A Review of “Partisan Balance: Why Political Parties Don't Kill the U.S. Constitutional System”

How, and why, do presidents use the rhetorical content in signing statements for strategic purposes? The article analyzes the rhetorical content of the 985 signing statements from FDR through Carter and argues that the president's rhetoric is an effort to frame the accomplishment that has just occurred with an eye toward maximizing prospective power and building legacy. The article explores the impact of different political contexts (divided government and elections) on several important rhetorical characteristics found in signing statements. In addition, the study delves into three interesting cases related to presidential credit claiming and attribution. LBJ and Carter were the most likely to attribute credit to members of Congress, while Nixon was the most likely to claim credit for himself. The findings help illuminate the various motivations that presidents have to use signing statements for reasons beyond constitutional challenges.

Successful political leaders do not necessarily do more than other leaders; successful leaders control the political definition of their actions, the terms in which their places in history are understood. The failures are those who, upon leaving office, look to some time in the distant future when people might begin to appreciate the wisdom of what they did. (Skowronek 1997 Skowronek, Stephen. 1997. The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  [Google Scholar], 17–18)     

Keeping the Devil at Bay: The Shoe on the Coffin Lid and Other Grave Charms in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century America

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century graves excavated archaeologically in the United States are occasionally found in association with objects beyond the typical clothing or coffin hardware, such as ceramic vessels, coins, and perhaps most mysterious of all, a single shoe placed on the lid of the coffin or casket. Not clearly described in archival accounts, the single shoe phenomenon within a mortuary context is argued here to be a creolized practice, combining an African cosmology and belief in the liminal state of the soul after death with a European and especially British Isles tradition of shoes as magical objects and potential traps for evil.     

Hacking the master code: cyborg stories and the boundaries of autism

In this paper, we consider how the use of Internet technologies by individuals on the autism spectrum (AS) may contribute to recoding the spatial, sociopolitical, ontological, and epistemological boundaries commonly assumed to delimit autistic from non-autistic lifeworlds. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, we argue that the responses of AS individuals to a survey about online communication suggest these individuals are engaged in a form of cyborg writing, admixing constraints and opportunities in a way that opens alternative, polycentric, and indeterminate but nonetheless important political possibilities for people on (and off) the AS.     

Sarah and the Puritans: Feminist Contributions to New England Historical Archaeology

This article analyzes a seventeenth-century adultery case from southern Massachusetts to examine the effects of Puritan colonization on Native American women. As a feminist analysis the article focuses on gendered access to power and considers Puritan strategies for transforming Native American gendered relations. This reading highlights Puritan use of physical punishment and public humiliation to shape gendered behavior. It exposes Puritan efforts to transform Native American men into Puritan patriarchs and to transform Native American women into submissive consorts. It concludes with a series of characteristics that will define archaeological sites that date to the period immediately after New England’s colonization. Arguably, Sarah and the Puritans contributes to history more than it contributes to archaeology because the primary evidence is documentary, rather than archaeological. Nonetheless, this analysis informs archaeological interpretation by revealing the consequences of cultural change on the archaeological record. By demonstrating colonization’s transformative power on southern New England Native American culture, Sarah and the Puritans identifies the context in which many historical period Native American sites were created. Ultimately, this affords an opportunity to gender New England colonization and to examine the archaeological record of that process.     

Confessions of an Archaeological Tour Guide

This article examines the contradictions, responsibilities and opportunities that inhere when the authenticity of the tourist experience results at least in part from having an archaeologist guide. It is argued that archaeologists are always participants in tourism, through the visions of the past they offer in even the most scholarly of papers, that make their way to tourists and tour guides through a wealth of secondary literature. It is argued that, even if most are not aware of it, archaeologists are engaged with the cultural heritage industry and it would be irresponsible to try to step aside. It is argued that archaeologists should take responsible action in light of the undeniable influence of archaeologists in defining the routes and meanings of site tours.