The Sinclairs of Pigeon Bay and the Romantic 'Prehistory' of the Robinsons of Ni'ihau

Francis and Elizabeth Sinclair and their six children migrated from Scotland to New Zealand in 1840. Francis died there in 1846 and in 1863 Elizabeth resettled her, by then expanded, family in Hawai'i. There they bought the island of Ni'ihau and prospered as ranchers and planters, especially after the 1880s under the family name of Robinson. The early history of the family, up to the 1860s, has been often told, but never completely and often inaccurately, and is contained in two distinct historiographic traditions. This essay attempts to set the record straight by providing an extensive body of detailed, accurate information about the Sinclairs, and to discuss these two traditions. The older and more reliable New Zealand one presents the Sinclairs as hard-working pioneer settlers. The Hawai'ian tradition, in contrast, deriving from an oral record passed on by Francis and Elizabeth's daughter Anne, was dominated by elements of 'family romance'. It presented Francis as an heroic naval captain in the Napoleonic campaigns, making him a mythical ancestor befitting a family that had risen in the world. A more matter-of-fact treatment, though, has prevailed since 1988.     

Wives,Children … Husbands: Supporting Roles

In 1965, Hugo L. Black asked his wife, Elizabeth, to host a dinner party. The purpose: to help him persuade Carolyn Agger, wife of Washington attorney Abe Fortas, to allow her husband to accept President Lyndon B. Johnson's offer of a seat on the Supreme Court. A tax lawyer at the same firm as Fortas, Agger was displeased that the move would mean a big cut in his salary; she thought he should spend a few more years in his lucrative private practice before becoming a judge. After all, he was only fifty‐five. Elizabeth Black described the tense occasion in a diary entry:     

Du passe imaginaire au passe revolutionnaire: Modeles de resistance et resistance des modeles

This article examines the use of dialogues in two texts which functioned superficially as scientific handbooks for women: Aphra Behn's translation of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's Entretien sur la pluralité des Mondes and Elizabeth Carter's Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy Explained for the Use of Ladies (1739) translated from Francesco Algarotti's Il Newtoniasnismo Per le Dame (1737). Original texts exploit the female figure for the scientific cause, but at first glance, both of the original texts appeared generous to the ‘fair sex’. However, neither text is as sympathetic as it initially appears. The confused gender messages emitted by these texts are further complicated by the fact that they were translated by women.     

Strange associations: Elizabeth Bowen and the language of exclusion

Since The Last September was first published in 1929, the novel's style has been a major source of controversy amongst Elizabeth Bowen's critics, many of whom align the work with reactionary feeling among the Anglo-Irish community in early 1920s Ireland. This longstanding view ignores, I think, a complex but critically overlooked aspect not only of The Last September but also of Bowen's many opinions about the novel form: the author's fascination with the language of exclusion. In this essay I argue that Bowen's use of literary devices in The Last September that rely on exclusion – including ellipses, euphemism, rumour, overheard conversation, narrative digression, and lying – dramatise the ways in which war disorients figurative language and, in so doing, subverts and transforms the apparently stable metaphors through which the Anglo-Irish sought to reconcile events occurring in September 1920, that fitful last September of the Republic's colonial ties to England, with their historical role as settler-colonialists in Ireland. Further, Bowen's experimental style disorients the reader, thereby undermining any confidence in the legitimacy of Ascendancy protocol, or the morality of British colonialism, or the militant expression of Irish nationalism, and leads instead to an emergent, though ultimately unfulfilled, cosmopolitan vision of late modernist Ireland.     

Excursion to Southchurch and Prittlewell

Abstract

In the late 15th century, a monumental brass was laid in the church at Etchingham (East Sussex) to the memory of two never-married women, Elizabeth Etchingham, who died in 1452, and Agnes Oxenbridge, who died in 1480. This article investigates the possible social meanings of their brass, with a particular eye to Alan Bray's recent interpretations of other funeral monuments dedicated to same-sex couples.     

Motel by the Roadside: America's Room for the Night

The origins of the American motel are rooted in the traveler's use of the automobile. After 1910 the need for inexpensive overnight facilities convenient to the roadside led to the establishment of auto camps in the United States, especially in the West. In the East, the tourist home served a similar function. The highway traveler's rejection of the hotel (most hotels were located in congested downtowns and lacked adequate parking facilities) prompted the rapid evolution of cabin camps, cottage courts, motor courts, motor inns, and, eventually, highway hotels. Standardizing influences were exerted first through trade associations and then through chain and franchise corporations. Changing motel morphology was characterized by evolution rather than revolution until the revised tax code of 1954 and the Highway Act of 1956 vastly accelerated motel construction attracting corporate investors. Hotels and today's larger motels are very similar with increased emphasis on public as opposed to private space and increased formality. Thus in fifty years the motel has come full cycle as an alternative to hotel accommodation.     

