bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Electroconvulsive Therapy
Authors: Abrams Richard
Published: October 2023

In this fully-revised fourth edition of what has long been the standard textbook for the field, Dr. Richard Abrams once again demonstrates his unique ability to analyze and present a wealth of new(and often technical) material in a lucid, compelling, and highly readable fashion. Hundreds of new clinical studies called from the more than 1500 published since the third edition appeared have been analyzed in depth and incorporated throughout the book. An important new chapter has been added on Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation(TMS) therapy, a treatment for depression that is widely-used in Europe and expected to become available soon for clinical use in the United States. Dr. Abrams exposes the scientific flaws in several widely-cited reports, while focusing on the few carefully-controlled studies that provide solid support for the results claimed. The sections on the electrical stimulus, seizing introduction, seizure quality, and treatment electrode placement have been completely revised and updated with new information on those clinical and technical issues that are presently of greatest concern to practitioners and researchers. A comprehensive critical assessment of the nature of the seizure threshold and the validity of the stimulus titration method for ECT dosing is presented for the first time, with conclusions and recommendations that many will find surprising. The continued controversy over the relative efficacies of unilateral and bitemporal ECT is revisited in light of the latest dosing strategies and treatment outcomes reported, and of the latest results obtained with bifrontal ECT. The potential clinical and theoretical advantages of the recently-rediscovered technique of ultrabrief pulse therapy are explained in detail. The chapter on the memory and cognitive consequences of ECT has been expanded to focus on the subjective memory effects of treatment, with new analysis of the possible biological basis for the improvement in subjective memory so often reported. Recently-published claims of persistent or permanent memory effects of ECT are refuted in detail. In full accordance with the American Psychiatric Association’s new guidelines for the practice of ECT, Dr. Abrams’ book remains the essential practical guide and reference work for all those who prescribe, perform, or assist with ECT, or are interested in learning more about the subject.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Therapy (TMS)
Authors: Abrams Richard
Published: October 2023

There is no such thing as magnetic stimulation therapy. The magnetic fields applied to the scalp in both nonconvulsive and convulsive magnetic methods induce electrical current to flow in the brain, and it is that current that has therapeutic properties; viewed in this way, there is no inherent difference between electrical and magnetic brain stimulation methods in psychiatry. Indeed, attempts to induce seizures in monkeys via magnetic fields were only successful when the intracerebral peak voltage levels induced matched those recorded during the conventional application of electric current for ECS (Lisanby et al., 2001a).

There are important practical differences between the methods, however, the most striking of which is that the skull, which deflects at least 90% of applied electrical current, is entirely transparent to magnetic fields. Thus, any “blurring” effects that might be attributable to skull impedance during electrical stimulation simply do not occur with magnetic fields, allowing for far more accurate focusing on the desired site of cortical stimulation with magnetic, as compared with electrical, methods.
Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown
Authors: Brown Henry Box , Newman Richard , Gates Henry Louis
Published: October 2023

I was born about forty-five miles from the city of Richmond, in Louisa County, in the year 1815. I entered the world a slave— in the midst of a country whose most honoured writings declare that all men have a right to liberty— but had imprinted upon my body no mark which could be made to signify that my destiny was to be that of a bondman. Neither was there any angel stood by, at the hour of my birth, to hand my body over, by the authority of heaven, to be the property of a fellow-man; no, but I was a slave because my countrymen had made it lawful, in utter contempt of the declared will of heaven, for the strong to lay hold of the weak and to buy and to sell them as marketable goods. Thus was I born a slave; tyrants— remorseless, destitute of religion and every principle of humanity— stood by the couch of my mother and as I entered into the world.
Introduction: Why Dissent Matters to Literature
Authors: Sabin Margery
Published: October 2023

I start with some explanation for what may appear an idiosyncratic selection of texts for analysis. This book is clearly not proposing a roll call of heroic dissenters in the history of British colonialism in India. As Edward Said and others have persuasively demonstrated, opposition to British rule in India (or elsewhere in the emerging empire) scarcely existed in England during the two centuries of British power.1 There is no heroic textual tradition of anticolonial dissent.
Privatizing Probation and Parole
Authors: Reynolds Morgan
Published: October 2023

At the end of 1998, 3.4 million people in the United States were on probation and 705,000 were on parole.1 That’s one in fifty adult U.S. residents “under the supervision of the criminal justice system” yet free on the streets. A majority (57 percent) of those convicted and released to straight probation (nonincarceration) were convicted of a felony crime (crimes punishable by one year or more in prison), 40 percent were guilty of misdemeanors, and the remaining 3 percent were guilty of other infractions. With regard to parole, over four in five prisoners are released short of serving their full sentences in favor of some form of “community supervision.” Currently, a large public bureaucracy of probation and parole officers (there are 50,000 probation officers alone, many of them members of the American Probation and Parole Association [APPA]) is responsible for supervising these 4.1 million offenders.
Improving Bankruptcy Procedure
Authors: Aghion Philippe , Hart Oliver , Moore John
Published: October 2023

