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Allen describes Socratic pedagogy in Plato's I Republic i as follows: "the result of effective teaching will be enactment, and not merely comprehension."[13] In Allen's reading, Plato criticized the Athenian democracy in favor of instituting a more managerial politics.[14] Intriguingly, however, Plato's most memorable image stands in tension with Allen's line of interpretation. The practical, ameliorative shape of Allen's political philosophy prompts me to wonder whether Allen abandons too quickly the "free society" or the "open society" as the highest avatar of democracy. Keywords: history; utopia; Plato; Tocqueville; democratic Athens EN history utopia Plato Tocqueville democratic Athens 865 871 7 10/03/23 20231001 NES 231001 Danielle Allen is known for refashioning diverse traditions, texts, and histories in the service of improving American political life. "Beliefs are rules for action" - to quote Allen quoting James.[8] Danielle Allen's ideas have great practical importance. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the accomplishments in the call for historians to write about history using languages that reflect the boundaries between politics and poetics, witnessing and writing, and memory and history. Other topics include the criticisms by critics like Pierre Birnbaum and Philippe Carrard on the historians' writings, and some works of French historians like "Saint-Pierre ou la Douceur de Vivre?" by Philippe Ariès.

11 I discuss this in Jacob T. Levy, I The Multiculturalism of Fear i (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapters 3, 4, and 8. 12 Fukuyama, I The End of History i , 329. 7 Fukuyama, I The End of History i , 136-8. 8 W.E.B. Du Bois, I The Souls of Black Folk i (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002 [1903]), 5. 9 Fukuyama, I The End of History i , 201. Keywords: liberalism; history; ideology; Fukuyama; recognition; Augustine EN liberalism history ideology Fukuyama recognition Augustine 802 809 8 10/04/22 20221001 NES 221001 Even setting aside the ways in which Francis Fukuyama's I The End of History and the Last Man i [3] introduces questions that he himself pursued in his subsequent thirty years of wide-ranging scholarship, it is remarkable how many topics in academic debates of the following generation are present in its pages. Liberalism, history, ideology, Fukuyama, recognition, Augustine. [Extracted from the article]

Liberalism, history, Fukuyama, conservatism, globalization, pessimism Here, despite his partial disavowals, Fukuyama's thinking may well be following a trajectory found in some forms of post-war political realism that sought to craft visions of a "realistic" or even "conservative" liberalism capable of meeting these challenges. Keywords: liberalism; history; Fukuyama; conservatism; globalization; pessimism EN liberalism history Fukuyama conservatism globalization pessimism 794 801 8 10/04/22 20221001 NES 221001 The fate of sophisticated arguments that become best-selling books seems to be a descent into caricature and cliché. The forces of nationalism and resentment that Fukuyama thought (or perhaps hoped)[9] would be tamed by market liberalism and "tolerant" nationalism[10] have gained force from liberalism's very successes and evolution - something we might even see as an alternative dialectic directly subverting his guardedly optimistic liberalism. [Extracted from the article]

