This essay sheds new light on the supposedly familiar world of Victorian philanthropy by considering charity in relation to market regulation. Focusing on the “charity fraud,” we suggest that in the shaping of this exclusive and paradoxical marketplace, charities eagerly seized fraud denunciations to advertise and authenticate their legitimacy. This reflected the massive changes in the charitable world since the days of paternalist social relations and, paradoxically, illustrates the extremity of the problem facing the donating public: if one could not be entirely certain of a local charity, how could he or she discern between the national organizations that undertook fund-raising for international disasters? This contest for legitimacy and the exposure of fraud shaped a contested but oddly virtuous exchange market: by the turn of the twentieth century, charities not only published account sheets but debated them publicly, too.

This article explores how notions of African authenticity informed urban planning in post-colonial Africa. It examines an attempt by Tanzania's ruling party to build a new national capital in the sparsely populated region of Dodoma. Paradoxically, Dodoma's planners sought to build a modern African city based on the social principles of the traditional African village. This vision of African village authenticity legitimized Tanzania's ruling party by linking its authority to a purely African, rather than colonial, past. At the same time, it allowed politicians to criminalize urban poverty by attributing it to racial betrayal rather than broader structural failures.

In the twentieth century, the Orthodox Christian diaspora played a critical role in the development of modern Orthodox theology. Forced to take up residence in the West, major figures like Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944), Georges Florovsky (1893–1979), Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958), and Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983) successfully reinvigorated Orthodox theology for succeeding generations. Their works have become the standard readings in theological faculties and seminaries the world over. But despite the durable and multifaceted heritage of modern Orthodox theology, contemporary Orthodox Christians have been, for the most part, rather timid in thoroughly engaging themselves with matters political. Notable exceptions include Nicolas Berdyaev (1874–1948), who provides a far-reaching critique of both state sovereignty and the Orthodox Church's historic role in supporting worldly realms of authority. For his part, Bulgakov offers some penetrating insights in favor of the separation of church and state in the very brief chapter devoted to this topic, “Orthodoxy and the State,” in his classic treatise, The Orthodox Church. Somewhat later in the twentieth century, the few noteworthy authors who have much more specifically engaged with broader political questions include the current archbishop of Albania, Anastasios Yannoulatos, and arguably the most important Orthodox political philosopher today, Christos Yannaras.

During the 1920s and 1930s many working-class families needed emergency credit. Their use of pawnbrokers is well documented but the presence of a network of moneylenders, most of whom were women operating from their own homes, is not. This article examines the background to and the impact of the Moneylenders Act (1927) which was designed to reduce the number of working-class lenders, widely perceived as disreputable, in order to protect vulnerable borrowers, most of whom were women. Using Liverpool as a case-study, I also examine the possible reasons for the dramatic decline in the number of licensed moneylenders and analyse the implications of this for the provision of working-class credit.

This article offers a syntactic analysis of the construction [be done NP], e.g. I am done dinner, I am finished my homework, as found in Canadian English and some US dialects. After situating this construction in the context of a productive transitive be perfect in Scots/English dialects, [be done NP] will be distinguished from a set of its conceptual and structural relatives, and ultimately be shown not to be reducible to a surface realization of another underlying structure. From the perspective of syntactic theory, the article problematizes the parsimony of the mainstream generative approach (most recently in MacFadden & Alexiadou 2010) in accounting for the facts of [be done NP] on strictly compositional grounds, as well as the mainstream view of lexical items as projecting theta grids and subcategorization frames (as e.g. in Grimshaw 1979; Emonds 2000). Following Fillmore et al. (1988), Goldberg (1995, 2005) and others, what will be suggested instead is a construction grammar approach to [be done NP], under which a construction holistically licenses its argument structure. Along these lines [be done NP] will be characterized as an abstract construction with some fixed material.

The small population of Weddell seals at Larsen Harbour, South Georgia, is isolated from the rest of the species and is unique because nearly all pups are born on land rather than on sea-ice. Observations of seals in Larsen Harbour during the breeding season are summarised. These have been infrequent until cruise ships started to visit. With often only a single observation in a year, accurate estimates of pup production are impossible but it appears that the population has decreased over the last three decades.

This article examines a case of real-time language change in the spoken French of adolescents residing in four localities in Ontario, Canada. The focus of the study is the alternation between verb forms meaning ‘went/have gone’ over a three-decade timespan (1978–2005), and involves three main variants: avoir été, être allé and avoir allé. This study investigates the influence of both social and linguistic factors on variant choice, showing evidence for both devernacularization and regularization as a result of social change.