Speculative History Research Articles

Messiahs of 1933: radical Yiddish theatre at Artef (a speculative theatre history

This essay is about how playwright Moishe Nadir and Artef (The Worker's Theatrical Alliance) led America out of the Great Depression to a future of full employment, justice and Yiddish satire for all.

A Neurologist Looks at Mind and Brain: "The Enchanted Loom"

For a long time, before we developed an appreciation of the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of the brain, there was uncertainty as to the nature and source of the human mind. Philosophers linked the mind to mythical "humors" that controlled the human body, and others speculated that the mind was associated with "life-force" or soul. Few felt that there was a relation between the human mind and brain, but they had to wait for the Age of Enlightenment and scientific discovery in the 18th and 19th centuries to establish a clear association between the two. Three centuries ago Rene Descartes described the mind as an extracorporeal entity that was expressed through the pineal gland. Descartes was wrong about the pineal, but the debate he set off regarding the relationship between mind and brain rages on. This review looks at the history of speculation on the mind and the development of ideas that have led to our present understanding of this phenomenon. The basic anatomy and physiology of the brain is reviewed to help us understand the brain's association with the complex function we call mind. This is followed by a look at some syndromes that may result when part of the brain is damaged-the parietal lobe is arbitrarily selected as an example-and the resulting effect on the subject's mind. This assists us in understanding the association of mind and brain, and also to better understanding its components, behavior, function and dysfunction.

Goethe 2000: Intercultural Readings of his Work (review)

Goethe Yearbook 421 Paul Bishop and R. H. Stephenson, eds., Goethe 2000: Intercultural Readings of his Work. Leeds: Northern University Press, 2000. 193 pp. It would have been a delight to have been a fly on the wall in Glasgow in March 1999 in order to eavesdrop on the lively proceedings of the Goethe celebration there. The next best thing is to read the book, even without the dialogue and scholarly give-and-take that are the ineproducible essence of such colloquia. It is refreshing, for instance, to see Goethe—this all-too-German provincial , whose favorite designation, conversely, was "cosmopolitan"—from an international and comparative perspective. It is enlightening to see a range of global topics covered from Brahma over Kabbalah to German-Chinese anniversaries . And it is lovely to hold in one's hands a book treated with such editorial and aesthetic care by its editors: Witness, as just the most obvious example, the reproduction on the cover of Michael Mathias Prechtl's Der Naturforscher J. W. Goethe im Farbenkreis. But just what is meant by "intercultural"? Gordon A. Burgess ventures the most outright, yet most limited definition of intercultural practice: a refusal to interpret "by any narrow reference to time or place or specific events" (14546 ). To me that sounds suspiciously like retrograde motion: a close (or closed) or hermeneutic reading with a passport. Yet it is clear from the methodology of Paul Bishop's "intercultural glance" at the "Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten" that "intercultural" attempts a reformulation of the concept Weltliteratur in theoretical terms: a synthesis of semiotics, the aesthetics of science, and an "encounter between different cultures" (88). And in terms of postmodernist space, the "intercultural" undoubtedly provides a virtual chat room with plenty of corners for scholars to rub elbows. In fact, the essays collected here (eight in English, two in German) represent six loosely defined, loosely related stages in the development of what began as comparative literature in the American academy in the 30s under Wellek and Warren . A number of contributions here are warhorses that still meet that original charge of intellectual history and of aesthetic relationships going beyond nationalism : Andrew Fineron's study of the genesis of Paria; Shona M. Allan's empirical reading of analogies between Goethe and Byron; the capstone lecture on Ernst Cassirer, delivered peripherally to the colloquium by John Michael Krois. A second category, theory, is keynoted by David Wellbery's semiotic discussion of origins in the young Goethe, and supplemented by Patricia D. Zecervic's feminist reading of the Kabbalah and Wilhelm Meister. Burgess's reading of Die natürliche Tochter strikes me as straightforward Germanistik, despite his intention of reading Goethe 's relative silence on the French Revolution. Two hybrids of comparative literature , revisionism and speculative history, provide fireworks: In the best tradition of Eliot influencing Shakespeare, Alberto Destro rewrites Goethe as a decadent in the image of Huysman; Werner Schwan gives a nuanced, theatrical twist to the old what-if? question, "War Weimar ein Irrtum Goethes?" (128). Finally, Bishop's paper is a splendid microcosm of cultural studies, which is the all-encompassing category of which the intercultural is a subset, not necessarily a link or connection. And a conservative subset at that. A nod at what's missing—in terms of geography , in terms of issues, in terms of methods—is indicative, even indicting. There 422 Book Reviews is no Africa or Latin America (barely any NAFTA at all) in this Glasgowian Goethe. If Goethe has an economic or political impact—or if postcolonial smdies have any use for Goethe—you would not know it from the view from Glasgow. But let me not allow who is not there and what is not said to spoil the delight in what can be overheard here. In one corner of this intercultural room (on the other side of the room from the theorists), Feneron would be reminding Schwan that when Goethe looks East (toward the India of Paria), he really has his eye on the Old German of the Hildebrandtslied and, tellingly, the Reformation (44). Schwan would counter that it was really Goethe, not Tom Stoppard, who in Wilhelm Meister wrote the original script...