There is a widespread dissatisfaction with bankruptcy procedures throughout the world. Bankruptcy reform is being actively considered in the United Kingdom and France and is in the air in the United States. East European countries that must select a bankruptcy law for their new capitalistic economies have had a hard time making the choice and, in some cases, dissatisfied with their original decisions, they are already making changes. Russia has recently implemented a bankruptcy law that seems complex and apparently suffers from many of the disadvantages of Western procedures.
Three Conceptions of Nonarbitrariness
Authors: Richardson Henry S
Published: October 2023

The ideal of freedom, as I have explained, gives rise to two powerful arguments against the arbitrary use of power, placing government under a burden of legitimation. Meeting this burden requires that government actions be based on reasons. In conjunction with the elemental ideal of treating persons with equal concern and respect, this basic rationality requirement in turn gives rise to a basic case for democracy. In addition, compatibly, the republican ideal of freedom from domination further demands that the government not have the capacity to exercise power arbitrarily. In light of these arguments, how should we understand the idea of non-arbitrariness? The basic case suggests a minimal interpretation. The use of government power-in particular power that purports to put citizens under duties-must be nonarbitrary at least in the sense that it rests on reasons. The republican ideal clearly demands more than this. Slaveholders and tyrants often have their reasons for what they do, after all. How, then, should we understand the kind of nonarbitrariness to which the basic case and the ideal of domination commit us? How we assess the threat of bureaucratic domination will hinge on our answer to this question. In this chapter, I will consider three ways of interpreting the republican demand for nonarbitrariness: an objectivist way, a welfarist way, and a liberal way. (The welfarist version itself has three variants that are important to discuss as they introduce themes that I will pursue throughout.) Although these three main variants do not exhaust the conceptual possibilities, they are influential interpretations that seem compatible with other democratic themes. I shall argue for the superiority of the liberal interpretation, concluding that liberalism should enter into the ideal of democracy at this point. Liberal ideas are needed to help give an appropriate rendering of the idea of nonarbitrary power. A liberal conception of democratic politics as a set of procedures that respects the freedom and equality of citizens is a necessary support, I shall claim, to an adequate understanding of nonarbitrary power.
Conclusion
Authors: Richardson Henry S
Published: October 2023

Democracy is a demanding ideal. If all of its demands are met in some jurisdiction, then its citizens will rule themselves by reasoning together about what to do. Then, too, bureaucracies will not dominate the citizens but rather will play an indispensable part in their figuring out what they ought to do. I have woven together the four strands of the democratic ideal-liberalism, republicanism, rationalism, and populism-into a conception of democracy as democratic autonomy. I have elaborated a conception of democratic reasoning both for its own sake, to help us understand what it is to reason together democratically, and also for the sake of addressing the problem of bureaucratic domination. In the end, the two problems converge. Only if all four of the component ideals of democracy are adequately and harmoniously realized can we decide what to do by reasoning together democratically; and only if all four ideals are adequately and harmoniously realized can bureaucratic domination be prevented. Whether these four aspects of democracy are anywhere adequately and harmoniously realized is an open question. I know of no jurisdiction that could serve as an obvious paradigm. Thus it is that although the ideal of democracy has triumphed in the world, the reality lags behind. Yet the four-part ideal of democracy as democratic autonomy is eminently realizable. To remind you of the reasons why all four aspects are necessary to democratic reasoning and to preventing bureaucratic domination, and to assess the distance that most existing regimes have yet to travel, I will briefly review each strand in turn.
The American Temptation
Authors: Hirsh Michael
Published: October 2023

Shortly After September 11, General Richard Myers was asked at a congressional hearing why the mightiest military in history had failed to protect the heart of American power from a band of men brandishing box cutters. Why hadn’t he “scrambled:’ or launched, fighter planes? In those early, shell-shocked days, before the spin set in, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs had no ready reply but the unvarnished truth. “We’re pretty good if the threat is coming from outside:’ Myers said. “We’re not so good if it’s coming in from inside:’ The fact that at this late date, in the age of globalization and a borderless world, many Americans still believe threats are divisible into those that are “outside” and those that are “inside” says a lot about the American sensibility. The historian John Lewis Gaddis points out that few other nations have had to worry so little about “homeland security” for as long as the United States. After all, before September 11 the country had not suffered a foreign attack on continental soil since the War of 1812. Other nations, such as Britain, have long accommodated themselves to domestic surveillance with agencies like Ml5, because of the infiltration of terrorists. America is just getting started on this very troubling road.
When Ideas Bite Back
Authors: Hirsh Michael
Published: October 2023

