bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Non-thermal radio supernova remnants of exiled Wolf–Rayet stars
Authors: Meyer D M-A , Pohl M , Petrov M , Oskinova L
Published: February 2021

A signification fraction of Galactic massive stars (${\ge}8\, \rm M_{\odot }$) are ejected from their parent cluster and supersonically sail away through the interstellar medium (ISM). The winds of these fast-moving stars blow asymmetric bubbles thus creating a circumstellar environment in which stars eventually die with a supernova explosion. The morphology of the resulting remnant is largely governed by the circumstellar medium of the defunct progenitor star. In this paper, we present 2D magneto-hydrodynamical simulations investigating the effect of the ISM magnetic field on the shape of the supernova remnants of a $35\, \mathrm{M}_{\odot }$ star evolving through a Wolf–Rayet phase and running with velocity 20 and $40\, \rm km\, \rm s^{-1}$, respectively. A $7\, \mu \rm G$ ambient magnetic field is sufficient to modify the properties of the expanding supernova shock front and in particular to prevent the formation of filamentary structures. Prior to the supernova explosion, the compressed magnetic field in the circumstellar medium stabilizes the wind/ISM contact discontinuity in the tail of the wind bubble. A consequence is a reduced mixing efficiency of ejecta and wind materials in the inner region of the remnant, where the supernova shock wave propagates. Radiative transfer calculations for synchrotron emission reveal that the non-thermal radio emission has characteristic features reflecting the asymmetry of exiled core-collapse supernova remnants from Wolf–Rayet progenitors. Our models are qualitatively consistent with the radio appearance of several remnants of high-mass progenitors, namely the bilateral G296.5+10.0 and the shell-type remnants CTB109 and Kes 17, respectively.
Constraining red supergiant mass-loss prescriptions through supernova radio properties
Authors: Moriya Takashi J
Published: February 2021

Supernova (SN) properties in radio strongly depend on their circumstellar environment and they are an important probe to investigate the mass-loss of SN progenitors. Recently, core-collapse SN observations in radio have been assembled and the rise time and peak luminosity distribution of core-collapse SNe at 8.4 GHz has been estimated. In this paper, we constrain the mass-loss prescriptions for red supergiants (RSGs) by using the rise time and peak luminosity distribution of Type II SNe in radio. We take the de Jager and van Loon mass-loss rates for RSGs, calculate the rise time and peak luminosity distribution based on them, and compare the results with the observed distribution. We found that the de Jager mass-loss rate explains the widely spread radio rise time and peak luminosity distribution of Type II SNe well, while the van Loon mass-loss rate predicts a relatively narrow range for the rise time and peak luminosity. We conclude that the mass-loss prescriptions of RSGs should have strong dependence on the luminosity as in the de Jager mass-loss rate to reproduce the widely spread distribution of the rise time and peak luminosity in radio observed in Type II SNe.
Four-pronged negative feedback of DSB machinery in meiotic DNA-break control in mice
Authors: Dereli Ihsan , Stanzione Marcello , Olmeda Fabrizio , Papanikos Frantzeskos , Baumann Marek , Demir Sevgican , Carofiglio Fabrizia , Lange Julian , de Massy Bernard , Baarends Willy M , Turner James , Rulands Steffen , Tóth Attila
Published: February 2021

In most taxa, halving of chromosome numbers during meiosis requires that homologous chromosomes (homologues) pair and form crossovers. Crossovers emerge from the recombination-mediated repair of programmed DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). DSBs are generated by SPO11, whose activity requires auxiliary protein complexes, called pre-DSB recombinosomes. To elucidate the spatiotemporal control of the DSB machinery, we focused on an essential SPO11 auxiliary protein, IHO1, which serves as the main anchor for pre-DSB recombinosomes on chromosome cores, called axes. We discovered that DSBs restrict the DSB machinery by at least four distinct pathways in mice. Firstly, by activating the DNA damage response (DDR) kinase ATM, DSBs restrict pre-DSB recombinosome numbers without affecting IHO1. Secondly, in their vicinity, DSBs trigger IHO1 depletion mainly by another DDR kinase, ATR. Thirdly, DSBs enable homologue synapsis, which promotes the depletion of IHO1 and pre-DSB recombinosomes from synapsed axes. Finally, DSBs and three DDR kinases, ATM, ATR and PRKDC, enable stage-specific depletion of IHO1 from all axes. We hypothesize that these four negative feedback pathways protect genome integrity by ensuring that DSBs form without excess, are well-distributed, and are restricted to genomic locations and prophase stages where DSBs are functional for promoting homologue pairing and crossover formation.
Precision medicine approaches for diabetic kidney disease: opportunities and challenges
Authors: Tye Sok Cin , Denig Petra , Heerspink Hiddo J L
Published: February 2021

