Alternative Chronologies Research Articles

SISALv2: a comprehensive speleothem isotope database with multiple age–depth models

Abstract. Characterizing the temporal uncertainty in palaeoclimate records is crucial for analysing past climate change, correlating climate events between records, assessing climate periodicities, identifying potential triggers and evaluating climate model simulations. The first global compilation of speleothem isotope records by the SISAL (Speleothem Isotope Synthesis and Analysis) working group showed that age model uncertainties are not systematically reported in the published literature, and these are only available for a limited number of records (ca. 15 %, n=107/691). To improve the usefulness of the SISAL database, we have (i) improved the database's spatio-temporal coverage and (ii) created new chronologies using seven different approaches for age–depth modelling. We have applied these alternative chronologies to the records from the first version of the SISAL database (SISALv1) and to new records compiled since the release of SISALv1. This paper documents the necessary changes in the structure of the SISAL database to accommodate the inclusion of the new age models and their uncertainties as well as the expansion of the database to include new records and the quality-control measures applied. This paper also documents the age–depth model approaches used to calculate the new chronologies. The updated version of the SISAL database (SISALv2) contains isotopic data from 691 speleothem records from 294 cave sites and new age–depth models, including age–depth temporal uncertainties for 512 speleothems. SISALv2 is available at https://doi.org/10.17864/1947.256 (Comas-Bru et al., 2020a).

An Alternative Chronology for the Xia Dynasty and Discussion on Issues Related to Xia Culture

Abstract This paper proposes an alternative chronology for the Xia dynasty [ca. 2100-1600 BCE] based on the respective year counts and generation numbers of the Xia, Shang [ca. 1600-1046 BCE], and Zhou [1046-256 BCE] dynasties. It argues that Qi 啟 founded the Xia dynasty midway through the twentieth century BCE and further discusses questions relating to the capital cities and culture of the Xia. By integrating archeological material, it further contends that the ancient city of Wangchenggang 王城崗 located in Dengfeng 登封 was Yangcheng 陽城, the capital established by Yu 禹. It also argues that the Wadian 瓦店 site in Yuzhou 禹州 may have been inhabited by Yu and Qi, that the ancient city of Xinzhai 新砦 was an early capital of the Xia dynasty from the reigns of Qi to Shao Kang 少康, and that the Erlitou 二里頭 site was the capital of the Xia dynasty during its middle and late periods after the reign of Di Huai 帝槐. Xia culture should be approached as a concept that blends the disciplines of archeology and history and defined as the Xia people and the Xia dynasty within its region of governance or a culture whose creators mostly consisted of the Xia people. Furthermore, the ruins of the Xinzhai period represent Xia culture during its formative period, while Erlitou culture represents Xia culture during its maturity.

Possibility and Peril: Trade Unionism, African Cold War, and the Global Strands of Kenyan Decolonization

Abstract Trade unionism was at the leading edge of African freedom struggle in the 1940s and 1950s. It was an incubator where different visions of decolonized futures vied for ascendency after WWII. This article analyzes international labor networks and trade union activism in Kenya to explore the entanglements of decolonization and Cold War from Africa in the 1940s to 1960s, an era when competing modes of anticolonial internationalism laid paths to independence. This story is told in two phases. Through Makhan Singh, the article assesses the influence of Indo-African connection, Marxism and the radical left on labor organization over the 1940s. Then, through Tom Mboya, the article charts Kenyan affiliation to the anticommunist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) from the early 1950s. It shows how this internationalist volte-face transformed Kenya’s trade union landscape, propelled anticolonial agitation and, by the late 1950s, wrought irreparable fractures in fledgling pan-African institutions over the very nature of postcolonialism. The article argues that mobile African labor leaders coproduced, domesticated, and molded Cold War networks—that the conduits of early global Cold War agency ran both ways. Singh and Mboya were interlocutors in pluripotent world conversations marshaled for African decolonization. They also helped delineate the terms of global dialogue at a moment of neocolonial peril and decolonizing opportunity. This calls on historians to define alternative chronologies of globalist possibility masked by the tighter constraints placed on African states in the later twentieth century.

