26,288 research outputs found
Technology transfer and domestic innovation: evidence from a new dataset of Italian inventors, 1855–1914
No full textThis paper studies the relationship between the exposure of Italian inventors to foreign technologies and the quality of their inventions from the Unification (1861) to WWI. The paper relies on two complementary individual-level datasets: The first dataset comprises all the more than 131,000 patents registered in Italy between 1855 and 1914 as reported (Martinez et al., Soc Sci Hist 1861–1938, 2024). The second dataset contains biographical information about notable inventors and thus allows to obtain both technology- and inventor-based measures of the quality of inventions. The findings indicate that the direct exposure to foreign technologies improved the quality of patents, but the benefits were not substantial. While exposure to technologically similar patents from France and Great Britain led to an improvement in the quality of patents, exposure to more technologically distant patents from Germany did not. These findings suggest that Italian inventors benefitted from the exposure to foreign technologies to a limited extent
Interview with Andres Martinez
No full textAuthor, Andres Martinez, discusses his dissertation and the resulting book he is writing that will expand on Valley conjunto musicians.https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/bordermusicoralhistories/1014/thumbnail.jp
Interview of author Michelle Martinez
No full textMichelle Martinez, author of the crime novel "Most wanted," talks about the issues faced by Latin Americans in their home country versus what they face in the United States. She describes her family and education, graduation form Harvard Law School, and her professional endeavors. Martinez discusses the story line of her book, what motivated her to write, and how she brought her experiences from the prosecutor's office to bear on her writing. She describes her writing as an opportunity to explore her own cultural heritage. Martinez discusses the art of writing and talks about what she reads. Martinez is interviewed by Diana Rivera at the 2005 Left Coast Crime Conference held in El Paso, Texas
The Fan and the Idol: Re-tracing Authorship in “The Author of Beltraffio”
No full textThis article is an investigation of the theme of authorship in Henry James’s tale “The author of Beltraffio.” Written at a crucial stage of James’s career, this tale stands at the crossroads between James’s high realism, his uneasy flirting with aestheticism, and his more experimental narrative turns. The article argues that in this story authorship is step by step not only mobilized, but also vampirized and dispossessed by the narrator, who exchanges the intimacy with the author and his individuality for commodities to be consumed. Authorship, Martinez contends, is figured in the tale as the result of a social discourse, where the veneration of the narrator for the “author of Beltraffio” borders on the relationship between “fan” and “idol.” Such a gesture is located within the broader cultural concerns James was dealing with at the time: the establishment of literary realism in America; the reconfiguration of the relation between private and public experience; the emergence of a mass readership; and a growing bifurcation between the mutually constituting high-brow and low-brow cultural spheres
The Fan and the Idol: Re-tracing Authorship in “The Author of Beltraffio”
No full textThis article is an investigation of the theme of authorship in Henry James’s tale “The author of Beltraffio.” Written at a crucial stage of James’s career, this tale stands at the crossroads between James’s high realism, his uneasy flirting with aestheticism, and his more experimental narrative turns. The article argues that in this story authorship is step by step not only mobilized, but also vampirized and dispossessed by the narrator, who exchanges the intimacy with the author and his individuality for commodities to be consumed. Authorship, Martinez contends, is figured in the tale as the result of a social discourse, where the veneration of the narrator for the “author of Beltraffio” borders on the relationship between “fan” and “idol.” Such a gesture is located within the broader cultural concerns James was dealing with at the time: the establishment of literary realism in America; the reconfiguration of the relation between private and public experience; the emergence of a mass readership; and a growing bifurcation between the mutually constituting high-brow and low-brow cultural spheres
The origins of Italian human capital divides: new evidence from marriage signatures, ca. 1815
No full textThis paper provides new evidence on the geography of literacy rates in pre-unitary Italy. I provide direct estimates based on a novel and balanced random sample of marriage certificates in 1815. The new figures are disaggregated by gender, area, and skill levels, and are compared to the relevant alternative estimates available. Lit- eracy rates are generally low, and North versus South difference in 1815 literacy was as low as 13.7 percentage points, with the Southern literacy rate of about 50% that of Northern Italy. The North–South gap is much smaller for women than for men, and the average female literacy rate across Italy is a lower 9%. Literacy rates in Central Italy were almost identical to that of Southern Italy, arguably because the schooling systems of Central and Southern Italy were more elitist than the Northern Italian one. This evidence suggests that, although partially present also before 1815, the wide magnitude of North–South gaps in literacy which characterized the country on the eve of the political unification (1861) originated after the Napoleonic period. Primary school centralization reforms might have helped women to rapidly improve literacy rates, leading to a first, regionally unequal, ‘Silent Revolution’ (Cappelli and Vasta in Cliometrica 15:1–27, 2020a)
