings attached to the male body, young and old, rich and poor.
An Oscar for Iphigeneia
Authors: Winkler John J.
Published: September 2023

This chapter considers a later institutional factor—canon formation. This involves two phases: the selection of the “best” texts for preservation and for commentary, and the devising of theoretical justifications for their “bestness.” What has happened in the case of Attic tragōidiai is that there is an ancient but post-Classical selection of best plays, and in Aristotle's Poetics a theory of what is required to compose “a best play” (hē kallistē tragōidia, not tragedy in general) is provided. Here, the chapter demonstrates that Aristotle's arguments for dramatic excellence imply a very different canon from the actual selection of plays that survives to this day. Indeed, his best type of play roughly coincides with what can be called the “scenario of risk,” and that his formal criteria for tragic plot construction are determined by social considerations that mesh very closely with the perspectives outlined in the previous three chapters.
The Return of Proserpina
Authors: Spence Sarah
Published: September 2023

In the first century BC, Cicero praised Sicily as Rome's first overseas province and confirmed it as the mythic location for the abduction of Proserpina, known to the Greeks as Persephone, by the god of the underworld. This book takes readers from Roman antiquity to the late Middle Ages to explore how the Mediterranean island offered authors a setting for forces resistant to empire and a location for displaying and reclaiming what has been destroyed. Using the myth of Proserpina as a through line, the book charts the relationship Western empire held with its myths and its own past. It takes an in-depth, panoramic look at a diverse range of texts set on Sicily, demonstrating how the myth of Proserpina enables a discussion of empire in terms of balance, loss, and negotiation. Providing new readings of authors as separated in time and culture as Vergil, Claudian, and Dante, the book shows how the shape of Proserpina's tale and perceptions of the island change from a myth of loss to one of redemption, with the volcanic Mt. Etna playing an increasingly central role. Delving into the ways that myth and geography affect politics and poetics, the book explores the power of language and the written word during a period of tremendous cultural turbulence.
Venus’s Other Son
Authors: Spence Sarah
Published: September 2023

This chapter evaluates how, in Metamorphoses, Ovid reworks the relationship between poetry and empire and uses Sicily to make a very different point. Rather than using his poetry to question or explore the goals of empire, he suggests instead that the true contribution of empire lies in the poetic realm. Consequently, Ovid's epic is a narrative empire of constant fertility and transformation, and of regeneration and regrowth rooted in the absence of decay that, at the same time, critiques the politics of the real world. It is Venus's role at the start of the tale of Proserpina that is ultimately so telling for understanding Ovid's perception of the role of Sicily in his tale as she extends her imperium into the afterlife, erases difference between life and what comes after, and extends the range of poetry into the future. While on a political level Venus's challenge to Cupid in Metamorphoses 5, to cause Hades to fall in love, does indeed speak of extending imperium beyond its bounds, it also, and perhaps more importantly, speaks of the continuity of poetic imperium from the past to the present.
Claudian, Etna, and the Loss of Proserpina
Authors: Spence Sarah
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the reception of Claudian's De Raptu Proserpinae, which includes two important differences from the earlier versions of the Proserpina myth. Though her story is still set on Sicily, Proserpina is abducted from the slopes of Mt. Etna rather than from the center of the island, and the story breaks off at the moment when Ceres begins her search for her daughter. While the ancient versions of the tale all resolved Proserpina's abduction through a negotiation between Pluto and Ceres (with Jupiter sometimes weighing in), Claudian's version and its commentaries omit that negotiation. As a result, the myth of Proserpina both unfolds in a different location, and it comes to serve as a myth of departure. As the story is transmitted, it is a tale in which Etna is the only location that matters, a location marked by both beauty and terror, and it is a tale of loss.
Quando n’apparve una montagna
Authors: Spence Sarah
Published: September 2023

This chapter addresses the role of the mountain of Purgatory in Dante's Commedia as seen from afar in Inferno 26. In this canto, Dante and Vergil encounter Ulysses in the flame with Diomedes and hear the tale of Ulysses' journey and death. As Vergil himself says here, it was Ulysses who, through the ruse of the Trojan horse, led not only to the fall of Troy but, more, to the opportunity of the story of Aeneas and Rome, and therefore to the resulting empires and their tales. Ulysses, in other words, is critical for the afterlife of Troy, both in terms of the tradition that includes the Aeneid and the founding of the Roman Empire. The chapter then considers how an examination of the intertexts activated in the description of Purgatory by Ulysses confirms an association between Sicily and Purgatory.
Popular Politics and the Path to Durable Democracy
Authors: Kadivar Mohammad Ali
Published: September 2023

