Is ‘white nationalism’, nationalism?

Are ‘white nationalists’ really nationalists? This label is one that right-wing, white activists themselves have chosen, and as such, compels rigorous investigation to avoid simply adopting the preferred nomenclature of these activists and their ambitions. The nation and nationalism are concepts with rich scholarly histories, and this paper seeks to examine the discussion, activities and statements of so-called white nationalists in light of this literature. We argue through a three-fold concept of the nation—based on territoriality, population and symbolic and/or cultural content—that the vision of the political community and ambitions of these activists falls short of the standard of a nation and that their aspirations do not conform to what the literature lays out as nationalism. We argue, therefore, that using the language of ‘white nationalism’ to describe these groups obfuscates and sanitises their motives and lends undue legitimacy to their standing in public discourse.     

A white‐hot liquid earth and geological time

EUROPE

Scotland, By IAN FINLAY. 7 1/4 X 4 1/2 in. Pp. vii+136. 10 illustrations. 4 maps. London : Oxford University Press, 1945. Price 3s. 6d.

Highland Holiday : Arran to Ben Cruachan. By W. A. POUCHER, F.R.P.S. Crown 4 to. Pp. 104. 76 photographs. 3 end‐paper maps. London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1945. Price 18s.

Bath. By R. A. L. SMITH. Demy 8VO. Pp. 118. 84 illustrations. Map. London : B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1944. Price 12s. 6d.

Radnor Old and Neul. By W. H. HOWSE. With a Foreword by The Lord Rennell of Rodd. Demy 8vo. Pp. 54. Hereford : Jakemans Ltd., 1944. Price 41.

History of the Isle of Man. By R. H. KINVIG, M.A. Crown 8 vo. Pp. xv+240. 48 figs., including sketch‐maps. . End‐paper maps. London : (For the Manx Society) Oxford University Press, 1944. Price 5s.

Roman Panorama: A Background for To‐day. By HUMFREY GROSE‐HODGE, M.A. Crown 8vo. Pp. xviii+260. Frontispiece. 14 plates, ao text‐figures. 3 sketch maps. Cambridge : University Press, 1944. Price 8s. 6d.

Eastern Europe. By JOSEF HANG. Foreword by Jan Masaryk. Demy 8vo. Pp. 272. Sketch map. London : Museum Press Ltd., 1943. Price 12s. 6d.

The U.S.S.R.: A Geographical Survey. ByJ. S. GREGORY, B.A., F.R.G.S., and D. W. SHAVE, M.SC. Crown 8vo. Pp. 636. 72 figs. London : George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd., 1944. Price 21s.

Russia : A Concise History—from the Foundation of the State to Hitler's Invasion. By Louis SEGAL. . Crown 8vo. Pp. 26a. Illustrated. London: W. H. Allen and Co. Ltd., 1944. Price 8s. 6d.

ASIA

Verdict on India. By BEVERLEY NICHOLS. 8 x 5 1/4 inches. Pp.256. London : Jonathan Cape, 1944. Price 12s. 6d.

China Looks Forward. By SUN Fo. Demy 8vo. Pp.260. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1944. Price 12s. 6d.

China Among the Powers. By DAVID NELSON ROWE. Demy 8VO. Pp. x+205. 3 maps. New York : Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945. Price $2.00.

AMERICA

Climate of Indiana. By STEPHEN SARGENT VISHER. Crown 4 to. Pp.511. 492 figs. 81 tables. Indiana University Publications, Science Series No. 13. Bloomington : Indiana University, 1944. Price $4.00.

Needle to the North: The Story of an Expedition to Ungava and the Belcher Islands. By ARTHUR C. TWOMEY in collaboration with NIGEL HERRICK. Demy 8vo. Pp. 335. Illustrated. London : Herbert Jenkins Ltd., 1944. Price 25s.

Canadian North. By MALCOLM MACDONALD, P.C., M.P. Crown 8vo. xi+268. 20 illustrations. i map.’ London : Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1945. Price 10s. 6d.

The Aleutian Islands: Their People and Natural History (with Keys for the Identification of the Birds and Plants). By HENRY B. COLLINS, Jr., AUSTIN H. CLARK, and EGBERT H. WALKER. Med. 8vo. Pp. iv+131. ai plates. 8 figs. Smithsonian Institution War Background Studies No. 21. Washington, D.C. : Smithsonian Institution, 1945.

OCEANIA

Fiji: Little India of the Pacific. By JOHN WESLEY COULTER. Med. 8vo. Pp. xiii+156. 5 maps. 1 graph. Chicago : University of Chicago Press ; London : Cambridge University Press. 2nd Impression, 1943. Price $2.00.

