All of Life an Experiment

US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. reshaped American free speech law through his Supreme Court opinions during World War I and after. This paper explores the oft-debated questions of whether and how Holmes’s free speech views changed between his legal education (during which he was taught that the common law’s bad tendency test allowed governments to punish any speech after it was uttered) and World War I (during which he created and developed the more expansive clear and present danger test). This paper argues that Holmes developed the underlying principles of his later free speech ideas in his writings on American common law, but that he only expressed those ideas in Supreme Court opinions after several other legal thinkers prodded him to do so.

“The Rivalry is Hot:” Shakespeare, Harry Potter, and the Magic of Fanfiction

While most crossover fanfiction focuses on characters of different works interacting, fanfiction involving Shakespeare often involves characters from one work interacting with a particular Shakespeare text. By examining this phenomenon in three Harry Potter/Romeo and Juliet crossover fanfictions, it can be seen that Shakespeare’s language and cultural capital are being used in fan communities in order to develop new interpretations of both Harry Potter and Shakespeare’s work, especially when it comes to utilizing tropes like “star-crossed lovers” to develop relationships not present in Harry Potter’s text. As such, Shakespeare has taken on a role in these fanfictions that is magic-like, and the fanfictions speak to how Shakespeare, rather than becoming lowbrow popular culture, has instead ascended to a role in literature no author has reached before. Literature Review: Scholars that have studied Shakespeare in relation to fanfiction such as MK Finn and Michelle Yost have argued that Shakespeare’s existence and prevalence on fanfiction sites is a sign of his descendance from a literary pedestal to existence on the same level as other “lowbrow” popular culture, such as Star Trek and The Avengers. A 2013 survey of high school English teachers showed that 93% of ninth-grade classrooms studied Romeo and Juliet, which fueled some scholars in their belief that Shakespeare, by becoming more accessible, has lost some of his highbrow reputation. However, I argue that rather than this accessibility resulting in the loss of Shakespeare’s cultural power, this power has instead increased, and Shakespeare has taken on a role in culture unseen by any other author, and this can be seen most clearly in his impact on fanfiction and his popularization of tropes like “star-crossed lovers,” which have moved beyond an existence in Shakespeare’s plays and have now been used as an interpretive lens in their own right.

Capitalist and Communal Foundations in The Bingo Palace

Published in 1994, Louise Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace traces the journey of Lipsha Morrissey, who is called to return to his childhood home, a fictional Ojibwe reservation, after years of living off-reservation with his father. Upon his return, Lipsha becomes enamored with a young woman, Shawnee Ray, and entangled in conflict with Lyman, Lipsha’s uncle, half-brother, and the father of Shawnee Ray’s child, who plans to build a glamorous “Bingo Palace” on reservation land to bring wealth to the Ojibwe people. As Lipsha struggles to reconcile his conflict with Lyman, he faces questions of identity, family, and an ethical dilemma: would the economic benefits of a “Bingo Palace” outweigh the cultural costs?

Contradictions in the Treatment of Roma and Sinti During the Holocaust

In this article, I argue that the Nazi treatment of Roma and Sinti Gypsies was distinct from their treatment of other victim groups by virtue of its inconsistency. There was never a very clear articulation of the ideological position of the Nazis regarding the Gypsies, and the guidelines that werein place were applied inconsistently. A wide variety of exemptions theoretically protected Gypsies from arrest and deportation. For example, as distinct from the Nazi beliefs about Jews, so-called racially pure Gypsies were sometimes considered more valuable and were protected. These rules, however, were never consistently followed. The extent to which Gypsies were persecuted by the Nazis was often determined more by the attitudes and personal beliefs of lower level administrators, combined with the perceived demands of the local situation, than by an intentional Nazi mandate.

Perspectives on the Transformation of Breslau into Wrocław, 1945-1948

Breslau, which is now known as Wrocław, is a city in Western Poland that was annexed after the end of the Second World War. The final goal regarding Poland was to create an ethnically homogenous nation state, and this was achieved through forced expulsions, killings, and the mass migration of Poles from what is now Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. This paper will explore both civilian and administrative perspectives of these events in the city of Wrocław while this was taking place in Poland from 1945 to 1948. It will also examine the relationships that developed between the two through the use of statistics, propaganda posters, pictures, firsthand accounts, diaries from the period, newspaper and magazine articles, a novel by Olga Tokarczuk, and three other nonfiction books on the topic.

The Shrine of St. Winefride and Social Control in Early Modern England and Wales

In 1534, Henry VIII declared himself the supreme head of the Church of England. In the years that followed, his advisors carried out an agenda to reform the Church. In 1536, the Crown condemned pilgrimages and the veneration of saints’ shrines and relics. By the end of the seventeenth century, nearly every shrine in England and Wales had been destroyed or fell into disuse except for St. Winefride’s shrine in Holywell, Wales. The shrine has continued to be a pilgrimage destination to the present day without disruption. Contemporary scholars have credited the shrine’s survival to its connections with the Tudor and Stuart regimes, to the successful negotiation for its shared use as both a sacred and secular space, and to the missionary efforts of the Jesuits. Historians have yet to conduct a detailed study of St. Winefride’s role in maintaining social order in recusant communities. This article argues that the Jesuits and pilgrims at St. Winefride’s shrine cooperated to create an alternative concept of social order to the legal and customary orders of Protestant society.

Patented in China

The body of research providing empirical support for the importance of innovation for rapid economic growth has left countries scrambling to cultivate innovative capabilities amongst their citizens. China’s emergence as the top filer of domestic patent applications in 2011 has been attributed to policies enacted by the Chinese leadership aimed at increasing innovative activity within the country. This paper finds support for the argument that government intervention has a stronger influence on innovation than free markets, for patterns in domestic patent activity in China and Malaysia seem to coincide with each government’s policies and incentives that explicitly target innovative activity. However, the debate on the quality of Chinese patents suggests the importance of implementing a more sustainable innovation development strategy over enforcing short-term quantitative targets. This paper discusses the role of education in serving as a more sustainable method in the development of a nation’s innovation trajectory.

Defensive Humanitarianism

During World War I, the Swiss state interned nearly 30,000 foreign soldiers who had previously been held in POW camps in Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, Austria, and Russia. The internment camp system that Switzerland implemented arose from the Swiss diplomatic platform of defensive humanitarianism. By offering good offices to the belligerent states of WWI, the Swiss state utilized humanitarian law both to secure Swiss neutrality and to alleviate, to a degree, the immense human suffering of the war. The Swiss government mixed domestic security concerns with international diplomacy and humanitarianism. They elevated a domestic policy platform to the international diplomatic level and succeeded in building enough trust between the party states to create an internment system that reconceptualized the treatment of foreign soldiers from the holding of prisoners to the healing of men.