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The article reports on the conference "Der Kult des großen Plans um 1910: Gestaltung von Metropolen in historischer Perspektive," held on November 25-26, 2010, at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. The conference discussed philosophies and standards of urban planning in the early 20th century in cross-cultural perspective, with papers focusing on various cities, including Chicago, Illinois, Vienna, Austria, and Canberra, Australia.

Therapeutic substances, their development, testing, application and effects, have in recent years become a central topic of the history of medicine, history of science, and science and technology studies. This paper provides an overview of the literature on this topic through the four-fold perspective of individual substances, industry, patients, and regulation. It introduces the recently established, DFG-funded research network "Pharmaceuticals in the 20th Century" and sketches current methodological approaches to the history of therapeutic substances. At present it appears to be particularly promising to adopt an approach which uses substances or groups of substances as a heuristic device for exploring their complex networks and interdependencies.

"This paper investigates how education influences marriage behavior in three countries: the United States, West Germany, and former East Germany. Following family economics we postulate that for women a longer education decreases marriage rates both during education (institutional effect) and after the degree has been obtained (human capital effect). For men family economics predicts the delaying institutional effect, too, but the human capital effect is expected to increase marriage rates. Further considerations lead to the additional hypothesis that for younger birth cohorts these sex differences should attenuate.... For the United States and West Germany the observed marriage patterns confirm our hypotheses for the most part. For East Germany, however, we observe different marriage patterns. This was expected because the institutional context in this former socialist country was a very different one." (SUMMARY IN ENG), (excerpt)