The completion of the House of Commons, 1604–1629, a sprawling research project involving over a dozen scholars who have toiled in the archival vineyards for the past quarter century, is a development of fundamental importance for the study of early Stuart history. This essay highlights some of its many findings and suggests some directions for further research, deploying the riches in these six volumes.

British officials' largely negative impression of the United States caused by America's intransigence in allowing renegotiation of Britain's First World War debts must be viewed against a backdrop of a longstanding debtor-creditor relationship between the two nations. Since the mid-nineteenth century, British creditors, largely through the efforts of the London-based Corporation of Foreign Bondholders, vigorously yet unsuccessfully attempted to collect large debts on repudiated American state bonds. This article provides greater understanding of this history and shows that the nineteenth-century debt controversy might well have been avoided to the economic benefit of the British and particularly the American South.

The processes of globalisation, market deregulation and the retreat of the welfare state in advanced capitalist societies have revitalised the debate about how to reconcile economic development and social cohesion. This debate has been widespread in Italy, where great differences occur between local contexts as regards economic performance, the level of inequality and, more generally, the cohesion of the social fabric. Within this framework, this paper explores the level of both economic development and social cohesion in Italian provinces, through the analysis of secondary data. With particular reference to the Italian situation, the article therefore contributes to the debate on the focalisation and operationalisation of the two concepts. Finally, the complex relation between economic development and social cohesion is analysed, and its non-linear trend is outlined.

The aim of this study is twofold: first, to find evidence for additional advanced stages in L2 French. The continuum of Bartning and Schlyter (2004) is taken as a point of departure. It is hypothesized that a number of linguistic criteria will account for high-level proficiency. It was earlier found that besides morpho-syntax, formulaic sequences and information structure are interesting phenomena for highly proficient learners (Bartning, Forsberg and Hancock, 2009). Three more measures are now added, i.e. perceived nativelikeness, lexical richness and fluency.

The second aim of this study is to contribute to the debate on the possibility of nativelike attainment. The study shows that several measures are prone to characterise nativelike performance in highly proficient users among whom some attain nativelikeness.

On September 18, 1938, Benito Mussolini disembarked in the port city of Trieste to begin a seven-day visit of the Tre Venezie. The tour was in keeping with Mussolini's policy of andare verso il popolo which involved periodic visits to Italy's regions. It was also an opportunity to impose the cult of the Duce on a frontier region which had, since the 1920s, been the site of harsh anti-Slav policies designed to Italianize the Venezia-Giulia region. This article examines the workings of the cult in Trieste where the regime was anxious to demonstrate that it was present in a city that had felt neglected by Rome. Often viewed as a top-down enterprise, this article will explore how the cult of the Duce relied significantly on local dynamics and spaces.

Landscape and culture are among the topics that make a place attractive for tourists. Protected areas, used also for leisure purposes, represent good development opportunities for the neighbouring communities. The National Park of Greenland has adopted new regulations and leisure activities will be allowed in its area. This will represent an opportunity of increasing the tourism business in Ittoqqortoormiit, the adjacent community to the park, which is suffering from a difficult economic situation. This new use of the resources in the protected area may well serve as engine for growth and revitalization of the local economy that has a chronic lack of jobs and an important outmigration. In this article are presented some of the results of interviews done in 2009 with the Inuit of Ittoqqortoormiit regarding tourism. The goal of the project ‘Community-based tourism as an option for concrete, viable development in peripheral, remote places’ was to investigate how a small Inuit community, peripheral and remote, which has traditional subsistence activities, but low incomes and high unemployment rate, could seek economic alternatives in tourism.

Following the 1906 midterm elections, Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge was excited to return to Washington to introduce a bill that would prohibit child labor in the nation's factories, mines, and mills. He hoped the bill would curtail the unpopular practice and help rebrand his Republican Party as the nation's progressive party. The Party's old guard, however, proved uncooperative. Recognizing the unpopularity of child labor, they fought the bill on constitutional grounds and challenged Beveridge with a parade of horribles. If Congress could constitutionally regulate child labor, they asked, could it not also regulate the hours or wages of adults? Could it not prevent a man from joining a labor union? Or require it? One would have expected Beveridge—who opposed such regulations—to blunt that criticism with some legal distinction. Instead, he embraced it. Would Beveridge go so far as to claim that Congress could prohibit the interstate shipment of cotton picked by children, asked one Senator. “Yes,” Beveridge retorted, “or [by] a redheaded girl.”

Despite the increasing scholarly attention dedicated to the study of reception and memory of Fascism, these issues have not yet been widely addressed from the standpoint of collective memories in specific local contexts. Through a combined use of oral history and micro-history, this study explores the identity and collective memory of Predappio, Mussolini's hometown. Predappio is an emblematic place on account of its ‘public’ role within the Italian nation as the town of the Duce and, since 1957, the site of neofascist pilgrimages. By looking at memories of people born under the regime from different political orientations, ranging from the right to the left, it concentrates on the local collective memory of Fascism, of Mussolini and of the ongoing post-war cult of the Duce. The article aims to demonstrate both the relevance of local mythologies and the increasing spread of a reconciliatory narrative of Fascism based on traditional values such as family and kinship.