At the time of its publication in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1959, this text by Michel Mourlet constituted a manifesto for the Mac-Mahonists, a group of cinephiles named after the Paris movie theater, the Mac-Mahon, where they would gather, program, and watch films. This short but foundational essay stands as a vibrant defense of the near-ecstatic power of the movies, which Mourlet argues comes from the gaze of the camera and its ability to capture reality directly. For Mourlet, art must be sublime or it is of no interest; it must be intimate and passionate or it is trivial. Great movies set viewers "reeling in a vertigo," precipitate them into a hypnotic state in which they lose themselves in a transformative experience from which they emerge whole. Praising absorption and fascination, Mourlet decries Brechtian distancing and any distortion of reality for expressive purposes. What makes filmmakers great, he writes in this text, is "the way in which their means of approaching the fundamental themes of the mise-en-scène, organized around the bodily presence of actors in a setting, is or is not capable of fascinating us." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on a notable historical flashpoint in the history of deinstitutionalization, the removal, by Jerome Miller in the mid-1970s, of more than 400 juveniles from Pennsylvania's Camp Hill prison, a facility that incarcerated juveniles with adult prisoners. It draws on a combination of archival research and in-depth interviews with individuals who played a role in the prison's closing and the development of new community alternatives. Miller and the reformers aspired to revolutionary change but had to settle for successfully removing juveniles from an antiquated prison and developing a patchwork system of community alternatives. This research sheds light on the goals, strategies, and impact of 1970s-era deinstitutionalization reformers who attempted to transform a juvenile justice system that seemed impervious to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Prince , Machiavelli often associates power with force and the ability to compel obedience. In the Discourses on Livy and Florentine Histories , however, he emphasizes the role that moral authority has played in the construction of princely power, especially in republics like ancient Rome and modern Florence. This article explores the alternative style of princely virtù that Machiavelli associates with these princes and contrasts it with cruder forms of fraud, like moral hypocrisy, playing the hero, and ideological innovation. Finally, it shows how Machiavelli's analysis of power and princely virtù constitutes a revival of the historiographic tradition epitomized by Thucydides, Sallust, and Tacitus, in which irony is used to critique the social grammars that princes have used to underwrite their domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People living in the Appalachian region, including its rural areas, face challenging economic, social, and cultural conditions with limited financial opportunities, information poverty and unemployment, and low levels of information literacy and educational attainment. The roles played by rural public libraries in small business economic development in this region require exploratory study of representative small businesses to refocus library services and resources on their information needs and information-seeking experiences. This article proposes a user- and usebased model to represent the information context and perspectives of such businesses in the state of Tennessee as a case study in order to apply the lessons and insights to other parts of the United States. It concludes with suggestions for the blueprint design of a public library small business tool kit, an ideal resource that Tennessee's rural public libraries can develop for small businesses in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on highlighting the entanglements of modernity and coloniality in the foundational histories of the field. Topics include historical scholarship tending to describe the early development of the field through uncritical reading of the emerging world order of liberalism; and disrupting the banality of the English-language scholarship around the founding histories.

This article draws together two works created in late fifteenth-century Mantua. Although radically different in kind, they were borne from the same acts of violence: Andrea Mantegna's Madonna of Victory and a responsum about Jewish religious law by Rabbi Joseph Colon. Mantegna's altarpiece, painted to commemorate the bloody battle of Fornova as a Gonzaga victory, was paid for by Daniele Norsa; Norsa, a Jewish banker, was accused of destroying a prior Christian icon and ordered to finance the new altarpiece as reparations for this crime, under threat of death. Colon's responsum addressed the permissibility of creating a Christian image under duress—idolatry being one of the sins for which a Jew must sacrifice their life rather than transgressing. We explore the remarkable artistry and distinct craft practiced by the painter and the rabbi—image making in the one case, legal reasoning in the other—as modes of describing, interpreting, and creating reality. Both works address problems of religion and idolatry, faith and coercion, victory and violence, and triumph and lament. Together they reveal the dynamics of a fascinating iconoclash, a conflict of culture waged over the struggle between making and breaking images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the changing relationship between horticulture, agriculture, and philosophy across the seventeenth century, as the personae of the philosophical husbandman and the philosophical gardener intertwined and competed. At stake in the dynamics between them was the relationship between abstruse researches and practical applications in evolving experimental philosophy, as well as the aesthetic of experimental practices and rhetoric. Early seventeenth-century promoters of colonial projects, such as Virginian sericulture, situated the metropolitan pleasure garden, a place of whimsy and fantastical reasoning, as a realm of trial that presumed eventual utility and application to large-scale husbandry. Such views informed relationships between fanciful trials, speculative proposals, and presumptions of future utility in the development of the persona of the philosophical gardener and attendant notions of experimental philosophy over the course of the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1794 the exiled chemist Joseph Priestley found asylum in the United States, where science was seen as both an international endeavor that depended upon human rights and a tool that would enhance national development. The arrival of Priestley, the first of many scientific exiles to relocate to the United States, seemed to fulfill Jeremy Belknap's 1780 description of the United States as "the Mistress of the Sciences, as well as the Asylum of Liberty." By declaring the United States the best, freest place to practice science, American scientists began to realign scientific internationalism according to U.S. interests and linked the universal ideals of science to the national mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philology haunts the humanities, through both its defendants and its detractors. This article examines the construction of philology as the premier science of the long nineteenth century in Europe. It aims to bring the history of philology up to date by taking it seriously as a science and giving it the kind of treatment that has dominated the history of science for the last generation: to reveal how practices, instruments, and cooperation create visions of timeless knowledge. This historical inquiry therefore asks how one modality of textual interpretation could morph into an integrated system of knowledge production, which ostensibly explained the whole human world. Ultimately, it advances a central argument: philology operated as a relational network, one that concealed diversity and disunity, projected unity and stability, and seemed to rise above the material conditions of its own making. The article scrutinizes the composition of philology as a heterogeneous ensemble, the functioning of philology comparable to other sciences, whether human or natural, and the historical contingency in the articulation of philology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the rich history of social justice as a concern in archival studies and delineates future lines of inquiry for the field. We begin by examining how social justice has been defined in the archives literature and its implications for archival studies. Next, we draw forth five major strands of archival thinking in relation to social justice. We identify prominent areas in the archival literature that highlight the relationship between archives and social justice. We also identify critical questions in the relationship between social justice and archives and propose new research trajectories that we deem necessary to advance the archival field in general and its scholarship in particular. Finally, we argue for the importance of research that strengthens the tenets of social justice as a central principle in archival scholarship and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history of women in the book trade and printing industry. The author reflects on women printers such as Anna Rüger of Augsburg, Yolande Bonhomme, and María de Sansoric. Other topics include books such as "My Gracious Silence: Women in the Mirror of 16th Century Printing in Western Europe" by Axel Erdmann and "Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England" by Helen Smith.

