Question Implicit Research Articles

Blue Notes 2.0: The Diachronic Resonance of Langston Hughes During the George Floyd Protests: A Foreword

Blue Notes 2.0: The Diachronic Resonance of Langston Hughes During the George Floyd Protests: A Foreword

“It’s too political”: The overt and covert silencing of critical Latino/a voices

The concept of school-sponsored silencing of students in K-12 contexts in the United States is well documented, particularly in relation to students of color. Discussions have addressed and called into question implicit and explicit administrative and pedagogical practices of silencing that curb critical reflection and thinking. The case explored here explores both overt and covert practices of silencing as lived by Latino/a high school students in rural Idaho. By directing attention to silencing in this context, I argue that it can be much more routinely and unknowingly used than we might imagine, and that it has the potential to severely stymie critical conversations of change and eventually disempower in subtle ways.

What is political about political ethnography? On the context of discovery and the normalization of an emergent subfield

Despite recent interest in political ethnography, most of the reflection has been on the ethnographic aspect of the enterprise with much less emphasis on the question implicit in the first word of the couplet: What is actually political about political ethnography and how much should ethnographers pre-define it? The question is complicated because a central component of the definition of what is political is actually the struggle to define its jurisdiction and how it gets distinguished from what it is not. In this article we aim to show how ethnography can actually lead us out of this conundrum in which the political is paradoxically both predefined and, at the same time, the open question that leads the process of inquiry. We do so by advancing a formal and relational approach that provides us with procedural tools to define the nature and specificity of the political bond not ex ante, but rather during the process of research itself. In the first part of the article we historicize the development of political ethnography as a distinct avenue for inquiry and show what have been the challenges to its normalization. This is followed by the article’s main section, which focuses on the four ways in which what is political has been conceptualized in contemporary socio-ethnographical literature. In the conclusion of the article, we advance a lowest common denominator definition proposal, with examples from other scholars as well as from our own research to illustrate how this approach would work.

Language and Experience inLady Chatterley’s Lover

Concerning James Joyce and his Work in Progress , Samuel Beckett said: “His writing is not about something; it is that something itself .” 1 The same can be said of any novel whose language has the power to compel the reader’s interest and participation. What the novel is “about” is the least of the invigorating power that makes it what it is . Hence Gustave Flaubert’s desire to write a lively novel about nothing. Beckett’s later novels may not be about nothing, but they are about less and less. D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover has most commonly been taken as a novel that is about something: about class prejudice, about challenging censorship, about the destructive character of Victorian moralism, about the human and ecological costs of industrialization, about feminism, about homosexuality, about any number of ideologies. The success of all this critique by and about Lawrence raises the question implicit in Beckett’s comment. Since the problem of what Lady Chatterley’s Lover is all about intellectually has been largely settled, we are left with the more compelling and difficult question: What, if anything, is this novel?

Welcoming Opposition: Havruta Learning and Montaigne’s The Art of Discussion

Michel de Montaigne’s L’art de Conférer offers a moral groundwork for students’ learning of havruta, a traditional Jewish form of studying in pairs, based on collaborative critical text-based learning, that can be applied to students everywhere. The article attends to the nature of havruta learning and to cultural norms that make it difficult for students to become open to their partners’ opposing ideas. Students’ critical discussion of Montaigne’s essay is then conceptualized as a pedagogical tool for cultivating the welcoming of opposing viewpoints and opening their own ideas to critical scrutiny in text- and discussion-based learning. I draw on Wolfgang Iser’s theory of reading as bringing the reader into deeper self-consciousness and calling into question implicit beliefs about the role of opposing ideas. The article provides an analysis of Montaigne’s ideas and includes study questions to help students adopt a more constructive attitude toward opposing views and expand their understanding of the role of the confrontation of ideas in learning discussions.

The College reply to Francis misses the big question: a commentary on OP92.

