The need for subnational demographic, social, economic, and fiscal data in designing effective intergovernmental fiscal systems is becoming increasingly evident. In Central and Eastern European countries, the legacy of the region's communist past are information systems rooted in the centralized economy. Such an approach becomes less acceptable as economic issues become more complex and subnational governments in these transition economies become responsible for the delivery of local services. As political imperatives support increasingly democratic forms of governance in which people's needs...

For nineteenth-century New Englanders, "vampires" lurked behind tuberculosis. To try to rid their houses and communities from the scourge of the wasting disease, families sometimes relied on folk practices, including exhuming and consuming the bodies of the deceased. Author and folklorist Michael E. Bell spent twenty years pursuing stories of the vampire in New England. While writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, and Amy Lowell drew on portions of these stories in their writings, Bell brings the actual practices to light for the first time. He shows that the belief in vampires...