bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Roth Carla
Published: February 2022

The Introduction argues that early modern exchanges of information were shaped by the social dynamics of face-to-face exchanges long into the age of print. It proposes to study these dynamics through the lens of an exceptional but little-known source, namely Johannes Rütiner’s Commentationes, and by bringing together the histories of information and sociability. A close reading and contextualization of Rütiner’s notes on hundreds of conversations allows us to explore what the inhabitants of a sixteenth-century town talked about, what kind of information they valued, through which channels such information reached them, and how it was then processed, shared, criticized, contradicted, and employed as a means to forge and strengthen social bonds. Zooming in on a small sixteenth-century town moreover enables us to examine what the early modern communications revolution looked like outside of the large printing centres upon which historians of communication have so far bestowed much of their attention, and to a community which did not directly partake in its novelties. At the same time, Rütiner’s notes also force us to rethink both what constituted valuable information in the sixteenth century and who was able to provide it. To this end, the introduction introduces the concept of ‘communicative capital’, and argues that such diverse content as jokes, gossip, rumours, and tales could serve as currency on the early modern marketplace of information.
Conclusion
Authors: Roth Carla
Published: February 2022

The conclusion turns to the end of the 1530s, when, just before Rütiner’s notes come to a sudden end, the talk of the St Gall increasingly reached the consensus that war was imminent. It argues that this fear of war was amplified by the close entanglement between information and community in 1530s St Gall, which gave informants both an incentive to tailor their stories to their audiences’ fears and expectations and the knowledge required to do so. The conclusion then looks beyond sixteenth-century St Gall to argue that one of the more important transformations in the history of early modern communication was a growing separation between the dissemination of news and the circulation of social knowledge—a development which is in the process of being reversed in the current age of social media.
Living with a Playhouse
Authors: Highley Christopher
Published: February 2022

This chapter considers why there were no formal complaints against the playhouse between 1596 and the next petition of 1619. It argues that the playhouse brought economic and social benefits to the area, and that over time theater people became a familiar part of the neighborhood. Even the godly learned to live in the shadow of a playhouse. For the Blackfriars clergy, maintaining neighborhood stability by accommodating the interests of different factions usually trumped a desire for ideological purity. The presence of a playhouse may even have served their polemical goals until material conditions dictated otherwise.
Gouge, the Spanish Match, and Blackfriars “Spanish” Plays
Authors: Highley Christopher
Published: February 2022

This chapter argues that William Gouge not only continued Stephen Egerton’s tradition of dissident preaching but also made the parish of St. Anne’s a cockpit of opposition to Stuart policy in church and state. King James’s pursuit of an inter-faith dynastic marriage for Prince Charles and his reluctance to support the Protestant cause in Europe galvanized Gouge and his activist parishioners. Their sermons and other writings pushed back against Stuart policies in subtle and not so subtle ways. In doing so, they resonated with similar oppositional discourses in contemporary Blackfriars Spanish-themed plays. During these years, sermons and plays were more in dialogue with than opposed to one another.
Intention and Motivation
Authors: Raz Joseph
Published: February 2022

What is the role of intentions in the actions intended? What do they contribute, and how do they contribute to the occurrence of the intended actions? The chapter will offer an account of acting with an intention and of having an intention to act. It will not offer an account of intentional action, merely suggesting that when intentional actions are not actions done with an intention, their explanation as intentional relates to that of actions with intentions, showing how like them and unlike them they are. Motivation will be discussed mainly to distinguish its role in leading to action from the role played by intentions.
Is There a Reason to Keep a Promise?
Authors: Raz Joseph
Published: February 2022

If promises are binding there must be a reason to do as one promised. There is a difficulty in explaining what that reason is. It arises because the reasons that promising creates are content independent. Similar difficulties arise regarding other content-independent reasons, though their solution need not be the same. Section 1 introduces an approach to promises, and outlines an account of them. The problems discussed in the chapter arise, albeit in slightly modified ways, for various other accounts as well. It is, however, helpful to use a specific account as a springboard leading to one explanation of promissory reasons, namely of the reasons that valid promises constitute for performing the promised act (Section 2). We can call it the bare reasons account. Sections 3 and 4 will raise difficulties with that account, leading to its abandonment in favour of an alternative in Sections 5 and 6.
John Locke and Trust in Government
Authors: Levack Brian P.
Published: February 2022

The chapter begins with a discussion of the political philosophy of Locke, who claimed that all government is, or at least should be, based on trust. Locke’s theory originated in response to the policies of the governments of Charles II and James II, which Locke claimed violated the trust that the people had placed in the executive and the legislature. Locke’s argument provided a foundation for the opposition of the Commonwealthmen to the establishment Whig ministries of the early eighteenth century and colonial American opposition to the British government in the 1760s and 1770s. The concluding section in this chapter deals with efforts to promote mutual trust between the federal government and the states in drafting the United States Constitution in 1787 and the Bill of Rights in 1789.
Cambridge and London
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: February 2022

