bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Rate or Trade? Identifying Winning Ideas in Open Idea Sourcing
Authors: Blohm Ivo , Riedl Christoph , Füller Johann , Leimeister Jan Marco
Published: March 2016

Information technology (IT) has created new patterns of digitally-mediated collaboration that allow open sourcing of ideas for new products and services. These novel sociotechnical arrangements afford finely-grained manipulation of how tasks can be represented and have changed the way organizations ideate. In this paper, we investigate differences in behavioral decision-making resulting from IT-based support of open idea evaluation. We report results from a randomized experiment of 120 participants comparing IT-based decision-making support using a rating scale (representing a judgment task) and a preference market (representing a choice task). We find that the rating scale-based task invokes significantly higher perceived ease of use than the preference market-based task and that perceived ease of use mediates the effect of the task representation treatment on the users’ decision quality. Furthermore, we find that the understandability of ideas being evaluated, which we assess through the ideas’ readability, and the perception of the task’s variability moderate the strength of this mediation effect, which becomes stronger with increasing perceived task variability and decreasing understandability of the ideas. We contribute to the literature by explaining how perceptual differences of task representations for open idea evaluation affect the decision quality of users and translate into differences in mechanism accuracy. These results enhance our understanding of how crowdsourcing as a novel mode of value creation may effectively complement traditional work structures.
Asymptotic Optimality of Constant-Order Policies for Lost Sales Inventory Models with Large Lead Times
Authors: Goldberg David A. , Katz-Rogozhnikov Dmitriy A. , Lu Yingdong , Sharma Mayank , Squillante Mark S.
Published: March 2016

Lost sales inventory models with large lead times, which arise in many practical settings, are notoriously difficult to optimize due to the curse of dimensionality. In this paper, we show that when lead times are large, a very simple constant-order policy, first studied by Reiman, performs nearly optimally. The main insight of our work is that when the lead time is very large, such a significant amount of randomness is injected into the system between when an order for more inventory is placed and when the order is received, that “being smart” algorithmically provides almost no benefit. Our main proof technique combines a novel coupling for suprema of random walks with arguments from queueing theory.
Does Institutional Change in Universities Influence High-Tech Entrepreneurship? Evidence from China’s Project 985
Authors: Eesley Charles , Li Jian Bai , Yang Delin
Published: March 2016

This paper contributes to institutional theory on cognitive and normative institutional change targeted at altering beliefs, behaviors, and ultimately firm performance. Prior work emphasizes institutional changes where the ideas and beliefs originate from those within the institutional context. Under examined are cases of institutional changes in beliefs and behaviors imposed from outside of the context, which may result in inconsistencies among cognitive, normative, and regulatory institutional pillars. Project 985 was a program implemented by the Chinese government that provided funding for a set of universities to build new research centers. We found that graduates of these universities subsequently expressed greater beliefs in innovation and founded more high-tech ventures, but that entrepreneurs influenced by the reform were not as financially successful as entrepreneurs who founded firms before the reform or from non-985 universities. We explain this surprising finding as caused by the fact that Project 985 was institutionally inconsistent with China’s broader institutional environment. An important implication is that institutional changes may alter beliefs and behavior, but they must be consistent with the broader institutional environment to improve firm performance.
Patients’ response to consultant-level outcomes in vascular surgery
Authors: Bamford RF , Hunter ID , Stewart AHR , Eyers PS , Coulston JE
Published: March 2016

A closer look at how patients enquire about their surgeon.
Choosing War
Authors: Scranton Roy
Published: February 2016

Hobbes doesn’t come up much in Georgetown University philosopher Nancy Sherman’s book Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers, but his definition of war as nature implicitly informs everything she says. Like Hobbes, Sherman would have her readers forget that war is a thing humans do to each other. Like Hobbes, Sherman would like to believe that war is something that exists outside civilization.
Phantom Public
Authors: Taylor Astra
Published: February 2016

In 1964 the enigmatic Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously declared “the medium is the message.” At the same time he called media “extensions of man.” Fifty years ago these assertions were provocative enough to turn McLuhan into a countercultural celebrity. Today, it all seems somewhat unremarkable: who doesn’t feel their smartphone, for both better and worse, to be a part of them? The idea that media extend us—making us more connected and sociable, informed and empowered—is not just pervasive; it is essential to the promotion of the digital economy, or what theorist Jodi Dean has dubbed “communicative capitalism.”
Innovation for What?: The Politics of Inequality in Higher Education
Authors: Williams Jeffrey J.
Published: February 2016

“Innovation” is the new mantra of American higher education. It is invoked as an indubitable good by college presidents and government officials, business advisors and philanthropists alike. It typically refers to developments in technology aimed at delivering “educational content” and transforming the way that universities themselves work, as well as developing products for businesses outside. Beyond the vista of continual progress that it projects, the rush for innovation carries a deliberate politics that has largely gone unquestioned. Innovation for what? For what purpose, and with what result? And for whose benefit?
Back to the Future
Authors: Deb Siddhartha
Published: February 2016

