Last charge of the knights? Iraq,Afghanistan and the special relationship

At the heart of the ‘special relationship’ ideology, there is supposed to be a grand bargain. In exchange for paying the ‘blood price’ as America's ally, Britain will be rewarded with exceptional influence over American foreign policy and its strategic behaviour. Soldiers and statesman continue to articulate this idea. Since 9/11, the notion of Britain playing ‘Greece’ to America's ‘Rome’ gained new life thanks to Anglophiles on both sides of the Atlantic. One potent version of this ideology was that the more seasoned British would teach Americans how to fight ‘small wars’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, thereby bolstering their role as tutor to the superpower. Britain does derive benefits from the Anglo‐American alliance and has made momentous contributions to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet British solidarity and sacrifices have not purchased special influence in Washington. This is partly due to Atlanticist ideology, which sets Britain unrealistic standards by which it is judged, and partly because the notion of ‘special influence’ is misleading as it loses sight of the complexities of American policy‐making. The overall result of expeditionary wars has been to strain British credibility in American eyes and to display its lack of consistent influence both over high policy and the design and execution of US military campaigns. While there may be good arguments in favour of the UK continuing its efforts in Afghanistan, the notion that the war fortifies Britain's vicarious world status is a dangerous illusion that leads to repeated overstretch and disappointment. Now that Britain is in the foothills of a strategic defence review, it is important that the British abandon this false consciousness.     

20世纪六七十年代美国华裔青年“新左派”团体探析

论文论述了20世纪六七十年代美国华裔青年"新左派"团体产生的社会政治背景,华裔青年新左派团体的兴衰与转型。论文认为,华裔青年新左派团体作为亚裔美国人运动一支不容忽视的力量,从校园斗争转向唐人街,开展"草根阶层"运动和"为人民服务"行动,力图发动普通华人向不平等、不公正的社会制度发起挑战,争取应得的平等权益。他们的努力确实取得了一定的成效,让唐人街失学的青少年、失业的劳工、贫困的租客等获得了一些教育、就业、医疗等方面的福利。但是,这些左翼团体主张以"革命斗争"推翻美国政府,脱离了社会实际,因而得不到大多数华人的认同,有的只维持几年就解散了,有的转向"温和",接受了美国主流政治的游戏规则。虽然受特定时代思潮的影响,有一定的"局限性",但其在美国华人民权运动史上的贡献不应被遗忘。正是他们无私无畏的斗争,并发挥教育和引领的作用,才使得普通华人民众的维权意识得以提升,给相对保守"沉默"的华人社区带来一股革新之气。     

Race, Class, and Political Activism: Black, Chicana/o, and Japanese-American Leftists in Southern California, 1968–1978

This paper explores the third-world left in Los Angeles, from 1968–1978. In it I examine the political ideology and foci of one organization for each of the major racial/ethnic groups of the time: African Americans (Black Panther Party), Chicanas/os (El Centro de Accion Social y Autonomo [CASA]), and Japanese Americans (East Wind). In addition to reclaiming this relatively unknown history, I seek to explain the differences in the various organizations by analyzing them within the context of differential racialization. I argue that the distinct nature of each organization is at least partly due to the particular racial position of each racial/ethnic group within the local racial order.     

Why Authorship Matters: The Grimké Essay on Marriage

In the 1850s, one of the Grimké sisters wrote an essay on marriage that included an unprecedented discussion of what later generations would label marital rape. But which sister was responsible for the work? Angelina's experience of pregnancy and motherhood offers parallels to the essay's horrific portrayal of marriage. Yet Sarah's late-life search for purpose and recurring themes within her correspondence suggest just as strongly that the essay is hers. The bulk of the evidence points toward Sarah's authorship. Yet this complicates the essay's placement within the history of antebellum reform ideology, for its writing coincides with a shift in Sarah's broader reform philosophy, including an abandonment of earlier abolitionist goals. If Angelina's, the essay might be cast as a continuation of earlier efforts as an abolitionist. But if Sarah's, the essay must be viewed as a redirection, even repudiation, of her earlier efforts, informed by a loss of confidence in men and the possibilities for temporal reform.     

Shirking and Ideology: Defense in the Senate

A repeated finding in political science is the influence of a representative's so-called ideology on roll call voting in the U.S. House and Senate. Many of these studies attempt explicitly to separate the impact on roll call voting of "personal" ideology from that of constituency ideological preferences. In these studies, personal ideology is viewed as a form of shirking in which members pursue their own policy preferences rather than those of their constituents. This paper shows, at least for the case of defense in the Senate in the 1980s, that the evidence is sufficient to reject the claim that shirking represents the consumption of personal ideological policy preferences. Instead, the apparent impact of shirking on defense voting was an instrumental, reelection-oriented response to President Reagan's ability to muster popular support for his defense build up, and thus cannot be regarded as shirking at all.     

