DOGS, 'WATER' AND WALL

1 Sam 25 describes David and Nabal on a collision course diffused by Nabal's wife Abigail. Had she not been successful, David would not have left ''a single one who urinates against a wall'' (25,22.34). The phrase also appears a number of times in 1-2 Kgs. Much has been written about this phrase either in reference to dogs or male humans, but very little scholarship has discussed it in terms of canine realia. We intend to re-examine all of the verses and will attempt to show that some of the later Rabbinic commentary was sensitive to canine realia and maybe of help in determining the meaning of the phrase.     

War Time Hysteria, 1917: Senator Miles Poindexter, ‘American-ness’ and the Strange Case of Colonel Carl Reichmann*

When, on 6 April 1917, the United States entered into the First World War, a wave of anti-German sentiment captured the nation. The Army was not immune from accusations of subversion. In 1917 Senator Miles Poindexter accused a high ranking officer named Carl Reichmann of being in league with Germany. Despite the support from officers such as Hugh Lennox Scott and John J. Pershing, Reichmann was not permitted a promotion to general or service in France. Although most senators supported the promotion, Poindexter was able to prevent a vote on the subject using internal Senate rules. The resulting notoriety Poindexter gained made him a viable Republican candidate in the 1920 election. Although the military did not prevail over Poindexter — thereby continuing the constitutional expectation of military subservience to the civil government — the forces sent to France were without a commander who had gained a scholarly understanding of modern warfare well before the actual conflict.     

Agency Characteristics and the Use of Executive Orders

Past scholarship has offered varying explanations for why presidents choose to use executive orders. However, to this point, much of what we know of unilateral powers does not adequately address the role the bureaucracy plays in the president's decision. This research seeks to account for bureaucratic factors as a strategic presidential consideration in the employment of such directives. I classify executive orders from 1989–2012 based on which agency or agencies they apply to, and consider the importance of various characteristics (e.g. agency ideology, level of centralization, politicization, etc.) in determining which organs of the bureaucracy presidents will direct executive orders to generally. The results provide evidence that the White House directs fewer executive orders to agencies that have a politically independent leadership structure, and this result holds across a variety of measures judging an order's impact. The results demonstrate that the type of directive is crucial in determining a president's strategic decision to use executive orders, in line with previous research, and that agency centralization is one crucial component of this strategic calculation.     

‘Germany’s salvation’: Carl Schmitt’s teleological history of the Second Reich

Although Schmitt’s enthusiastic conversion to National Socialism is well known, his short history of the German Kaiserreich, published in 1934, remains neglected in Anglophone scholarship. This article contextualizes Schmitt’s narrative through the National Socialist conception of history and its accompanying teleology leading to the formation of the Third Reich. By placing Schmitt’s historical text in conversation with his earlier Staat, Bewegung, Volk, this article argues that Schmitt appropriated the history of the Kaiserreich to construct liberalism as a social pathology which could only be cured through the ‘concrete state theory’ he outlined in Staat, Bewegung, Volk. Furthermore, this article argues that Schmitt’s history relied heavily on propagandistic clichés of the Third Reich and thereby functioned as a rhetorical legitimation of Hitler’s rise to power.     

Identical rock types with different chemistry: sourcing phyllite-tempered Hohokam pottery from the Phoenix basin,Arizona

The organization of ceramic production and distribution among the ancient Hohokam of the Phoenix basin, Arizona, has been documented in recent years with much detail. Based on diverse temper and clay compositions, the provenance of individual ceramics is routinely determined with considerable precision. One exception is phyllite-tempered pottery, which was made in one corner of the basin but also across a broad upland zone adjacent to the north. The phyllite-tempered pottery from different production sources cannot be distinguished on the basis of their temper type. As shown with assays with an electron microprobe, however, both the temper and clay fractions are chemically diverse and geographically distinct, allowing many of the phyllite-tempered wares to be sourced. Among the phyllite-tempered ceramics consumed in the Phoenix basin, some are shown to have been made locally, but, surprisingly, large numbers were imported from the northern uplands. Their numbers support the idea that the connection between the Phoenix basin and the northern uplands was a prominent component of the Hohokam regional economy despite the great difference between them in settlement size and density.     

Evaluating consistency in typology and classification

Typological systems are essential for communication between anthropologists as well as for interpretive purposes. For both communication and interpretation, it is important to know that different individuals using the same typology classify artifacts in similar ways, but the consistency with which typologies are used is rarely evaluated or explicitly tested. There are theoretical, practical, and cultural reasons for this failure. Disagreements among archaeologists using the same typology may originate in the typology itself (i.e., imprecise type definitions, confusing structure) or in the classification process, because of observer errors, differences in perception and interpretation, and biases. We review previous attempts to evaluate consistency in typology and classification, and use consensus analysis to examine one well-established typology. Both consensus and disparity are apparent among the typologists in our case study, and this allows us to explore the kinds of forces that shape agreement and diversity in the use of all typological systems. We argue that issues of typological consistency are theoretically and methodologically important. Typological consistency can be explicitly tested, and must be if we hope to use typologies confidently.