Le Sueur Research Articles

Editorial

Editorial
 The first 11 articles in the first issue of 2014 deal with global legal topics ranging from outer space to domestic South African matters and legal challenges in other African countries, such as Uganda, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. Anél Ferreira-Snyman discusses legal challenges relating to the commercial use of outer space, with specific reference to space tourism. She points out that the current legal framework is outdated and no longer deals adequately with the rapidly developing space tourism industry. Further away from the moon, although it deals with creations of the mind and is just as mysterious for the average person, is the contribution of André van der Walt and Richard Shay, which analyses the South African Constitutional Court's treatment of intellectual property. They focus on the methodology that the Court has formulated to assess if state interference complies with constitutional provisions to determine if state intervention into property interests has been legitimate. The third contribution, by Joel Baloyi, also deals with a creation of the mind, namely copyright. He attempts through a comparative analysis to demystify the role of copyright as a tool for economic development in Africa and criticises the stifling effect the transferability principle has on the effectiveness of copyright in certain African countries. Bradley Slade discusses the differences between the concepts "public purpose" and "public interest" in the context of third party transfers as a result of property being expropriated for the realisation of public purposes in the fourth contribution. The influence of the Constitution of South Africa, 1996 on organ transplants is the topic of the fifth contribution, by Debbie Labuschagne and Pieter Carstens. They come to the conclusion that the South African government has failed to provide an effective legal framework to relieve the shortage of human organs available for transplantation. Sixthly, Lize Mills discusses recently proposed regulations prohibiting the advertising and promotion of infant formulae and other products marketed as being suitable for infants or young children with the purpose of promoting breast-feeding. The last five articles move further afield and deal with legal issues elsewhere in Africa. Dana van der Merwe gives a comparative overview of the relationship between digital information in certain legal fields in South Africa and Uganda. Nazreen Shaik-Premanov examines Zimbabwe's Marange conflict diamond situation and Lovemore Chiduza analyses the Zimbabwean constitutional provisions on judicial independence. Peter Obutte scrutinises ICT laws in Nigeria and the last two authors, Serges Kamga and Ogechukwu Ajoku, reflect on addressing human rights violations by extractive industries in both South Africa and Nigeria.
 Four notes are also published in this issue. The first one is an overview article by Christa Rautenbach dealing with the modern-day impact of cultural and religious diversity as reflected in the book on "Managing Family Justice in Diverse Societies". The other four notes are case discussions. The first one is a discussion of the case of Government of the Republic of Zimbabwe v Louis Karel Fick by Erika de Wet. The second one is a discussion of the case of Le Sueur v eThekwini Municipality by Warren Freedman, and the last one is a discussion of the case of Apollo Tyres v South Africa (Pty) Ltd v CCMA by Shamier Ebrahim.
 

The Legislative Authority of the Local Sphere of Government to Conserve and Protect the Environment: A Critical Analysis of Le Sueur v eThekwini Municipality [2013] ZAKZPHC 6 (30 January 2013)

Legislative authority in South Africa is divided among the national, provincial and local spheres of government. Section 43 of the Constitution provides in this respect that the legislative authority of the national sphere of government is vested in Parliament; that the legislative authority of the provincial sphere of government is vested in the provincial legislatures; and that the legislative authority of the local sphere of government is vested in the municipal councils.
 
 The allocation of legislative authority to municipal councils gives rise to a number of complex questions. One of these is the extent to which municipal councils are entitled to pass legislation that deals with the conservation and protection of the "environment". This issue was considered by the KwaZulu-Natal High Court: Pietermaritzburg in Le Sueur v eThekwini Municipality [2013] ZAKZPHC 6 (30 January 2013).
 
 In this case the High Court found that even though the functional area of "environment" has been explicitly allocated to the national and provincial spheres of government and not to the local sphere by the Constitution (see Schedule 4A of the Constitution), municipal councils are entitled to pass legislation that deals with the conservation and protection of the "environment", at least in those circumstances where it forms a part of "municipal planning".
 
 While there is no doubt that the functional area of "municipal planning" does encompass certain specific environmental matters at the local level, it does not encompass the broad area of the "environment", as the High Court suggests in its judgment. The approach adopted by the High Court, therefore, is open to some criticism. The purpose of this article is to set out and discuss the High Court’s judgment as well as the criticisms that may be levelled against it in the light of the allocation of legislative authority to the three spheres of government.