The film Fracture Phenomena in Glass is a noteworthy case of a film reuse: it was published in the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC) in 1976, bearing the signature E 2355. In this instance, surprisingly, the Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film (Institute for Scientific Film [IWF]), which produced, edited, distributed, and archived the EC films, reused ballistic film recordings from World War II. Produced at the Ballistic Institute of the Berlin-Gatow Air War Academy in 1942–1943 under the direction of Hubert Schardin, they were first published in 1944 as C 433 by the National Socialist predecessor institution, the Reich Institute for Film and Images in Science and the Classroom (Reichsanstalt für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht [RWU]). This reuse suggests that at least some of the EC films bear witness to telling discrepancies in political, historical, and epistemological classification within a distinctive worldwide project of postwar visual film research. This essay considers the controversial role of the encyclopedist Gotthard Wolf and the institutional history of the RWU/IWF by looking at examples of the reuse—or nonreuse—of ballistic films and concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the death of their young daughter in 1841, the Griffith family of northern Maryland commissioned artist Sarah Miriam Peale to paint her portrait. Peale, academically trained and a member of a famous artistic family, was renowned for her paintings of the American elite. Peale's portrait of Mary "Molly" Griffith—along with a diary kept by the girl's mother, mourning jewelry, family papers, and a gravesite—makes the Griffith's grief tangible and highly visible, even today. However, these materials also reveal the experiences of people enslaved by the Griffiths that have been overlooked, including a bondswoman named Caroline whose own story is inextricably intertwined with that of Molly's. By examining these artifacts collectively and alongside the context of slavery, this article illustrates the complex relationship between labor, loss, and the material culture of mourning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of French opera librettos and vaudeville, specifically those published by French publisher Nicholas-Bonaventure Duchesne and his wife Marie-Antoinette Duchesne between 1753 and 1779. The author explores the musical notation included by Nicholas-Bonaventure, examines why Marie-Antoinette placed the music after the text, and discusses "Dictionnaire de musique" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The article explores the history of the Flemish panel stamp and its use in bookbinding decoration. Topics discussed include the popular use of octavo format printing, research by scholar Staffan Fogelmark on the molding of stamps, wooden book covers, and composite panels separated by a decorative frieze.

The article looks at the history of copyright, focusing on the British Licensing of the Press Act of 1662. It outlines the law, including a requirement for printed materials to be registered with the government-affiliated Stationers' Co., a limit on the number of printing presses, and the limit of copyright to the person registering a title. Topics include enforcement of the law and its replacement by a different copyright statute in 1710, proposed U.S. copyright changes, and censorship.

