bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Peaceful and Violent Separatism in North America, Europe, and the Middle East, 1861–1993
Authors: Butt Ahsan I.
Published: January 2022

This chapter begins with looking at the Israeli–Palestinian conflict since the 1980s. It discusses Israel's coercive response to Palestinians' secessionist moment, the first intifada. The chapter then investigates how security fears sprung from its rough neighborhood, featuring a history of warfare with its neighbors, and its essentializing of Palestinian nationalism, subsuming it under an “Arab” identity. This chapter also reviews two of the handful of completely peaceful major secessions to occur in the twentieth century: one in 1993 that dissolved Czechoslovakia into its constituent units, and the other in 1905 that separated Norway and Sweden. It illustrates how the muted external security implications of Norwegian and Slovak separatism facilitated their respective host states peacefully negotiating their exit from the polity. The chapter next examines the American Civil War, even though it neither took place in the twentieth century, nor was it, strictly speaking, ethnic in nature.
The “Saint” of Urakami
Authors: Diehl Chad R.
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on the life of Nagai Takashi (1908–1951) — the most unlikely representative voice of Nagasaki to emerge in the early postwar years. The chapter unfolds Nagai's leadership among the Urakami Catholics in three stages: first, during the Second World War; second, from 1945 to 1947 Nagai led the Catholic survivors into recovery from the atomic bombing; and third, from 1948 to 1951 Nagai acted as the representative voice for Urakami and the city more generally, by publishing prolifically. The chapter details how Nagai's writings and persona supported the municipal vision of reconstruction. It also discusses Nagai's Catholic interpretation of the atomic bombing and how it became the central motif of his postwar writings. The chapter debates that Nagai spoke for Nagasaki's atomic experience in the eyes of local, national, and international media and publishers.
A Partial List of House Remedies for Sale by Kyokutei
Authors: Bakin Kyokutei
Published: January 2022

• Having a blank page here at the front of the book, and being faced with the pressing necessity of making a living, I record here the following proclamation, commending it warmly to all you gentlemen far and wide:

Water of the Divine Lady—A Family Tradition: 100 coppers per packet....
Kagetsura sells Nobutoki—a nefarious plot;
Authors: Bakin Kyokutei
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores Anzai Kagetsura's nefarious plot to sell Kogorō Nobutoki to Ujimoto. Kagetsura must have thought that his position could not be forever secure, though he might appear to have the advantage for a moment. Once Sadakane had finally met his end and Yoshizane had possessed his lands, Nobutoki could no longer be expected to provide any shelter for Kagetsura under his wing. Rather, his courage would impel them to hasten into a reckless war, one that Kagetsura feared them too weak to win; and so Kagetsura gave the appearance of joining himself to Yoshizane, causing Ujimoto to kill Nobutoki. The chapter then looks at the death of Takayoshi.
Saint John at the Latin Gate
Authors: Ferguson Gary
Published: January 2022

This chapter introduces the church of San Giovanni a Porta Latina, which is an important Christian site as it marks the supposed place of the martyrdom of Saint John the Evangelist. It mentions Saint John at the Latin Gate that represents a geographically and legally marginal place in the late sixteenth century. It also talks about Marco Pinto, who was able to exploit a different kind of marginal culture by introducing “hermits” of an unaccustomed sort in San Giovanni. The chapter refers to Geronimo de Pacis, who confessed to his interrogators that he has had several sexual interactions with Pinto for many years, a scenario that is considered a typical one in early modern Europe. It highlights the context wherein the older man can take advantage of his physical proximity to a youth to initiate sexual relations that take place along clearly determined pederastic lines.
Pastourelle Encounters
Authors: Harris Carissa M.
Published: January 2022

This chapter moves from exploring obscenity's role among men to focus on its relationship to sexual violence in pastourelles. It shows how women's obscenity has the potential to disrupt rape narratives and educate audiences about consent and power. By outlining the two poems — All to lufe and not to fenyi in the Bannatyne Manuscript and The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, the chapter illustrates two ways that Middle English and Middle Scots literary texts engage with rape. In some texts, women's experiences of violation are not the chief focus, and we rarely hear from the victim herself. Instead, rape functions as a literary trope. The chapter argues that pastourelles are centrally concerned with women's experiences of the threat of sexual violence, and their female speakers articulate resistance, fear, anguish, and anger in response to that threat. Echoing the rape-prevention strategies of female-voiced conduct texts, the chapter reveals how pastourelles show how fictive female voices were imagined as educating young women about how best to navigate life as embodied subjects in a world where assault is an ever-present possibility.
Conclusion
Authors: Harris Carissa M.
Published: January 2022

