JFK and the future of global leadership

On 10 June 1963 President John F. Kennedy gave a speech that changed the world. His commencement speech at American University helped to spur the signing of a world‐changing agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States—the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. This episode of peacemaking is remarkable for two reasons. First, it arguably helped to save the world, since the nuclear confrontation at that stage of the Cold War was not a ‘stable balance of terror’, as sometimes described, but rather a highly unstable situation that was prone to accidents, misjudgements and potential disasters. Second, this was an episode of statesmanship in which presidential leadership played a crucial role. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy understood that he bore sole responsibility on the US side to find a way back from the brink of nuclear war. He used the ‘peace speech’ to create a novel kind of peace diplomacy, and worked together with his counterpart, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, to pull the superpowers back from this precarious brink.     

Ancient Fishing Methods and Fishing Grounds in the Lake of Galilee

Fishing was an important economic activity in the Lake of Galilee during the Roman period. This study proposes a comparative analysis involving archaeological remains, classic literature, ancient art and modern ethnographical accounts regarding fishing in the Kinneret to produce an historical reconstruction of the ancient commercial fishing methods. Furthermore, it aims to individuate the most important fishing areas, the fishing seasons, and to the roll of cities and towns around the Kinneret within the fishing industry.     

Interpreting the Moon Landings: Project Apollo and the Historians

By focusing on the key book‐length studies of the Apollo program that landed American astronauts on the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s, this essay seeks to evaluate the historiography about Apollo in the first decade of the twenty‐first century, dividing the subject into five major areas. The first area is the foreign policy and public policy antecedents of Apollo and its immediate ramifications; some of these efforts have yielded significant studies. The second area involves the evolution of space hardware, in many instances these are overwhelmingly detailed studies of rockets and other space flight technologies. Third, there is a great fascination with the astronauts and their actual flights, and a rich tradition of memoir and narrative exists in this arena. The fourth area receiving attention from historians of Apollo and the lunar voyages emphasizes the history of science, in which much of the focus is on the scientists, scientific findings from the voyages of discovery, and the use of this evidence in developing larger theories about the origin and evolution of the solar system. Finally, and increasingly so in the last 20 years, the Apollo story has been recontextualized through social and cultural investigations of its meaning in modern America. Assessing the five major areas enumerated above, this essay also offers some possibly fruitful avenues of future research.     

A Test of Ideological Bias in House Subcommittees, 1979-2000

Committees play a pivotal role in the legislative process. Since the mid-1970s, subcommittees have been important in the lawmaking process as well. Given this enhanced performance, the membership of subcommittees can be a key element in the direction that the legislative process takes. In this article, we develop and test a set of expectations regarding the ideological makeup of subcommittees. Resting firmly on the shoulders of Cox and McCubbins (1993), we assert that those subcommittees with particularized interests will possess memberships which are ideologically distinguishable from their parent committees, while those that affect a wider range of interests will have contingents ideologically indistinguishable from their parent committees. Employing a Monte Carlo simulation technique on ideological composition data of members of subcommittees of the House Appropriations and Ways and Means Committees from the 96th to 106th Congresses, we expect to find that the occurrence of subcommittee outliers are generally consistent (with some notable exceptions) in their direction over time. Additionally, we test the hypothesis that there were no significant changes in the mix of subcommittee outliers from the 103rd to the 104th Congresses and beyond. We find that the change in partisan control of the House resulted in few shifts in outliers.     

Historians and Political Scientists: Observations on Presidential Studies

Absenteeism on roll call votes in the U.S. House decreased just prior to events of the early 1970s, thus suggesting that the two events are related. Changes during the early 1970s increased the number, the visibility and the pubic accessibility of recorded legislator's decisions. With relevant political actors having easier access to more legislator's decisions, lawmakers have less room to deviate from what they perceive to be the electorally tenable position. While good roll call attendance rates are now the norm, this is even more so in cases of high visibility votes, i.e., conflictual votes and votes of stated presidential concern. Nonetheless, the use of strategic absenteeism by politically conflicted, southern Democrats seems to endure.