The ‘Ungallant Silence of the Historian’: Elizabeth Stone,Esther Owen and the Art of Needlework

This essay explores the challenges of authorship for two women authors of important needlework books during the 1840s. Elizabeth Stone authored the first British history of needlework, the Art of Needlework (1840), and Esther Owen wrote an influential pattern book, the Illuminated Ladies' Book of Useful and Ornamental Needlework (1844), but both women were powerless over their work when authorial mis-attribution and financial mismanagement hindered their efforts to engage in professional careers. Countless anonymous writers of needlework articles and guidebooks provided scholars with a treasure of textual artifacts that contain valuable cultural and historical information about women's lives, whether the women were readers, editors or writers. Yet the lack of specific bibliographical and biographical details about needlework books and their authors often frustrate adequate scholarly reappraisal. The tradition of anonymity and a general lack of respect for domestic women's art from publishers and contemporaries outside the woman's sphere created a dearth of archival material, and careless reviewers spurred mistakes and omissions that sometimes began as early as the first printing and continue from that moment until now. The careers of Stone and Owen serve as case studies of complications for women working in the writer's trade, and of problems encountered by scholars writing nineteenth-century women's history.     

The Gender Dynamics of Dress Gifts from Elizabethan Men at the Court of Elizabeth I

This article explores the gender dynamics of giving dress gifts at the Elizabethan court (1558–1603). Current scholarship considers the role of elite women and the ‘favourite’ in giving dress gifts. In contrast, this article seeks to understand the significant but largely overlooked role of merchant and courtier men as both givers of dress to Elizabeth I and holders of vital information that others relied upon in giving dress gifts to her. Drawing on New Year's gift lists, correspondence and records of progresses this article shows how an approach informed by material culture and situated in a gendered framework actually complicates our understanding of the Elizabethan court's culture of dress gifts. A gendered analysis highlights that merchant and courtier male subjects, sometimes in tandem with their wives, played a vital role in shaping the fashion and economy of early modern England by providing innovative and tasteful offerings to their queen. Dress gifts from male subjects strongly influenced Elizabeth's image of magnificence and made the English court one of the most fashionable in Europe.     

Women's Public Lives: Navigating the East India Company,Parliament and Courts in Early Modern England

This article traces the strategies that women deployed, and the resources upon which they drew, in order to challenge the East India Company (EIC) and ultimately lay claim to property that they believed was rightfully theirs. It focuses on three women, Elizabeth Dale, Rebecka Duteil and Mary Goodal, who navigated the EIC, parliament and the courts in seventeenth-century London to try to secure their inheritance from husbands and siblings. It offers a fresh perspective on early modern women's public lives by focusing on a wide array of agentic strategies that women employed in their encounters with various institutions. Using a range of sources, including company records, petitions, court depositions and wills, it argues that exploring women's interactions with the EIC, especially in their role as adversaries, enriches understandings of women's agency in early modern England. This article suggests that such a lens can further nuance how we understand the inherent tensions of early modern women's public lives: as inflected by global as well as local contexts and shaped by conflict as well as collaboration.     

Review Article: The Lights that Failed - and Those Never Lit

The unresolved question of who would succeed Queen Elizabeth I in the last years of the sixteenth century had repercussions beyond the British Isles. For the papacy, the contested succession seemed to provide a possibility of returning England to the Roman Catholic Church. This article places the English succession crisis in an international context, analysing the interests of princes in Spain, France, Flanders, and on the Italian peninsula from the perspective of papal diplomacy. Studying Pope Clement VIII's efforts to balance these princely interests, this article examines the options discussed in Rome, which ranged from converting James VI of Scotland - if he became King of England - to installing a Catholic candidate from the European mainland. It argues that Pope Clement VIII was not duped into passivity by James VI/I's vague promises of conversion and demonstrates that the Pope pursued a flexible policy which considered the succession in England within a much wider context: the retention of the Catholic religion in Europe.     

Die these von der verschwörung 1776–1945: Philosophen,freimaurer, juden,liberale und sozialisten als verschwörer gegen die sozialordnung

How do Goya's representations of the body disrupt the Enlightenment's configurations of the corporeal? If for eighteenth-century aesthetics the body is both the site of ideal beauty and the limit of what can and may be represented, then Goya's panoply of monsters provides a way of understanding other modes of reason(ing), other ways of representing the body and its functions within culture. In his work there is a recuperation of those elements that seem to lie outside the ken of the Enlightenment project: physicality, animality, hybridity, the grotesque, the popular; a recognition of the animal nature of the body and the products of bodily impulses and forces. A rethinking of the body would incorporate an understanding of its role as a physical and social phenomenon in the constitution of the subject. Following on from Paul Ilie's concept of counter-rational Reason, which he defines as the opposite of a uniform centre of rationality in representative thought, the first half of my paper will consider Goya's problematization of representation. My analysis of a selection of drawings from the collection Los Caprichos (1799) will focus not just on the representation of bodies in the painter's work but on his exploration of bodies in their material variety—configurations of modes of constructing the body. This examination of Goya's prolific pictorial negotiations and adaptations of flesh and world will draw upon contemporary approaches to theorizing the body, namely the theories of Julia Kristeva and Elizabeth Grosz.     

