Re-Inventing Mississippian Tradition at Etowah,Georgia

Frequent population movement and political re-organization spurred a pattern of repeated abandonment at the Mississippian mound center of Etowah in the southeastern United States. These processes also characterized the larger surrounding region in north Georgia and southeast Tennessee. The Etowah abandonments provided inflection points where interest groups were able to distance themselves from previous conventions of structure and reformulate new forms of sociopolitical organization. Re-invented traditions were embedded in changing definitions of genealogical and mythical time, and mediated through the built environment and iconography.     

Robert,earl of Gloucester,and the daughter of Zelophehad

Robert, earl of Gloucester, the leader of Mathilda's party in England during Stephen's reign, has a good press because the main source for his activities is his admirer, William of Malmesbury. This article re-assesses Robert's role and character by concentrating on chroniclers other than Malmesbury and on charter evidence. It finds, by these methods, that Earl Robert may have been in some ways an attractive man, but that he was also a practised curialist, a ruthless factionalist, a plunderer of church lands, and a man who made acquisition of his neighbours' lands one of his main objects. New evidence is presented to account for his behaviour in the crucial months at the end of 1135 and beginning of 1136 when Stephen made himself king. Robert is found to have had little choice but to cross to England because his lands in the southern Marches were under threat from a Welsh rising. His alienation from Stephen in the next few years is traced to a failure at court against his rivals, the Beaumont group. His subsequent private war against the Beaumonts in Dorset and Worcestershire is further evidence against Malmesbury 's portrayal of him as a man of pure principle. conduct of the war against Stephen after 1139 can be shown to have had serious flaws. The result was a rebellion against him by his own sons and the repudiation of his methods (if not his acquisitions) by his successor Earl William. Evidence is presented that Earl William sparked off the movement amongst the magnates to draw up private treaties to contain the Anarchy. In view of all this, it is not surprising to find indications that Earl Robert lacked any real commitment to the claims of his half-sister, the empress.     

Robert Graves,Marshall Hall,and reflex action in 1837

ABSTRACT

In several issues of the London Medical Gazette during June–July of 1837 there was an interchange of letters between Robert Graves, Regius Professor of the Institutes of Medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, and the London physician and experimental physiologist Marshall Hall, often considered the discoverer of the phenomenon of reflex activity. Graves asserted that he, rather than Hall, was the originator of the idea of reflex action as a disease mechanism. Hall rejected that assertion and, after exchange of some verbal “pleasantries,” began a tirade about a somewhat different, although not unrelated issue into which the journal editor interjected some not exactly dispassionate comments. Graves soon let the matter of priority lapse, and Hall continued his war with the Council of the Royal Society, but examination of the contemporary and earlier literature suggests that Graves probably was correct, by a narrow time margin, in relation of his claim for priority in using the concept of reflex action in explaining neurological disease mechanisms (not a claim for discovering reflex action), that Hall had used the phrase “reflex action” earlier than Graves, and that others before Hall had gone a long way in studying reflex mechanisms, although Hall’s writings had familiarized the medical profession with the concept.     

Land Privatization and Enterprises in Georgia

An American attorney directing a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program supporting privatization of urban and industrial land in Georgia since autumn 1997 describes the procedure whereby previously privatized enterprises can acquire the land beneath and surrounding those enterprises. This program, incorporating experience derived in commercial land privatization elsewhere in the former USSR and designed to emphasize transparency and minimize fees and paperwork, is compared with alternative approaches utilized in other republics. A procedure whereby enterprises not meeting land privatization criteria may lease land from the state, and whereby local authorities may sell vacant land, also is described. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: D23, R33, R52. 20 references.