Often treated as a unified concept with a single definition, the presidential mandate actually encompasses multiple definitions, each connected to distinct ideas about democracy and presidential leadership. This article looks at how and when modern presidents have used mandate rhetoric and seeks to explain changes in presidential mandate-claiming patterns. Using an original dataset of 1,467 presidential communications from 1933 through 2009, I find that after 1969 presidents became more likely to use election results to justify their actions. However, they also became less likely to emphasize the magnitude of the election result, focusing their mandate rhetoric instead on campaign promises and distinctions between candidates and parties. Evidence suggests that this shift is the result of a combination of several factors: changes to the presidential nomination system, polarized party politics, and an overall decline in presidential approval ratings. Based on this research, I conclude that ideas about the presidential mandate are closely connected with the political conditions and challenges facing presidents. As the place of the presidency has shifted in American politics, the ways in which presidents interpret and communicate about elections have also changed.

Between 1915 and 1929 across North America most commercial builders ceased to erect dwellings for low- and moderate-income households. As a result, these households increasingly relied on housing units that had filtered down. This development had momentous consequences for the housing market and eventually for housing policy as well as for the character of American cities. The reasons for this change were complex. They included a rapid and then permanent increase in building costs coupled with an irregular decline in owner-building, the means by which many families had once housed themselves. Especially after 1918 there was a shift in consumer preferences away from housing and toward other consumer goods, notably automobiles. This was partly counterbalanced by a new appreciation by the middle class of the virtues of home ownership and improvement, but this preference was channeled into the development of large, planned, and well-serviced subdivisions. This type of residential development required larger amounts of capital and fostered the growth of a new financial instrument, the mortgage bond. Bonds redirected the savings of small investors that had previously financed small-scale land speculation, house building, and landlordism. In 15 years the urban housing market had been transformed, with large consequences for the lives of Americans.

This article proposes a methodology to address the urban evolutionary process, demonstrating how it is reflected in literature. It focuses on “literary space,” presented as a territory defined by the period setting or as evoked by the characters, which can be georeferenced and drawn on a map. It identifies the different locations of literary space in relation to urban development and the economic, political, and social context of the city. We suggest a new approach for mapping a relatively comprehensive body of literature by combining literary criticism, urban history, and geographic information systems (GIS). The home-range concept, used in animal ecology, has been adapted to reveal the size and location of literary space. This interdisciplinary methodology is applied in a case study to nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels involving the city of Lisbon. The developing concepts of cumulative literary space and common literary space introduce size calculations in addition to location and structure, previously developed by other researchers. Sequential and overlapping analyses of literary space throughout time have the advantage of presenting comparable and repeatable results for other researchers using a different body of literary works or studying another city. Results show how city changes shaped perceptions of the urban space as it was lived and experienced. A small core area, correspondent to a part of the city center, persists as literary space in all the novels analyzed. Furthermore, the literary space does not match the urban evolution. There is a time lag for embedding new urbanized areas in the imagined literary scenario.

This article examines whether published keyword indexes to 22 British poets had any measurable effect on scholarly production related to those poets, mainly using quantitative output measures, since these are all that is available. It also draws on archival information about the individual concordances and their origins. The article tests whether concordances facilitated scholarship, or were a by-product/correlative of scholarship, or were unrelated to scholarship. The preponderance of the evidence leans toward the by-product hypothesis. More important, given the centrality of keyword indexing today, the evidence is mostly inconsistent with the facilitation argument. It is most likely that concordances emerged as a by-product and adjunct to scholarship and that their main use was by undergraduates, amateurs, and others below the elite level. Implications for the present are briefly discussed.

This article assesses the pirate bands in the coastal waters of late imperial China as political communities in flight from the state. James C. Scott's (2009) recent work on fugitive political communities in the highlands of Southeast Asia presents a novel and compelling account of small, remote groups living as escapees from the state. I expand on Scott's thesis by considering pirate bands as escape groups that not only escape state coercion but go on to accumulate sufficient power to reengage with and sometimes coerce the states they escaped. The pirate bands of the period formed relationships with the Chinese state that were by turns competitive, cooperative, coercive, and extractive. They were persistently loyal to no one but themselves. Two cases illustrate the argument: that of the pirate band of Zheng Zhilong and his son Zheng Chenggong and that of the pirate queen Zheng Yi Sao.