If Americans Know one thing for certain, it is that their values are right not just for them, but for the world. This is a bedrock belief that unites left and right, the Wilsonian internationalists of the Clinton administration and the powerful neoconservatives of the Bush administration. It is a sense that they can make the world a better and safer place by asserting America’s power and spreading cardinal American values such as democracy and free markets, if only the world would stand back and let them do it. This chapter is about why this practice is likely to fail in the future-ironically enough, because it has succeeded so well in the past. It is about why we Americans must depend on the institutions of the international system we built, such as the UN and WTO, to do the main work of continuing to promote these values, even though this rubs against our national grain. The alternative is that we will find ourselves caught up in endless self-contradiction and accusations of hypocrisy-at war with our own ideas.
Breakthrough, 1920–1940
Authors: Dowbiggin Ian
Published: October 2023

By the 1920s, euthanasia was no longer a secret in America. The popular and medical press had run stories on mercy killing, the first signs of a debate that would mark much of American life for the rest of the century. A motion picture, titled The Black Stork, about withholding surgery from a deformed newborn, had been released and was being shown commercially throughout the country. Clarence Darrow ,Jack London, Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, and the editorial board of the New Republic had spoken out in favor of euthanasia.

Popular attitudes toward euthanasia also showed signs of movement. Most Americans in the interwar period agreed that there was something morally wrong about euthanasia as official policy, but that majority was growing slimmer as time went on. By 1939 roughly 40 percent of all Americans polled said they supported legalizing government-supervised mercy killing of the terminally ill. The times looked ripe for someone to exploit these shifts in popular sentiments.
Cohesion by Exclusion, Redux from Above
Authors: Marx Anthony W .
Published: October 2023

Fanatical exclusion was not the only course open to or attempted by nation and state builders. In the aftermath of earlier exclusions and some achieved popular coherence, Spain, France, and England to varying degrees had all turned to an inclusive approach to state-building. Earlier fanaticism was put in abeyance to restore order within which central state authority could be built further toward absolutism. Imperatives from above eclipsed and held in check the passions, at least for a time. But the circumstances of popular exhaustion and elite pragmatism allowing for these inclusive efforts at state-building passed. Consolidation of institutional power and of popular allegiance remained incomplete, confronted anew by challengers and factions, themselves enflamed by both tolerance and greater central state power. To shore up authority and cohesion and to dampen potential discord, elites reengaged in the project of national consolidation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the more conventional focus of analysis of such efforts. But this reengagement revived the pattern of using exclusion to bolster unity that had proven effective a century or more earlier. Thus, nationand state-building in the eighteenth century was neither as inclusive as much analysis has suggested nor explicable without reference to the earlier experiences as foundational.
Civil Rights Struggle and the Rise of Affirmative Action
Authors: Anderson Terry H
Published: October 2023

While training in the north Georgia hills Powell wanted to attend church services on Sundays. A simple request, but in order to do that he had to be driven to an African American church some miles away. The army summoned a white corporal to drive the black lieutenant to the closest Baptist church. On one Sunday, the corporal informed Powell that he also would like to attend services. Powell asked the preacher, but the kindly old minister said that he feared the reaction of local white folks. The “reality I wanted to ignore, was forcing its way into my life,” wrote Powell, “the lunatic code that made it wrong for two men to sit together in a house of God, or share a meal in a restaurant, or use the same bathroom.” “Racism was not just a black problem,” Powell continued. “It was America’s problem.” During the 1950s southern states continued to restrict black voting rights by gimmicks and various tests, so by 1958 only 9 percent of Alabama blacks were registered to vote; only 4 percent in Mississippi.
Demise of Affirmative Action in the Age of Diversity
Authors: Anderson Terry H
Published: October 2023

“The Man from Hope,” declared one of Bill Clinton’s campaign slogans. Hope, Arkansas, was his birthplace, where his mother raised him, where he went to high school, and where he left for George-town University, then Oxford, and eventually Yale Law School. He returned to Arkansas with his wife, Hillary, and enough drive to be elected governor at age 33. Six years later he was stunned by Ronald Reagan’s overwhelming reelection in 1984, and along with other moderate Democrats, such as Sam Nunn of Georgia and Al Gore Jr. of Tennessee, he began to think that his party would be doomed to more defeats unless it changed its focus from the left to the middle and made a strenuous effort to woo white voters back to the party. A year later Clinton was one of the founders of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of centrists, and the DLC began advocating welfare reform, a tougher stance on crime, smaller government, a middle-class tax cut, and a strong defense. Clinton embraced those themes in 1991 when he declared his nomination and presented himself during the campaign as a “New Democrat.” He was an energetic campaigner, a smooth speaker, and he fought off challenges from Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, former Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas, and former California Governor Jerry Brown. The South’s primary, “Super Tuesday,” in March 1992 catapulted Clinton into the lead. He won his party’s nomination easily, picked Al Gore as his running mate, and began his march to the White House.
conclusions: The Pursuit of Fairness
Authors: Anderson Terry H
Published: October 2023