Histories of ocean science have emphasized the ways that state-sponsored deep-sea expeditions ushered in a new age of oceanic understanding during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This essay, on the other hand, examines the ways that shallow waters played host to less formal but nevertheless important efforts to create oceanic natural knowledge, often centuries earlier. By documenting the legends and experiences of people who worked on and lived by the ocean—divers, sailors, and fishermen, among others—and corroborating their stories with firsthand observation, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century natural historians built a nascent science of the sea. In its close focus on "sea beans" and "barnacle geese," subjects of wide conjecture and earnest curiosity, the essay shows how shallow waters welcomed new actors onto the scientific stage and decentered the geographies of knowledge production, thereby advancing contemporary knowledge of oceanic circulation as well as the taxonomies and ecologies of coastal creatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in ecology and evolution today often emphasizes an equilibrium view of dynamical systems, to the point where historical explanations are largely ignored. Such views are especially prominent in the mathematical modeling of such systems where "solving" a model means finding and characterizing the stability of its equilibria. I argue that history is far too important in biology to be discounted in this way. I then outline a number of different "flavors" of history, by which I mean potentially overlapping ways in which history can play a critical role in biological processes. I illustrate these flavors with examples from the ecological and evolutionary literature, and demonstrate that adding an explicitly historical perspective leads to a deeper understanding of the relevant biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the cataloging of a collection of primary source materials of French opera and ballet scores donated to the Harvard University Houghton Library by former Harvard musicologist John Milton Ward. The article discusses the changes in full engravings that illustrated elements of the operas. It also discusses the Paris, France, family the Ballards and their music printing monopoly.

The article discusses the publication of Dutch-language imprints during colonial America. According to the article, publishers such as William Bradford and John Peter Zenger produced most of the Dutch-language books in colonial America, in addition to publishers Hugh Gaine, Henry Deforeest, and James Parker. The article states that almanacs comprised most of the printed Dutch books, followed by Dutch Reformed and Lutheran church catechisms, sermons, and tracts.

Games and other forms of play are used in today's libraries to attract underserved patrons, to introduce patrons to other library resources and services, and to facilitate engagement between library patrons. While many perceive gaming as a new library service, gaming services have been part of librarianship since the nineteenth century through chess clubs. During the Great Depression, libraries supported patrons with puzzle contests and developed circulating toy and game collections. Academic libraries built game collections for research and classroom needs, while school libraries collected and facilitated educational games to aid teachers. Video games have been used in libraries to help patrons learn to use technology and to bring groups of patrons together to enjoy shared experiences. The goal of this article is to demonstrate the different ways in which libraries have used games, toys, and puzzles over the last 150 years through both collections and services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eleanor (Edwards) Ledbetter, who served immigrant populations in Cleveland throughout most of the Progressive Era and the Great Depression, was one of the first librarians to advocate for multiculturalism (then called cultural pluralism) as opposed to Americanism. In providing multicultural and multilingual library services for immigrants, Ledbetter was active locally as librarian at the Broadway Branch of the Cleveland Public Library and member of the Cleveland Americanization Committee and nationally as chair of the American Library Association's Committee on Work with the Foreign Born. She was recognized internationally as a bibliographer of Polish literature and translator of Czech folktales, for which she was awarded honors by the Polish and Czechoslovak governments, and as an unofficial ambassador for the American public library in eastern and southeastern Europe, specifically the countries of the former Yugoslavia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the historical relationships between libraries, policy, and politics in the United States. Far too often, policy and political discussions related to libraries have little historical context. While libraries have long viewed themselves as a pillar of democracy by supporting informed, educated, and engaged citizenry, political and policy decisions have treated libraries in a number of different ways, ranging from neglect to direct intervention. Tracing the development of the relationships between libraries, policy, and politics at local, state, and national levels over time, this article posits that these relationships have passed through four distinct phases. Understanding these phases and incorporating these understandings into library advocacy and perspectives in political and policy discourse will allow libraries to better assert the contributions of libraries to democracy, the reasons for the stances they take, and the importance of political and policy decisions that support and adequately fund libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid growing isolationism after World War I, the American Library Association transferred its wartime programs to train librarians in Europe and promote the American model of public libraries. Working in collaboration with American philanthropists and members of the French library community, ALA established a permanent library school in Paris that operated from 1924 to 1929. This article traces the school's evolution from an ALA-run program for a few French librarians to a center for international librarianship aimed at creating a global professional structure and promoting international understanding. In pursuing these global ambitions, the Paris Library School became central to the development of international librarianship and placed the library profession at the forefront of wider internationalist activities that are often cited as precursors to current trends in globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the eighteenth century there were enough printed sources and archival materials to challenge or even overwhelm historians of that day. Two productive editors of lexicons and information management were Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, who taught history at the University of Leipzig and became the chief librarian at his university, and Johann Heinrich Zedler, an eminent collector of biographical data. Jöcher published his multivolume Allegemeines Gelehrten Lexicon in 1750-51. Jöcher's chief rival and competitor, Zedler, published and finished his 64-volume Universal-Lexicon 1732-50. Both Jöcher and Zedler claimed much networking among other scholars. Some questions treated in this essay include the following: What characterized Jöcher's and Zedler's library and source management? In what ways is their viral work still of use and value to librarians and other scholars? Does revisiting old and dusty scholarship help us understand our own information jam? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the financial context of the development of modern science in Republican China (1912–1949) during the 1920s. At that time, funding for related endeavors was channeled first through the China Medical Board of the Rockefeller Foundation and then through the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture, a body that oversaw part of America's remission of indemnities paid by China under the Boxer Protocol (1901). Although both entities drew their entire funding from U.S. sources, the transition from the private foundation as principal patron to the backflow of indemnities can be seen as a process through which Chinese promoters and practitioners of science earnestly sought and eventually secured control of resources for their own institution-building efforts. Still more important, active Chinese involvement extended the role of these funding agents from mere donors of physical assets to portals where concerned individuals and organizations intersected. It was this new capacity that smoothed the way for a self-perpetuating scientific community to emerge and prosper well into the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the important role played by roadways in the expansion of Buddhism in ancient Japan which is defined as late seventh through early ninth centuries. Topics covered include the emergence of connectivity in Japan and the darker side of a networked society, the Japanese state as a highway network, and the rise in temple construction alongside road construction.