The College has recently published an occasional paper in response to the Francis inquiry into the care at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. We consider that it overlooks one key question implicit in the inquiry’s recommendations: ‘Is the business model of care fit for purpose?’ We question whether the business model in its present form is appropriate for the delivery of healthcare. We suggest there is a need for greater conceptual clarity with regard to the nature of compassionate care and the meaning of person-centred medicine. We recommend that a broader moral and ethical framework is considered not only for psychiatry, but for all healthcare provision which would transcend specialty and Royal College boundaries.

Young People Exploring Their Media Experiences - Mediagraphy as a Reflection Tool in Upper Secondary School

This article explores how upper secondary students reflect on their media practices while participating in the learning activity of mediagraphy. Mediagraphy involves researching four generations of one’s own family with respect to e.g. media use, identity, and education and then writing an essay based on this information. A case study is presented, in which mediagraphy was implemented in upper secondary school for the first time. The data sources are classroom observation, student essays, and interviews. The analysis is guided by a categorization of reflection types: qualification, competence, creativity, meta-perspectives, and critical reflection. The findings show that the students identify and question implicit characteristics of culture and society, and critically evaluate their own choices and actions in a mediasaturated everyday life.

Pluralistic Predilections: Surface Reading as Not-Altogether-New Resource

When Lisa invited me onto this panel I leapt at the chance, mostly out of a rare contrarian impulse triggered by the question implicit in its title. Why do we argue about the way we read? Well, I don't; I suspect that maybe you don't really either; I sort of don't think we should; and I'm not sure, to echo Hamlet, that we could, even an if we would-that we'd be able to even if we wanted to. The premise behind all these claims is roughly the same, and it's simple verging on simplistic. It hinges on that singular noun in our Trollopian rubric: the way we read now. To which I'd retort that the ways we actually read-not just all of us collectively, but each of us individually, at every given moment in our reading-are so numerous, so complex, and so concurrent as to be insusceptible of full articulation, let alone argument; whatever you might say about the way you read must radically underrepresent (and thereby distort) the ways in which you really read. So I tend to resist polemics, because I suspect (as perhaps do many of you) that all of us are pluralists in practice.But maybe I'm talking not so much about pluralism as about sedimentation: layered reading habits and methods acquired, winnowed, questioned, but still persistent, and cumulative over time. That's certainly my case. My own reading life-my predisposition toward a mingling of formalisms new and old (I'm not always able to distinguish between the two)-began with six years of Hebrew day school: some three hours of Biblical exegesis every morning, with all the attendant commentaries in all those distinct orthographies-whole constellations of explication surrounding the central scrap of scripture-and performed as acts of nanoscopically close reading. I've always cherished the wary reviewer of my first book who drily and acutely described my method as Talmudic; perhaps he had in mind the twelve pages (down from an original twenty-five) that I'd devoted to two sentences in which Pepys describes his walk to Greenwich holding a new watch in his hand.1Small wonder then that in high school (late Sixties) and college (early Seventies) I found immensely congenial both the New Criticism in its twilight and Stanley Fish's affective stylistics in its first effulgence: all those nuances of syntax and diction minutely tracked across spectacularly slow time. Teaching high school for the remainder of the decade, I remained intoxicated by these tactics; they were, and remain, good to teach with. Thus sequestered, I missed much of the theory revolution and was later-well after returning to grad school and then entering the profession-scourged for it: how dared I, department colleagues asked, write so belletristically? Revising in the aftermath, I hit upon what at the time seemed to me a surprising critical contiguity. Having thought of myself as close-reading a bunch of clockfaces and diary entries, I was delighted to discover that I'd been speaking almost-New-Historicism all the time. The move from the mere formalism my colleagues deplored to the historicism they propounded entailed no big leap, just a comfortable mid-length stride. Cultural Studies seemed just a kiss away.The notion of such proximity has become something of a commonplace, on both sides of the debate. It inflects Robert D. Hume's acerbic description, two decades ago, of New Historicism as merely New Criticism repurposed for different kinds of documents.2 And it informs Richard Strier's more affirmative argument, two years ago, that the application of old method to new texts renders formalism (old or new) abidingly indispensable: even now, he avers, very few historical documents-meaning nonliterary and practically significant texts-have been subjected to 'close reading' in the formalist sense.3 For me that pronouncement acts as invitation: in recent years, I've found the eighteenthcentury theater a wonderful place to mess with documents-newspapers, playbills, advertisements, afterpieces-hitherto not often closely read; there's so much to see and show amid their crossplay. …