Victorian Feminist Criticism: Recovery Work and the Care Community

It is fitting that this article emerged from a conference in which the orderly progression of speakers was continually modified by exchanges within the conference space, for these two ways of organizing information form the subject of this article. When we aim to recover Victorian women writers, we often imagine a particular case in a timeline, selecting and extracting in a tacit model of linear orderliness. This is particularly significant in what we might call “recovery feminism,” the practice of salvaging texts that have been lost to history. Recovery feminism has dominated Victorianist feminist criticism since its development in the late 1970s, and I practiced it enthusiastically in my first book,The Forgotten Female Aesthetes. In this article, I want to acknowledge what recovery feminism has given us, but I also want to delineate the profound and often unarticulated ways it continues to structure our work, often with unintended consequences. In order to explore alternative forms of feminism, I assess theories of influence and intertextuality, and I use Charlotte M. Yonge'sThe Heir of Redclyffe(1853) as an example that both thematizes this issue and acts as a case study of forms of feminist criticism. A viable feminist criticism, I contend, ought to be able to address a novel likeHeir, andHeiritself may be able to provide a model for how to do that. Such a model of feminist practice might actually resemble the simultaneous, atemporal, interactive model of the conference day. In the digital era, we occupy an alternative chronology, in which we envision ourselves not as strenuously excavating the last disintegrating relics of the past, but rather as choosing among multiple simultaneous virtual texts, severed from markers of time or space. What might be a feminist critical practice for the way we work now?

Toward Embracing Multiple Perspectives in World History Curricula: Interrogating Representations of Intercultural Exchanges Between Ancient Civilizations in Quebec Textbooks

Guided by critical discourse analysis, this study analyzes how ancient civilizations are constructed in high school history textbooks used in Quebec, Canada. The findings suggest that the narrative generally ignores 2-way intercultural exchanges. The narrative is also Eurocentric, silencing sub–Saharan Africa’s contributions and nonmaterial influences of non-Western civilizations, such as ancient Near Eastern influences on the Judeo–Christian monotheistic tradition. Such depictions normalize a dominance paradigm that sanctions the supremacy of particular civilizations, religions, or groups. Students need to develop a reflective historical consciousness that is conducive to intergroup dynamics based on respect for diversity. Thus, in studying ancient civilizations, they should be encouraged to interrogate their own worldviews, explore the interdependence of human civilizations, and engage with omitted counternarratives, alternative chronologies, and periodization.

The Tepi Shemu Feast: A Tool for Testing Chronologies of Dynasty 21 to 25?

Due to the lack of a reliable king list and secure reign lengths, some freedom still exists to rearrange and re-date Egyptian kings of Dynasties 21 to 25. In recent articles, Ad Thijs as well as Michael Bányai have elaborated alternative chronologies for large parts of the Egyptian Third Intermediate Period. Various suggested chronologies will be discussed in this article, taking into account the Karnak Priestly Annals, the Nile Level Records, the Chronicle of Prince Osorkon, Assyrian and Biblical texts referring to Egypt or Nubia, and astronomical data. The main focus rests on the astronomical data and the basic idea that it seems unlikely that priestly inductions during the Tepi Shemu feast took place on miscellaneous lunar days in different years. A tentative reconstruction of the course of events of the Tepi Shemu feast is proposed.

The Docimium Marble Sculptures of the Grotto of Tiberius at Sperlonga

Seventeen marble samples drawn from the Scylla, Polyphemos, and Pasquino Groups, the Theft of the Palladium statue group, and the Ganymede statue discovered at Sperlonga in 1957 were investigated scientifically and proved to be all Docimium marble from the quarries of İscehisar near Afyon. New quarry data now available for the lithos lartios of Rhodes and for the white marble of the island of Kos and the quarries of Göktepe near Aphrodisias allow us to rule out old hypotheses as well as newly discovered sources of marble. These results as well as technical details about the manufacture of the sculptures seem to fully cohere with Andreae’s hypothesis that the Sperlonga groups were made on-site during the Tiberian age. They also tend to exclude alternative chronologies. The same arguments, however, make it difficult to believe that the Sperlonga sculptures and the Laocoön, thought to be made by the same Rhodian sculptors (Plin., HN 36.37) joining together several blocks of Parian Lychnites, are coeval. This apparent incongruity is briefly discussed, and the possibility of reconciling prosopographical and art historical considerations with technical marble data is examined. A free, downloadable appendix can be found under this article’s abstract on AJA Online.

An alternative chronology for the art of Chauvet cave

It is now 20 years since the discovery of the Grotte Chauvet with its impressive cave art, but controversy continues over the antiquity of the images. Radiocarbon assays have been used to argue that the ‘black series’ charcoal drawings date to the Aurignacian period, more than 20 000 years earlier than traditional stylistic models would suggest. This paper questions the validity of the radiometric dating and cautions against reliance solely on the date of the charcoal. Instead, the authors propose an alternative chronology for the art of Chauvet based on stylistic comparanda, palaeontological remains and stratigraphic evidence.