The article examines the Plague response in Late Medieval Valencia, Spain. It reports that Plague had been in the city since March 1395 , and despite the council's best efforts, the death toll continued to rise and the councilmen authorized several new measures to combat the epidemic. They organized charitable donations "to placate divine anger," and a procession to the chapel of Our Lady of Mercy to beseech divine mercy for the said plague.

The United States' present neoliberal era shares with earlier tumultuous periods significant repressive tendencies in the political and economic domains. In the past, leading social workers confronted such crises in public forums and venues. This discourse analysis examines how they constructed compelling democratic narratives that influenced the enactment of beneficial social policy within three periods of democratic crisis. These social work leaders were members of presidential administrations, leaders of social work professional associations, directors of civil society organizations, and prominent writers for the profession or the public. They communicated through public and professional speeches, peer-reviewed articles, pamphlets, radio addresses, and congressional testimony. Discourse analysis reveals democratic themes such as autonomy, human dignity, equality, recognition, fostering of human capacity, social responsibility, and the necessity of moral contemplation. The historical lesson is that all social workers today should advance democratic discourse in their areas of influence to stem neoliberalism and promote democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Georg Agricola's De Re Metallica (1556) is an impressive work about mining arts and sciences, still used as a reference work to understand the mining world of his time and to analyze the relationships between scholars and practitioners. This essay begins by studying how Agricola presents the underground surveying, also known as geometria subterranea. How does the author's mathematics relate to contemporary geometry or to actual surveying practices? Second, the essay contrasts his scholarly approach with sixteenth-century administrative and technical documents, as well as mining sermons. Comparing the practical geometry contained in the De Re Metallica with different kinds of sources helps to question the relationships between the arts and natural and exact sciences in the practical settings of early modern Europe. Finally, it argues for a distinction between the inquiry on the historical progress of mathematics in civil life and philosophical questions about the rise of new sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the popularity and consumption of coffee in provincial Great Britain from its introduction in roughly 1650 until circa 1720, by focusing on records for Norfolk, Cheshire, and South Lancashire taken from three types of historical sources: port books; records from the ecclesiastical and quarter session courts; and probate inventories. An historiography overview of coffee in Great Britain is also presented. Other topics include popular culture, a comparison between the tobacco and coffee trades, coffeehouses, and coffee's impact on society and public sphere.