Geology of Lau, Fiji. By HARRY S. LADD and J. EDWARD HOFFMEISTER. Imp. 8vo. Pp. vi+_ 399. 62 plates. 41 figs. 118 bibliographical references. Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum (Bulletin 181), 1945.

POLAR REGIONS

Plowing the Arctic. By C. J. TRANTER. Crown 8vo. Pp.256. Illustrated. London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1944. Price 12s. 6d.

MEDICAL GEOGRAPHY

Civilization and Disease. By HENRY E. SIOERET. Med. 8vo. Pp. xi+255. 52 illustrations. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press; London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1944. Price $3.75 or 2.2.S. 6d.

Climate Makes the Man. By CLARENCE A. MILLS, M.D., Ph.D. Crown 8vo. Pp. 186. London : Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1945. Price ys. 6d.

EDUCATIONAL

Global Geography. By GEORGE T. RENNER and Associates. Demy 8vo. Pp. viii+728. Illustrated. New York : Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1944. Price $3.75.

Astronomical Air Navigation: A Comprehensive Handbook embodying the Latest Principles for Practical Navigators, Instructors and Students. By Squadron‐Leader RONALD HADINGHAM, R.A.F.O. With a Foreword by Air‐Commodore P. E. Maitland, M.V.O., A.F.C. Fcap 4to. Pp.

xii+151. 63 figs. 2 end‐paper (star recognition test) maps. London: The Technical Press Ltd., and ed., 1945. Price 12 S.

Le Canada par l'image. By BENOIT BROUILLETTE. Med. 8VO. Pp.114. 96 photographs. I map. Montreal : Libraire Beauchemin Limitee, 3rd ed., 1944. Price $1.00 (including postage).

GENERAL

The Naval Heritage. By DAVID MATHEW. Demy 8VO. Pp. xxiii+264. 8 illustrations. London‐: William Collins, Sons and Co. Ltd., 1944. Price 12s. 6d.

Macpherson's Voyages. Edited by JOHN SCOTT HUGHES. Demy 8VO. Pp. xvi+197. 23 plates. 3 figs. 11 maps. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1944. Price 15s.

A Life of Travels. By C. S. RAFINESQUE. Being a verbatim and literatim reprint of the original and only edition (Philadelphia, 1836). Foreword by E. D. Merrill. Critical Index by F. W. Pennell. 10 1/4 x 6 3/4 inches. Chronica Botanica, 1944, 8 (2): 291–360. 5 illustrations. Waltham, Mass. : The Chronica Botanica Co.; London : Wm. Dawson and Sons Ltd., 1944. Price $2.50.

Gypsy in the Sun. By ROSITA FORBES. Demy 8VO. Pp.382. 55 illustrations. 7 maps. London; Cassell and Co. Ltd., 1944. Price 17s. 6d.

Camera at War. By F.‐Lt. HENRY HENSSER. Demy 8vo. Pp. 92. 49 illustrations. London : Jarrolds Publishers (London) Ltd., 1944. Price 12s. 6d.

Out of Old Fields. By ANNE BLAKEMORE. Crown 8vo. Pp. 288. 30 photographs. London and Redhill: The Lutterworth Press, 1944. Price 10s.     

MakingGüeras: Selling white identities on late-night Mexican television

This article examines discourses of whiteness and color in Mexico through a discussion of White Secret, a widely available skin-lightening cosmetic product. In an analysis of a televised infomercial advertising the product, we examine contextualizations of whiteness in Mexico, as figured through the product's representations of light-skinned female bodies and advanced cosmetic technology. We consider the ways that White Secret can speak to broader conceptualizations of whiteness and identity and, furthermore, argue that such an engagement points to the need to interrogate the geographical and epistemological limits of current understandings of whiteness based in Anglo-American and Latin-American contexts.

Creando güeras: La venta de identidades blancas en la televisión Mexicana de media noche En este artículo, hacemos un análisis sobre los discursos de ‘blancura’ y de color con respecto a la población en México a través de una discusión sobre ‘White Secret’, un producto cosmético para aclarar la piel que es muy disponible en México. Por un análisis de un ‘info-nuncio’ que sale por la televisión anunciando el producto ‘White Secret’, exploramos los entretejemientos de la construcción de blancura en México y como este ‘info-nuncio’ manipula imágenes de los cuerpos de güeras (mujeres de piel clara) y tecnología cosmética avanzada. Reflexionamos acerca de las maneras que el producto ‘White Secret’ pueda hablar a concepciones más amplias sobre la construcción de identidad y blancura y además, discutimos que tal exploración indica la necesidad de interrogar los limites epistemológicos y geográficos de la comprensión actual de la construcción de blancura basados en los contextos Latino Americanos y Anglo Americanos.     

