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The material basis of the Mpondo chiefdom, c. 1820–60 Although it is clear that the Mpondo chiefdom had been located as a recognisable entity on the eastern side of the Mzimvubu river for at least a couple of centuries, and probably longer, before the Mfecane, sources on the area are too sparse to provide a picture of the society in this period. The few reports and traditions that have survived affirm that the Mpondo resembled other ‘Nguni’ peoples who inhabited the whole of the east coast of South Africa. Each Nguni polity had its own distinctive character: linguistically and culturally, the Mpondo fell somewhere between the Xhosa, Thembu, Bomvana and Mpondomise to the south-west, later dubbed the ‘Cape Nguni’, and the many small units in pre-Mfecane Natal, whose way of life has been reconstructed by Bryant from traditions. Yet all shared basic features of social organisation and material culture which distinguished them from other African societies in southern Africa. They had been forged in a relatively similar environment–the undulating coastal strip, with a high rainfall and broken by many rivers and streams, between the Drakensberg and the sea. Settlement was usually in dispersed home-steads, rather than the concentrated villages of the Sotho and Tswana; cattle played a central role in subsistence and social relationships; land was cultivated by means of wooden digging sticks or, more rarely, metal hoes. A similar pattern of kinship, lineage and clan organisation, patrilineal succession and exogamous marriage, in which cattle were used as bridewealth, recurred throughout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drug addiction is a pathophysiological disorder characterized by the progression of acute drug use into patterns of chronic drug abuse associated with craving and seeking behavior as well as increasing risk for relapse in drug use during attempts at withdrawal. Drugs of abuse include a wide variety of substances diverse in structure, pharmacology, toxicology, and long-term clinical sequelae but with the common target of brain reward centers. The authors discuss drugs within each of the major classes of abused substances from the perspectives of the history of each drug΄s use as well as chemical properties, mechanisms of action including selective receptor interactions, pharmacokinetics of distribution-metabolism-elimination, and the toxicology of these drugs. The major classes of drug reviewed include the two most commonly used substances, ethanol and tobacco, as well as stimulants, opiates, cannabinoids, hallucinogens, barbiturates, and benzodiazepines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1917, Russian soldiers and their wives demanded that the revolution represent and reflect their interests and concerns. Their actions and demands shaped the revolution and contributed to the confusion and sense of disorder that were defining features of 1917. The actions and impact of the unarmed soldiers' wives alongside the actions and impact of their armed and mobilised husbands demonstrates the commonality of the experience of war and highlights that troop mobilisation was perhaps the single most important factor in shaping experiences of the revolution. The recent work of Joshua Sanborn explored the role of military conscription in forming national identities and in transmitting the violence of war to civilian Russia in the course of the civil war. This chapter explores the role played by soldiers and their wives and illustrates in part Sanborn's thesis of conscripted soldiers as the source of escalating violence and collapsing authority in provincial life. Whether deserters, members of reserve regiments, prisoners of war, on leave or invalids, soldiers played a highly vocal and visible role in political life. This was partly because they were armed, and had clear and easily identifiable group identity. Regional power structures depended on soldier support, both for their own safety and for the maintenance of their orders. When force or violence occurred in civilian life, it almost invariably included soldier participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comrades! Public teachers! You gave the people literacy, now you must give them development! Make free Russia's conscious citizens out of yesterday's village philistines! This chapter looks at the methods used by the political elite to communicate with ordinary people and offers some explanations for the problems that they faced. Russia's political elite sought to educate ordinary people, and to transform their cultural lives, in the pre-revolutionary period. These attempts to communicate with and to educate ordinary people were intensified in 1917. So-called ‘cultural-enlightenment campaigns’ were high on the agenda of public life in the course of 1917. Correspondingly, ordinary people sought out and utilised information on the nature of the revolution, and of how they were to participate in the revolution. The Provisional Government and soviets, and educated society in general, sought to orchestrate popular education. For the Provisional Government, popular education had to be a success, as they relied on popular understanding and participation in the administration. Without popular support, their stated goals of overseeing democratic elections, keeping Russia in the war and preventing civic disorder were unachievable. Educational campaigns were undertaken with heartfelt faith from Russia's political elite that education could ‘transform’ Russia's citizens into newly fledged democratic citizens, who could participate in the building of an egalitarian, even utopian, state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 1796, Benjamin Hawkins arrived in Creek country to assume his new position as Principal Temporary Agent for Indian Affairs South of the Ohio. A proponent of what later became Jeffersonian Indian policy, Hawkins intended to transform the Creeks gradually and peacefully into respectable members of the new American republic. He explained in 1807: The plan I persue is to lead the Indian from hunting to the pastoral life, to agriculture, household manufactures, a knowledge of weights and measures, money and figures, to be honest and true to themselves as well as to their neighbors, to protect innocence, to punish guilt, to fit them to be useful members of the planet they inhabit and lastly, letters. Behind his inexact reference to “the Indian,” Hawkins hid another goal: to reshape gender roles in Creek country. He encouraged