The Civil War pension system was the most comprehensive social policy in the late nineteenth-century United States. Between 1880 and 1910, approximately a quarter of the federal government’s expenditure was devoted to this enormous system of military benefits. Scholars have typically charted the development of the pension system through a series of legislative watersheds, detailing its gradual expansion and liberalization. Yet, as this article shows, this was not the only path that the pension system could have followed. By investigating Commissioner of Pensions John Bentley’s five-year administration of the Pension Bureau during the late 1870s, this article explores a story of suppressed – rather than successful – state-building. While Bentley attempted to administer the pension system according to the shibboleths of the contemporary civil service reform movement, the nation’s veterans and their allies pursued a pension system predicated upon an incipient theory of veterans’ entitlements and rights. The Civil War pension system, this article thus reminds us, was not simply the sign of a precocious nineteenth-century state, but the product of a specific type of state, one that reflected a preference for distributive policies and decentralized administration rather than administrative centralization and broad grants of bureaucratic discretion.

Based on excerpts from the author’s book, Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019), this article explores the passage and early implementation of Japan’s infamous prewar law, the Peace Preservation Law (Chianijihō). Enacted in March 1925, this law was utilized to arrest over 70,000 people in the Japanese metropole and tens of thousands more in Japan’s colonial territories until being repealed by order of Allied Occupation authorities in October 1945. Proponents initially explained that the law was to suppress communists and anticolonial activists for threatening the national polity, although how to exactly define such threats remained ambiguous. By the 1930s the purview of the law expanded and was used to detain academics, other activists, and members of religious groups who were seen as challenging imperial orthodoxy. This article focuses on the interpretive debates over the law’s central category—kokutai, or national polity—and how its interpretation started to transform as the law was first applied in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The occasion of the Peace Preservation Law’s centennial invites us to consider its history and legacy, especially as policing and state power have expanded since the so-called war on terror.

The human need for rehabilitation, assistance, and augmentation has led to the development and use of wearable exoskeletons. Upper limb exoskeletons under research and development are tested on human volunteers to gauge performance and usability. Direct testing can often cause straining of the joints, especially the shoulder joint, which is the most important and flexible joint in the upper extremity of the human body. The misalignment of joint axes between the exoskeleton and the human body causes straining. To avoid this, we propose designing and developing a novel human shoulder phantom mimicking the shoulder complex motion and the humeral head translation that can help in the real-time testing of exoskeletons without the need for human volunteers. The device can be used to test the interaction forces and the maximum reachable position of the exoskeleton. It consists of three degrees of freedom (DOF) passive shoulder girdle mechanism and seven DOF glenohumeral joint mechanisms, of which six are passive revolute joints and one is an active prismatic joint mimicking the humeral head translation. All the passive joints are spring-loaded and are incorporated with joint angle sensors. A custom-made, three-axis force sensor measures the human–exoskeleton interaction forces. The design details, selection of joint springs, linear actuation mechanism, and the analysis of the phantom’s reachable workspace are presented. The device is validated by comparing the interaction forces produced during the conventional exoskeleton-assisted and human-assisted phantom arm elevation.

Researchers applying evolutionary theory to political psychology discover that in democracies, most citizens struggle to select political leaders based on their ideologies. Rather, they tend to concentrate on procedural fairness during public decision-making when evaluating their leaders. We re-examine such evolutionary propositions in China using eight Wason selection experiments. In autocracies, where accountability systems are weak or absent, little is known about how citizens judge politicians’ ideologies and their cheating behaviors. Our findings show that Chinese citizens are incapable of identifying political leaders’ ideological orientations; instead, they rely on a cheater-detection mechanism, evaluating leaders based on their adherence to procedural fairness. These results contribute to our understanding of democratic competence and the cognitive mechanisms of political judgment in autocratic contexts.

This study examines the historical evolution of a Companion report detailing the burning of an unnamed man as punishment for assuming the passive role in male–male anal intercourse (liwāṭ). The genesis of this sexual passivity report can be traced back to an earlier incident involving Abū Bakr, in which the apostate al-Fujāʾa al-Salamī (d. 11/632) was executed by being burned alive for multiple offences, including apostasy, betrayal, and the slaughter of Muslims. This study investigates the transformation of the apostasy report into one specifically addressing male sexual passivity, analysing how these two accounts converged over time. It explores both the mechanisms and motivations behind their evolution into a punitive report focused on burning a man for his passive sexual role in liwāṭ. Additionally, it considers potential reasons for the development of this report, including the possibility that the phrase “he was penetrated like a woman” was initially used as a rhetorical insult directed at the apostate al-Fujāʾa, but gradually evolved in later sources into an association with the crime for which an unnamed man was purportedly punished with burning.

