Metropolitan Scurvy in the Shadow of the Cook Voyages

Recent scholarship on scurvy in 18th-century Britain has focused on the disease in the context of voyages of exploration, especially those bound for the Pacific Ocean. Using materials from quack physicians, print culture and popular song, this essay contends that the problem of scurvy was just as acute in metropolitan London and elsewhere in Britain. By studying representations of the disease and its markets at home in Britain, it aims to shed new light on the treatment and perception of the disease at sea, particularly during the voyages of James Cook (1768?79).     

Change and the Corporeal in Seventeenth‐ and Eighteenth‐Century Gender History: Or,Can Cultural History Be Rigorous?

This essay is a methodological evaluation of the procedures and presuppositions informing the social and cultural history of gender, as exemplified in recent scholarship about the transformations of sex and gender in Britain from the early modern period through the long eighteenth century. It suggests answers to two questions: how can we write the cultural history of gender while maintaining both rigour in the enterprise and an awareness of its limits? And where might we go when these limits suddenly appear to undermine the very foundational presuppositions on which the whole cultural‐historical project is built?     

The Danzón,North American Racial Discourses,and Reflections on Early Jazz

This essay proposes a way of understanding the formation of jazz as part of a broader transnational exchange of culture. It argues that the processes by which jazz came into being closely resemble others taking place in Cuba and elsewhere, and thus calls for analysis that positions jazz as part of a hemispheric exchange of cultural influences that extend beyond the United States. Second, it reviews and critiques existing scholarship on New Orleans jazz from a transnationalist perspective. It suggests that such literature presents turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans culture as insular, with little or no recognition of the international movement of artists and musical forms. Finally, it suggests that the cultural projects associated with jazz in the United States have necessitated a strong emphasis on the contributions of black US artists to the exclusion of Hispanics.     

Cities,Racialized Poverty,and Infrastructures of Possibility

This essay argues that the study of urban poverty is too often characterised by the disappearance of specific people and bodily politics from our analytic frames, rendering modes of life and politics illegible to scholars. We call for attention to the embodied politics of knowledge production, as neighbourhoods surrounding universities are exploited first as laboratories for poverty scholarship—exemplified in the relationship between the Chicago School’s theory of human ecology and the racialised real estate markets—and then as devalued spaces for creative industries. Following work at the intersection of urban studies and American studies, we call for a relational reading of the archives of dominant poverty scholarship, and for scholarship attentive to the body—as a knowledge project only ever partially recorded in fieldnotes or the archives—as a key site for politics.     

Revisiting the Iranian Crisis of 1946: How Much More Do We Know?

The Iranian crisis of 1946 occupies a significant place in the early history of the Cold War. While this fact has been increasingly acknowledged by scholars, there remain aspects of the crisis, in particular the motivations of the major actors involved, which demand further exploration. This article reconsiders the roles of early Cold War actors, including the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union and Iran itself in the Azerbaijan crisis and offers a synthesis of different perspectives. In revisiting the crisis it draws upon Cold War and post-Cold War literature including recently available archival material. It aims to combine contributions from International Relations, the Cold War and Iranian history to offer a balanced and integrated narrative of events.     

Putting the Roman periphery on the map: the geography of Romanness,orthodoxy, and legitimacy in Victricius of Rouen's De Laude sanctorum

Victricius of Rouen's De laude sanctorum (c.396) contains an original discussion of the cult of relics, introduced by a brief excursus on his recent trip to Britain. In this article, I argue that the author used both sections to define two symbolic territories, Britain and the centre of the empire, which invited his audience to think geographically about the concepts of Romanness, orthodoxy, and legitimacy. Exploiting a long‐standing tradition of stereotypes and geographical imaginations, Victricius used his argument of the unity of relics to justify his position in the Felician controversy, a contemporary episcopal and political conflict.     

The “tribal spirit” in modern Britain: evolution,nationality, and race in the anthropology of Sir Arthur Keith

ABSTRACT

This article re-examines the anthropological scholarship of Sir Arthur Keith (1866–1955), who served as the president of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1914–1917), the Royal Anatomical Society (1918), and the British Association of the Advancement of Science (1927), who wrote prolifically on anatomy, evolution, and the idea of race. While most commonly associated with the Piltdown man hoax, Keith's contributions to the discipline were far greater and more complex. This essay specifically considers how Keith sought to problematize the concept of the nation, considering the nation-state as an evolutionary unit. The first half of this essay examines Keith's theories on the mechanism of evolution (hormonal instincts) and how this informed his ideas of races and nations as evolutionary units. The second half of the essay considers how Keith deployed his ideas about evolutionary instincts, with the goal of advising Britons about how an evolutionary perspective would help understand, if not resolve, modern political challenges, both international and domestic, that faced the British Empire around the time of the First World War.     

