OCCUPATION AND ETHNICITY IN FIVE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CITIES: A COLLABORATIVE INQUIRY

Abstract

Literary critics and historians often interpret authors and authors' works as more or less significant, but are reluctant to quantify those works. The interdisciplinary field of creativity studies, however, poses methods of quantifying the eminence of an author's works. This study uses four measures from that field (anthology entries, scholarly citations, entries in books of quotations, and auction sale records) and one measure from the fields of computational linguistics and data mining (ngrams using millions of books digitized by Google) to assess the eminence of John Milton's thirty-one prose works1. For the purpose of this study, Milton's short “A Letter to a Friend Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth” (1659) was not included in the quantitative analysis out of concern with possible conflations and confusions with letters in Milton's Familiar Letters. and their relation to his greater achievement in epic poetry. These measures indicate the singular eminence of Areopagitica, Milton's 1644 tract on the liberty of unlicensed printing.     

Dealing with the King's Enemies: The Drafting of the Communist Party Dissolution Bill 1950

Abstract

The lawyers called upon to draft a Bill which, if enacted, could validly give effect to the promise of the successful Liberal–Country Party coalition in the 1949 federal election to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia, faced a difficult assignment. Their political instructors faced a dilemma: should the new government take a less confrontational approach to communist disruption of the economy and risk undermining the government's popular support, or should it press ahead with the promised ban and risk having the High Court of Australia invalidate it? In a process in which the politics of pragmatism gave way to Cold War ideology, the choice of the latter path led to failure.