A new monthly chronology of the US industrial cycles in the prewar economy

This article extends earlier efforts at redating the US industrial cycles for the prewar period (1890–1938) using the methodologies proposed by Bry and Boschan (1971) and Hamilton (1989) and based on the monthly industrial production index constructed by Miron and Romer (1990) and modified by Romer (1994). The alternative chronology detects 90% of the peaks and troughs identified by the NBER and Romer (1994), but the new dates are consistently dated earlier for more than 50% of them, especially as regards the NBER troughs. The new dates affect the comparison of the average duration of recessions and expansions in both pre-WWI and interwar eras. Whereas the NBER reference dates show an increase in average duration of the expansions between the pre-WWI and interwar periods, the new dates show evidence of shortened length of expansions. However, the new dates confirm the traditional finding that contractions lasted longer in the post-war period than during the pre-war period.

Sequence and Lyric Narrative in Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War

but are in retrospect better described by alterity. Its structural and rhetorical casuistries demand that we compare the rhetorical purposes of its sections to one another. Because the promise of coherence is only rescinded at the end of the book, the alternative chronologies of each of the different generic subsections can fruitfully be compared (there is no ultimate reason to prefer Auden’s sonnet sequence to Isherwood’s “Travel-Diary,” although many critics do). Moreover, my reading suggests that a limit-case like Journey to a War, composed of instantaneous lyrical fragments, can further expand current rhetorical theories of narrative within poetry and of lyric-narrative progression in particular. By all accounts made by real readers (contemporary reviews, Auden’s own later reassessment, Auden’s late-career embarrassment, etc.), judgment of the authors and their encounters occurs throughout the text as well as via retrospective assessment of the project. Tracking those judgments as they occur, and relating them to the text’s peculiar habit of eliciting hostile reactions to its mission, is integral to understanding the book’s structure and the rhetoric of its aspirations. Only once we recognize the weak narrativity of Journey to a War and modify our current understanding of how judgments drive readerly progression through lyricnarrative hybrids, can we begin to theorize its humane attempt to intervene in the Sino-Japanese conflict. Lyric Instantaneity and Montage Poetry criticism is at best ill-equipped to discuss poetic narrative; critics forfend talk of story by focusing largely on characterization, insisting that lyric speakers are utterly distinct from narrators, and that if those speakers accidentally narrate events, any consideration of their causal association should be subsumed to the greater understanding their rhetorical relation reveals about the speaker. As a genre, lyric is best known for the suggestion of intimacy between poet and audience. That intimacy has long been understood as the convention of lyric instantaneity—that no time passes over the course of a lyric, regardless of its length. Literary glossaries emphasize the ephemerality of the form, creating a context through which to read any slightly-longer-than-instantaneous utterance as if it transpired within an instant. A typical lyric, like “Yesterday” by the Beatles, may contain descriptions of prior events, but contains no narrative to speak of: the story behind Paul’s breakup with his unspecified paramour may be inferred, but within the “today” of the song’s recording, the persona is more concerned with bemoaning the fact that “she had to go” than finding out why (the lament that “she wouldn’t say” indicates his frustration with his beloved’s intransigence rather than prompting the reader to guess at her reasons for rejecting him). “Yesterday” circles repetitively around a single evocation of sadness and loss, and never progresses beyond it (indeed, why should it?); through several refrains, our acquaintance with his sullen loneliness becomes more and more profound. Time passes as one reads a lyric, but not within the world it conveys; any events mentioned are related retrospectively, because action is understood to exist outside of, or beyond the limited scope of, or superfluously beneath the interests of the lyric poem.

