Oxford University Press's Blog, page 267

The untold story of ordinary black southerners’ litigation during the Jim Crow era

In 1868 North Carolina, Henry Buie’s former master sought to take his mule away from him. Two states away, in 1870, the white owner of the land farmed by Georgia sharecropper Moses Summerlin tried to only pay him half the amount he was owed, and threatened to kill Summerlin if he pressed the matter. In 1907, Lurena Roebuck was deceived by a local white saloonkeeper who told her a deed transferred 20 acres of her Alabama land although it actually gave him possession of her full 80 acres. Three years later, in Kentucky, Rebecca Sallee fell into a large open hole that had been left on the street as she made her way to a church service. In 1926, the city of Atlanta passed an ordinance limiting the hours black-owned barbershops could operate and whose hair they could cut, damaging the profitability of Alonzo Herndon’s barbershop business. Finally, in 1944, in Virginia, a pregnant black woman named Ethel New was ordered to give up her seat on a bus and when she refused, was forcibly carried off the bus, leading to a miscarriage.

In response, all of these black men and women—and almost one thousand others across the US South between 1865 and 1950—litigated civil cases against white southerners. They would win the majority of these cases that eventually reached eight southern states’ highest courts. In the end, Henry Buie got his mule back, Moses Summerlin was paid for his crop, the transfer of Lurena Roebuck’s land was canceled, Rebecca Sallee was paid by the city for the loss of income she had incurred, and the city of Atlanta’s ordinance was invalidated. Of these cases, only Ethel New would fail to win her case.

Black southerners received vast injustice in criminal courts during this time. They had almost completely lost the vote by the beginning of the 20th century, and experienced widespread segregation. Southern courts, in turn, were dominated by white judges and white lawyers and had largely white juries by the turn of the century. Black litigants only won these cases against whites by negotiating a legal system in which those in power often had very different interests and perspectives than their own.

To accomplish this difficult task, successful black litigants used a range of strategies. First, they often sought to align their suits with white members of the community. In cases against whites that reached southern state supreme courts, for example, they almost always used white lawyers in their litigation. These white lawyers were often motivated to take on African Americans’ cases when the suit’s success would bring them a large fee. At other times, notions of professionalism, ideas of paternalism, personal connections, and (in a small number of cases) ideological sympathies influenced lawyers’ decisions to take on suits as well. Black litigants also highlighted their connections with local whites in their testimony, at times drawing on longstanding interactions with whites whom they had known for decades. Additionally, in most of the civil cases between white and black southerners that reached their state’s highest court, white witnesses from the community testified on the black litigants’ behalf, as well as against them.

Black litigants also frequently shaped their testimony to appeal to the white judges and juries who would be deciding their suits. At times, black litigants drew on their knowledge of the relevant law—often gained from coaching by lawyers or from past experience with the courts—to shape their testimony. Like many other black litigants in fraud cases, Lurena Roebuck emphasized her lack of business understanding. This aided her legal claim as establishing unequal knowledge between the two parties was a key part of showing fraud had taken place.

Even if they had no understanding of the relevant law, most black litigants drew on their knowledge of southern race relations to shape how they presented themselves in their testimony. Some presented themselves as loyal to whites in the community, others emphasized their hardworking nature, and still others testified about their trust of whites. Even as they shaped their suits in these ways, however, black litigants also frequently asserted their legal and economic rights. At times, their suits even challenged whites’ violence. By discussing the white landowner’s threat of violence in his testimony, for example, Moses Summerlin boldly contested the use of violence to uphold white supremacy.

Even as they worked with their lawyers to shape their suits in pragmatic ways, black litigants still encountered many limitations. Whereas white southerners litigated a wide range of cases against each other, black litigants were most successful in litigating certain kinds of cases against whites, and the kinds of cases that they could litigate shifted over time as society changed. In addition, the types of cases that they had the most success in were often suits that would only impact the litigants’ families, and did not have wider societal impact. Rebecca Sallee’s successful suit after being injured in an open hole only sought recompense for her own injury. Ethel New’s personal injury suit, on the other hand, challenged segregation on interstate buses as well as asking for damages for her miscarriage and injury—and was ultimately unsuccessful. Moreover, to win a case against a white person in a southern courtroom they generally had to work with white lawyers and appeal to white judges and white juries, limiting the kinds of arguments they could make and the cases they could litigate.

But the very fact that these black litigants were able to negotiate the southern court system at all, after being shut out of other branches of government, is extraordinary. Whites’ general view of this litigation as unthreatening and the structure of the legal system often contributed to black southerners’ continuing ability to access the courts in certain kinds of cases. Undoubtedly, though, black litigants’ own pragmatic choices as they negotiated the legal system played a critical part in the economic victories they won for themselves and their families in southern courts during the 85 years after the Civil War.

Featured image credit: Legal gavel on a law book by verkeorg. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

The post The untold story of ordinary black southerners’ litigation during the Jim Crow era appeared first on OUPblog.

Opportunity recognition: the heart of entrepreneurial thinking

With the 2018 Winter Olympics over, I’m reminded of one of the key traits all entrepreneurs possess and all would-be entrepreneurs must develop: the ability to recognize opportunities.

