From rags to robes

He is author of many works about social class, including The Protestant Establishment Revisitedand Philadelphia Gentlemen,both published by Transaction Publishers.     

The Relationship Between Religious and Spiritual Factors and the Perpetration of Intimate Personal Violence

Despite some understanding of general correlates and possible antecedents to intimate partner violence (IPV) within the Christian community, the impact of religious and spiritual factors tends to be confounded by other factors and is often misjudged. Archival data from Wave III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) were used to examine the impact of nine religious and spiritual factors on the probability of IPV perpetration by males, aged 18 to 26, who nominally classified themselves as Catholic, Protestant, or Christian. Logistic regression results indicated that IPV perpetration could not be adequately predicted from the religious and spiritual factors. Given the geographic breadth and the size of the Add Health sample, no finding of a predictive model for Christian male-perpetrated IPV challenges the paradigm that religious and spiritual factors should be overtly addressed in faith-based batterers’ programs targeting young adult males.     

Russian Terror/ism and Revisionist Historiography

Interest in the violence of the Soviet regime has been a concern primarily of more conservative historians, while those on the Left have either been discomforted by the excessive brutality of the Russian Civil War and Stalinism or have looked for rationalizations for the necessity of violence. One tendency in the historiography has been to see violence as deeply embedded in the Bolshevik project, part of the Marxist or Leninist effort to transform the world or perfect the human being. Revolutionary and Stalinist violence are seen as similar or intimately linked, and differences between them have been largely effaced. This essay argues that the violence and terror of the Civil War years is best understood as part of wartime exigencies as well as choices made by the Bolsheviks and their enemies, while Stalinist violence was much more the product of the will of Stalin and his closest collaborators in their consolidation of autocratic power, and was far more gratuitous and irrational than the violence of the fledgling Soviet regime.     

The Australian Welfare State: Has Federalism Made a Difference?

This paper examines the historical development of the Australian welfare state with a view to identifying the role that Australia's federal constitutional arrangements have played in shaping that development. Theoretical paradigms have been unanimous in their prognoses: that federal states are likely to be slow in developing welfare state programmes and typically spend less on them than unitary states. But recently it has been argued that federal institutions may have a “ratchet effect” of slowing down the pace of change, irrespective of its direction. The purpose of this chronological account of significant stages in the development of the Australian welfare state is to use the unfolding of historical events — far too rich in nuance and detail to be captured in quantitative modelling — as a test‐bed for establishing whether, and, if so, to what extent, federalism has impacted on the trajectory of Australian welfare state development.     

The effect of various stain carriers on the quality and quantity of DNA extracted from dried bloodstains

Bloodstains were made with 200 microliters blood on each of 11 different common substrates to examine the effect of the stain carrier on the amount and quality of DNA recoverable. High-molecular-weight DNA was extracted from all samples after 2 days. The yield of DNA from each sample varied considerably, not only between the different stain carriers but also within a given category. With a DNA yield of up to 10 micrograms, paper, glass, nylon, wood, smooth leather and wool gave the best results, followed by blue denim and wallpaper (up to 6 micrograms), cotton fabric and carpeting (up to 4 micrograms) and suede (up to 2 micrograms). For several stain carriers the DNA-containing solution was contaminated by chemical substances, which in the case of the blue denim, suede, and carpet samples inhibited the digestion of the DNA with restriction enzymes and prevented DNA typing. The different textures of the stain carriers tested and (as for varying yields on the same carrier) the differing degree of loss of DNA during extraction and the physiological variation in the number of leukocytes in human blood are discussed as possible reasons for the wide range of variation in the amounts of DNA it was possible to extract.     

Metropolitan Planning Organizations and the New Regionalism: The Case of Louisville

This article outlines the new regionalism movement and its metropolitanagenda, reviews federal efforts to promote new regionalism underISTEA and TEA–21, considers how the new federal policieschanged the role of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs)in transportation planning by examining the MPO for the Louisvillemetropolis, and assesses the MPO process in Louisville. Thelocal decision of whether to build a new bridge across the OhioRiver was a major test of the enhanced MPO process. Federaltransportation policies enhanced regional coordination and cooperationin transportation planning in the Louisville metropolis resultingin a consensus plan to build two bridges across the Ohio River.However, the MPO process did not lead to the development ofa metropolitan-wide interest or perspective. Moreover, the newregionalist agenda was not advanced because sprawl was not afactor in the decision on whether and where to build the bridges.