An American who has lived in Vancouver, Canada since the 1960s, William Gibson is a one-man brand for speculative fiction, a sort of Steve Jobs of prose narrative, the man who—as a note in a recent MoMA exhibition put it— is “credited with having coined the term ‘cyberspace,’ and having envisioned both the Internet and virtual reality before either existed.” Gibson’s recent collection of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor, shows him writing on the future for Wired, Time, Rolling Stone, Forbes, and the Whole Earth Catalog, and addressing audiences at the annual BookExpo America in New York and the Director’s Guild in Los Angeles. Taken together, all of this makes his latest novel, The Peripheral, appear as much the expression of an entire culture as a book written by a single person, a vision of the future that comes to us with the stamp of approval of the West’s most powerful cultural arbiters.
A Lost Boy in Louisville: One Refugee’s Story
Authors: Solomon Daniel
Published: February 2016

For local activists, the killing of a black South Sudanese refugee by a white officer clearly mirrored the racial violence and police brutality that has shaped the lives of people of color in so many other American cities. For Manyoun’s community of South Sudanese refugees in Louisville, this sentiment is familiar. Refugees resettled in Louisville, as in most American cities, are expected to assimilate into a society in which racial discrimination is widespread, especially when it comes to interactions with the police.
Country Music Capital
Authors: Fraser Max
Published: February 2016

If you were asked to name an iconic American city of the last fifty years, odds are your first choice wouldn’t be Nashville. So you might say it was an inspired piece of wishful thinking when, in October 1962, Mayor Ben West staked a claim to Nashville’s future by posting new roadside signs on the highways leading into town. For the first time, visitors were welcomed to the “Home of the Grand Ole Opry, Music City U.S.A.” In the half century that followed, Music City U.S.A. has been the subject of a great American film, a popular television melodrama, and much handwringing about the current state of American culture and politics. Through it all, one thing has become clear: when Nashville was anointed the capital of country music, a true American icon was born.
The Corbyn Experiment
Authors: Stafford James
Published: February 2016

Depending on who you ask, Britain’s Labour Party is either soaring, or in free-fall. There is evidence for both propositions, but the reality is messier. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership should not be viewed as merely one example of a broader flourishing of populist anti-austerity politics across Europe. Corbyn’s victory owed much to the specific and local circumstances of British Labour in summer 2015, as the party reeled from an epochal electoral defeat. Whether Corbyn’s leadership can prosper outside this very specific moment remains an open question.
Introduction: Whose Family?
Authors: Lewis Natasha , Schwartz Madeleine
Published: February 2016

The last few decades have seen American families dissolve and transform. Americans are having a smaller number of children. Fewer people are getting married, and more couples are opting to live together before or instead of marriage. Last year the Supreme Court expanded access to this increasingly unpopular institution to same-sex couples.But while families keep changing, not all Americans have equal power over their transformation. Many mourn the end of marriage and the nuclear family, but clinging to a mythical, outdated model of family life is pointless. If we want to fight inequality and improve life for parents, children, and the rest of us, we must look seriously at families as they exist today.
Who Pays Writers?
Authors: Doherty Maggie
Published: February 2016

In 1967, the novelist John Barth, then teaching at SUNY Buffalo, made an infamous argument for literary experimentation. Nearly half a century later, we find ourselves at different sort of crisis point. Radical literary experimentation continues, but it has become the privilege of a few. In Barth’s day, a robust welfare state supported writers. Public patronage programs provided new classes of Americans with the resources needed to write and, through financial support, enabled them to take aesthetic risks. The upshot was a more diverse literary world—racially, politically, and aesthetically.
Spouses with Benefits
Authors: Kahn Suzanne
Published: February 2016

Last June, the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage throughout the United States. The historic opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, used language so soaring that it was quickly incorporated into wedding ceremonies. In September, I attended three that quoted Kennedy’s declaration that marriage “allows two people to find a life that could not be found alone, for a marriage becomes greater than just the two persons.” Less often quoted, but arguably more important, is the section of Kennedy’s opinion which lists the “material burdens” placed on same-sex couples previously denied the right to marry: exclusion from the benefits and rewards given to workers and their spouses through retirement savings programs, health insurance, and tax policy, for example.
The Two Lefts of Jorge Castañeda
Authors: Iber Patrick
Published: February 2016

In 1981, as revolution and counterinsurgency raged across Central America, Mexico’s secret police believed they had bagged an important spy: Jorge Castañeda Gutman, the son of the foreign secretary. According to surveillance carried out by the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), Castañeda was an avowed “Marxist Leninist” who had betrayed his country on behalf of the Cuban government, by using his father’s connections to help foreign revolutionaries from Central America. A quarter century later, in 2006, Jorge Castañeda published an article in Foreign Affairs that would have shocked his DFS pursuers.
State of Emergency
Authors: Marcus David
Published: February 2016