You see, one of my favorite Olympic sports is bobsledding. I love the speed and excitement, the precision with which the sleds must be steered to gain the most speed—but also avoid disaster. I’m also fascinated by the tracks themselves: how are they made and maintained? And how did this thrilling (and dangerous) sport develop in the first place?

During the last winter Olympics, I decided to find out more about bobsledding, and I uncovered a great example of opportunity recognition. It turns out that in the alpine resort towns of late 19th century Switzerland, toboggans had become very popular—so much so that they were a nuisance. Folks were racing them, often careening through city streets, taking out pedestrians or colliding with carriages in the process. Clearly, something had to be done. The first solution was to design a steering mechanism, and while that helped avoid some mishaps, it made riding the sled even more exciting and popular. The calamity continued.

Then, an enterprising hotel owner in St. Moritz named Caspar Badrutt had a thought: what if he built a special track for “bobsleighs” that would contain the sleds? This would both allow them to attain greater speeds and also avoid running over the townspeople. He went on to build the world’s first halfpipe-style bobsled track, and it was such a hit that not only did his hotel thriv,e but he built another resort nearby to accommodate the increased tourism. St. Moritz would go on to become one of the great winter resorts in the world, and host several Olympic games.

So what does all of this have to do with music entrepreneurship? For starters, entrepreneurship of any kind hinges on the willingness to see things with new eyes, to see something from a perspective that others aren’t. For Badrutt, he didn’t see bobsleighs as either a civic nuisance or something that should simply be relocated to a less populated area. He saw an opportunity to capitalize on their popularity and the obvious desire for greater speed and competition. How to execute that idea came next, of course, but without that first insight the business success that followed would never have happened.

To develop an opportunity into a successful idea, we may be forced to challenge our assumptions, find out what knowledge we lack, or put ourselves in the shoes of our customers.

This ability to see things through one’s own unique perspective is at the very heart of all entrepreneurial thinking, and it’s also something that I’ve found is surprisingly rare amongst classical musicians. We’re so used to thinking of our options as limited to the traditional ones: performing in a venue designed for musical performance, teaching in the academy, private teaching in a home or rented space, and so forth. But there are so many more opportunities—an infinite number of them, really—that if we just develop the habit of looking around with an eye for what’s missing, and how we can bring our skills and passions to bear on some issue, problem, or situation taking place around us.

I call this habit “strategic observation,” and it’s the first step in learning to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. What sorts of things are the people around you doing (or not doing)? What things do they value, and how do they put those values into action? What are some defining characteristics of your community? Are there iconic places or signature events that you might be a part of or tap into in some way? The more you begin to observe your surroundings in this way, the more potential opportunities you’ll begin to identify. Some of them will be trivial, others will turn out to be impractical, and still others might simply reside outside your own circle of interests. But every great entrepreneurial venture begins with an idea— usually borne out of observing people and their needs or sensibilities.

One important thing to keep in mind as you work to develop your opportunity recognition skills is that proverbial “box” we’re always being told to think outside of. It’s worth taking a moment to consider this question: what, exactly, is this box?

Well, to be blunt, the box is you.

The “box” consists of all our assumptions and preconceptions, the things that limit our point of view and prevent us from seeing solutions outside what is familiar and comfortable. While the realm of the familiar is a good place to start developing our habit of strategic observation, the next step of identifying an opportunity requires more from us. To develop an opportunity into a successful idea, we may be forced to challenge our assumptions, find out what knowledge we lack, or put ourselves in the shoes of our customers. In short, we must go outside the box of our own perspective and scope of understanding. The “box” limits us to what we already know; oftentimes, the best opportunities reside beyond those limitations.

Understanding the nature of the “box” is particularly important for musicians. Our musical training tends to focus on a very specific set of skills: technical mastery, historical context, analytical insights, and standard performance practice. If you’re lucky, your teacher will also give you some tools for finding your own artistic voice, but even those tools are likely confined to a fairly strict range of acceptable practice. Unless we’re studying jazz (or composition), we’re not likely to be encouraged on a regular basis to improvise, experiment, or break down the barriers of standard practice.

Being aware of the dynamic of our muse, though, can help us solve the “box” problem. Start with exploring, and then actively creating, the conditions under which your best ideas tend to emerge. It might be as simple as making the time to take a walk by yourself for at least 30 minutes every day. Maybe it’s yoga. Meditation. Working out. Cooking. Whatever it might be for you, find a way to nourish your muse, to provide the conditions under which it best speaks and can be heard. Give yourself the time and mental space to free-associate, and break yourself of the habit of rejecting things out of hand as “too stupid” or telling ourselves, “That would never work.” Learn how to let your mind wander, and see which ideas stick with you.

The more you develop the habit of observation, the more you begin to see that you are surrounded by unmet needs and potential opportunities. You begin to see your world as one of abundance as opposed to scarcity. It’s a process that not only serves to continually stir the pot of our creativity, it can be quite fun as well!

Featured image credit: “Snow” by Fil.Al. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

The post Opportunity recognition: the heart of entrepreneurial thinking appeared first on OUPblog.

How our financial system has gotten out of control [excerpt]

Capitalism has been a key force behind human progress for centuries. But as the power of the finance sector has grown, public interests have been sidelined, and human rights concerns have been ignored.

The following shortened excerpt from Necessary Evil takes a look at how the finance sector has repeatedly failed to advance the human condition, and why its level of political influence is dangerous for humanity.