This chapter highlights how obscenity is marshaled both for and against rape culture and misogyny in our own time, demonstrating how practices of obscene pedagogy from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries continue to shape Western sexual culture. It argues that the use of obscenity to foster fraternal bonds and endorse violence in recent years has taken the form of explicit recordings exchanged among men, enabling them to boast of their conquests in a digital brotherhood. In light of obscenity's continued power to teach humiliation, aggression, homophobia, and rigid masculinity, the chapter uncovers how little has changed culturally from Chaucer's band of “felawes” swapping comic tales of assault and Scottish poets exchanging misogynist vitriol about one another's wives to prove their literary supremacy. The chapter urges us to acknowledge the perniciousness and unacceptability of locker room talk regardless of where it occurs, and we must reckon with how this discourse uses obscenity to educate men about sex and power. It concludes by suggesting that we respond to its provocation by exploring how its galvanizing charge can be harnessed to protest injustice and shed unforgiving light on persistent inequalities.
Temples
Authors: Carso Kerry Dean
Published: January 2022

This chapter takes a look at how follies highlight the iconography of the early American republic and sometimes even relate fictional stories, contributing to the mythmaking of the United States. Although overlooked in scholarship to date, these little temples reveal the complexity of classical iconography in the early republic. Temples took their place in the garden alongside a variety of other garden structures in different styles and building types. In addition to their iconographical purposes, temples often functioned as retreats from the world. These garden structures functioned as associationist architecture, raising their importance from architectural follies to sacred meeting spaces of the founding fathers. As the chapter shows, patriotic Americans embedded a great deal of cultural significance into this plaything of a structure.
Making Home
Authors: Ong Soon Keong
Published: January 2022

This chapter glances at the decisions and purposes of two overseas Chinese to return to Xiamen — a first-generation emigrant to the Philippines, Li Qingquan (1888–1940), and a third-generation overseas Chinese emigrant from Singapore, Lim Boon Keng (Lin Wenqing, 1869–1957). It illustrates their experiences and shows that the overseas Chinese relationship with the homeland was not natural nor guaranteed, and they were not always successful in settling back in China. Chinese emigrants were in a constant struggle to make sense of their socioeconomic and political environments and to settle, and foreign circumstances were as important if not more so than native-place connections in informing their decisions to return to China. More importantly, they did not assume a natural affinity with the place they returned to; rather, their choice to make home in Xiamen was a deliberate one. The chapter further discusses how emigrants are no longer bound to a given place once they began their journeys. Hence, home is not about returning to from where they originated but where they go that is most comfortable and familiar, and where they could create a sense of belonging, that is, a place that feels most like home.
Development, Ideology, and Catastrophe in the Americas
Authors: Lee David Johnson
Published: January 2022

This chapter discovers the relations between the United States and Nicaragua in the age of development, from the pinnacle of modernization as ideology in the 1960s through the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. The chapter explores US plans for development as they changed in reaction to events in the global South, beginning with the Cuban revolution, that set off a global program of anticommunist modernization. It reveals how Nicaragua played an important role in US plans for Latin America thanks to its leaders' close affinities with the United States and the two countries' long interconnected histories. While requiring attention to interests and imaginings emanating from the United States, the chapter also tracks closely the circulation of development ideas between North and South. It examines how elite Nicaraguans especially responded to US programs for development. From the Alliance for Progress onward, US officials made Latin American ideas, networks, and individuals an intimate part of programs for reshaping the region's political and economic life.
Dis-integrating Rural Development
Authors: Lee David Johnson
Published: January 2022

This chapter presents how politicians and planners reacted to the realization that US development was not working as planned, and not only in Nicaragua. The chapter discusses the action and pressure of the US Congress coming from a growing network of nongovernmental organizations and activists. As the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional's rebellion grew, the United States made Nicaragua the site for a new program of “integrated rural development.” While US planners used Nicaragua to reconfigure development around a new form of “benign counterinsurgency,” the chapter unveils how radicalized Nicaraguans used the image of peasant victims of human rights abuse to mobilize an international human rights campaign. With the imagery of peasants as victims of a repressive developmental order, the chapter follows the union of Nicaraguan nationalists, radical socialists, and international human rights activists around the idea that peasants were both modernization's victims and potential revolutionary subjects.
Institutionalized Precarity in Postwar Nicaragua
Authors: Lee David Johnson
Published: January 2022

This chapter evaluates the conflicts between the US and Nicaraguan visions of political and economic development amid global post-Cold War transformation. It looks at the United States' new doctrines of sustainable development and their plans for Nicaragua as a prototypical neoliberal republic after the 1990 election brought an end to the revolutionary order. With the country's changing economic and political horizons, the transition generated local forms of adaptation to structural transformation, as elites used the Latin American model of concertación to manage local conflict in the face of US power. The chapter then uncovers the fractious nature of US power which brought new forms of intervention as dissident elements in the United States and Nicaragua rejected concertación and attempted to turn back the revolution. The chapter then examines how the United States' new forms of intervention to oversee local politics institutionalize new forms of precarity in the new post-development world.
Repetition, Alliance, and Protest in Contemporary Nicaragua
Authors: Lee David Johnson
Published: January 2022