Born of fire: The pursuit of the ‘white gold’

For more than 300 years, scores of historians and researchers have vigorously argued about the question who might have been the genuine inventor of European porcelain of Meissen fame: Johann Friedrich Böttger or Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus. Although the story of the invention of porcelain has been told countless times, the exact circumstances of its discovery are still shrouded in mystery. For a very long time the palm has been awarded to Böttger, but today, the scale is increasingly tilting toward Tschirnhaus. In this contribution, ancient letters and laboratory notes, and modern phase diagrams and microstructural investigation are being used to paint a picture of royal desire, efficient research organization, arduous labor, ingenious reasoning, but also treason, camouflage, bald lies, and perfidy.     

Own-child estimates of U.S. white fertility, 1886–99

Abstract

The collapse of empires is exceedingly difficult to understand. The author examined the distribution of imperial lifetimes using a data set that spans more than three millennia and found that it conforms to a memoryless exponential distribution in which the rate of collapse of an empire is independent of its age. Comparing this distribution to similar lifetime distributions of other complex systems—specifically, biological species and corporate firms—the author explores the reasons behind their lifetime distributions and how this approach can yield insights into empires.     

Metis,missionaries and mediaries: One hundred years of Indian‐white relationships

Castile, George Pierre. The Indians of Puget Sound: The Notebooks of Myron Eells. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. xix + 470 pp. including illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. $40.00 cloth.

Peterson, Jacqueline, and Jennifer S. H. Brown, eds. The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Metis in North America. Manitoba Studies in Native History I. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. xxii + 266 pp. including illustrations and index. $22.50 cloth.

Iverson, Peter, ed. The Plains Indians of the Twentieth Century. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. ix + 277 pp. including illustrations, maps, and index. $21.95 cloth, $9.95 paper.

Driben, Paul. We Are Metis: The Ethnography of a Halfbreed Community in Northern Alberta. Immigrant Communities and Ethnic Minorities in the United States and Canada, 2. New York: AMS Press, 1985. xi + 176 pp. including bibliography and index. $32.50 cloth.     

‘The white woman's burden’ – the racialized,gendered politics of volunteer tourism

Talking about race in volunteer tourism is like breaking a taboo. By critically exploring the racialized and gendered politics of volunteer tourism from the perspective of the ‘white savior complex,’ we seek to open new avenues of discussion to break this silence. We employ a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to analyze volunteer tourism. The meanings, practices, and policies of volunteer tourism development are informed by the racialized, gendered logics of colonial thought. If older colonial logics were predominantly masculinist, it considers the largely (white) women participants in contemporary volunteer tourism as a window onto current transformations in historic racialized and gendered logics. Colonial logics and discourses have shifted over time, from the erstwhile ‘civilizing mission’ to the subsequent mandate for development to contemporary depoliticized social causes such as ‘saving the environment.’ Volunteer tourism is an exemplar of this third discourse, as global North volunteer tourists, through their depoliticized logic of ‘saving’ and ‘helping’ the less fortunate others in the global South, inherits such distinctions and reproduces them further. Given the predominance of young white women in contemporary volunteer tourism, beyond these continuities, we also point to compelling shifts in this logic from the masculinism of historic colonial processes. We also highlight the religious dimension, how Christian ideologies which were so central to formal colonial processes continue to play an important role in volunteer tourism today. Future studies on volunteer tourism need to examine its emergence, growth, and popularity (with young white women in particular) from the perspective of historic and ongoing power relations having to do with race and racialized gender, which will enable a critical conversation on volunteer tourism that adds significantly to our knowledge of contemporary neo-colonial processes and their gendered dynamics.     

Courting white southerners: Theodore Roosevelt’s quest for the heart of the South

Most studies of President Theodore Roosevelt address his “southern strategy” to revive the Republican Party’s fortunes in a region where it was effectively shut out by 1900. This essay revisits Roosevelt’s approach to the South between 1901 and 1912 and argues that wooing white southerners away from the Democratic Party, more than any other approach, represented Roosevelt’s overriding strategy for the revitalization of the southern GOP.     