Shifting Tradition: Writing Research in Canada

This essay locates Canadian writing research historically and provides a brief taxonomy of the scholarship produced in Canada and by Canadian rhetoric and composition scholars. It examines Canadian writing research from 1953 to the present day, and notes the importance of the scholarship of definition to mapping the Canadian landscape of the discipline of rhetoric and composition. It provides a contemporary snapshot of the work of Canadian writing scholars as intentionally separate from that of the United States, and asserts that Canadian scholarship is poised for revitalization, given the current new trend of focused attention on international writing research.     

Broadcasting after devolution: policy and critique in the Welsh media landscape 2008–2015

This essay examines the provision of media (especially broadcasting) in Wales and considers recommendations made in key reviews and reports which have sought to bring about change in how the media serve people in a devolved Wales. It provides a critical insight into how these debates have developed since 2008 and reveals how some of the monumental economic, policy, production and technological changes that have affected broadcast and digital media internationally have taken shape in Wales specifically. The chief aim is to identify how a distinctly Welsh media policy agenda is developing in the context of devolution. This research is timely given the growing political pressure from several parts of the UK both for greater accountability of broadcasting to the nations of the UK and also for substantive devolution of powers over broadcasting to their governments. The essay argues that media scholars need to pay further attention to how policy evolves in the context of multi-governmental levels such as those existing in the devolved nations of the United Kingdom.     

Regional survey and the economic geographies of Britain 1930–1939

This paper re-considers the history of economic geography in the interwar period in Britain. The activities of the discipline are considered in the context of the commercial geographies of this time, and the intensive round of industrial and social surveys undertaken at a regional level in Britain in the period. Taken together, these economic geographies constructed a range of representational and material spaces and helped construct industrial regions characterized by particular types of places, peoples and performances. These surveys, and the production of the economic geographies that they facilitated, became a key intellectual arena where conflicting ideas about the political and economic management of the industrial region and the national economic were acted out. Following the intention of recent work into the histories of geographical knowledge, the essay will seek out the lateral associations of economic geography, paying particular attention to politically situated nature of the economic geographies produced by academics, regional organizations and the Labour Party.     

Decentring the state: perspectives from the encounter between India and Australia

This introduction makes a case for assembling an archive of approaches taken individuals and groups independently of the state to rethink the nature of the Indo-Australian relationship. It situates the project in the scholarship of different knowledge formations – most of all international relations – about the future of the nation-state and the modern state system. Our contributors write from a postcolonial standpoint in support of minority knowledges, subordinated peoples and reform of the global system. It is argued that postcolonialism has a natural affinity with the everyday, although in practice the relationship is not so cut and dried. This essay concludes by suggesting some of the ways in which each essay contributes to the collective project.     

Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis

This article examines the historically and culturally specific valence of ‘gender’ as currently deployed in the field of gender and women's history. It draws broadly on the scholarship on gender since the 1980s, while focusing particularly on the case of the British North American colonies and the early United States republic. The essay argues against the common practice of assuming that gender, understood as an oppositional binary, functions virtually universally as a primary process for representing differential power. It concludes by calling for a way of thinking about gender that can recognise important historical and cultural alternatives.     

墨西哥革命与第一次世界大战期间的英美墨关系

1917年墨西哥政府颁布了一部限制外国人在墨拥有财产的新宪法。此后不久德国外交部长阿瑟·齐默曼发电报给墨西哥领导人卡兰萨,提议双方建立同盟关系。为了更有效地控制全国,不久卡兰萨宣布没收英国在墨西哥的最大投资——铁路。这一系列举动严重激化了墨西哥与美国和英国的矛盾。1917-1918年,美英之间就如何处理与卡兰萨政府的关系问题产生了巨大分歧,但由于需要美国的帮助,英国政府最终作出了妥协。第一次世界大战的结束使英国失去了在墨西哥的影响力,从而进一步加强了美国对拉美地区的控制。     

The Fate of Academic Freedom in the Age of High Liberalism: The Case of Charles Beard

In the early years of the Cold War, the American historical community fought vigorously over the reputation of Charles Beard. Midwestern progressives defended his legacy, while postwar liberals denounced Beard as an isolationist whose scholarship had not prepared the United States to fight either German fascism or Soviet communism. This essay explores the attack on Beard, its implications for academic freedom, and its role in silencing critics of the Cold War.     