The prevalence of end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) continuously increases worldwide. The increasing prevalence parallels the growth in the number of people with diabetes, which is the leading cause of ESKD. Early diagnosis of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in patients with diabetes and appropriate intervention is important to delay the progression of kidney function decline and prevent ESKD. Rate of CKD progression and response to treatment varies among patients with diabetes, highlighting the need to tailor individual treatment. In this review, we describe recent advances and areas for future studies with respect to precision medicine in diabetic kidney disease (DKD). DKD is a multi-factorial disease that is subject in part to genetic heritability, but is also influenced by various exogenous mediators, such as environmental or dietary factors. Genetic testing so far has limited utility to facilitate early diagnosis, classify progression or evaluate response to therapy. Various biomarker-based approaches are currently explored to identify patients at high risk of ESKD and to facilitate decision-making for targeted therapy. These studies have led to discovery and validation of a couple of inflammatory proteins such as circulating tumour necrosis factor receptors, which are strong predictors of kidney disease progression. Moreover, risk and drug-response scores based on multiple biomarkers are developed to predict kidney disease progression and long-term drug efficacy. These findings, if implemented in clinical practice, will pave the way to move from a one-size-fits-all to a one-fit-for-everyone approach.
Radiogenomic modeling predicts survival-associated prognostic groups in glioblastoma
Authors: Nuechterlein Nicholas , Li Beibin , Feroze Abdullah , Holland Eric C , Shapiro Linda , Haynor David , Fink James , Cimino Patrick J
Published: February 2021

Background

Combined whole-exome sequencing (WES) and somatic copy number alteration (SCNA) information can separate isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH)1/2-wildtype glioblastoma into two prognostic molecular subtypes, which cannot be distinguished by epigenetic or clinical features. The potential for radiographic features to discriminate between these molecular subtypes has yet to be established.

Methods

Radiologic features (n = 35 340) were extracted from 46 multisequence, pre-operative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of IDH1/2-wildtype glioblastoma patients from The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), all of whom have corresponding WES/SCNA data. We developed a novel feature selection method that leverages the structure of extracted MRI features to mitigate the dimensionality challenge posed by the disparity between a large number of features and the limited patients in our cohort. Six traditional machine learning classifiers were trained to distinguish molecular subtypes using our feature selection method, which was compared to least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) feature selection, recursive feature elimination, and variance thresholding.

Results

We were able to classify glioblastomas into two prognostic subgroups with a cross-validated area under the curve score of 0.80 (±0.03) using ridge logistic regression on the 15-dimensional principle component analysis (PCA) embedding of the features selected by our novel feature selection method. An interrogation of the selected features suggested that features describing contours in the T2 signal abnormality region on the T2-weighted fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) MRI sequence may best distinguish these two groups from one another.

Conclusions

We successfully trained a machine learning model that allows for relevant targeted feature extraction from standard MRI to accurately predict molecularly-defined risk-stratifying IDH1/2-wildtype glioblastoma patient groups.
A date pit induced aorto-oesophageal fistula: a case report and concise literature review
Authors: Lichtenstein Kevin M , Russell Thomas B , Lichtenstein Julia B , Brar Harinderpal S
Published: February 2021

Aorto-oesophageal fistula (AEF) is rare and fatal without intervention. Having consumed a date pit 2 weeks prior, the patient in this case presented with the ‘Chiari’ triad of chest pain, sentinel arterial upper gastro-intestinal haemorrhage and exsanguination after an asymptomatic interval. Following resuscitation, the patient was managed with a Blakemore tube with both oesophageal and gastric balloons inflated to systemic pressures. An aortic stent graft was planned but the patient died on the operating table.

AEFs can be treated surgically with either open or endovascular repair. Open repair is highly risky and involves combined replacement/bypass of the thoracic aorta along with resection/repair of the involved oesophagus. Endovascular repair can prevent fatal exsanguination and increase the likelihood of survival but is associated with a significant rate of secondary infection, recurrence of fistula, mediastinitis and sepsis. Further studies are required to inform on management.
I-FAST Intervention for Trauma
Authors: Grove David R. , Greene Gilbert J. , Lee Mo Yee
Published: February 2021

Integrative family and systems treatment (I-FAST) family intervention procedures are described in this chapter. How to integrate intervention procedures from any trauma-related treatment approach into I-FAST is shown. How to organize a family treatment approach when trauma symptoms are the direct focus of treatment is described. When survivors and or families request help on problems other than trauma, how to indirectly address trauma symptoms on a family treatment level is outlined. Several case examples showing how to focus on trauma both directly and indirectly are offered.
Introduction
Authors: Robin William
Published: February 2021