Security has always been as much a problem for modern democracies as it has been a solution. The tension between security and democracy, safety and legitimate rule, has been at the center of modern politics going as far back as Hobbes’s leviathan state, where fear above all else “is the passion to be reckoned upon.” But since September 11, the pursuit of complete security has done considerable damage to our democratic process. We will never be able to truly escape the risks and uncertainty of modern life. Rousseau was right: complete security is impossible. But if fear is to continue to be a permanent condition in our lives, then let’s make sure democracy is as well.
Into the Cave: Sheldon Wolin’s Search for Democracy
Authors: Marcus David
Published: February 2016

Sheldon Wolin published Politics and Vision in the early months of 1960. He was thirty-seven and a junior ranking professor at the University of California-Berkeley. He had written a few academic articles here and there, and an unpublished dissertation on English constitutionalism, but no one was really sure what to expect from his first book.
George Washington’s Dentures: Disability, Deception, and the Republican Body
Authors: Horn Jennifer Van
Published: February 2016

George Washington’s dentures are well-known but understudied. This article examines the first president’s extant dentures along with medical texts, satirical prints, portraits, novels and elocution manuals that circulated around the Atlantic to argue that by concealing his tooth loss Washington’s dentures enabled him to perform republican virtue. Inserting Washington’s false teeth into early Americans’ larger cultural interest in deception, made evident in trompe l’oeil painting, reveals the ways that these new citizens accepted some amount of dissimilation in their republic in the name of politeness. Finally, considering the fact that Washington paid slaves for teeth that were then likely used in his dentures, the article examines his prostheses from the perspective of both the presidential wearer and the men and women he enslaved.
“This Week Black Paul Preach’d”: Fragment and Method in Early African American Studies
Authors: Saillant John
Published: February 2016

Documents concerning Thomas Paul (c. 1773–1831), Nathaniel Paul (1770s–1839), and their siblings, dating from their early lives, before they became involved in the abolitionist movement, are examined. The documents suggest that by 1805 the Paul family was committed to defending the Calvinist theology of Baptist Isaac Backus (1724–1806), to critiquing Universalist Christianity, and to soliciting charitable donations for semi-independent black Baptist churches. In Boston, in 1806, Thomas Paul opened the First African Baptist Church. This essay argues that documents from the early history of black Baptists should be interpreted with a method different from that used for early black Congregationalists, Methodists, and Anglicans. With little access to print culture, early black Baptists are more likely to have left brief fragments as manuscripts than to have published full-length tracts, sermons, poems, and memoirs. The method recommended is comparative, taking into account both contemporary black authors and white co-religionists. Utilization of this method reveals a set of black Baptist concerns that predate the organized, immediatist abolitionist movement by several decades. This method may be extended to other fragmentary documents.
American Constitutionalism and the War for Independence
Authors: Johnson Herbert A.
Published: February 2016

Although the war for independence profoundly impacted American life throughout the founding era, historians have paid little attention to the development of governing institutions and the evolution of constitutional principles during that conflict. An empirical look at the actual conduct of the war demonstrates the degree to which American leaders were guided by traditional principles of English constitutionalism, and how they shaped institutions and military behavior to insure Army subordination to civilian political authority. Military logistics were managed with concern for rights of private property, and were moderated by state judicial or official supervision. Congress appointed a succession of committees at camp to represent it at Amy headquarters, facilitating communication between Congress and Army commanders, and providing Congress with current information about the Army. These committees were also involved in assisting with strategic planning, recommending unit reorganization, and providing advice concerning the selection, assignment, and promotion of Army officers. They also served as points of contact between the Continental Army and state and local authorities. In 1781 these committees were replaced by a single Secretary at War who assumed their coordinating and advisory duties.
“Frères et Enfants du même Père”: The French Illusion of Empire West of the Great Lakes, 1731–1743
Authors: Berthelette Scott
Published: February 2016

In the eighteenth-century, France’s metropolitan authorities and colonial officials tasked the French western explorer Pierre de La Vérendrye to integrate the Indigenous peoples of the Petit Nord – Cree, Assiniboine, Monsoni, Anishinaabeg, and Dakota – into the network of French-mediated alliances emanating from the Great Lakes. The governor-general of New France, known as Onontio by the Natives, sought to ensure the symbolic subjugation of all Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes and the Petit Nord. Unlike the Great Lakes, devastated by endemic warfare and virulent diseases, the Indigenous social formations of the Petit Nord and Northern Great Plains remained politically cohesive and autonomous in the eighteenth-century. Thus, the Cree, Assiniboine, Dakota, and others, resisted creating a “middle ground” with La Vérendrye and other French newcomers, as they had little desire or need of French mediation in their territories. La Vérendrye’s ambitions for a French-mediated peace, or “Pax Gallica,” were thwarted in the overwhelmingly Native political space of the Petit Nord and Northern Great Plains.
Changing Definitions of Germanness across Three Generations of Yekkes in Palestine/Israel
Authors: Kranz Dani
Published: February 2016

