The conflict between the US government and the Mormons in Utah Territory during the second half of the nineteenth century reflected shifts in the American territorial system. Through a repudiation of religious practices and dismantling of the Latter-Day Saints’ Church as an institution, the federal government demonstrated a willingness and ability to interfere with and regulate traditional local issues such as marriage and religion. This provided a foundation for the changes to the territorial system outlined by the Supreme Court in the Insular Cases. Scholars have overlooked the continuities between earlier territorial policy and the post-Insular Cases colonial system. Linking the struggle over authority in Utah Territory with the outcome of the Insular Cases as a component of territorial policy history fills this gap and helps to illuminate the policy connections between continental expansion and overseas expansion.

Through intensive archaeological investigation of temples in Hawai'i, the authors reveal a sequence of religious strategies for creating and maintaining authority that has application to prehistoric sequences everywhere. Expressed in the orientation and layout of the temples and their place in the landscape, these strategies develop in four stages over the course of a few hundred years, from the fifteenth to nineteenth century AD, from local shrines associated with agriculture to the development of a centralising priesthood serving the larger political economy.

The permanence and stability of 20 territories of the dikdik Rhynchotragus kirki, were studied at Arusha National Park Tanzania. Response criteria included the structure, size and vegetation attributes of territories, density of dikdik, and spatial distances between neighbouring territories. Fourteen of the territories studied were spatially fixed and stable while six were unstable. Two of the unstable territories were completely abandoned. Mean territory size was 0.11 and 0.13 ha during the rainy and dry seasons, respectively. 14.2% of circular territories and 42.9% of elliptical and kidney-shaped territories were stable. The figure of 55 dikdik km−2 sighted during morning censuses was lower than that for evening censuses by 13.5%. Spatial distance between territories ranged from 4.5 m to 100 m, an indication that population density might be a function of the size of suitable habitat. Although shrub canopy cover within stable territories decreased by 44.6% between 1982 and 1987, and some territories were realigned with changes in rainfall pattern, pair-bond was maintained by dikdik in 70% of the territories studied.

The aim of this article is to describe the evolution of the Italian regional party systems 25 years after the establishment of 15 Ordinary Statute regions and five years after the implementation of a major Constitutional reform increasing the powers of the regions and the visibility of regional political actors. The theoretical point of departure of the article is the second order election model originally applied to European elections to highlight their dependence on the national political level. The article begins by showing that this model has been applicable for regional elections only since the mid-1990s, a finding that goes against the conventional wisdom. The article then explains the structure of regional political competition through the analysis of two phenomena, fragmentation and differentiation, and the way they are correlated, stressing the changing pattern of competition before and after the breakdown of the First Republic.

A new survey and spatial analysis enables the author to argue that inland examples of Easter Island’s famous stone statues were not in transport to the coast but mark out ancient territories proposed by ethnologist Katherine Routledge in 1919.