Finance’s monster, like Frankenstein’s, has developed a life of its own and escaped the control of its creators. Where financial institutions might once have been too big to let fail, they are now too big to save. A repeat of the 2007/08 cri­sis today would find the West’s coffers bare. Even China’s massive rainy-day cur­rency reserves would not suffice to reverse a global liquidity crisis on that scale.

Outrage over the finance sector’s special pleading, gargantuan bailouts, tax dodging, and resistance to increased scrutiny and regulation is a sign of an awak­ening consciousness. But the protests are no more than pinpricks to an elephant, and finance’s monster is far from tamed. The major banks are now bigger than they were ten years ago, and they still hold debts so large that failure of even a modest portion would bring the financial system to its knees; levels of cyn­icism within the sector itself, and distrust outside it, remain sickeningly high and are, if anything, rising (barely 50% of us trust banks, the lowest of all the major industry sectors surveyed by the Edelman Trust Barometer); and wealth disparities continue to expand, reaching levels last seen one hundred years ago on the eve of the Great War and the Great Depression. Beneath it all, around 1.5 billion people still struggle daily to find enough to eat and clean water to drink, to enjoy even the most basic levels of health care for themselves, or educa­tion for their children, or power for their homes, and whose access to anything resembling adequate legal or financial services, still less political representation, is nonexistent.

This is not the way things should be. Wealth is not the problem; its allocation is. The world’s total financial assets (valued at a staggering $294 trillion) are four times larger than the combined output of all the world’s economies. So there is, apparently, plenty to go around. Finance argues that the trickle- down effect is its contribution to wealth redistribution, but evidently a trickle is not enough. The median income of US households has in fact significantly dropped over the last 17 years, while that of the rich has steadily risen. For the ultra­rich it has risen stratospherically. For those at the very bottom of the wealth table, the trickle has not registered at all, with the proportion of Americans liv­ing beneath the poverty line rising during that same period.

“Wealth is not the problem; its allocation is.”

We forget (or do not care to remember) that the financial system is a means, not a goal. Its object is not just to bake the biggest wealth pie possible, regardless of ingredients and recipe, texture and taste. It must also be to slice and serve it in ways that increase the sum of human welfare and happiness; in short, in ways that protect, promote, and fulfill the human rights of everyone. The proof of the pie is in its eating: who gets to eat, when, and how much. Finance can enable the good life— a life in which one’s individual security, dignity, and worth are rec­ognized and respected. Its service to the needs of the wider community is what provides finance with validity, as it is these basic “good life” rights that constitute fundamental precepts upon which our societies are built. The continuing failure to recognize the impact that finance has upon them is crippling our efforts to bet­ter understand finance and to make it work for all of us, not just a privileged few.

How can the financial sector be encouraged to spread wealth, not just make it? To reduce poverty, not entrench it? To protect human rights and security, not endanger them?

It turns out that the answers to these questions lie in tackling two elemental obstacles presented by the financial sector itself. First, its narcissism— the perception that such unquantifiable “externalities” as human rights exist beyond the realm of finance and are therefore irrelevant to it. They are somebody else’s prob­lem; neither the concern nor the responsibility of finance. Second, its “financial exceptionalism”— the view that given its immense size, power, and prevalence, the sector justifies its own existence; it is an end in itself, in other words, rather than a means to help achieve other ends.

These are, in fact, perversions of what finance is meant to be. Finance is a mere utility. A vital one to be sure, but one nonetheless intended to serve soci­ety, not to subvert it. The institutions of finance are licensed to promote broad community interests, not just to satisfy the narrow interests of their immediate stakeholders. Even financial insiders concede the point. William Dudley, former CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and former managing director of Goldman Sachs, opened a 2014 workshop on reforming banking culture with the words: “Financial firms exist, in part, to benefit the public, not simply their shareholders, employees and corporate clients.” The protection and promotion of human rights is one of the most important ends to which finance must be put. This is something that finance itself can neither ignore nor avoid, as it is by way of delivering such service that the financial system obtains its very legitimacy, its social license to operate.

“We forget (or do not care to remember) that the financial system is a means, not a goal.”

It is also something that the sector is quite capable of achieving. For alongside finance’s negative entries in the human rights ledger, there are also some nota­bly positive ones. Finance has helped liberate individuals and peoples alike by providing them with greater independence, freedom, security, and self- respect. It has further enabled states to improve the basic living standards of many and to provide particular help to those most in need. Relatively small but significant increases in individual income and wealth have also lifted hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. Finance’s engagement with human rights, there­fore, is not just about the damage it causes. Its contribution can and should be much more constructive.

Featured image credit: “stock-exchange-wall-street-business-1376107” by MonicaVolpin. CC0 via Pixabay.

The post How our financial system has gotten out of control [excerpt] appeared first on OUPblog.

Prohibition and its discontents [Q&A]

The Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution banned alcohol from 1920 to 1933. Sometimes called the “noble experiment,” this disastrous public policy reduced tax revenues, made gangsters rich, and failed to stop drinking. Alcohol consumption did drop some, but regular drinkers turned to bootleg liquor and moonshine, some of which was deadly. In the following interview the historian W. J. Rorabaugh discusses prohibition and its discontents.

Q: What was Prohibition, and when did it take place?

A: During the 1920s the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution banned the production and sale of alcohol in the United States.

