“Right Moves”: the American View on the Formation of the U.S. Political Culture from the Second Half of the 20th Century and the First Half of the 21st Century (Book Review: Stahl, J. Right Moves: the Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture since 1945 [Text] / J. Stahl. - Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016. - 248 p.)

The review of the monograph by J. Stahl presents to Russian readership the author’s views on the process of development of the American political culture in the second half of the 20th century and in the first decade of the 21st century. According J. Stahl, during this period, the “right move” took place in the U.S., and its ideological support was carried out by American think tanks. The relevance of J. Stahl’s work consists in setting the new trends in the development of American political culture in the period under study, which extended American conservative traditions and values and disseminated them to all spheres of public life in the United States. In our opinion, based on the principle of historicism, the work under review represents a new contribution to studying American political culture In the western historiography. As for our critical remarks, they consist in the author’s underestimation of the analysis of value-normative factors in the post-war development of the American political culture, when the political consciousness as well as the political behavior of the American political and intellectual elite had changed

Review of New American Studies on the Civil War (1861–1865) and Reconstruction in the USA (1865–1877) for 2019

Introduction. Studies of American historians on the Civil War and Reconstruction continue to be central issues in the 21st century. There is an increased public demand for these studies. The author of the analytical review of American publications tries to answer the question of what this interest is related to. Methods. The author of the review uses the methodological tools such as the scientific principle of objectivity, the special historicalcomparative method and the systematic approach to answer this question. Analysis. The author points out the main areas of studying new aspects marked by American historians of the mid-19th century. These areas include the issues and interpretations on military, political, everyday, anthropological, social and cultural, and economic history. Besides, new approaches in peer-reviewed monographs for the comprehensive coverage of the study material of this issue are highlighted. Results. The interest of academicians and the American public to studying the historical period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, on the one hand, tells about carrying the deep psycho-civilizational trauma by all subsequent generations of both white and black Americans at this time, and on the other hand, this war debunks the myth of God’s chosen destiny of the American nation to build a “City on a Hill”. Constant refinements, additions, revisions, and reinterpretations of the events and consequences of the Civil War and Reconstruction in contemporary American historiography only confirm this conclusion. The publications selected by the reviewer on this issue for 2019 not only introduce new American historical works to Russian Americanists, but also provide an opportunity to expand their own research on this issue

The Doctrinal Foundations of the Change in U.S. Foreign Policy During Trump’s Presidency: Mexico and Canada

Introduction. The research’s subject is the foreign policy’s theoretical foundations of D. Trump’s presidential administration in 2016–2020, which consist in changing the principles’ use of American liberal internationalism to the conservative nationalism’s principles under the motto which is called “Make America Great Again”. The theoretical approaches’ basis of intergovernmental interaction in the field of politics, economics and migration is considered on the example of relations between the United States, Canada and Mexico. The work’s purpose is to identify the doctrinal basis of D. Trump administration’s foreign policy and the impact of the adopted foreign policy settings on changes in intergovernmental interaction in the international arena. Methods. The theoretical bases’ methodology for the doctrinal provisions development of the U.S. foreign policy during the D. Trump’s administration was to use behavioral approach and special methods of political analysis. There were no major analytical studies on this topic at the time of writing. Therefore, the author of the article used the materials for his research from Russian and American scientific and periodical journals for 2019–2020. Analysis. The publications’ analysis by domestic and American authors has shown that the change in the U.S. foreign policy during the D. Trump’s presidency is due not so much to the personal qualities of the U.S. President, as some researchers believe, but to the objective conditions of the world process, where the United States want to but they can’t bear the burden of the world leader in the conditions of significant growth of other global power centers. Results. The author’s analysis of intergovernmental interaction between the United States, Canada and Mexico has shown the chosen path of using the conservative nationalism’s principles in relations with their closest allies is not so much due to the personal qualities of D. Trump how many objective changes taking place in the world political process, which led to an increase in mutual contradictions between these states. Overall, the author argues that the choice of a conservative nationalism’s policy in American foreign policy is associated with the crisis of liberal democracy

EVERYTHING COUNTS: Building a Control Regime for Nonstrategic Nuclear Warheads in Europe