The mysteries within: a surgeon reflects on medical myths

Our understanding of the human body has changed dramatically since the time of Hippocrates and, later, Galen, who dominated medical thinking for more than a millennium. Yet elements of myth and folklore persist to the present day -- every time someone says Gesundheit, for example -- alongside the latest medical science. Drawing on a lifetime of surgical experience, Dr. Sherwin Nuland shares some memorable operating room stories that illustrate the distinctive personalities of five organs: the stomach, liver, spleen, heart, and uterus. He shows how our present knowledge of these organs has emerged from a rich history of imaginative speculation about how the human body works and what role each of these major organs plays. (Our early ancestors believed that our organs were independent creatures inside our bodies, the animals within.)The Mysteries Within brilliantly melds myth and science from the dawn of recorded history to the present day. It will fascinate anyone interested in medicine, history, or folklore. Eloquent and insightful, it is a book about human anatomy and, at the same time, an exploration of the human mind and spirit, especially our somewhat contradictory thirst for knowledge about ourselves and our quest for an immortality that transcends the physical body.

HUGH STRETTON AND THE WISE ADMINISTRATOR

His massive textbook, Economics: A New Introduction, is in many ways the culmination of Hugh Stretton's work as a theoretician of the social sciences. From his first major publication in 1969, The Political Sciences, Stretton has wrestled with two major issues. One has been the nature of the social sciences, particularly the role of moral ideas in shaping the theory and practice of social inquiry. The second has been the relationship between social theory and social practice, particularly in terms of policy development. His first book was the most ‘academic’. Since then he has written more in response to the problems of the age than out of a desire to solve merely academic questions. Hence his involvement in issues of housing, the environment and, during the last decade and a half, economic policy. One of his favourite techniques has been to use ‘speculative history’, providing alternative futures to illustrate what he believes to be the consequences of particular policy choices.

Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation

Abstract By Edward Chancellor New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999 386 pages, $25.00

Devil take the hindmost: a history of financial speculation

This is a challenging history of the role of financial speculation from early modern times to the end of the 20th century. Focusing on speculation as it developed in the world's leading stock markets, the story starts with the tulipomania in 17th-century Holland, then moves to Britain with accounts of famous speculative manias (the South Sea Bubble, Railway mania) and to America with chapters on the roaring twenties, the junk bond revolution of the 1980s and finally the bubble economy of Japan in the 1980s.

