In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

Chapter 10 examines a different type of long-run consequence. Various counties spent different amounts of time “on the frontier” and had different levels of absolute and relative homesteading.

This chapter introduces the three contributions that constitute Part III, “Population Dynamics, Learning, and Biology.” These contributions discuss biology and population dynamics in game theory. The chapters concern models of strategy adaptation: process models. Such models have refined our understanding of Nash and other equilibrium concepts, and the evolution of population shares through time is itself an object of interest from the perspectives of biological reproduction and of learning human (and artificial) agents.

In this chapter, I consider the Dialogues as a text that formulates and criticises a particular argument for design (‘the argument for design’). After presenting the relevant material from the Dialogues, I consider the strengths and weaknesses of the formulation of the argument that is the object of Hume’s criticisms, and set out what I take to be the full range of criticisms that Hume makes of it. I then assess the strength of these criticisms, paying particular attention to writers – for example Paley, Reid, Dawkins, and Hawthorne and Isaacs – who have claimed that Hume’s objections to ‘the argument for design’ are weak or ineffectual. Next, I consider the originality of Hume’s critique of ‘the argument for design’; I argue that, on the evidence that I have considered, Hume deserves most of the credit for the objections to ‘the argument for design’ in the Dialogues. I conclude with some brief remarks about the relative importance of the success of the criticisms of ‘the argument for design’ to the overall project of the Dialogues.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

This chapter connects the threads from the preceding two chapters by examining representations of “India” as part of the social, cultural, and physical landscape of Eastern Africa in fictional works by African authors of Indian descent. In Sophia Mustafa’s In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (2002) and Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès (1999), the diasporic imagination cites and sites symbolic Indian spaces within local African contexts hierarchized by race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Placing these texts in a shared but differentiated discourses of race, colonialism, and nationalism in Mauritius and East Africa, the chapter demonstrates that they inscribe Indian cultural spaces in diasporic locations not to express nostalgia for a distant homeland or to make cultural claims on the locality; but instead, their diasporic imagination moves through local, unresolved histories of colonial, racial, and gendered violence, uniquely sustained by ongoing forms of displacement and dispossession. Anarchival movements in these texts uncover Black migration histories as entangled and interdependent with Indian diasporic insinuation of transnational ties.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

This chapter introduces several basic tools in high-dimensional probability: decoupling, concentration for quadratic forms (the Hanson–Wright inequality), symmetrization, and contraction. These techniques are illustrated through estimates of the operator norm of a random matrix. This is applied to matrix completion, where the goal is to recover a low-rank matrix from a random subset of its entries. Exercises explore variants of the Hanson–Wright inequality, mean estimation, concentration of the norm for anisotropic random vectors, distances to subspaces, graph cutting, the concept of type in normed spaces, non-Euclidean versions of the approximate Caratheodory theorem, and covariance estimation.

The response describes initiatives at the University of Cambridge Primary School (UCPS) and Laborschule Bielefeld in Germany that promote democracy education and provide children with the tools and opportunities to engage meaningfully in democratic processes. At UCPS, a Children’s Congress allows students to participate in school decision-making processes, a collaboration with academic researchers sought to understand how children think and feel about their disenfranchisement and a democracy curriculum teaches children key concepts and empowers them to form their own opinions and articulate them effectively. Laborschule Bielefeld focuses on peaceful conflict resolution as a foundation for democratic education. It uses the concept of ‘nonviolent communication’ to teach children how to express their feelings and needs constructively.

If anyone is worthy of the title of “Cold War liberal,” you think it would be the celebrity journalist and public philosopher Walter Lippmann. Lippmann coined the phrase “Cold War” in 1947 and had long been considered the guru of modern liberalism. Yet Lippmann was a harsh critic of containment and, by the time of the Vietnam War, considered himself a “neo-isolationist.” He was also self-identified as a conservative by the Cold War era and was an outspoken critic of New Deal “planning.” Lippmann’s career highlights the problem of talking about “Cold War liberalism” in the singular. At the same time, there were few greater champions than Lippmann of a large military establishment and an expansive welfare state that typified Cold War liberal orthodoxy.

It is argued that homesteading density is a good measure of defining “the frontier,” and it contrasts with measures based only on low population density, which are likely better measures of “isolation.”