German-speaking Jews arrived in Palestine in vast numbers from 1933 onwards. They are not Olim (ascenders, Jewish immigrants to Palestine/Israel) in the classical, Zionistic sense but emigrated out of necessity from Europe. Their history in Europe, and their arrival in Palestine reflect a particular integration into the nascent Jewish society, and resulted in a pronounced particularism that was transmitted across generations. To understand the interdependence of self-definition and superimposed ascription within a society that aims at absorbing immigrants, this paper chronicles the different definitions of Germanness amongst three generations of Yekkes (German-speaking Jews) in Palestine, later Israel, by focusing on community building, familial tradition, and everyday praxes of expressing Germanness.
Hungaro-German Dual Nationality: Germans, Slavs, and Magyars during the 1848 Revolution
Authors: Maxwell Alexander
Published: February 2016

German patriots in the Kingdom of Hungary developed a politics of “Hungaro-German dual nationality,” proclaiming themselves both German and Hungarian, drawing on the precedent set by Hungarian Slavs resisting Magyarization. The analysis concentrates on the 1848 Revolution: during each ebb and flow of the revolutionary movement, Hungarian Germans consistently proclaimed their loyalty both to Hungary and to German culture in journalism, poetry, history, and travel writing. Hungaro-Slavic dual loyalty problematizes historiographic assumptions about German “ethnic nationalism.”
Constructing the Volksgemeinschaft : Saxon Particularism and the Myth of the German East, 1919–1933
Authors: Davis Sacha E.
Published: February 2016

In the interwar period, Transylvanian Saxon nationalists integrated Saxon particularism into a broader German Volksgemeinschaft , stretching from Germany to the Baltic under the rubric of the myth of the German East. However, Saxon identification with the Volksgemeinschaft varied according to the degree to which other Germans matched Saxon particularistic understandings of Germanness. Saxon nationalists identified strongly with Germany, which gave new meaning to the Saxons’ imagined civilizing mission in Transylvania. Other historically privileged German communities in eastern Europe such as the Baltic Germans also reinforced Saxon views of the Volksgemeinschaft . However, Saxon nationalists struggled to identify with other Germans in Romania, whose comparatively low socioeconomic standing did not match their expectations. These patterns continued after 1933.
Far away at Home in Qingdao (1897–1914)
Authors: Groeneveld Sabina
Published: February 2016

In this essay, I outlay main developments within the administration of German Qingdao (1897–1914) and the resulting consequences for the Germans and Chinese living in this colony. Against this background, I examine how German colonial actors were able to identify Qingdao as a “second” Heimat. In particular, I investigate the possibility of a link between the early colonial policies introduced by the German administration and the construction of Heimat by German colonizers within everyday life.
The Yoke of the Hat: Consumption, Middle-Class Values, and Social Mobility in Carmen de Burgos’s La Flor de la Playa
Authors: Trautenberg Ezekiel
Published: February 2016

Carmen de Burgos’s novella La Flor de la Playa explores themes of consumption and social mobility in early-twentieth-century Portugal and Spain. Elisa, the novella’s working-class protagonist, is a seamstress who travels with Enrique, her office-worker boyfriend, from Madrid to Portugal on a summer vacation. During their trip, the lovers pretend to be a middle-class married couple. Elisa and Enrique facilitate their social transformations within the foreign linguistic, spatial, and social contexts of Portugal through the consumption and production of fashion, language, and the touristic space of the beach. Despite their belief in the socially transformative power of consumption, the couple is unable and, in Elisa’s case, unwilling to adopt the conventional and stifling model of middleclass marriage. Ultimately, their relationship collapses under the strain of a foreign and incompatible “grammar” of bourgeois marriage, restrictive middle-class values, and illusory social mobility.
Realism as Master Genre: The Dialogic Crisis in Cecilia Valdés
Authors: Jiménez Javier
Published: February 2016

Published as a short novel in Cuba in 1839 but expanded and published definitively in the United States in 1882, Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés is typically read for its antislavery and pro-independence messages. However, I argue that the novel’s costumbrista description and its realist plot generate a crisis of meaning that modifies the text’s antislavery and pro-independence messages in an unexpected way: the narrative imagines a future Cuba as a liberal nation-state that, paradoxically, functions by means of a colonial racial hierarchy, thus preserving the colonial structure of society. My analysis shows that the combination of costumbrismo , a genre concerned with type characters and scenes, and realism, which focuses on the faithful representation of reality, creates a crisis of referents in the narrative that destabilizes how the text produces meaning. Indeed, this crisis generates a surplus of meanings that undermine the text’s explicit goals of political and economic liberalism.
Barroco, monstruosidad y mercancía en Historia general y natural de las Indias , de Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo
Authors: Hernández-Ramírez Azucena
Published: February 2016