‘Sharing the white man's burden’ Nazi colonial revisionism and Australia's New‐Guinea mandate

ABSTRACT

The September 2014 general elections in Fiji resulted in a decisive victory for Prime Minister Bainimarama and his FijiFirst Party. It indicated a desire for stability on the part of the electorate as well as the popularity of measures such as ‘free’ education and the removal of affirmative action programmes for Indigenous Fijians. The Social Democratic Liberal Party garnered a significant portion of the Indigenous vote through appeals to ethnic identity, but will need to broaden its base in future to have any chance of forming a government. The high voter enrolment and participation reflects a hope for more accountability as well as transparency, in contrast to the arbitrariness of the previous eight years. New oversight institutions and a more expansive bill of rights in the constitution offer some ground for cautious optimism in the face of cynicism about the gap between the government's rhetoric and its actions.     

Pigments from the Zuiddorp (Zuytdorp) ship sculpture: red,white and blue?

SUMMARY: The Dutch East India Company ship Zuiddorp (also known as Zuytdorp) met its demise in 1712 at the base of steep cliffs along the Western Australian coast. Material from the shipwreck includes an extraordinary example of a caryatid herm from the ship’s stern counter. A recent study of this sculpture and the pigments found on its surface demonstrates Zuiddorp’s archaic stern construction and adornment, which is more of a late 17th-century, than an early 18th-century, Dutch Indiaman. This paper discusses the results of this study and emphasizes how the smallest pieces of evidence can broaden our understanding of contemporaneous regional Dutch East India Company shipbuilding practices.     

'A bit fast money, a bit white shoe brigade'? Freedom of Information and Australian History

In the second of our series on Freedom of Information and theHistorian, Greg Terrill writes on the impact of Freedom of Information(FOI) upon the writing of Australian history. Historians inAustralia have barely engaged with FOI—they do not havea record of being good agitators for their professional interests,and they have never been active campaigners for FOI. This isunfortunate, but need not be repeated in Britain. To forearmthe British historian, this article outlines the relationshipbetween FOI and history in Australia, and points to some issuesfor consideration in Britain.     

Innovative application of portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) to identify Göktepe white marble artifacts

An efficient and non-destructive method to classify white marble artifacts by using a hand-held, portable XRF analyzer (pXRF) is here reported. The identification is based on the uniquely high strontium content of this marble and has been verified by testing 32 artifacts, most of which had already been provenanced, using conventional micro-destructive analyses. Besides strontium, other potential provenance indicators, such as manganese and iron, were analyzed and their concentration values obtained after empirical calibration of the instrument by using 17 quarry samples of known composition. The results show that Göktepe/non-Göktepe discrimination is almost always possible (30 artifacts) and that additional analyses are required only when the Sr value is at the lower edge of the Göktepe field (2 artifacts). The success of the method, however, resides in the particular composition relative to trace elements of Göktepe and is not easily extended to other marble varieties. Main reasons are related to insufficient accuracy at low concentration values, intrinsic trace variability of marble artifacts, surface effects that may produce not representative results. Interest in the method therefore is tightly linked to the exceptional importance of Göktepe as a sculptural marble, in which case, detailed data, obtained with a fast and totally non-destructive method, may provide relevant information concerning chronology, workshops, and places of production of the artifacts.     

‘None but Abigails appeared in white aprons’: The Apron as an Elite Garment in Eighteenth-Century England

In the early eighteenth century, the Duchess of Queensberry arrived at the Bath Assembly wearing a white apron, only to have it torn from her person by a Master of Ceremonies who declared that only a lady’s maid would appear dressed so. This article looks at the apron as a garment worn by elite women in eighteenth-century England in order to consider some of the questions raised by this encounter. Aprons were closely linked with the labouring classes in contemporary representation, and elite women wearing them were therefore accused of imitating the dress and behaviours of their inferiors. While emulation from below has received due attention from scholars, this apparent imitation from above remains underexplored. Elite women certainly did masquerade as country girls at times; however, the apron as an item of elite dress was not as transformative as contemporaries feared. Instead, it became subject to expectations and conventions governed by the rhythms of elite everyday life. Though the Duchess of Queensberry became infamous, elite women wearing aprons were most likely to provoke censure when they defied these conventions.     

‘Concrete bodies’: young Latina women transgressing the boundaries of race and class in white inner-city Stockholm

This article examines young Latina women's interactions in the urban landscape of Stockholm, with a particular focus on white, middle-class areas, and how social difference and racial positioning are produced in and through the processes of urban segregation. Although Stockholm consists of different multiethnic and middle-class white suburbs, a discourse of sharp division between ‘the suburb’ and the inner-city is prevalent in the daily press. Here ‘the suburb’ is either portrayed as dangerous or exotic. This article is based on qualitative research with 29 young Latina women living and attending schools in both the suburban and inner-city areas. This approach facilitates an understanding of how gendered, racialized and classed aspects of segregation are embodied in multiple directions and how mechanisms of spatial exclusion prevail in predominantly white areas – often seen as ‘neutral’ or non-racialized areas. In conclusion, in order to capture the realities of young people's lives within materialized discourses of race and space, I argue that it is crucial to include white settings in the analysis, and experiences of exclusion.     