This chapter examines the foundation in June 1833 of Section F, the statistical section, of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at its third meeting in Cambridge, and the creation in the following year of the Statistical Society of London, now the Royal Statistical Society. The informal origins of Section F, which provoked controversy in the British Association, are related to the so-called ‘Cambridge Network’ of leading savants and scientists, especially the mathematician Charles Babbage, the physicist William Whewell, the astronomer John Herschel, and the political economist Richard Jones. They took the intellectual lead in the institutionalization of statistics in Britain. The focus then moves to London where the Statistical Society of London was founded in Babbage’s house. It held its inaugural meeting in March 1834. It is argued that in the switch from Cambridge to London what was originally intended to be an intellectual movement and academic forum for the study and application of numbers was transformed into a bureaucratic organization to assist the collection of data by government. It was patronized by politicians, largely from the Whig party, professional men, and activist civil servants, so-called ‘statesmen in disguise’. The Statistical Society of London became a centre for policy formation rather than a learned society for social science by inductive means as the Cambridge Network had intended. The protean nature of statistics at this time, which seemed to offer advantages to all groups, allowed an intellectual project to be overwhelmed by public affairs.
Medicine and Statistics at Mid-Century
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: February 2022

This chapter considers the impact of statistics on Victorian medicine, one of the most fertile academic combinations of the era, through three case studies. First, it examines the work of Dr William Farr, the creative force for four decades in the General Register Office, and the most prominent and famous Victorian statistician. Farr composed annual reports on the health of the nation that inspired successive waves of the public health movement, and was at the heart of every effort to institutionalize statistics from the late 1830s. He used various statistical approaches in the study of cholera, though they were all rendered redundant by the advent of microbiology and the isolation of bacterial pathogens in the 1880s. His friend, Dr William Augustus Guy, was the most prolific giver of papers to the Statistical Society of London, a leader in public health reform, and a proponent of the idea that statistics were, in themselves, the one and only social science. Finally, the chapter examines the work of Sir John Simon at the Privy Council Medial Office between 1858 and 1871, a golden era of research into environmental causes of disease undertaken by a cadre of distinguished young physicians who used statistical approaches reflexively. It is argued that medicine had an obvious affinity for statistical methods, and it was believed that by counting it would prove possible to understand and control disease. But in the event, it was biological science and not statistics that led in countering the epidemics of the nineteenth century
Social Statistics in the 1880s
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: February 2022

The penultimate chapter demonstrates a key theme in the history of Victorian statistics: the central and continuing role played by arguments over living standards and the extent of poverty. It concerns the Industrial Remuneration Conference, held in London in January 1885. This brought together leading representatives from politics, intellectual life, business, and working-class organizations, to discuss the maldistribution of wealth and the proceeds of industry in Britain. It also considered the reforms required to give working people higher incomes and better life-chances. The statistics of daily life and working-class consumption dominated discussion. The recent Presidential Address to the Statistical Society of London by the civil servant Robert Giffen on ‘The Progress of the Working Class’ was roundly condemned for its roseate and optimistic views of material progress over the past half-century in Britain. Many delegates contested Giffen’s statistics on wage rates and prices. The Conference reached no consensus and conclusions. It was a further example of the so-called ‘re-discovery of poverty’ in the 1880s, however, and an important context for the origins of Charles Booth’s great inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People of London, one of the most important of all British social investigations, which began in the following year.
Introduction
Authors: Cammack Paul
Published: February 2022

This chapter reviews work in critical political economy that discusses the character of the global economy, its development since the Second World War, and the way in which it is managed, and draws out the connections and contrasts with the analysis of the politics of global competitiveness. It then sets out the argument that the principal role of the OECD and the World Bank is to govern global capitalism, and to secure the development of the world market as a whole. Its central task, in doing so, is to promote the revolutionary transformation of social relations around the world, to increase the global hegemony of capital over labour.
Capitalising on COVID-19?
Authors: Cammack Paul
Published: February 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted two of the major initiatives of the OECD and the World Bank—the organisation of production on a genuinely global scale through global value chains, and the creation of a skilled and mobile proletariat through employment-related education and the promotion of mobility within and across borders. At the same time, it has brought significant advances in the development and exploitation of digital platforms, along with flexible working and working from home. The two organisations have produced hundreds of policy documents and extended analyses that encourage flexible working, but express increasing concern over the setback that the pandemic represents to reforms initiated over the last decade in particular. The overall conclusion is that on balance the pandemic represents less an opportunity to profit from crisis than a threat to the promotion of versatility, flexibility, and mobility on the part of workers around the world.
The Resolution of Inter-State Disputes in Civil Aviation
Authors: Zhang Luping
Published: February 2022

