Faulkner’s Stores: Microfinance and Economic Power in the Postbellum South

2019 ◽  
pp. 156-168
Author(s):  
David A. Davis

After the Civil War, stores played a crucial role in the redevelopment of the South's economy. Landowner-merchants used crop liens, loans against the value of a crop, as contracts to bind laborers to the land through debt and dependency. The landowner-merchants provided food, seeds, fertilizer, and all of the other items necessary to live and raise a crop for a season, but they charged exorbitant interest on the items, and the cost of the charges was deducted from the value of their share of the crop. Faulkner depicts the stores as a system of coercive microfinance in several of his novels. In Absalom, Absalom, Thomas Sutpen opens a store when he returns from the war to rebuild his plantation. In The Hamlet, Flem Snopes uses Jody Varner's store as the vehicle for his social mobility, and in The Sound and the Fury, Jason Compson works in a store while investing in the cotton commodities market.

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (8) ◽  
pp. 1137-1147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduard Ort ◽  
Johannes J. Fahrenfort ◽  
Christian N. L. Olivers

It is debated whether people can actively search for more than one object or whether this results in switch costs. Using a gaze-contingent eye-tracking paradigm, we revealed a crucial role for cognitive control in multiple-target search. We instructed participants to simultaneously search for two target objects presented among distractors. In one condition, both targets were available, which gave the observer free choice of what to search for and allowed for proactive control. In the other condition, only one of the two targets was available, so that the choice was imposed, and a reactive mechanism would be required. No switch costs emerged when target choice was free, but switch costs emerged reliably when targets were imposed. Bridging contradictory findings, the results are consistent with models of visual selection in which only one attentional template actively drives selection and in which the efficiency of switching targets depends on the type of cognitive control allowed for by the environment.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 193-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ashworth

Abstract This paper introduces arguments from Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic1 to suggest that the Civil War arose ultimately because of class-conflict between on the one hand, Southern slaves and their masters and, on the other, Northern workers and their employers. It does not, however, suggest that either in the North or the South these conflicts were on the point of erupting into revolution. On the contrary, they were relatively easily containable. However, harmony within each section (North and South) could be secured only at the cost of intersectional conflict, conflict which would finally erupt into civil war. The Civil War was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ not only because it destroyed slavery, an essentially precapitalist system of production, in the United States but also because it resulted in the enthronement of Northern values, with the normalisation of wage-labour at their core.


Author(s):  
Judkin Browning ◽  
Timothy Silver

This chapter discusses the crucial role that animals such as horses, hogs, and cattle played in the Civil War. Horses were the primary engine of the armies, and suffered from catastrophic losses during the war, as well as epidemic diseases. The authors discuss how the northern and southern armies acquired, treated, and cared for their horses. The chapter discusses the experience of horses in the Gettysburg and Chickamauga/Chattanooga campaigns. Hogs, the most utilitarian food source for the South, served as the major protein for the armies, and suffered from devastating epidemics of hog cholera. Cattle, the other major food source for both armies, faced their own difficulties due to disease and weather during the war, especially from floods and drought in California, as well as cattle tick fever.


2017 ◽  
Vol 137 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Komlos

Abstract Donald Trump won in 2016 largely because enough voters in three states, all in the Rustbelt which had voted for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012, switched their electoral votes from Democratic to Republican. Economic dislocations played a crucial role in these states to induce them to vote for an anti-establishment candidate. The sources of the dislocation were the development of a dual economy characterized at one end by low and stagnating wages, increasing debt, downward social mobility, declining relative incomes, and the hopelessness accompanying them while at the other end of the income distribution the economy was booming. JEL Codes: F13, F60, F66, H11


2011 ◽  
pp. 99-118
Author(s):  
Yu. Olsevich

The article analyzes the psychological basis of the theory and economic policy of libertarianism, as contained in the book by A. Greenspan "The Age of Turbulence", clarifies the strengths and weaknesses of this doctrine that led to its discredit in 2008. It presents a new understanding of liberalization in 1980-1990s as a process of institutional transformation at the micro and meso levels, implemented by politicians and entrepreneurs with predatory and opportunistic mentality. That process caused, on the one hand, the acceleration of growth, on the other hand - the erosion of informal foundations of a market system. With psychology and ideology of libertarianism, it is impossible to perceive real macro risks generated at the micro level, which lead to a systemic crisis, and to develop measures to prevent it.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjell Hausken ◽  
Mthuli Ncube