This chapter situates the return of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional to power in the 2000s within Latin America's “pink tide” and the longer history of international development and intervention. It recounts Nicaragua's relations with the United States, and the rise of the current Ortega regime and the subsequent unraveling of its support. The chapter also elaborates on the most frequently noted vulnerabilities of the pink tide governments before the wave of protests and election losses that overtook them in the 2010s: governments' overreliance on resource extraction. It highlights how it led to pollution, corruption, and inequality which helped spark popular discontent. Nicaragua's precarious neoliberal present brought about a new process of alliance formation that recapitulated many of the aspirations of the early days of modernization while pushing Nicaragua's history once again to the brink of catastrophe.
Bloomberg’s Place in Urban Theory and in the City’s History
Authors: Weikart Lynne A.
Published: January 2022

This chapter highlights an urban political theory in order to provide an analytical perspective to view the leadership strategies and tactics of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It reviews the perspective of the history of mayors in New York City to give a gauge to measure Bloomberg's successes and failures. It also mentions classic pluralist studies, such as Edward Banfield's Political Influences and Robert Dahl's Who Governs, that focus on interest group analysis. The chapter analyzes Michael Bloomberg's policies that fall within the polity approach as he is well-known within a long line of pro-growth reformers. It emphasizes Bloomberg's belief in the power of elected officials to improve citizens' lives and promotion of economic growth that can be achieved by the local government working side by side with the private sector.
Creating Long-Term Fiscal Health
Authors: Weikart Lynne A.
Published: January 2022

This chapter analyzes Mayor Michael Bloomberg's financing strategies and tracks how they changed over time, growing in understanding on how the city could be structured financially for its long-term fiscal health. It discusses Bloomberg's ideas about urban finance that matured as he gained experience in raising and spending New York City's resources, even while dealing with major fiscal crises. It also refers to Bloomberg's limitations on his powers as compared to those of the governor and the federal government, noting that his insufficient power was relative to that of entrenched labor unions. The chapter emphasizes Bloomberg's impressive achievement of balancing the budget while he held the reins of government after the 9/11 attack, the 2008 recession, and Hurricane Sandy. It describes the first set of strategies Bloomberg adopted before the 2008 recession and the second set after it.
Introduction
Authors: Samalin Zachary
Published: January 2022

This chapter reconstructs the singular, outsized role played by one particular emotion — disgust — within this wide-ranging and still-unfolding nineteenth-century drama of civilizational ideology, social transformation, and the universalization of emotion. It argues that disgust has had a tendency to turn up in unexpected places, connecting disparate areas of social life. The chapter places the nineteenth-century discourse of disgust within a wider historical and conceptual arc, one that reaches back into the eighteenth century as well as forward into the twentieth and toward the present. Zooming out from the Darwinian moment, the chapter finds that in the second half of the eighteenth century, disgust was the focus of heated debate among German and British philosophers working in the new field of aesthetics, where the repulsive was taken to be the antithesis of the beautiful; now, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the philosophers are joined by neuroscientists, who conduct brain scans of the insula, seeking to elucidate the primal nature of our revulsion. Ultimately, the chapter explores the highly productive nature of this seeming contradiction in the discursive function of Victorian disgust.
Darwin’s Vomit
Authors: Samalin Zachary
Published: January 2022

This chapter turns to the Darwinian theory of disgust. It delves into these intertwined matters of thought, digestion, and feeling, as they arise through Darwin's closely related writings on disgust and vomiting in his late book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). The chapter argues that disgust played — and continues to play — a central role in the natural–scientific elaboration of what the author will call the “primal scene” of European modernity. The chapter then returns to Darwin's assertion to his sister that brain and belly are not only “antagonistic powers,” but also “brother faculties,” in order to ask what kind of relationship, precisely, is described by this beguiling pairing of terms — for the commonsensical tone of Darwin's letter belies an unstable complexity. Reading Darwin's earlier writings on instinct against his far more idiosyncratic evolutionary theory of vomiting, the chapter presents a comprehensive analysis of the allegedly primitive character of the emotion, while also showing how Darwin's account anticipates the characterization of disgust within psychoanalytic theory.
The Masses Are Revolting; or, The Birth of Social Theory from the Spirit of Disgust
Authors: Samalin Zachary
Published: January 2022