This book investigates dispute resolution mechanisms in international civil aviation, with a primary focus on the functions of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Council. The Convention on International Civil Aviation (Chicago Convention) has laid the foundation for dispute resolution mechanisms in international civil aviation, which led to the creation of ICAO. However, economic regulations have been left out from the Chicago Convention. Over the years there has been a proliferation of bilateral air services agreements (ASAs) and the multiplication of multilateral treaties. With the advancement of the aviation technology, this book considers whether dispute resolution mechanisms should be modernized, and if so, what form such modernization might take. The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 provides an introduction and defines the scope of the research. Chapter 2 is an empirical chapter, which traces the evolution of dispute resolution clauses under both multilateral air law treaties and bilateral ASAs with the most updated data collected to date. Chapter 3 analyses how disputes brought to the fora designated under the treaties in Chapter 2 are resolved in practice. The fourth chapter builds on the empirical evidence provided in Chapters 2 and 3 to critically assess the political and legal means that are involved in the settlement of international aviation disputes. The final chapter proposes reforms on the basis of the lessons learnt in the previous chapters and introduces proposals for amending rules of procedures in the ICAO as well as establishing a new arbitral institution.
The Practice of Dispute Resolution of International Civil Aviation
Authors: Zhang Luping
Published: February 2022

Chapter 3 examines the State practice and maps out the composition of the number and nature of cases. The purpose of this chapter has two layers: the first layer is to assess the loopholes of dispute resolution mechanisms in international civil aviation and test if the deficiencies embedded in the text of the treaties prove to be true. The second layer is to summarize and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each forum—the ICAO Council, ad hoc arbitral tribunals, and the ICJ. Section B presents an overview of the case law filed along the same timeline as the air services agreements (ASAs) collected in Chapter 2 (1941–2020). It argues that the number of cases is on the rise and will continue rising in the future. Section C then introduces three fora: the ICAO Council, ad hoc arbitral tribunals, and the ICJ. Of these three fora, the ICAO Council has a special status as a United Nations specialized agency in international civil aviation. This forum is also the optimal choice for reforms proposed in Chapter 5. Section D provides an overview of case law arising out of these disputes under both multilateral air law treaties and bilateral ASAs. Chapter 3 serves as the second cornerstone with practical evidence for proposals in Chapter 5.
Early Years
Authors: Beiser Frederick C.
Published: February 2022

This chapter covers Herbart’s early education in Oldenburg. It discusses his teachers, the subjects he learned, and the schools he attended. Already at an early age Herbart studied philosophy and he was encouraged to think for himself about philosophical issues. He wrote two early essays, one on freedom of the will and another on the existence of God. The final section examines the extant writings in some detail. Herbart admired Kant when he was very young and came under the influence of Kant’s moral philosophy. However, it would be wrong to regard him as a disciple of Kant because on important points he will depart from Kant’s teaching. It was Kant, however, who liberated Herbart from the common eudemonism of his age.
Rethinking the Great Transition
Authors: Larson Peter L.
Published: February 2022

This case study of two rural parishes in County Durham, England uses a wide range of medieval and early modern sources to offer an alternate view on the economic development involved in the transition from medieval to modern, partly explaining England’s rise to global economic dominance in the seventeenth century. These are an example of agrarian expansion, as coal mining did not come to these parishes until the nineteenth century. Low population, favourable seigneurial administration, and a commercialized society saw the emergence of large farms on the bishopric of Durham soon after the Black Death; these secure copyhold and leasehold tenures were among the earliest known in England. Individualism developed within a strong parish and village community that encouraged growth while enforcing conformity. Along with low rents, this allowed for a swift expansion of agricultural production in the sixteenth century as population rose and then as the coal trade expanded rapidly. The prosperity of these families is reflected in their lands, livestock, and consumer goods. Yet not all shared in this prosperity, as the poor and landless increased in number simply by population growth. Through reformation and rebellion, these and other parishes prospered without experiencing severe disruption or destruction. In north-eastern England, agrarian development was an evolution and not a revolution. England’s economic development was a single narrative, but a collection of regional experiences at different times and at different speeds.
Development and Capitalism
Authors: Larson Peter L.
Published: February 2022

