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Addresses by celebrated Americans, grouped under historical headings. ; Vol. 1, 1899; v. 2, 1896; v. 3, 1899; v. 4, 1898. ; v. 1. I. Colonialism. II. Constitutional government. III. The rise of democracy. IV. The rise of nationality -- v. 2. V. The anti-slavery struggle -- v. 3. V. The anti-slavery struggle (continued) VI. Secession -- v. 4. VII. Civil war and reconstruction. VIII. Free trade and protection. IX. Finance and civil service reform. ; Mode of access: Internet.

How can we account for the triumph of quantitative methodology in contemporary social sciences? This article reviews several historical works on the use of quantification in the pursuit of objectivity. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, objectivity was increasingly valued due to the absence of an elite culture, increasing anonymity, and the rise of pseudosciences. Before and during World War I, financial and governmental pressures intensified the movement toward objectivity and quantification. Quantification became almost mandatory as a response to World War II and Cold War conditions of mistrust and disunity. In the next decades, research findings started to circulate across oceans and continents and quantification served international communication very well. During the 1980s, the discussed challenges were no longer evident and the 1990s were characterized by continuous argument over the arbitrariness of quantitative decision making. Since then, there have been few reform, and roughly the same criticism applies to current statistical use. One can conclude that quantification has served the demands of social scientists for transparency, neutrality, and communicability, but in order to advance, social scientists should re-evaluate their own critical and creative mind.

The 2006 midterm has undercut some familiar assertions about contemporary electoral politics. Political analysts seem to have overstated Republican advantages in several areas: voter turnout, campaign finance, congressional apportionment, party unity, and social issues. The GOP's loss is the discipline's gain, as the election raises good questions for scholarly research. Adapted from the source document.

The history of the Internet has been narrated many times. However, political histories of the Internet with a non-US-centric focus are still an uncharted research area. This paper contributes to closing that research gap. It reconstructs the Internet's history in Germany through the lens of semantic changes in press coverage on politics. In our investigation, we sought to analyse semantic change as a political history by drawing on insights concerning the relationship between semantic change and political conflict from the perspective of discourse theory and theoretical reflections on politicisation. The study follows our intuition that semantic struggles of the past leave traces in word contexts. Conversely, it uncovers semantic change by following the traces of semantic struggles in these contexts. In line with this rationale, we conducted a 'blended reading' of word contexts that relied on a quantitatively assisted qualitative text analysis. The study finds that the Internet has long been understood predominantly as a tool for politics in the political public. In the late 2000s, its perception as a highly politicised object of governance also became dominant. While the Internet was always associated with a medium and a public sphere, its characterisation changed from 'web 1.0' to a 'web of corporations'.

An influential body of scholarship in political science has investigated the impact of economic crisis on various political outcomes. The vast majority of these studies rely on annual growth rates (AGR) to specify economic crisis. I argue that this canonical approach comes with several logical shortcomings. It leads to misguided impressions of crisis severity; it makes no distinction between rapid expansion years and rapid recovery years; and it disregards the financial dimension of economic crises. I present and discuss three alternative approaches of measuring economic crisis, imported from economics: economic shocks, economic slumps, and measures of financial crises. Examples from the regime instability literature demonstrate that these alternative crisis measurements provide results that are theoretically more nuanced and empirically more robust. On this basis, the article encourages researchers to pay more attention to the way they measure economic crisis in general and to supplement the AGR approach with alternative crisis measures in particular.