Q: How long did Prohibition last?

A: Prohibition lasted only thirteen years. The Twenty-First Amendment repealed Prohibition in December 1933.

Q: If the United States had long been a hard-drinking country, how did the dry minority achieve Prohibition?

A: The dry forces had superior political organizations. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) had been campaigning for a dry country since 1874, and in 1895 it was joined by the Anti-Saloon League (ASL). The nation’s first single-issue political action group, the ASL spent lavishly to elect dry legislators and members of Congress. Whenever they had a majority in a state legislature, they moved to dry out that state. In 1913 they started lobbying for a dry amendment to the US Constitution.

Q:  How did the Republicans and Democrats respond to the ASL’s demands?

A: Both parties were terrified of the ASL, which moved aggressively to defeat any candidate that did not agree to its demands. The ASL spent lavishly on campaigns, provided its candidates with speech writers and advertising, and organized an army of dry volunteers through evangelical churches.

State Officers of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of South Australia. L – R: Maisie Hone; Mrs. Pengelley; Mrs. Edwards; Lady Julia Holder; Mary Lockwood; Elizabeth Nicholls in 1900 by State Library of South Australia. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Q: How did wet candidates confront these tactics?

A: Many wet candidates took money from the German-American Alliance, an official group founded in 1900 by the German government to foster better German-American relations and promote German culture in America. In the early 1900s one-quarter of Americans were of German ancestry. The Alliance had two million members.

Q: What was the problem with Alliance money?

A: While some people objected to the Alliance because it was an official German-government sponsored organization, the greater problem was that the money came from American brewers, who were mostly of German ancestry. The brewers kept their role hidden by giving money secretly to the Alliance, which then openly backed wet candidates.

Q: How did the First World War affect the situation with the German-American Alliance?

A: When the war started in 1914, the United States was neutral, but most Americans favored the British and the French over the Germans. There were increasing suspicions that the Alliance had been created to provide spies and saboteurs to the German government in the event that the United States was ever at war with Germany.

Q: How did 1916 prove to be pivotal for the Prohibition movement?

A: First, the press disclosed how brewers had funneled money through the Alliance. Second, the press showed that the Alliance had been secretly promoting the German war effort inside the United States since 1914. Finally, when the fall 1916 elections were held, almost no wet candidates could compete. They could not take money from any brewers or the many saloons that the brewers controlled. Dry candidates backed by the Anti-Saloon League won in droves, and the new Congress had more than two-thirds majorities favoring a dry constitutional amendment in both the House and Senate.

Q: When was the Eighteenth Amendment enacted?

A: Congress passed the amendment in 1917 after the United States entered the First World War. Prohibitionists argued that while soldiers sacrificed their bodies abroad, civilians needed to sacrifice drinks at home.

Q: How popular was Prohibition in 1917?

A: Due to the war, it was very popular. Thirty-six states ratified the amendment by January 1919, and it went into effect one year later. The delay was to give the alcohol industry time to adjust by selling off stock and entering new businesses.

Q: Was Prohibition a success?

A: No, it was a disaster. Many Americans continued to drink. The liquor that was sold was often adulterated and could be deadly. Mobsters gained control of the lucrative illegal alcohol industry. They corrupted politicians and police, and they fought a lot of violent gang wars. At the same time, the gangsters got rich and paid no income tax.

Q: Why was Prohibition eventually repealed in 1933?

A: The Great Depression tipped the balance. Bad liquor, corruption, and mob violence were problems, but the depression caused all governments to suffer tremendous declines in revenues. Repeal enabled cities, states, and the federal government to use high alcohol taxes to help their starved budgets. Alcohol also became much more closely regulated after Prohibition was repealed.

Q: What do Americans today think about Prohibition?

A: Americans today recoil at Prohibition because most of the stories that they have heard are overwhelmingly negative. It is hard to convey the sincerity and moral fervor that drove dry advocates to push for the Eighteenth Amendment. Many reformers truly believed that no one would dare violate the Constitution, and the country would be forever dry.

Featured image credit: Prohibition by Eleanor Jaekel. Public domain via Flickr .

The post Prohibition and its discontents [Q&A] appeared first on OUPblog.

The eleventh hour: a look at the final battles of the Great War [timeline]

  “I remember someone saying before the war that he imagined that when troops were in action under fire, each man thought to himself that whoever else might be hit, he himself would be alright. Well I don’t think this is correct—at any rate not in this war. I think men fully expect to be hit or killed, but carry on just the same. Personally, I was always thinking I was going to get hit or killed and was often surprised when I found I wasn’t.”

—Captain Henry Owens, 57th Field Ambulance, Royal Army Medical Corps, 57th Brigade, 19th Division

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the Great War came to an end. Conventional accounts of the war often allow these closing battles to be overshadowed by opening moves and earlier battles. However, the human costs behind the Allied victory cannot be truly understood without examining the summer of 1918.

Using personal accounts featured in The Last Battle, the timeline below captures the final battles of World War I through the eyes of the men fighting them.

Featured image credit: “Armistice Day in London, 11 November 1918 Q47852” photographed by American official photographer, released by the Imperial War Museum. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The eleventh hour: a look at the final battles of the Great War [timeline] appeared first on OUPblog.