Cancer, quackery and the vernacular meanings of hope in 1950s America

Hope was central to cancer control in twentieth-century America. Physicians placed great store in its power to persuade people to seek medical help as early as possible in the development of the disease, when it was most amenable to treatment; to maintain patients' loyalty through what could be a long, painful and uncertain course of therapy; and to encourage doubts about alternative healers. Some also argued that hope could have beneficial therapeutic and psychological effects for patients. However, we know very little about its meanings for the public. Focusing on a large collection of letters written to the Food and Drug Administration in the 1950s concerning an anti-quackery campaign, this article explores how men and women responded to the competing messages of hope promoted by orthodox cancer organizations and by alternative healers. It asks: What did hope mean to such men and women? How did they construct this meaning? How did they decide which treatments were hopeful and which were not? And, how did they use hope to imagine the social world of cancer? In short, this article explores the vernacular meanings, epistemologies, and imaginative uses of hope among Americans in the mid-twentieth century.     

Millenarism and agricultural settlement in the Holy Land in the nineteenth century

The pioneers of modern agricultural settlement in the Holy Land were Christians. Foremost among these were several Americans who came in the 1850s and 1860s to settle—ignoring warnings from local experts and from representatives of the United States government. The leaders of the settlers were inspired by millenarist ideas and by faith in the Return to Zion—rife among fundamental Protestant sects in the early nineteenth century. The personal accounts of these visionaries provide insights into what drove them to attempt to migrate to remote and backward Palestine and also throw light on the economic concepts and practical plans for implementing their schemes. Despite their failure, these attempts were very important in the history of agricultural settlement in nineteenth-century Palestine. The settlers maintained a wide range of international contacts through letters, pamphlets, sermons and publicity in the press in America, England, Germany and Palestine. In addition, many people who heard indirectly about these ventures, took an interest in their ideology and practice. Millenarist schemes influenced early preachers and founders of Jewish societies for agricultural settlement in Palestine. The Jewish forerunners of the Hovevi Zion and Zionist movements promoted remarkably similar ideas. Millenarist and Jewish visionaries alike spoke of the hour being propitious for the coming of the Messiah and favourable for settlement in the land of Israel. Both groups established schools to teach the lore of the land and to educate youth in agricultural pursuits. Many years after the disappearance of American settlers from Palestine, their story reverberated in Jewish polemic literature.     

„Fremde Körperwelten”︁. Russische Anthropologie und Medizin im kolonialen Diskurs des ausgehenden Zarenreiches

?Exotic Bodies”?: Russian Anthropology and Medicine in the Colonial Discours of Late Imperial Russia. In the nineteenth century Russian anthropologists adopted Western theories on the biological superiority of the white man in order to justify Russian colonization at the Asiatic periphery. After the Great Reforms the imperial process of acculturation was discussed in the context of modernization that also touched the institutionalization of colonial medicine. Whereas Russian armchair anthropologists were operating with racial idioms, physicians as practitioners on the colonial spot were not receptive to the ideology of “white man's burden”. From experience with the socioeconomic backwardness of Russia's Asiatic periphery physicians stood up for the vital rights of the indigenous population in the colonial Public Health. With deep respect for indigenous medicine Russian physicians were not advocates of Russian colonial expansion and racial discrimination that made them different to their Western colleagues. On the basis of Russian nineteenth century medical literature and Siberian archival sources this paper outlines the critical reflections of Russian physicians on Tsarist colonialism     

Two Solitudes Lost: Comparing and Contrasting Interwar American and Canadian Isolationisms

For many Americans during the 1930s, participation in real and potential foreign conflicts was a national dilemma as serious as the Great Depression. As the decade progressed and the possibility of war loomed larger, an ideological battle ensued between two loosely formed yet bitterly hostile camps: one favoring unilateral isolation and the other for a more active role in the international system. This period of intense public debate about national foreign policy was not an American phenomenon, though. It had a distinct northern counterpart in Canada. The core of this project is to explore isolationism as an ideology of North American themes within national varieties. Comparing an American and a Canadian example of this mindset brings a broader perspective to a subject so commonly associated with the United States alone, revealing both cross-border commonalities and national differentiations.     

Seventeenth century concepts of "apoplexy" as reflected in Bonet's "Sepulchretum"

The term "apoplexy," which has been in use since antiquity, referred to a catastrophic illness with an abrupt loss of consciousness and a frequently fatal outcome. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries scholastic approaches that relied on authorities were merging with an observational approach to medicine and Galen's speculation that apoplexy was due to an accumulation of phlegm or black bile in the cerebral ventricles began to be seriously challenged. The most extensive collection of case reports with autopsies published in the seventeenth century was Theophile Bonet's Sepulchretum sive Anatomia Practica. Section 2 of Book I of the Sepulchretum contains 70 case reports of patients that died with the diagnosis of apoplexy. The scholia in this section provide an idea for the modern reader of the notions physicians had of apoplexy in the seventeenth century. The Sepulchretum was an important book for physicians of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It played an important role in the development of modern medicine and it was an important foundation for Morgagni's De Sedibus et Causis Morborum. This essay reviews the pathological findings reported in victims of apoplexy and examines the views concerning the symptomatology, pathogenesis, etiology, and treatment of this condition that were prevalent at that time.     