Reviews the literature and major questions on the end of serfdom and rural economic development in pre-modern England. The period from the Black Death to the later seventeenth century was one of major transitions in Europe. The Netherlands, then England and Britain, overtook Spanish and Italian states for economic dominance in Europe, leading to the Great Divergence as Europe overtook Asia. In England, these centuries saw the end of serfdom and open field, and communal agriculture, with a new emphasis on individual and agrarian capitalism. The northeast was prospering, with capitalist farmers supplying the region and the expanding coal trade in Newcastle, although not at the scale of London with its exports of the new draperies and its growing population leading to agrarian development in southern England. This demonstrates an alternative to the traditional models of agrarian and economic development and indicates the importance of regional growth in supporting the national economy.
The High Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes and the Rise of Alimony
Authors: Kesselring K.J. , Stretton Tim
Published: February 2022

The issue of jurisdictional conflict that runs through each of the previous chapters emerges again and more forcefully in the fourth chapter, on the Court of High Commission. No regular church court, High Commission derived its power from statute and royal prerogative. Like Requests and Star Chamber, High Commission would fall in the revolutionary ferment that preceded the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. Historians are familiar with many aspects of the conflict between common lawyers and the High Commission, but our focus here is on the heightening of tensions generated by the court’s provision of aid and alimony to wives in troubled marriages.
Introduction
Authors: Kapoor Ria
Published: February 2022

The introduction lays out this work’s central tension of self-determination and human rights, as embodied in the figure of the refugee, explaining how India offers a window into understanding belonging and rights in the postcolonial world. It explains the place of this work in furthering the twentieth-century understanding of the refugee in history, asking how experiences within the British Empire and the lack of equal rights as citizens in empire made Indian colonial subjects wary of bureaucratic categories born in an international order when empires still prevailed. The refugee in India was understood in ways that deviated from the international definition and associated practices, but very much in conversation with global developments and discussions, and this chapter lays the groundwork for arguing for India as a clear case where the refugee was both constitutive and destructive for citizenship and rights. At every turn, India protected self-determination as the right from which all other rights stemmed, in keeping with a Nehruvian idea of anti-colonial worldmaking.
The Refugees’ Imperial Past
Authors: Kapoor Ria
Published: February 2022

Set in the early twentieth century, this chapter focuses on the position of Indians within the transnational British Empire in the age of the nation-state based order of the League of Nations. It discusses the inequalities of Indian subject-citizenship within that empire, even as the British influenced key decisions of the League of Nations. The questions of self-determination, of minority rights, and of refugees are revealed to be inextricably intertwined, particularly in discussing the situation of India both within the empire and in its anomalous position at the League of Nations under British aegis. It thus exposes the tensions over the lack of Indian people’s equal rights under British rule, even as rights, assistance, and bureaucratic recognition that exceeded that of these citizens of the British Empire were extended to those called ‘refugees’, paving the way for the postcolonial nation-state’s policies.
Creole Noise
Authors: Edmondson Belinda
Published: February 2022

Creole Noise constructs a literary history of Creole literature—also known as dialect literature, or literary dialect—and performance in the English-speaking Caribbean from the heyday of colonialism in the late-eighteenth century to the post-Emancipation period of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. It does so from an understanding that Creole is an essential feature of Caribbean cultural production. In emphasizing travel, the gendering of literary dialect, pro-slavery authors, and multi-racial authors, the book revises the common view that Creole literature was an insular local practice of the twentieth century Caribbean, or solely the product of modern, anti-colonial, black-affirming nationalist projects. Authors of early literary dialect include white creoles, blacks and browns. The book reconstructs an earlier proliferation of dialect literature in the preceding centuries, usually dismissed as merely racist mimicry of “black talk”, not understood as part of a continuum of artistic production in the Caribbean. The book argues that the Caribbean’s history of dialect literature is a factor in the literary histories of the United States and the wider trans-Atlantic.
Domestic Study, Worship, and Instruction
Authors: Pipkin Amanda C.
Published: February 2022

This chapter argues that the transformation of homes into vital religious meeting places laid the groundwork for increasing numbers of women to become esteemed religious instructors and authors. Theologians and other devout men authored popular domestic advice books that instructed women to study the Bible with their families, to help run daily worship services at home, and to teach their children the Reformed faith. Reaching a highpoint in English and Dutch books between 1590 and 1679, authors offered the women who adopted their advice a new religious vocation based on women’s traditional roles in childcare and early education. Authors asked parents to create studious households, to make books available, and to set aside time for all of the household members to study. This ideal offered particularly devout and talented women the opportunity to expand their efforts into related activities such as organizing larger informal gatherings of neighbors, teaching others’ children, converting adult unbelievers, and authoring devotional works.
Anna Maria van Schurman
Authors: Pipkin Amanda C.
Published: February 2022