This introduction outlines the starting point for this study: the rise of Bang on a Can, a large-scale contemporary music organization that started as a marathon concert in downtown New York overseen by composers David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe in 1987. Bang on a Can’s success in the 1980s and 1990s was a product not only of their individual ingenuity, but also a broader marketplace turn in new music: an ideological project, driven by institutions and musicians who contended that in order for contemporary composition to survive and flourish, it must reach a broad, non-specialist audience. This chapter surveys the postwar history of American composition through the lenses of uptown academicism and downtown experimentalism, describes how this book grapples with Bang on a Can’s institutional practices, and briefly outlines subsequent contents.
Conclusion
Authors: Natale Simone
Published: February 2021

The historical trajectory examined in this book demonstrates that humans’ reactions to machines that are programmed to simulate intelligent behaviors represent a constitutive element of what is commonly called AI. Artificial intelligence technologies are not just designed to interact with human users: they are designed to fit specific characteristics of the ways users perceive and navigate the external world. Communicative AI becomes more effective not only by evolving from a technical standpoint but also by profiting, through the dynamics of banal deception, from the social meanings humans project onto situations and things. In this conclusion, the risks and problems related to AI’s banal deception are explored in relationship with other AI-based technologies such as robotics and social media bots. A call is made for initiating a more serious debate about the role of deception in interface design and computer science. The book concludes with a reflection on the need to develop a critical and skeptical stance in interactions with computing technologies and AI. In order not to be found unprepared for the challenges posed by AI, computer scientists, software developers, designers as well as users have to consider and critically interrogate the potential outcomes of banal deception.
Conclusion
Authors: Daxecker Ursula , Prins Brandon
Published: February 2021

This chapter reviews what has been learned from the extensive research conducted by the authors and how the findings speak to the current state of knowledge about maritime piracy operations. It then considers theoretical and empirical extensions of the study that go beyond piracy, exploring implications of the conceptual framework for other types of crime and political violence. The chapter proceeds to policy implications of the findings, explaining why naval patrols and state-level capacity enhancements remain insufficient to eradicating maritime piracy completely. The chapter ends by examining recent and future trends in maritime piracy.
Grocery Workers
Authors: Cummings Scott L.
Published: February 2021

This chapter analyzes the labor movement’s challenge to retail giant Wal-Mart, which in 2002 announced plans to open forty Supercenters in California—threatening to undermine labor standards, and union strength, in the grocery sector. It focuses on the confrontation with Wal-Mart in the separately incorporated city of Inglewood, a historically working-class African American community in South Los Angeles. There, a community-labor coalition, led by LAANE, organized to stop Supercenter development through legislative and legal challenges—a technique known as a “site fight” because it aimed to block Wal-Mart at a specific location. The chapter examines three phases of the fight, tracing how the coalition mobilized law to defeat the Inglewood proposal, design innovative policies to limit Wal-Mart’s entry into the Los Angeles market, and thwart Wal-Mart’s effort to bypass those policies by opening a small-format grocery store in historic Chinatown. In evaluating the campaign, the chapter suggests that the outcome was, in part, a product of Wal-Mart’s political miscalculation: The company’s drive for a Supercenter in Inglewood failed despite evidence of public support, in large measure because of an ill-conceived attempt to gain voter approval through a city initiative that would have completely circumvented the local planning process. Yet Wal-Mart’s defeat was not merely self-inflicted. The company’s miscalculation of the local response to the initiative was politically consequential precisely because there was a sophisticated team of activists and lawyers who used Wal-Mart’s disregard of public input to successfully mobilize community opposition to the Supercenter and build new anti-big-box policy. In that sense, the presence of a political-legal support structure, with experience mounting development-oriented campaigns from the community benefits context, was essential to Wal-Mart’s defeat—strengthening grocery labor standards in Los Angeles going forward.
Truck Drivers
Authors: Cummings Scott L.
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the monumental campaign to raise labor and environmental standards in the trucking industry at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. Building on the blue-green coalition launched in the CBA and big-box contexts—and incorporating central lessons from a decade of community–labor organizing in Los Angeles—the Campaign for Clean Trucks emerged as a fight over air quality but ultimately advanced as a local policy struggle over working conditions for roughly sixteen thousand short-haul port truck drivers. For these drivers, the central problem was their misclassification as independent contractors. Misclassification forced drivers to bear all the costs of operation—contributing to poorly maintained dirty diesel trucks causing air pollution—while depriving them of the right to organize unions to improve labor conditions. Restoring drivers to the status of employees was the mutual goal bringing together the labor and environmental movements in this campaign. It rested on a novel legal foundation: The ports, as publicly owned and operated entities, had the power to define the terms of entry for trucking companies through contracts called concession agreements. The campaign—led by LAANE, the Teamsters union, and NRDC—leveraged this contracting power to win passage of the landmark 2008 Clean Truck Program, which committed trucking companies seeking to enter the Los Angeles port to a double conversion: of dirty to clean fuel trucks (thus reducing pollution) and of independent contractor to employee drivers (thus enabling unionization). However, the program’s labor centerpiece—employee conversion—was invalidated by an industry preemption lawsuit that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. As a result, the policy gains from a blue-green campaign built on mutual interest were split apart and reallocated, resulting in environmental victory but labor setback. Why the coalition won the local policy battle but lost in court—and how the labor movement responded to this legal setback through an innovative strategy to maneuver around preemption—are the central questions this chapter explores.
Theosophy, Cultural Nationalism, and Home Rule
Authors: Bevir Mark
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the role of Theosophists in mobilizing Indian politics or the home rule movement, especially in the form of “cultural nationalism.” The first section shows how Western Theosophists simplified and appropriated Indian thought, deploying it to resolve dilemmas confronting occult and other religious traditions. The second section explores the ways in which Theosophical ideas then provided inspiration for a tradition of cultural nationalism within India itself. The third section briefly shows how this cultural nationalism transformed Congress in the years immediately surrounding Gandhi’s return from South Africa. It is argued that Theosophy was one strand feeding into cultural nationalism, as Theosophy introduced important and largely novel themes to cultural nationalism, including a principled commitment to non-violence and an alternative to liberal subjectivities.
Experiments with Theosophical Truth
Authors: Bergunder Michael
Published: February 2021