Editing Arthur Machen

Of the challenges Arthur Machen presents to an editor, two, in particular, have shadowed me during the preparation of this new collection of his stories. The first is simply the special sense of responsibility one feels when curating the work of a deeply loved writer—for even when Machen’s reputation has been at low ebb (as, often enough, it has been), he has always had a hard core of devoted admirers. A questionable editorial choice in a new collection of John Stuart Mill’s writings might earn one a critical review in an academic journal. But in leaving, say, the novella A Fragment of Life out of a Machen collection, one feels sure that one has made, somewhere, a secret and implacable enemy. And one cannot, alas, include everything.

This leads to the second difficulty, namely the fact that there cannot be, I believe, a truly “representative” edition of Machen, at least within a single volume of reasonable size. A “best of” Edgar Allan Poe, one feels, could be assembled by a well-trained monkey (orangutan, I suppose I should say, in the case of Poe). It will be built upon a foundation of most—if not all—of a set of perhaps a dozen tales, including; “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and so on; certainly, to include none of these would indicate a perverse degree of editorial idiosyncrasy, if not incompetence. But just look at the half-dozen or so “best of“ collections of Machen which have appeared in the seven decades since shortly before his death in 1947. Each volume has its merits; no two are alike. Some, indeed, are as unalike as chalk and cheese, including the two different Penguin editions which bookend the period of which I speak (the 1946 collection Holy Terrors and the 2011 “Classics” volume, The White People and Other Weird Stories). These have only a pair of selections in common, the Great War tale “The Soldiers’ Rest” and the Grail story “The Great Return”; neither contains “The Great God Pan”, considered by many to be Machen’s finest work. And while there are certainly wonderful things in the comprehensive-sounding Collected Arthur Machen (Duckworth, 1988), including Machen’s autobiography Far Off Things complete, there are almost no horror stories at all.

Such an apparently egregious lack of consensus points, above all, to the co-existence of two Arthur Machens. There is the weaver of nightmares, whose fin-de-siècle “shockers” terrified Conan Doyle and inspired H. P. Lovecraft, and there is the seeker after the numinous and the sacred, whose “The Secret Glory” changed the course of John Betjeman’s inner life. For this reason, critics of Machen have long been in the habit of dividing up his stories into two categories, which they have variously labeled “infernal and supernal,” “satanic and celestial,” “macabre and mystical,” “diabolic and divine.” His fiction has been parsed into tales of “sorcery and sanctity”, and into “pièces noires” and “pièces roses.” (D. P. M. Michael, in his 1971 contribution to the Writers of Wales series, actually produced a tally: “Analysis of some fifty stories reveals approximately thirty of black and twenty of white magic.”).

Image credit: Caricature of the author Arthur Machen by Edmund Duffy Wikimedia Commons.

  

Like most divisions of this kind, this one should not be taken too far: terror and wonder are often intermingled in Machen’s work. There is soul-ravishing beauty in the disconcerting “N,” nightmare as well as transcendence in “The Hill of Dreams”. (Machen himself links “sorcery” with “sanctity” in “The White People,”: “these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.”) But it has seemed reasonable to me to be guided by some such distinction in preparing this volume. My ambition has been to assemble, in a critical edition, as full and varied a selection as practicable of Machen’s celebrated “pièces noires”—of those tales both of visceral horror and of creeping dread which make him, in Brian Stableford’s words, “the first British writer of authentically modern horror stories.” The nineteen tales included here span a writing career of nearly half a century—a lifetime. The first, “The Lost Club”, appeared two years after the Ripper murders, and the last, “Ritual”, two years before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. (Both stories, I realize belatedly, begin with a gentleman strolling up Piccadilly.) In between the two, the reader will find Machen’s weird tales of occult science gone amok (“Pan” as well as “The Inmost Light”), his complete novel The Three Impostors (usually cut up and harvested for individual episodes), and his stories exploring the dark side of Celtic fairy lore (“The Shining Pyramid”, “The Red Hand”, and “The White People”). Here, too, are lesser-known prose poems of haunting beauty, as well as a selection of Machen’s late tales, less graphically horrific, perhaps, than “Pan” and his other productions of the Yellow Nineties, but no less memorable.

If it is any consolation to partisans of the “other Machen,” I do sometimes find myself haunted by the spectre of this collection’s uncanny double, an imaginary companion volume made up of his “pièces roses.” But surely all lovers of Machen will share my delight that, in becoming a “classic,” the  flower-tunicked priest of nightmare will find many new readers—even if that delight is tinged (just a little) with envy for those discovering his fiction for the first time.

A version of this article originally appeared on Wales Art Review .

Featured image credit: “Ruin, Castle,” by cocoparisienne. CC0 Public Domain via  Pixabay .

The post Editing Arthur Machen appeared first on OUPblog.

Corporate governance from a federal law perspective

Traditionally, American states have regulated the sphere of corporate governance, encompassing the relations among and between a corporation, its directors, its officers, and its stockholders. With respect to publicly-held companies, Delaware, known as the jurisdiction with an expert judiciary in company law, sound precedent and legislative flexibility, reigns supreme as the state where the greatest number of such enterprises incorporate. Statutes and court decisions focusing on shareholder agreements, duties owed by corporate directors and officers, M&A “deals”, and shareholder remedies exemplify the prevalence of state law with respect to corporate governance matters.