The cavities over the re-entry vehicle alter the aerothermodynamic properties, leading to enhanced thermal protection as well as effective aerothermodynamic performance. This paper investigates the estimation of aerothermodynamic properties over a re-entry vehicle with different types of cavities on the frontal face of the vehicle. The direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) simulation of hypersonic flow over the Crew module Atmospheric Re-entry Experiment (CARE) capsule was simulated with the re-entry velocity of 7,422 m/s and the freestream temperature of 225 K at an altitude of 110 km. A transient flow Knudsen number of 0.1 and air consists of 78.09% of ${N_2}$ and 21.91% of ${O_2}$ are used in the simulations. Two types of cavities, namely trapezoidal and the semi-circular cavity on the frontal face of the re-entry vehicle with different length to depth ratios, are analysed. The simulation results show that the recirculation regions are formed at the base of the cavity in the case of a cavity with sharp corners, whereas in the case of a cavity with rounded corners, the recirculation formed at the lip of the cavity for both trapezoidal and the semi-circular cavities. Increasing the length and depth of the cavity leads to smaller decrement in the drag when compared to the capsule without cavity for both trapezoidal and the semi-circular cavities. The heat flux is low for a cavity with the small L/D ratio (L/D = 0.5) for both fixed length and depth for trapezoidal-type cavity, whereas for large L/D ratio (L/D = 1.5) increasing the length of the cavity increases the overall heat flux.

This article examines working-class views of the Tammany Hall political machine and its main opposition parties between 1870 and 1924. Previous historians, relying mostly on accounts from machine politicians like George Washington Plunkitt, have tended to argue that Tammany Hall enjoyed popularity among working-class New Yorkers in this period because it offered them effective forms of material aid through the practice of job patronage and informal acts of charity. This article complicates that assertion by examining accounts and voting records from working-class individuals themselves. It finds that, while patronage and informal charity were indeed popular with working-class voters in this period, they were often dissatisfied with most other aspects of Tammany Hall governance, such as its reputation for corruption or inefficient delivering of city services. Working-class voters only continued to vote for Tammany Hall because the machine’s political rivals were generally led by wealthy reformers who repeatedly and openly disparaged members of the working class in their speeches and supported policies that were even more unpopular with working-class voters than Tammany Hall’s governance.

The haunting sounds of shakuhachi music and poet Lawson Inada's resonant narration underscore the powerful emotional and moral reverberations of the Ina family's American diasporan story, told in Dr. Satsuki Ina's evocative documentary, From a Silk Cocoon. The film describes her father's upbringing as a kibei, a Japanese-American educated in Japan; his hastened return to the United States because of parental fear that he would be drafted into the Imperial Japanese military; his marriage to a beautiful kibei, born in Seattle and educated in Nagano; and the profound damage perpetrated by the U.S. government on the young couple during their devastating four years of incarceration during the Second World War because of their ethnic heritage. The Inas spent two years at Topaz Internment Camp, in Utah before they were separated and Satsuki Ina's father was sent to a Department of Justice internment camp in Bismarck, North Dakota with other so-called “enemy aliens” while Ina, her mother, and brother were sent to Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security prison for those who either refused or said “no” to a loyalty questionnaire.

When Ulysses S. Grant succumbed to cancer on July 23, 1885, the nation mourned the loss of one of its greatest generals and the first president to enforce the civil rights of African Americans. As scholars are increasingly recognizing, many Republicans remained committed to the protection of Black suffrage as late as 1890, but in exploring the reaction to Grant’s death, Civil War memory scholars have overlooked the importance of memories of Grant’s presidency. Through an examination of newspapers and biographies in the months after Grant’s death and the immediate years thereafter, up to 1890, this article demonstrates that Americans of all political stripes used their memories of Grant’s presidency to aid their long-term political goals of either restricting or promoting Black civil rights. Democrats and reform-minded Republicans tried to denigrate Grant’s administration for supposed corruption while still applauding his magnanimity at Appomattox. In contrast, their Republican opponents, Black and white, contested this memory by constructing a politically purposeful memory of Grant’s Reconstruction-era politics as part of their ongoing fight to enforce Black voting rights and by extension secure the fruits of Union military victory. In doing so, Americans demonstrated that they remained unreconciled and divided on both the battlefields of Civil War memory and Reconstruction.