At the beginning of our involvement in World War II, just a year after A. Philip Randolph threatened his march on Washington, Mark Ethridge, the liberal publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal commented at a Fair Employment Practices Commission hearing,”No white Southerner can logically challenge the statement that the Negro is entitled, as an American citizen, to full civil rights and to economic opportunity.” But, he continued, Northerners “must recognize that there is no power in the world—not even in all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis—which could now force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social segregation.”In 1942 that outlook was considered realistic, and segregation was considered fair. A poll taken two years later asked, “Do you think Negroes should have as good a chance as white people to get any kind of job, or do you think white people should have the first chance at any kind of job?” Only 44 percent thought that blacks should have equal opportunity.
Obtaining the Necessary Information
Authors: Donabedian Avedis
Published: October 2023

Two observations I wish to make at the outset. First, information is the life-blood of quality assessment (as it is of practice also). Without it nothing can be done. If the information is incomplete invalid, or intentionally distorted, a false picture of quality inevitably results. Second, as I have already remarked, there is a reciprocal relation between criteria-standards and the information one needs and seeks. The criteria and standards one formulates are contingent on what information is available concerning the degree of adherence to them. But it is also hoped that if the criteria and standards are put into effect, the needed information will be forthcoming.
Introduction: A Dream Country
Authors: Cullen Jim
Published: October 2023

That title Won’t Work, James Truslow Adams was told. No one will pay three dollars for a book about a dream. Adams, author of a series of popular books on American history think of him as the David McCullough or Ken Burns of the 1930was seeking to broaden his literary horizons. A man with elite bloodlines dating back to the seventeenth century, when one of his ancestors came to Virginia as an indentured servant and ended up in the landowning class, Adams, born in 1878, had nevertheless grown up under relatively modest circumstances. (His father was an unsuccessful Wall Street broker.) After graduating from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1898 and earning a master’s degree in philosophy at Yale 1900, he went to work on Wall Street himself, making enough money to devote himself to writing.
Dream of The Good Life (II): Upward Mobility
Authors: Cullen Jim
Published: October 2023

The Declaration of Independence may be the charter of the American Dream, but between that abstract document and current reality are countless variations on the pursuit of happiness: e unum, pluribus. Yet it is also true that among all the possibilities, as variegated as any American who has ever lived, are basic classes of dreams that rest on concepts whose meaning both transcends a particular context and gets defined by that context. The Puritans dreamt of freedom; so did African Americans.
King Of America: The Dream of Equality
Authors: Cullen Jim
Published: October 2023

Homer plessy was not a slave. Born in New Orleans on March 17, 1862—six months to the day before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation—the was the son of Creole parents. Although Plessy and his entire family were light-skinned and “passed” as white, his great-grandmother was of African descent. This meant, according to Louisiana law, that he was legally black. Unlike many African Americans—or “negroes,” as they were called in polite circles at the time—Plessy, who grew up to become a shoemaker, had been a free man his entire life. Nobody owned him; nobody could buy or sell him. He could say what he pleased, go where he wanted. He enjoyed a series of constitutionally protected rights as a United States citizen.

Of course, as a negro, there were certain, shall we say, considerations. Nobody owned him, but if he was ever unfortunate enough to go to jail (something statistically more likely for him than for a white man), he might end up on a chain gang performing forced labor. He could say what he pleased, but as surely he understood, some things (particularly those critical of the state of race relations) could only be said at his own risk. He could go where he wanted, assuming he had the means (and obeyed the prevailing rules, like sticking among his own kind).
Detached Houses: The Dream of Home Ownership
Authors: Cullen Jim
Published: October 2023

In 1969, My present, sister, and I moved from our row house apartment in the Jackson Heights section of Queens, New York, to a first-floor rental in a two-family house on Long Island. The reason was the racial desegregation of our neighborhood public schools. The civil rights movement, whose first stirrings had focused on southern school systems in the 1950s, had spread the country and was increasingly coming closer to home. This was apparent in the racial violence that now engulfed cities like Newark no less than Birmingham. Perhaps even more frightening than spectacular eruptions like the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King were more lasting structural changes in everyday life. The previous year, a political struggle over school integration erupted in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Ocean Hill–Brownsville, and in the ensuing arguments, which resulted in a state takeover of the schools, even former allies—the teachers’ union, black activists, Jewish residents—found themselves bitterly divided.
Dream of The Good Life (III): The Coast
Authors: Cullen Jim
Published: October 2023