When protests swept through the Middle East at the height of the Arab Spring, the world appeared to be on the verge of a wave of democratization. Yet, with the failure of many of these uprisings, it has become clearer than ever that the path to democracy is strewn with obstacles. This book examines the conditions leading to the success or failure of democratization, shedding vital new light on how prodemocracy mobilization affects the fate of new democracies. The book shows how the longest episodes of prodemocracy protest give rise to the most durable new democracies. The book analyzes more than one hundred democratic transitions in eighty countries between 1950 and 2010, showing how more-robust democracies emerge from lengthier periods of unarmed mobilization. The book then analyzes five case studies—South Africa, Poland, Pakistan, Egypt, and Tunisia—to investigate the underlying mechanisms. It finds that organization building during the years of struggle develops the leadership needed for lasting democratization and strengthens civil society after dictatorship. The book challenges the prevailing wisdom in American foreign policy that democratization can be achieved through military or coercive interventions, revealing how lasting change arises from sustained, nonviolent grassroots mobilization.
Contentious Mobilization and Democratic Outcomes in a Cross-National Perspective
Authors: Kadivar Mohammad Ali
Published: September 2023

This chapter elaborates on contentious mobilization and democratic outcomes under a cross-national perspective. It considers whether democracies that emerge from sustained unarmed mobilization improve their quality in comparison with other new democracies. Democracies that emerge from longer periods of mass mobilization are more likely to survive, improve, and achieve a robust civil society. The chapter discusses the effects of an unarmed mobilization on four different but related outcomes, referencing the notions of democratic failure, electoral democracy, liberal democracy, and civil society. It also explores the effect of mass mobilization for democratic survival and democratic quality and the factors that determine the length of unarmed mobilizations resulting in democratic transitions.
Mechanisms of Success and Failure in South Africa, Poland, and Pakistan
Authors: Kadivar Mohammad Ali
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses the case studies revolving around the democratic transitions of South Africa, Poland, and Pakistan. It explains the importance of organization building during the years of mobilization and its effect on the transition period and democratic durability. The three countries exhibit variations in the duration of nonviolent mobilization and the survival of democracy. In South Africa and Poland, lengthy mobilization occurred hand in hand with building an organizational structure to sustain the mobilization and to bring together otherwise separate groups in the opposition. Meanwhile, the case study of Pakistan demonstrates the fragilities and weaknesses faced by young democracies when authoritarian elites make formative decisions.
Predicaments of Rapid Success
Authors: Kadivar Mohammad Ali
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the failed democratic transition of Egypt following a short period of mobilization. It looks into the theories concerning the negative effects of civil society on democracy and the negative consequences of short-term mobilization for democratization. The short mobilization resulted in a lack of consensus and an imbalance of power between the main factions in civil society. The chapter explains how a rapid wave of mobilization resulted in two unfavorable mechanisms for Egypt's transition. The mechanisms include the continued political activities of the previous regime's holdover and the Egyptian civil society split between an organizationally strong Islamist camp and an organizationally weak non-Islamist camp.
Government Victory in Guatemala
Authors: Daly Sarah Zukerman
Published: September 2023

This chapter pays close attention to Guatemala, where the war ended not in stalemate, but instead in a relative government win. The chapter details how the war in Guatemala left in its wake viable parties of all three prototypes: a militarily victorious successor party, a militarily vanquished one, and a nonbelligerent party. It also studies how a successful brutal belligerent maneuvered not against a rival belligerent successor as in El Salvador, but against a strong party without blood on its hands. The chapter talks about the nonbelligerent and the successful belligerent parties in Guatemala that were right-wing and had equal claim to the security issue by a partisan-ownership explanation. It goes on to cover the media control that played a role in the Guatemalan case, which suggests that harnessing the media may matter most when the competitive parties face incentives to propagate convergent messages.
Political Life After War Globally, 1970–2015
Authors: Daly Sarah Zukerman
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the phenomenon of violent actors who win votes on a global scale to understand the generalizability and limitations of the theory. It uses an original dataset, the Civil War Successor Party cross-national dataset, which encompasses the full universe of belligerents around the world that transitioned from civil war between 1970 and 2015. The dataset traces the postwar political trajectories of the civil war belligerents, identifies their successor parties, charts their electoral performance, and identifies their nonbelligerent opponents. The chapter shows that parties with violent pasts tend to dominate the elections and that war outcomes are powerful predictors of belligerent party performance, irrespective of the belligerents' use of mass atrocities. It also looks at newly assembled subnational data on violence, war outcomes, and voting.
Personification
Authors: Jackson Virginia
Published: September 2023