This chapter shifts the focus from the natural to the social sciences. Against the economic backdrop of the financial revulsion of 1857, the chapter provides a genealogical account of the role of attraction–repulsion in early twentieth-century works of urban sociology and social theory through readings of mid-nineteenth-century texts by Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer. It contends that the fin-de-siècle notion that attraction–repulsion sits at the core of all social relations cannot be understood in isolation from the fact that attraction–repulsion in various guises and iterations was a de facto affective posture for many of the major protosociological urban investigators of the preceding hundred years. The chapter seeks to use the genealogy of attraction–repulsion to complicate the role that has customarily been attributed to emotion and affect in historical accounts of the rise of the social sciences. Ultimately, it illustrates how a confusion between pleasure and disgust, which had been the de facto affective state for Victorian bourgeois social observers, was, for fin-de-siècle social theorists like Georg Simmel, Émile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud, excluded from sociological method while simultaneously diagnosed as a fundamental precondition for all sociality.
Introduction
Authors: Vu Linh D.
Published: January 2022

This chapter records the biographical information about fallen soldiers and civilians at the Academia Historica (Guoshiguan) in Taiwan in 2014. The chapter details the afterlives of the Chinese war-dead in the first half of the twentieth century — focusing on the three men who died on the eve of China's transition from empire to nation-state. It sheds some light on how and why a nation cares about its dead. The dead necessitate that political, social, and cultural institutions develop the ritual and rhetoric to control the way by which they are remembered. The dead are invested with significance to affirm political legitimacy, to recreate social coherence and temporal continuity, and to constitute the national spirit. With such awareness, the chapter explores the “work of death” in the context of twentieth-century China's political and social transformation. It also looks at the nation-state's efforts to manage the dead and bereaved families on multiple facets of China's modernity, altering the relationships between the state and society, the nation and the family, and the living and the dead.
On Good, Bad, and Ugly Malay
Authors: Hoogervorst Tom G.
Published: January 2022

This chapter analyzes how the Malay spoken, written, and described by people of Chinese ancestry resonated across the public sphere, from society's elites down to the grassroots. It shows how print entrepreneurs outraged colonial language hierarchies through their contents, but especially through the linguistic style they adopted. By providing a wealth of Sino-Malay and other sources, the chapter offers insights into the questions like: How did people look at their language? How did others perceive it, and how did the speech community respond to such external judgments? It pays attention to a confluence of scholarly traditions — including Hokkien dialectology, Sinographic transcription systems, and European-influenced linguistics — that shaped the ways Chinese-Indonesians talked about language. The chapter then dismantles the received wisdom that Java's Malay was inferior to that of Sumatra, highlighting strategies to talk back against these prevailing hierarchies. Ultimately. the chapter underscores the importance of spelling to colonial language attitudes.
Printing, Pulp, and Popularity
Authors: Hoogervorst Tom G.
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores how Chinese entrepreneurs managed to secure a prime spot in the Malay printing industry. It elaborates on the interdependence of mass media and vernacular language. The chapter first situates the emergence of the SinoMalay press in the broader constellation of popular printing in Asia, which took shape in the mid-nineteenth century. The popularity of SinoMalay depended in part on the serialized stories they published, some of which were translated Chinese tales. The chapter then shifts to discuss how Malay printing industry diversified during the 1910s when it came to serve different political agendas. The colonial authorities continued to appropriate it as a controlling device and catalyst for “civilization.” By recounting the growing numbers of indigenous progressives who relied on periodicals to generate emancipatory change, the chapter explores the interplay between print entrepreneurs, audiences, and linguistic styles. Ultimately, the chapter highlights the importance of the vernacular in articulating society's effusions on violence, sex, and other explicit themes.
Introduction
Authors: Hoogervorst Tom G.
Published: January 2022

This chapter approaches language as a prism into the past. Focusing on late colonial Malay, as used by the urban Chinese, the chapter aims to better understand its speakers and their lived experiences. Many writers from this community relied on the press to navigate the world they inhabited. The chapter argues that a linguistic reading of vernacular texts — placing language in conversation with history and culture — is key to make sense of the society that slowly transformed into Indonesia, and the position therein of its Chinese minority. The chapter treats linguistic development and social change as co-constitutive: language describes and defines new lifeways but is also expanded and enriched by them. By investigating the linguistic character of these sources, the chapter attempts to add empirical depth and cultural texture to the historical conditions in which they were forged. Ultimately, the chapter discusses methods to examine Chinese-Indonesian experiences through the crucible of language, it then offers vistas into life in Indonesia's late colonial cities.
Female Strikers in Recent Decades and the Politics of Memory
Authors: Nam Hwasook
Published: January 2022

