War and Diplomacy in the Age of Louis XIV: A Historical Study and Annotated Bibliography Volume II

In the last forty-five years historians have produced numerous books and articles on European diplomatic relations and military affairs during the era of Louis XIV. However, there exists no up-to-date annotated bibliography listing and describing these works or older, but valuable studies. The latest annotated bibliography to appear regarding early modern history is Hugh Dunthorne and Hamish M. Scott, Early Modern European History c. 1492–1789 (London: Historical Association, 1983) which devotes less than six pages to international relations and warfare. John Roach\u27s A Bibliography of Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) also contains little on war and diplomacy and fails to provide anything more than a list of books. In addition, the most recent edition of The American Historical Association\u27s Guide to Historical Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) contains only a highly select listing of works on European war and diplomacy in the Age of Louis XIV. William Calvin Dickinson and Eloise R. Hitchcock\u27s The War of the Spanish Succession, 1701–1713: A Selected Bibliography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996) is valuable, but it concentrates on only one aspect of the Wars of Louis XIV. The following research project is an annotated bibliography of studies concerning war and diplomacy in the Age of Louis XIV. The bibliography contains eight chapters concentrating on different aspects, including general studies in international political history, 1648–1715/21; the art of diplomacy in the Age of Louis XIV; warfare in the Age of Louis XIV; French expansionism and the wars against Spain and the Dutch Republic, 1648–1678; English foreign policy under Cromwell and Charles II, 1649–1685; the formation of the Grand Alliance and the Nine Years\u27 War, 1678–1697; the First and Second Partition Treaties and the War of the Spanish Succession, 1698–1714; as well as the struggle for supremacy in the Baltic and the Turkish threat to Europe, 1648–1721. The bibliography reviews over 500 works including books, journal articles, and theses published in English. The beginning of each chapter includes a short narrative of the topic considered before listing the annotated citations. The citations include a brief review of each work. The bibliography also cross references studies between chapters as well as contains an index of authors cited. This bibliography serves as a valuable research tool for history teachers, graduate students, researchers, and specialists

The Wilhelmstrasse and the Nazi Conspiracy to Wage Wars of Aggression: An Investigation Into the Continuity of German Foreign Office Influence on the Formulation of Foreign Policy, 1871-1945

In the late forties, military tribunals held at Nuremberg tried several surviving key German diplomats, including Constantin von Neurath, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Ernst von Weizsaecker, and Ernst Woermann, for their part in the so-called Nazi conspiracy to wage wars of aggression. All of the diplomats on trial claimed that the German Foreign Office was innocent since it had no influence on the formulation of foreign policy: Hitler had acted as his own Foreign Minister. This thesis investigates to what extent these individuals and other diplomats influenced the making of foreign policy during the Third Reich, as well as examines the Foreign Office\u27s role in formulating policy from 1871 to 1945 in order to determine if there exists any continuity in its activities. The author uses the unpublished Nuremberg trial papers in the University of North Dakota\u27s Chester Fritz Library as well as numerous published diplomatic documents and memoirs. The study shows that there is a strong case for the continuity argument that the Foreign Office had little, if any, influence in policy making under Bismarck, Wilhelm II, and Hitler. All three men practiced, to varying degrees, their desire to be their own Foreign Minister. The Foreign Office existed to carry out foreign affairs, not formulate policy. Only during the Weimar era, especially under Stresemann, did the Foreign Office exert a strong influence in policy making. With the emergence of Hitler, the diplomats returned to their established pattern of serving a strong German leader. Thus, when the diplomats on trial at Nuremberg stated that Hitler was his own Foreign Minister and the Foreign Office had no influence on his decisions, they were arguing a viewpoint that holds true for much of the time during 1871 to 1945

Natural variability is essential to learning new faces

We learn new faces throughout life, for example in everyday settings like watching TV. Recent research has shown that image variability is key to this ability: if we learn a new face over highly variable images, we are better able to recognize that person in novel pictures. Here we asked people to watch TV shows they had not seen before, and then tested their ability to recognize the actors. Some participants watched TV shows in the conventional manner, whereas others watched them upside down or contrast-reversed. Image variability is equivalent across these conditions, and yet we observed that viewers were unable to learn the faces upside down or contrast-reversed - even when tested in the same format as learning. We conclude that variability is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for face learning. Instead, mechanisms underlying this process are tuned to extract useful information from variability falling within a critical range that corresponds to natural, everyday variation