This article is about monstrosity understood as merchandise and consumerism in the Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535–1550) by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. The excess of materiality, exuberant American nature, and the deformity of baroque pearls have significant relevance to understanding the profound changes in perception that the discovery of America produced in the first explorers and chroniclers. In his vast, great foundational work he offers a precise account of the gestation of a new perception, a new way to see the difference and alterity that fall within the category of monstrosity as a phenomenon of representation. At the same time, Oviedo points to a sensibility that is fully baroque, showing a lack of harmony and order in his narrative form. Through a focus on specific moments of his Historia ( piña, iguana, gatico monillo , among others), it becomes a catalogue overflowing with figures and bodies that move through the heterogeneous scene of monstrosity and merchandise.
Returns: Youth, Time, and Maturity in The Ambassadors
Authors: Ku Chung-Hao
Published: February 2016

In this essay, I study numerous spatiotemporal returns in The Ambassadors to make three points. First, youth is multitemporal and relational rather than chronological and individual in this novel. A chronological view of Strether’s lost youth and Chad’s precarious youth eludes the returns of Strether’s young self and his dead son to figure in Strether’s relationship with Chad. Second, Strether’s consciousness analytically moves forward by temporally moving backward: his progress has to be backward. And third, Strether and Chad are boyish characters not necessarily because they are immature by nature but because their representations botch the telos of maturity.
“The Ecstasy of the Martyr”: Lesbianism, Sacrifice, and Morbidness in The Bostonians
Authors: Kishi Madoka
Published: February 2016

This article explores the metaphysical erotics of The Bostonians (1886), reading the novel with and through the works by Henry James Sr. and William James. Rather than read Olive Chancellor’s “morbidness” as a sign of suppressed lesbianism, I read it as a reflection of William James’s concept of the “sick soul.” This recasting enables me to see Olive’s relation to Verena as a quasi-religious ecstasy charged with “passion” in the word’s original sense: the suffering of martyrdom. With this genealogy in place, I contend that the text theorizes an identificatory erotics with the trope of sacrifice.
The Betrayal of Love: The Golden Bowl and Levinasian Ethics
Authors: Kronick Joseph
Published: February 2016

James’s novels have always elicited ethical thought, but the inadequacy of traditional ethics is revealed by the split among readers of The Golden Bowl in their judgments of Maggie’s character. R. P. Blackmur was right to call the true plot the “ineluctable,” which I take to mean the ethical, but on a register that cannot be reduced to a thematic reading, which would deal with what Emmanuel Levinas calls the shadow of reality and Blackmur the mechanical plot. An Aristotlean thematics and ethics serve as our mechanical plot, but the ineluctable demands a Levinasian reading if we are to be responsible to the true plot and James’s vision.
Tourist Love: The Erotics of Travel in James’s Early Fiction
Authors: Lowe Ryan Stuart
Published: February 2016

In “Tourist Love,” I argue that the international theme in James’s early career has a unique erotic structure set apart from any simple identification of the author’s sexual orientation. In early works like Roderick Hudson and “Daisy Miller,” James offers us erotically charged encounters between an informed tour guide and a “virginal” tourist. These tales defuse the tension between the values of the tourist and the traveler, a growing preoccupation in the nineteenth-century imagination. In doing so, James crafted the first modern tourist love stories—and later American authors would follow his cues in crafting their own love stories abroad.
Hanging Fire, or A New Ontology for Poynton
Authors: Goldberg Shari
Published: February 2016

This essay discovers the etymological history of James’s frequently used phrase, “hanging fire.” James employed the phrase idiosyncratically, such that he consistently, if implicitly, compares characters to malfunctioning firearms. I follow the consequences of such unorthodox characterization in The Spoils of Poynton . If when Fleda “hangs fire” she becomes a gun, then the novel’s apparent ontological division between persons and things no longer holds. Instead, Poynton introduces persons who are sometimes things. The figural world of the novel echoes this unconventional ontology, proposing amalgamations of bodies and houses that open up new referents for James’s characters.
mak 5 kԑ 4 乜个 and man 3 ɲin 2 瞞人 in Hakka: A historical and typological perspective
Authors: Lien Chinfa
Published: February 2016

