The discourse on twentieth-century urban planning has hidden from view the way religion (re)shaped the urban landscape. By analysing the interaction between urban development and Catholic politics in the southern Dutch provincial cities of Eindhoven and Roermond, this article argues that religious thinking, practice and institutions had considerable influence on urban planning. Religious views and ideas played an important role in the spatial transformation of these towns. The secular instruments of urban planning were used during the ‘pillarization’ period to emphasize the sensus catholicus of town and region, and to achieve the desired Catholic social and moral order.

Built in 1769 as a private observatory for King George III, Kew Observatory was taken over in 1842 by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). It was then quickly transformed into what some claimed to be a ‘physical observatory’ of the sort proposed by John Herschel – an observatory that gathered data in a wide range of physical sciences, including geomagnetism and meteorology, rather than just astronomy. Yet this article argues that the institution which emerged in the 1840s was different in many ways from that envisaged by Herschel. It uses a chronological framework to show how, at every stage, the geophysicist and Royal Artillery officer Edward Sabine manipulated the project towards his own agenda: an independent observatory through which he could control the geomagnetic and meteorological research, including the ongoing ‘Magnetic Crusade’. The political machinations surrounding Kew Observatory, within the Royal Society and the BAAS, may help to illuminate the complex politics of science in early Victorian Britain, particularly the role of ‘scientific servicemen’ such as Sabine. Both the diversity of activities at Kew and the complexity of the observatory's origins make its study important in the context of the growing field of the ‘observatory sciences’.

Prescriptive pronunciation manuals of French generally present a vocalic inventory with two low vowels: front [a] and back [ɑ]. At the same time, descriptive overviews of modern French note the tendency of the posterior vowel to merge with the anterior token, especially in unstressed position. The actual spread and conditioning factors of this alleged merger are nevertheless unknown: we are ignorant about the degree of neutralization, and it is not clear whether it is a change affecting all regions and generations in France.

This article studies the French low vowels from a sociolinguistic perspective, by analyzing metropolitan French corpus data.

The absence of a ‘real’ urban chronicle tradition in fifteenth-century Flanders similar to the Italian or German models has raised questions among scholars. However, there is also no satisfactory consensus on the exact meaning or contents of medieval ‘urban historiography’. Some were ‘official’ city chronicles, while others lauded patrician lineages or took the viewpoint of specific social groups or corporate organizations and reinforced construction of the groups’ collective memories. Some seem to express the literary aspirations of individual city officials or clerics with strong connections to their towns. We propose an analytical framework to identify and measure the ‘urbanity’ of late medieval chronicles, taking into account the authorship and thematic emphasis of historiographical texts, but focusing on the social environment of their circulation and the ideological strategies at work.

Since its introduction into North America in the late nineteenth century, direct democracy, particularly in the form of direct legislation, has periodically piqued the interest of legal scholars. A handful of studies have examined the history of direct legislation in the United States and in Canada; however, these studies often fail to examine how direct legislation was actually used. Brief references might be given to which initiatives the voters attempted to secure via direct legislation, but the actual mechanics of the vote, and questions such as what the ballot said, for example, are typically overlooked.

In December 1993, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled in Pratt and Morgan v. The Attorney General for Jamaica that excessive delay in the enforcement of death sentences—defined with some caveats as more than 5 years from the time of conviction to execution—was “inhuman” and therefore unconstitutional. The Judicial Committee also reversed earlier rulings in finding that the 5 year time frame for appeals should include those delays that resulted from legal proceedings initiated by prisoners themselves. The result was to clear death row cells across most of the British Caribbean, with the capital sentences of more than 100 condemned prisoners commuted in Jamaica alone. Pratt also ushered in a new era of Judicial Committee activism in Caribbean death penalty cases that resulted in a series of further safeguards against executions, including the abolition of mandatory death sentences. The cumulative effect of these judgments is that there has not been an execution in Jamaica since 1988, even though capital punishment remains legal and, amidst persistently high rates of violent crime across the region, political support for a resumption of hanging is strong.

In this paper we consider middle-passive voice in Greek and Albanian, which shows a many-to-many mapping between LF and PF. Different morphosyntactic shapes (conditioned by tense or aspect) are compatible with the same set of interpretations, which include the passive, the reflexive, the anticausative, and the impersonal (in Albanian only). Conversely, each of these interpretations can be encoded by any of the available morphosyntactic structures. Specialized person inflections (in Greek and Albanian), the clitic $u$ (Albanian) and the affix -th- (Greek) lexicalize the internal argument (or the sole argument of intransitive in Albanian) either as a variable, which is LF-interpreted as bound by the EPP position (passives, anticausatives, reflexives) or as generically closed (impersonals, in Albanian only). The ambiguity between passives, anticausatives and reflexives depends on the interpretation assigned to the external argument (generic closure, suppression or unification with the internal argument respectively). In perfect tenses, auxiliary jam ‘be’ in Albanian derives the expression of middle-passive voice due to its selectional requirement for a participle with an open position. Crucially, no hidden features/abstract heads encoding interpretation are postulated, nor any Distributed Morphology-style realizational component.

In 1860, unfenced land across the South was open to the public. No state criminalized trespass, and the range was closed in only part of one county. Elsewhere, some states had closed the range, but most unfenced land in the United States was open to the wanderer. In the former Confederacy, fresh elections were held in 1865, and legislatures moved quickly to criminalize trespass, restrict hunting and fishing, and close the range.

Building on the empirical insights of Beckman, Jessen & Ringen (2013), we compare the fricatives within the laryngeal systems of Russian and Turkish on the premise that the former is a final devoicing language, while the latter is not, but instead has alternations based on processes of intervocalic voicing and final fortition. This view has consequences for the analysis of fricatives in Russian vs. Turkish: Russian fricatives undergo final devoicing, while Turkish fricatives do not. By contrast, unlike Russian fricatives, Turkish fricatives induce [spread glottis] assimilation in following sonorants. We show that these differences are upheld in three phonetic studies, extending the relevance of the ‘laryngeal realism’ hypothesis to fricatives as well as stops.

Increasing investment in agricultural land by global corporations and investors from wealthy developed nations in poorer, less developed countries has significant human rights and environmental impacts. Proponents of such land deals argue that they provide opportunities for improvements in agricultural practices and generate employment, which will benefit economic growth in host countries. However, there is growing evidence that the phenomenon known as ‘land grabbing’ displaces poor and vulnerable populations and damages the environment, which in turn exacerbates poverty and food insecurity. This article explores the impact of land grabbing in Ethiopia and examines the human rights and sustainable development frameworks within which land grabbing takes place. The article argues that a human rights approach is fundamental to reconcile the sustainable development imperatives of economic development and environmental protection in the context of land grabbing. It advocates an integrated human rights and sustainable development approach as a holistic framework for assessing the impact of land grabbing and for the development of policy and regulatory responses.