This chapter focuses on Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78), who circulated in academic and domestic venues by studying at the University of Utrecht under Gijsbertus Voetius and by hosting informal religious gatherings at her home near the cathedral. Better known today for her remarkable intellectual achievements and her international network of learned correspondents, chapter 3 is innovative for focusing on van Schurman’s religious poetry and songs, activities, and relationships to highlight her ministry to members of her religious communities. By studying van Schurman alongside other studious religious women and men, this chapter argues that while incredibly gifted and unique due to her noble status and her capacity to master a remarkable number of academic disciplines, her religious devotion motivated her to compose poetry and song in conversation with male and female friends within her religious networks to advance Further Reformation goals. She authored texts that fit in both waves of the Further Reformation literary reform initiative, espoused Voetian teachings for more than thirty years while supportive ministers dominated the university and the Church from the 1630s through the 1650s, and continued to do so after their loss of influence after 1660. Van Schurman created opportunities for other women to worship and study, and vehemently battled those who advocated a more liberal theological interpretation alongside her lifelong companion and brother Johan Godschalk van Schurman, and Utrecht minister Jodocus van Lodenstein.
Henrica van Hoolwerff and Cornelia Leydekker
Authors: Pipkin Amanda C.
Published: February 2022

This chapter provides a unique sketch of the religious literary network fostered by authors, Cornelia Leydekker (1654–1725) and her friend Henrica van Hoolwerff (1658–1704), whose inability to leave her bed inspired her to host conventicles at her bedside. Actively writing during the 1690s and into the first decade of the seventeenth century, Leydekker and van Hoolwerff’s literary careers coincided with the end of Nevius’, although they were each more than twenty years Nevius’ junior. Examining their networks reveals alliances between Middelburg-native ministers Melchior and Jacob Leydekker, their unmarried sister Cornelia Leydekker, and the wealthy, well-connected van Hoolwerff, and sheds light on the literary friendship the latter two shared. While Leydekker and van Hoolwerff’s focus on the individual soul demonstrates the growing popularity of inward-focused mystical piety, they simultaneously reached outward, creating devout literary networks that spanned Zeeland, Utrecht, Amsterdam, as well as several smaller towns and produced appealing literature and song in an effort to convert more people to greater religious devotion.
Introduction
Authors: MacConochie Alex
Published: February 2022

The introduction situates theatrical contact within the period’s burgeoning discourse on manners and interpersonal behavior in conduct literature, arguing that plays do not depict codes and norms of touch. Instead, the drama participates in the construction of new ideas about conduct, civility, rudeness, and decorum. This argument, as the introduction details, necessitates a sociology or social semiotics of touch in action, rather than a phenomenology of contact. Likewise, the scope is different from other studies: erotic contact is treated as a subset of touch practices in a variety of contexts where individual affect and social negotiation intertwine—political, neighborly, business-related, and so on—rather than touch being a subset of the sexual. The introduction lays out the book’s use of Eve Sedgwick’s approach to agency and social negotiation, as well as the book’s adaptation of Bakhtin’s and Volosinov’s concept of utterance to analyze acts of touch. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy serves as a case study in this approach. Finally, the introduction considers the differences between the theater’s depictions of touch and those of other genres. With reference to anti-theatrical writing in particular, it argues that theater had a specific ability to model behavior and, due to early modern ideas about physiology and the humors, to alter audiences’ humors, emotions, and hence practices because of the proximity of actors’ bodies performing acts of touch.
“Untwine those Arms”
Authors: MacConochie Alex
Published: February 2022

This chapter focuses on two kinds of touch: embracing, which is subject to fierce debate in texts on manners, and linking arms, which is not, but which raises a similar set of concerns in the drama. Dramatic portrayals of embraces and walking arm in arm complicate widely accepted histories of intimacy and the private sphere, in which certain forms of touch are claimed to have become restricted to expressions of normatively heteroerotic intimacy. If plays did in fact sometimes contribute to such historical shifts, they often resist such developments. Male–male embraces in Coriolanus blend friendly and erotic uses of the gesture in a way that allows for simultaneous claims to and refusals of dominance. Marlowe’s Edward the Second dramatizes a struggle between the king and his barons to codify ambiguous gestures such as same-sex embraces and walking arm in arm, a struggle that hinges on overlapping, often competing valences of these gestures as signs of erotic affection or political favor. Finally, the anonymous Arden of Faversham exploits the social ambiguities of walking arm in arm—a configuration sometimes erotic, but at other times simply a sign of courteous sociability—in presenting this form of contact as a means for female characters to thwart patriarchal surveillance of their behavior.
Reader beware
Authors: Townsend Peter
Published: February 2022