The Pen is Mightier than the Sword

Jill Lepore's subject is history itself: the chronicling, explaining, justifying, memorializing, and even fictionalizing of King Philip's War (1675-1678) and of war in general. Thickly researched, original, contemporary, and disturbing, The Name of War also belongs to an ambitious American studies tradition that seeks to find sweeping meaning, nothing less than the origins of American identity, in American letters. Lepore delves deeply, too, into the history of the book. She dabbles in the history of commemoration and of the body. Laced with such scholarly apparatus as discursive endnotes, time lines, and graphs (all of them useful), this book is, nonetheless, a self-consciously speculative history. The writing is generally brilliant. The arguments, if not always convincing, are always interesting and often provocative. Lepore's first seven chapters analyze works produced in England and New England during and in the generation that followed the war. Lepore finds and carefully teases meaning out of the few words written by Indians that survive (pp. 94-96). For there were literate Indians in New England; Lepore's figures indicate that among Christian Indians the literacy rate may have been as startlingly high as that among colonial women (pp. 36-37). But though one Indian was a printer, and may even have set the type for Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, none left a war narrative. Instead, the war produced a stream of colonial and English print; twenty-one separate accounts were published before 1685. Examining these works along with many unpublished writings, Lepore contends that the sheer violence of King Philip's War intensified the settlers' fears of losing their Englishness. This is why they especially abhorred the nakedness and homelessness wrought by the war and why they became increasingly uneasy with Indians in English dress or in English-style towns. This is why they ruthlessly removed Indians from their presence: incarcerating their allies on disease-ridden Deer Island, driving survivors underground, and exporting as slaves captured enemy Indians, women and

History of managed behavioral health care and speculations about its future.

Editor's Note For better or for worse, managed behavioral health care will likely be regarded as the most potent force affecting public health policy in psychiatry during the last quarter of the twentieth century. It is therefore odd that the history of its development has been given so little attention. This is probably because managed behavioral health care is so controversial that those who are affected by it are busy responding to its challenges rather than pondering its origins. The following article, by Kenneth A. Kessler, MD, is a noteworthy contribution to the record. As the first-hand account of an important participant in the events described, the paper is a useful reminder of the historical antecedents of what is often experienced as if it were the proverbial plague of locusts, unrelated to anything human. In the future, Dr. Kessler's account will be helpful to historians as they sort out the implications of the managed-care revolution from a broader perspective, enriched by the wisdom of hindsight.

The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion

scope, freedom of thought, and analytical rigor of this book make it essential reading.--Jean-Jacques Courtine, University of California, Santa BarbaraMarcel Gauchet has launched one of most ambitious and controversial works of speculative history recently to appear, based on contention that Christianity is the religion of end of In The Disenchantment of World, Gauchet reinterprets development of modern west, with all its political and psychological complexities, in terms of mankind's changing relation to religion. He views Western history as a movement away from religious society, beginning with prophetic Judaism, gaining tremendous momentum in Christianity, and eventually leading to rise of political state. Gauchet's view that monotheistic religion itself was a form of social revolution is rich with implications for readers in fields across humanities and social sciences.Life in religious society, Gauchet reminds us, involves a very different way of being than we know in our secular age: we must imagine prehistoric times where ever-present gods controlled every aspect of daily reality, and where ancestor worship grounded life's meaning in a far-off past. As prophecy-oriented religions shaped concept of a single omnipotent God, one removed from world and yet potentially knowable through prayer and reflection, human beings became increasingly free. Gauchet's paradoxical argument is that development of human political and psychological autonomy must be understood against backdrop of this double movement in religious consciousness--the growth of divine power and its increasing distance from human activity.In a fittingtribute to this passionate and brilliantly argued book, Charles Taylor offers an equally provocative foreword. Offering interpretations of key concepts proposed by Gauchet, Taylor also explores an important question: Does religion have a place in future of Western society? The book does not close door on religion but rather invites us to explore its socially constructive powers, which continue to shape Western politics and conceptions of state.

'What verse for it? What instance for it?': Authority, Closure, and the Endings of Troilus and Cressida in Text and Performance

Barbara Bowen’s perceptive reading revels in the relationship between Troilus’ final speeches and Pandarus’ final appearance, but many critics, bibliographers, and editors have argued that the ending printed in both Q (1609) and F (1623) may be only one of the ways the play ended. There is a long history of speculation that Troilus and Cressida was revised, and that the ending may have been altered, perhaps for different audiences. The theories of editors and bibliographers can be read alongside the play’s theatre history, revealing how the heroism and scurrility that Bowen describes have been emphasised and diminished in different literary, theatrical, and social climates. I am particularly interested in exploring the play’s multiple and disruptive movements of closure, and the ways in which changing notions of an ‘authentic Shakespeare’ have been evoked in the critical responses to originary and modern texts and performances.