In this paper I will first explore the issues centering around the evolution of the interrogative word 物 as a common source into its modern descendants mak 7 and other forms in Hakka. In contrast to the more uniform form in Southern Min, varieties of Hakka boast more variants such as mak 7 , maʔ 7 and man 3 . Such a variation can be accounted for in terms of minor regional difference as well as types of phonological process. The retention of the bilabial nasal initial of the word 物 as a reflex of the Middle Chinese 微 phonological category in Hakka lends support to the thesis of lexical diffusion that sound change is not phonologically independent but rather bears the result of interaction with lexicon. Second, on the basis of earlier Hakka texts I will examine the patterns in the distribution of the modern reflex of 物 often written as a demotic word 乜 in its capacity of a variable as a component of the complex interrogative words ‘what’, ‘who’ (=what person) and ‘why’ (=do what kind) or universal quantifiers in Hakka. The finding of the patterns of the Hakka interrogative word will be brought to bear on the patterns of its precursor in Early Modern Chinese colloquial texts. Close attention will be paid to the interaction of inherent lexical properties of the interrogative word and the grammatical constructions in which it occurs. Last of all, an attempt is made to survey the distribution and evolution of the Hakka-related 物-based interrogative word in other dialectal areas.
Grammatical diversity across the Yue dialects
Authors: Kwok Bit-Chee , Chin Andy C. , Tsou Benjamin K.
Published: February 2016

There is a general belief that Yue constitutes a highly uniform dialect group, with its members sharing a good number of structures and lexica with the regional prestige dialect, Cantonese. Based on our first hand data collected from the field, this paper * describes the lesser known grammatical diversity across the Yue dialects, which can be illustrated by the different uses of the following features: (a) ideophonic suffixes; (b) diminutive suffixes and tone sandhi; (c) perfective aspect markers and their position in the VP, and (d) neutral question forms. The survey includes nine dialects from different subgroups, most of which are spoken far away from the Pearl River Delta where Cantonese dominates. Our study reveals that while Cantonese has obvious influence over other members of Yue, the grammatical diversity across Yue cannot simply be overlooked.
A study of the relation between personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns in Chinese dialects
Authors: Wang Hua-yun
Published: February 2016

In Chinese some personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns share the same origins because of the conceptual cognitive mappings existing between the personal domain and demonstrative pronoun domain. The traces of such origins can also be found in the Chinese dialects which can be divided into three main categories. There exists a systematic correspondence between first person concept and proximal deixis concept, and between second person concept and distal deixis concept in Mandarin and southeast dialects. Therefore, the second personal pronoun er evolves into na , and the vacancy of the third personal pronoun can only be filled in with other pronouns which have nothing to do with proximal or distal demonstrative pronouns. Because of the mental distance of the referent of the third person concept and the historically later appearance of K series of distal demonstrative pronouns in the southeast dialects, the pronouns of the “other demonstrative” type ta and qi of specific reference similar in sound to the N series and the K series evolve into the third personal pronouns in the two categories of dialects. The concept of the third personal pronoun in northwest dialects corresponds to that of proximal deixis and distal deixis, and because its referent is mentally far, the distal demonstrative pronoun wu/na is used for the third personal pronoun as well. Such mechanism comes from Altaic languages. Probably similar is the evolution mechanism of the proximal demonstrative pronoun yi for the third personal pronoun.
Subjects, objects and relativization in Japhug
Authors: Jacques Guillaume
Published: February 2016

Japhug is a language with ergative alignment on NP arguments and direct-inverse verbal indexation. However, this paper, through a detailed description of relativizing constructions in Japhug, shows the existence of accusative pivots and proposes an unambiguous definition of ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ in this language.
Topic and left periphery in Shanghainese
Authors: Weifeng Han , Dingxu Shi
Published: February 2016

This paper aims to present a novel picture of the left periphery in Shanghainese with special reference to the position of topic. We find that, contrary to “major-vs.-sub-vs.-sub-sub-topic” distinction, all TopPs in Shanghainese land outside IP. The only landing site for pre-posed adverbs is Spec-TopP (rather than an independent Mod(ifier)P). Int(errogative)P is always generated lower than TopP. The difference between NP topics and AdvP topics lies in that the former can be headed by both spelt (with lexical topic marker) and silent (with comma intonation) heads, while the latter can only land in the Spec position of a spelt head. We also prove that there is a lower FocP within IP in Shanghainese. The FocP in CP and that in IP, however, allows of no co-occurrence. Finally, the left periphery in Shanghainese is described as: (Foc) Top (Foc) Int (Foc) … We find that up to three topics may be allowed in this dedicated position in Shanghainese.
Lexical diffusion in sound change in the dialect of an immigrant community in Dongfeng Village of Linyi City: A preliminary exploration
Authors: Zhu Junling
Published: February 2016