This chapter argues that there is strong textual evidence to suggest that M. K. Gandhi’s notion of Hinduism, his specific view of Christianity, and his general belief that all religions refer to the same truth were shaped by the ideas of the Theosophical Society. The chapter presents the respective sources, discusses their plausibility, and puts these findings into perspective. This perspective is provided by a global history approach, which holds that the religious concepts in play since the nineteenth century were already products of globally “entangled histories.” Furthermore, it is argued that the impact of esotericism on global religious history, from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, needs to be investigated with more academic rigor.
The Diaspora and Returnee Entrepreneurship
Authors: Williams Nick
Published: February 2021

This book analyses the role that the diaspora play when returning as entrepreneurs to their homeland. Returnee entrepreneurs are defined as individuals who have moved away from their home country and lived as part of the diaspora, and have later returned home to live, invest, or both. With increased movements of people around the world, the role of transnational economic activity is becoming ever more significant, yet little is still understood about the motivations and contribution of those who return to their homeland to undertake entrepreneurial activity. The book examines return to post-conflict economies, with the returnees initially forced to move due to war. In doing so, it examines policy approaches to return and the intentions of returnees, and highlights the important role that emotional attachment plays in harnessing return. The book recognises the undoubted potential of diaspora entrepreneurs to benefit their homeland. Yet it also recognises the challenges in doing so. Not all diaspora entrepreneurship will be beneficial. Not all policy interventions will be effective, despite good intentions. Yet the lessons contained within this book are that by understanding the challenges and opportunities associated with diaspora return entrepreneurship, more effective strategies can be put in place.
Universal Education
Authors: Rothstein Bo
Published: February 2021

Widespread education has been linked to lower levels of corruption. This chapter shows a surprisingly strong correlation between levels of mass education in 1870 and corruption levels in 2010 for 78 countries. This correlation remains strong when controlling for change in the level of education, GDP/capita, and democracy. A model for the causal mechanism between universal education and control of corruption is presented. Firstly, societies with more equal education gave citizens more opportunities and power for opposing corruption. Secondly, universal education leads to other factors that seem to promote decreased corruption, such as a high level of generalized trust, and a sense nationalism leading people to identify with an entire country rather than with specific sects, clans, or ethnic/religious groups. Thirdly, losing wars seem to have led elites to strive for increased state capacity and was a strong motivation for the introduction of universal education in many countries.
Gender Equality, Impartiality, and Meritocracy
Authors: Rothstein Bo
Published: February 2021

A substantial number of studies show that increased gender equality is one important factor behind getting corruption under control. Men are hugely overrepresented in serious criminality and since most corruption is illegal, we should expect the same gender bias in this area. Also, impartiality in the exercise of public power has a powerful effect on lowering corruption and meritocracy and gender equality will increase competence in the public administration. This implies that there is a causal link between impartiality, gender equality, and control of corruption. Going from these results to policy recommendations is fraught with many difficulties. One is how to handle problems of legitimacy in the implementation process for various forms of preferential treatment of discriminated groups. Meritocracy may be far from an ideal solution for lowering corruption and thereby promoting human wellbeing, but it may be the least bad of existing alternatives.
Giving the Land a Kick
Authors: Kirchman David L.
Published: February 2021