Duration of Greenland Stadial 22 and ice-gas Δage from counting of annual layers in Greenland NGRIP ice core

Abstract. High-resolution measurements of chemical impurities and methane concentrations in Greenland ice core samples from the early glacial period allow the extension of annual-layer counted chronologies and the improvement of gas age-ice age difference (Δage) essential to the synchronization of ice core records. We report high-resolution measurements of a 50 m section of the NorthGRIP ice core and corresponding annual layer thicknesses in order to constrain the duration of the Greenland Stadial 22 (GS-22) between Greenland Interstadials (GIs) 21 and 22, for which inconsistent durations and ages have been reported from Greenland and Antarctic ice core records as well as European speleothems. Depending on the chronology used, GS-22 occurred between approximately 89 (end of GI-22) and 83 kyr b2k (onset of GI-21). From annual layer counting, we find that GS-22 lasted between 2696 and 3092 years and was followed by a GI-21 pre-cursor event lasting between 331 and 369 yr. Our layer-based counting agrees with the duration of stadial 22 as determined from the NALPS speleothem record (3250 ± 526 yr) but not with that of the GICC05modelext chronology (2620 yr) or an alternative chronology based on gas-marker synchronization to EPICA Dronning Maud Land ice core. These results show that GICC05modelext overestimates accumulation and/or underestimates thinning in this early part of the last glacial period. We also revise the possible ranges of NorthGRIP Δdepth (5.49 to 5.85 m) and Δage (498 to 601 yr) at the warming onset of GI-21 as well as the Δage range at the onset of the GI-21 precursor warming (523 to 654 yr), observing that temperature (represented by the δ15N proxy) increases before CH4 concentration by no more than a few decades.

Violence et guerre moderne dans les Balkans à l’aube du xx e siècle

Modern warfare and violence in the Balkans on the eve of the 20th centuryThis article is a contribution to the reappraisal of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, considered in their historical proximity with recently radicalised colonial wars, the Russo-Japanese War and the Great War.The first part analyses the military events of the short and violent campaigns of winter 1912 and summer 1913, taking into account the prewar preparation of the belligerants on European standarts, as to equipment, armament and doctrine. From the battlefield, an alternative chronology of “war violence” draws a large 1904-1915 period.Then, the medical dimension of the conflict, explored through experience reports of foreign medical personnel serving during the war, allows to penetrate behind the front lines, notably in recently occupied areas submitted to high intensity violences.The last part of the article draws historical hypothesis concerning the colonial/industrial/genocidal war problematic. The conclusion stresses the importance of representational impact of the Balkan Wars on the continental military, facing the aporical question of “moderne warfare” after the manchurian experience and preparing themselves to cope with a frontal conflict in Europe, in which the probable civilian involvement could be the critical point.

Comment on “Abrupt change in tropical African climate linked to the bipolar seesaw over the past 55,000 years” by E. T. Brown, T. C. Johnson, C. A. Scholz, A. S. Cohen, and J. W. King

Comment on “Abrupt change in tropical African climate linked to the bipolar seesaw over the past 55,000 years” by E. T. Brown, T. C. Johnson, C. A. Scholz, A. S. Cohen, and J. W. King

Forward-looking Estimation of Default Probabilities with Italian Data

The solution adopted in Basel II to deal with procyclicality of capital requirements (i.e. through the cycle ratings and long-run average estimates of default probabilities) implies a reduction in the risk-sensitivity that contradicts the original spirit of the new framework. In order to preserve risk-sensitivity and to dampen procyclicality at the same time, Pederzoli and Torricelli (2005) set up a model which relies on a business cycle forecast in the estimation of the default probability and provide an application for the US. The modelling approach hinges on a forward-looking definition of capital requirements, in anticipation of the business cycle with a possible smoothing effect on the business cycle turning points. The present paper checks the robustness of the approach for the Italian case, where alternative business cycles chronologies are used and ratings have to be approximated by exploiting default data provided by the Bank of Italy. Findings suggest that the comparison between the alternative chronologies is an important issue.

Dating the Iron Age I/II Transition in Israel: First Intercomparison Results

Nearly a decade ago, a different chronology than the conventional absolute chronology for the early Iron Age in Israel was suggested. The new, lower chronology “transfers” Iron Age I and Iron Age IIA contexts in Israel, traditionally dated to the 11th and 10th centuries BCE, to the 10th and 9th centuries, respectively. Thus, it places the Iron I|IIA transition at about 920–900 BCE. This alternative chronology carries important implications for Israelite history, historiography, and Bible research, as well as for the chronologies of other regions around the Mediterranean. Relevant radiocarbon data sets published to date, which were measured at different sites by different laboratories, were claimed to be incompatible. Therefore, the question of agreement between laboratories and dating methods needs to be addressed at the outset of any study attempting to resolve such a tight chronological dilemma. This paper addresses results pertaining to this issue as part of a comprehensive attempt to date the early Iron Age in Israel based on many sites, employing different measuring techniques in 2 laboratories. The intercomparison results demonstrate that: a) the agreement between the 2 laboratories is well within the standard in the 14C community and that no bias can be detected in either laboratory; and b) calculating the Iron I|IIa transition in 3 different ways (twice independently by the measurements obtained at the 2 labs and then by combining the dates of both) indicates that the lower chronology is the preferable one.