Dongfeng Village of Linyi City in Shandong Province, PRC, is an immigrant village formed in the 1960s as part of community relocation from Mengyin County of Shandong Province due to the building of a reservoir. This paper first provides a comprehensive description of the sound changes in the Dongfeng dialect, and has identified nine major differences between the Dongfeng dialect and the surrounding local dialect in syllable initials, finals and tones. Drawing on the theory of lexical diffusion, it then explores the pattern of spreading of sound changes from the perspectives of word frequency, competing changes and residues. As a tentative conclusion, it is posited that the sound changes in Dongfeng village over a span of 40 years are the results of the competition of the dual influence from the local dialect and Mandarin. Lexical diffusion of the various types of sound changes is not only related to word frequency, but is also sensitive to word class. The word frequency effects are significant only within word classes.
The Foreign Intercourse Bill of 1798 and the Debate over Early American Foreign Relations
Authors: Smith Robert W.
Published: February 2016

Between January and March of 1798 the House of Representatives debated the foreign intercourse bill, which would fund the diplomatic corps for the next two years. This was a generally a routine function, but it soon became a wide-ranging debate over the basis nature of American diplomacy, and of the American republic itself. The debate revealed something important about the politics of the 1790s. Given that republics were inherently fragile, even seemingly small matters might destroy the American republic. Both Republicans and Federalists proceeded from this assumption. The debate fell into three broad categories. First was the question of who should be appointed. The Republicans accused President Adams of using additional diplomatic appointments as a vehicle to create a patronage machine that would corrupt Congress. The Federalists that countered that amount of patronage available was insignificant, and that that the president was justified in excluding Republicans from office. Second was the question of who should control the appointments. This led back to the control of American foreign policy. The Republicans argued for congressional control through the appropriation and war powers. The Federalists contended for presidential control through the treaty and appointment powers. Third was the question of whether diplomats should be appointed at all. The Republicans believed that trade would allow the United States to secure its diplomatic goals without recourse to the normal institutions of diplomacy. The Republicans considered the United States as existing outside the European balance of power. The Federalists saw no choice but to play by the generally established rules, and thus must appoint diplomats.
Beckert Is Liverpool, Baptist Is New Orleans: Geography Returns to the History of Capitalism
Authors: Rood Dan
Published: February 2016

Empire of Cotton: A Global History. By Sven Beckert. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. By Edward E. Baptist.
STEM in the EAR
Authors: Johnson Ann
Published: February 2016

Situate science and STEM in the early republic, doing so can be challenging. What our historical subjects meant by words like “science” and “medicine” can be profoundly different from their use in the twenty-first century. Several phenomena of the early republic engage science in important and interesting ways, and overlooking science results in a skewed account. Ubiquity, as much as its poor resemblance to post-WWII science, helps account for both its invisibility and importance in the historiography of early America. A renewed attention to the roles of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in the early republic will enrich the classic questions of the period, offering new insights about political formation and commercial development. A key consideration is not to ask “what was science?” but rather to ask “what counted as science?” Why did a particular activity or body of knowledge count as science, and what was at stake in making a claim of being scientific?
The Long Life of William Blanding: Doctor, Apothecary, Naturalist
Authors: Fabian Ann
Published: February 2016

William Blanding, physician and naturalist, was born in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, in 1773. He graduated from Rhode Island College (Brown University), studied with a Massachusetts doctor and moved to Camden, South Carolina, where he spent the next several decades, treating patients and running an apothecary shop. In the 1830s, he retired to Philadelphia and then finally returned to Massachusetts to die in 1857 on the farm where he’d been born. This essay, based on the 2015 SHEAR presidential address, uses Blanding’s correspondence to explore connections between the everyday concerns of this man and his family and the larger economic, political, and cultural issues that shape the history of the Early American Republic. It explores Blanding’s place in a network of amateur American naturalists, looks at the importance of his wife’s benevolent networks, traces his ties to the slave-based economy of South Carolina and to former slaves settled in Liberia, and, using the Cistuda blandingii (“Blanding’s turtle”) that bears his name, teases out histories behind the specimens Blanding collected and donated to Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences.
The Point of Perfection: Cattle Portraiture, Bloodlines, and the Meaning of Breeding, 1760-1860
Authors: Pawley Emily
Published: February 2016

Portraits of famous cattle, sheep and horses crowded the agricultural journals on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. More than simple representations, these images were intended to shape the animals they showed-establishing standards of taste that would allow breeders to create “thrifty” meat-producing bodies, while advertising the bloodlines of already thrifty animals. In doing so, they became central to the expansion of a new form of domestic animal: the “improved breed.” In the early eighteenth century, “breeds” had been understood to emerge from particular kinds of places. Emerging in the mid-eighteenth “improved breeds” came to be defined by rules of ‘blood’ and kinship. Improved cattle were novel bodies; they grew to enormous sizes, came in new shapes and colors, and dominated the new agricultural fairs. Their blood relationships, the source of their value, were recorded not only in internationally circulated record books, but also in a linked and elaborate tradition of portraiture. This article shows how the transatlantic circulation of cattle portraits shaped both the changing definition of breed and the bodies of the animals defined. As cattle were bred to match new forms of taste, made concrete by prices in the market, portraits and cattle became more uniform. At the same time, the paper argues, ideas about the meaning of these changes diverged and fragmented. Recorded over generations by portraits, changing cattle bodies lent themselves to radically different ideas about nature, and about human and divine capacity to shape living bodies.
Science in Early America: Print Culture and the Sciences of Territoriality
Authors: Valencius Conevery Bolton , Spanagel David I. , Pawley Emily , Gronim Sara Stidstone , Lucier Paul
Published: February 2016