This chapter steps into the post-1987, post-developmental period of democratization and neoliberal transformation in South Korea and considers the conditions that shaped the invisibility of yŏgong and the underappreciation of their contributions in the current organized labor movement and in the larger society. It features Pusan's female shoe workers' resistance to capital flight in the 1990s and assesses shifting gender politics in the union movement before and after the 1987 Great Workers' Struggle. The unresolved nature of the gender question reveals itself starkly in the case of woman welder Kim Jin-Sook in the changed neoliberal environment of the twenty-first century. During this period, the progress that workers had achieved through massive strike waves in the 1980s and 1990s has eroded significantly under new management strategies aiming at reducing union power to cut costs and regain control on the shop floor. The process of irregularization of the workforce accelerated following the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 and reached the unionized large-firm, heavy-industry regular male workers, engendering ferocious and long-lasting labor disputes. Meanwhile, an apathy toward labor struggle has become widespread in society, as many South Koreans have lost interest in embracing industrial workers as an essential component of nation-building.
The Mesmerist Renaissance
Authors: Quinlan Sean M.
Published: January 2022

This chapter highlights the published books on animal magnetism by Amand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, the Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825), a former aristocrat and artillery officer. It analyzes how Puységur stunned literary and scientific audiences and sparked a large public debate among leading doctors and intellectuals that persisted until the 1830s. Puységur raised vexing questions about mind and matter that defied simple scientific resolution and seemed to get to the heart of passionate concerns about the role of will and imagination in the making of natural reality. The chapter explores Puységur's resurrection of the mesmerist controversy that had once embroiled the intellectual world of Old Regime France. This “mesmerist renaissance,” inaugurated the last but most extensive serious public debate, within medico-scientific circles, about the veracity and efficacy of animal magnetism. The chapter demonstrates that the mesmerist renaissance is a significant part of this story about medical subcultures, genre, and readership, above all in how these undercurrents channeled medical ideas and languages, both licit and otherwise, into the larger intellectual world of post-revolutionary France. Here, the story increasingly shifts to the contested political decades of the 1820s and 1830s.
Genesis and Exodus
Authors: Morrison James Ashley
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides an overview of the tragedy of England's return to gold. In the spring of 1925, Winston Churchill settled upon a plan to make Britain great again: he would restore the gold standard. This was Churchill's first significant policy initiative since becoming the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new Conservative government. However, in the wake of the First World War, Parliament extended the UK's wartime capital controls. This created an opportunity for the revered economist John Maynard Keynes to wage an aggressive, highly visible campaign against this very course of action. The book argues that the UK's particular path back onto gold in the 1920s followed directly, although not inevitably, from a combination of three things: a zealous and widespread faith in “orthodox” political economy; the reality that such beliefs were less an “orthodoxy” than a mythology; and the theocracy to which this gave rise.
The Cunliffe “Consensus”
Authors: Morrison James Ashley
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines the significance of the Cunliffe Committee's First Interim Report. The Cunliffe Committee's infamous First Interim Report stressed the consensus of opinion, both within the committee itself and between the committee and the witnesses it interviewed. A mere two pages long, the committee's Final Report simply restated the principal conclusions presented in the Interim Report. The committee claimed that they “have found nothing in the experiences of the war to falsify the lessons of previous experience that the adoption of a currency not convertible at will into gold or other exportable coin is likely in practice to lead to over-issue and to destroy the measure of exchangeable value and cause a general rise in all prices and an adverse movement in the foreign exchanges.” The chapter then shows how the experts who sat on and appeared before the Cunliffe Committee could not agree on the steps to take to return to gold, when to begin taking these steps, or even how to keep the UK on the gold standard once it had arrived there.
Atop Sinai
Authors: Morrison James Ashley
Published: January 2022

This chapter investigates how the Cunliffe Committee began meeting in the middle of February 1918. From the start, a cleavage developed between Walter Cunliffe and John Bradbury. Cunliffe “thought that the first question to consider would be that of any necessary alterations in the Banking Laws.” He proposed inviting experts to give evidence on this. Bradbury tried to contain Cunliffe's initiative. Speaking for HM Treasury — and invoking the chancellor's authority — Bradbury suggested that taking witnesses would be unnecessary, as the committee members “themselves would for the most part possess the necessary information.” Rather than reforming banking regulation — and the charter of the Bank of England — Bradbury argued that the committee ought to focus on simply rolling back the wartime issuance of paper currency. The chapter then considers the committee's first estimates of the UK money supply. It also looks at Cunliffe's proposal that the Cunliffe Committee begin to take witnesses; it was his last hope of saving the gold standard through reform.
The Golden Calf
Authors: Morrison James Ashley
Published: January 2022