Localising Environmental Governance: The Le Sueur Case

In the matter of Le Sueur v Ethekwini Municipality the KwaZulu-Natal High Court decided that municipalities had the power to legislate on environmental issues such as biodiversity and conservation. This note argues that the precedent established in this case is that municipalities have authority to legislate upon environmental matters as an incident of municipal planning, which is an original constitutional power. In contrast to both the judgment and recent commentary, it argues that the source of municipal legislative authority over municipal planning is not based in legislative assignment but in s 156(5) of the Constitution (the "incidental power" provision relevant to local government). This argument is based on understanding the distinction between original and assigned powers, and the nature of the control that the national and provincial spheres exercise over Schedule 4B powers. Notwithstanding this inaccuracy in the judgment, it is argued that the precedent is a welcome one that can be justified not only on the basis of the principle of subsidiarity but also in terms of the emerging and increasingly important theory of social-ecological resilience.

Regeneration through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic. By Margaret Cook Andersen. France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization. Edited by A. J. B. Johnston, James D. Le Sueur, and Tyler Stovall.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+326. $55.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsRegeneration through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic. By Margaret Cook Andersen. France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization. Edited by A. J. B. Johnston, James D. Le Sueur, and Tyler Stovall.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+326. $55.00.Elinor AccampoElinor AccampoUniversity of Southern California Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 88, Number 4December 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/688806 Views: 64Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Phosphorus in the Minnesota River Basin: The debate over its source and ways to mitigate impacts

Phosphorus in the Minnesota River Basin: The debate over its source and ways to mitigate impacts

A Watershed Level Economic Analysis of Cellulosic Biofuel Feedstock Production with Consideration of Water Quality

<p>National policy supports the production of renewable energy from cellulosic feedstocks such as corn stover and switchgrass. These feedstocks have contrasting impacts on water quality. In this study, the regional supply response for cellulosic biofuel from these two feedstocks is estimated for the Le Sueur Watershed in South-Central Minnesota. The impacts of the resulting agricultural production activities on water quality in this northern corn belt watershed are also estimated. The Le Sueur River is a tributary of the Minnesota River, which in turn feeds into the Mississippi. The analysis is conducted with a multi-region, endogenous supply, mathematical programming model of the agriculture sector in the watershed. A unique aspect of the analysis is the spatial detail used in the production model. Results from a previous simulation analysis conducted with the Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model are used in the economic model to simulate the effects of the feedstock supply response on water quality in the Le Sueur. Sediment and nutrient losses from corn stover production make switchgrass more promising on environmental grounds, but the relatively high cost of production causes switchgrass to cover only a small part of crop land if farmers have unrestricted choice about how to supply cellulosic feedstocks.</p>

Role of courts in interpreting local government's environmental powers in South Africa

Local government in post-apartheid South Africa has undergone fundamental transformation. This is evident from its extensive governing powers and functions and its expanded developmental mandate. At the forefront of sustainable development, municipalities have legislative and executive powers to administer the matters listed in Schedules 4B and 5B of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996. Moreover, matters listed in Schedules 4A and 5A of the Constitution can be assigned to municipalities by national and provincial governments. Like other spheres of government, municipalities are obliged to contribute towards realising s 24 of the Constitution – guaranteeing environmental rights. However, the exact contours of their powers in promoting the objectives of s 24 of the Constitution are ill-defined and subject to ongoing definition by way of legislation, policies and case-law. This article argues that environmental litigation presents courts an opportunity to further redefine the powers of municipalities in fostering constitutional environmental objectives in South Africa. Drawing from Le Sueur and Another v eThekwini Municipality and Others [2013] ZAKZPHC 6 (30 January 2013), this article demonstrates how courts can play an important role in clarifying the environmental powers and functions of municipalities in South Africa. This article is based on a review of legal and extra-legal sources.

