Bringing Back the States: A Congressional Perspective on the Fall of Slavery in America

In the aftermath of America's Civil War, national lawmakers who chronicled the fall of slavery described the North as a terrain of states whose representatives assembled in Congress, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–77) and Alexander Stephens’s A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–70). Beginning in the early 1900s, scholars who helped establish the field of American constitutional history redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–1877) and Alexander Stephens's A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–1870), a first generation of scholars writing during the Progressive Era redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in William A. Dunning's Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (1898), John W. Burgess's The Civil War and the Constitution (1901–1906), and James G. Randall's Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (1926). Although a second generation of scholars uncovered traces of the lawmakers' perspective of states, new efforts in the wake of the civil rights movement to understand the internal workings of political parties and the contributions of ordinary Americans kept the study of national lawmakers and their states on the margins of inquiry, as evidenced in leading revisionist histories of Reconstruction, including Harold Hyman's A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (1973), Michael Les Benedict's A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (1974a), and Eric Foner's Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution (1988). Today, the terrain of Northern states remains in the backdrop, as illustrated in recent studies featuring the wartime national government, including James Oakes's Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012) and Mark E. Neely, Jr.'s Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (2011), as well as studies of the mechanisms of constitutional change during Reconstruction, including relevant sections of Bruce Ackerman's We the People II: Transformations (1998) and Akhil Reed Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography (2005). This review essay argues that incorporating the states back into this century‐old framework will open new lines of inquiry and provide a more complete account of federalism's role in the fall of slavery. In particular, a return to the archives suggests that in the uncertain context of mid‐nineteenth‐century America, slavery's leading opponents in Congress saw the Constitution's federal logic not simply as an obstacle, but as a crucial tool with which to mobilize collective action and accommodate wartime opposition at a time when no one could say for sure what would remain of the United States.     

Intuitive Practice by Municipal Controllers

The restrictions placed by New Public Management on the work of municipal controllers raise questions regarding if and when these public controllers can make effective use of their intuition. A study has been carried out to answer these questions. Intuition in this study is defined as a ‘non-conscious process involving holistic associations that are produced rapidly, which result in affectively charged judgments’. While experience deals with known facts, intuition focuses on new ones. The study was carried out in the form of a simulation in which municipal controllers were asked to analyse the financial situation of a fictional municipality. Afterwards the participants were presented with four factors and were instructed to indicate which factor had been decisive in the financial process. Two factors required extensive experience as a municipal controller, while one factor required the use of intuition. The initial expectation was that experienced controllers would make more use of their intuition. Another supposition was that the use of intuition would increase with increasing time pressure. The research has shown that good use of intuition does indeed require experience. Thus, experienced public controllers make more and better use of their intuition than their less experienced colleagues. In addition, the use of intuition increases with the decrease in time available for analysis, but experience plays a crucial role in this respect. Further, the study reaches the conclusion that intuition and rational analysis do not so much exclude as complement each other. A good use of intuition requires considerable experience in rational analysis. Finally, the results of the study demonstrate that the use of intuition does not lead to worse decisions than those made using rational analysis.     

Worlds,Families, Regimes: Country Clusters in European and OECD Area Public Policy

This article focuses on the notion that the policies and politics of states and nations constitute distinct worlds or clusters. We begin by examining the concept of clustering as it has emerged in the literature on policy regimes and families of nations. We then address a series of empirical questions: whether distinct worlds persist in an era of policy convergence and globalisation, whether policy antecedents cluster in the same ways as policy outcomes and whether the enlargement of the EU has led to an increase in the number of worlds constituting the wider European polity. Our main conclusions are that country clustering is, if anything, more pronounced than in the past, that it is, in large part, structurally determined and that the EU now contains a quite distinct post-Communist family of nations.     

The survival of Nepad and the African peer review mechanism: A critical analysis

A lack of definition, poor communication and organisational weaknesses are damaging Nepad just as its most important venture — peer review — begins. The article asks how long Nepad can survive without robust delivery and plain talk about its future.     

The Security Treaty System and the Japanese Military-Industrial Complex

Abstract

Recently much discussion has focused on the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, first signed in September, 1951, renewed in a more equitable form in 1960, and up for renewal again in 1970. Much less attention has been paid the U.S.-Japan military-economic relationship shaped largely by adminstrative agreements that followed in the wake of the first Security Treaty. This article deals with that military-economic relationship and other aspects of recent U.S.-Japanese relations relevant to the discussion of contemporary American imperialism in Asia.     

Report on Japan 1972

Abstract

Nothing has more mystified discussions of Japanese military development than the innumerable simplistic conclusions drawn from percentage comparisons with Gross National Product (GNP) or with international levels of military spending. This is seriously misleading from two broad angles: (1) the actual size and growth of the military and the hidden expenses of the military budget; (2) the key role that Japan’s defense expenditures play in supporting American imperialism in Asia.     

Japan studies old and new at the end of the eighties

Abstract

During the first two decades of the Cold War era, many historians of Japan in American universities sought to rise above the hatreds of the war era and develop a brighter, more positive image of Japan's recent past. Concentrating on the rational nature of the state-building process (but downplaying the ways in which irrationality was also institutionalized), they described how the Meiji oligarchs constructed a modern state that led Japan at the end of the nineteenth century into the worlds of capitalist industry, great-power politics, and colonial empire. This explicitly anti-Marxist phase of American historiography is known as the modernization perspective.     

Autopsy at 2 months after death: brain is satisfactorily preserved for neuropathology

Disclosure of neurological disorders by neuropathological examination may be one important aim of forensic autopsies. There are insufficient data on human brain tissue preservation after prolonged postmortem periods. Here, we describe neuropathological findings in a brain of a 77-year-old woman that was fixed at autopsy 2 months after death. The body had been stored in a cooling chamber at 3 degrees C temperature. Gross inspection of the brain was satisfactorily possible. Histomorphology was excellently preserved. Many histochemical and immunohistochemical stains allowed satisfactory neuropathological evaluation of brain tissue and the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. Nevertheless, some immunohistochemical stainings repeatedly yielded negative or suboptimal results. We conclude that neuropathological examination of human brain tissue extracted from the skull and fixed after prolonged body storage in a cool environment is feasible for forensic diagnosis of neurological disorders even several months after death. However, in such cases the significance of negative immunohistochemical staining results must be interpreted with caution.     

EU accession and the hardening of soft budget constraints: some macro evidence

The hardening of soft budget constraints (SBCs) is a central element in transforming the economies of Central and Eastern Europe into market economies. This paper presents macro evidence on budget hardening of transition economies comparing the performance of EU accession countries relative to non-accession countries. We estimate SBC hardening for 21 transition economies in a partial adjustment model by measuring the reaction of employment to output changes over a 10-year period. The paper finds that accession candidates have reduced excess labour demand substantially relative to non-accession countries.