The State between Fragmentation and Globalization

The terms used in the title of this essay were chosen to enable us to go beyond a purely legal approach in order to integrate legal facts into the broader legal context from which their meaning derives.1 State, fragmentation, globalization: these terms constitute the three poles of our analysis. The relations between them form the threads which tie it together, with the state, however, forming the central focus. It may well be supposed that the state is not terribly popular. Once again, it is being brought before the tribunal of history, this time a prospective or speculative history. At worst, the state is being asked to reabsorb or dissolve itself, even to allow itself to be divided up or reshaped by this pushing and pulling in two different directions. At best, the state must agree to transform itself. It is therefore useful to shed some light, at the outset, on this trial to which the state is being subjected (Section I). From this basis, we can then move on in Section II to consider the observed, or predicted, break-up of the state: Is it indeed a case of fragmentation or, on the contrary, the promotion of a new model of the state? Finally, Section m concludes our analysis by examining this curious term 'globalization': What is it really? Is it not simply a contemporary mask for the classic old game of domination? Should we speak of globalization or of hegemony of the New World?

Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution.

Preface Prologue: General introduction: Animal minds, human minds Kathleen Gibson A history of speculation on the relation between tools and language Gordon Hewes Part I. Word, Sign and Gesture: General introduction: Relations between visual-gestural and vocal-auditory modalities of communication Tim Ingold 1. Human gesture Adam Kendon 2. When does gesture become language? Susan Goldwin-Meadow 3. The emergence of language Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Duane Rumbaugh 4. A comparative approach to language parallels Charles Snowdon Part II. Technological Skills and Associated Social Behaviors of the Non-Human Primates: Introduction: Generative interplay between technical capacities, social relations, imitation and cognition Kathleen Gibson 5. Capuchin monkeys Elisabetta Visalberghi 6. The intelligent use of tools William McGrew 7. Aspects of transmission of tool use in wild chimpanzees Christophe Boesch Part III. Connecting Up The Brain: Introduction: Overlapping neural control of language, gesture and tool use Kathleen Gibson 8. Disorders of language and tool use Daniel Kempler 9. Sex differences in visuospatial skills Dean Falk 10. The unitary hypothesis William H. Calvin 11. Tool use, language and social behaviour in relationship to information processing capacities Kathleen Gibson Part IV. Perspectives on Development: Introduction: Beyond neotony and recapitulation Kathleen Gibson 12. Human language development and object manipulation Andrew Lock 13. Comparative cognitive development Jonas Langer 14. Higher intelligence, propositional language and culture as adaptations for planning Sue Parker and Constance Milbrath Part V. Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives: Introduction: Tools, techniques and technology Tim Ingold 15. Early stone industries and inferences regarding language and cognition Nicholas Toth and Kathy Schick 16. Tools and language in human evolution Iain Davidson and William Noble 17. Layers of thinking in tool behaviour Thomas Wynn 18. The complementation theory of language and tool use Peter Reynolds 19. Tool-use, sociality and intelligence Tim Ingold Epilogue: Technology, language, intelligence Tim Ingold Index.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Land: The Plunder of Early America

This book offers a vivid account of the bloody, corruption-laden, yet engrossing history of land speculation in America, from pre-colonial times to the election of President Thomas Jefferson. Friedenberg conducts a fast-paced, eye-opening tour through the labyrinth of North American land deals, and in doing do exposes the real motives influencing some of the major events in our nation's history while placing the lives and careers of America's forefathers in a disturbing new light. Discover the powerful role that the desire for land played in carving out colonies in the New World and how greed sparked the French and Indian War and spawned an array of land companies created to make quick profits and displace Native Americans. Friedenberg explains how colonial merchants and traders were willing to risk revolution to achieve new western markets. He looks at the American Revolution through the eyes of those who speculated on land grants promised to soldiers and discusses how political intrigues among land company delegates at Congress influenced ratification of the Articles of Confederation and debate on the Constitution. He reveals the legacy of treason, fraud, treachery, and deceit as some of the most distinguished names in our early history sliced up the American pie.