This chapter recalls Phillis Wheatley's metalyrical creation of a poetics of personal abstraction in the late eighteenth century. The chapter focuses on the poem that became “On Recollection,” in order to consider the many ways in which Wheatley's poetics saw the threat of Romantic apostrophe coming in the privileged eighteenth-century figure of personification. As the chapter highlights, the result of this figure in Wheatley's poetics is not animation or “mute responsiveness,” but silence, disintegration, vanishing, dissemination, scattering, disappearance, and refinement into evanescence. It is as if her personifying figures literalized and realized the dangers of figurative personhood that later Black Romantic poets perceived before they happened. Yet, as the chapter also reveals, that may be because the pathos that aligned Wheatley's poetics with her self-characterization as the “last and meanest of the rhyming train,” the poet and the poetry “all beautiful in woe,” influenced the Anglo-American Romantic poetics that later Black poets recast as inherently antiblack. Finally, the chapter investigates how Wheatley's poetics prefigured both Romanticism and the Black nineteenth-century critique of Romanticism that together formed American lyric.
Deep Time
Authors: Heringman Noah
Published: September 2023

This book argues that the concept of “deep time”—most often associated with geological epochs—began as a metaphorical language used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the origins of life beyond the written record. Their ideas about “the abyss of time” created a way to think about the prehistoric before it was possible to assign dates to the fossil record. The book challenges the conventional wisdom that the idea of deep time came forth fully formed from the modern science of geology. Instead, the book argues, it has a rich imaginative history. The book considers Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster, naturalists on James Cook's second voyage around the world, who, inspired by encounters with Pacific islanders, connected the scale of geological time to human origins and cultural evolution; Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who drew on travel narrative, antiquarian works, and his own fieldwork to lay out the first modern geological timescale; Blake and Johann Gottfried Herder, who used the language of fossils and artifacts to promote ancient ballads and “prehistoric song”; and Darwin's exploration of the reciprocal effects of geological and human time. Deep time, the book shows, has figural and imaginative dimensions beyond its geological meaning.
Primitive Rocks and Primitive Customs
Authors: Heringman Noah
Published: September 2023

This chapter introduces an environmental history of the human species that is recast by Comte de Buffon, by Johann Gottfried Herder and William Blake, and by Charles Darwin and John Lubbock without departing wholly from the model established in the Forsters' voyage narratives. The Forsters, Johann (John) Reinhold Forster and his son Georg (George), first began to place their conjectural histories of Pacific peoples in the context of the emerging geological time scale. Taking note of the many volcanoes in the South Pacific, the Forsters brought the question of how the Pacific islands formed to bear on the question of human origins and migrations. Their successful integration of human and nonhuman time owes much to their historical situation as shipboard naturalists. Indeed, their repeated experiences of first contact with Pacific peoples were enacted on a stage already framed by their expertise as naturalists.
The “Profoundest Depths of Time” in Buffon’s Epochs of Nature
Authors: Heringman Noah
Published: September 2023

This chapter talks about Buffon's The Epochs of Nature (1778). Epochs of Nature is one of the first geochronologies to insist on a comparatively long prehuman past, and Buffon anticipates some of his contemporaries' objections by establishing a human epoch, a seventh and final age “in which Man assisted the operations of Nature.” Whereas the Forsters are content to situate the human species biogeographically, using contemporary field evidence and the written record, Buffon must at times resort to “romantic” conjectures about a multispecies prehistory, as necessitated by his commitment to prehuman time. Epochs of Nature is one of the earliest histories of the earth to invoke deep time in the sense in which it is now most commonly understood, as geological in contradistinction to historical time. At the same time, it is close enough to the Enlightenment genre of conjectural history to explain why the expression continues to invite metaphorical uses today, such as “literature through deep time” or “the deep time of the media.”
William Blake, the Ballad Revival, and the Deep Past of Poetry
Authors: Heringman Noah
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses William Blake's treatment of deep time in his works, particularly in Songs of Innocence and Experience. It examines Blake's “ballad culture” in greater detail, which encompasses not only the echoes of popular song and the vernacular meters but also his concern with oral composition, his poetic investigation of earlier stages of society, and even his technique of illustration. The chapter then elaborates the six topoi associated with the ballad tradition: the “rude age” of early humanity, conjectural history, the precedent of Homer, the origins of art, survivals, and human species identity. These topoi create an interface between ballad literature and human prehistory, or species time. The chapter then returns to Blake to show how these topoi from the ballad tradition informed Blake's reflections on time, scale, and human antiquity in his later mythopoeic epics.
Migrants and Machine Politics
Authors: Auerbach Adam Michael , Thachil Tariq
Published: September 2023

