In the wake of the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, democratic nationalism promoted the liberation of oppressed peoples from the shackles of absolutist empires and prophesied the emergence of a cosmopolitan brotherhood of nation states. From a global perspective, however, this political culture could be imperial. The governors of State of Buenos Aires modelled plans for the White colonization of the pampas on French Algeria. They sent a Military-Agricultural Legion to the enclave of Bahía Blanca, near the Patagonian frontier, to participate in the war against the Indians. Launched as the successor to Garibaldi’s Italian Legion of Montevideo, its leaders promised to bring civilization to savage lands in the spirit of Columbus and in the name of the Risorgimento. This case study offers a window into the cross-pollination of ideas concerning conquest and colonization between Latin America and Europe. Expansion and secession, empire and nation, mestizaje and racial hierarchies, cosmopolitanism and adventurism, all coexisted within an entangled republican universe.

In his influential paper ‘Two Types of Foundationalism,’ (TTF) William Alston distinguishes two important conceptions of foundationalism: ‘simple foundationalism’ (SF) and ‘iterative foundationalism’ (IF). SF is the view that there are immediately justified beliefs of some kind or other. IF is the stronger view that certain epistemic propositions are immediately justified. Alston favors a reliability account of immediate justification of the kind defended by externalists such as Armstrong, Dretske, and Goldman. Alston rejects IF by appeal to what he calls the ‘second level argument.’ He claims, further, that since IF is essential to the Cartesian project of reconstructing knowledge, the Cartesian project must be abandoned.

Recent fieldwork and archival sedimentary materials from southern Iraq have revealed new insights into the environment that shaped southern Mesopotamia from the pre-Ubaid (early Holocene) until the early Islamic period. These data have been combined with northern Iraqi speleothem, or stalagmite, data that have revealed relevant palaeoclimate information. The new results are investigated in light of textual sources and satellite remote sensing work. It is evident that areas south of Baghdad, and to the region of Uruk, were already potentially habitable between the eleventh and early eighth millennia B.C., suggesting there were settlements in southern Iraq prior to the Ubaid. Date palms, the earliest recorded for Iraq, are evident before 10,000 B.C., and oak trees are evident south of Baghdad in the early Holocene but disappeared after the mid-sixth millennium B.C. New climate results suggest increased aridity after the end of the fourth millennium B.C. For the third millennium B.C. to first millennium A.D., a negative relationship between grain and date palm cultivation in Nippur is evident, suggesting shifting cultivation emphasising one of these crops at any given time in parts of the city. The Shatt en-Nil was also likely used as a channel for most of Nippur's historical occupation from the third millennium B.C. to the first millennium A.D. In the early to mid-first millennium A.D., around the time of the Sasanian period, a major increase in irrigation is evident in plant remains, likely reflecting large-scale irrigation expansion in the Nippur region. The first millennium B.C. to first millennium A.D. reflects a relatively dry period with periodic increased rainfall. Sedimentary results suggest the Nahrawan, prior to it becoming a well-known canal, formed an ancient branch of the Tigris, while the region just south of Baghdad, around Dalmaj, was near or part of an ancient confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates.

We compare water adsorption and desorption on ferroelectric copolymer poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene), and the dipole ordered polymer poly(methylvinylidene cyanide). The angle-resolved thermal desorption spectra prove that the absorbed water species interacts more strongly with poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene) than with poly(methylvinylidene cyanide). The angle resolved thermal desorption spectra shows large deviations from the cosine distribution for light illuminated poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene). Water desorption from poly(methylvinylidene cyanide) deviates from the cosine distribution without illumination.

Kenneth Ledford's thoughtful and poignant commentary has highlighted a number of intriguing theoretical issues that will be debated as the study of modern Catalonia continues to make inroads into various disciplines within the Anglo-Saxon academy. Acknowledging Ledford's observations, I limit my response to clarifying three points: (1) the degree to which the Barcelona legal profession was unified; (2) lawyers and liberalism; and (3) the challenge that Catalan exceptionalism poses to Weberian modernization. In order to address these issues, I expand the scope of this response beyond that of the original article.

By the close of the nineteenth century, most continental Europeans tacitly accepted, if they thought about it at all, the notion that a civil code governed multiple personal and familial relationships in their daily lives. Like so many legislative structures, intellectual suppositions, and cultural artifacts, what was once regarded as a novel or even a major break with the past came to be understood as one of the many requisites of modernity. Contemporary historians have adopted a similarly indifferent posture, their curiosity only piqued when encountering specific provisions entangled with other political issues. In a strikingly dissimilar approach to that adopted toward penal law, they have been disinclined to explore the relationship between civil legal endeavor and political culture or the history of ideas. Only with respect to Germany have scholars considered these topics worthy of in-depth analysis; in so doing, they have demonstrated that understanding juridical culture is fundamental to appreciating the textures and peculiarities of the liberal nation state.

Both insoluble (particulate) and soluble (molecular) sedimentary organic matter carry signatures of physical, chemical, and biological processes. These signatures may reflect (a) primary age-diagnostic, organism-specific, and environmentally-sensitive processes; (b) secondary factors related to mode of transportation, deposition, and preservation; and (c) tertiary agents that indicate post-burial alteration of the organic matter. Application of any or all organic matter data recorded in rocks can be used to solve geologic problems.

Organic stratigraphy may be applied to hydrocarbon exploration. Our example uses both particulate and molecular data to reconstruct the age relations of Cretaceous-Lower Tertiary sediments in Wyoming, to determine the age of thrust fault motion, and to demonstrate constraints on the timing of upward petroleum migration to available trapped reservoirs.

Another perspective helps establish chronostratigraphic frameworks for correlations of global sea-level change. Our example from Antarctic sediments that span the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary reflects perturbations in relative sea-level and the consequential changes in the distribution of organic particulates from marine and terrestrial regimes. These data can be compared to age-equivalent data from other parts of the world, and test global sea-level change.

Both of these applications demonstrate the versatility of organic matter in solving geologic problems. Data from contemporaneous land plants, freshwater and marine organic-walled micro-organisms provide clues on their lifestyle and subsequent afterlife alteration. Organic stratigraphy represents a long anticipated integration of several paleontological disciplines. It combines aspects of palynology, organic geochemistry, paleobotany, and coal petrography into a coherent science, with an enhanced capability to provide significant applications in the future.

Strength and toughness of single-phase Be12Nb have been assessed at temperatures from ambient to 1200°C using four-point-bend and hardness tests. Vacuum-hot-pressed beryllide exhibits low bend strengths (∼110 MPa) and fracture toughnesses (∼2.5 MPa√m) at temperatures up to 500C. Measured bend strength then increases to a maximum at 1000°C, while KlC slowly increases through 1100 C. Significant plastic deformation is only observed at 1200 C for the test strain rate of 2×10−6/s. Hardness values were found to remain relatively constant at temperatures up to 800 C and then sharply decrease at higher temperatures. Results indicate that low toughness limits bend strength at temperatures below ∼1000 C and prompts the observed increase in strength at high temperatures.