<i>Goethe's History of Science</i> (review)

264 Book Reviews intertextuality" (199), it is not for those who look for a discussion of meaning in the essays of Goethe the poet, scientist, and critic. University of Chicago Astrida Orle Tantillo Fink, Karl J., Goethe's History of Science. Cambridge, New York, Port Chester, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1991· xii + 242 pp. This study would serve well as a concise introduction to Goethe's major scientific endeavors: geology, anatomy, botany, and optics. However, the focus of Fink's investigation is Goethe's construction of the history of scientific speculation, thought, and experimentation. It involves the history of his personal involvement as well as the description of the psychological and sociological aspects of scientific developments in general. In the beginning, the author discusses the principal concepts underlying Goethe's literary essay on granite as the primeval rock, and the discovery of the intermaxillary bone as a link which signals connectedness rather than difference of organic forms. Three basic and familiar principles of Goethe's view of nature emerge: the notion of an archetypical form, the notion of a metamorphosis of this form into all other existing varieties, and the notion of an organic unity of all nature. These are, indeed, the basic constituents of Goethe's romantic science. It is not clear to me why Fink then decided to call Goethe 's work in botany and optics (or rather sight) classical science, unless by this he means the forms of presentation rather than the working concepts. The idea of a primeval plant and the notion of a leaf as the basic organ from which all other forms of plants develop through metamorphoses are essentially the same as the notion of a primeval rock as prototype of all geological formation. And the case of Goethe's theory of color is too complex to fit into the romantic-classical framework. However, as far as the texts of the Morphological Notebooks and the Materials on the History of Color Theory are concerned, there is a sense in which they might be called classical. When Goethe republished his "Metamorphosis of Plants" of 1790 as the first section of the Morphological Notebooks, it was framed by two essays entitled "History of my Botanical Studies," and "Fate of the Printed Text" respectively . As Fink clearly shows, here Goethe establishes the basic pattern of his historical writing: the scientific text, the personal involvement with the subject matter, and something like a sociology of the text. Both a subjective and an objective frame of reference are established and fused, and the narration of the history becomes part and parcel of the scientific insight itself. In later sections of his study, Fink discusses the narrative strategies of Goethe's scientific writings at length, the logocentrism of scientific movements in general (and that of the Newtonians in particular), and finally the rhetoric of the scientific guild. Reading the history of science as the history Goethe Yearbook 265 of certain texts with a language and especially a reservoir of metaphors uniquely characteristic of certain historical periods and schools emerges as one of Goethe's main contributions to the historiography of science. The other, surprisingly modern sounding, perspectives are Goethe's views on the psychology and sociology of scientific knowledge. Newtonian optics, as Fink describes very well, bears the features of Newton, the individual, of Newton in relation to British society of his time, of England and her position in the world. Goethe also clearly saw that scientific authority, scientific dogma, scientific paradigm, but also popularizers like Voltaire, played a key role in shaping the history of Newtonian science. This history—as the members of the guild would have it and the unsophisticated public had accepted it—did not, as it were, write itself as a logical progression of discoveries devoid of psychological and sociological aspects. It is Goethe, as Fink convincingly shows, who appears to be the first historian of science to have depicted scientific developments in the context of subjective-psychological, objective-sociological, and linguistic fields of forces. Therefore, it may be that while Goethe's contributions to science are usually regarded as marginal , his contributions to the historiography of science are of central importance . Fink's concise...

Identifying the Beast: Samuel Horsley and the Problem of Papal AntiChrist

The tortuous history of apocalyptic speculation took a new turn in the late eighteenth century, and one of its proponents was the ebullient bishop of Rochester, Samuel Horsley. The new and alarming ideas emanating from abstruse considerations of the Book of Daniel, of Revelation and the eighteenth chapter of Isaiah were puzzled over in a series of reviews in the Gentleman's Magazine, one of which was a review of the letter from an anonymous ‘Country Clergyman’ to the bishop. It was clearly the opinion of the ‘Country Clergyman’ that Horsley's views were novel.

