K-complexの発見者として知られるAlfred Lee Loomisは, 物理学や生物学の研究と並行して1935年から睡眠脳波の研究を始め, 5年間で10本の論文を出した。しかしその後は脳波に関する研究は行わなかった。Loomisの生涯と, 彼が行った数々の最先端の研究, 近年のK-complexに関する知見について紹介する。その1では, Loomisの経歴と人物像, Loomisが行った脳波以外の研究, 脳波の研究を中止した理由について述べる。その2では, Loomisが脳波の研究を始めたきっかけと, Loomisが製作した脳波計, 睡眠実験室と, 睡眠段階の分類に関する研究を紹介する。その3と4では, Loomisが発見し, 近年になってNREM睡眠中のslow oscillationとの関係で再び脚光を浴びているK-complexについて解説する。

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The Vietnam War had hardly ended when intensive efforts to “correct” the war narratives were commenced within the United States. The challenge to the once seemingly established fact that the United States had suffered a humiliating defeat came to its peak in the middle of the 1980s. Revisionists such as the former and incumbent Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan aimed to cure the Americans of the Vietnam syndrome, and to help them regain their self-confidence and a sense of national integrity.
The withdrawal of American troops, the revisionists insisted, should never be portrayed as a surrender, instead merely as an American unilateral decision to leave Vietnam. The defeated, if any, were the South Vietnamese, not the Americans. The United States was actually a winner there, for it helped the anti-Communist regime in South Vietnam survive for two decades so that other nations in Southeast Asia could develop their economic and political strength. Moreover, American soldiers were always victorious in any encounter with the Communist guerrilla or regular forces.
The revisionists believed that the United States could have won at an earlier stage if only it had used its military power in an overwhelming way. The United States was on the verge of triumph by the end of 1972, almost forcing the leaders in Hanoi to accept American terms in peace talks through its massive bombing attacks in central North Vietnam. Then, suddenly, the revisionists argue, the U. S. Congress, intimidated by an unjustified fear of United States inability to win the war, threw in the towel.
Political leaders in Washington came under the attack of the revisionists. The United States lost this war for several reasons, namely because the government was unable to offer the American people a definite war objective, placed exceedingly unnecessary restrictions upon the military, failed to demonstrate sufficient will to win, and was unsuccessful in fully mobilizing the public behind the war effort.
American mass media, including television, was another target. The correspondents were criticized for being too young and too inexperienced to grasp the reality of battleground and sometimes too naive to shelter themselves from the influence of the Communists' propaganda. Hence, their reporting across the Pacific contributed to serious increases in anti-war sentiment back home, which in turn caused extreme damage to the American war strategy.
The majority of the American people were, however, far from being persuaded by such revisionist arguments. They knew that they had never fulfilled their objective of building a strong and viable anti-Communist regime in Vietnam, that they had been responsible for the South Vietnamese deficiencies, that winning in a shooting war had been irrelevant to the political future of the country, that the results of truce negotiations could hardly have been American triumph, and that blaming politicians and reporters merely was a means to protect the military from further criticism. That is why, to the regret of the revisionists, the memory of defeat in Vietnam still haunts the American people.

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In early 1977, U. S. President Jimmy Carter announced that U. S. ground combat forces would be carefully withdrawn from South Korea within a few years. His decision, however, was soon faced with strong resistance from the military and Congress. Officially because of a new intelligence estimate on North Korea's military capability, in June 1979, President Carter postponed immplementing his withdrawal plan till after the next presidential election in which he was severely defeated by Ronald Reagan.
This failed attempt has been often regarded as a typical example of Carter's amateurish diplomacy. History tells us, however, that U. S. defense commitment towards South Korea has frequently fluctuated between the two extremes of intervention and withdrawal. This fluctuation seems to result from a dilemma in U. S. defense commitment towards South Korea: the United States has to provide enough credibility to maintain a favorable military balance in Northeast Asia without being too deeply involved in the defense of South Korea, which is not necessarily of vital interest for the United States.
It is far from an easy task for Washington to escape from this dilemma. First of all, it is extremely hard to evaluate the strategic value of the Korean Peninsula in the context of U. S. global, regional and local strategies. Secondly, given the relatively decreasing U. S. economic capability and the diversified public opinion on foreign policy, a domestic consensus on a desirable degree of U. S. defense commitment towards South Korea cannot be easily obtained. Thirdly, regardless of changes in international and domestic situations, due to their vested interest in maintaining the U. S. presence in South Korea, the Army and the State Department bureaucracies tend to be opposed to reducing the defense commitment.
After briefly reviewing the history of U. S. defense commitment towards South Korea, this paper intends to analyze how the Carter Administration tried to overcome the dilemma in U. S. defense commitment toward South Korea but was unsuccessful through the examination of the policy process of its withdrawal plan with available written materials and interviews with key participants.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine oil field management in the oil regions of Pennsylvania in the latter nineteenth century, especially taking the economic interests of landownership into consideration. Much research has been done on the history of the American petroleum industry, mainly on Standard Oil Company. The research has, however, not sufficiently analyzed the crude-producing sector, which had for a long time been independent of Standard Oil's control. In this paper, we focus on the management of the United States Petroleum Company, which first developed the Pithole oil field, the site famous for the “oil rush.” What sources we depend on are the original materials preserved in the Drake Well Museum.
U.S. Petroleum was not an oil-producing company but was essentially in real estate. Although the company developed the Pithole oil field and completed the United States Well as a discovery well, all these efforts were made to cause the oil rush; creating high land prices (through the oil rush) was the ultimate purpose of the Company. In fact, after the completion of U.S. Well, the company no longer continued in petroleum development but rather divided Thomas Holmden farm (the center of petroleum development) into small lots to sub-lease to oilmen at exorbitant prices. The severe terms of lease and the “rule of capture” stimulated many oilmen to overdrill, and, as the result, crude production increased rapidly. This situation was favorable to both U.S. Petroleum, as the receiver of royalties, and the downstream sector, which demanded a large supply of cheap crude oil.
The economic interests of landownership in oil fields continued to stimulate the crude-producing business and soon came to guarantee (excessive) crude supply to the downstream sector, Standard Oil. The combination of the interest in monopolistic capital and that of landownership in the development of the American petroleum industry lasted until the New Deal era.

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