Turner, Beard, Chandler: Progressive Historians

For almost half a century, Alfred D. Chandler Jr. has enjoyed an enviable reputation as the most influential business historian in the world. Even in history departments that have shifted their primary focus from politics and economics to society and culture, Chandler remains required reading. Yet, there is one dimension of his scholarship that has thus far been mostly overlooked. And that is its indebtedness to, and refinement of, the genre of historical writing that we customarily label "progressive," a genre whose most prominent exemplars include Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard

Why Did Memetics Fail? Comparative Case Study

Although the theory of memetics appeared highly promising at the beginning, it is no longer considered a scientific theory among contemporary evolutionary scholars. This study aims to compare the genealogy of memetics with the historically more successful gene-culture coevolution theory. This comparison is made in order to determine the constraints that emerged during the internal development of the memetics theory that could bias memeticists to work on the ontology of meme units as opposed to hypotheses testing, which was adopted by the gene-culture scholars. I trace this problem back to the diachronic development of memetics to its origin in the gene-centered anti-group-selectionist argument of George C. Williams and Richard Dawkins. The strict adoption of this argument predisposed memeticists with the a priori idea that there is no evolution without discrete units of selection, which in turn, made them dependent on the principal separation of biological and memetic fitness. This separation thus prevented memeticists from accepting an adaptationist view of culture which, on the contrary, allowed gene-culture theorists to attract more scientists to test the hypotheses, creating the historical success of the gene-culture coevolution theory

Populist Mobilization: A New Theoretical Approach to Populism*

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112280/1/j.1467-9558.2011.01388.x.pd

the Progressive Movement 1900 to 1915

185 hal.;ill.;21 c