Fra Satire e Rime ariostesche (Gargnano del Garda 14-16 ottobre 1999) by Claudia Berra (review)

MLRy 99.1, 2004 215 even ifit could almost certainly have been just as effectivelyargued without frequent reference to the 'Bakhtinian reading', to which it is presented as an alternative, and to other seemingly tangential theories of the grotesque referredto in the final chapter. Papio's book is, as its cover claims, 'the firstthorough analysis of [Masuccio's] tales in English'. But it is also an important addition to the whole critical literature on Masuccio. It is a handsomely produced volume with minimal typographical errors and containing the most complete and up-to-date bibliography of the short-story writer who?and I would fully concur with the author on this?'has found new life in a modern age accustomed to finding aesthetic pleasure in the juxtaposition of comic and horrificevents'. University of Wales Swansea Howard Moss Fra Satire e Rime ariostesche (Gargnano del Garda 14-16 ottobre 1999). Ed. by Claudia Berra. (Quaderni di Acme, 43) Milan: Cisalpino (Istituto Editoriale Universitario?MonduzzoEditore). 2000. 591pp. ?31. ISBN 88-323-4593-3. This volume contains a series of essays on Ariosto's 'minor' poetic works, the Satire and the Rime. The firstsection, dealing with the Satire, opens with a series of general essays. Eduardo Saccone discusses the creation of the narrating voice through a series of comparisons between the poet's values and those attributed to others. Michel Paoli's essay argues against traditional readings of the satires as autobiographically 'true', providing convincing evidence for an alternative chronology, with the fifth satire being the first in order of composition. Simone Albonico adduces further arguments for the literary nature of the Satire with a detailed reading of the first satira, noting a series of thematic and textual links with the seventh poem in order to demonstrate the collection's complex structure. Angelo Romano discusses Ariosto's ambiguous view of Rome, to which he was a frequent visitor,and the contrast between the vices of the Papal city and the literary ideal of humanistic Rome. Alessandra Villa examines the various fables recounted in the Satire with reference to both their function within the texts and Ariosto's sources. These essays are complemented by some in-depth considerations of individual poems. Anna Maria Cabrini discusses the firstsatira, with particular reference to Ariosto's debts to Horace's satirical poetry, and the presentation of Ippolito d'Este as a 'failed' Maecenas. Antonio Corsaro's essay maps the background to the sixth satire, and Ariosto's relationship to the humanist tradition and the accusations of misbelief frequently directed at literature and its creators. Claudia Berra examines the function ofthe seventh satira as a conclusion to the collection, and its recapitulation and reformulation of two recurring themes, the death of hope, and the author's 'madness', here interpreted as an implicit criticism of the worldly preoccupations of others. On a differentnote, Piero Floriani discusses the Cinquecento satire in general, and then goes on to examine Ariosto's influence on Pietro Nelli. The section on the Rime opens with Claudio Vela's discussion of Cesare Bozzetti's seminal work on Ariosto's lyric verse, including his unfinished edition of and com? mentary on the poems contained in MS Vaticano Rossiano 639 (Vr), published here for the firsttime. Bozzetti's 1985 essay on the Rime represents the starting point for almost all the studies which follow. Andrea Comboni notes some furtherinstances of intratextual links within Vr, and examines the textual presence of Gasparo Visconti, Niccolo da Correggio, and Antonio Tebaldeo in the Rime. Rinaldo Rinaldi surveys the importance ofthe themes of magic and silence, and of Celio Calcagnini's influence on Ariosto, with particular reference to the capitoli. Paola Vecchi Galli discusses the attribution of the capitolo 'Or che la terra di bei fiori e piena', concluding that its 216 Reviews attribution to Ariosto is at best unproven, and suggesting a more likely authorship by Tebaldeo. Stefano Carrai surveys Ariosto's use of classical Latin sources in the lyrics, alongside a series of Petrarchan citations. Massimo Malinverni takes the capitolo 'O piu che '1 giorno luminosa notte' as the starting point for a detailed investigation of the theme of the 'luminous night' from Propertius to Ariosto, with special reference...

