The Pre-Settlement Vegatation of the Western and Central Wimmera Plains of Victoria,Australia

Historical records indicate that the fertile soils of the western and central Wimmera Plains of Victoria, Australia formerly supported grassy woodlands on rises and flats, and grasslands on shallow depressions and clay plains. Soil type and micro-relief appear to have been the major factors that determined the distribution of these communities. Burning of the woodlands by Aborigines may have contributed to their open grassy nature. The few ungrazed remnants of Buloke (Allocasuarina luehmannii) woodland support a suite of species that are absent from or uncommon in other Buloke woodland remnants in the region. This work demonstrates that in districts where little intact native vegetation remains, investigation of the distribution and floristic composition of the pre-settlement vegetation can provide useful information for the maintenance and restoration of remnant vegetation.     

"A sudden and terrible revelation": motherhood and infant mortality in France, 1858-1874

In 1874, legislators in France passed a law regulating the wet-nursing industry. Citing recent medical research into the causes and social costs of high infant mortality, the law's supporters met little opposition, despite the fact that the law challenged the tradition of paternal authority and familial autonomy that had been inscribed in French law since the promulgation of the Civil Code of 1804. Extending state power into the familial realm required a concerted effort by reformers, who concentrated on two issues: maternal responsibility for newborn infants and the social costs of early death. Because working women in urban areas used wet-nurses to preserve their wage-earning capacity, reformers capitalized on widespread opposition to women's labor outside the home. The law met little opposition in part because the issues of paternal authority had already been thoroughly debated several months earlier in the child labor law of 1874.     

Empire, emigration and school geography: changing discourses of Imperial citizenship, 1880–1925

The state school curriculum, and geography in particular, played a role in encouraging emigration to the colonies, if not in actually educating for emigration. Emigration was an implicit and explicit topic in school geography, and was increasingly endorsed after the 1885 Revised Instructions to inspectors of schools which explicitly sought the promotion of emigration to young people as an “honourable enterprise”. Early-twentieth century school geography texts were part of the broader imperial discourse which valorized the settler Dominions over the tropical colonies and portrayed them as the good citizen's choice for emigration. The 1922 Empire Settlement Act represented the British government's most direct intervention in supporting out-migration from Britain, but texts at this time were generally less jingoistic than some of their forerunners, in keeping with the changed attitudes in post-World War I Britain.     

Cities and Privatization

Cities across America look for management strategies useful for accomplishing their responsibilities and programs. While some cities include privatization strategies in their management portfolios, others do not, and the underlying reasons are not readily apparent. This study seeks to gain some insight into this disparity through several questions: Why do some cities use more privatization than others? Are privatization levels higher in fiscally healthy or fiscally stressed cities? Where are the cities that use privatization located? This study attributes municipal privatization levels in medium-sized cities, in part, to degree of wealth, fiscal stress, and location. The findings suggest that privatization levels are higher in wealthy, fiscally healthy, suburban cities.     

Rethinking State Rail Policy

In the last two decades, many states established rail promotion programs in an effort to limit the contraction of their railroad networks. Now federal funds for rail projects are nearly exhausted, and states must decide whether to expand considerably their levels of internal funding for short line investments. Such a decision requires a careful articulation of policy goals, combined with sound cost-benefit techniques. Research shows, however, that states often fail to evaluate the full range of costs and benefits when considering rail investments. Instead, the economic development benefits of local rail service frequently are overstated, while the potential for rail investments to meet broader transportation planning needs is neglected. This paper evaluates the rationale behind state intervention in the rail industry, discusses the tendency of states to focus on economic development to the exclusion of other benefit categories, and presents summary results from an analysis of an investment project in North Carolina. The paper suggests that state funding for rail projects is more likely to be justified based on intermodal substitution benefits generated by local rail service, rather than the railroads' potential to increase jobs.     

„Und setzet eure Worte nicht auf Schrauben”︁ Medizinische Semiotik vom Ende des 18. bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts - Gegenstand und Forschung

There is no doubt that medical semiotics are having a revival at the moment. Different aspects of yesterday's and today's interest in semiotics and in the historical interpretation of signs of disease in the context of theory and history of medicine can be illuminated: their deciphering as the history of the sign in medicine by historic science, their overestimation by philosophy during the Age of Enlightenment, their reduction to a phenomenology of medicine and natural science during the first half of the 19th century and their transformation to medical diagnostics since the middle of the 19th century and recently even their functionalization as methodical instrument within the history of science. The following will show the change in meaning of medical semiotics. Modern development and especially the transition to medicine, based on natural science, will be emphasized.     

Impure Public Goods, Relative Gains, and International Cooperation

The characterization of the products of international cooperation as public goods has been severely challenged, undermining a central pillar of theories of international cooperation. I review the criticism of public goods assumptions, identifying the need to account for both exclusion and rival consumption in international cooperative arrangements. Drawing on the recent debate of states as relative versus absolute gains maximizers, I offer a characterization of international cooperative arrangements as discriminatory clubs. I develop a refined relative gains model, which focuses on relative net gains, and apply it to a hypothetical situation to illustrate its usefulness in predicting patterns of exclusion and distribution in international trade.