The American Dream was never meant to be a zero-sum solution: the goal has always been to end up with more than you started with. Even the Puritans, whose dream in its purest formulation was about as selfless as any in American history, and who were as skeptical of human will as any people in the Western world of the last five hundred years, nevertheless acted from this premise. There’s really no other way to understand their migration except as motivated by a belief that it could procure some gain, if not for themselves in providing a reassuring sense of purpose, then at least for the good of their children and community, who might yet be saved even if they themselves were not. Other believers then and since were not nearly as circumspect about their errands in the wilderness, acting with confidence that they could secure their futures in the next world through good works in this one. In all these cases, however, this was the Dream of the Good Life as a spiritual affair.
The Balkans as Borderland and Melting Pot
Authors: Wachtel Andrew Baruch
Published: October 2023

In the historical and literary imagination, the Balkans loom large as a frightening but ill-defined space. Most attempts at classification focus on geography (the Balkan Mountains give the area its conventional name) or, from the mid-nineteenth century, on the set of prejudices attached to the term by local and outside observers. Historians have generally been less concerned with defining this region in positive terms and taking as a starting point the cultural, historical, and social threads that make it a coherent, complex whole.
The Medieval Balkans
Authors: Wachtel Andrew Baruch
Published: October 2023

From the sixth century until the beginning of the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the latter half of the fourteenth century, the final “permanent residents” of the Balkan Peninsula migrated to the region. These were the Slavs—most important because eventually most numerous—but also the Turks (first Bulgars, a small warrior elite that led a group of Slavs into the Balkans in the sixth century, and then Ottomans) in the south and east, Magyars (Hungarians) in the north, and finally the Roma (Gypsies), who would eventually spread over the entire peninsula. These peoples joined those already present in the region—the Greeks, the Illyrians (likely ancestors of the Albanians), and the Romanized Dacians (ancestors of the Romanians and, probably, the Vlachs). Although there would be a great deal of mixing among these peoples over the centuries as well as many conflicts between them, the ancestors of all the modern Balkan nations were thus present by the end of the medieval period.
Introduction
Authors: Williams Rhonda Y
Published: October 2023

In the early 1960s Rosetta was around thirty and raising one boy and two girls. She had left the father of her children for a fresh start. A black woman, worked as a cook, making $25 a week and pay-ing weekly rent of $18.50, leaving her little to buy food and necessities. She rented a cramped, two-bedroom apartment in a row house in west Baltimore. In an interview, she recalled the nice cabinets, the hardwood the back porch, and the bay windows.
Shifting Landscapes in Post war Baltimore
Authors: Williams Rhonda Y
Published: October 2023

Poe Homes’ pioneer resident, Clara Gordon, had made a fairly comfortable home in public housing. But within a few years, that began to change. The happy times of courtship, marital bliss, and homemaking had waned. Her husband wanted to be boss in the household and was a philanderer in the streets.”I tell the truth,” Gordon stated.”A spade is a spade is a spade.” Furthermore, claimed Gordon, her husband did not possess the zeal for or faith in education that she did. And this was no small point. Gordon believed that through education “you could move.
Beating The Blues
Authors: Thase Michael E , Lang Susan S
Published: October 2023

This is a clear, practical resource for the millions of people plagued by persistent mild depression. One of the most underrecognized and undertreated mood disorders, dysthymia can be treated through self-help measures, psychotherapy, medication, or a combination of all three. This book is designed to offer general information on dysthymia and outline specific measures individuals can take in order to reclaim a positive outlook on life. Practical advice and thorough research will make this the ultimate guide for those who might otherwise have resigned themselves to a lifetime of apathy, lethargy, and pessimism.
Exercise and Nutrition
Authors: Thase Michael E , Lang Susan S
Published: October 2023

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. —Sir Richard Steele There is little doubt that certain lifestyle changes can go a long way to promote good mental health. The effects of exercise in particular are well researched (probably because it’s easier to study than nutrition), and a growing body of evidence confirms the powerful influence of exercise on buoying mood and helping dysthymia and mild depression. Exercise: Good for Your Body and Good for Your Mind For dysthymia and other forms of mild and moderate depression, several studies have found that exercise is as powerful an antidepressant as psychotherapy or medication. Moderate, regular exercise can significantly lift mood and selfesteem, and improve sleep patterns, one’s sense of mastery, and the ability to cope with stress. In fact, exercise seems to significantly influence almost all the symptoms of dysthymia.
Dysthymia in Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults
Authors: Thase Michael E , Lang Susan S
Published: October 2023

Dysthymia afflicts children, too. In fact, the vast majority of adults— some 75 percent—with dysthymia report that their mood difficulties began while they were children or teenagers. Diagnosing dysthymia early is important, not only to improve a child’s quality of life but also to prevent problems later in life. Depressed kids may be irritable and act out, or they become passive and withdraw. They stop trying hard and do poorly in school, don’t connect much with other kids, are moody and contrary, and later become promiscuous, rebellious or turn to ways to self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. And, as in adulthood, suicidal behavior can be a consequence of feeling stuck in a hopeless existence. Although it is normal for adolescents to be moody, it is the broader, all-encompassing, and persistent changes in mood and behavior that distinguish dysthymia from normal moodiness.
Gender and Dysthymia
Authors: Thase Michael E , Lang Susan S
Published: October 2023