Women Inventors in Italy, 1861-1939
No full textThis paper studies women’s participation in innovative activities during the deep societal changes of twentieth-century Italy. It does so by tracking female inventors among the more than 330,000 patents registered in Italy between 1861 and 1939. The resulting dataset allows to disaggregate women’s inventive activity across industries, provinces, and social backgrounds. Despite accounting for only 0.7% of total patents, the number of women patenting increased steadily from 1861 to 1939. Until 1920, the growth of female-linked patents was comparable to that of male-only patents, but started to slow down during Fascism. The quality of inventions registered by women was only slightly lower than that of men and the gap was gradually reduced. Women also patented in a wide variety of technological sectors. This suggests that entrepreneurial women were able to innovate, but that systemic barriers, particularly during the Fascist period, limited their inventive potential. Although legal restrictions on women’s autonomous business activity were lifted in 1919, societal expectations of marriage and work and the restrictive policies of the Fascist regime contributed to a decline in women’s patenting activity in the 1920s and 1930s, suggesting an intersection of gender dynamics and political climate in shaping female inventive activities
Retelling racialized violence, remaking white innocence: the politics of interlocking oppressions in transgender day of remembrance
No full textTransgender Day of Remembrance has become a significant political event among those resisting violence against gender-variant persons. Commemorated in more than 250 locations worldwide, this day honors individuals who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. However, by focusing on transphobia as the definitive cause of violence, this ritual potentially obscures the ways in which hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality constitute such acts. Taking the Transgender Day of Remembrance/Remembering Our Dead project as a case study for considering the politics of memorialization, as well as tracing the narrative history of the Fred F. C. Martinez murder case in Colorado, the author argues that deracialized accounts of violence produce seemingly innocent White witnesses who can consume these spectacles of domination without confronting their own complicity in such acts. The author suggests that remembrance practices require critical rethinking if we are to confront violence in more effective ways. Description from publisher's site: http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/srsp.2008.5.1.2
A Reconstruction of the Italian Road Network, 1861-1910
No full textThis paper offers a new georeferenced database of Italian roads available by the Italian Unification and constructed from 1863 to 1910. The Italian government (Ministero dei Lavori Pubblici) published three statistics about the road network in 1864, 1904 and 1912. Relying on these sources, this paper reconstructs the provincial and state road network in three benchmark years: 1863, 1904, and 1910. The georeferenced road lines are then integrated despite other information available in the sources. The road network appears already quite widespread at the time of Unification (1861), despite a significant North and Centre vs. South divide. Following the Unification, the road network further expands in a complementary way to the concurrent railroad expansion and mitigates, to some extent, the regional divides in access to road infrastructure
It’s not About the Money: New evidence on U.S. reconstruction aid in Italy, 1947-1968
No full textThis paper studies the economic impact of foreign aid on Italian firms. In particular, I study the different effects of three main forms of aid: The Export-Import Bank loans, the Marshall Plan ERP ‘dollars’ loans, and the Marshall Plan ERP ‘lire’ loans. In all programs, the U.S. sent technologically advanced machinery to allow a modernisation of the technology of Italian firms, but the conditions of such loans differed. This paper tests how crucial such different features have been for the effectiveness of firm reconstruction aid. By creating a new data set on recipient firms and linking it to a large comprehensive firm-level dataset (Imita.db), I compare the effects on the performance of firms. I find that the Export-Import Bank loan raised the long-run profitability of firms, but that firms who received more flexible forms of Marshall Plan aid (‘ERP-lire’) raised their performance much more than Export- Import Bank recipients. Recipients who only received funds provided with long delays (‘ERP-dollars’) did not benefit from them. This evidence suggests that rather than receiving foreign aid per se, the most crucial features of reconstruction aid in Italy have been obtaining the requested goods on time and adjusting requests to receive the most needed productive goods
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