Understanding information is complex as it depends on the source and reliability of the initial data and the way information is presented, as well as our own ability to make the correct interpretation. Each aspect of an information chain can lead to failure, including when the presenter does not correctly understand, or is deliberately trying to mislead, and from errors because the audience lacks the expertise of the source. Statistics and political examples of information errors are common, not least as many will have no ability or familiarity with graphical or mathematical steps involved in the process. Several types of presentation are included, where we are likely to draw totally opposite conclusions from the same information, or the aim was intentionally to mislead. The topic is relevant in daily life, from politics and health, as well as more complex issues such as wealth statistics, climate change or control of pandemics.
Examples of new glass technologies
Authors: Townsend Peter
Published: February 2022

Whilst glass bottles and products have existed for millennia, the current understanding of glass production has advanced rapidly in the last century. Instead of small window panes, modern high quality architectural glass can coat entire buildings in large sheets of material with properties that define, and control, both heat transport to offer temperature stability for buildings and vehicles, as well as colour for decorative usage. Additionally, the glass may be photochromic in windows or sunglass usage. More exotic types include impact and bullet-proof resistance, as described by numerous routes to toughen and modify glass surfaces. In each of the industrial scale examples, as well as more demanding situations such as glass lasers, the key factor is a stringent usage of dopants and impurities (i.e. perfect examples of control by imperfections).
Optical fibre communication
Authors: Townsend Peter
Published: February 2022

Optical fibres and their associated signal processing of laser pulses are the backbone of modern communications but, without exception, every aspect of their structure, and component items, rely totally on extremely fine and accurate control of impurities, which were once discussed as unwanted dopants and imperfections. The history and techniques to make the fibres are discussed from their initial usage in medical internal probes for visual inspection, their progress from a limited useful range of a metre (because of optical absorption) to networks measured in hundreds of kilometre length transporting, and sorting, millions of signals simultaneously. The challenges are to add dopants to vary their refractive index, remove those that absorb light, and add others to create fibre lasers and amplifiers, and to do all such steps simultaneously is an incredible achievement. Without optical fibres the world as we now know it could not exist.
Beauty from imperfections
Authors: Townsend Peter
Published: February 2022

Gemstones and minerals are attractive and coloured because they include impurities. The chapter discusses how such impurities are located in the crystal lattice structures, and the differences that ensue between natural and synthetic crystal growth. Whilst the latter may be controllable (e.g. for 30 cm long rubies) they are small compared with some natural mineral examples. Examples cited range from gemstones to lasers, but progress is only made once there is knowledge of the lattice locations of impurities in the host structure. This is often apparent from the crystallography and shape of natural minerals. Perfection (i.e. accurate and uniform placement of the impurities) is essential for laser crystals, whereas high value natural gemstones invariably show visible flaws. Understanding involves the role of chemistry, ionic sizes and thermal processing, in addition to the dopants.
Valuable imperfections in crystal lattices
Authors: Townsend Peter
Published: February 2022

Crystal lattice structures are prone to error with both localized faults of impurities or misplaced atoms, and more major long-range flaws. The chapter discusses the many ways in which a lattice may be imperfect, both at the localized level of nearby neighbours, or with larger grains, boundaries and inclusions. All types exist and variously offer beneficial or negative features for various properties of the material options and how they influence the overall properties. Some very simple, well-characterized defect structures are discussed and from there one tries to extrapolate to more complex systems. Imperfections are variously valuable or destructive, and therefore understanding and control are critical. In reality this is challenging and so the examples used here are idealized but, because they are based on simple structures, they are readily understandable.
Evolution achieved through imperfections
Authors: Townsend Peter
Published: February 2022

Without genetic imperfections there would be no evolution of any life form and all progeny would be identical to their ancestors. Stasis is not ideal as it would mean an inability to evolve and survive new diseases, changes in climatic conditions or food sources. Factors involved in genetic changes (nominally imperfections) that offer diversity and alternative chances of survival are discussed. Where humans have played with genetic control, as in breeding of farm and domestic animals, there has been very varied success and often benefits in one aspect have been offset by negative features elsewhere. Hence human interventions in this field may be well intentioned but results certainly are not guaranteed to be positive, and with a long lifespan it is neither simple to readily study changes, nor to reverse them.
Improving our future lives
Authors: Townsend Peter
Published: February 2022

This is truly an idealistic chapter as it is simple to recognize past mistakes in human activity, with all the weaknesses of behaviour for personal advancement and wanting power or wealth, that have led to wars and persecutions. Identifying typical human imperfections is simple, but trying to overcome them is perhaps an impossible challenge, not least as the faults of greed or power have often been the inspiration, or funding, for many of the advances which we now see as being very positive science. Our difficulty is to exploit the human weaknesses as motivation, but limit their extent so as to have progress without the negative aspects. Human imperfections can potentially destroy both countries and cultures, hence thoughts on how to attack such problems are considered.
The greatest challenges that we face
Authors: Townsend Peter
Published: February 2022