When it became clear that nutrients cause the rise of dead zones, scientists next examined the possible sources of the nutrients. This chapter argues the biggest source today is agriculture. The expansion of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone directly follows the huge increase in agricultural productivity, especially for corn. Yields increased over six times since 1930 in part because farmers used more fertilizer, “to give the land a kick.” As the chapter explains, Nancy Rabalais and Gene Turner found a direct link between fertilizer use and nutrient levels in the Mississippi River. In spite of opposition from agribusinesses, their work led to the formation of a White House committee and passage of legislation to support work on the hypoxia problem. Agriculture is also the main source of nutrients feeding dead zones in other regions of the world. The chapter later points out that the biggest user of fertilizer is now China, where excessive nutrients have caused massive harmful algal blooms and other environmental problems.
Silence andUpāya
Authors: Garfield Jay L.
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the paradox developed in the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa-sūtra regarding the limits of language. The sūtra argues that ultimate reality is ineffable, and that regarding it one must be silent. But that is to say something about it, and the silence one maintains, if it is to express ultimate reality, must also be a kind of speech. Speech and silence, and the expressible and the ineffable, are hence paradoxically related.
New Countries, Old Problems
Authors: Hoy Benjamin
Published: February 2021

Chapter 3 focuses on the Great Lakes in the 1860s and 1870s to argue that the border’s importance shifted in response to Reconstruction and Confederation. National consolidation encouraged each nation to rethink how African Americans, Indigenous people, immigrants, and settlers fit into each country. By dividing those who constituted the nation from those who threatened it, battles over belonging helped to usher in new immigration laws and extradition provisions. Debates over suffrage required each country to outline the core tenants of the socieities they intended to create. This forced them to weigh the relative importance of cultural beliefs, gendered norms, contract freedom, racial background, and private property against one another. In this uncertain environment, sexual morality, suffrage rights, citizenship, and ideas about the family created the terrace that border control grew from.
Borders of Stones, Guns, and Grass
Authors: Hoy Benjamin
Published: February 2021

Chapter 4 focuses on the Prairies to show how violence served as both a motivation and a tool for federal control. During the 1860s and 1870s, the Red River Resistance (1869), Fenian raids (1866–1871), the continuation of the whiskey trade, and the Cypress Hills Massacre (1873) provided a series of humiliating reminders of the limited power both countries maintained along their shared border. As the Métis resistance and Fenian movements suggested, the Canada–US border was home to more than just two national stories of self-determination and expansion. Securing land cessions, curtailing violence, and controlling space required colonial governments to either understand Indigenous boundaries or destroy them.
Where It All Went Wrong
Authors: Hoy Benjamin
Published: February 2021

Violence across the Prairies helped to develop new ideas about border control and made them possible. Canadian and American conceptions of territory required erasing all other pre-existing forms of territorial organization. That process relied on a kind of violence and suffering that occurred in parallel to warfare. Erasure of Lakota, Dakota, Cree, and Métis boundaries became possible as famine, drought, deprivation, and demographic disruption forged a new order across the West. In the span of only a few decades, the geopolitics of thousands of miles of territory shifted. In 1874, Canada and the United States had just finished surveying and placing boundary markers across the Plains. Less than two decades later, the Canada–US border had become one of the most significant boundaries in the region.
Borders of Salt and Rock
Authors: Hoy Benjamin
Published: February 2021

On the Pacific Coast, the transition from boundary survey to day-to-day control took half a century. Canadian and American dependence on Indigenous labor limited the restrictions they could implement. By the mid-1880s, the immigration of hundreds of thousands of settlers shifted the balance of power. Both governments drove the Coast Salish out of the work force and imposed a new geographic order on top of existing Indigenous ones. At the same time, Chinese immigration drove grassroots pressure to reform federal border controls. In the wake of riots, protest, and vigilante justice, the United States passed Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1882 and 1888 and Canada developed a head tax.
The Chaos of Control
Authors: Hoy Benjamin
Published: February 2021

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Canada–US border operated as an inconsistent patchwork from one end of the continent to the other. Ottawa and Washington bankrolled the agencies that guarded the international line, but never controlled what happened day to day. In a world filled with ambiguity, individual agents (rather than the federal government more broadly) became the key arbiters of how the border felt to surrounding communities. Corruption and misunderstandings proliferated. Federal agents misclassified, undervalued, and overenforced cargoes for personal profits. Merchants found loopholes of their own to exploit the economic environment created by the border.
Pensions Imperilled
Authors: Berry Craig
Published: February 2021

