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Chapter 1 of the book "Ethics and the Beast: A Speciesist Argument for Animal Liberation," by Tzachi Zamir is presented. The author discusses his attempt to extract a sense of speciesism, which had opposed the pro-animal claim. Furthermore, speciesism had become a target for reformers under a strong and unintuitive sense.

Chapter 4 of the book "Everyday Life: Reform in America" is presented. It highlights the efforts of reformer Dorothea Lynde Dix to address the deplorable conditions in the country's asylums and prisons. It discusses the implementation of several methods of treating prisoners, including the Quaker system and the separate and silent system.

Chapter 3 of the book "The Utes Must Go!: American Expansion and the Removal of a People," by Peter Decker is presented. It profiles writer-poet-reformer Nathan Meeker, who was appointed as Indian Bureau agent to the Ute Indians of Colorado from 1878-1879. It narrates how he was influenced by the agricultural socialism envisioned by Charles Fourier as well as his literary foray as a novelist and writer-reporter. It discusses his failed experience as in-residence president of the Union Colony in Colorado that pushed him to apply as Indian Bureau agent.

This chapter focuses on the paradoxical invention of economic modernity. The theme of the paradoxical invention of modernity runs through the work of author Max Weber, albeit alongside the construction of ideal types. For example, when he admits that the cultural consequences of the Reformation were to a great extent, perhaps in the particular aspects with which the people are dealing predominantly, unforeseen and even unwished-for results of the labors of the reformers. Or when he speaks of modes of the economic orientation of action, stating that economic orientation may be a matter of tradition or of goal-oriented rationality.

The article presents information on critical writing and visual art. Critical analysis operates on the assumption that its data are ideologically constructed and positioned, whereas the notion of ideology is usually absent in empirical analysis. The idea of critique is a product of the Enlightenment, though the term is older still. The Humanists and Reformers to describe the art of first used it informed judgment, appropriate to the study of ancient texts. Since individual relationships are always changing, so society correspondingly changed. Eventually its specific structure would collapse, at the same time giving rise to another historical stage in its development. For social philosopher Karl Marx, art is not an economic category, nor is it to be confused with false consciousness. Art is a strategy of demystification, and it is a distinct form of the labor process in which is kept alive the materialized imagery of man's hope for a future society. Art is, in another sense, man's mode of mediation between the sense and the intellect, between cognition and feeling; it is a means of educating men's senses, their sensibility, and their consciousness; and it is a mode of human expression which provides both the commitment and the enthusiasm to permit the activity of transforming the latent into the actual, the present into beyond the present.

The article presents information on Victorian sexual behavior and attitudes in childhood. It is perhaps with respect to the Victorians' view of childhood sexuality that contemporary wisdom is most inclined to see a confusion of the romantic and the puritan view of the child. In the last third of the century, several factors brought debates about prostitution to a head. An attempt to regulate prostitution and control venereal disease, through the enforced examination of women suspected of prostitution, was made through the Contagious Diseases Acts, the first of which became law in 1864. Associated with the military and also with privilege and loose morality, the Acts were increasingly opposed by various groups with a radical and sometimes evangelical orientation, not least by the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, founded in 1869. Social reformer John Ruskin made plain his very orthodox, bourgeois perception of the feminine in his description of the role of women in his essay "Of Queen's Gardens."

The chapter provides information on the misrepresentation of the classical economists. Because economists has been concerned with questions of social goodness the economist has been drawn into the field of social philosophy. The economist has been expected to pass judgment on rival policies and has required some criterion of the general good. The economist's unpopularity has arisen from the stress he has placed on the opposition between private interest and the general good. The economist's criterion has aroused the hostility of vested interests and typical reformers.

Chapter II of the book "Word From New Spain: The Spiritual Autobiography of Madre María de San José 1656-1719," edited by Kathleen Myers is presented. It focuses on the work of Peter of Alcantara, a Franciscan reformer, Manana de San Joseph, reformer of the Augustinian nuns in Spain and Anthony of Padua, María's patron when learning to read.