This collaboration promotes a broad reconsideration of science in the early American republic. We argue that scientific activity permeated early American society, but appeared in different forms and in different places than most historical literature has identified. Mathematical tables and astronomical charts in almanacs, snippets on chemistry and climate in agricultural journals, illustrations of mineral resources in geological maps, accessibly-written resource analysis in consulting reports, and articles in local newspapers arguing about causes of phenomena from the mundane to the surprising: all express a pervasive commitment to scientific ideas, questions, and investigation. These diverse genres of print, moreover, evidence a society that strongly valued studies of the natural world for their connections with important contemporary human endeavors. In the early republic scientific questions were deeply interwoven with commerce, with territorial claims, and with moral order: Early Americans mapped the world conceptually in order to claim it for some people and not for others. We identify a constellation of interests that we call the ‘‘sciences of territoriality’’ centered on the description and appropriation of natural resources. Our investigation of print culture both emphasizes an often-ignored facet of the early American republic-that scientific thinking was as ubiquitous and as taken for granted as religion or politics-and reveals particular, often unrecognized, characteristics of science in the early United States. The commercial and moral forces underlying the ‘‘sciences of territoriality,’’ combined with widespread literacy and an active broad-based print culture, deeply shaped early epistemological hierarchies in the United States.
Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers as Board Book: From the Matter of Materiality to the Way That Materiality Matters
Authors: Abate Michelle Ann
Published: February 2016

This essay explores what happens when we foreground the materiality of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers , examining it first as a board book and second as a graphic memoir, a work of historical non-fiction, or a therapeutic piece of trauma writing. Michelle Ann Abate argues that the thick card stock on which the text is printed forms a key readerly access point as well as a thematic pivot point. Heeding the cue provided by the format of the board book moves children and childhood from the margins to the centre of the narrative. This new perspective reveals that, together with offering a critique about the politicization of 9/11, No Towers contains an illuminating analysis about the politicization of young people in the United States.
Gregor the Overlander and A Wrinkle in Time : Father Lost, Father Found
Authors: Lavoie Chantel
Published: February 2016

This paper argues that Suzanne Collins’s book Gregor the Overlander rewrites Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time , including the significant character of the father who has been missing from his child’s life for two years for the sake of science. The effect of this rewriting is in effect a secularizing and updating of L’Engle’s classic for children. Because L’Engle’s book is a Christian text whereas Collins’s is not, the former is more interested in myth, the latter in history, and both in considering warfare (as each father character is a prisoner of war) and in writing about science itself.
Representations of Happiness in Comedic Young Adult Fiction: Happy Are the Wretched
Authors: Wayland Nerida
Published: February 2016

Critical scholarship on happiness provides a way to read comedic young adult fiction that foregrounds and investigates representations of happiness. This paper draws on the work of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant in order to explore the ways in which comedy interrogates social constructions of happiness that serve to exclude or to constrain young people who are portrayed as outsiders. The result is a narrative representation of individual subjectivity and of society that examines the promise of happiness and the fantasy of normative happiness scripts. In Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Alyssa Brugman’s Alex as Well , comedy functions to encourage a re-evaluation of happiness and to question its appeal.
2013 Arthur O. Lovejoy Lecture: A Cognitive History of Divination in Ancient Greece
Authors: Struck Peter T.
Published: February 2016

Ancient Greeks drew advice from oracles, dreams, entrails, the movements of birds, sneezes, and myriad other sources for divination. Classicists typically study such phenomena as examples of occult religion, or for their use as a social mechanism for managing dissent and forging consensus. Ancient philosophical accounts by contrast go a longer way toward considering them seriously, on their own terms. They take them as an invitation into developing speculative accounts of non-standard epistemological schemes. Plato is examined as a case study of a more general Greek philosophical tendency to treat divination as something akin to what we might call intuition.
On Context and Meaning in Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion , and on Gibbon’s “Protestantism” in His Chapters on Religion
Authors: Rosenblatt Helena
Published: February 2016

Rosenblatt questions whether Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion , though enormously learned and rich, in fact accomplishes Pocock’s stated aims. In other words, does the context presented help to explain the intended meaning and significance of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall ? She asks whether Pocock’s methodology, indebted to the Cambridge School, is consistent and serviceable and challenges his claim that Gibbon should be seen as a member of the “Protestant Enlightenment.”