A descendent of two U.S. presidents and winner of the Pulitzer
Prize, Henry Adams enjoyed a very particular place in American
life, not least due to his ancestry. Yet despite his prolific
writing in ...the years between 1877 and 1891, when he lived in
Washington, D.C., Adams has somehow slipped into the gap between
history and literature. In Henry Adams in Washington,
Ormond Seavey integrates the diverse aspects of Adams's writing,
arguing for his placement among the major American writers of the
nineteenth century.
Examining Adams's nine-volume History, which Seavey
argues demands renewed literary attention, as well as his two
novels, Democracy and Esther, and his biographies
of Albert Gallatin and John Randolph of Roanoke, Seavey shows how
Adams reveals his own character and personality in his writings,
particularly his fondness for the personal rather than the public
sphere. As a historian writing in Washington, D.C., Adams surely
encountered the expectation that public life takes precedence over
the personal; in the execution of both his historical writing and
his novels, however, he dwells instead on the personal costs of
public life and the diminishment of public figures who lack a
fulfilling personal life. Revealing Adams to be a missing link
between the essential American writers in the time of Emerson and
the modernist writers of the early twentieth century, Seavey shows
his novels to be considerations of contemporary political issues
while also recognizing the novelistic dimensions in his history and
biographies.
At the 1914 Crown Council, which decided to keep Romania neutral in 1914, former Conservative prime minister Petre Carp offered his succinct and direct opinion about the direction of Romanian foreign ...policy in the opening days of the Great War. He admonished the Council that, if Romania wanted to remain among the ‘civilized states’ (statele civilizate) it had to follow Germany and Austria-Hungary into war immediately. The idea of ‘civilized states’ that dominated the remainder of the Crown Council was not merely an intersubjective social construction. It was a legal term of art in fin de siècle international law that could be applied in the real world. It was only the legally-civilized states that enjoyed the full panoply of rights, privileges, and protections under international law.
This is a study of how Romania’s policy-making elite, and Ion I. C. Brătianu’s government, in particular, confronted the challenges of ‘situational sovereignty’. It asserts that, during Romania’s two-year Period of Neutrality (3 August 1914–17 August 1916), Brătianu initially used bilateral conventions as both a method to establish recognition of Romania’s status (or at least a guarantee of territorial integrity) and as a litmus test to determine which (if any) foreign powers recognized Romania as a legal equal. Although he was able to achieve a short-term victory of having an equality clause inserted into the August 1916 political convention with the Entente, it is unclear if that clause could have been durable. Ultimately, Brătianu was trapped between a desire to secure Romania’s recognition through international agreement, but confronted with the reality that Romania’s lack of recognition as a legally-civilized equal meant those very conventions could be unenforceable.
The 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic was one of the deadliest infectious disease events in recorded history, resulting in approximately 50-100 million deaths worldwide. The origins of the 1918 virus ...and the molecular basis for its exceptional virulence remained a mystery for much of the 20th century because the pandemic predated virologic techniques to isolate, passage, and store influenza viruses. In the late 1990s, overlapping fragments of influenza viral RNA preserved in the tissues of several 1918 victims were amplified and sequenced. The use of influenza reverse genetics then permitted scientists to reconstruct the 1918 virus entirely from cloned complementary DNA, leading to new insights into the origin of the virus and its pathogenicity. Here, we discuss some of the advances made by resurrection of the 1918 virus, including the rise of innovative molecular research, which is a topic in the dual use debate.
Exploring the results of the COVID-19 response in New Zealand (Aotearoa) is warranted so that insights can inform future pandemic planning. We compared the COVID-19 response in New Zealand to that ...for the more severe 1918–19 influenza pandemic. Both pandemics were caused by respiratory viruses, but the 1918–19 pandemic was short, intense, and yielded a higher mortality rate. The government and societal responses to COVID-19 were vastly superior; responses had a clear strategic direction and included a highly effective elimination strategy, border restrictions, minimal community spread for 20 months, successful vaccination rollout, and strong central government support. Both pandemics involved a whole-of-government response, community mobilization, and use of public health and social measures. Nevertheless, lessons from 1918–19 on the necessity of action to prevent inequities among different social groups were not fully learned, as demonstrated by the COVID-19 response and its ongoing unequal health outcomes in New Zealand.
German imperialism in Europe evokes images of military aggression and ethnic cleansing. Yet, even under the Third Reich, Germans deployed more subtle forms of influence that can be called soft power ...or informal imperialism. Stephen G. Gross examines how, between 1918 and 1941, German businessmen and academics turned their nation - an economic wreck after World War I - into the single largest trading partner with the Balkan states, their primary source for development aid and their diplomatic patron. Building on traditions from the 1890s and working through transnational trade fairs, chambers of commerce, educational exchange programmes and development projects, Germans collaborated with Croatians, Serbians and Romanians to create a continental bloc, and to exclude Jews from commerce. By gaining access to critical resources during a global depression, the proponents of soft power enabled Hitler to militarise the German economy and helped make the Third Reich's territorial conquests after 1939 economically possible.
2018 marks the 100-year anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed ~50 million people worldwide. The severity of this pandemic resulted from a complex interplay between viral, host, and ...societal factors. Here, we review the viral, genetic and immune factors that contributed to the severity of the 1918 pandemic and discuss the implications for modern pandemic preparedness. We address unresolved questions of why the 1918 influenza H1N1 virus was more virulent than other influenza pandemics and why some people survived the 1918 pandemic and others succumbed to the infection. While current studies suggest that viral factors such as haemagglutinin and polymerase gene segments most likely contributed to a potent, dysregulated pro-inflammatory cytokine storm in victims of the pandemic, a shift in case-fatality for the 1918 pandemic toward young adults was most likely associated with the host's immune status. Lack of pre-existing virus-specific and/or cross-reactive antibodies and cellular immunity in children and young adults likely contributed to the high attack rate and rapid spread of the 1918 H1N1 virus. In contrast, lower mortality rate in in the older (>30 years) adult population points toward the beneficial effects of pre-existing cross-reactive immunity. In addition to the role of humoral and cellular immunity, there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that individual genetic differences, especially involving single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), contribute to differences in the severity of influenza virus infections. Co-infections with bacterial pathogens, and possibly measles and malaria, co-morbidities, malnutrition or obesity are also known to affect the severity of influenza disease, and likely influenced 1918 H1N1 disease severity and outcomes. Additionally, we also discuss the new challenges, such as changing population demographics, antibiotic resistance and climate change, which we will face in the context of any future influenza virus pandemic. In the last decade there has been a dramatic increase in the number of severe influenza virus strains entering the human population from animal reservoirs (including highly pathogenic H7N9 and H5N1 viruses). An understanding of past influenza virus pandemics and the lessons that we have learnt from them has therefore never been more pertinent.
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