苏格兰与英格兰合并对民族主义的启示

1707年,苏格兰自愿选择与英格兰合并,苏格兰与英格兰开始共同营建一个新的国家。合并为苏格兰带来了单靠自身力量无法企及的高度繁荣。从苏格兰自愿选择与英格兰合并,至合并为苏格兰带来高度繁荣,苏格兰政治家的选择为民族主义的终极追求问题开辟了一种新的思路。     

Poland in the ‘Paris system’: self‐determination,stereotypes, and decisions in 1919

One of the most important questions at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference was what to do about the newly re‐created state of Poland. The Paris peacemakers realised the importance of the settlement, thanks in part to dire warnings about Poland's future, and the leaders spent much time discussing the territorial settlement. Yet discussions of this important question regularly strayed from debates about policy to incorporate understandings of Polish national character. In particular, the leaders of the so‐called Big Three, Britain, France, and the United States, connected expert opinion and the broader political landscape to stereotyped understandings of national character, among other factors. With reference to scholarship on stereotyping, this article analyses how developing attitudes on Polish national character became integrated into the complex settlement of Poland's borders. The peacemakers' decisions, which were a compromise between different points of view, reflected interconnected understandings of the Polish settlement.     

Safavid Iran and the “Turkish Question” or How to Avoid a War on Multiple Fronts

This essay parts with the compartmentalized way in which scholarship tends to view Iran’s military predicament in the Safavid era by examining the perennial threat the Ottomans posed to the country largely in isolation from the recurring conflict between the Safavids and their other main adversaries, the Mughals and Uzbeks, respectively. The security dilemma facing Safavid Iran, it is argued here, was acute as well as multifaceted, and should be approached as such. All three of its direct neighbors were Sunni and two, the Ottomans and the Mughals, were capable of mobilizing far greater military resources than Iran. The main strategic concern of the Safavids was to prevent these neighbors from joining forces and engaging them in a two-front war. This study examines balancing the strategies employed by the three most consequential Safavid shahs, Esma‘il I (1501?24), Tahmasb (1524?76), and ‘Abbas I (1587?1629), to avoid becoming the target of a simultaneous or combined assault by their neighbors. This analysis provides the backdrop to the rational decision the Safavids made in 1639—to end the threat of a two-front war by concluding a lasting peace accord with their most formidable enemies, the Ottomans.     

The background to the proposition that plankton be used as food in the United Kingdom during the Second World War

Food shortages, particularly of proteins, in Britain during the Second World War led to the suggestion re-surfacing that marine plankton might be harvested on an industrial scale first as human food, then turning to its potential use as a supplement to stock and poultry feed. The notion emanated in the United Kingdom from Sir John Graham Kerr, at Glasgow University. He encouraged Alister Hardy, at Hull, to develop the idea and the natural testing ground was the Clyde Sea Area (given the extensive history of plankton research at Millport). Unpublished documents from the archives of the Scottish Association for Marine Science shed new light on the interactions behind the scenes of this project between Kerr, Hardy and the Millport Marine Station's then director, Richard Elmhirst. Elmhirst, who was sceptical about the feasibility of the plan from the outset, went along with it; not least as a way of attracting welcome research funding during lean times but also, doubtless, regarding it as his patriotic duty in case the proposal proved worthwhile.     

Artifacts of the neurosciences: A resource guide to museums and collections

ABSTRACT

Medical museums and collections care for important artifacts relating to the history of the neurosciences across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. This essay highlights the collections and galleries of greatest interest and worth a visit. It also provides a list of online directories of medical museums and bibliography of related publications.     

What He Thought…What He Did: An Archaeological Study of the Persian Gulf Coasts Colonial Sites of Sheikh Khazal Khan in the Early Twentieth Century

Iranian colonial sites on Persian Gulf coasts include eighteenth-century Portuguese fortresses and graveyards on the islands of Hormoz and Qeshm and twentieth-century British colonial missions in southern Iran and Kuwait. Sheikh Khazal Khan, an Iranian Arab, who lived in the early twentieth century, ruled Khuzestan and counseled the governors of Kuwait. He also apparently worked as Great Britain’s political dependent in the region at least from 1890s. He constructed five palaces on the shores of southwestern Iran and two in Kuwait. The author excavated these sites in 2008. Khazal’s identity is a problematic subject in contemporary Iranian history. He is judged variously as a spy (for most Iranians) and as a hero (for Pan-Arabs). Introducing Khazal Khan’s Persian Gulf coastal architectural data, this essay explains the context in which these colonial architectural units were constructed. The patterns of this colonial process are used to interpret Khazal’s identity, based on the material culture of the era.