The Modern Presidency and Theories of Accountability: Old Wine and Old Bottles

This study attempts to reconcile two apparently conflicting characteristics of congressional voting–stability in congressional decisionmaking and efforts to influence change in congressional voting decisions–by developing a concept and measurement of congressional voting response to short-term forces. The analysis indicates that congressional members do occasionally deviate from established policy positions on a subset of votes in response to the President of their party. In general, congressional members are more likely to deviate from their general policy positions when the policy area is characterized by change.     

Old Wine in New Bottles: The Utility of Data Reanalysis in the Social Sciences

Abstract

The authors reconstruct processes of ethnic identification among residents of rural northeast China from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth through an analysis of naming behavior. They apply discrete-time event-history techniques to individual life histories compiled from longitudinal, nominative household-register data from state farms in what is now Liaoning Province to identify the individual and household circumstances associated with the adaptation of Han or Manchu names, focusing on the role of heredity and status. Ethnic identification in late imperial northeast China was potentially fluid. Many residents were descended from migrants from Shandong who became hereditary tenants on state land administered by a system of Manchu government known as the Eight Banners. As banner people, or qiren, these residents could legitimately claim to be Manchu. As descendants of Shandong migrants, they could also claim to be Han. They could express their choice of ethnic identity through their choice of names not just for their children but also for themselves. Names not only express ethnic self-identification, but their registration by state authorities in the analyzed data also implies official recognition and legitimacy. The authors' results demonstrate that ethnic identity was not hereditary but subject to individual and family choice.     

Changes in the Geography of Wine New Wine in New Bottles

Abstract

The wine industry is experiencing considerable change, with improvements in quality, the emergence of new geographical areas producing distinctive and prestigious wines, and particularly the increasing significance of large scale organisations in production and distribution. Scientific, technological and commercial factors have been crucial to these developments.     

Reformation on the Continent: Approaches Old and New

Much has changed in Reformation historiography over the last two decades. Long established temporal and geographical frameworks have been thoroughly revised and reappraised. If theology, politics, social movements, and economic trends were once treated as discreet areas of study, nowadays scholars in the field are much more appreciative of how these themes inform each other. This review essay appraises a selection of works that are indicative of the richness and variety that characterizes Reformation and Counter-Reformation scholarship today.     

Lhalu:An Eyewitness of Old and New Tibet

LhaluwasoneofthelargestserfownersinoldTibet.Heownedascoreoflargelandsmallmanorsandthousandsofslaves.Asthehigh-rankingofficialofthelocalgovernment,hedidhisbesttodefendtheoldruleatthecrucialmoment.Heeventriedtorelyonimperialistforcestodefendtheprerogativesofserfowners,andstoodforTibetanindependence.WhenTibetachievedpeacefulliberationin1951,hewasforcedbythegeneralsitlla-tiontoacceptthereality.Inhisndnd,howev-er,hewasponderinghowtomaintaintheinterestsofthethreeestate-holdersinpoweLIn1955,theC…     

Culture Wars, Old and New

Book reviewed in this article:
Volker Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy     

Early West African Metallurgies: New Data and Old Orthodoxy

The debate on West African metallurgies cannot be properly understood without reference to the colonial template that featured Africa as the receiving partner in all crucial social, economic, and technological development. The interesting debate that took place in West Africa during the Colonial Period was more meta-theoretical than factual. These conflicting glosses, despite their lack of empirical foundations, have constrained the nature of archaeological research and oversimplified the dynamics of the many facets of technological innovation. The relative boom in archaeological research that took place from the 1960s onwards resulted in an exponential growth of factual information. Challenging evidence has emerged from Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Gabon, Togo, and Senegal. The picture that emerges from this survey calls for more sophisticated explanations for the origins of West African metallurgies away from the single non-African source hypothesis.     

Old and New Tang Books on Tubo

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New Presses for Old Grapes: I: Multiple Classification Analysis

Searching, gathering, organizing, and retrieving data are basic tasks for historians. As long as historians work by themselves, decisions concerning data format, data exchange, computer platform, and the like remain secondary. Teams of historians often use relational databases for centralized data storage. However, fundamental risks are implicit when one uses databases. Among technical considerations, the process of transformation between the source and the database is a deciding factor. For those who gather data, the effective use of such possibilities as data exchange, compatibility, and simplicity of survey and the reuse of the data in other contexts and platforms becomes increasingly important. In contrast, the user's needs include the possibility of data verification and use of the data for more than one question. Many relational databases have considerable shortcomings because the stored data lose the visual characteristics, the syntax, and the semantics of the original source. The EuroClimHist database environment is a part of the NCCR Climate project. It uses a data tool, written in Java for the gathering of documentary data, which generates extensible markup language (XML) files for data exchange.     

North African Bird Lore: New Light On Old Problems

In many parts of the world one encounters a disapprobation of living beings, either animals or humans, walking, jumping, or otherwise crossing a corpse. Nearly as widespread as aversion to the act is one supposed consequence: the corpse is believed to become reanimated. Drawing on a variety of cases, this article describes the distribution of the idea both in ritual practice and myth and establishes its fundamental form. Consideration is given to how far the representation can be traced to cross-culturally common features of mortuary ritual and common ideas about spiritual entities and non-human animals. As none of these approaches sufficiently accounts for the disapprobation or the concomitant belief in reanimation, it is then shown how an explanation can be found in equally widespread and possibly universal tendencies of human cognition, including an experience of newly deceased persons as incompletely dead and therefore transitional between life and death, and an association, expressed in many different languages, of traversal with transgression.