Historians have invoked a wide range of factors to explain why reformers in the 1790s failed to obtain their objectives. Government repression, the strength of the popular loyalist movement, the pervasive influence of a sophisticated conservative ideology, the resilience of the institutions of monarchy, aristocracy and the Church of England, or the pluralism of British culture and the responsiveness of its institutions to the needs of the poor, have all been cited as key factors in this failure. So, too, have the ideological disagreements amongst reformers and the factionalism in the organisations for reform: The reform movement was hopelessly divided on what changes ought to be made and none of the competing elements could rally adequate support in or out of Parliament… The evidence… shows how the radicals were divided among themselves, how most of them failed to take their ideas to their logical conclusions and how all of them failed to devise any effective means of implementing their policies. It is primarily with this last claim that this chapter takes issue. It does not deny that there were substantial disagreements among reformers over both means and ends, but it challenges the view that these contributed significantly to their failure to achieve parliamentary reform. In doing so, it also seeks to cast doubt upon the adequacy of explanations of the failure of reform which do not recognise that the radical agenda was as much the outcome of the political struggles of the 1790s as it was their cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of the French Revolution is more than usually subject to the vagaries of intellectual fashion and remains a vehemently contested field for research. Indeed, this has been the case since the first days of the Revolution. Although less subject to historical fashions, the precise nature of the British response to France has also been hotly disputed territory ever since news of events in France first crossed the Channel. It is not difficult to see why this should be so. The French Revolution, following hard on the heels of the American, raised questions for contemporaries, as for later generations, about the legitimacy of Britain's ‘ancien régime’ and the degree and sources of its stability. It also led many to believe that substantial parliamentary reform was both necessary and inevitable, and this gave rise to a number of organisations dedicated to making the inevitable actual. The period from 1791 to 1803 is seen by many historians as the first major opportunity (and for some also the last) for a radical, popular, democratic reform of the British social and political order. One indication of its significance is Alfred Cobban's description of the pamphlet debate which followed the publication of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790 as, ‘perhaps the last real discussion of fundamentals of politics in this country… Issues as great have been raised in our day, but it cannot be pretended that they have evoked a political discussion on the intellectual level of that inspired by the French Revolution’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are told that baptism ‘… gives … initiates … unites … effects’. It has to be asked what is meant by ‘baptism’ where this sort of language is constantly used. Is it the actual performance of the rites? If so, the language seems at best hyperbole and at worst objectionable. This hostile reaction to the 1982 Statement of the World Council of Churches on Baptism (the ‘Lima’ text) reflects the modern continuance of suspicions of a number of reformers in the sixteenth century. If we say that a sacrament has an effect, do we imply that the Holy Spirit is somehow at the disposal of the Church, so that the mere ‘performance’ of the rite ‘guarantees’ the effect, ex opere operato? The question can be put in that way only if the Church is seen as in some sense standing over against divine authority and laying claim to an independent power; with its ministers endowed with a personal ‘priestly power’, and claiming that ‘rites of the Church’ infallibly bring about the operation of the gift of grace. Such assumptions are to be found on both sides in the sixteenth century debates, and they largely dictate the shape of the discussion about the role of the Church in salvation. Luther was first and foremost concerned with the forgiveness of the individual as he responds to God in faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FORMAL REASONING Testimony from ‘authorities’ other than Scripture was used by Protestants in the sixteenth century with restraint, by Roman Catholics much as it had been throughout the Middle Ages. Protestants who employed it at all drew principally on the Fathers, especially Augustine, in a deliberate attempt to cut out what they deemed a millennium or so of corruption in the Church's life. But both alike found themselves needing to use authorities in a context of more or less formal argumentation as a means of proving theological truths, because ‘authorities’ and ‘reasons’ had always gone hand in hand here. It seemed to Luther and others that formal logic had in recent generations created a scholastic obfuscation of plain Scriptural teaching, so that ‘reason’ could be seen as confronting Scripture not harmonising with it; and furthermore, the institutional Church was seen as supporting a professional class of academic theologians in their claim to an authority which overrode that of Scripture. As early as 1516 Luther was mocking ‘the subtlety of the philosophers’ who entertain themselves with proving that what is true is also false. In a similar spirit Melanchthon laughs at attempts to make a difference between Papam vidi and vidi Papam, and the seriousness about these logical squabbles which calls anyone who disputes that ego currit is bad Latin not a poor grammarian but a ‘heretic’. ‘Scholastic’, ‘school’ and their cognates are frequently a term of abuse among humanists and reformers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The confession of Christ as Lord is the heart of the Christian faith. To him God has given all authority in heaven and on earth. As Lord of the Church he bestows the Holy Spirit to create a communion of men with God and with one another. To bring this koinonia to perfection is God's eternal purpose. The Church exists to serve the fulfilment of this purpose when God will be all in all. Christian authority is Christ's authority. The debates on authority which rent apart the Church in the West in the sixteenth century turned again and again on whether Christ's sovereignty was being set at risk in the Church's life; and whether his Word, Holy Scripture, was being disregarded or overridden by those in authority in the Church. The chapters which follow look first at sixteenth-century concerns over the authority on which Christians believe matters of faith. As textual scholarship investigated Greek and Hebrew and raised the possibility that there ought to be emendations, Scripture itself could no longer be looked upon, in an uncontroversial way, as a text to