The Four Petty Kingdoms of Upplǫnd: Equestrian Graves and the Political Integration of the Norwegian Highlands in Late Viking Age Norway

In continental and north-western Europe armed cavalry – aided by the introduction of the stirrup – was closely linked to the emergence of feudalism but was this also the case in Scandinavia? Were the resulting military specialists linked to the growing national kingdoms, or to local and regional power spheres ruled by petty kings? I will investigate this in the historical region of Upplǫnd – the last Norse area to be integrated into the Kingdom of Norway by Óláfr Haraldsson around AD 1020. Two thirds of Norway’s 51 known equestrian graves are located in this inland area and I will employ a novel way of investigating their relationship to local administrative units, such as þriðjungar (thirds), herǫð (hundreds), and not least fjórðungar (fourths), as well as travel routes and settlements. There is little that suggests that these graves were linked to an early national aristocracy, and its ruling Scandinavian dynasty – Ynglingene – as has been argued in previous research. Equestrian grave traditions survived longer in Upplǫnd than elsewhere in Scandinavia, which was not Christianised until the 11th century, and it is unlikely that the buried had served the uniting and converting King Óláfr. It is also difficult to establish links between historically known lendr menn (the most prominent retainers of the king) families, and such graves. However, a new revelation is that the farms where such graves were located, were situated along the boundaries between local fjórðungar, which were judicial districts, as well as subsidiaries of local military administration in the herǫð. This suggests that these locations had important warning and supervision roles in local military systems.

Storming the Bastille of Orthodoxy

After describing orthodox medicine and its alternatives in early America, this chapter discusses the rise of country’s earliest medical licensing laws, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These schemes strove to exclude unorthodox practitioners from the medical profession. American arguments for freedom of therapeutic choice were born in opposition to these original licensing systems. The chapter examines in detail the medical liberty advocacy of Benjamin Rush, an influential Founding Father who was also the most prominent American physician of the early national period. The chapter analyzes the genesis during this time of various strains of medical freedom rhetoric that would persist, to varying degrees, throughout American history.

From Disestablishment to Dartmouth College v. Woodward: How Virginia's Fight over Religious Freedom Shaped the History of American Corporations

This article clarifies the precise connection between two early national Supreme Court decisions, the little-known Terrett v. Taylor (1815) and the landmark Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819). The missing link between these cases is incorporation. Both disputes arose in the turmoil of post-Revolutionary disestablishment as state legislatures directly challenged the rights of colonial corporations. While Dartmouth College had been incorporated by a royal charter in colonial New Hampshire, the litigant in Terrett, a parish vestry, had been incorporated under common law in colonial Virginia. After the Revolution, Virginia's legislature disestablished the Anglican Church, disregarded its customary incorporation, revoked its post-revolutionary act of incorporation, and seized parish property. These radical policies set Virginia apart from other states and made these disputes a critical litmus test for the rights of all corporations. John Marshall opposed these policies while serving as a delegate in Virginia's legislature, and his views on these issues prefigured his opinion in Dartmouth College. Virginia's highest court upheld these policies as lawful, but the US Supreme Court's rejected them as unconstitutional in Terret. The Court's ruling in Terrett set a significant precedent for the standing of all private corporations vis-a-vis state legislatures and laid the groundwork for the Court's decision in Dartmouth College.

The Impact of a Mentor: The Course of a Life: The High Impact of Undergraduate Research and Mentoring

The trajectory of my life changed in the most mundane of ways. It was on the first day of classes during my junior year in college. While seated at a desk in a classroom in the Armory at the University of Illinois, I awaited eagerly for what would be my first upper-division history course: Professor Robert McColley’s course on Early National America, which covered the period roughly from the 1780s to the 1820s. After introducing the class, the professor handed out a list of topics and assigned one of them to each of us. My topic was William Blount (1749-1800). Who was William Blount, I wondered. The assignment was to write a research paper that would be due at the end of the semester.