State politics,railroads, and Civil Rights in South Carolina, 1883–89

In 1889 the General Assembly of South Carolina repealed the state's Civil Rights Act (1870), following a protracted debate that had been prompted by the United States Supreme Court's decision in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). This article examines in detail the contours of the civil rights controversy in South Carolina and, in doing so, identifies a number of competing dynamics, among them outside corporate interests (in this case, railroads), local state interests, and regional loyalties. Taken together, these different factors demonstrate conclusively that civil rights in South Carolina during the 1880s was a contested space. They also shed important new light on the development of de jure segregation in the South and, in particular, the complex relationship between Jim Crow legislation and the social and economic issues related to railroad expansion.     

The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and their Museum: Scotland’s National Collection and a National Discourse

Founded in 1780, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland began immediately to form a museum that has survived remarkably intact within the National Museums of Scotland. Their initiative marked a significant point in the evolution of material culture studies between the “cabinet of curiosities” of the Renaissance and the large public museums of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An exploration of the Society’s work and ethos in its early years points to the emergence of a distinctive “Scottish History” of collections and a greater significance for the evidence of material culture than has been conventionally accorded it in conventional scholarly discourses.     

The body politic and “political medicine” in the Jacobean period: Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique

ABSTRACT

The use of metaphors and analogies was widespread in English political literature during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and for contemporary readers they were more than merely rhetorical artifices – they were used to illustrate and, in some cases, even to provide evidence. In this regard, none was more apt than the most prominent of these analogies: that between the human body and the state. The political thought of the time established an unshakeable connection between the two, building an argument for how their structures and ways of functioning mirrored each other. This paper examines one of the most extensive and thorough examples of corporal analogies in early modern English political literature – that of Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606) – and shows how such corporal analogies were used to construct an absolutist political model wherein the king was depicted as the soul, the head and the heart of the body politic. The paper integrates Forset’s A Comparative Discourse within the context of the ideological struggles from the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, while its place within the larger picture of the medieval and early modern metaphor of the body politic is also examined, in order to assess the lineage and originality of Forset’s ideas and point out how the same kind of analogies could be used to provide significantly different political interpretations.     

It’s Getting Better All the Time: Comparative Perspectives from Oceania and West Africa on Genetic Analysis and Archaeology

Technological advances are making genetic data collection and analysis feasible on a scale unimaginable only a few years ago. Early genetic research using mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome provided important insights for macroscale modeling of regional and continent-wide population movements, but the capacity to study the entire genome now opens an era of finer-grained, mesoscale studies of regional and local population histories that are more compatible with the scale of archaeological analysis. The utility of integrating both types of data is illustrated by a case study from Oceania, where genetic studies were used to evaluate two models for the geographic origins of the populations that colonized Polynesia beginning ca. 3000 bp, bringing with them the distinctive Lapita cultural assemblage. A second case study considers the application of genetic studies to an understanding of Fulbe history, especially that of the pastoral Fulbe. Both archaeological and genetic data are underdeveloped for the key Fulbe homeland regions of Mauritania and Senegal, but recent research in the Middle Senegal Valley permits some conjectures on the history of Fulbe nomadic pastoralism. The article concludes with suggestions for a multidisciplinary research agenda to expand and upgrade the quality of relevant archaeological data, incorporate biodistance studies of human skeletal material, and improve and expand genetic sampling using more historically sensitive collection protocols.     

Glory,Passions and Money in Alberti’s Della famiglia: A Humanist Reflects on the Foundations of Society

Abstract

The article examines Alberti’s dialogue Della famiglia (“On the Family”) as a reflection on the foundations of ethics and politics from the perspective of humanist discourse. The polyphonic work presents and critically examines several views. The authorial voice of the text rehearses the traditional philosophical view the humanists inherited, according to which humans are sociable by nature. However, some of the interlocutors reject this convenient view, implying that it cannot be squared with the humanist critique of the premises of mainstream classical and medieval philosophy. Another line of argumentation in the dialogue attempts to harness the key humanist notion of gloria as the basis of human association, according to which humans self-interestedly seek fame and glory but to gain them they must promote the common good. But also this position is contested in the dialogue, with some arguing that the agonistic competition for glory produces envy and resentment rather than a civic spirit and as such threatens social cohesion. Finally, Della famiglia also explores the implications of the radical possibility that men and women are asocial creatures, by casting them as selfish economic actors who are only interested in making material gains.     

The Huatou Revolution,Pure Land Practices,and Dahui’s Chan Discourse on the Moment of Death

Song-dynasty Chan depended for its place in society and its financial resources on lay patrons. Educated gentleman-officials (shidafu) were the wealthiest and most powerful of men. From the time of Dahui Zonggao in the Southern Song, Linji teachers shifted from elaborate comments on gongan in periodic sermons to a new method of gongan inspection termed “critical phrase” (kan huatou). Scholars have argued that Dahui’s invention of huatou practice was primarily related to internal Chan rivalries for elite patrons. I argue that Dahui’s motive was also connected to a rivalry with Pure Land Buddhism over the making of appeals to lay followers among scholar-officials. Dahui was aware and tried to communicate the usefulness of huatou in addressing the elite laity’s doubts about birth and death, and in particular their anxieties about facing the decisive moment of death. Therefore, he developed a gongan discourse that is related to anticipation of dying by harnessing the power of doubt to create an experience of spiritual awakening.     

The Present State of Research into Industrial Clusters and Districts. Content Analysis of Material Published in 1997–2006

The aim of this work is to help gain a better understanding of the research conducted on territorial agglomerations of firms at a multidisciplinary level. To this end, an analysis was performed of the contents of the most significant scientific literature on economics, management, planning and development, urban studies and geography published over the period 1997–2006. From the results, a database of 142 papers from 43 journals was then elaborated. An analysis of these works reveals the level of development of the main lines of research in this field and, consequently, makes it possible to detect the topics that require greater attention and that can be the object of future research for researchers and academics. The main conclusions include the growing number of studies conducted on the subject in recent years, as well as a greater predominance of empirical research over conceptual work, and the existence of a significant change in the topics or lines of research throughout the period under study.