Pivotal Politics,Presidential Capital,and Supreme Court Nominations

We analyze the Supreme Court nomination process in order to provide a general explanation of presidents' propensity to win confirmation battles even in the face of an ideologically hostile Senate. The analysis serves two purposes. First, we argue that employing the conventional measure of the Senate's power to constrain the president's choice of nominees–the median senator–provides an inaccurate picture of this process. In its stead we argue that the filibuster pivot (or the sixtieth most liberal or conservative senator) more accurately captures the Senate's power over the president (Krehbiel 1998). Second, we argue that even under this more stringent spatial constraint, presidents still have the ability to win most confirmation battles with the Senate. Indeed, our results indicate that presidents often overcome situations where the Senate should reject their nominees, or where it should force them to make a less desirable choice, by invoking political capital.     

Femininity and the Right: From moral order to moral order

This article highlights the complexities of conservative, anti-feminist discourses. It underscores the cross-cutting of religious, class and political cleavages and goes some way toward illustrating the resulting multivocality of anti-feminism. Three case studies of the Right in the 1870s, the 1930s and the 1980-1990s demonstrate both the resilience of the French Right's anti-feminism and its imperative of a moral order as well as its relative ineffectiveness in subordinating conservative women. The final picture is one in which conservative women have both accepted and rebelled against the Right's conventional idea of femininity.     

Proceedings Of The Fourth Annual Meeting Of The European Association For The History Of Psychiatry (Eahp), The European Club For The History Of Neurology (Echn), And The International Society For The History Of The History Of The Neurosciences (Ishn)

Abstract

Osphresiology, though beginning with Aristotle, and the title of a classical monograph from 1819 by Cloquet, has, like the human sense of smell itself, played a relatively modest role, compared to other sensory functions. The anatomical and physiological connections of the nose to the brain proved to be more complex than those of sight, hearing and even touch, and were therefore poorly understood before the second half of the 19th century. Moreover, the close association between smell and taste gave rise to much controversy regarding the respective roles of the first and the fifth cranial nerves. Next, came the unfolding of the evolutionary influence of cerebral structure and function ‐ viz Broca's “limbic”; concept, and the “olfactory desert”; in the brains of “anosmatic”; animals. Jackson's “uncinate”; seizures featuring olfactory hallucinations brought the hippocampal formation into focus. Finally, there were the clinical manifestations of hyposmia and hyperosmia, from “coryza”;, the common cold, to injury or neoplasms causing hyposmia, as well as some endocrine alterations causing hyperosmia. (And let us not forget Charles Huysman's “Against the Grain”; and Marcel Proust's evocative fragrant madeleine.)