«True lovers of religion»: Methodist persecution and white resistance to anti-slavery in Barbados, 1823–1825

This paper argues that white Barbadian responses to the renewed anti-slavery campaign from 1823 to 1825 were characterized by a combination of strident assertions of loyalty with a more hostile rhetoric of difference and distance. Drawing on work that emphasizes the place of the anti-slavery campaign in the formulation of English identity, this paper considers where such accounts leave white West Indians, and argues that opposition to anti-slavery was linked to the production of white identity in Barbados. It seeks to explore the complex nature of white resistance to anti-slavery, and thus the ambiguous nature of West Indian whiteness, by focusing on a series of texts produced in the aftermath of ameliorative instructions sent out by the British government and of a major slave revolt in Demerara. In particular, it considers a series of anonymous texts produced during a period of intense anti-Methodist persecution. Locating this anti-Methodism within the broader context of opposition to the anti-slavery campaign, these texts encapsulate the ambivalence of identity and difference, loyalty and hostility that characterizes West Indian whiteness in the early nineteenth century. In this way, the paper aims to contribute to a more nuanced historical geography of white identity.     

Wives and mothers like ourselves? Exploring white women's intervention in the politics of race, 1920s-1940s

This paper takes the issue of the removal of Aboriginal children, and the broader white anxiety over the 'half-caste problem' which underpinned the policy, to explore white women reformers' intervention in the politics of race in the years 1920-40. In these years middle-class women's citizenship was based on maternalism and the defence of motherhood. At the same time the national feminist lobby, the Australian Federation of Women Voters, joined the public debate about the 'Aboriginal problem'. In this context it is necessary to ask: What was the feminist view of Aboriginal women's status? Were they considered 'wives and mothers' like themselves, as Louisa Lawson suggested in the 1890s? What was their view of the 'half-caste problem' and the 'absorption proposal' formulated to solve it? By asking such questions I hope to modify the current feminist historiographical view of white women reformers as 'pro-Aboriginal' and 'radical' and their policies as challenging White Australia in these years.     

Northward,upward: stories of train travel,and the journey towards white South African nationhood, 1895–1950

Rhodes' ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ vision was more than a road, rail and telegraph route linking the two extremities of imperially-controlled Africa; it was also an imaginary axis that gathered around it a range of cultural ‘epiphenomena’ during the early twentieth century. This paper examines one of these, accounts of the Cape-to-Rand railway journey, which first appeared in the 1890s, and became a common trope in travel-writing about South Africa until after World War II. These accounts, which appeared in everything from personal memoirs to travel books and were written by visitors as well as South Africans, helped localize and naturalize the ‘spatial story’ of imperialism during the period when South Africa was emerging as a modern, autonomous nation. A recurring set of textual strategies in these accounts rehearsed a particular bodily subjectivity towards landscape, while at the same time incorporating the new nation's physiographic regions into a historically and geographically-legible whole. The Cape-to-Rand railway journey became a discursive trope in which culturally-constructed ideas about landscape and identity were protected and saved.     

‘It was entirely his fault’: constructing white masculinities and the Haga Man assaults in Umeå, Sweden 1998–2006

Several cases of single repeat offenders in urban space have raised public concern in Sweden during recent decades. Few studies have been conducted on the consequences of the ‘hostage situations’ that emerge when one individual offender causes fear and affects a large group of people in a specific place. The concern of this article is to examine consequences of the Haga Man phenomenon: the case of a serial rapist operating between 1998 and 2006 in Umeå, a medium-sized Swedish city. The article focuses on the construction of white masculinities among male respondents in Umeå during the time of the attacks. I examine how men positioned themselves in relation to the public image of the offender as a ‘normal Swede’ and how they related to women's increasing fear of violence in urban space. Three prominent constructions of masculinity emerged from the research data: the dangerous stranger, the suspect and the protector. These three constructions of masculinity were not clear-cut and did not ‘belong’ to specific men – several of the interviewees articulated various forms of masculinities but stressed them in different ways depending on, for instance, age and/or ethnicity/race. I conclude that men largely positioned themselves as protectors as a strategy to distance themselves from the perpetrator (the image of the ‘normal Swedish man’ performing the rapes) and to ensure that they would not be perceived as suspects. However, men largely perceived that women's increased fear of crime was ‘one man's fault’ and broader issues about gendered power relations in space were not raised.