This chapter evaluates how, by the spring of 1918, there really had been only one major policymaker to seriously reconsider the gold standard orthodoxy: Bank Governor Walter Cunliffe. But his scheme was less an attack on the gold standard than a tempering — a reforming — of it. He believed that modern financial innovations, better management of the financial system, and capital diversification could allow the UK to circulate a larger quantity of money without sacrificing the currency's convertibility into gold at the prewar rate. Over its eighteen months of work, Cunliffe Committee members interviewed more than a dozen expert witnesses and discussed memoranda from more. From simply reciting the incantations of the gold standard orthodoxy, these witnesses brought varied understandings of the practical operation of the monetary system in their domains of expertise: retail banking, manufacturing, and trading. Unshackled by formal training, these men felt free to think creatively about Britain's likely postwar struggles. Many, including the elite City financiers, even questioned the assumptions that underpinned orthodox theory, although they did so only inadvertently and only until the orthodox committee members maneuvered them into doing otherwise.
Indulgence
Authors: Morrison James Ashley
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses the counter-reformation orchestrated by the Chamberlain-Bradbury Committee. The traditional view is that the Chamberlain-Bradbury Committee largely ignored industry and labor. Empowered by the chants of finance and enchanted by the chorus of intelligentsia, these elites are said to have overruled the venal interests of the UK's producers. In fact, the opposite was true on both counts. As with the Cunliffe Committee, the members of the Chamberlain-Bradbury Committee were far more reflective and nuanced than we have appreciated. Indeed, even the greatest exponents of the orthodoxy — Arthur Cecil Pigou and John Bradbury — had begun to rethink the gold standard in light of John Maynard Keynes's devastating critique. They did this even as the representatives of UK industry vigorously cast their lot behind the agenda of the City of London.
The Torgsin Empire
Authors: Osokina Elena
Published: January 2022

This chapter investigates how Torgsin became a trade empire, whose vastness exceeded even the boundaries of the USSR and whose contribution to industrialization surpassed even the boldest expectations. The true history of Torgsin started when it opened its doors to Soviet customers. Hundreds of new stores opened, spreading out to distant territories. Torgsin's trade volumes grew, its functions multiplied, and the assortment of valuables that it accepted widened. From luxurious stores in big cities to unsightly shops in forgotten towns — Torgsin's network webbed the entire country. Torgsin reached abroad as well, calling on foreigners to send currency and order parcels for their relatives in the USSR. The government's desire for people's valuables only partly explains the lightning rise of Torgsin. Food shortages and, especially, the mass famine of 1932–1933 played a crucial role. To survive, people brought to Torgsin whatever valuables they had to exchange them for food. Initially Torgsin accepted only foreign currency and gold, but the starved kept bringing silver, diamonds, emeralds, and art.
What’s for Sale?
Authors: Osokina Elena
Published: January 2022

This chapter studies the shops within the Torgsin trade enterprise. Throughout its existence, Torgsin underwent several transformations. Before it opened its doors to Soviet buyers, Torgsin was a souvenir and antiques shop for foreigners. After Soviet consumers were allowed into Torgsin, its trade skyrocketed; the commodity structure of sales began to change as well. In the first half of 1931, food products accounted for 80 percent of Torgsin's sales. However, that did not yet indicate famine; at that time, Torgsin's main operation was to provide for foreign ships in Soviet seaports, and the captains ordered mostly food supplies for their crews. The assortment of Torgsin's goods favored by Soviet people in the second half of 1931 reflected a border line between a relatively good, although already shaky, urban welfare and advancing problems with food. The 1931 results suggest that Torgsin potentially could have turned into a chain of elite urban hard-currency department stores if famine had not occurred. Nevertheless, the end of rationing in 1935 and the development of a network of free-access stores reoriented consumer demand toward goods that were not basic necessities crucial for survival. Torgsin was turning into a model hard-currency enterprise to serve elite consumer demand.
Coherence and Contestation
Authors: Thomas Ward
Published: January 2022

This chapter presents the theoretical framework for the nonstate actor violence in international politics, examining an important but neglected cause of normative change. It unfolds a different avenue of normative change, one characterized by the contestation of preexisting norms whose coherence has been undermined in unintended ways by changes in other norms to which they bear a logical or mutually constitutive relationship. This can be understood through what the author calls “the principle of normative coherence.” The chapter also looks at how changes in some norms, especially significant constitutive norms that define actors' roles or relationships, can trigger crises of coherence for others. It explains how the macronormative shifts — one granting independence to colonized peoples and the other greatly reducing states' discretion in choosing to use force — made it more difficult to sustain the vision of sovereignty that gives states a monopoly on force and set the stage for nonstate actors to contest that monopoly. The chapter investigates how changing ideas about the relationship between sovereign states and political violence often contributed to the rise of, and the demand for, nonstate military force.
From Soldiers of Fortune to Fortune 500
Authors: Thomas Ward
Published: January 2022