The Pregnant Body and Utopian Social Organization in Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl

This paper examines how Communist Party writer Meridel Le Sueur brings together personal narrative and political ideology as a way of writing the woman’s body and experiences into Depression-era class struggle. Le Sueur’s novel The Girl, written during the 1930s but not published until its 1978 rediscovery by feminists’ recovery efforts, offers an antidote to capitalism’s pervasive commodity fetishism and reification. The novel imagines an alternative social model: an interdependent society patterned on the pregnant woman’s body. By using allegory to connect the individual story of one woman to the larger economic and social problems facing working-class people during the Depression, Le Sueur’s novel demonstrates that the experiences of an individual can embody, communicate, and educate readers about stark political and economic realities. Le Sueur attends to the bodies, hungers, desires, and shared experiences of working-class women in order to counter the individualism and competition fostered by Depression-era society. Reading the novel allegorically, this paper proposes that Le Sueur offers a new way to educate and inspire a working class readership to support the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) cause—one that goes beyond didactic summaries of Marxist texts or the assumption that members of the working-class can intuit Marxist ideas by interpreting their conditions of oppression.

Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West

Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West

Comparing spectrophotometry and photography with hyperspectral imaging for pigments' characterization on paintings

Pigments characterization on paintings is usually made with X-ray fluorescence, traditional false color photography and optical microscopy. The use of optical techniques based on reflectance spectra, like reflectance spectrophotometry or hyperspectral imaging, is limited today to some case studies. We would like to improve these optical techniques for pigment characterization, because they are non-invasive and can give a lot of information. After comparing the ways to calibrate to reflectance spectrophotometry and hyperspectral imaging, we develop the two techniques for the specific study of pigments. We develop a Matlab program to analyze (identify and quantify) reflectance spectra given by spectrophotometry, and a new methodology based on false color composites to use hyperspectral images in a simple way. The choice of the spectral bands to identify pigments takes its roots in the maximization of spectral differences, and leads to the generation of 3 false color composites - called variable composites FC1, FC2 and FC3 - to distinguish the pigments of the four categories (blue, red, yellow and green). The results of spectrophotometry and variable composites on a painting of the 17th century by French painter Eustache Le Sueur are encouraging and consistent with other techniques' results. Our results should promote the use of spectrophotometry and hyperspectral imaging for pigment characterization in the future.

Characterizing pigments with hyperspectral imaging variable false-color composites

Hyperspectral imaging has been used for pigment characterization on paintings for the last 10 years. It is a noninvasive technique, which mixes the power of spectrophotometry and that of imaging technologies. We have access to a visible and near-infrared hyperspectral camera, ranging from 400 to 1000 nm in 80–160 spectral bands. In order to treat the large amount of data that this imaging technique generates, one can use statistical tools such as principal component analysis (PCA). To conduct the characterization of pigments, researchers mostly use PCA, convex geometry algorithms and the comparison of resulting clusters to database spectra with a specific tolerance (like the Spectral Angle Mapper tool on the dedicated software ENVI). Our approach originates from false-color photography and aims at providing a simple tool to identify pigments thanks to imaging spectroscopy. It can be considered as a quick first analysis to see the principal pigments of a painting, before using a more complete multivariate statistical tool. We study pigment spectra, for each kind of hue (blue, green, red and yellow) to identify the wavelength maximizing spectral differences. The case of red pigments is most interesting because our methodology can discriminate the red pigments very well—even red lakes, which are always difficult to identify. As for the yellow and blue categories, it represents a good progress of IRFC photography for pigment discrimination. We apply our methodology to study the pigments on a painting by Eustache Le Sueur, a French painter of the seventeenth century. We compare the results to other noninvasive analysis like X-ray fluorescence and optical microscopy. Finally, we draw conclusions about the advantages and limits of the variable false-color image method using hyperspectral imaging.

Application of FOSS4G and Open Data to Support Polio Eradication, Vaccine Delivery and Ebola Emergency Response in West Africa.