Private pensions provision in the United Kingdom is in crisis—but it is not the crisis often depicted in political and popular discourses. While population ageing has affected traditional pensions practice, the imperilment of pensions is due in fact to the incompatibility of pensions provision’s peculiar temporality with the financialization of the wider economy. This book offers a political economy perspective on the development of private pensions, focusing specifically on how policy elites have sought to respond to perceived crises of demographic change, undersaving, and fund deficits, and in doing so absorbed imperatives to subject individuals to a market-led regime under the influence of neoliberal ideology. This terrain is explored through chapters on the historical and comparative context of UK pensions provision, the demise of collectivist provision, the rise of pensions individualization (and the state’s role as facilitator and regulator in this regard), and the financial and economic context in which pensions provision operates. The book offers an original understanding of the unique temporality and materiality of pensions provision, as a set of mechanisms for coping with generational change and forecast failures in capitalist economies. Accordingly, it also offers a nuanced account of pensions statecraft, challenging a tendency in the existing literature to focus on the boundary between state and market, rather than how the pensions market operates (and the state’s role in this). The book ends by outlining a coherent and radical programme of progressive pensions reform, steeped in the author’s experience as a policy practitioner.
Whites and Reds
Authors: Bittner Stephen V.
Published: February 2021

Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar tells the story of Russia’s encounter with viniculture and winemaking. Rooted in the early-seventeenth century, embraced by Peter the Great, and then magnified many times over by the annexation of the indigenous wine economies and cultures of Georgia, Crimea, and Moldova in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, viniculture and winemaking became an important indicator of Russia’s place at the European table. While the Russian Revolution in 1917 left many of the empire’s vineyards and wineries in ruins, it did not alter the political and cultural meanings attached to wine. Stalin himself embraced champagne as part of the good life of socialism, and the Soviet Union became a winemaking superpower in its own right, trailing only Spain, Italy, and France in the volume of its production. Whites and Reds illuminates the ideas, controversies, political alliances, technologies, business practices, international networks, and, of course, the growers, vintners, connoisseurs, and consumers who shaped the history of wine in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union over more than two centuries. Because wine was domesticated by virtue of imperialism, its history reveals many of the instabilities and peculiarities of the Russian and Soviet empires. Over two centuries, the production and consumption patterns of peripheral territories near the Black Sea and in the Caucasus became a hallmark of Russian and Soviet civilizational identity and cultural refinement. Wine in Russia was always more than something to drink.
Conclusion
Authors: Werth Paul W.
Published: February 2021

Something approximating historical consensus posits a critical shift in Europe and the world around the year 1830, with the next decade or so, by implication, exhibiting attributes of a substantively new era. If the 1830s represent such a threshold, then the year 1837 reveals its significance for Russia with particular clarity. From 1835 to 1840, a whole series of shifts and transformations occurred, with 1837 serving as their center or pivotal point.
A Behavioural Theory of Economic Development
Authors: Huggins Robert , Thompson Piers
Published: February 2021

This book is motivated by a belief that theories of economic development can move beyond the generally known factors and mechanisms of such development. It establishes a behavioural theory of economic development illustrating that differences in human behaviour across cities and regions are a significant deep-rooted cause of uneven development. Fusing a range of concepts relating to culture, psychology, human agency, institutions, and power, it proposes that the uneven economic development and evolution of cities and regions within and across nations are strongly connected with the underlying forms of behaviour enacted by humans both individually and collectively. Integrating theoretical and empirical analysis, the book builds upon entrepreneurial and innovation theories of economic evolution to make sense of the cultural, psychological, and agentic components and elements of city and regional economic ecosystems that lead to long-term differentials in development. For social scientists with an interest in understanding the nature of uneven economic development, the book provides a novel theory of the role of human behaviour, psychocultural context, and institutions in the evolution and uneven development of cities and regions. This human behaviour is framed in the form of the ‘behavioural profile’ of cities and regions encompassing citizens in terms of their personalities, cultural histories, aspirations, and perceived opportunities, as well as their broader propensities to act in certain ways.
The Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Southwest
Authors: Faust Avraham
Published: February 2021