Petroleum Prophecies

Petroleum Prophecies Janet Stewart (bio) Petroleum, Petroleum, in The Dedalus Meyrink Reader. Gustav Meyrink. Ed. and Trans. Mike Mitchell. Dedalus Books. http://www.dedalusbooks.com. 317 pages; paper, $12.47. How are we to understand our abiding fascination with oil? That is the question implicit in a series of "digital oil paintings" that the artist duo UEBERMORGEN.COM (Hans Bernhard and lizvlx) produced in response to the 2010 oil spill from BP's Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The pair describe the resulting oil slick as a work of art in its own right—an "oil painting on an 80,000 square miles ocean canvas with 32 million liters of oil" that is testament to the awe-inspiring destructive force of nature. As controversial as this take on the catastrophe undoubtedly is, UEBERMORGEN.COM were not the first artists to draw attention to the "beauty of excess" in the shape of a major oil spill at sea. Petroleum, Petroleum, a novella first published in 1913 by Gustav Meyrink, the Austrian fantasy writer and sometime banker, went viral on the Internet in the wake of Deepwater Horizon. In this highly lyrical work, heralded for its apparently prophetic vision of the contamination of the Gulf of Mexico, Meyrink depicts a fictional oil slick, the imagined magnitude of which was infinitely greater than the 2010 disaster: "And the sea took on a fearfully beautiful quality: a smooth surface, extending into infinity, glinting and shimmering in all sorts of colours, red, green and violet, and then again a deep, deep black, like images from a fantastic starscape." This description of a fictional catastrophe as an uncanny spectacle doubtless speaks to a contemporary fascination with visuals documenting the natural force of oil, such as the Lumière brothers' 1896 film, The Burning Oil Wells of Baku, which toured Europe later that year, the instantly recognizable photographs of the Spindeltop gusher in Texas which date to 1901, or similar images emanating from the Galician oil fields in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then the world's third-largest oil producing country. Unlike these early visual examples of "petroculture," however, Petroleum, Petroleum has no pretense to documentary status but is a satirical fantasy typical of the bizarre fictional world so often conjured up in Meyrink's writing. Although no longer as well known as that of his Prague contemporary, this world clearly has more than a little of Franz Kafka about it. And yet in Meyrink's stories and novels, the Kafka-esque joins forces with the socio-political satire of Karl Kraus or Jonathan Swift while being lent a darker twist through his well-documented interest in the occult—yoga, freemasonry, alchemy, and the "profane illumination" offered by drugs such as mescaline. It is mescaline that provides Dr. Kunibald Jessegrim, Meyrink's anti-hero in Petroleum, Petroleum, with the means to exact revenge from a world that has refused him recognition. Jessegrim, whose evocative name combines medieval legend, the messianic (in its nod to the informal exclamation, "Jesses" or "Jesus"), and "grimm" (meaning wrath or fury), is consumed by an inner anger that draws him to avenging figures such as Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, or the Vandal Kings, "creatures," as he notes, created by the power of the Hindu God Shiva. In short, Jessegrim is a man through whose veins the "dark powers of nature" course. His very body is a metonym for Mexico itself, large swathes of which he has acquired through the proceeds of his lucrative trade in self-manufactured illegal drugs. The motivation for his acquisitive behavior stems from his own careful scientific study of the country, enabling him to establish that Mexico sits atop huge underground reservoirs of oil. According to his calculations, the oil reserves stretched "as far as Omaha, perhaps even further to the north" and were 'bigger even than Hudson Bay." Patiently enacting a dastardly plan for vengeance on an unsuspecting world, he has spent years covertly destroying natural barriers between individual reservoirs to construct one vast lake of oil. Petroleum, Petroleum recounts the moment, set far in the narrative future on New Year's Eve 1951, on which, at Jessegrim's behest, a "frightful explosion...