Today, state law is not the only source of corporate governance legal standards. With the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) and the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, federal law now plays an integral role in this process. Pursuant to these Acts and their implementation, for example, audit and compensation committees must be comprised entirely of independent directors, shareholders are entitled to advisory say-on-pay votes on management compensation, and companies generally may not extend loans to officers and directors. In addition, the national securities exchanges, charged with implementing several of the SOX and Dodd-Frank corporate governance directives, provide meaningful input.

Clearly, these Acts, along with the promulgation of SEC and stock exchange requirements, have further federalized corporate governance. Significantly, however, this process began in 1934 with the enactment of Section 16 of the Securities Exchange Act—requiring directors, officers, and shareholders (who beneficially own more than ten percent of a subject company’s equity securities) to disgorge their profits from purchases and sales, or sales and purchases of such equity securities that occur within a six-month period. In addition, these insiders are prohibited from engaging in short sales of the company’s equity securities. By engaging in substantive insider trading regulation—namely, conduct that otherwise would come within the purview of state law scrutiny—Congress initiated this federalization journey.

Today, a new landscape has emerged. The federalization of corporate governance—a concept that earnestly began over a century ago— is firmly entrenched.

Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th century, numerous bills were introduced in Congress seeking to require that subject companies incorporate under federal law or implement federal minimum standards regarding fiduciary conduct. The most recent such bill was sponsored in 1980 by Senator Howard Metzenbaum. Although none of these bills were enacted, they illustrate that the federalization of corporate governance is a long-standing concept.

As evidenced by the Securities Exchange Act, Congress selectively opted to federalize aspects of insider trading. Not long thereafter, the SEC engaged in this federalization process by adopting the shareholder proposal rule in 1942. Having celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2017, the rule provides a key example of SEC rulemaking to ameliorate state shortcomings. Although the parameters of shareholder voting rights remain largely a matter of state law, the SEC elected to federalize a shareholder’s entitlement to make eligible proposals to one’s fellow shareholders. The shareholder proposal rule thus serves as a vintage example of federal corporate governance.

Returning to insider trading regulation, disappointed with laxity by the states, the SEC sought to federalize insider trading far beyond the express provisions of the Securities Exchange Act. A 1961 administrative decision (In re Cady, Roberts, 40 SEC 907) partly achieved this objective. Seven years thereafter (SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co., 401 F2d 833 (2d Cir. 1968)), a major appellate court confirmed the SEC’s position by adopting a broad insider trading prohibition. Although the US Supreme Court subsequently has narrowed the scope of the insider trading proscription, importantly, improper insider trading remains firmly entrenched under federal law.

As another example, over 50 years ago, the SEC sought to affect fiduciary substantive conduct under the guise of disclosure (Franchard Corp., 42 SEC 163 (1964)). Today, by requiring disclosure to shareholders and the securities markets of executive compensation, self-dealing transactions, prior illegal conduct, and business experience, the Commission seeks to induce corporate fiduciaries to act in a more shareholder-protective manner. Although insider excesses continue with some frequency, undoubtedly, the Commission’s disclosure regime has instilled enhanced standards of normative fiduciary conduct.

In closing, two other examples are presented. Disappointed with the US Supreme Court’s decision in Santa Fe Industries (430 US 462 (1977))—holding that Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act does not reach misconduct that is neither deceptive nor manipulative—the SEC promulgated a rule requiring that in a going-private transaction the subject party must disclose whether, in its view, the transaction is fair or unfair to minority shareholders and the reasons supporting that position. By focusing on disclosure, rather than substantive fiduciary conduct, the Commission complied with its rulemaking authority. Nonetheless, the impact of disclosure in this setting directly affects the manner in which valuation determinations are ascertained in such cash-out transactions.

As the last example, displeased with a Delaware Supreme Court decision (Unocal, 493 A2d 946 (1985))—holding that a target company’s directors were acting properly when authorizing the making of a discriminatory self-tender offer that excluded the hostile bidder—the SEC responded by adopting a rule prohibiting the use of such exclusionary tender offers. Thus, in practical effect, the Commission overruled the Delaware Supreme Court. In doing so, the SEC federalized an aspect of tender offer regulation that previously had been within the sole purview of state corporate governance.

Today, a new landscape has emerged. The federalization of corporate governance—a concept that earnestly began over a century ago— is firmly entrenched. In this respect, the SOX and Dodd-Frank Acts may be understood as further measures—indeed, major undertakings—in this evolutionary process.

Featured image credit:'”Wisconsin State Capitol Building,” by Pauliefred. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

The post Corporate governance from a federal law perspective appeared first on OUPblog.

Italian election reflects voters unhappiness with current economy

On 4 March Italians surprised pollsters and observers. They awarded most votes to the centre-right coalition, as predicted, but within it they preferred the conservative League, which quadrupled its votes, to Silvio Berlusconi’s party and its post-fascist allies. Voters punished the Democratic Party (PD), which dominated the past parliament, more harshly than expected. And they rewarded the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (5SM) far more than expected.

These results reflect both contingent causes, such as Berlusconi’s old age or the PD’s mistakes. Other causes include, phenomena common to the whole Western world, such as globalization, inequality, migration, dissatisfaction with the contemporary forms of democracy, and, especially in continental Western Europe, the decline of social democracy. It is the factors that stand between these two extremes that explains this shift in power.