The Neo-Assyrian empire—the first large empire of the ancient world—had attracted a great deal of public attention ever since the spectacular discoveries of the nineteenth century. The southwestern part of this empire, located in the lands of the Bible, is archaeologically speaking the best-known region in the world, and its history is also described in a plethora of texts, including the Hebrew Bible. Using a bottom-up approach, this book utilizes this unparalleled information to reconstruct the outcomes of the Assyrian conquest of the region, and how it impacted the diverse political units and ecological zones that comprised it, forcing the reader to appreciate the transformations the imperial takeover brought in its wake. The analysis reveals the marginality of the annexed territories in the southwest, and that the empire focused its activities in small border areas, facing the prospering clients. A comparison of this surprising picture to the information available from other parts of the empire suggests that the distance of these provinces from the imperial core is responsible for their fate, leading to a better appreciation of factors influencing imperial expansion, the considerations leading to annexation, and the imperial methods of control, challenging some old conventions about the development of the Assyrian empire and its rule. The detailed information also enables an examination of the Assyrian empire within the context of other ancient Near Eastern empires, and of imperialism at large, shedding a new light on the nature of Assyrian domination, and the reasons for the harsh treatment of the distant provinces. The book also examines what set the limits on the Assyrian empire, and highlights the historical development of imperial control in antiquity, and how later empires were able to overcome these limitations, paving the way to much larger and longer-lasting polities.
Social Entrepreneurship
Authors: Hägel Peter
Published: February 2021

Chapter 7 examines two cases of how billionaires use philanthropy to promote social change in foreign countries. Through the massive funding of research and public–private partnerships, Bill Gates, via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has advanced international vaccination programs to fight communicable diseases. His influence on agenda-setting and policy implementation in the governance of global health can be seen in the World Health Organization’s declaration of a “Decade of Vaccines.” The second case is George Soros, whose attempts to build open societies as a “stateless statesman” are extremely wide-ranging. The chapter focuses on his efforts to promote human rights and democracy, putting the spotlight on his role in regime change during the so-called “Rose Revolution” in Georgia (2002–4).
Conclusion
Authors: Bailey Mark
Published: February 2021

This chapter pulls together the main arguments of the book, creating a new narrative and assessment of the nature of economic and social change in fourteenth century England. It confirms that pre-plague England was a laggard by European standards, and trapped in a cul de sac of impoverishment and low productivity, but offers a different explanation to conventional ones for that economic sclerosis. It also portrays the third quarter of the fourteenth century as a period of significant volatility and change, when rapid and dramatic adjustments occurred in factor and commodity markets, and when serfdom quickly declined. The framework of contracting institutions was strengthened, which meant that the forces of supply and demand exerted more influence on the allocation of land and labour than seigniorial coercion. Hence the shift in factor ratios caused by successive outbreaks of plague—operating through an institutional framework and emerging legal culture conducive to the progressive growth and commercialization of markets—resulted in increased output per head and accelerated England’s march to modernity.
Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare
Authors: Kolb Laura
Published: February 2021

In Shakespeare’s England, credit was synonymous with reputation, and reputation developed in the interplay of language, conduct, and social interpretation. As a consequence, artful language and social hermeneutics became practical, profitable skills. Since most people both used credit and extended it, the dual strategies of implication and inference—of producing and reading evidence—were everywhere. Like poetry or drama, credit was constructed: fashioned out of the interplay of artifice and interpretation. The rhetorical dimension of economic relations produced social fictions on a range of scales: from transitory performances facilitating local transactions to the long-term project of maintaining creditworthiness to the generalized social indeterminacy that arose from the interplay of performance and interpretation. Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage. It also analyses a range of practical texts—including commercial arithmetics, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interest—which offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Fictions of Credit argues that both types of writing constitute “equipment for living”: practical texts by offering concrete strategies for navigating England’s culture of credit, and plays by exploring the limits of credit’s dangers and possibilities. In their representations of a world rewritten by debt relations, dramatic texts in particular articulate a phenomenology of economic life, telling us what it feels like to live in credit culture: to live, that is, inside a fiction.
Friendly Credit and its Dangers
Authors: Kolb Laura
Published: February 2021

This chapter reads Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness alongside early modern letter-writing manuals. In the early seventeenth century, popular epistolary manuals began to include examples of letters begging for money and letters denying or extending loans. These fictional epistles offer a repository of stock phrases and rhetorical moves useful for eager borrowers and unwilling lenders alike, two positions most of the books’ users would occupy at one point or another over the course of their lives. Letter-writing guides teach their users the necessity of self-contradiction over time: of now adhering to one set of values and practices, now to another. Shakespeare’s and Heywood’s plays analyze their protagonists’ inability to do precisely this. In Merchant and A Woman Killed, tragedy or near-tragedy results from the failure to exercise the social flexibility necessary for balancing the demands of love with those of thrift.
Debt’s Poetry, Credit’s Fictions
Authors: Kolb Laura
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines Timon of Athens alongside handbooks that teach readers how to interpret the fictionalized credit world that surrounds them—a world full of false surfaces, which invite misconstrual. It focuses on the portrayal of a particular hard-to-read figure: the “rich beggar,” an outwardly wealthy person whose debts invisibly outstrip his assets. While handbook authors simply warn readers against lending to such persons, Shakespeare and Middleton go further, probing the conditions that produce this paradoxical figure. Their co-authored Timon of Athens suggests that rich beggary results less from poor estate management than from the interplay of language, conduct, and interpretation. The play suggests that the fiction-making power of debt and credit extends from the individual “rich beggar” to the fabric of society. Credit here appears as an agent of universal falsification: a demiurgic power that upends hierarchies and rewrites identities.
Schumania and Spain’s Heavy-Industry Supply
Authors: Guirao Fernando
Published: February 2021

