Like other historiographical fields, that of German history has been defined through most of its existence by the things historians argued about. We could go back well over a hundred years to the Methodenstreit over Karl Lamprecht's efforts to write multidisciplinary history, follow the line through the work of Eckart Kehr, Fritz Fischer, Hans Ulrich Wehler, and the Sonderweg debate, and continue on through the Historikerstreit and the Historikerinnenstreit of the 1980s, and the Goldhagen and Wehrmacht exhibit fights in the mid-1990s, to recent debates over the relative weight of colonial and Holocaust memory.

Situated on the tip of a mountainous peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Africa, the city of Freetown, Sierra Leone, receives an extraordinarily high rainfall, heavily concentrated in the few months of the rainy season. Working from this extreme wetness and inspired by recent work in the oceanic humanities, this article reads Freetown’s colonial era newspaper archive for water. It argues that the heavy rain of the West African Monsoon was an important agent in shaping the decaying streetscape of the city, and a broader imaginary of decline, at the turn of the twentieth century. Using vivid descriptions of wetness, nature and disease, African editors, correspondents and letter-writers evoked a sodden modernity to push the colonial government to maintain and improve the city’s street infrastructure and at once to forge an elite urban public in opposition to migrants from the urban hinterland.

This paper introduces a theory of ownership that is rooted in Israel Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship – The Entrepreneurial Theory of Ownership. Its central idea is that natural resources are not available to us automatically as other approaches to justice implicitly assume. Before we can use a resource, we need to do preparatory work in the form of making an entrepreneurial judgement on it. This fact, as I argue, makes it possible to put private ownership as a natural right on a firm normative ground and answer many traditional challenges to private property.

Beall's original understanding of the nature of the divine allows for contradictory statements to be true of God, by assuming that parts of reality, such as the Trinity, are ‘glutty’ (namely, what we can say about them is both true and false). Is the divine is the only glutty part of reality, and if so, why? Furthermore, does the glutty nature of the divine undermine its simplicity? Beall argues that God is not mereologically complex, but on his account God is logically and hence, it appears, metaphysically complex.

Early in World War I, Virginia Woolf wrote these words: ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be […]’. It is tempting to assume that darkness simply hides the unknown and the threatening. It is more challenging to think of it as Woolf did: rich with possibility in even the most desperate times.

We live in what many would readily describe as dark times. These times have brought (among much else) a once-in-a-century public health crisis, the continued redemption of toxic white supremacy, declining trust in and support for public institutions, and growing evidence of impending climate devastation. ‘Dark Futures’ will consider some of the scenes of this devastation and mine them for insights into our predicaments and our prospects.

Yegiazaryan v. Smagin represents a landmark case within the Supreme Court's (SCOTUS) jurisdiction, revolving around a contractual dispute between John Yegiazaryan and Alex Smagin. The legal intricacies unfolded when Smagin sought to enforce a multimillion-dollar arbitration award against Yegiazaryan in California under the New York Convention. The district court's asset freeze faced complications as Yegiazaryan, residing in California, received an unrelated arbitration award and attempted to evade the freeze. In response, Smagin invoked the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), alleging a coordinated effort to obstruct the collection of the arbitration judgment. The case stands as a pivotal legal milestone marked by complexities and jurisdictional challenges.

Within a year of World War II’s end, the United States federal government passed the National Mental Health Act of 1946. This bill was the country’s first significant foray into the realm of psychological health. Many studies have examined the act and its legacy, including the creation of the National Institute of Mental Health. Fewer studies, however, have investigated the significant roles of veterans and veterans’ organizations in the passage of this legislation. This essay delves into these various roles and argues that veterans, from various professional backgrounds, united by creating strategic arguments to lobby for this act. Their motivations ranged from the desire to destigmatize mental health issues to discovering methods for the prevention and treatment of psychiatric problems among American society. Ultimately, these veterans helped the nation revolutionize its approach to mental health policy and paved the way for future servicemembers to take a stand and become political actors.

