'Nothing Could Exceed the Badness of His Character Even in This Bad Age'

Initially the model for the speakership of the US house of representatives could not but be drawn from Westminster, though the occupants of the chair in the Commons around the time of independence were not impressive. Not however till Henry Clay's election in 1812 was the American Speaker transformed into a partisan, politically-active leader of the House. The contemporary Commons Speaker, Manners Sutton, though he failed to be re-elected to the chair on political grounds, was not a party leader. Between Clay and the civil war the intensity of party conflict obscured the role of the Speaker, and minorities flourished. Speaker Reed in the 1880s believed in the rights of the majority and used the authority of the chair to promote them. He ended the practice of members delaying business by refusing to answer a roll-call though present, and he developed special rules to accelerate the progress of bills. About the same time, Speaker Brand in the Commons, in the face of Irish obstructionism, also reasserted the rights of the majority by introducing the closure, to which guillotines were later added. Reed's authoritarianism broke in the hands of Speaker Cannon in 1909–10 as progressive members of his party rebelled. By then the Commons speakership had entered a period of complete political neutrality. Speakers O'Neill and Gingrich in the last quarter of the 20th century regained much of the power and authority which Cannon's speakership had lost.     

Multiperiod migration patterns: the timing and frequency of household responses

"The structure of intertemporal patterns of household migration responses is empirically examined. The findings indicate that migration decisions are often related to changes in household conditions in both prior as well as following periods, are dependent on the duration of household status characteristics (e.g., marital status) and not just their presence at any point in time, and finally that migration response in any particular period very often differs among households as a result of differences in the underlying structure of migration frequency behavior. These findings suggest that inferences based on comparisons of household migration responses over only a single period of time are incomplete, possibly to the point of being misleading." The study is based on a calculation of "the distribution of migration patterns between 1976 and 1979 for a sample of 4,739 households in the [U.S.] Michigan Panel Survey on Income Dynamics (PSIC)."     

Using historically informed archaeology: Seventeenth and eighteenth century Hueda/European interaction on the coast of Bénin

The period of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and European colonies is relatively well documented compared with the historic records of many regions of precolonial Africa. However, this documentation necessarily presents a perspective distilled through European eyes. This paper suggests a methodology influenced byAnnales history for critically analyzing documentary sources in conjunction with a critical interpretation of archaeological remains. Archaeological evidence from recent excavations at the site of Savi, capital of the Hueda kingdom, is contrasted with documentary evidence, facilitating an interpretation of motivations guiding Hueda interaction with European traders and structuring their spatial relationship.     

Coarse cloth and clerical tailoring: negotiating Boston-Irish cultural imperatives in the Famine era

Recent calls for updated approaches to the Irish-American historical experience recommend more systematic attention to complexities inherent in Irish immigration and settlement. They also seek further contextualisation of the history of the Irish in the USA within broader North American, transatlantic and global frameworks. The need to review and potentially reappraise longstanding, essentialist perspectives on Irish arrival and assimilation is equally evident. This article expands on foundational narrative histories of the Boston Irish to re-examine Famine-era settlement and contending agendas within spheres of religious affiliation and political activism. The character and evolution of Irish-American ethnic identity, and the tragic imprint of the Famine under consideration here pave the way for new readings of traditional orthodoxies. Collectively, they reveal Boston's Irish historical terrain to be more complex than the record currently suggests.     

Hunter–gatherer dispersals in the mammoth-steppe: technological provisioning and land-use in the Enisei River valley,south-central Siberia

Late Pleistocene Siberia was characterized by a unique mammoth-steppe biome. Two prevailing hypotheses exist to explain modern human dispersals in the Siberian mammoth-steppe. Upper Paleolithic human populations were either maintained continuously throughout the late Pleistocene or the peopling of this region resulted from multiple dispersal events. Past attempts at explaining the colonization process have resulted in culture-historical interpretations. This article uses lithic technological data from middle and late Upper Paleolithic sites in the Enisei River valley of south-central Siberia to explain human dispersals from a behavioral perspective. Technological provisioning and land-use strategies are reconstructed to help explain dispersal processes. Results of the study demonstrate that hunter–gatherers were using different adaptive strategies before and after the Last Glacial Maximum, indicating that multiple dispersal events shaped the peopling of Siberia.     

Experimental analysis of the practical limits of lithic refitting

We report on the results of an experiment aimed at determining the effects of experience/aptitude, lithic reduction type (biface v. core), and flake size cut-offs on different rates of success in refitting studies. We found that experience matters, but that there can be large differences in aptitude for refitting; that cores are easier to refit than bifaces; and that the effort of refitting increases considerably for flakes smaller than 5–6 g. We propose the use of an asymptotic equation fit to a cumulative curve as a way to determine when a study has reached the point of diminishing returns for a given flake size cut-off, and to help determine differences in aptitude for refitting.     

Western Australian electoral reforms: Labor finally succeeds

Australian electoral systems have a history of malapportionment, designed to give added voting weight to rural and remote areas. However, by 2000, all Australian jurisdictions except Western Australia had adopted voting equality within specified tolerances. This paper provides a brief analysis of the Gallop Labor government's efforts to reform the Western Australian system, drawing primarily on interviews with key players involved in the debates, including parliamentary members of the political parties involved. Quotations in this paper are drawn from these interviews, which were conducted in August 2004.