Why Women Have a High Rate of Dysthymia The fact that women have twice the rate of depression as men is a worldwide phenomenon. Some 9 percent of American women at any particular time suffer from some form of depression compared with less than half that of men. In fact, in at least one study, up to half the women surveyed said they’d had some kind of depression at some time in their lives. Studies suggest a range of potential reasons for the gender differences, from women’s cyclical hormonal changes and their ruminative style of thinking to their greater use of emotion-focused ways of coping, to their many psychosocial disadvantages compared with men. Whether genes account for the gender difference in depression is still not known.
Introduction Rethinking Suffrage
Authors: Nym Mayhall Laura E
Published: October 2023

On 25June 1909, Marion Wallace Dunlop, member of the British militant suffrage organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), stenciled the following words from the Bill of Rights (1689) on a wall in the outer precincts of the House of Commons: “It is the right of the subject to petition the King, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.”‘ Wallace Dunlop was arrested and incarcerated, whereupon she refused to eat in protest against the court’s adjudication of her actions as having criminal rather than political motivations. Her hunger strike, in fact, is the reason Wallace Dunlop remains one of the most well-known suffrage activists of the Edwardian period. Like Emily Wilding Davison, who died after hurling herself at the king’s horse at the Derby in 1913 in protest against the government’s treatment of suffragettes in prison, Wallace Dunlop, the “first hunger striker,” emerges in histories of the militant suffrage movement as an exemplar of some British women’s willingness to sacrifice their bodies for the achievement of political rights.
Embodying Citizenship, 1908-1914
Authors: Nym Mayhall Laura E
Published: October 2023

In formulating resistance to constituted authority, suffragettes struggled with legacies of liberal political revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As historian Joan Scott has argued about the French Revolution, the “abstract gesture of embodiment-the attribution of citizenship to (white) male subjects-complicated enormously the project of claiming equal rights, for it suggested either that rights themselves, or at least how and where they were exercised, depended on the physical characteristics of human bodies.” Questions of embodiment lay at the very heart of the demands suffragettes made upon the state: sexed female, they demanded incorporation into a body politic conceptualized as male. Suffragettes repeatedly encountered resistance to their claims on the basis of their sex. At one open-air suffrage meeting in Campden Hill Square in February 1914, Emmeline Pankhurst compared the women’s struggle to earlier male franchise campaigns. She reminded the crowd that “when your forefathers fought for their liberty they took lives,” to which a voice in the crowd replied, ‘“You are only a woman.”‘
Into a Changing World
Authors: Davidson James West
Published: October 2023

The woman who eagerly awaited the chance to be photographed—who thought the camera could “catch” her like-ness—instinctively distinguished between her true identity and what the camera might or might not catch. The world observes us and, inevitably, makes rough and ready judgments about our character based on a host of categories that come with their own expectations: married/unmarried; immigrant/native born; Christian/Jew. Some categories we accept as a reasonable reflection of who we are. Others strike us as misleading and provoke us to push back. But they are applied and used, just as we apply and use them on others—and on ourselves. They say/we say .
The Voice in the Machine Hazlitt, Austen, Hardy, and James
Authors: Clayton Jay
Published: October 2023

Abell rings. Another message. The voices in the machine resume their insistent chatter. So many words, streams of code, flowing through the machine on his desk. He will be doing other things, moving about his small room with the inattentive composure of a person at home in his own world, when the bell chimes. He cannot ignore it.
Concealed Circuits Frankenstein’s Monster, Replicants, and Cyborgs
Authors: Clayton Jay
Published: October 2023

In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, a technothriller set in the permanent twi light of Los Angeles in 2019, an owl perches in the main offices of the Tyrell Corporation, creators of the”replicants” that have set the story in motion. In a nice visual allusion, this owl takes flight through the penthouse suite, passing in front of a wall of plate glass windows, behind which a brilliant orange sun is setting. Since its first release in 1982, Blade Runner has been taken by critics as a vision of a particular historical epoch, the period many people today call postmodernism.Its portrait of ecological disaster and urban poverty, of a visual and aural landscape saturated with advertising, of a polyglot population immersed in a Babel of competing cultures, of decadence and homelessness, of technological achievement and social decay, has appeared to many people as prescient. By bringing Mary Shelley’s story of the creation of an artificial human into the era of genetic engineering and new reproductive technologies,2 it succeeded in crystallizing some of the fears, uncertainties, and desires that surround the coming of the postmodern.
Is Pip Postmodern? Or, Dickens at the Turn of the Millennium
Authors: Clayton Jay
Published: October 2023