mtDNA and osteological analyses of an unknown historical cemetery from upstate New York

Thirteen burials located on Jackson Street in Youngstown, NY, USA were recovered from a construction site and excavated in 1997. Based on the artifact assemblage, it was suggested that the cemetery was used sometime between the late 1700s and 1840. No historical records existed, and initial assessment of the skeletal remains was not able to determine any cultural affiliation. We carried out osteological and genetic investigations in order to gain insight into ancestral affiliation and kinship of the unknown individuals from the burials. Due to poor preservation of the remains, dental traits and limited osteological observations were available for only a few individuals. We performed DNA extraction and sequenced the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region following standard ancient DNA procedures. Our results suggest that ten individuals have evidence of biological affiliation with Native Americans, and in particular, four individuals have maternal Native American ancestry. One male individual was determined to be of European ancestry, from both the mtDNA and osteological results. This burial may reflect admixture as a result of frequent contact between Native Americans and Europeans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and attempts by missionaries to convert Native Americans to Christianity. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of a multifaceted approach through archaeological, osteological, and genetic analysis that provides valuable perspectives in understanding the individuals buried at the Jackson Street Burials.     

Index to volume 40

In this article, the author illustrates a case of the exclusion that most Hispanists do when promoting a sort of predestined universality of Don Quixote. Just what do Don Quixote and "el Día del idioma" mean and entail for the indigenous people, that is, those who have been resisting national programs of forced assimilation or extermination since the arrival of the Spanish? The author offers an interpretation of Don Quixote that addresses the text's presentation of the indigenous Americans and the related themes of frontier, conquest, and imperial expansion—a level of interpretation used by both current and past readers that is consistent with the imperial ideology of Hapsburg Spain.     

Wardens of Civilisation: The Political Ecology of Australian Far-Right Civilisationism

The notion of a superior “civilisation” has been a hallmark of the politics of Western institutions and fringe white supremacists alike. Known ideologically as “civilisationism”, it has occupied a prominent position in the ideology of the Australian far-right. Paying tribute to their settler-colonial origins, the far-right has consistently promoted “white civilisation”, even inspiring terrorist attacks. Despite this propensity for violence, far-right civilisationism remains largely unexplored. Through investigating a dataset of Australian far-right content, this paper reveals civilisationism as a significant part of their ideology, an ideology which relies on the idealisation of European technologies and environments to render Indigenous land and people uncivilised. A critical narrative analysis of the data illustrates the ways that these ecological factors are drawn into narrative to articulate Australian far-right civilisationism, an ideology inseparable from the political ecology of European history and colonialism, that today represents a particularly virulent version of its legacy.     

Ideology,Semiotics, and Clifford Geertz: Some Russian Reflections

This article, written by a Russian cultural historian, analyzes the concept of “ideology” in the work of Clifford Geertz and his role in understanding the figurative nature of ideology as a cultural system. The author compares Geertz's semiotic approach to culture with the semiotics of culture developed by Russian theorists, particularly Yuri Lotman, showing the convergence and divergence of the two different national traditions. This understanding of the nature and functions of ideology opens new possibilities for discussing the tortured relations of ideology and literature, showing the way fiction can affect the formation of ideological systems and influence practical politics. The analysis is illustrated by examples from Russian political life of the 1990s,when revolutionary changes demanded new sets of ideological metaphors that in their turn shaped the direction of events.     

Ideological uncertainty and the path of convergence: the impact of the 1970s in France and the UK

This article looks at the fracturing of certainties that began in the 1970s, at the end of the period described as ‘les trente glorieuses’ in France, but a period that was also, to a more modest extent, a period of economic expansionism and intellectual optimism in the UK. At the level of political discourse and policy options, the economic crisis of the late 1970s prepared the ground for a marked divergence between France and the UK: on the one hand, the ‘socialisme aux couleurs de la France’ that was to characterise the ambition of the socialist years under François Mitterrand, and on the other, a return to the corner-shop capitalism of thrift and endeavour that was at the heart of Margaret Thatcher’s remedy for the UK’s ills. Looked at, however, from the perspective offered by theories of convergence, underlying that manifest divergence was a deeper gravitational pull to the same path as both countries endured the loss of old ideological certainties and grappled, as we shall argue, with a new ideology that is no less powerful and ubiquitous for refusing to declare itself as such.     

"Yea, I have a goodly heritage": health versus heredity in the Fitter Family contests, 1920-1928

By the 1920s, the future of the middle-class family had become a topic of great concern for mainstream Americans. This widespread concern led to a new acceptance of the discussion of sexual and marital issues in print and in public. Within this public discussion, eugenicists, physicians, clerics, sociologists, and various others offered solutions to the questions and concerns of their rapidly changing society. The Fitter Family contests, sponsored by eugenicists and held at state fairs in the 1920s, reflected these public and professional anxieties. Though infused with eugenic ideas about race betterment through better breeding, the contests were equally concerned with improving the health of individuals and strengthening American families.