The eighteenth century was a period of dramatic change in political and legal thought. Much of the way in which we currently conceive of democratic institutions and the responsibilities and rights attached to citizenship can be traced back to concepts that dominated eighteenth-century thought. The social contract was debated by figures such as John Locke, Algernon Sidney, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Among the many issues under deliberation were the validity of consent, the will of individuals, the role of virtue, and the rights of self-governance. Legal thought was very closely tied to political thought because law was a foundation of political authority. Natural law, which was associated with divinity, rose in importance because it protected inalienable rights, such as self-preservation. Positive law, that is, laws of civil society such as common law and statute law, could be reformed and updated as civil society evolved. This flexibility was praised by jurists such as Lord Mansfield, but it also drew attempts to clarify and systematize law by Sir William Blackstone and Jeremy Bentham, as they prepared the citizenry for a growing engagement with the law.

In a span of just over ten years, the reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s work moved from temperate admiration to heightened political controversy, emotional sympathy, and personal condemnation. When Wollstonecraft wrote about female education, her ideas were generally well received. At times her thoughts were dismissed as trite or she was admonished for encouraging young women to be too independent. But she was in safe territory. Predictably, when Wollstonecraft entered into political and cultural controversies, her thoughts were either embraced because they aligned with theories of the rights of man, or they were thought to be revolutionary and a challenge to British stability. Most controversial was Wollstonecraft’s suggestion that women actively participate in civil society. In this case, she drew censorious responses from parties at both ends of the political spectrum. Her later publications, including posthumous work published by her husband, William Godwin, elicited starkly personal reactions, ranging from sympathy for her emotional turmoil, and pity because her husband made her intimate life public, to outrage over her sexual behavior and condemnation of her dubious moral conduct. Wollstonecraft’s early reception was charged with the controversies of the 1790s and marked by the uncertainty surrounding the place of women in the transformation of civil society.

Intellectually gifted children from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds as well as varying levels of risk were evaluated to determine the effect of risk on gifted children when intelligence level has been controlled. Each of 7,323 children from six ethnic backgrounds had achieved a standardized intelligence test score (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children Revised [WISC-R] or Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices) at least two standard deviations above the mean. Areas of risk evaluated in a case study approach included cultural, economic, emotional, environmental, health and language factors. Although each child in the sample demonstrated high intellectual potential, differences were found only between groups defined by level of risk. Higher degrees of risk were found for disadvantaged students on several measures of aptitude, achievement, and verbal intelligence. Implications and limitations of these findings for assessment of giftedness, identification of potential gifted underachievers, and development of gifted curricula are discussed. (PB) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** U.S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) V` This document has been reproduced as received f rom the person or organization originating it Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quahly Points el view or opinions stated in this docu ment do not necessarily represent official OE RI position or policy

Reviewed by: Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s Nancy E. Johnson (bio) A.A. Markley. Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. xx+278pp. US$89.95. ISBN 978-0-230-61229-7. A.A. Markley's book is a testament to how far scholarship on late eighteenth-century political fiction has come. Markley provides a welcome overview of a pivotal period in the development of the novel and a coherent analysis of a wide variety of texts that advocate reform and strive to alter public opinion. The strength of this well-researched, lucidly written book lies in its range and cohesiveness. Markley's broad perspective rightfully blurs the borders of what has been traditionally called "English Jacobin" fiction and firmly integrates these reformist texts in the history of the novel in the long eighteenth century. The sheer number of novels included in this study impresses. While Markley's focus is on the 1790s, he includes texts published before and after this pivotal decade. Some of the novels are well known to readers of the 1790s: William Godwin's Caleb Williams, Thomas Holcroft's Hugh Trevor, and Mary Wollstonecraft's Wrongs of Woman. Others are far less familiar: Anna Maria Mackenzie's Slavery; or, The Times, George Walker's Theodore Cyphon; or, The Benevolent Jew, Thomas Northmore's Memoirs of Planetes, and the anonymous Excursion of Osman. Markley unifies his analysis of these diverse novels by organizing his readings around the authors' goals of reform and by establishing conceptual attributes common to each of the novels: "a commitment to the rights of the individual"; "a devotion to the idea that reason could and must triumph over convention"; and "a conviction that reform could best be achieved by working to alter 'the private and internal operations of the mind' of the individual" (3). Markley argues that the novelists' method of "conversion" was to operate on the mind of the individual reader. The epigraph to the book—a quotation from Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1796 edition)—is a concise statement of just such a view. By 1796, after the French Reign of Terror, Godwin is quick to observe that a "revolution of opinions is the only means of attaining to this benefit"—that is, the benefit of social and political reform (xix). Markley's argument and Godwin's observation are pertinent reminders of how measured were British reform efforts, particularly in the latter part of the revolutionary decade in light of developments in France. This restrained and sober perspective also explains why reformers turned to the novel as a mechanism of reform. Markley's assertion that authors saw potential in the novel for "fostering a revolution of opinions one reader at a time" (5) is supported by ample textual evidence. One of the advantages of Markley's focus on the novel's reformation of public opinion is that it allows him to address many subjects of [End Page 733] reform—the status of women, slavery, race, aristocratic privilege—and to account for the subtle differences in approaches to reform. The first two chapters of the book draw on many of the now-canonical texts of the 1790s, such as Helen Maria Williams's Julia and Robert Bage's Hermsprong, to outline the multiple facets of the reformist hero: the figure of sensibility, the noble savage, and the young philosopher. The varying types of heroes found in these texts not only illustrate Markley's point that authors struggled to find the right balance of reason and sensibility in their reformist characters, but they also support Markley's contention that novels of the 1790s are complex and richly varied. The second chapter addresses the status of women, focusing on the motif of incarceration, which is indeed pervasive, and the use of the Gothic, which was also widespread in reformist fiction. In both chapters, Markley firmly embeds the reformist texts in the development of the novel through the eighteenth century, elucidating connections to Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne. The last three chapters take the reader into less familiar terrain, looking at representations of African characters to examine...