The title of this book -The European Rescue of the Franco Regime- intends to draw the reader’s attention away from traditional narratives. The thesis widely sustained by scholars and reflected in public opinion is that the institutionalized pattern of European integration contributed to isolate and weaken the political regime that generalissimo Francisco Franco established after his victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) and headed until his death in November 1975. In Spain, during the struggle for democracy under and immediately following Franco’s dictatorship, membership in the European Communities became emblematic of a collective desire for democratic consolidation and social modernization, as well as the fastest route to elevate the Spanish standard of living in line with Europe’s most advanced societies. This notion of the Europeanization of Spain has made it difficult to conceive the Spanish policy of the European Communities during the Franco era as anything other than a significant element in the combat against Francoism. It is indisputable that the Axis stigma prevented Francoist Spain’s membership to the European Communities. Yet the absence of membership constitutes neither the beginning nor the end, nor even the most important component of the story. From exclusion, a multiplicity of possibilities sprouted, including active support. Although the rescue concept emerged from the analysis of the Six, it could be extended to Franco Spain. The purpose of the Spanish EEC strategy was to generate material prosperity in Spain to maintain the dictatorship’s grip on the country, not to advance the arrival of democracy.
Marketing the 1970 Agreement
Authors: Guirao Fernando
Published: February 2021

The basic feature of the 1970 Agreement between the EEC and Spain, Chapter 6 explains, was the negotiated asymmetry in favour of Spain. Franco’s governments succeeded in securing irreversible access to the Common Market, with the most favourable terms possible for a non-EEC country. This was despite the increasing political costs for the Six/Nine and Madrid not having to pay the price of political evolution. The Spanish administration accepted that the Franco regime should evolve but only if the speed and the destination were left up to Madrid. The 1970 Agreement represented a shield granted by the Six in favour of Franco Spain. The Six and the EEC Council and Commission dealt with a relatively weak partner. Meanwhile, Spain faced a set of countries that together formed an omnipotent trading bloc and embodied the highest democratic values. Despite this, Franco’s negotiators succeeded in imposing the essential aspects of their objectives.
Caballeros and Indians
Authors: Olguín B. V.
Published: February 2021

Chapter 1 examines Latina/o encounters with and reclamations of indigeneity from the eighteenth century to the present. Deploying violentologies as a heuristic device and hermeneutic prism, it focuses on established and emergent Latina/o autobiographical literary genres, cinematic texts, performative popular culture spectacles, and recently recovered archival materials and unique oral histories. These texts cumulatively reveal the wide spectrum of Latina/o antipathies toward, and affiliations with, Native nations and indigenous peoples in the United States and abroad. This chapter thus foregrounds the ideological diversity of supra-Latina/o violentologies by examining the myriad Latina/o involvements in the US Indian Wars vis-à-vis ambidextrous, albeit ambivalent, Latina/o neoindigenous, as well as problematic indigenist, performances of XicanIndia/o and LatIndia/o modalities, in addition to mixed-heritage, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and nonbinary (LGBTQI+), as well as Two-Spirit warrior paradigms in Indian Country and elsewhere.
Militarized Mestizajes
Authors: Olguín B. V.
Published: February 2021

Chapter 5 focuses on how the War on Terror’s permutations of Latina/o war literature, theater, television, film, and popular music present methodological and political challenges to conventional understandings of Latina/o relationships to power as inherently oppositional to capitalism and US imperialism. These relatively new genres include Latina/o War on Terror combat action memoir and related oral histories; wounded warrior narratives; protofascist Special Forces Über-warrior memoir and biographical profiles; Conscientious Objector testimonio, ideologically ambivalent wartime theater, and pacifist performance art; military command memoirs by junior and senior officers; as well as Latina/o spy memoir, biography, and historical fiction. Despite the authors’ profound differences in cultural heritage, experiences, and aesthetic capacities, their cultural productions cohere around intersecting, and diverging, violence-based theories of knowledge and being that extend through, but also far beyond warfare and wartime contexts. They also demonstrate the stark right-wing turn in a large segment of contemporary Latina/o life writing, which accentuates the wide range of ideological trajectories identified in earlier chapters.