This chapter investigates the return of entrepreneurial violence to the international system in the form of private military and security companies — offering a detailed analysis of their rise. The chapter begins by discussing the decline of private force in the nineteenth century and its resurgence in recent years. It then examines the literature that attempts to explain this resurgence. The chapter also revisits the twin macronormative transformations of the post-World War II system — the change in international norms surrounding decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s and the post-1945 change in international law regarding the legitimate resort to force — and inspects their implications for the proscription of private force, especially in the form of mercenaries. The chapter reveals how this changed normative landscape not only contributed to material conditions that created fresh demand for mercenaries but also caused the norm against mercenaries to be narrowed and its application circumscribed. It outlines how the crisis of coherence for the norm was exploited by purveyors and proponents of privatized force, who vigorously and often shrewdly contested the state monopoly on violence. The chapter claims that these contestation efforts have largely succeeded, staving off attempts to abolish the private military and security industry, distancing it from the negative connotations of “mercenarism,” and swinging international consensus toward a relatively permissive regime of regulation and oversight.
A Moscow Education
Authors: Doder Dusko , Branson Louise
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines the author's arrival in Moscow and his meeting with his new United Press International colleague, Ted Shields, and the UPI photographer John Mantle. They explained that the militiamen, whom foreigners dubbed “mili men,” was to record their movements and keep most Russians out. They also warned that they should be careful about what they said indoors because the KGB tapped their phones and bugged their apartments. The author then compares the experience of entering the Soviet Union to his Communist Yugoslavia childhood. The big story that summer of 1968 was that the Soviet Union was making threatening noises against fraternal Communist Czechoslovakia. Its leader, Alexander Dubcek, was introducing liberalizing reforms. Would the Soviet Union invade or not was the question of July and August. On August 21, 1968, as predicted, the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact countries had invaded Czechoslovakia. The chapter also looks at the other important stories that the author covered while he was in Moscow.
Reluctant Intelligence Reporter
Authors: Doder Dusko , Branson Louise
Published: January 2022

This chapter addresses how the author was assigned to the intelligence beat. He protested, pointing out that it would be hard to cultivate sources within an intelligence community that had been embarrassed by his Andropov scoop and by his reporting from the Soviet Union. However, Ben Bradlee insisted on giving him the position. In July of 1986, with his book now finished and with him scheduled to return to the Washington Post, the author proposed another story that would help him see more of Louise Branson and delay his start on the intelligence beat. It involved Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary general who was then president of Austria. Rumor had it that he had served with Nazi forces in Yugoslavia during World War II and had been accused of war crimes by Tito's government. The 1947 indictment was rumored to be stored in the basement of the UN building in Manhattan.
Court Fight
Authors: Lewis Tom
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses the system of protecting inventors. It elucidates Congress' removal of the issuance of patents from the duties of the secretary of state and its creation of a separate patent office with its own building. The chapter elaborates on the complex procedures of the Patent Office, designed to protect the rights of inventors. It is not generally known that inventions were often the subject of patent litigation pressed by other inventors who claimed to have made the discoveries first. In some instances, the lawsuit went as far as the Supreme Court. The chapter explores how some inventions have changed the course of the nation. It pays attention to the Lee de Forest and Edwin Howard Armstrong case over rights to the discovery of regeneration. For nearly twenty years, from 1914 to 1934, ego and pride combined with the promise of financial reward and fame to create what was, in the end, ruinous to each man.
Victories Great and Small
Authors: Lewis Tom
Published: January 2022

This chapter recalls the contributions and inventions of Lee de Forest, Edwin Howard Armstrong, and David Sarnoff. It first looks at Armstrong's legacies, financial settlements, and equipment which possessed significant historic value. The chapter then explores how Armstrong's wife, Marion, spent the next quarter century redressing the wrongs her husband had suffered, and ensuring that he received the recognition after death that had eluded him in life. The chapter also discusses the life of Lee de Forest at the end of the war — enjoying relatively good health and a joyful marriage. It explicates the publication of his autobiography, on which he had been working for many years — Father of Radio. Father of Radio proved to be pure de Forest, his attempt to record his life as he saw it, embellished with his own recollections. It recorded de Forest's success and failures as only he could see them. The chapter narrates David Sarnoff's personal triumph and personal failure in the last two decades of his life. It also investigates how he masked those failures through self-aggrandizement on a grand scale.
Reimagining Governance Through the Role of Law
Authors: López-Calva Luis F.
Published: January 2022

This chapter looks at the ideas presented in the previous chapters through the lens of the “functionalist” approach to law developed in the World Development Report 2017 on Governance and the Law (World Bank 2017). That report had attracted a huge amount of attention from both policymakers and the academic community. The chapter argues that although we use the word “law” in a rather generic fashion, in reality, there are various types of laws, and it is important to classify them. It shows that laws often have a hierarchy. They can be ground-level rules pertaining to how individuals relate to one another, and at the other extreme, they can be rules about how rules are to be created and enforced. The chapter also draws special attention to understanding the role of law as an instrument for resolving disputes and contestation. During major shifts in technology, such as the one the world is witnessing now, this becomes key to the peaceful resolution of conflict.
Beyond Law and Economics
Authors: Hassoun Nicole
Published: January 2022

