March 18, 1948 dawned cold and rainy in Berlin. Although the city government had proclaimed the hundredth anniversary of the 1848 revolution an official holiday, Berliners awoke to a day that seemed ill-made for personal or political celebrations. One century earlier, some nine hundred persons had died on Berlin's barricades, dramatically challenging the Prussian ancien regime but falling short of their aspirations for a free and unified Germany. After one hundred years that had seen only a brief interlude of tumultuous democracy between the world wars, competing forces in postwar Berlin both claimed the democratic legacy of those barricade battles in a new contest for the city. But that legacy proved difficult to control. For the Soviet-supported Socialist Unity Party (SED), Berlin represented at once the core of the party's expanding power and the greatest threat to its realization. Like the 1848 revolutionaries, the SED leadership in Berlin found the lines between victory and defeat decidedly blurred.

A large number of newly published and unpublished hectare plots in Amazonia and the Guiana Shield area allow an analysis of family composition and testing of hypotheses concerning alpha-diversity in the south American rain forest. Using data from 94 plots the family-level floristic patterns in wet tropical South America are described. To test diversity patterns, 268 plots are used in this large area. Contrary to a widely held belief, western Amazonian plots are not necessarily the most diverse. Several central Amazonian plots have equal or even higher tree diversity. Annual rainfall is not a good estimator for tree diversity in the Amazonia area and Guiana shield. Plots in the Guiana Shield area (and eastern Amazonia) usually have lower diversity than those in central or western Amazonia. It is argued that this is not because of low rainfall or low nutrient status of the soil but because of the small area of the relatively isolated rain forest area in eastern Amazonia and the Guiana Shield. The low diversity on nutrient-poor white sand soils in the Amazon basin is not necessarily due to their low nutrient status but is, at least partly, caused by their small extent and fragmented nature.