The Dyos Prize has been awarded annually since 1992 for the best article submitted to the Urban History Journal in each calendar year. The articles are judged by the journal editors and two independent adjudicators. The prize is named after H.J. Dyos (1921–78) to commemorate his innovative contribution to the development of the field of urban history. To reflect the catholicity and interdisciplinarity which Dyos encouraged, no temporal, geographical or thematic restrictions exist, except that the paper must make a significant contribution to the study of urban history. The prize consists of a cash sum and the publication of the paper in Urban History.

This article presents an analysis of two constructions in the Eastern Algonquian language Passamaquoddy in which the position of the object of a verb of cognition (‘know’, ‘believe’, ‘remember’, ‘wonder about’, ‘suspect’) is linked, either by apparent raising or by apparent long-distance agreement, to a position within a clausal complement to the verb. The latter position may be arbitrarily deeply embedded. The analysis developed here, formulated in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, demonstrates that the two constructions in fact represent alternative realizations of identical argument structures for the verbs in question and that the apparent long-distance dependencies involved can be accounted for in terms of a purely local principle of argument selection.

Indonesia's national ulama council, the Majelis Ulama Indonesia, or MUI, has successfully transformed itself during the reform era reversing its earlier relationship with government. It is the MUI that now sets the agenda on appropriate ways to recognize, protect, and promote the majority faith. However it does not operate entirely separate to the state, indeed, there are numerous points of contact and mutual dependence between this group of Islamic scholars and state agencies.

This article offers two case studies on religious freedom demonstrating different aspects of the MUI's self-appointed role of national mufti. The first case study demonstrates how the MUI has taken control of the high ground of religious doctrine. Through its response to blasphemy cases and deviant Muslim activities the MUI defines appropriate, orthodox Muslim conduct. The second case study deals with the revised regime of halal food certification. Here the state has sought to bring the MUI back into its embrace, partly as a result of corruption scandals. In doing so, however, Islam continues to be further entrenched in state law and regulation.

Indonesian Islam was said to be deconfessionalized, reflecting the nature of the former authoritarian and bureaucratic state's engagement with various Islamic institutions. The changing role of the MUI demonstrates that the state and law are becoming increasingly confessionalized. This change has significant implications for Indonesia's democratic constitutional framework, evident in what these cases say about the enjoyment of the fundamental right of citizenship.

The phenomenon of “secret” (siri) Muslim marriages—marriages that are conducted without state recognition—has become a hotly debated topic in Indonesia, particularly since the emergence of Muslim marriage agencies that organize unregistered online marriages. The issue is particularly contested between the state, women's activists, legal activists, and religious leaders. This article analyses the current efforts of the Indonesian state to bureaucratize Muslim marriages by insisting that unregistered marriages need to be registered with the state, and the societal responses to such regulations. Those who believe in the importance of state registration of Muslim marriage emphasize that it is an integral part of social reform. However, it has also been seen as creating problems when it only serves the interests of the majority and stands in the way of minority religious understandings, particularly by some conservative Muslims who believe that marriages within the Muslim community should be regulated by Muslim leaders (ʿulamāʾ) only, and not the state. This article argues that unregistered marriage has been the real test of the bureaucratization of religion in Indonesia. The government's effort to demonstrate its Islamic credentials by accommodating the people's majority religion has led it to assume an ambiguous position on the issue of unregistered marriages.

The use of Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) in healthcare allocation has been criticized as discriminatory against people with disabilities. This article considers a response to this criticism from Nick Beckstead and Toby Ord. They say that even if QALYs are discriminatory, attempting to avoid discrimination – when coupled with other central principles that an allocation system should favour – sometimes leads to irrationality in the form of cyclic preferences. I suggest that while Beckstead and Ord have identified a problem, it is a misdiagnosis to lay it at the feet of an anti-discrimination principle. The problem in fact comes from a basic tension between respecting reasonable patient preferences and other ways of ranking treatment options. As such, adopting a QALY system does not solve the problem they identify.

This article traces the development of national opera on political-historical themes in Germany between 1815 and 1848 and attempts to explain why this genre ultimately did not succeed. The focus will lie on the warrior hero Arminius/Hermann, one of the most potent national symbols of the nineteenth century, who was indeed brought to the German opera stage, but could never conquer it. The period between 1815 and 1848 not only forms a crucial phase in the coming of age of German opera against the background of a burgeoning national conscience, but also presents a lacuna in the current literature on Arminius as an opera character. Two early nineteenth-century Arminius opera projects will be discussed: musical realizations of August von Kotzebue’s 1813 libretto Hermann und Thusnelde and French composer Hippolyte Chélard’s 1835 opera Die Hermannschlacht, based on a libretto by Carl Weichselbaumer. Questions of authorship, patronage, musical style and reception will be addressed. This article presents a history of an operatic ‘misfit’ that fills a hiatus in the study of German nineteenth-century opera and will add to our understanding of the peculiar relation between opera and German national thought during the first half of the century.

In the 1950s, the National Association of Women Lawyers (“NAWL”) undertook what it considered its “greatest project,” the drafting and promotion of a model no-fault divorce law. It launched its campaign at a time when post-war realities and the law in practice were putting increasing pressure on the law on the books which lagged behind contemporary sensibilities. NAWL acted two decades before the no-fault divorce “revolution” of the 1970s. It did so in the 1950s when women were said to be both “domestic” and “quiescent.” The Article has three aims. First, it considers NAWL's project as a missing piece in the history of divorce law, the no-fault revolution, and the rise of mass divorce in mid-twentieth century America. Second, it reflects on the implications of NAWL's undertaking for the standard narrative of “domesticity” in the 1950s, an account that has been questioned in recent years. Last, it tells a story of women's activism in the depth of the so-called “doldrums” of the organized women's moveme