We consider revolutions and civil war involving an incumbent, a challenger, and the population. Revolutions are classified into eight outcomes. In four outcomes incumbent repression occurs (viewed as providing sub-threshold benefits such as public goods to the population). Accommodation occurs in the other four outcomes (benefits provision above a threshold). The incumbent and challenger fight each other. The incumbent may win and retain power or else lose, thereby causing standoff or coalition. In a standoff, which is costly, no one backs down and uncertainty exists about who is in power. In a coalition, which is less costly, the incumbent and challenger cooperate, compromise, and negotiate their differences. If the population successfully revolts against the incumbent, the challenger replaces the incumbent. Eighty-seven revolutions during 1961–2011, including the recent Arab spring revolutions, are classified into the eight outcomes. When repressive, the incumbent loses 46 revolutions, remains in power through 21 revolutions, and builds a coalition after 12 revolutions. When accommodative, the incumbent loses seven revolutions and builds a coalition after one revolution. The 87 revolutions are classified across geographic regions and by time-period.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-291
Author(s):  
Manuel A. Vasquez ◽  
Anna L. Peterson

In this article, we explore the debates surrounding the proposed canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken defender of human rights and the poor during the civil war in El Salvador, who was assassinated in March 1980 by paramilitary death squads while saying Mass. More specifically, we examine the tension between, on the one hand, local and popular understandings of Romero’s life and legacy and, on the other hand, transnational and institutional interpretations. We argue that the reluctance of the Vatican to advance Romero’s canonization process has to do with the need to domesticate and “privatize” his image. This depoliticization of Romero’s work and teachings is a part of a larger agenda of neo-Romanization, an attempt by the Holy See to redeploy a post-colonial and transnational Catholic regime in the face of the crisis of modernity and the advent of postmodern relativism. This redeployment is based on the control of local religious expressions, particularly those that advocate for a more participatory church, which have proliferated with contemporary globalization


Author(s):  
Christine Cheng

During the civil war, Liberia’s forestry sector rose to prominence as Charles Taylor traded timber for arms. When the war ended, the UN’s timber sanctions remained in effect, reinforced by the Forestry Development Authority’s (FDA) domestic ban on logging. As Liberians waited for UN timber sanctions to be lifted, a burgeoning domestic timber market developed. This demand was met by artisanal loggers, more commonly referred to as pit sawyers. Out of this illicit economy emerged the Nezoun Group to provide local dispute resolution between the FDA’s tax collectors and ex-combatant pit sawyers. The Nezoun Group posed a dilemma for the government. On the one hand, the regulatory efforts of the Nezoun Group helped the FDA to tax an activity that it had banned. On the other hand, the state’s inability to contain the operations of the Nezoun Group—in open contravention of Liberian laws—highlighted the government’s capacity problems.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 2767 ◽  
Author(s):  
Víctor Yepes ◽  
José V. Martí ◽  
José García

The optimization of the cost and CO 2 emissions in earth-retaining walls is of relevance, since these structures are often used in civil engineering. The optimization of costs is essential for the competitiveness of the construction company, and the optimization of emissions is relevant in the environmental impact of construction. To address the optimization, black hole metaheuristics were used, along with a discretization mechanism based on min–max normalization. The stability of the algorithm was evaluated with respect to the solutions obtained; the steel and concrete values obtained in both optimizations were analyzed. Additionally, the geometric variables of the structure were compared. Finally, the results obtained were compared with another algorithm that solved the problem. The results show that there is a trade-off between the use of steel and concrete. The solutions that minimize CO 2 emissions prefer the use of concrete instead of those that optimize the cost. On the other hand, when comparing the geometric variables, it is seen that most remain similar in both optimizations except for the distance between buttresses. When comparing with another algorithm, the results show a good performance in optimization using the black hole algorithm.


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