The social survey movement of the early twentieth century made an important contribution to quantitative and qualitative investigation, social reform, and advocacy in social work. This Progressive Era approach galvanized social workers and others around a promising method to assess and attack urban social problems. The Pittsburgh Survey of 1907–8 served as the first and archetypal example of a comprehensive project to understand an entire city and engender reform. This article reintroduces the profession to this episode in social work history and examines its relatively limited impact on Pittsburgh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several prominent accounts suggest that democratic transitions are more likely to take place when opposition to the incumbent regime is led by certain social groups. We further develop the argument that opposition movements dominated by industrial workers or the urban middle classes have both the requisite motivation and capacity to bring about democratization. To systematically test this argument, we collect new data on the social composition of antiregime opposition movements, globally from 1900 to 2006. We find that movements dominated by one of these urban groups more often result in democracy, both when compared to other movements and to situations without organized mass opposition. As expected, the relationship is stronger in urban than rural societies, and in more recent decades. When further differentiating the groups and accounting for plausible alternative explanations, the relationship between industrial worker campaigns and democratization is very robust, whereas the evidence is mixed for middle-class campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terrain is central to understanding why some countries experience contentious ethnic divisions and civil war. While existing research specifies a direct effect of rugged terrain on civil war (i.e., it impedes state efforts to counter rebellion), we argue that terrain has an overlooked indirect effect on civil war via its historical influence on the distribution and political status of ethnic groups. We argue that access to variable rugged terrain facilitated the development and survival of more distinct ethnic groups by both restricting interaction among communities in rugged areas and complicating state repression. Both arguments suggest that groups in rugged areas face greater risk of political marginalization. Using geocoded data on civil war, terrain, and the distribution and political status of ethnic groups, we demonstrate that up to 40% of rugged terrain's effects on civil war are mediated by its indirect effect on the exclusion of politically relevant ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do party strongholds exacerbate partisan extremism? Using over 140 years of election data and roll call votes I find that, on average, members of Congress elected in states where their party overwhelmingly dominates tend to moderate from their national party's ideology when compared to members elected in more competitive settings. I argue that heavily one-party states have often been engendered by widespread agreement over locally salient issues, group affect, or imbalanced party organization, not because the electorate consistently agrees with one national party. Consequently, representatives have incentive to run under the dominant party label but must respond to diverse electoral pressures that align to both national parties. While scholars prominently observe one-partyism in the Democratic South, I observe that the plains and rural west, particularly between 1896 and 1932, can be characterized as one-party Republican, too. Perhaps surprisingly, state party strength since the 1990s, in a historical perspective, is quite balanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a literary criticism of classical philology "Oscan Kúnsíf Deívúz and the Di Consentes." Topics discussed include Adriano La Regina, who published the text; existence of a Tiberian-era cup with the name "opalis" written on it; and the Sabellic language, in which language-specific sound change is to be ordered before Final Syllable Syncope.

The article discusses the meaning of 15th century pageant form and culture of 'Purification of the Virgin', which was first sponsored by independent religious house York's Hospital of St. Leonard, England. Topics include early prominence of female roles such as the Virgin Mary and widowed prophetess Anna, emphasis on women's religious lives in York's civic structure and dramatic performance during the York cycle's early days.

This essay challenges traditional assumptions about the small-town American public library and the roles it has played in its community. Conventional thinking and professional rhetoric grounded on a "user in the life of the library" perspective identifies the public library as a neutral agency "essential to democracy" that guards against censorship and makes vital information accessible to all. From a "library in the life of the user" perspective, however, this essay argues that a particular smalltown public library during a particular time period was indeed essential to its local community, but instead of supplying vital information "essential to democracy," it functioned primarily as an active agency peacefully mediating local cultural and literary values, supplying patron-driven fictional media, and providing public space--all of which over the generations enabled its host community to weave a socially harmonious fabric that its public library helped craft and then put on public display. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two theoretical models dominate discussion of research methods in the history of reading: "market" models such as Robert Darnton's communications circuit and "resistance" models such as those that draw on Michel de Certeau's concept of poaching. This article suggests that both make important contributions but also have limitations, especially when researching later nineteenth- and twentieth-century print culture. An alternative approach considers institutional sites of print as a middle layer that can bridge the gap between structure and agency and between macro and micro views. These sites are also spaces where activities of reading and writing may intersect, since they provide opportunities for individuals to both produce and consume texts. Moreover, an explicitly institutional view gives researchers a window onto the acts of reading and writing by nonelite groups for whom few individual records survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]