We tend to live in the present, both personally and politically, and this inhibits serious actions that involve the long-term future, unless one can see political or commercial advantage. Whilst there are claims that we are destroying the planet and its resources (a truly significant imperfection), the reality is that there is inadequate action to seriously address these issues. Not least is that over the last century population has increased eightfold by adding around a billion people every decade. This is unsustainable, and it should be an absolute key concern of all of us. The fact that it opens commercial markets, and profits, means we ignore the increase, although over two more generations we will have passed the window of opportunity to salvage humanity. This is an imperfection on the ultimate scale.
Debates about Potentialities and their Relations to Being
Authors: Adams Marilyn McCord
Published: February 2022

Thomas Aquinas’ account of soul-powers rests on his general metaphysics of act and potency; Giles of Rome is primarily driven by a cosmic-recapitulation hypothesis about the metaphysical structure of substances. Henry of Ghent argues that Thomas and Giles were mistaken in holding that souls are really distinct from their powers. All three put their arguments in an Aristotelian philosophical context. Duns Scotus’ main disagreement with them is theological: that “In what is divine, the persona has in itself all perfections, because of the unlimitedness of its essence; but it is not the same in a created image, or in its soul, because its soul is not unlimited.” Though largely in agreement with Scotus, William Ockham argues that principles of creatures’ sensory functions need to be housed in something separate from those of their understanding and willing.
Political Institutions and Income Taxes
Authors: Andersson Per F.
Published: February 2022

The chapter analyses the link between political institutions and the adoption of income taxes. The main claim is that this link differs across different types of income tax. The personal income tax represents primarily an investment in fiscal capacity. Hence, its introduction depends crucially on political institutions that constrain executive power. The corporate income tax, by contrast, falls more heavily on the rich. As a consequence, its adoption depends critically on democratic institutions that allow for broad political participation. The chapter explores these predictions for a global sample of countries. The results support the contention that executive constraints facilitate personal income tax adoption, while corporate income taxes are more likely to be adopted by countries with broad suffrage rights.
The Incredible Lord Rayleigh
Authors: Meurig Thomas John
Published: February 2022

Lord Rayleigh, who worked at the RI for 15 years as well as in his baronial home in Terling, Essex, is regarded by most scientists as one of the cleverest and perspicacious of all classical physicist. He was extraordinarily gifted both as an experimentalist and as a theoretician. It was he who first explained why the sky is blue, and why sunsets are red. He also discovered the noble gas, argon, which earned him the first-ever Nobel Prize (as a British scientist). As a young man, suffering from tuberculosis, he sailed with his wife up the Nile, during the course of which he wrote the definitive text (Vol 1) of the ‘Theory of Sound’: he solved his problems as they arose. He had no access to a library. The location of earthquakes and earth tremors are nowadays greatly assisted by his theoretical studies
Molecular Biology and the Crucial Role Played by the Davy–Faraday Research Laboratory in its Birth
Authors: Meurig Thomas John
Published: February 2022

It was at the Davy Faraday Research Laboratory in the late 1920s, early 1930s, that a group of Sir William Bragg’s research students (notably J. D. Bernal and W. T. Astbury) started to study, by X-ray methods, all nature of living molecules, such as skin, amino acids, steroids, finger nails, proteins, tendons and viruses. These studies continued when Bernal returned to Cambridge and Astbury started a molecular biophysics group in the University of Leeds. Dorothy Hodgkin (from Oxford) and Max Perutz (from Vienna) both joined Bernal at Cambridge, and they made enormous progress in determining the structures of ‘living’ molecules. Hodgkin elucidated the structure of cholesterol and many other steroids. And Perutz started his monumental work on haemoglobin at Cambridge, and he also studied it at the DFRL.
Afterword
Authors: Meurig Thomas John
Published: February 2022

The final chapter constitutes my reflections on the status—present and past—of the Royal Institution and my own involvement in various aspects of its works. One of the main conclusions that I draw is that (a) the presentation of popular lectures is still being maintained at a very high level; (b) the RI Christmas Lectures are now less impressive when televised than they were even 20 years ago, because they now constitute only some 3 lectures (compared with the six that were given 30 years ago); (c) it is noted with sadness that the original research carried out at the DFRL (founded in 1896) has now almost ceased.
Relative clause extraposition and PP extraposition in English and German
Authors: Francis Elaine J.
Published: February 2022

