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During the second phase of the Meuse‐Argonne offensive, the American 29th and 33d Divisions were given the task of silencing German artillery along the Heights of the Meuse River. This essay explores the service of these two American divisions, fighting under the command of the French XVII Corps, and their experiences east of the Meuse. From 8 to 16 October 1918 the American and French servicemen pushed into difficult terrain, having to overcome fierce resistance from the German Fifth Army. Their experiences serve as a unique window onto the leadership of the American Expeditionary Forces and shed light on how the Meuse‐Argonne offensive as a whole was conducted.

This article examines an eighteenth-century historical work, Antoine-Yves Goguet's De L'origine des loix, des arts, et des sciences, et de leurs progrès chez les anciens peuples. Goguet studied ancient cultures, but maintained that they were inferior to modern European civilization. His methodology, wide erudition, and detailed footnotes were praised at the time, including by the customarily critical Edward Gibbon. Goguet's work was translated into several languages and was influential into the beginning of the nineteenth century, although he was later all but forgotten. The article discusses his work in the context of eighteenth-century scholarship.

The lobbying activities of private groups had an important redistributive influence on national economic policies in both England and France; however, the different organization of government in the two nations gave a particular shape and structure to the redistributive character of national politics. In England, Parliament's role in the legislative process made gaining economic concessions from the government long and difficult. During the eighteenth century, the English government's role was increasingly limited to adjudicating the claims of influential but conflicting groups. In France, by contrast, the government's economic decisions were neither subject to parliamentary scrutiny nor to open public discussion. Whereas the rules of the redistributional game in eighteenth-century England were increasingly public knowledge, the administrative and political process that allowed the French government to pursue its mercantilist programs was private. Furthermore, the rules changed according to ministerial whim. As one historian put it, public law was a forbidden domain, “a mystery reserved to the king and his ministers,” permitting select members of privileged clans, rather than broadly defined interest groups, to enjoy the benefits of government patronage. Although the creation of sophisticated interests and competitive lobbies allowed the English Parliament to provide special favors to particular industries during the eighteenth century, unlike the French executive, neither Parliament nor the English executive had the discretionary authority to distribute monopoly rents to particular ministerial or royal favorites. In England the government's distribution of spoils followed procedures more open to the English political elite as a whole; still, corruption was more pervasive in English public administration than in France, where executive supervision of central government agents was more comprehensive.

The drama of the London Corresponding Society's struggle for extension of the franchise, the attack on its leaders in the treason trials, the subversive challenge of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, so threatening to the establishment that he was forced to flee to France, the incipient feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft, so excoriated that her works would be buried for over a century, all led the ruling elite to fear the contagion of the French Revolution and to respond with forceful repression. Therefore, such assumptions, Makdisi contends, also led such radicals to be complicit in defense of property, industrial discipline and imperialism and in denunciation of the passions, culture, political militancy and economic issues of the lower classes.