Improvement in genetic gains of crops could be achieved by phenomics' characterization of agronomic, physiological and stress-related traits. Molecular and strategic breeding programmes require broad range of foreground and background phenotypic information for crop improvement. The current experiment was performed on 123 advanced soybean (Glycine max L.) genotypes including seven local lines belongs to four different maturity groups (000-lV) to estimate the endogenous potential of various yield-related traits. The experimental trial was repeated for two cropping seasons. Four traits out of six, yield per plant (YPP), number of seeds per plant, number of pods per plant and plant height (PH), showed maximum variation (CV%) that directly correlate with variability in the subjected population. PH, number of pods, 100-seed weight and YPP showed strong positive correlation in both years. Among the principal components, factors 1 and 2 showed maximum contribution in phenotypic variability ranges from 19 to 48.5% and 26 to 47.7% in the first and second years, respectively. Number of pods showed significant positive correlation with genotypes in both years. Dendrogram showed two distinct groups of soybean genotypes. Genetic variation and association among the accessions is indispensable for effective conservation and utilization of germplasm. Principal component analysis helps to identify the diverse genotypes that will be used as a parent for various breeding programmes. These phenotypic data will be used for detection of heat stress-related quantitative trait loci with genotypic data in genome-wide association studies experiments.

This paper investigates the moral emotion of being socially, but non-agentially connected to a harm. I propose understanding the emotion of an affiliated onlooker as a species of regret called ‘social-regret’. Breaking from existing guilt- and shame-based accounts, I argue that social-regret can be a fitting, expressive, and revelatory reactive attitude that opens the way for deliberation over accountability for others’ harms. When we feel social-regret, our attention is directed towards the moral salience of our social relations and the expectations that undergird them, as well as possibilities for ameliorative action. I consider several existing accounts of affiliated onlookers’ emotions (including embarrassment, guilt, and shame), and I highlight the advantages of supplementing these with a regret-based account. Social-regret provides a novel way to understand negative, self-directed emotions in response to others’ harms as rational, expressive, and potentially reason-giving experiences.

With recent epidemics such as COVID-19, H1N1 and SARS causing devastating financial loss to the economy, it is important that insurance companies plan for financial costs of epidemics. This article proposes a new methodology for epidemic and insurance modelling by combining the existing deterministic compartmental models and the Markov multiple state models to facilitate actuarial computations to design new health insurance plans that cover epidemics. Our method is inspired by the seminal paper (Feng and Garrido (2011) North American Actuarial Journal, 15, 112–136.) of Feng and Garrido and complements the work of Hillairet and Lopez et al. in Hillairet and Lopez ((2021) Scandinavian Actuarial Journal, 2021(8), 671–694.) and Hillairet et al. ((2022) Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, 107, 88–101.) In this work, we use the deterministic SIR model and the Eyam epidemic data set to provide numerical illustrations for our method.

Andrés Segovia's repertoire—the repertorio segoviano—has crucially shaped the guitar canon. Although some guitar scholars argue that these works helped rescue the instrument from the periphery of art music, others contend that, by commissioning music from minor, conservative composers, Segovia missed the chance to request pieces from the most influential twentieth-century modernists. This article questions the conservative homogeneity of the repertorio segoviano. Focusing on Segovia's collaborations with Heitor Villa-Lobos, I argue that it contains traces of coloniality: The perpetuation of colonial domination in Latin America. The relationship between Segovia and Villa-Lobos was more contentious than the official narrative suggests—tensions stemming from their dominant personalities, divergent approaches to guitar composition, and conflicting musical ideologies. Indeed, although Segovia's stance aligned with Francoist and European conservative aesthetics, Villa-Lobos embraced a transcultural approach to music shaped by, a response to, and exertion of the coloniality of power—discrepancies that were engraved in their collaborations and ultimately the repertorio segoviano. This article ultimately foregrounds that elite composers from the periphery played an essential role in the modernization of the guitar in the twentieth century, thereby questioning historiographies that detach the instrument from the social, political, and cultural messiness of colonial difference and the coloniality of power.