Italy has been ailing for nearly a decade. Its 2008 to 2014 near-uninterrupted recession was the worst in Italy’s peace-time history and the longest in the Eurozone, and recovery was belated and comparatively slow. Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is still 5% below its 2007 level, unemployment exceeds 11%, and between 2014 and 2016 poverty and inequality continued rising. Not even the growth acceleration in 2017 of 1.5%, almost double the 2015–16 average, lifted citizens’ morale leading to the defeat of the parties of government. But deeper financial causes can also be blamed.

Underlying this data is the performance of productivity, which effectively ceased growing more than two decades ago. The financial crisis struck an economy already enfeebled by a illness of its own, which magnified its effects. The average real disposable income is at about the same level as it was in 1995, for instance, whereas in Italy’s closest Eurozone peers—France, Germany, and Spain are about 25% higher. The causes of this malaise lie in the country’s politico-economic equilibrium, which is characterized by comparatively low political accountability and economic competition, entrenched collusion between political and economic elites, a long-sedimented system for the particularistic inclusion of the middle classes, and widespread clientelism, tax evasion, illegal construction, corruption, and organized crime.

With the possible exception of the latter, none of these phenomena is unique to Italy among its peers. What is unique is their gravity and combination, which may explain also some peculiar characteristics of the country’s politics, such as the early rise and success of populism and the strength of anti-establishment sentiment.

For the equilibrium I just sketched is harmful to the vast majority of society. Such an equilibrium can be beneficial for the less innovative segments of the political and economic elites, which draw from it rents and protection from Schumpeterian creative destruction, but is typically damaging for ordinary citizens and firms. They resort to corruption and clientelism—to quote two clear examples—chiefly to obtain, as private goods, those public goods that the inefficiency of the state of denies to them: in other words, unless a critical mass of citizens and firms can coordinate its actions—voting, rejecting corruption, etc.—in such a way as to change the extant equilibrium, the cost-benefit calculus can suggest opportunistic over public-spirited behaviour. Such an equilibrium can be modelled as an assurance game, in which reciprocated public-spirited behaviour and reciprocated opportunistic behaviour are both stable equilibria, and the latter yields a higher payoff: in this setting opportunism is a defensive strategy, therefore, which becomes rational when opportunism is expected from one’s peers. And this logic will prevail until the credible prospect of an equilibrium shift emerges, changing society’s expectations: credible enough, that is, to lead citizens to behave as if public-spiritedness was individually rational and thereby make it individually rational to eschew opportunism.

Italy’s centre-right—the League included—is both offspring and guarantor of that equilibrium. The centre-left generally proclaimed an aspiration to change it, but failed to either offer proposals credible enough to change citizens’ expectations—including, remarkably, after the mighty shocks of 1992 to 1994 and 2011 to 2012—or to make deeds follow words. They acted within, not against, that logic; between 2013 and 2018 they did not just fail to decisively improve economic performance but also to appear as sharply alternative to the centre-right on most matters concerning the rule of law, political accountability, and public ethics.

These matters further project the common prediction that Berlusconi would have won the elections. Voters shattered that prediction, by also punishing Berlusconi, which emphasizes that at least at the margins, voters might have revised their perception of their own interests.

My conjecture moves from the observation that since 1992 the system of particularistic inclusion I mentioned earlier—which buttressed Italy’s equilibrium by granting to several categories of non-elites selective privileges that brought their interests closer to the elites’—was progressively eroded, as a result, primarily, of tighter budget policies and pension and regulatory reforms. The payoff of reciprocated opportunism fell, therefore. Coupled with the weight of Italy’s recession, this may have led part of the most vulnerable segments of the electorate to reject the exchange between particularistic inclusion and tolerance for political and economic efficiency. Hence the rise of the League, whose radical rhetoric was often sufficient to capture the discontented of the richer regions, and 5SM’s success among younger, poorer, and Southern voters.

On the fairly plausible assumption that the 5SM’s foundational promise to restore public integrity and political accountability carried, in the eyes of those voters, greater weight than its recent vague proposal for a form of universal basic income, we may have just witnessed the opening of a deep crack in the equilibrium on which Italy stands. Although serious questions exist about the 5SM’s capacity to take it, a fresh opportunity for shifting the country onto a fairer and more efficient equilibrium does seem to exist. It will probably be missed if the battle of ideas on what kind of society Italy is, and what kind it wants to be, will again be cast aside.

Featured image: Italian flag by juliacascado1. CC0 via Pixabay.

The post Italian election reflects voters unhappiness with current economy appeared first on OUPblog.

“Watermelon snow” on glaciers: sustaining life in colour

Glacier surfaces around the world often host active communities of specialized organisms, including annelids in Alaska, insects in the Himalayas, and rotifers in Iceland. But these organisms, like all life, need liquid water in order to survive.

The most strikingly visible signs of life on glaciers come from the microbes responsible for “watermelon-snow” – so-called both for its colour, and its smell. When sufficiently abundant, single-celled green algae can tint the snow surface orange, pink, or red with their cellular pigments. A handful of the snow can even smell fruity. Aristotle knew about watermelon snow in the fourth century BC, and by the time of the microscope, scientists recognized that watermelon snow was caused by living organisms.

