Stiffening Abe: William Pitt Fessenden and the Role of the Broker Politician in the Civil War Congress

The difficult but by no means dysfunctional relationship between President Abraham Lincoln and Congress remains an understudied aspect of Civil War history. Indeed, it is impossible to arrive at a comprehensive or convincing explanation for Union victory until that relationship is limned more precisely. This article contends that U.S. Senator William Pitt Fessenden (1806–69) played a critical mediating role in the wartime Congress. He did so firstly in his capacities as chair of the Senate finance committee and close associate of U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and secondly as a public supporter of executive war powers. Although the influential Maine Republican had serious doubts about the effectiveness of the Lincoln administration, his determination to quash the southern rebellion and considerable powers of self‐restraint enabled him to act as an important and constructive broker between the White House and the fractious Republicans on Capitol Hill.     

Einzelhandel als Katalysator für nachhaltige urbane Radlogistik? – WüLivery,ein Fallbeispiel aus Würzburg

Standort - Die Covid-19-Pandemie gilt in vielen gesellschaftlichen Teilbereichen als Beschleuniger für Transformationsprozesse. Auch im Bereich der Organisation urbaner Logistik und...     

THE POETICS OF ANCIENT GREEK MEMORY AND THE HISTORICAL IMPERATIVE

This book examines Greek engagements with the past as articulations of memory formulated against the contingency of chance associated with temporality. Based on a phenomenological understanding of temporality, it identifies four memorializing strategies: continuity (tradition), regularity (exemplarity), development, and acceptance of chance. This framework serves in pursuing a twofold aim: to reconstruct the literary field of memory in fifth‐century bce Greece; and to interpret Greek historiography as a memorializing mode. The key contention advanced by this approach is that acts of memory entailed an “idea of history” that was articulated not only in historiography, but also in epinician poetry, elegy, tragedy, and oratory. The book offers a rich account of poetic conventions and contexts through which each of these genres counterbalanced contingency through the use of exemplary and traditional modes of memory. This fine analysis highlights the grip of the present on the past as a significant feature of both historiographical and nonhistoriographical genres. The essay argues that this work fills a disciplinary gap by extending the reflection on memory to a new period, Greek antiquity. The retrospective positioning of this period at the outset of Western historical thought brings Grethlein's investigation to the center of debates about memory, temporality, and the meaning history. In engaging with the book's argument, the essay suggests that historiographical memory emerged in Greece not as a first‐order encounter with time, but as a second‐order encounter with forgetting. This confrontation marked a certain separation of historiography from other memorializing genres. Whereas poetic and rhetorical memories were posited against contingency, historiography sought to retrieve those aspects of the past that may otherwise have been irretrievably lost and forgotten. In doing so, it formulated the historiographical imperative as a negation of forgetting that problematized the truth‐value of memory and the very act of remembering the past.     

Toward a new humanism in social science

Maurice Roche. Phenomenology, Language and the Social Sciences. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. x. + 361 pp. Bibliography and index. $15.50.     

The existence of open areas during the Mesolithic: evidence from aeolian sediments in the Elbe–Jeetzel area,northern Germany

Traditionally Mesolithic hunter–gatherer cultures are supposed to have lived in a primeval forest environment with a closed vegetation cover during the Early and Mid-Holocene. It is not until the onset of subsequent Neolithic agricultural societies that the development of more expansive open areas is assumed. Therefore our perception of the Mesolithic economy in the European lowlands is highly affected by the idaea of adaptation to dense forest environments and a very stable system of resource exploitation. However, recent palaeoenvironmental studies provide evidence that areas of open landscapes must have existed at least temporarily during the Mesolithic and evoke the question whether human impact may be accountable for this.     

New books received for review

Abstract

Geological information was first printed in colour on a map in 1820 but serious efforts to print geological maps in multiple colours began in Europe only in the 1840s. Increased geological mapping activity created the need to print more maps by cheaper methods, while general advances in lithographic colour printing provided the means. Better colour registration, transparency, range, permanence and distinctiveness were attained in the 1840s and 1850s by technical innovations and also by new design strategies. Consequently, as printed colour replaced hand colour as the norm, it also influenced the look of the geological map.     

Late Devonian gastropods from the Canning Basin,Western Australia

Over 50 identifications of Tertiary pollen are reviewed. The pollen assemblages indicate rain-forest through most of the Tertiary, but the requisites for pollen preservation are biased towards the wetter climates.

The present day geographical affinities of the botanical groups are largely with taxa of the tropical zone and Australia-wide taxa. There is geographic variation in the fossil pollen assemblages when southeastern Australia is compared with Central Australia and Queensland.

The major changes in the fossil floras coincide with climatic change, indicating the influence of climate on the evolution of plant assemblages. The older phytogeographic concepts are inappropriate for the fossil record, especially when considered in conjunction with palaeoclimates and palaeogeography.

It is unfortunate that palynology has given little information of the evolution of floras in drier climatic regimes, or of the evolution of the eucalypts.