The horrifying record of rape by Soviet troops in postwar Germany has long been a matter of record. What is new is the argument that the behavior of American GIs in the European Theater of Operations was little better than that of the Russians. Inspired by a new study alleging that some 190,000 German girls and women were raped by U.S. servicemen, the Kehoes maintain that official military statistics from 1945-46 confirm such high levels of sexual predation. It can now be said with confidence, they assert, that “U.S. soldiers raped and assaulted civilians with frightening abandon.” Yet this generalization and others like it are not supported by the authors’ own data, which instead repeatedly display low rape figures. The Kehoes’ reliance on theorizing to overcome this deficiency is clearly unconvincing.

Contrary to Robert Dykstra’s contention, we do not attempt to equate Soviet and U.S. crimes. Instead, we present new quantitative evidence that indicates a higher rate of U.S.-perpetrated crime than previously thought. The result should be a re-appraisal of U.S. soldiers’ behavior that penetrates further than the popular narrative that contrasts a peaceful West with a disorderly East. Dykstra’s mistaken critique of our statistical results appears to derive from his failure to appreciate the full relationship between crime reports and crime charges and from his lack of familiarity with the complications surrounding the calculation of the “dark number.”

Subsequent to Harper’s review essay centered on Brooke’s Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey , Brooke concedes that he could have focused more attention on the problem of the Malthusian trap. He stresses, nevertheless, that his reservations regarding the concept of Malthusian crises in pre-industrial societies are well placed, given the concept’s prominence in the large-scale environmental histories written during the past several decades. Turning to the impact of climate change in late classical antiquity, Brooke discusses established and new evidence for increasing, sometimes catastrophic, precipitation from the Mediterranean area into central Asia after a.d. 500 and after 1250, as a result of shifts toward the negative mode of the North Atlantic Oscillation. He also surveys the evidence for emerging arguments that this cooling-driven precipitation may have triggered outbreaks of bubonic plague in Central Asia.

In this continuation of his exchange with Brooke about Brooke’s big-picture model of climate change and human response, Harper argues for careful articulation of what kind of Malthusianism Brooke claims, or does not claim, for or against his model. Harper also challenges Brooke’s description of the paleoclimate known as the Roman Climate Optimum as a period dominated by a persistently positive mode of the North Atlantic Oscillation.

The commentaries of White and of Büntgen and Hellmann in this journal fail to prove that Europe experienced the kind of sustained falls in temperature between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries that can justify the notion of a Little Ice Age. Neither of them adequately addresses the cogency of the anecdotal or statistical evidence as presented in Kelly and Ó Gráda's article, “The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe,” especially with regard to the spurious peaks and troughs created by the smoothing of temperature series—the so-called Slutsky Effect.

The impatience with “rational behavior” that Ramsay MacMullen expresses in his review essay, “The Translation of History,” has apparently led him to misinterpret portions of our book, Origins of Roman Christianity. Moreover, in addition to locating so-called “factual errors” in our work, he recommends the Kahneman-Tversky attempt to inject psychology (and neuroscience) into market behavior as a kind of “new economics” that challenges the “rational-agent model” and thus supposedly has value in religious history and the social sciences as well. He is incorrect as regards both methods and facts.

Medieval Italian political culture was founded on a general mistrust of the candidates for public office. Officials attempted to counteract what they perceived as a natural tendency toward corruption by instituting complex voting strategies designed to make chance the deciding factor in elections. This point has important ramifications for recent theories concerning the origins of social capital and civic society.

The threat of a Malthusian crisis in the late-eighteenth-century Habsburg monarchy is evident from the decline in physical stature of the male population. This evidence is consistent with diminishing returns to labor on account of the acceleration in population growth, with a concomitant decline in real wages. An alternative hypothesis—that heights decreased, not because nutrient consumption fell, but because work effort, and hence energy expenditures, increased, leaving less calories available for the biological growth process—is found to be unsubstantiated on the basis of the available evidence.