men to abandon the chase in favor of ranching and planting, and women to vacate their farms for the production of “household manufactures.” In addition, the Indian agent urged men to take control of family property and to assume command over their wives and daughters. Any analysis of the Creek response to the “plan of civilization” must therefore first consider the relationship between men and women before Hawkins's arrival, for when Creeks welcomed or rejected the Indian agent's proposals, they did so in large part because of the quality of this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recalling his travels among the Creeks in the 1770s, William Bartram wrote, If one goes to anothers house and is in want of any necessary that he or she sees, and says I have need of such a thing or things, It is only a polite way of asking for it, & the request is forthwith granted, without ceremony or emotion; For he knows he is welcome to the like generous & friendly return, at any time. To this day, Europeans and Americans have caricatured, idealized, and even invented Indians in order to critique Western civilization. Bartram was not immune from the practice. This collector of plants and seeds who was given the name Puc-Puggy, or flower hunter, by his Creek hosts, surely had in mind in this passage the selfishness and oneupmanship of his Philadelphia brethren. Bartram, however, was too keen an observer to fabricate his description. Despite its romantic overtones, his account suggests that Creeks and colonists had notably different relationships to property. The Creeks' generosity did not create an Edenic world – their enthusiasm for torturing and killing enemies dispels such notions – but it did set them at odds with the expanding colonial settlements. In Creek country, where the possession and accumulation of things meant so little, property could not command people. Compared with their colonial neighbors, Creeks possessed few material goods in the first half of the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our detailed examination of mainland history begins with the western sector of the mainland in part because it is convenient to proceed west to east and in part because here I am best able to address regional conundrums with indigenous-language primary sources. Moreover, insofar as any sector can be representative of so varied a region, the western mainland has a good claim. In duration and degree, for example, post-charter disruptions were intermediate between those of the central and eastern mainland. The same may be said of intrasectoral tensions: Upper Burma reemerged as the dominant zone within the western mainland in the 1630s. This was long after Ayudhya had established its preeminence in the central mainland, but almost 170 years before Hue gained a secure authority along the yet more fragmented eastern littoral. As elsewhere, political change had a cyclic character: periodic breakdowns encouraged administrative reform, but reformed administrations collapsed before destabilizing economic growth, external attacks, and domestic factionalism. Whenever the capital region was in trouble, restive provinces were quick to magnify its difficulties. Thus Lower Burma exploited Upper Burma's problems in the 1280s and 1740s, and when the south faltered in the late 1500s, Upper Burma returned the favor. With the interior home to Burmans and the south to Mons, endemic north–south tensions had an irreducible, if fluid, ethnic component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The histories of western and central mainland Southeast Asia were closely joined and reasonably comparable. The central mainland is here defined as present-day Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and more peripherally, the Mekong delta. Although in fact communications between this region and China were at least as easy as with South Asia, from an early date India and Sri Lanka provided the central, no less than the western, mainland with its chief high cultural inspiration. The broad similarities between the western and central mainland in art, literature, law, kingship, and Theravada affiliation that grew from this common South Asian exposure were reinforced by a constant west-central exchange. Monks, diplomats, traders, soldiers, and migrants showed that upland barriers between the Irrawaddy, Chaophraya, and Mekong river systems were relatively porous. Thus a unique Theravada civilization embracing virtually all wet-rice areas in the western and central mainland cohered and diverged from the ever more Sinic eastern sector. To these shared cultural traditions must be added the unifying effects of demography and geography, particularly in what became the two chief Theravada kingdoms, Burma and Siam. In both kingdoms a semicircle of highlands surrounded a great alluvial plain whose chief river, the Irrawaddy or Chaophraya, provided the main avenue of communication. In both sectors a maritime coastal region competed with a less commercially privileged interior zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The dominant influence on the progress of living standards in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain was not the rise in nominal incomes but the long-run movement in the cost of living. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the principal source of the sustained rise in the general standard of living of the working class was the strong downward trend in the cost of food, fuel and other necessities. And at the end of the century, when the steady improvement of the late Victorian period gave way to what Beveridge (1923, p. 463) called ‘the cramped, uneasy, envious, but not impoverished age of Edward’, it was the abrupt transition from falling to rising prices which precipitated the turnaround in real incomes. For many years now the standard source for the quantification of these trends in wages and prices has been the careful work of Bowley (1904, 1920, 1937) and Wood (1909). According to Bowley, real wages improved by some 55 per cent from 1873 to the turn of the century, and four-fifths of this advance was accounted for by the bonus of lower retail prices, leaving only one-fifth attributable to higher money wages (Bowley 1904, p. 459, 1937, pp. 30 and 122). The significance of this partitioning is that it meant that a generous windfall was immediately available to all those in receipt of some source of income, and did not have to be won through acquisition of skill or struggles with employers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]