Objective: Agricultural health studies often use respiratory symptom report as a surrogate measure of disease and exposure; little, data exists on the accuracy of symptom report in a work-motivated population. Methods: Screening spirometry and telephone survey data for Kentucky male farmers >55 year (n = 134) in the NIOSH Farm Family Health and Hazard Surveillance Project were compared to investigate the accuracy of symptom report as a measure of respiratory disease risk in older farmers. Results: The prevalence of reported obstructive respiratory symptoms was 0. 24 (95 % CI = 0. 17 to 0. 31); objective measures increased prevalence to 0.35 (95% CI = 0.27 to 0.43). Customary symptom questions did not reliably reflect objective indicators of respiratory impairment. Conclusions: Older farmers may not accurately report respiratory symptoms. Whether by intention or misinterpretation of physical cues, self-reporting errors in this population may introduce misclassification bias. (J Occup Environ Med. 2009;51:472-479)

Mediation of child custody disputes is mandated in several states. Investigators have averred that victims of domestic violence (DV) are greatly disadvantaged in mediation. The present study empirically evaluated outcomes and found that mediators failed to recognize and report DVin 56.9% of the DV cases. The court’s screening form failed to indicate DV in at least 14.7% of the violent cases. Mediation resulted in poor outcomes for DV victims in terms of protections, such as supervised visitation and protected child exchanges. Mediator capacity to focus on the child’s best interest was called into question. Child custody mediation should not be mandated in cases of DV.

In the framework of the eighteenth-century family and society at large, women could not claim the legally protected civil and economic independence that was necessary to self-governance in the public domain. Also excluded from consideration were others who could not claim the right of property, such as servants and beggars. While the gradual conversion to a market economy and the rise of commerce demanded that the concept of ownership be closely aligned with the development of the self, women and servants continued to be seen only in relation to domestic roles. At the same time, beggars, who were reliant on the charity of others, were situated outside the family, at the periphery of society. All were considered "part of their masters", dependents who would speak and act on the wishes óf fathers and husbands or acquiesce to the desires of financial supporters. Because of their lack of economic autonomy, their identities were absorbed in that of others. Consequently, one sees in the novels of the English Jacobins a pervasive concern with exploring definitions of property and the boundaries of the self. In contrast to the sanguine novels envisaging the new citizen, William Godwin introduces the problem of exclusion in Caleb Williams and thereby changes the course of the English Jacobin novel.

The debate over natural and civil rights was a furious, ubiquitous exchange that dominated public discourse in the 1790s. Much was at stake in defining personal liberties and public duties: the configuration of the body politic and the direction of the modern state. One particular conflict that prevailed in the ensuing battle was a struggle between the family and the self-contained individual as the image and, more importantly, the site of political authority. From the essays of Sir Robert Filmer and John Locke on patriarchalism and government to the treatises on the social contract by Algernon Sidney, James Harrington, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, the exploration of the individual’s relation to the state maintained a vibrant momentum that peaked in the excitement of the French Revolution. By the 1790s, the notion of liberty was either safely protected in the “inherited rights” of Burke’s design or boldly redistributed to the “individual inalienable rights” advocated by Paine. One conception of rights was meant to contain the franchise, the other to extend it.

The development of an alternate form for Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) Test is described. Items for each of the original 60 items of the SPM were developed to be comparable to the corresponding original items in terms of the underlying strategy and difficulty. An alternate form reliability analysis on a diverse group of 449 children (77 African-American, 122 Asian, 54 Filipino, 156 Latino/Hispanic, 38 white, and 2 other) showed an alternate form reliability coefficient of .90. Kuder-Richardson reliabilities of the newly developed alternate and the SPM were identical at .94: A Kolmogorov-Smirnov two-sample test, moreover, revealed no significant differences in central tendency, dispersion, and skewness for distributions of individual item difficulties. In addition, the two tests showed comparable predictive validity coefficients. The alternate form resolves one limitation of the SPM and could provide widespread utility as a research tool.

verbal and performance IQ (VIQ-PIQ) discrepancies were evaluated in 4,546 gifted African-American, Caucasian, Filipino, and Hispanic children in Grades 1-9. Results, which were cross-validated on an independent sample, showed that the VIQ-PIQ pattern depended on ethnic background, the interaction of ethnicity and risk, and the size of the indicidual VIQ-PIQ discrepancy. Gifted African-American and Caucasian children showed significantly higher VIQs than PIQs ; there were no significant VIQ-PIQ differences in the Filipino or Hispanic groups. Language risk was associated with a low VIQ in African-American children. Among large VIQ-PIQ discrepancies, PIQs were higher than VIQs for Filipino children ; the other three groups showed the reverse pattern