Extension of the $\nu$-metric for stabilizable plants over $H^\infty$

An abstract $\nu$-metric was introduced in [1], with a view towards extending the classical $\nu$-metric of Vinnicombe from the case of rational transfer functions to more general nonrational transfer function classes of infinite-dimensional linear control systems. Here we give an important concrete special instance of the abstract $\nu$-metric, namely the case when the ring of stable transfer functions is the Hardy algebra $H^\infty$, by verifying that all the assumptions demanded in the abstract set-up are satisfied. This settles the open question implicit in [2].

Shortage, fuzzy property and other dead ends in the anthropological analysis of (post)socialism

The article begins with the observation that, despite almost ideal conditions, anthropological research on postsocialism has had little impact on general theoretical debates. One reason for this development, it will be argued, can be found in earlier interpretations of socialism that continue to have an effect on the field by obstructing innovative conceptualizations. The appropriation of ideas derived from neo-institutionalism by anthropologists produced analyses that found both socialism and postsocialism to be deficient. Thereby the ambivalent construction of the socialist ‘other’ allowed the general focus on economics to appear unproblematic. Following the introduction of Western institutions into formerly socialist contexts, the analytical focus shifted from old ‘different’ and ‘inefficient’ institutions to now ‘inefficient’ or at least ‘different’ actors. Taking the example of work relations, the article shows that only by overcoming these normative assumptions about the ‘other’ can anthropologists begin to question implicit knowledge and thereby open the possibility for new theorizing.

Research-driven reading assessment: Drilling to the core

There is considerable interest and controversy in the community concerning how our students are faring in the task of mastering reading. Broad scale assessment, formerly at a State level and now at a National level (NAPLAN), is potentially valuable in helping answer this question in a broad sense. However, there are limitations to the value of this style of testing when the only tasks included are those intended to assess reading comprehension. It is unquestionably a major function of reading, but not the only important component. The assessment of other critical components can supply valuable information not available in the NAPLAN process. For example, other forms of assessment can assist in the identification and management of students at-risk even before reading instruction commences. They can also help identify those making slow progress at any year level. This is especially important given the usually stable learning trajectory from the very early stages. If specific interventions are implemented, appropriate reading assessment can provide ongoing information about the effectiveness of the chosen approach. There is an important question implicit in this potentially valuable activity. What sorts of assessment are likely to be most beneficial in precluding reading pitfalls and enhancing reading success? In this paper, the emphasis is directed towards assessment of those aspects of reading that have been identified by research as critical to reading development.

Lonely Voices

Page 27 January–February 2009 Lonely Voices Scott Elliott The Man Back There and Other Stories David Crouse Sarabande Books http://www.sarabandebooks.org 224 pages; paper, $15.95 In The Lonely Voice (1963), Frank O’Connor argues that the short story is the literary form best suited to expressing the otherwise unheard angst of submerged populations, at giving voice to the lonely misfit out of step with a more contented majority. O’Connor would likely approve of David Crouse’s second collection as it chronicles some moments of quiet desperation in the lives of unexpectedly sympathetic male misfits crying out in lonely voices from a variety of stations. As the title indicates, we encounter many of these men as present circumstances force them to acknowledge, once again, and in many cases against their wishes, that they have a history, that they carry around a former, regrettable version of themselves that may arise again at any moment. Or the characters are still on the ropes and stomaching and/or giving the blows that will lead to a break between selves, surviving the experience they will someday look back on as the marker between the men they have become and the men they used to be. These blows come in many forms: a former wife’s potentially career-shattering book, a father’s suicide, the imminent loss of a job, divorce, a son’s attempted suicide, loneliness, the disappearance of a lover, a wife’s discovery of a disturbing addiction. This is literary fiction, so more important than the blows the characters endure is the way they respond and what their reactions reveal about their character. In the complex psychological world of these stories—a world in which characters are not always good witnesses to their own motivations—a heightened awareness of past mistakes and failures does not necessarily lead to an avoidance of the same mistakes the next time around. Instead, these stories implicitly suggest, the mistakes themselves and the interesting trouble the characters get into as a result of these mistakes bring the characters (and careful readers) as close as we can come to powerful emotional truths, the raw material of character itself. Even to classify what the characters do to get themselves into trouble as “mistakes” is problematic in the world these stories forge as many things which could be classified as “mistakes”—for sound reasons based in mainstream morality—may be the best expression of a more primal being. In most cases, the men in this collection no longer enjoy the protection that a false personality, a comfortable material situation, or some other self-delusion might provide. In every case, we see these characters laid bare, and through the laying bare, come to better understand the nature of the mystery informing their actions and our own. Distance from and closeness to self and others is important in this collection. In the collection’s titular story, Sweets, a forty-four-year-old man who has just punched his girlfriend’s ex in a bar realizes how much he and this ex have in common. Crouse writes, “[Sweets] felt sorry for the man in the bar now, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He probably didn’t want to have a history either, right? He probably wanted that very much.” The person you damage, the person from whom you might expect you’d like to distance yourself, is likely to be the very one with whom you have the most in common. On one level, the man in the bar is the man back there; on another level, Sweets is the man back there as his present self ponders the question implicit in this phrase: “how much, if at all, have I changed?” Similarly , the very characters convention might compel a reader to condemn may be the ones closest to the reader in his or her secret moments. In addition to Sweets’s redemption through his capacity to empathize with someone he’s punched, he is further redeemed in “The Man Back There” in a quick, almost throw-away moment of aesthetic appreciation for moonlight on a river. The collection is filled with small redemptions...