This chapter reflects on various special themes and policy problems discussed in the book using the broader brush of moral philosophy. It argues that law and economics, while themselves multidisciplinary, have a basis in an even broader disciplinary mooring, that of philosophy. Drawing on classic works in law, economics, and philosophy, the chapter then raises important questions about the concept of legitimacy in the context of the kinds of interventions discussed in the previous chapters, such as central bank policies and antitrust regulations. While much of standard law and economics deals with the direct economic consequences of legal interventions, we often overlook the fact that many of these decisions taken by lawyers, policy economists, and technocrats can have sweeping consequences. What gives technocrats the legitimacy to take these actions? What makes these kinds of sweeping decisions, with large human consequences, “morally permissible”? Some of these big topics do not have easy answers and are, by their nature, open ended.
Ecosystem design as an avenue for improving services provided by carbonate producing marine ecosystems
Authors: Westphal Hildegard , Murphy Gary N. , Doo Steve S. , Mann Thomas , Petrovic Alexander , Schmidt Christiane , Stuhr Marleen
Published: January 2022

Ecosystem Design (ED) is an approach for constructing habitats that places human needs for ecosystem services at the center of intervention, with the overarching goal of establishing self-sustaining habitats which require limited management. This concept was originally developed for use in mangrove ecosystems, and is understandably controversial, as it markedly diverges from other protection approaches that assign human use a minor priority or exclude it. However, the advantage of ED lies within the considered implementation of these designed ecosystems, thus preserving human benefits from potential later disturbances. Here, we outline the concept of ED in tropical carbonate depositional systems and discuss potential applications to aid ecosystem services such as beach nourishment and protection of coastlines and reef islands at risk from environmental and climate change, CO2sequestration, food production, and tourism. Biological carbonate sediment production is a crucial source of stability of reef islands and reef-rimmed coastlines. Careful implementation of designed carbonate depositional ecosystems could help counterbalance sea-level rise and manage documented erosion effects of coastal constructions. Importantly, adhering to the core ethos of ED, careful dynamic assessments which provide a balanced approach to maximizing ecosystem services (e.g.,carbonate production), should identify and avoid any potential damages to existing functioning ecosystems.
Transportation of Blackmoor (Carassius auratus) Goldfish Variety with Low-Temperature Treatment at Different Durations
Authors: Lili Walim , Herman Roffi Grandiosa , Yusuf Raihan Achmad , . Iskandar
Published: January 2022

This research aims to analyze the induction time and recovery time of Blackmoor Goldfish (Carrasius auratus) with different low temperatures as a transportation method, to find out how to handle it with a proper temperature reduction in its transportation, and to find out the optimum time period in its transportation This study was carried out from November 2020 to February 2021 in the Ciparanje wet laboratory, Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Sciences, Universitas Padjadjaran. This research was conducted experimentally using the Factorial Randomized Block Design (FRBD) which consisted of two factors, namely four levels of treatment (12 °C, 16 °C, 20 °C, and 24°C (control)) and three levels of transportation duration (3, 5, and 7 hours) which were repeated three times. This research uses a closed transportation system. The research results showed that the low-temperature treatment of 16°C and a transportation duration of 3 hours was the best treatment with an induction time of 02:37, recovery time of 07:13, and having a post-transportation survival rate of 90% and post-maintenance for 7 days of 85 %. The DO parameter is ±7.53 mg/L, pH is ± 7.38 and ammonia is ±0.0016 mg/L.
Role of Vitamin D Supplementation in Allergic Rhinitis
Authors: El Gharably Mai Mohamed , Amer Mohammed Abdel-Rahman , El-Sheikh Mohamed Nasser
Published: January 2022

Background: Allergic Rhinitis (AR) is one of the inflammatory diseases of the nasal mucosa, caused by immunoglobulin E (IgE) after allergens exposure, Severity measurement of the AR symptoms can be conducted subjectively by counting the total nasal symptom score (TNSS) and objectively by counting the serum IgE levels. Vitamin D (VD) plays a significant part in inborn and adaptive immunity; however, this is not completely understood. It is reported that over 900 genes are regulated by VD. The aim of this study is to assess the role of VD supplementation in AR.

Methods: This prospective randomized controlled study was carried out on 90 patients Test group (n = 45): received standard medications and supplementation of oral VD3 (cholecalciferol; 1000 IU) for 3 months. Control group (n = 45): received standard medications without supplementation of oral VD3.

Results: Comparison between both groups showed insignificant difference between both groups in VD level at the start of the study. According to TNSS in test group, there was significant improvement after 3 months compared to before the study. According to TNSS in control group, there was significant improvement after 3 months than before the study. There was significant improvement in test group than control group as regard to TNSS after 3 months.

Conclusions: There was highly significant reduction in the TNSS after VD supplementation. Thus, VD supplementation alters the course of AR towards clinical improvement.