Tasserkidrilus cf. americanus (Clitellata, Naididae) – A new record from Slovakia confirms the dissimilarity between the European and North American populations

The main objective of this study is to present a new record of Tasserkidrilus cf. americanus found in a channel near the Tešmak swamp in Slovakia (Central Europe) and to compare its morphological features and habitat requirements with those of populations occurring in North America and Europe. The new specimens are similar to those found in The Netherlands and Belgium, but dissimilar to previously reported North American material of T. americanus, reopening the question of whether the European form is a separate species. The European form has the penis sheaths approximately twice as long as and wider than the North American form and may inhabit slow-flowing or standing waters of a eutrophic character, which is in conflict with the current knowledge on the morphology and ecology of North American populations. Further investigation is necessary to solve the questions about the origin and taxonomic relationship of the European population to other populations.

Globalism, Made and Remade

This concluding chapter argues that one can pinpoint a broad pattern in U.S. Christianity: globalism operates in the unstable space between God-scale immensity and human-scale particularity. It is the dialogical relation between immensity and particularity that gives globalism its tensile strength and creates highly effective tools for engaged empathy, as attested by the billions of dollars that American individuals give to overseas projects each year. Christian globalism yearns for a certain kind of future. In its modern American form, these expectant hopes are inseparable from intimate human relations that are understood as an expression of, and channel for, the ultimate relation of human beings to their common Creator. This is what has driven U.S. Christians at home to support children abroad for more than 200 years. These are the aspirations, sometimes ineffable, often bodily and concrete, that make and remake global subjects.

Public Policy, Industrial Innovation, and the Zero-Emission Vehicle

Regulating environmental outcomes without stipulating the technologies to accomplish them is a characteristically American form of governmental intervention. This approach aims to encourage industry to address public-policy concerns while minimizing interference in its affairs. However, California's zero-emission-vehicle mandate of 1990 implied the development of specific technologies with highly disruptive sociotechnical effects. The most practical zero-emission vehicle of the day was the all-battery electric vehicle, a technology characterized by the temporal mismatch of its components. Batteries have shorter life-spans than electric motors, a durability dilemma that rewards battery-making. In response, General Motors and Toyota devised strategies to mitigate this risk that involved mediating the technology of the Ovonic Battery Company.

Identification of the Invasive Form of Corbicula Clams in Ireland

The basket clam genus, Corbicula, commonly known as the Asian clam, has become one of the most internationally high-profile and widespread aquatic invasive species. This genus is now considered to comprise a polymorphic species complex. The international invasion of Corbicula is characterised by four lineages, each fixed for one morphotype, genotype and haplotype combination: the American form (A) and European round form (R), the American form (C) and European saddle from (S), American form B, form round light colour (Rlc) and an intermediate between forms R and S known as Int. We investigated the genetic and morphometric makeup of each Irish population in order to establish which invasive lineages were present so as to identify the number of introductions to Ireland. A combination of morphometric, mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (mtCOI) gene analysis and microsatellite markers were used to determine the invasive form at each Irish site. All Irish Corbicula samples conformed morphometrically to the invasive form A/R. All mtCOI sequences retrieved for 25 Irish individuals were identical to the international A/R form, while microsatellite markers again showed a common clustering with the international A/R forms of Corbicula. The combined approach of morphometries, total genomic DNA and microsatellite markers indicate only one form of Corbicula invaded Ireland; the international A/R form.

An American Kipling: Colonial Discourse, Settler Culture and the Hollywood Studio System in George Stevens’ Gunga Din

Serious scholarly attention to Gunga Din(1939) has largely been neglected as allegations of condescending and one-dimensional depictions of its Indian characters have disrupted its reputation as one of the greatest epics of the studio era.However, George Stevens’ adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem extends its source text’s colonial ambivalence to American anxieties stemming from the death rattle of Manifest Destiny and the traumas of the Great Depression. Seizing upon the popularity of late Victorian Empire narratives, Hollywood integrated its own ideology into a final product that was a hybrid of imperial narrative and American western. This chapter argues that the film’s loose resemblance to its source material demonstrates a fissure in the American valorization of British culture. Gunga Din completely dismantles Kipling’s poem, recreating it as an example of a uniquely American form: the seamless studio system product that led to Hollywood’s international dominance in cultural production. While the politics of the adaptation resemble textual strategies of resistance common in postcolonial texts, the film’s retention of colonial literature’s representations of its native characters addresses an America beginning to assert a distinct national culture while positioning itself as a future imperial power in the tradition of the faltering British Empire.

Drift

This is a book about drift and drifters—about the ways in which dislocation and disorientation can become phenomena in their own right. Locating drift within social, political, and spatial theory, the book also situates contemporary drift within the contested politics of the present day. Here the book explores the ways in which contemporary arrangements of power both promote and police drift; it also explores the experiential and collective politics of drift as a form of resistance to power. The book, in turn, highlights a distinctly North American form of drift—that of the train-hopping itinerant—via historical analysis of the hobo and the hobo’s collective politics, and through the author’s own train-riding immersion in the contemporary world of gutter punks and train hoppers. In conclusion, the book considers drift as a methodology and epistemology attuned to the contemporary world. It argues that we can better understand the world that has emerged around us by abandoning traditional, slab-like approaches to social inquiry and, instead, by learning the theoretical and methodological lessons offered by drift. In this context, the book reconsiders the photodocumentary tradition and explores the potential of ghost method and ghost images, absences, aftermaths, ruins, residues, and mistakes.

The Americanization of Virtue

This chapter explores the history of the American consciousness in search of what manifestations of the problems of the republican perspective may be found there. It follows the discussion in the eighteenth-century debate of the previous chapter, and then turns to the debates on virtue and corruption, as well as an apocalyptic dimension to Machiavellism. The fact that the apocalyptic discourse was still an available recourse illustrates how far American thought and speech still belonged to the Renaissance tradition studied earlier in this volume. The chapter then turns to the debates regarding the Federalist theory as well as the end of the Machiavellian moment in America—that is, the end of the quarrel with history in its distinctively American form.

Financial Evolution and Central Bank Credit: Ethics, Morals, Taxation, Stagnation and Bank Holidays

Since the credit crisis of 2007-8 the global economy has been in a stagnant condition, with little growth, little wage increase (Gordon, 2014), but a division in asset devaluation, with oil collapsing in recent years and many other commodities, likewise losing ground while gold and stocks rising or holding steady. Fearing a repeat of the Great Depression, economists, led by Ben Bernanke, a scholar of the Great Depression, acted to save the finance industry and create sufficient liquidity to reverse a catastrophic drop in the stock market (Bernanke, 2015a; 2015b). The strategy since 2009-10 has been to continue this liquidity, while attempting to stabilize banks. While no Great Depression-like destruction of value or massive unemployment took place (or only a short temporary one in some views), little success in overcoming stagnation has taken place with only very low growth. This article discusses the importance of destruction, especially in banking and finance, and identifies the central problem as a lack of opportunity for capitalist evolution strangulated by central bank and government action and the American form of anacyclosis, yet mediated by what can be identified as Durkheim’s social condensation process.