William Godwin and Catholicism

This essay traces Godwin‘s changing attitude to Catholicism by exploring a variety of texts generally considered marginal to his oeuvre and a hitherto unexamined selection of his unpublished manuscripts

Descriptions of new species of the New World genus Perilypus Spinola (Coleoptera: Cleridae: Clerinae)

Thirty-two new species of Perilypus Spinola (Coleoptera: Cleridae: Clerinae) are described; they are Perilypus ancorus, P. angustatus, P. aquilus, P. arenaceus, P. caligneus, P. cartagoensis, P. collatus, P. comosus, P. concisus, P. copanensis, P. copiosus, P. diutius, P. divaricatus, P. elimatus, P. flavoapicalis, P. galenae, P. hamus, P. hornito, P. infussus, P. iodus, P. lateralis, P. latissimus, P. licinus, P. limbus, P. miculus, P. odous, P. orophus, P. patulus, P. punctus, turnbowi, P. violaceus, and P. yasuniensis. Included in this work are 58 line drawings and 32 color habitus photographs of primary types. To facilitate species identification the species included herein are linked to a key to Perilypus species provided in a previous review of the genus

William Godwin and the puritan legacy

This essay’s analysis of Godwin’s engagement with his (and Britain’s) puritan and Dissenting legacy is significant in two respects. First, it offers a reading of two of Godwin’s lesser known, later writings and thus contributes to our appreciation of a thinker whose activity and influence in the nineteenth century is still poorly understood. Second, this topic offers a unique point of entry into the bewildering complex of religious, political and historiographical tensions comprising the intersection of Britain’s long eighteenth and long nineteenth centuries. This pivotal period saw the emergence of a radically reformed British polity, an important element of which addressed long-standing issues of religious profession and allegiance. In this context, it is surely helpful to engage the extensive historical reflections of one of English letters’ most productive and generically versatile practitioners

Balcus violaceus (Fabricius) : senior synonym of Balcus niger Sharp and B. signatus Broun (Coleoptera: Cleridae: Clerinae)

The elytra of Balcus signatus Broun (Coleoptera: Cleridae: Clerinae) from New Zealand have pale markings. Such markings, most prominently found in females, represent intraspecific variations of Balcus violaceus (Fabricius). Accordingly, Balcus signatus Brown is synonymized with Notoxus violaceus Fabricius, new synonymy. Four habitus figures of Balcus violaceus (Fabricius) are presented to display the range of elytral color variation in the species

Stability of Utility Maximization in Nonequivalent Markets

Stability of the utility maximization problem with random endowment and indifference prices is studied for a sequence of financial markets in an incomplete Brownian setting. Our novelty lies in the nonequivalence of markets, in which the volatility of asset prices (as well as the drift) varies. Degeneracies arise from the presence of nonequivalence. In the positive real line utility framework, a counterexample is presented showing that the expected utility maximization problem can be unstable. A positive stability result is proven for utility functions on the entire real line

Teaching history is talking history

Like many teachers, my early practice was in equal parts reiteration and repudiation of the models to which I had been exposed as a student. As a consequence of my own shyness I took great efforts not to place students in uncomfortable positions, particularly with regard to speaking in class. In retrospect, I can appreciate that I did not encourage or provide adequate opportunities for discussion. As I designed and reflected on my own pedagogic initiatives, it became clear that discussion underpinned the learning taking place in all classroom activities. Brookfield and Preskill have thoroughly and perspicaciously enumerated the myriad learning benefits accruing from the use of ―discussion as a way of teaching‖; and I am now convinced that it is integral to the learning process. Thus, I attempt to create a classroom in which students are encouraged to talk and feel comfortable doing so

Being there and being then: Ideal presence and historical tourism

Should history be affecting? Should we engage with it emotionally? These concerns were central to eighteenth and nineteenth century historiography and remain relevant to historians, especially public historians. Eighteenth century historians like Godwin were highly exercised by the effect of history on the reader, particularly the moral effect. Relatedly, eighteenth and nineteenth historians speculated constantly on the extent to which the reader ought to be proximate to and engaged with their subject(s) and the extent to which they should be detached and maintain a distance from them. There is a tension here – some say a choice – between history as a primarily affective and aesthetic discipline and history as a cognitive, objective, scientific discipline. That history thus has a “curious doubleness” is a perennial observation, going back to Herodotus and Thucydides. But assuming the ongoing, central place of affect in History, I have to account for the general lack of affect on me of the historical place. This seems to put me at odds with most people though not, I suspect, all historians. In what follows I would like to reflect on a recent personal experience of historical tourism in Mexico. I am not an historian of Mexico: I have never formally studied Mexican history nor written about it. Yet I have been fascinated with it since being exposed to parts of William Prescott’s classic History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) as a young boy. Nearly forty years later I managed to travel to Mexico and visit some of the places about which I had enjoyed such a profound literary-historical experience. In terms of Mexican history I was an amateur historian; above all, I was a tourist