On the Very Idea of 'Outsider Art'

There has been little serious philosophical reflection on whether, and in virtue of satisfying what conditions, ‘Outsider Art’ is art, as is standardly assumed. I critically examine a number of responses to this question implicit in curatorial practice and the critical literature. I argue that none of these responses carries conviction, and propose, on the basis of broader considerations in the philosophy of art, that the arthood of ‘Outsider’ pieces must be settled by reference to their individual provenance. This supports a parallel approach to questions about the artistic status of ‘primitive’, ‘tribal’, and more generally non-Western visual art.

Unstated: Narrating War in Lebanon

This essay consists of three beginnings, then a deferred reading of a novel. One beginning, a theoretical beginning, reflects on the question implicit in my title: What is unstated in the state of Lebanon? Another beginning, a literary critical beginning, returns to the work of Kahlil Gibran, the most famous early-twentieth-century Arab North American writer. Gibran links modernist and postmodernist Arab North American writing and, in a historical parallel, connects the foundations of the Lebanese state under French colonial rule to its disintegration in the context of the civil war. A third beginning, a contextual beginning, evokes more recent events in Lebanon through a discussion of the July War of 2006, during which Israel bombed the country for over a month. These three points of departure, I suggest, are crucial to readings of contemporary Arab North American fiction, which is always conditioned by theories of the state, a post-Gibran literary sensibility, and the politics of the present. More specifically, I argue that Rawi Hage's representation of the civil war in Lebanon in DeNiro's Game negotiates the destruction of the Lebanese state through figures of the unstated, whose very existence questions more generally the state form as the preeminent site of political authority and contributes to unstating the state.

Medical Genetics in the Genomic Medicine of the 21st Century

The question implicit in my title was explicitly framed by Alan Guttmacher and colleagues1 in an article entitled “Genomic Medicine: Who Will Practice It?” While this question is a general one, my particular concern is with what the roles of medical genetics and medical geneticists will be in what is being referred to as genomic medicine. To answer these questions, it is necessary to define what we mean by “medical genetics and medical geneticists” and by “genomic medicine.” Although this might appear to be a semantic exercise, that is not my intention. Rather, if we are to look at the future role of medical genetics in the practice of medicine, I believe that we really need to understand what we are talking about. I shall start with medical genetics and medical geneticists.