Robust social categorization emerges from learning the identities of very few faces

Viewers are highly accurate at recognizing sex and race from faces-though it remains unclear how this is achieved. Recognition of familiar faces is also highly accurate across a very large range of viewing conditions, despite the difficulty of the problem. Here we show that computation of sex and race can emerge incidentally from a system designed to compute identity. We emphasize the role of multiple encounters with a small number of people, which we take to underlie human face learning. We use highly variable everyday 'ambient' images of a few people to train a Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) model on identity. The resulting model has human-like properties, including a facility to cohere previously unseen ambient images of familiar (trained) people-an ability which breaks down for the faces of unknown (untrained) people. The first dimension created by the identity-trained LDA classifies both familiar and unfamiliar faces by sex, and the second dimension classifies faces by race- even though neither of these categories was explicitly coded at learning. By varying the numbers and types of face identities on which a further series of LDA models were trained, we show that this incidental learning of sex and race reflects covariation between these social categories and face identity, and that a remarkably small number of identities need be learnt before such incidental dimensions emerge. The task of learning to recognize familiar faces is sufficient to create certain salient social categories

Understanding facial impressions between and within identities

A paradoxical finding from recent studies of face perception is that observers are error-prone and inconsistent when judging the identity of unfamiliar faces, but nevertheless reasonably consistent when judging traits. Our aim is to understand this difference. Using everyday ambient images of faces, we show that visual image statistics can predict observers' consensual impressions of trustworthiness, attractiveness and dominance, which represent key dimensions of evaluation in leading theoretical accounts of trait judgement. In Study 1, image statistics derived from ambient images of multiple face identities were able to account for 51% of the variance in consensual impressions of entirely novel ambient images. Shape properties were more effective predictors than surface properties, but a combination of both achieved the best results. In Study 2 and Study 3, statistics derived from multiple images of a particular face achieved the best generalisation to new images of that face, but there was nonetheless significant generalisation between images of the faces of different individuals. Hence, whereas idiosyncratic variability across different images of the same face is sufficient to cause substantial problems in judging the identities of unfamiliar faces, there are consistencies between faces which are sufficient to support (to some extent) consensual trait judgements. Furthermore, much of this consistency can be captured in simple operational models based on image statistics

Predictors of short-term clinical response to cardiac resynchronization therapy

Aims: Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) reduces morbidity and mortality in patients with symptomatic heart failure and QRS prolongation but there is uncertainty about which patient characteristics predict short-term clinical response. Methods and results: In an individual patient meta-analysis of three double-blind, randomized trials, clinical composite score (CCS) at 6 months was compared in patients assigned to CRT programmed on or off. Treatment–covariate interactions were assessed to measure likelihood of improved CCS at 6 months. MIRACLE, MIRACLE ICD, and REVERSE trials contributed data for this analysis (n = 1591). Multivariable modelling identified QRS duration and left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) as predictors of CRT clinical response (P < 0.05). The odds ratio for a better CCS at 6 months increased by 3.7% for every 1% decrease in LVEF for patients assigned to CRT-on compared to CRT-off, and was greatest when QRS duration was between 160 and 180 ms. Conclusions: In symptomatic chronic heart failure patients (NYHA class II–IV), longer QRS duration and lower LVEF independently predict early clinical response to CRT

‘Dominant ethnicity’ and the ‘ethnic-civic’ dichotomy in the work of A. D. Smith

This article considers the way in which the work of Anthony Smith has helped to structure debates surrounding the role of ethnicity in present-day nations. Two major lines of enquiry are evident here. First, the contemporary role of dominant ethnic groups within 'their' nations and second, the interplay between ethnic and civic elements in nationalist argument. The two processes are related, but maintain elements of distinctiveness. Smith's major contribution to the dominant ethnicity debate has been to disembed ethnicity from the ideologically-charged and/or anglo-centric discourse of ethnic relations and to place it in historical context, thereby opening up space for dominant group ethnicity to be considered as a distinct phenomenon. This said, Smith's work does not adequately account for the vicissitudes of dominant ethnicity in the contemporary West. Building on the classical works of Hans Kohn and Friedrich Meinecke, Anthony Smith has also made a seminal contribution to the debate on civic and ethnic forms of national identity and nationalist ideology. As well as freeing this debate from the strong normative overtones which it has often carried, he has continued to insist that the terms civic and ethnic should be treated as an ideal-typical distinction rather than a scheme of classification