An Archaeological Contribution to the Early Iron Age Chronological Debate: Alternative Chronologies for Phoenicia and Their Effects on the Levant, Cyprus, and Greece

The debate over the chronology of the early Iron Age in Israel by far transcends Palestinian archaeology, history, and biblical historiography. Chronologies for most of the adjacent regions, and th...

Cyclical aspects of business cycle turning points

This paper analyses changes in the intensity and duration of US business cycles through the spectrum of turning points chronology. We consider two alternative chronologies: one produced by the NBER dating committees and the other derived from the Markov switching regime model of the growth rate of general economic activity. As a result of favorable changes in economic conditions during the past few decades, the strength of traditional business cycles weakened and spread outside the typical band; that is, the periodicities of 2 to 8 years duration. Modern business cycles appear to be in interaction with major and minor cycles. A major NBER cycle of 10-year duration incorporates, on average, two 5-year cycles and each 5-year cycle embodies two minor cycles. On the other hand, the growth cycle of 10-year duration incorporates, on average, three cycles of 3.5 years duration, and each of them embodies one-and-a-half minor cycles.

Tracking the Economic Divergence of the North and the South

Questions relating to the distinctiveness of the American North and South have intrigued historians and the public for generations. In fact, these questions and broader related controversies have proven among the most long-lived and provocative in the literature of American history. Travelers visiting British North America in the eighteenth century, for example, often commented on the differences between the northern and southern colonies. Such travel commentary grew in both abundance and verve in the first half of the nineteenth century, with Tocqueville's Democracy in America being the most notable case in point. Questions relating to regional distinctiveness gained even greater currency with the approach of the Civil War, and many historians since that time, perhaps taking their cue from William Seward's famous irrepressible conflict speech of 1858, have sought to interpret the rupture between North and South in schematic, dichotomous terms: a split between two distinct economies, societies, and, at times, even civilizations. It is much easier, after all, to impart meaning to the 620,000 lives lost during the Civil War by arguing that those who died did so in defense of beliefs and values under attack by people with antithetical worldviews. Despite the power of this appeal to difference and to the idea of the irrepressibility of sectional conflict, this interpretation has not gone unchallenged. In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of Civil War historians sought to downplay differences between North and South by arguing that the war was repressible and targeting one group in particular for blame: the blundering generation of politicians holding office in the decades prior to the war. To these revisionists, political fallibility rather than distinctive beliefs and values, chance and circumstance rather than inevitability, best explain the coming of war. Scholars emphasizing difference quickly pointed out that the qualitative differences between the sections far outweighed their similarities, however numerous, and that even if the North and South were more similar than different, it does not necessarily follow that war was repressible. The Civil War revisionists never completely rebutted these arguments, and their interpretation is currently out of favor. Today, most scholars once again stress the differences rather than the similarities between the North and the South, even as they disagree among themselves over the details.(1) While political historians would doubtless offer alternative chronologies, economic historians commonly trace the roots of regional difference and distinctiveness back to the seventeenth century. The North and the South began to diverge as early as the mid-to-late seventeenth century when the formalization of racial slavery, the production of a staple crop (tobacco), and the rise of a nascent plantation sector set the South down a path never followed in temperate colonies in the North. These divergences were due largely to differences in climate, profit possibilities, and what classical economists called land--or natural resources--rather than to any stark contrasts in settlers' backgrounds, culture, or worldviews. Once the South embarked upon this path, inertial forces--what economists call lock-in mechanisms associated with path dependence, or path influence--worked to keep the region on a developmental route distinct from those followed in the North.(2) Not surprisingly, the materialist argument for path dependence or influence goes against the view that attributes economic differences between North and South predominantly to cultural differences between the dominant groups in the two regions. To downplay the importance of culture and cultural difference as independent variables is not to suggest that from the start the European settlers in the southern colonies were just like those in the northern colonies. Nor is it to privilege in any absolute or universal sense material concerns above all others. …

On seasonality and business cycle durations: A nonparametric investigation

Markov stochastic switching regime models indicate that business cycle phase transitions appear to exhibit uneven switching propensities throughout the calendar year. Instead of studying regime switching data, we investigate business cycle durations obtained from turning point chronologies to investigate this question. We test for the presence of seasonal features in duration data via nonparametric rank-based tests. This approach has some advantages over the parametric Markov stochastic switching regime models, since it only involves mild regularity conditions regarding the hazard model for business cycle turning points. We examine two alternative chronologies (NBER and Romer) to address the question of uneven propensity of switching.