Tragedy and Theory: The Problem of Conflict since Aristotle

Michelle Zerba engages current debates about the relationship between literature and theory by analyzing responses of theorists in the Western tradition to tragic conflict. Isolating the centrality of conflict in twentieth-century definitions of tragedy, Professor Zerba discusses the efforts of modern critics to locate in Aristotle's Poetics the origins of this focus on agon. Through a study of ethical and political ideas formative of the Poetics, she demonstrates why Aristotle and his Renaissance and Neoclassical beneficiaries exclude conflict from their accounts of tragedy. The agonistic element, the book argues, first emerges in dramatic criticism in nineteenth-century Romantic theories of the sublime and, more influentially, in Hegel's lectures on drama and history.This turning point in the history of speculation about tragedy is examined with attention to a dynamic between the systematic aims of theory and the subversive conflicts of tragic plays. In readings of various Classical and Renaissance dramatists, Professor Zerba reveals that strife in tragedy undermines expectations of coherence, closure, and moral stability, on which theory bases its principles of dramatic order. From Aristotle to Hegel, the philosophical interest in securing these principles determines attitudes toward conflict.Originally published in 1988.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Labor Stratification and Violent Crime

T7his paper uses dual labor market theory to examine the relationships between the structure of labor in census tracts, economic indicators, and violent crime. It tests the thesis that relationships between poverty, income inequality, and violent crime are affected by the distribution of workers into the primary and secondary sectors of the labor market. The results indicate that, when three measures of the conditions of employment are controlled, the association between the poverty rate and the overall violent crime index is reduced, and that the relationship between income inequality and violent crime rates is limited to murder rates. The implications of these results for future research on social economy and violent crime are discussed. The history of speculation and research concerning poverty as a crimogenic factor (Bonger 1916; J. Cohen 1957; Merton 1949; Miller 1958) is long and notably inconsistent. For collectivities such as states, cities, and census tracts, research results consistently show a positive relationship between crime rates and levels of poverty, although the strength of this relationship varies (e.g., Boggs 1965; Chilton 1964; Jarvis & Messinger 1974; Loftin 1980; McCarthy, Galle & Zimmem 1975; Schuessler 1962). For individuals, the findings are much less consistent. In his review of the empirical literature, Braithwaite (1981) concluded that a negative relationship between social class and criminal involvement has been demonstrated, but other reviews (e.g., Tittle, Villemez & Smith 1978, 1982) report no relationship between social class and crime. Brownfield (1986) found that the strength of the association between social class and violent crime *1 thank members of the Deviance and Social Control seminar at the University of Washington, George Bridges, Brian Galvin, Avery Guest, Elise Lake, James McCann, and especially Herbert Costner for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and Charles Freeman, David Hachen, and Adrian Raftery for helpful suggestions and direction during the course of this project. Direct correspondence to the author, Department of Sociology DK 40, University of Washington,.Seattle, WA 98195. O The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, December 1989, 68(2):489-512

Speculative histories of the Uranian satellite system

A long-term occupancy of Ariel and Umbriel in a 2 1 orbital resonance could lead to sufficient tidal dissipation in Ariel to account for the observed series of resurfacing events. The dissipation in Umbriel is always negligibly small in this history, which is consistent with its primordial cratered surface. The eventual disruption of this resonance might have been effected by the growing perturbations by Titania. We consider several possible histories of the satellite system that are very sensitive to the assumed masses of the satellites within the errors of their determinations and to the Q of Uranus. The resonances that could have been encountered in these histories and constraints on the orbital eccentricities for certain capture are determined. If Miranda's mass were the upper extreme value, it, too, could have been locked in a long-term 2 1 orbital resonance with Ariel, forming a Laplace-like three-body resonance including Umbriel. However, the tidal dissipation in Miranda is probably too small even in this history to have softened the interior, and much more violent events seem necessary to account for its exotic surface. Titania could have been a member only of rather high-order orbital resonances with the inner satellites, so tidal heating during resonance occupancy cannot be invoked for its resurfacing.

A Provincial Bibliography on Names in the Works of Shakespeare

A Provincial Bibliography on Names in the Works of Shakespeare