which one could simply point. The testimony of the authorities other than Scripture with which everyone in the West had been familiar for generations, ceased to be uncontroversially acceptable to many Protestants, and qualifications hedged about the use even of the Fathers. Proof by reasoning, which had reached a high point of sophistication in the late Middle Ages, and in which there had normally been embedded authorities to support propositions, underwent revolutionary attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Introduction we identified four stages in the history of reform in the last hundred years or so of the Ch'ing. These stages often overlapped, and a reformer could easily graduate from one to the next, thus highlighting the continuity of that reform tradition. The first stage was ushered in by members of the School of Practical Statecraft, who diagnosed the dynastic decline. They expressed their concern by diligently attending to administrative details and public works and were not afraid to tamper with time-honoured but ineffective institutions. Theirs was a response to an internal crisis. By the 1830s and 1840s, some of these scholar-officials, now joined by others, began to react to the new threat from the West. Patriotic sentiments emerged, as did the idea of adopting Western military technology to curb foreign encroachments. But it is often overlooked that they also advocated a selective renovation of inherited institutions in order to accommodate and maximize the benefits of the new technology. The civil service examination system, one of the most sacrosanct institutions of the state, was a main target of reform. This willingness to modify traditional institutions and practices greatly adds to the significance of this second phase of reform. When Shen began his education, he was exposed only to the practical statecraft ideas of the first stage. When he came of age, the reform ideas of the first two stages had already merged into a single tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Tso Tsung-t'ang founded the Navy Yard, his plan seemed grandiose, perhaps even impossible to achieve. In time, however, perceptions changed. Even as the Navy Yard came under heavy criticism in 1872, Shen Pao-chen felt positive about what had already been accomplished and argued that more, rather than less, should be done to modernize the country's defence. He then proposed the institution of a new civil service examination on mathematics, advanced studies in Europe for the students, and a programme for interprovincial naval training. Later, plans for building more advanced vessels were made. In his mind, Tso's original plan now represented the foundation, not the limits, of China's defence modernization. It is hard to say when Shen began to see the Navy Yard as a germinal modernizing enterprise. It is clear to us that the Navy Yard, as a foreign implant, could not be efficiently run by traditional means, and as it expanded, it would demand changes in the milieu in which it operated. But it cannot be assumed that the nature of yang-wu enterprises would itself bring about a new understanding of their seminal role in China's modernization. Managers of some modern arsenals appeared not to have acquired such an understanding. Shen, however, demonstrated a degree of awareness the day he took office as he accepted the inevitability of the Navy Yard's future expansion and the need to catch up with an everchanging technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the viability of the Ch'ing dynasty was severely tested. Massive internal uprisings, defeat in two foreign wars, and continued external threats could have toppled the two-century-old Manchu ruling house. Only the timely emergence of ‘a galaxy of extraordinarily able officials’ saved it from extinction. They put down the rebellions, worked hard at reconstruction, attempted to upgrade the bureaucracy, and tried to restore the old order. To block further imperialist inroads, they adopted aspects of Western diplomatic practices and military technology. By dint of dedication and effort, these men tried to bring about a dynastic revival – the Ch'ing Restoration – and prolonged the life of the dynasty by half a century. This book is about one of those ‘extraordinary able officials’ whose life and career were an integral part of the late Ch'ing experience. This man was Shen Pao-chen (1820–79), who began his journey to the top of Ch'ing officialdom after passing the civil service examinations. At the relatively young age of forty-one (1862), he was already the governor of an important province in the rich Yangtze valley. Then, in 1867, abandoning the security of high office and the chance for an early promotion to the rank of governor-general, he accepted the leadership of China's first fully fledged modern naval dockyard and held that position for more than eight years. His career closed with a four-year term as governor-general of Liang Kiang, which comprised the key provinces of Kiangsu, Anhwei, and Kiangsi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Foochow, the capital of Fukien, was divided into two adminstrative halves by a major thoroughfare, with the Min district in the east and Hou-kuan in the west. But if the city were divided according to the character of its sectors, a northern quarter of government and religious buildings, straddling the two administrative districts, could be easily distinguished. In many ways, Foochow was just another southern Chinese city with its eleven-kilometre wall enclosing the various wards, each with its narrow and dirty streets, badly paved with blocks of granite. In size, it was a little bigger than Canton, but the affluence and lustre of the latter were lacking. The city wall, in fact, enclosed a considerable amount of wasteland. Foochow, however, was not without its charms. Its Curiosity Street displayed merchandise ranging from antiques and fine lacquer-wares to exquisitely executed rice-paper flowers. Three wooded hills rose above the horizon of the city, which also boasted many banyan trees in its public areas. The Chinese called it the Banyan City. But one inescapable feature of this provincial capital was the large number of officials among its six hundred thousand inhabitants and the space dedicated to government offices. Learning, and its close tie with office, was given expression by the academies and the examination halls, one with ten thousand cells. Foochow had traditionally produced more than its fair share of scholars and officials, both in the province and in the empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about the topics discussed at a lecture delivered by American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson before the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association in Boston, Massachusetts on January 25, 1841 is presented. Topics include the use of man as a reformer, the need to cast aside all evil practices and customs, and idealism. Emerson emphasized the impact of a person's affection on his or her daily life and to the society.