This chapter documents how political networks form to connect poor migrants with the heart of urban governments. It shows how unraveling these processes yields new and counterintuitive insights about the ability of disadvantaged citizens to secure representation and responsiveness from city authorities, and to demand accountability from those who govern them. In doing so, residents of slums like Tulsi Nagar routinely defy the stereotypes used to portray them, and demand a starring role in the unfolding political drama of urbanization across much of the world. The chapter considers how slums like Tulsi Nagar transform from clusters of hurriedly constructed shanties into the epicenters of urban elections. This captures in brief how poor migrants from the countryside are politically incorporated into the growing cities of the Global South.
How Brokers Emerge
Authors: Auerbach Adam Michael , Thachil Tariq
Published: September 2023

This chapter demonstrates that the migrants who populate Indian slums are neither passive recipients of election-time handouts, nor cowering victims of local kingpins. In actively selecting their brokers, slum residents powerfully shape who represents their political interests in the city. With multiple aspirants vying for resident support, residents have meaningful choices in whom to seek assistance from and whom to follow. In choosing their brokers based on their problem-solving abilities, residents ensure a degree of quotidian, performance-based accountability within city politics. Tracing the formation of slum brokerage networks thus reveals a more substantial, if far from perfect, degree of representation and accountability within political machines than is commonly depicted.
How Patrons Select Brokers
Authors: Auerbach Adam Michael , Thachil Tariq
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines how political networks connect to the wider world of city politics beyond the slum. It does so by focusing on how political patrons choose which local brokers from slums to formally provide with organizational positions. This important choice has been largely ignored within studies of machine politics, due to insufficient recognition of the significant competition between brokers that affords patrons the opportunity to choose between multiple aspirants. The importance of organizational inclusion is further emphasized. The chapter presents novel data from the careers of slum leaders to show that many can and do experience some upward mobility within party organizations.
Conclusion: Decolonization, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Authors: mcnamee lachlan
Published: September 2023

This chapter notes the end of colonization in correlation with modernization and the politics of decolonization. Colonization and decolonization are alternative pathways available to states to resolve conflicts over sovereignty. Economic development remains a powerful force for decolonization, as coercive power is no panacea for resolving sovereignty conflicts in the long run. Meanwhile, moderization ends the partnership between states and settlers by transforming cities from demographic sinks into the most productive and desirable places to live in. The chapter clarifies the limitations of colonization alternatives for altering the ethnic composition, which references the ineffective demographic transition of China. It explains that the concept of decolonization is not synonymous with a metonym for diversity.
Facing the Road
Authors: Wen Xin
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that the roads that diplomatic travelers encountered were neither well-maintained highways nor merely unidentifiable, shifting paths. Depending on the existence of postal systems, military establishments, and sources of water, one can broadly distinguish four types of stops that lent different degrees of navigability to the roads they served. Without comprehensive maps, the chapter highlights that medieval travelers nonetheless navigated these often-challenging roads through geographical treatises, lists of place names, place-centered poems, and travelogues, as well as with the assistance of local guides and host states. The chapter chronicles how medieval envoys made use of these tools, as well as the orally transmitted knowledge that is largely invisible to us, to navigate the complex roads in Central Eurasia. Neither entirely well-maintained thoroughfares nor utterly uncharted and unidentified paths, the Silk Road in the eyes of the envoys was complex and changing, but fundamentally knowable and therefore traversable. The chapter underlines that travelers were able to connect fragments of information about diverse areas into an intelligible whole.
Switching Languages
Authors: Wen Xin
Published: September 2023

This chapter turns to the question of linguistic negotiation. Looking at the Dunhuang documents, the chapter provides a richer and multilayered source base on the issue of translation and linguistic negotiation on the Silk Road. It examines the envoy reports, diplomatic letters, and bilingual phrasebooks, then argues that multilingualism on the Silk Road existed, not only because some travelers spoke more than one language, but also through the multilingual diplomatic missions that consisted of monolingual travelers who spoke different languages. Regardless of the language(s) they spoke, the chapter underlines that the diplomatic travelers shifted their ways of communicating through translations of official documents, interpretations of key conversations, and exchanges on mundane topics on the road. In all of these cases, the chapter emphasizes that shifts occurred not only among different languages, but also between different registers—imperial, bureaucratic, or colloquial—of the same language.