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration insisted in arms control talks with Russia that a follow-on agreement to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) should cover all nuclear weapons and that such an agreement should focus on the nuclear warheads themselves. This would represent a significant change from previous agreements, which focused on delivery vehicles, such as missiles. The United States has been particularly interested in potential limits on nonstrategic nuclear warheads (NSNW). Such weapons have never been subject to an arms control agreement. Because Russia possesses an advantage in the number of such weapons, the US Senate has insisted that negotiators include them in a future agreement, making their inclusion necessary if such an accord is to win Senate approval and ultimately be ratified by Washington. In the wake of Russian nuclear threats in the Ukraine conflict, such demands can only be expected to grow if and when US and Russian negotiators return to the negotiating table

First results of the Kourovka Planet Search: discovery of transiting exoplanet candidates in the first three target fields

We present the first results of our search for transiting exoplanet candidates as part of the Kourovka Planet Search (KPS) project. The primary objective of the project is to search for new hot Jupiters which transit their host stars, mainly in the Galactic plane, in the $R_c$ magnitude range of 11 to 14 mag. Our observations were performed with the telescope of the MASTER robotic network, installed at the Kourovka astronomical observatory of the Ural Federal University (Russia), and the Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt Astrograph, installed at the private Acton Sky Portal Observatory (USA). As test observations, we observed three celestial fields of size $2\times2$ deg$^2$ during the period from 2012 to 2015. As a result, we discovered four transiting exoplanet candidates among the 39000 stars of the input catalogue. In this paper, we provide the description of the project and analyse additional photometric, spectral, and speckle interferometric observations of the discovered transiting exoplanet candidates. Three of the four transiting exoplanet candidates are most likely astrophysical false positives, while the nature of the fourth (most promising) candidate remains to be ascertained. Also, we propose an alternative observing strategy that could increase the project's exoplanet haul.Comment: 11 pages, 16 figures; Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 201

Doppler confirmation of TESS planet candidate TOI1408.01: grazing transit and likely eccentric orbit

We report an independent Doppler confirmation of the TESS planet candidate orbiting an F-type main sequence star TOI-1408 located 140 pc away. We present a set of radial velocities obtained with a high-resolution fiber-optic spectrograph FFOREST mounted at the SAO RAS 6-m telescope (BTA-6). Our self-consistent analysis of these Doppler data and TESS photometry suggests a grazing transit such that the planet obscures its host star by only a portion of the visible disc. Because of this degeneracy, the radius of TOI-1408.01 appears ill-determined with lower limit about $\sim$1 R$_{\rm Jup}$, significantly larger than in the current TESS solution. We also derive the planet mass of $1.69\pm0.20$~$M_{\rm Jup}$ and the orbital period $\sim4.425$ days, thus making this object a typical hot Jupiter, but with a significant orbital eccentricity of $0.259\pm0.026$. Our solution may suggest the planet is likely to experience a high tidal eccentricity migration at the stage of intense orbital rounding, or may indicate possible presence of other unseen companions in the system, yet to be detected.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Benchmarking the power of amateur observatories for TTV exoplanets detection

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Roman v. Baluev, et al, ‘Benchmarking the power of amateur observatories for TTV exoplanets detection’, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 450(3): 3101-3113, first published online 9 May 2015. The version of record is available at doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stv788 © 2015 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.We perform an analysis of ~80000 photometric measurements for the following 10 stars hosting transiting planets: WASP-2, -4, -5, -52, Kelt-1, CoRoT-2, XO-2, TrES-1, HD 189733, GJ 436. Our analysis includes mainly transit lightcurves from the Exoplanet Transit Database, public photometry from the literature, and some proprietary photometry privately supplied by other authors. Half of these lightcurves were obtained by amateurs. From this photometry we derive 306 transit timing measurements, as well as improved planetary transit parameters. Additionally, for 6 of these 10 stars we present a set of radial velocity measurements obtained from the spectra stored in the HARPS, HARPS-N, and SOPHIE archives using the HARPS-TERRA pipeline. Our analysis of these TTV and RV data did not reveal significant hints of additional orbiting bodies in almost all of the cases. In the WASP-4 case, we found hints of marginally significant TTV signals having amplitude 10-20 sec, although their parameters are model-dependent and uncertain, while radial velocities did not reveal statistically significant Doppler signals.Peer reviewe