In Africa, the use of GIS technology in the health sector is still nascent, with cost and lack of expertise being significant barriers to utilization (Tanser and Le Sueur, 2002). Data is very critical to implementation of GIS to support health projects (Oppong, 1999) and one of the problems in Africa is decentralized and uncoordinated data collection (Tanser and Le Sueur, 2002) which contributes to inadequate access to spatial data to support health projects. Free Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) solutions can play a substantial role in various health projects across the continent, mainly because of the freedom it gives to their early adopters. Currently, FOSS4G (QGIS, Open Data Kit, OSRM, etc.) and Open Data tools (OpenStreetMap, CKAN, etc.) are used across several projects in supporting Ebola emergency response in West Africa, polio eradication and vaccine delivery in Northern Nigeria. The ongoing successes of these projects using FOSS4G clearly show that usage of these solutions in the health sector is sustainable and achievable in Africa. Cost-saving from the use of mature FOSS4G, eHealth Africa (eHA), a technology focused NGO, has been invested back into capacity building activities, thereby reducing the problem of lack of GIS expertise to support health projects. eHA has been able to train local personnel on utilization and application of GIS solutions. This helps to build stronger technical knowledge of its personnel and improve health services by offering GIS solutions built on FOSS4G and cloud servers based on Open Source software to make spatial data more accessible.

Book Review: Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, & Other Essays on American Belief, by Jeff Sharlet, ed

Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, & Other Essays on American Belief. Jeff Sharlet, ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. 424 pp. $30 hbk.It is hard to think of a writer better suited to editing an anthology on American religion than Jeff Sharlet. The Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College is also a talented journalist especially known for The Family and C Street, investigative works chronicling the ways in which Christian fundamentalism has permeated the political power structure in Washington, D.C. His latest offering is subtler-less expose than meandering meditation. But it offers equally valuable insight into the role of religion in America's politics, communities, and in the private lives of its citizens.More precisely, Radiant Truths concerns itself with American belief, which Sharlet defines as a subset of religion. In practice, focusing on this supposed subset has produced a nonfiction collection that's broader than what one might expect to find in a book about faith. Sharlet begins with Walt Whitman on a Civil War battlefield in 1863 and proceeds chronologically to end in 2011 with a fragment from Francine Prose in which she recounts bursting into tears on seeing the poet's verses at an Occupy Wall Street camp. In between, there are stories that face religion head-on, such as John Jeremiah Sullivan's hilarious and ultimately humane portrayal of Christian rock fans in Upon This Rock (2004) and Zora Neale Hurston's mesmerizing immersion into the Voodoo traditions of New Orleans in Hoodoo (1935). In others, such as the selection from Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968), readers could debate whether the fervor being explored is religious or something else-a manifestation of culture, say, or of a powerful but not necessarily divine political ideology.Unsurprisingly, Sharlet's fascination with the intersection between religion and politics holds. This is good for readers. Without it, he might not have included Garry Wills's incisive Whittier: First Day (1970), which connects Nixon's Quaker roots to a destructive, uniquely American myth of self-improvement. The piece manages to feel fresh despite the fact that Nixon is long gone. His reign may be over, but our national obsession with the self-made man persists to this day, affecting social and political progress in myriad ways. Likewise, Sharlet includes communist writer Meridel Le Sueur's 1934 account of a labor strike, I Was Marching. The piece is another that is not strictly about religion, but the prose is sharp and surprisingly current, offering lines like this to readers fresh off a year of headlines about racism, inequality, and police brutality:Our life seems to be marked with a curious and muffled violence over America, but this action has always been in the dark, men and women dying obscurely, poor and povertymarked lives, but now from city to city runs this violence, into the open, and colossal happenings stand bare before our eyes. …

Reply to comment by P. Passalacqua and E. Foufoula‐Georgiou on “Objective extraction of channel heads from high‐resolution topographic data”

Reply to comment by <scp>P</scp>. <scp>P</scp>assalacqua and <scp>E</scp>. <scp>F</scp>oufoula‐<scp>G</scp>eorgiou on “Objective extraction of channel heads from high‐resolution topographic data”

Localising environmental governance: the &lt;i&gt;Le Sueur &lt;/i&gt; case

In the matter of Le Sueur v Ethekwini Municipality the KwaZulu-Natal High Court decided that municipalities had the power to legislate on environmental issues such as biodiversity and conservation. This note argues that the precedent established in this case is that municipalities have authority to legislate upon environmental matters as an incident of municipal planning, which is an original constitutional power. In contrast to both the judgment and recent commentary, it argues that the source of municipal legislative authority over municipal planning is not based in legislative assignment but in s 156(5) of the Constitution (the "incidental power" provision relevant to local government). This argument is based on understanding the distinction between original and assigned powers, and the nature of the control that the national and provincial spheres exercise over Schedule 4B powers. Notwithstanding this inaccuracy in the judgment, it is argued that the precedent is a welcome one that can be justified not only on the basis of the principle of subsidiarity but also in terms of the emerging and increasingly important theory of social-ecological resilience.

Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction: Environment and Affect by Heather Houser

<i>Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction: Environment and Affect</i> by Heather Houser

A Forgotten Writer: Alice Beal Parsons and “Cross Purposes”

During a 1920 court trial in Rockford, Illinois, one of America's most famous lawyers came to the defense of a wealthy housewife who was indicted for conspiring for the overthrow of the government by force and violence (Rockford). Clarence Darrow (1857-1938), who would become best known for his role in the 1925 Monkey Trial, was the lead lawyer in this case, which shook the small city of Rockford. Of those indicted, the housewife was under particular scrutiny, as a local paper reported:The radical utterances of Mrs. Parsons have been town talk for a long time. Her activities and associations with those inclined toward revolutionary proceedings were known to all her acquaintances and friends who deplored the situation deeply, but their admonitions and friendly counsel are said to have been of no avail. She appeared to glory in her fanaticism, they said, and to live largely for the purpose of devouring Red literature and apparently was saturated with the doctrines of the radical writers. (Seeking Reds 1)Mrs. Parsons, the wife of a successful business owner, risked her social status for the working men and women of Rockford when she joined the Communist Labor Party-a decision that would lead to her arrest, her divorce, and the loss of her home. Today she has been largely forgotten by history, as have been so many housewives, their personal struggles and triumphs seemingly insignificant in the larger historical narrative. What makes her particular absence surprising, however, is that Parsons went on to have a career as a prolific radical writer who published fiction and nonfiction in an array of periodicals, such as the American Mercury, The Dial, Harper's, Scribner's, Survey Graphic, the Woman Citizen, the World Tomorrow, and the Yale Review. Even as she wrote regular book reviews for Harper's and The Nation, she saw her own novels reviewed in periodicals such as the Chicago Sunday Tribune, the New York Times, and the Saturday Review of Literature. She was compared to Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), praised by reviewers such as Mark Van Doren (1894-1972), and admired by fellow writers such as Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945); in short, Parsons's work was well known and well received (Bryant).1 Yet, only her book Woman's Dilemma (1926) has received critical attention, having been cited by social scientists,2 whereas the rest of her work has remained unexplored.Alice Beal Parsons's (1886-1962) importance lies in her participation in a movement of radical writers who examined the role of the middleclass woman in socialism, within which she produced a number of novels, stories, and articles about the topic. She was part of a small contingent who argued that a true engagement with the socialist cause could occur only if the writer completely shed the ideological trappings of her former, bourgeois life. When writing about her decision to renounce her in Rockford after her arrest, Parsons used language that suggests a reawakening or a rebirth, a bubbling life (Trial 239) inside her that could rise only once her past had died (44). In this regard, Parsons may have found a kindred spirit in other women writers of the period, such as Meridel Le Sueur (1900-1996), another middle-class writer who believed that involvement in socialism could be like a rebirth; when describing her own experience joining a labor strike, Le Sueur declares, I feel most alive (I Was 163). Le Sueur writes in another article, It is a hard road to leave your own class and you cannot leave by pieces or parts; is a birth and you have to be born whole out of it. In a complete new body. None of the old ideology is any good in it (The Fetish 303).3 Parsons, indeed, left her class in what Le Sueur calls a full belief (303) and gave up everything for socialism. Looking in as the narrator of her autobiographical novel, Parsons comments on that beginning of her new life: Now her lost selves were being released from captivity (Trial 411). …

Ecosomatic and Ethnological Pathologies: Ethnicity, Disability, and Capabilities in Meridel Le Sueur’s "Women on the Breadlines"

Research Article| October 01 2014 Ecosomatic and Ethnological Pathologies: Ethnicity, Disability, and Capabilities in Meridel Le Sueur’s "Women on the Breadlines" Lina Geriguis Lina Geriguis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Polish American Studies (2014) 71 (2): 19–42. https://doi.org/10.5406/poliamerstud.71.2.0019 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lina Geriguis; Ecosomatic and Ethnological Pathologies: Ethnicity, Disability, and Capabilities in Meridel Le Sueur’s "Women on the Breadlines". Polish American Studies 1 January 2014; 71 (2): 19–42. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/poliamerstud.71.2.0019 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressPolish American Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West Edited by Michael C. Steiner (review)