Information Technology (IT) Appropriateness: The Contingency Theory of “Fit” and it Implementation in Small and Medium Enterprises

There is little doubt that advanced information and communication technologies (IT) are changing the way businesses operate and conduct commerce. As the advent of a more secure Internet and new transmission standards makes it easier and cheaper for businesses to conduct inter-organizational commerce, it is incumbent upon SME managers to assess whether implementing new technologies such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) over the Internet, XML or web-based e-commerce is the “right thing to do” for their organizations. The key question implicit in this decision is addressed in this paper: “Under what conditions should businesses consider themselves likely candidates for (new) IT implementation?” Using the structural contingency theory of “fit” as a foundation for this research, this paper reports the development of the notion of “IT appropriateness” and its determinants. This is followed by an analysis of the relationship between IT appropriateness factors and accrued benefits from IT implementation. Data collected from a survey of small businesses revealed that there are four critical factors that must be assessed by businesses to determine if they are likely candidates for IT (for this study, the particular technology in question was EDI) implementation. These factors are the internal/external business & technological environment, organizational readiness and trading partner support, financial impact and workflow productivity. The resulting factors are conceptually consistent with the notions established in the systems perspective to the structural contingency theory of fit. The results of this exploratory study demonstrate that IT appropriateness is a robust and valid construct and is a good mechanism for understanding the factors of organization-technology fit that impact organizational performance in terms.

The Multi-Layered Communities and “Einverständnis”

The purpose of this essay is to show an alternative perspective of Max Weber's rationalization theory. We use the concept of Einverstandnis for clarifying the question implicit in the text : how is the rational social order “valid” ? The concept of Einverstandnis hasn't been paid proper attention with consideration to rationalized modern society. But Weber said that Einverstandnis was the base of a rational society in his manuscripts of Economy and Society.We first set out to confirm the mechanism that the rational society involves Einverstandnis beyond its purpose. We then explicate the multi-layered structure of communities. It contains the fundamental social groups, that is, households, neighborhoods, and kin groups, as well as ideas, that is, race, ethnic groups, and nationality. They are all incorporated in the higher-level communities, especially political communities, and used to affirm people's feelings of identity. Thus, for example, Einverstandnis supports a rational nation-state. A rational social order is accepted as Einverstandnis by the members and it is “valid” through their interaction.So, we can grasp Weber's rationalization theory not only as a sequential development but also as the process of the invention of tradition. In the latter case, the rationalization process has made multi-layered communities which involved Einverstandnis.

“The Whole fulness of the Godhead dwells in him bodily”: The Materiality of Milton's God

It is a theological commonplace both in John Milton's day and our own to acknowledge that is a Spirit. It is apparently self-evident that is therefore immaterial. However, recent intense scrutiny concerning provenance of De Doctrina Christiana, traditionally attributed to Milton, has brought to attention of critics a number of idiosyncratic theological arguments typical of Milton within treatise. One of these is materiality of God. Questions concerning treatise's provenance initiated by William B. Hunter in 1992, which have been refuted to satisfaction of virtually other Milton scholars, have resulted in energetic discussion of congruencies of theological material in treatise with that of canonical Miltonic works. (1) The most heretical contention that this systematic theology manifests is an unusual form of biblical hermeneutics concerning Godhead--namely, a refutation of Nicaean formulation of Trinity for which, writes Milton, the only authority I accepted was God's self-revelation (CPW6:118) in Scriptures. One crucial element of Milton's biblical hermeneutics in De Doarina and manifested in Paradise Lost is his presentation of theory of accommodation, which is theological tool used by Christian exegetes to explain difference between nature of and our images or conceptions of Him. Recent studies of Milton's accommodation of by Michael Lieb and Neil D. Graves have shown that placement of Milton within an orthodox Christian hermeneutic tradition, as posited by C. A. Patrides among others, is erroneous. In fact Milton displayed a far greater literal understanding of a theomorphic scriptural deity than virtually other biblical exegetes. These concerns over ontological composition and portrayal of lead naturally to question of divine materiality in Milton's philosophy and poetry. This issue has not been considered specifically and at length since John Reesing's article in 1957, (2) but critics have failed to realize that it is integral to our understanding of Milton's conception of a monistic hierarchy of being. Recent work by Miltonists such as Stephen M. Fallon and John Rogers have made clear that this ontological Weltanschauung derives from one substance that is matter, but question that has been nearly sidestepped by scholars concerns what is referred to by being. The question implicit in this statement is whether Milton's Himself is included in metaphysical category of all being and this I will argue necessitates a reevaluation of Milton's debt to early patristic theologians Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Origen. Most scholars have ignored this problem altogether, and even those who have been forced to confront Deity's ontological composition in course of their analysis of Milton's monistic metaphysics have refused to consider question at any length (3) or have presented thesis only tentatively. (4) The central problem is whether Milton's should be posited beyond apex of author's concept of a monistic hierarchy of composed of matter. I believe answer lies in consideration of three interrelated points: first, Milton's unusual understanding of theory of accommodation in chapter 2 of De Doctrina makes it clear that he believed to be theopathetic, and this strongly suggests that Milton may also have envisaged as theomorphic; second, in what appears a paradox, Milton's statement that God [...] is a SPIRIT (CPW 6:140) actually implies that is material; and, third, Milton argues repeatedly in De Doctrina, as well as in Artis Logicae, that terms predicated of in Bible have same physical and metaphysical meaning when used with reference to man, and this seemingly eccentric idea is explored in several key phrases in Milton's delineation of material monism in treatise. I Historically, idea of God's passible was far more defensible than concept of His possessing a material body. …