One overcast day in February, under the failing light of a late-afternoon sun, several curiously dressed couples were seen hurrying down the platform of the Riverfront Depot in Nashville, Tennessee. Most days of the week a group of teenagers might Rollerblade from one end of the platform to the other without endangering human life. But this evening the depot was astir: the powerful locomotive-a renovated 1952 model EBA, weighing 318,000 pounds and developing 2,250 horsepower-hissed and vibrated, pulsing with anticipation; porters beckoned anxiously to late-arriving passengers; while men in white sequined suits, with bushy sideburns and hair swept forward over their brows, escorted ladies in tight-skirted red dresses toward the elegant dining cars. One couple in particular drew the observer’s attention, as they paused before a nostalgia poster of Roy Acuff’s 1946 movie Night Train to Memphis. This couple, although dressed as creatively as the other passengers, appeared more shy than most, as though this were their first date, and perhaps a blind one at that. Hoping to discover what had oc casioned the unwonted bustle at the depot, the observer moved closer; and happily, the gentleman’s first words dispelled the entire mystery.
Genome Time New Age Evolution, The Gold Bug Variations, and Gattaca
Authors: Clayton Jay
Published: October 2023

On the cover of the October 1999 National Geographic a piglet with human DNA introduces an issue dedicated to asking: ‘‘Are we ready for the gene age?” We should be. Not since Darwin’s time has there been so much public attention focused on the inherited traits of our species. During the last year of the twentieth century The New York Times averaged forty articles a month on the new genetics, covering topics such as Dolly the cloned sheep; newly discovered genesfor breast cancer, homosexuality, and longer life; ecological and religious protests against gene tampering; insurance problems arising from genetic screening; the patenting of genes; DNA forensic evidence in criminal cases and paternity suits; the prospect of cloning a wooly mammoth; and handy recipes for cooking genetically altered food. There was Doogie, the supersmart mouse, whose memory and intelligence had been enhanced by injecting a modified gene into fertilized mouse eggs. There was the painless vaccine that one day might be delivered by rubbing DNA cream on your skin. And there was an ecoterrorist group named Seeds of Resistance, which cut down a field of genetically engineered corn in Maine, followed by the demonstrations against genetically modified food at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.
Deep Strikes
Authors: LeDonne John P
Published: October 2023

We now turn to the evolution of Russia’s grand strategy from the accession of Elizabeth to the death of Catherine II and to an analysis of its three major principles—strategic penetration, deployment, and the client system—at a time when Russia sought and achieved hegemony in the Heartland. Faced with the re-luctance of the Swedish client to accept its place in the new international order created by the Treaty of Nystadt (1721) and ill-conceived attempts to regain some of its losses, the empire struck back with a determination to destroy Sweden’s military capability and discipline it to accept Russia’s overlordship. Russian troops were stationed in Stockholm for the first and only time. Determined likewise to teach the Prussian client that Russia alone was entitled to manage the client system anchored in the friendly kingdom, Russia fought the bloodiest engagements of the century against Frederick II, and its troops even briefly occupied Berlin. In the southern theater, imperial troops finally broke the Ottoman hold on the Black Sea and even crossed the Danube under the watchful apprehension of the Prussian client and Austria. Both were subsequently kept in line by an agreement to partition the Polish client. Farther east, a new client state was being created in Georgia. By the time of Catherine’s death in 1796, Russian forces were poised for deep penetrations beyond the Heartland’s periphery, in Holland and northern Italy. Russia’s position as hegemon and arbiter of interclient disputes within the Heartland had become an incontrovertible fact.
Economy, Culture, Client Societies
Authors: LeDonne John P
Published: October 2023

Russia’s rise to hegemony in the Heartland was made possible by the continued strength of its economy within the few parameters set by Peter: while “free” labor made progress in the textile industry concentrated around Moscow, metallurgy remained largely concentrated in the Urals, where the labor force was over-whelmingly servile. The foundation of the military-industrial complex continued to be serfdom, with its accompanying infrastructure of compulsion geared to the production of the weapons of war for the army and the navy and to the construction of fortresses and naval installations in an ever expanding empire. By 1750, the production of iron had reached 36,363 tons; by the end of Paul’s reign, in 1800, it had quintupled to reach nearly 181,820 tons, keeping Russia still ahead of England with its 172,730 tons.1 Russia had overtaken Sweden to become the leading exporter of iron and copper. But Russia’s lead over England was narrowing, as the basic flaws of Russian metallurgy began to appear: the exhaustion of the Ural forests and the reliance on serf labor, which discouraged innovation. Serfdom’s capabilities were being stretched to the limit, and farther demands would become counter-productive.
The Clergymen
Authors: Bonomi Patricia U
Published: October 2023