Anyone walking up a glacier during summer will encounter melting at lower elevations in the heat of the noon-day sun. However, this water drains quickly from surface snows and icy rugosities, where single-celled algae photosynthesize. Even during the melt season, freezing occurs daily and so water, paradoxically, often limits life in these environments. The icy nature of glaciers also challenges life in other ways. Nutrients are sparse and often unavailable, frozen within ice and snow crystals. And without the microbial equivalent of sunscreen, over-illumination can damage microbes’ photosynthetic apparatus as readily as it can blind the human eye without sunglasses.

On large icefields around the Gulf of Alaska, watermelon snow can cover anywhere from tens to hundreds of square miles. Alaskan algae benefit from marine-derived nutrients blown-in from the stormy North Pacific, and in turn these organisms feed glacier animals in the billions. Inch-long glacier ice-worms and “snow-fleas” graze on snow-algae, forming the most complex food-web of all our planet’s glacier organisms.

Greenland, by contrast, has far less watermelon-snow and far more “grape-ice”, which is coloured purple or grey by ice-algae. Unlike southern Alaska, Greenland experiences lighter snowfall but a deeper cold, garnering its reputation as a “polar desert”. Greenland has no ice-worms, for example, and watermelon-snow is commonly found only in the coastal mountains surrounding the main ice sheet. Still, both snow and ice-algae face similar problems: the freezing of liquid water, nutrient unavailability, and over-illumination.

Glacier algae’s solution to all three problems may lie in its colour. Japanese, American, European, and UK scientists working on glaciers from the Arctic, to the Antarctic, to the high Himalaya increasingly identify microbes as responsible for more melt than any other glacier surface particle, including dust and potent black carbon. Unlike the cold geophysics of non-living particles, the biological imperative for living organisms to survive and reproduce cause algae colours that natural selection likely favors for melt.

For example, imagine that you are winter camping. After a long day of cross-country skiing, you arrive at camp to find your drinking water frozen. To quench your thirst, you must melt water to drink; building a fire or starting a stove adds heat to frozen water, generating liquid. But if you’re a photosynthetic organism on the glacier’s surface, you have a different energy source available.

Light’s different wavelengths determine the colours we see. Our language commonly divides the visible spectrum into six colours (purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red), between the damaging ultraviolet and warming infrared. Most of the sunlight arrives at Earth’s surface as blue and green and these colours, if absorbed by an algal cell, could provide the energy needed for melt and, ultimately, survival.

“Most of the sunlight arrives at Earth’s surface as blue and green and these colours, if absorbed by an algal cell, could provide the energy needed for melt and, ultimately, survival.”

A particle’s colour – like the green of plant chlorophyll, or the red of a snow-algae cell – is the colour of light bouncing off the particle. In the case of glacier-algae, those colours which are absorbed are transformed into heat. Because most solar energy is contained in blue and green wavelengths, particles which appear purple or red will absorb the most energy, and therefore potentially melt the most snow. To prove this theory, one of my more creative grad students once sprinkled differently coloured chalk dust on our university’s snow-covered lawn, demonstrating the relative melting powers of black, red, and blue: black chalk dust melted the most, but red was not far behind. Blue did a poor job, exactly as predicted by theory.

So why do glacier algae make grape-ice and watermelon-snow? Research into the melting potential of a red particle reveals that it thaws almost as much as a purple particle, but does so with a lessened heat load on the particle itself. A red particle melts both by conduction of absorbed light energy into the snowpack, and by the reflection of red, preferentially absorbed by snow. If it is purple, a snow-algal cell surrounded by well-drained and insulating snow might risk overheating in the dead-air space of its miniature snow cave. If red, it can melt as much snow as a purple particle, but with a lesser heat load.

The molecule used by red-snow algae to melt snow is the carotenoid pigment called astaxanthin. Glacier algae studies generally claim astaxanthin’s primary function is sunscreen, a pigment un-involved in photosynthesis, and bound up in fatty deposits filling the cell interior. This likely gives watermelon-snow its smell, just as esters give fruity flavors to many candies. Astaxanthin likely keeps the algae on the surface of the snow, like oil on water, where it can continue to photosynthesize. Otherwise they might sink into the snow like mineral particles do.

Glacier travelers often overheat when skiing in black. The same would occur with black-coloured snow algae. Ice-worms, on the other hand, are black through and through, including their organs. They stay out of the sun, emerge only at night, but likely absorb the purple and blue light that readily penetrates snow. But black is not a colour, after all. Green is the coolest colour in direct sunlight, absorbing the least energy. An answer to the question “why is chlorophyll green?” could well be “to keep cool when bathed in sunlight.” This is the complete inverse of glacier algae’s needs.

Featured image credit: 163 by cjnoof. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. 

The post “Watermelon snow” on glaciers: sustaining life in colour appeared first on OUPblog.

The Quotable Guide to Punctuation quiz

Correct punctuation is vital for clear, accurate, and natural writing. Anyone preparing a course assignment, applying for a job or for college admission, or doing any other formal writing needs to know the standard conventions of punctuation. Do you consider yourself a punctuation expert? Do you know the differences between parentheses and square brackets? Test your knowledge with this quiz.

For more explanations, guidelines, rules, and advice, see Stephen Spector’s The Quotable Guide to Punctuation.

Featured image: “Cursive” by A. Birkan ÇAGHAN. CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

The post The Quotable Guide to Punctuation quiz appeared first on OUPblog.