Newspapers for Free: The Economies of Newspaper Circulation in the Early Republic

In a manner that astounded foreign observers and citizens alike, newspapers defined new republic of United States as did no other institution. By 182Os roughly six hundred newspapers, including sixty big-city dailies, were being pulled off nation's presses, a quantitative accomplishment in which editors took understandable pride.1 In 1814 Nathan Hale of Boston Daily Advertiser wrote, we have any striking traits of national character, their origin may be clearly discerned in our universal relish for newspaper reading, and in general character of newspapers we read.2 While London press could boast of its superiority in terms of literary talent and mechanical execution, Hale and his brother printers countered by pointing to America's numerical preeminence: more newspapers, more subscribers, and more readers could be found in their nation than in any other.3 In 1810 Isaiah Thomas, first historian of American journalism and a former editor, estimated that United States published about twenty-two million papers annually, compared to twenty-one million for Great Britain and Ireland.4 Eleven years later Essex Register of Salem, Massachusetts, put number for United States at eighty million, substantially above fifty-six million papers produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1824 William Coleman of New York Evening Post reported that annual production of newspapers in his state exceeded that for all of England. He believed there were two newspapers published in United States for every one in England, Scotland, and Ireland combined. If number of newspapers published drew editorial comment, so too did number of newspapers read. In 1821 Joseph Gales of quasi-official Daily National Intelligencer guessed that United States had 350,000 newspaper subscribers and 1.5 million newspaper readers.5 In other words, one of seven Americans read a newspaper for free. These nonpaying readers were both agents and beneficiaries of a massive giveaway that helped democratize culture of print. This essay addresses a central question implicit in Gales's numbers: how were newspapers transformed from everyday commodities into a form of public property?The quantitative explosion of newspaper circulation at opening of nineteenth century signaled a major transformation in relationship between public and news. With an intensity that would have astounded their colonial forebears, Americans of early national period came to believe that access to news, and therefore to newspapers, was their birthright. This new sense of entitlement sprang from confluence of two ideological currents that have often been treated as if they ran in opposite directions. The ideology of republicanism stressed importance of a well-informed citizenry.6 Because newspapers had no rival as an instrument of general enlightenment and a primer of civic values, didactic republicans had special reason to regard them as the book of people. The ideology of liberalism attached equal significance to well-informed consumer.7 Newspapers contained information that Americans needed in order to make intelligent decisions about enticing new world of consumer goods opening before them. Recent scholars have demonstrated that republican and liberal impulses, far from working at cross purposes, could produce a shared political vocabulary of sufficient flexibility to blur differences in meaning. Thus virtue required to sustain a liberal republic might be understood as either citizen's capacity to sacrifice for common good or economic self-restraint that consumers were called upon to exercise in ultimate den of temptations, marketplace.8 Whether legitimated by republican representations of enlightened citizen or by liberal constructions of enlightened consumer, newspapers came to be seen as an indispensable entre to modern, democratic life. …