The article presents a speech by essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered to the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association in Boston, Massachusetts on January 25, 1841. It states that the topic of the speech was related to the general relations of man as a reformer. It mentions that Americans possesses several virtues but they lack faith and hope.

Chapter XIII of the book "Catherine de' Medici" is presented. It explores the effort of the queen-mother Catherine de' Medici to reconcile the differences between the Catholics and Reformers by calling an assembly known by some new and distinctive name. It also highlights the role of Jean Calvin, son of a cooper at Noyon in Picardy, whose birthplace explains in some degree the obstinacy combined with capricious eagerness that distinguished the arbiter of the destinies of France.

Chapter IX of the book "Catherine de' Medici" is presented. It explores on the investigation of Prince de Conde concerning his alleged participation in the conspiracy of the Reformers. It also provides information on the quest of old Lecamus, the furrier of the two queens, to come to Chateau de Amboise to search for his son Christophe Lecamus. It also presents the bloody execution of the noblemen or leaders of the Reformers.

Chapter XI of the book "Catherine de' Medici" is presented. It provides information on the brain surgeries conducted by surgeon Ambroise Pare, and highlights the illness of King Francois II. It explores the prediction of the old Lecamus, the furrier, that the success of King Francois II's operation will ruin France and will signify the death of Reformers. It also mentions the arrival of Robertet and the Chancelier de l'Hopital in the kingdom.

Section 5 of chapter 5 of the book "Imperial Histories From Alfonso X to Inca Garcilaso: Revisionist Myths of Reconquest and Conquest" is presented. The "Cronica delle cose occorrenti nei tempi suoi" acts as an apology to the defeated reformers of the White Guelphs faction and the Black Guelphs. Compagni analyzes the merit and faults of the national character of fellow citizens due to the city's character to be the cause of its rise and fall.

Information on the Lisbon agenda is presented. The agenda, agreed at a summit in 2000, promised radical reform to turn the European Union (EU) into the world's leading knowledge-based economy by 2010. The EU disappointed would-be reformers by lagging behind the U.S. and Asia and holding its preference for the social dimension over market liberalization.

The article features Sigmund Freud who abolished regimes of silence that reformers had employed, made the mad talk and developed the structure including his medical personage as omnipotent and quasi-divine. It is also stressed by Michel Foucault, a French historian and philosopher, that the only way for madness to live in itself is through art and philosophy.

The article focuses on the late 18th century psychiatric reformers. It indicates that these reformers saw punitive measures as ill-treatment. It mentions that the insane who were physically liberated and placed under a moral educational and psychiatric discourse were now less free as their minds were even subject to treatment. It is also highlighted that the bourgeois authoritarian order was mirrored by the asylum.

Focuses on the life and works of Herbert Huntington, a reformer in Nova Scotia. Opposition to the grants of public money for denominational colleges; Refusal of Huntington to surrender the rights for expediency.