Chapter 6 applies theoretical concepts from earlier chapters to the interpretation of corpus and acceptability judgment data from several studies of relative clause extraposition and PP extraposition in English and German. It is shown that assumptions about form–meaning isomorphism influence how grammatical constraints that have a semantic component are interpreted, while assumptions about gradient grammaticality influence how lower acceptability ratings of structures that naturally occur in corpora are interpreted. It is further shown that by considering corpus data and data from elicited production tasks, it is possible to narrow down the range of plausible explanations for a given contrast in acceptability. Finally, it is argued that certain gradient patterns of acceptability are most plausibly interpreted as involving soft constraints—non-categorical grammatical constraints that encode the conventional preferences of language users.
Resumptive pronouns in Hebrew, Cantonese, and English relative clauses
Authors: Francis Elaine J.
Published: February 2022

Chapter 7 explores grammatical and processing-based constraints that affect acceptability judgments of relative clauses with a resumptive pronoun in Hebrew, English, and Cantonese. For all three languages, it is shown that some patterns of judgments are open to different theoretical interpretations with respect to the division of labor between grammar and processing. For such cases, it is argued that additional data from corpora and from other types of experiments can help determine the most plausible analysis. As in Chapter 6, it is argued that some patterns of data are plausibly interpreted as involving soft constraints in the grammar. Finally, the studies presented in the chapter are discussed in relation to the proposed typological distinction between grammatical resumption (Cantonese, Hebrew) and intrusive resumption (English). It is argued that a more nuanced interpretation of this distinction may be needed to allow for the synchronic representation of partially grammaticalized constraints.
Manhattan Phoenix
Authors: Levy Daniel S
Published: February 2022

In December 1835, former Mayor Philip Hone wrote in his diary how a vast fire raged across lower Manhattan, and how it “exceeded all description; the progress of the flames, like flashes of lightning, communicated in every direction, and a few minutes sufficed to level the lofty edifices on every side.” The fire devastated a large swath of lower Manhattan, clearing roughly the same number of acres as the World Trade Center bombing. Manhattan Phoenix explores the creation of modern New York after it emerged from the devastating Great Fire of 1835—a catastrophe that revealed how truly unprepared and haphazardly organized it was—to become a world-class city merely a quarter of a century later. The book charts Manhattan's almost miraculous growth, while interweaving the lives of various New Yorkers who took part in the city's transformation. Some are well known, such as the land baron John Jacob Astor and Mayor Fernando Wood. Others less so, as with the African American oysterman Thomas Downing and the Bowery Theatre impresario Thomas Hamblin. The book celebrates Fire Chief James Gulick who battled the blaze, and chronicles the work of the architect Alexander Jackson Davis who built marble palaces for the rich. It discusses the career of the merchant Alexander Stewart, who constructed the first department store, follows the struggles of the abolitionist Arthur Tappan, and records the efforts of the engineer John Bloomfield Jervis, who brought clean water into homes. And this resurgence owed so much to the visionaries, such as Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who designed Central Park, creating the refuge that it remains to this day.
Overturning Manhattan
Authors: Levy Daniel S.
Published: February 2022

This chapter examines the developments in Manhattan in the years before the 1835 Great Fire of New York. The seven-year-long British occupation of New York during the American Revolution stopped development. The British turned the city into an armed camp, building military earthworks along side streets and using some churches for stables and jails. Also, two fires ripped through Manhattan, one in 1776 and the other in 1778, both of which did enormous damage. Once the British surrendered New York in 1783, the town's leaders started pushing north and straightening out and widening the paths into the rural parts of the island. This reclaiming of the land went on for decades, and in the process, property owners filled in streams, marshes, and ponds. In 1811, a plan had been established for the grid pattern that stretches up the island, making New York a prime investment for the wealthy like John Jacob Astor. By the 1830s, New York was the nation's fastest-growing city and the largest in the New World.
London on the Hudson
Authors: Levy Daniel S.
Published: February 2022

This chapter begins by recounting Charles Dickens's visit to New York in 1842 and the huge party thrown in his honor. New Yorkers worried keenly how others saw them. They wanted to be seen as the leaders of American society, sought to be taken seriously, and worried how their city was viewed by those in places like London and Paris. Much of New York's self-celebration involved its expansion, and the boom that followed the 1825 opening of the Erie Canal and the Great Fire of 1835. The chapter details how New York's path to architectural distinction began with the success of architects Josiah Brady and Martin Euclid Thompson, and particularly with the arrival of Ithiel Town and his subsequent partnership with Alexander Jackson Davis. The presence of these designers coincided with an interest in classical architecture and the popularity of the Greek Revival style in the 1820s and 1830s. The chapter also looks at the development of posh areas like Washington Square, the growth of public and private education, and the popularity of cultural and social organizations.