Peace Conferences and the Century Of Total War: The 1899 Hague Conference and What Came After

The Hague Peace Conference of 1899 was unprecedented and momentous. Pressed by public concern about the arms race and its costs, the governments of all great and most lesser powers, suppressing their doubts about the possibility of achieving anything, convened in May 1899 to discuss the Tsar's draft proposals for general measures of disarmament and pacification. Although there was too much mutual suspicion for any progress with disarmament, the Conference opened up a new era in international relations: its multilateral treaty to encourage arbitration and its establishment of a permanent court to facilitate this may be seen as the germ of the International Court of Justice; and within a batch of measures designed to modernize the laws of war, the Hague Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, recapitulated at the second such conference in 1907, became the basis of our century's laws of war. Apart from those achievements, given the grand aims of the Conference and the public interest it generated, it can be seen as a prototype of all League of Nations and United Nations gatherings ever since.     

Eisenhower and Castro: US-Cuban relations, 1958-60

Books reviewed in this article:
United States Government Printing Office, Foreign Relations of the United States 1958-1960, Vol. V. American Republics
United States Government Printing Office, Foreign Relations of the United States 1958-1960, Vol. VI. Cuba     

Correcting temporal frequency distributions for taphonomic bias

In this paper, we expand upon a prior study [Surovell, T.A., Brantingham, P.J., 2007. A note on the use of temporal frequency distributions in studies of prehistoric demography. Journal of Archaeological Science 34, 1868–1877.] that explored the problem of taphonomic bias. Taphonomic bias refers to the tendency for younger things to be over-represented relative to older things in the archaeological record due to the operation of destructive processes like erosion and weathering. Using a database of radiocarbon dated volcanic deposits from Bryson, R.U., Bryson, R.A., Ruter, A. [2006. A calibrated radiocarbon database of late Quaternary volcanic eruptions. Earth Discussions 1, 123–124.], we develop an empirical model of taphonomic bias. In contrast to our prior study in which we modeled taphonomic bias as an exponential function wherein the likelihood of site loss remains constant through time, we argue that the probability of site destruction actually decreases with site age. We further demonstrate how this model can be used to correct temporal frequency distributions and extract demographic histories. We illustrate this approach using databases of radiocarbon dates from rockshelter and open-air sites in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, USA, and mammoths and humans in Siberia, Russia.     

Imperial Intervention in the Disputed Roman Episcopal Election of 418/419

Evidence for the conflict between two rival candidates for the bishopric of Rome following the death of Zosimus at the end of 418 comes from a group of twenty‐five letters, most of which are official letters to and from Emperor Honorius (the rest being from other imperial officials and the emperor's sister), all but one of which are found in the Collectio Avellana. Interestingly, we have nothing preserved from the two episcopal claimants about this matter. The group of letters chronicle imperial concern for the preservation of public order. Do we have here an example of imperial interference in episcopal elections in Rome? In this article a careful examination of the letters reveals that Honorius was concerned only that the Roman church's procedures had been followed (Collectio Avellana, Ep. 15), which should determine who was lawful bishop. Sociological Conflict Theory is employed to investigate the nature of the evidence to address issues of the nature of the dispute and its participants, what values were contested, how it escalated, and how it was resolved. Such an approach makes clear that our evidence focuses on the role of the emperor and only incidentally tells us of the thinking and strategy of the two candidates. The final decision was made not on the merits of the candidates and the legality of one of the two elections, but upon Eulalius' violation of the conditions imposed upon the two rivals while the dispute was to be settled. Despite the emperor's concern only to facilitate the church settling this conflict itself, in the end it was an imperial measure that determined the outcome of the disputed election.