Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Historians have traditionally explained the genesis of the Soviet system in terms of factors unique to the Soviet Union. Through an examination of international influences on the development of Soviet public health from 1917 to 1941, I propose to demonstrate the important influence of ideas and methods imported from Western Europe.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper analyses judicial decisions around expropriation. Land expropriation is one of the most controversial subjects in the discussion around property. In our research we have found some general tendencies in the use of expropriation and now we have a better picture of expropriation and its legal framework in Mexico. The debate around expropriation involves three main aspects: A controversial subject in expropriation is the procedure. The lack of interest from the legislative branch in modifying the law to adjust to the new social and political realities has generated insecurity and conflict. Closely related to his issue is the second aspect that is strongly debated, not only in Mexico but in the whole world. This second topic is the definition of public use or public interest. This issue has been strongly debated specially by the judicial branch, although this issue receives very little attention form the media. Another topic has appeared in the public debate due to the recent cases that had great political repercussion where the Mexican Government was condemned by the judicial power to pay vast amounts of money as compensation for urban expropriations. This discussion is about what owners have a right to expect as compensation in expropriation cases.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In 1917 and 1918, three European absolutist states – Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany - collapsed, one after the other. These empires, or at least two of them, existed for centuries, but fell simultaneously, in the historically momentous span of several months. How can one explain such striking historical simultaneity in the fall of East European empires? I claim that existing internalist narratives of imperial collapse cannot account for synchronicity of these metamorphoses. I outline an alternative, bellicist-externalist, interpretation of breakdown of three empires. I argue that a war of large coalition alliances (particularly a positional war like World War One) is likely to create a situation of a strategic stalemate which may turn the conflict into a full-scale war of attrition in which nations that are denied access to the international markets are likely to experience economic collapse, social unrest, elite crisis, and, if the war protracts, state breakdown. My analysis demonstrates consistence of evidence of economic mobilization among five European nations with the bellicist-externalist explanation. Nations that had free access to outside world (Britain and France) were able to maintain a high level social and political stability and avoided social crisis during the war. Nations that were excluded from world-economy (Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia) suffered deep economic and political crises. These states collapsed not because of their internal weakness, vulnerability, or “backwardness” but largely because of their specific location in geopolitical configurations of coalition alliances.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: On July 2, 1917, white mobs assaulted African Americans in the small industrial city of East St. Louis, Illinois. Assailants torched black homes and businesses, injured hundreds of African Americans, and forced at least seven thousand black people to seek refuge in neighboring St. Louis, Missouri. By city, state, and federal accounts, officially thirty-nine black men, women, and children and nine white men lost their lives, but eyewitnesses claimed that many more black—and white—people had perished. This episode of mass racial violence was a pogrom, an officially tolerated, organized attack by pogrom leaders who sought, above all else, to destroy black activism that for several decades had been undermining white entitlement to political power.
African Americans in de facto segregated East St. Louis fashioned a multifaceted grassroots tradition of activism, for example, building community institutions such as churches, women’s associations, and political clubs that defied white supremacy. From Reconstruction to 1917, black residents combined self-help actions similar to those of Booker T. Washington with militant agitation for full citizenship rights as advocated by radicals like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and W.E.B. Du Bois. Black townspeople had become powerbrokers in city politics by 1917. In response to this successful East St. Louis variation of what the Niagara Movement envisioned in 1906, namely assertive black activism for equality, white machine boss politicians, progressive reformers, and their allies used the pogrom to demonstrate the impossibility for black political activism to achieve a multiracial democracy in a national polity structured by white supremacy.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Paper reconsiders the extra-constitutional US citizenship that took shape with the passage of the Jones Act (1917) and explores the Act in light of the larger historical context of American immigration and nationality discourse in the 1900-1920's.