Reviewed by: Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West Edited by Michael C. Steiner J. Dee Kille Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West. Edited by Michael C. Steiner. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. xv + 399 pp. Notes, photographs, index. $39.95 cloth. Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West is a study of sixteen regional artists focused mainly on the 1930s and beyond. This collection of essays, each by a different scholar, examines artists from the Great Plains, the Midwest, the Northwest, and California. The fifteen scholars who wrote these studies closely examine how each of these artists represents regionalism and the depth to which their radicalism informed their works. In this study, “left radicalism” has been painted with a broad brush, a radical being defined as anyone who steps outside the mainstream. Meanwhile, the definition of a leftist runs the gamut from humanitarian to Communist and member of the Popular Front. Regionalism, too, has been redefined in several ways, as noted in each of the essays. The overall thesis behind these studies demonstrates that, where once all regionalists were considered conservative and regressive, many were actually radical and progressive. The radical writers Meridel Le Sueur, Josephine Herbst, Mari Sandoz, Sanora Babb, B. A. Botkin, Angie Debo, J. Frank Dobie, Américo Paredes, and the artist Joe Jones are familiar to many readers in the Great Plains. These regionalists covered the entire spectrum of radicalism and often reinforced each other’s work. In addition, many midwesterners will also be familiar with the works of Joseph Howard, D’Arcy McNickle, Robert Cantwell, John Sanford, Carlos Bulosan, John Steinbeck, and Carey McWilliams from the Northwest and California. Many of these regionalists were acquainted with the Great Plains writers, often traveling in the same leftist circles. Each brought his or her own interpretation to regionalism: Le Sueur and Herbst emphasized how local voices strove to be heard through the regional myths created by those later arrivals who conquered them and the land. Jones, in spite of efforts by local city fathers, insisted on painting the dignity of downtrodden workers. Botkin, on the other hand, took the unusual tack of demonstrating that diversity is integral to any understanding of regionalism. These are but a few of the radical regional stances presented in this book. But it is love of the land that informed their works, and through which these defenders of the downtrodden helped redefine regionalism while also broadening the definition of socialism to include human rights and human dignity. Thus these radical regionalists attempted to speak for the people who made the region what it really was; significantly, this was at a time when anyone who spoke against conservatism and accepted traditions was viewed as a Socialist or worse. Steiner has brought together a well-documented and informative study. The essayists have detailed the beliefs and actions of their chosen regionalist and fully demonstrated what made each effective radicals. Every essay is well constructed, highlighting regional perspectives, accomplishments, and failures. In addition, each scholar brings his or her own “regionalist take.” This not only broadens the understanding of these regionalists and their works, but also expands the definitions of regionalist, left, and radical, squarely placing these writers in the forefront. Regionalists on the Left points the way for further studies into the lives of lesser known but no less important regional radicals whose works helped [End Page 397] shape the ideas of class, community, and region that still inform us today. J. Dee Kille History and Core Humanities University of Nevada, Reno Copyright © 2014 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Morphometrics Indicates Giant Ordovician Macluritid Gastropods Switched Life Habit During Ontogeny

Paleontologists have long speculated that the bizarre, giant Ordovician gastropods Maclurites Le Sueur, 1818 and Maclurina Ulrich and Scofield, 1897 lived more like suspension-feeding oysters than typical algivorous snails. Geometric and eigenshape morphometrics demonstrate the plausibility of this lifestyle, but with a twist. The apertures of these gastropods were small ellipsoids when young, transitioning rapidly to polygonal morphologies at maturity, with angulations (sinuses) occurring in regions associated with development of mature ctenidia (gills) and enhanced stability on the seafloor. Combined with knowledge of extant suspension-feeding gastropods and functional and phylogenetic analysis of the anatomy of other fossil relatives, this ontogenetic pattern suggests these snails began life as typical mobile algae-grazers, but switched to sedentary suspension-feeders as they aged.