British contributions to the study of Russian geography in the nineteenth century

Urban geography

Managing the City. Edited by Brian Robson, 22 x 14 cm, 220 pp, Croom Helm, London, 1987, hbk, ISBN 0–7099–4232‐X, £30.00.

Regenerating the Inner City: Glasgow's Experience. Edited by David Donnison and Alan Middleton, 21.6 x 13.5 cm; xvii + 322 pp, Routledge and Keagan Paul, London, 1987, pbk, ISBN 0–7102–1117–1, £12.95.

Scotland

Rural Housing in Scotland. Edited by B. D. MacGregor, D. S. Robertson and M. Shucksmith, 22.7 x 15 cm, xii + 201 pp, Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen, 1987, pbk, ISBN 0–08–034529–8. £11.90.

A Pattern of Landownership in Scotland. By Robin Fraser Callander, 21 x 15 cm, 155 pp, Haughend Publications, Finzean, 1987, pbk, ISBN 0–907184–13–8, £5.25 (post free from the publisher at Finzean, Aberdeenshire AB3 3PP).

History of Orkney. By William P. L. Thomson, 24 X 16 cm, xvi + 321 pp, The Mercat Press, Edinburgh, 1987, hbk, ISBN 0–901824–82–8, £14.95.

The Roads of Fife. By Owen Silver, 23.5 x 15.5 cm, 197 pp, John Donald, Edinburgh, 1987, pbk, ISBN 0–85976–160–6, £12.50.

Conservation

Birds, Bogs and Forestry: the Peat lands of Caithness and Sutherland: Edited by D. A. Ratcliffe and P. H. Oswald, 29x21 cm, 121 pp, Nature Conservancy Council, Peterborough, 1986, pbk, ISBN 08–6139–3775, £8.50

Angling and Wildlife in Fresh Waters. Edited by P. S. Maitland and A. K. Turner, 29 x 21 cm, 81 pp, Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Abbots Ripton, 1987, pbk, ISBN 0–904282–99–6, £8.00.

Farm Woodlands in Central Scotland. By A. V. Halhead, 29.5 X 21 cm, 32 pp, Countryside Commission for Scotland, Perth, 1987, pbk, ISBN 0–902226–85–1, £3.00.

Alternative Manpower for the Scottish Countryside. By Centre for Leisure Research, Dunfermline College of Physical Education, 29.5 x 21 cm, 96 pp, Countryside Commission for Scotland, Perth, 1987, pbk, ISBN 0–902226–86–6, £4.50.

Geography in Education

Foundations of Geography for GCSE. By D. C Money, 29 x 21 cm, 262 pp, Evans Brothers, London, 1987, pbk, ISBN 0–237–51006–5, £6.95.

World Contrasts. By Brian Nixon, 19.5 x 26.5 cm, 219 pp, Bell &; Hyman, London, 1986, pbk, ISBN 07135–265‐X, £5.95.

People making geography: Book 1. By Chris Queree and Jeff Serf, ISBN 0–582–20289–2. Countries of the world: Book 3 The Americas. By Keith Gillard, ISBN 0–582–21219–7. (Copymasters. 25x24 cm, looseleaf, Longman, Harlow, 1987.)     

The context of migration: the example of Ireland in the nineteenth century

"A classic case where out-migration interacted with many other geographical phenomena is provided by rural Ireland in the nineteenth century. The apparent turning point was the Great Famine of the 1840s, but the areas with the greatest suffering from starvation did not necessarily show the greatest population decline, suggesting that other forces were active. Considerable economic and social changes were already taking place before the Famine: fertility was being reduced, later marriage was becoming established and considerable emigration was already taking place. Immediately after the Famine those areas which had been hardest hit often reverted to pre-Famine conditions and did not show strong population decline until the 1870s. The Famine was a most serious event, but the modernization of Irish rural life, which linked emigration with changes in family structure, agriculture and population numbers, was more important in bringing about geographical change."     

The cosmos of the Paris apartment: working-class family life in the nineteenth century

Drawing on Bachelard's notion of “cosmicity” this article investigates the living conditions of Parisian working-class families in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century social critics claimed that the lack of privacy in urban apartments made decent family life impossible. However, evidence from judicial dossiers concerning attentat à la pudeur (intimate assault against children) illuminates the lived experience of children and their families in Paris apartments. Rather than a sharp divide between public and private, children experienced their apartment homes as the core of a social and spatial world under the surveillance of parents, neighbors, and other children.     

Rethinking the history of female circumcision and clitoridectomy: American medicine and female sexuality in the late nineteenth century

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was one kind of female orgasm and it was clitoral; there was also only one kind of healthy sexual instinct for a woman and it was for penetrative sex with her husband. When a woman behaved outside of this normality-by masturbating or by not responding to her husband's affections-her sexual instinct was seen as disordered. If healthy women, then, were believed only to be sexual within the marital embrace, what better way to explain these errant behaviors than by blaming the clitoris, an organ seen as key to female sexual instinct? Doctors corrected a clitoris in an unhealthy state using one of four surgeries-removing smegma or adhesions between the clitoris and its hood, removing the hood (circumcision), or removing the clitoris (clitoridectomy)-in order to correct a woman's sexual instinct in an unhealthy state. Their approach to clitoral surgery, at least as revealed in published medical works, was a cautious one that respected the importance of clitoral stimulation for healthy sexuality while simultaneously recognizing its role as cause and symptom in cases of insanity that were tied to masturbation.     

The weight of nineteenth century Mexicans in the Western United States

When traditional methods for measuring economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, heights and BMIs are now well-accepted measurements that represent biological conditions during economic development. Weight, after controlling for height, is an additional measure for current net nutrition. Little is known about how weights varied among Mexicans living in the nineteenth century American West. Between 1870 and 1920, average Mexican weight was low and remained constant. Mexican farmers had the heaviest weights, and unskilled worker weights were low. Weight of Mexican-born individuals were higher than Mexicans born in the United States at low weights but lower at high weights. For combined characteristics, weight varied the most with age, an uncontrollable characteristic, indicating that nineteenth century Mexican current net nutrition varied the most with factors over which they had no control.     

The social magic of correspondence: conceptions of the mails in early nineteenth century Ireland

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the post in Ireland underwent fundamental changes in terms of its methods of operation, the scope of its delivery and the actual usage of the postal service. The volume of mail sent, the changing pattern of delivery routes and the time and expense of sending a letter all changed over the course of the century. The conceptions of the post were changing from that of being a purely functional instrument of limited appeal to that of being an acknowledged tool in the growth and development of industry and trade, in the operation of the structures of government and a vital link for individuals to people and places outside their immediate social circle. This paper draws upon various sources, both those of the state and of private individuals, and uses Bourdieu's theoretical perspectives, to build a framework for analysing the differing conceptions of the mails. These changing conceptions reveal how different groups positioned themselves in order to take advantage of and shape new forms of cultural capital in the early nineteenth century.