Historical thinking about the colonial clergy is at present in some flux, a consequence of two long-term problems of interpretation. First, the clergy has over the years been dealt with in piecemeal fashion, one denomination at a time, and with little attention to the general direction of its professional development or its place in the larger colonial society. True, the social role of the New England clergy has occasionally been examined, but clergymen elsewhere are often treated as a breed apart and left to the church historians. Then there has been a tendency to take at face value the hostile commentary on clerical shortcomings, real or imagined, so characteristic of early American religious discourse. Yet the most striking aspect of colonial religious culture, and its sharpest departure from Old World tradition, was the diversity—and thus the fierce competitiveness—of its beliefs and practices. Conceivably the best way to assess the experience of the many hundreds of ministers who made their way to the colonies from the late-seventeenth century onward would be against a background of Old World expectations as well as certain regional variations in provincial America.
Pirate Kings of the Islands
Authors: Hudson Benjamin
Published: October 2023

As OLAF CuARAN and his dynasty were becoming entrenched in Ireland, another empire was being assembled in the islands and headlands of the Irish Sea. In the third quarter of the tenth century two brothers named Magnus and Godfrey Haraldsson raided in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Within two decades Godfrey was described as the “king of the Isles” between Britain and Ireland. Little, however, is known of these men. Their ancestry and origin are matters for speculation, as is the location of their base of operations, and even what precisely is meant by “the Kingdom of the Isles” at a particular time. None of these obscurities is unique, but the search for answers reveals how widely and casually Viking families roamed.
The Obstructed Giant
Authors: Middlekauff Robert
Published: October 2023

When George III acceded to the throne in 1760, his English subjects were singing with spirit once more. “Rule Britannia” burst from their mouths—words twenty years old (they originally formed a patriotic poem)—and they went like this: The call to rule seemed natural in 1760; a few years earlier it had mocked the realities of British power and influence in Asia and America. For in these years of war with France, British arms took a terrible beating—and so did British pride.
The Children of the Twice-Born
Authors: Middlekauff Robert
Published: October 2023

English rigidities in government and in political imagination did not cramp the eighteenth-century American colonies. The colonies owed allegiance, and paid it, to the same king as England itself, but because their experience was different from the parent country’s, this connection and those to imperial agencies of government did not restrict them. Distance from England and the slowness of communications helped keep the ties, those “political bands” Thomas Jefferson was to mention in the Declaration of Independence, slack.
Response
Authors: Middlekauff Robert
Published: October 2023

Americans outside Massachusetts proved so adept in following Boston’s violent example that we may suspect that they did not need it. Needed or not, Boston’s action offered a model that captured attention everywhere in America. Revulsion from the Stamp Act permeated social groups of all sorts and came to focus, almost naturally it seems, on the men chosen to distribute the stamped paper—on the tax collectors and their friends. By the end of October all but two of the stamp distributors had resigned, usually in order to save their lives and property; and of the remaining two, one, William Houston of North Carolina, gave way on November 16, and the other, George Angus, appointed for Georgia, did not arrive in America until January 1766.
Selden’s Penny
Authors: Middlekauff Robert
Published: October 2023

My penny is as much my own as the King’s ten pence is his: if the King may defend his ten pence, why not Selden his penny? John Selden, member of Parliament during the struggles with Charles I, a learned lawyer whose work was used by the seventeenth-century opposition to the king, was only a minor hero to colonial pamphleteers and intellectuals. His name graced their writings far less often than Milton’s, Sidney’s, or Locke’s. Yet his maxim—”My penny is as much my own as the King’s ten pence . . .”—was quoted during the crisis over the Stamp Act and for good reason: it captured the importance of property in this crisis.
The “Bastards of England”
Authors: Middlekauff Robert
Published: October 2023

British troops did not end Boston’s disaffection; they simply gave it another focus—themselves. The immediate problem they faced was the refusal of town and provincial authorities to pay for their housing. Governor Bernard blustered and threatened in an unsuccessful attempt to extract money from the legislature; Colonel Dalrymple spoke coolly but to no purpose; and General Gage arrived from New York only to discover that he could accomplish nothing.
Drift
Authors: Middlekauff Robert
Published: October 2023

On the first day of January 1771, Samuel Cooper, the minister of the Brattle Square Church in Boston, wrote his friend Benjamin Franklin that “There seems now to be a Pause in Politics.” Cooper offered this assessment not primarily because the agitation about the Massacre and the trials of Preston and the soldiers appeared over but because, as he explained, “The Agreement of the Merchants is broken,” a reference to the decision of the Boston merchants in the preceding October to give up nonimportation.
War
Authors: Middlekauff Robert
Published: October 2023

The delegates to the first Continental Congress rode home to the applause and admiration of the continent—or a part of it. The Massachusetts delegates found their pace slowed by invitations to dine and to be entertained. For a time it seemed that every town between Philadelphia and Boston wanted to pay its respects. The Massachusetts men, having been dazzled by the food and wine and elegance in Philadelphia, managed to control their appetites on the road, begging off as politely as possible from all but necessary stops.