Flâneurie on bicycles: acquiescence to women in public in the 1890s

Although scholars have established the publicity of all types of nineteenth-century women, their public actions are still regarded as morally constrained. We offer one group of public women, bourgeois cyclists, who after encountering public skepticism only briefly were given free rein of the streets and country roads. This propensity of women and men to ride the thoroughfares 'a-wheel' we refer to as flâneurie on bicycles, a technology-mediated form of the pedestrian variety. Similarities and differences necessarily abound because of the requirements of safe cycling and the long-distance rambling capacity of cyclists. We argue, however, that flâneurie of the bicycle kind is largely faithful to the original in that cycling promoted peripatetic individualism, for female as well as male riders.     

AN EXAMINATION OF STATE FOREIGN EXPORT PROMOTION AND MANUFACTURING EXPORTS*

ABSTRACT As a means of promoting economic development state governments are increasing their levels of support for export promotion; however, there has been virtually no statistical analysis of the effects of the state export promotion expenditures. The present study specifies and estimates a cross-section model in order to quantify the relationship between state export promotion and exports. The empirical analysis allows for the calculation of the export promotion elasticity of exports on a state basis. Two conclusions are that the rationale supporting export promotion expenditures is supported empirically and that there is much diversity among states for the estimated elasticity.     

Heads or Tails? Modified Ceramic Gaming Pieces from Colonial California

Modified ceramic disks have been recovered from historic-era sites across the Americas. Small unperforated disks are commonly interpreted as gaming pieces and larger perforated disks are often classified as spindle whorls. Here, we examine these interpretations in light of collections from three colonial-era sites in central California: Mission San Antonio de Padua, Mission San José, and the Rancho San Andrés Castro Adobe. We argue that the small unperforated disks from our study sites were two-sided dice. These gaming pieces facilitated the social cohesion of Native people living in the large, multiethnic Indigenous communities that formed around Spanish colonial missions and later Mexican-era ranchos.     

Conflict and State Development in Ancient Tonga: The Lapaha Earth Fort

Warfare is often considered as a key factor in the formation complex societies, but in the Pacific archaeological evidence for inter-group conflict during political centralization is rare. Most earthwork forts in Tonga are assumed to have been built in the nineteenth century when the traditional system of rulership collapsed, yet few forts on Tongatapu have been excavated or 14C dated. A fort in the chiefly center of the ancient Tongan state was mapped with theodolite and LiDAR, and excavated. Radiocarbon and traditional history indicate the fort known as the Lapaha Kolotau was made in the fourteenth century AD at the same time that chiefly architecture was being built at an unprecedented scale at the new elite center. The construction of an earthwork fort provides the first evidence that political centralization in Tonga was likely to have been contested.