Elizabeth Elstob (1674–1752): England's First Professional Woman Historian?

Elizabeth Elstob was a scholar of Anglo‐Saxon, who published two important books and was admired by the leaders of the new movement for Anglo‐Saxon studies in the early eighteenth century. She was able to be part of this community because her brother William encouraged and enabled it. His death in 1715 was a catastrophe, marking the end of her productive life as an intellectual and plunging her into poverty. She disappeared for almost twenty years, but was discovered and rescued by the first generation of bluestockings. A project she had begun – a history of intellectual women – was taken up and completed by George Ballard. His Memoirs of British Ladies(1752) included Elstob's memories about Mary Astell, and is, among other things, the single most important source of information about this pioneer feminist.     

Questioning Craft Production at Angel Mounds Analysis of the 2006–2009 Angel Mounds Field-Schools

Abstract

Seventy years of archaeological investigations at the site of Angel Mounds (12VG1) have led to a broad overall understanding of the cultural practices of the Mississippian people in southwest Indiana nearly 1,000 years ago, but have also raised ever expanding new questions. Recent field-school excavations at Angel Mounds, sponsored by the Glenn A. Black Laboratory (GBL) at Indiana University, explored magnetic anomalies in a previously unexcavated area at Angel Mounds. Analyses of features and artifacts encountered during the excavations at Unit A (the “Potter's House”), including large amounts of Mississippi Plain pottery and craft-production objects, inspired new questions on the organization of craft production at Angel Mounds and other Mississippian archaeological sites. In this article, I test whether a structure at Unit A may have been a craftproduction workshop by reviewing data archaeologists traditionally associate with workshops and examining the standardization of pottery found at the location. Preliminary results demonstrate the variability of Mississippi Plain pottery, even within single locations, and also show the potential analytical utility of such variability for testing important issues in the archaeology of Mississippian societies, including supposed elite-control over craft production and intrasite social organizations.     

Lost and Found: the Woman Writer in the Eighteenth Century

Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: the Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn's Afterlife Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750’1810 Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (eds), Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700’1830     

Political Tourism: Elizabeth Simcoe’s Maps and Views of Canada (1791–1796)

Abstract

Elizabeth Simcoe (1762–1850) travelled from England to Canada in 1791 and returned to her home, Wolford Lodge, in Honiton, Devon, in 1796. She was accompanying her husband, John Graves Simcoe (1752–1806), who had just been appointed Lieutenant Governor of the newly formed province of Upper Canada. Throughout their travels, Elizabeth recorded her Canadian experiences in her diaries and sketchbooks. She drew, corrected and copied maps for her husband. Upon their return to England they offered to the king an album of 32 works and a map, all drawn on birch bark. The map and the album acted as a report to the king of her husband’s political achievements in Canada and her engagement as a cartographer.     

Book Reviews

James Grantham Turner (ed.) Sexuality and Gender in Early Modem Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds) Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England Roddey Reid, Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France, 1750–1910 Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France Jeffrey R. Watt, The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchâtel, 1550–1800 Claire Duchen, Women's Rights and Women's Lives in France, 1944–1968 Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City Angela Groppi, I Conservatori Delia Virtú. Donne Recluse Nella Roma dei Papi Joanne E. Gates, Elizabeth Robins, 1862–1952: Actress, Novelist, Feminist Angela V. John, Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 1862–1952 Kenneth A. Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century Christine Bolt, The Women's Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s Ian Tyrrell, Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective Audrey Oldfield, Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or a Struggle? The Blaze of Day Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (eds) Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours’Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early Slew England Virginia Bernhard, Betty Brandon, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Theda Perdue (eds) Southern Women: Histories and Identities Catherine Clinton (ed.) Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past Melvyn Stokes and Rick Halpern (eds) Race and Class in the American South since 1890 Catherine Wessinger (ed.) Women's Leadership in Marginal Religions: Explorations Outside the Mainstream Wendy E. Chmielewski, Louis J. Kern and Marlyn Klee Hartzell (eds) Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States Jean Humez (ed.) Mother's First-Born Daughters: Early Shaker Writings on Women and Religion W. Peter Ward, Birth Weight and Economic Growth: Women's Living Standards in the Industrializing West David Cordingly, Life Among the Pirates: Fact vs Fiction Catherine Wendy Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry, and Holy War in the Sixteenth-Century Adriatic B. R. Berg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (New York University Press, New York and London, 1994; rev. ed. of Sodomy and the Perception of Evil) Carol A. B. Giesen, Coal Miners’Wives: Portraits of Endurance Gillian Thomas, A Position to Command Respect: Women and the Eleventh Britannica     

A Patina of Age: Elizabeth Macquarie (née) Campbell and the Influence of the Buildings and Landscape of Argyll,Scotland, in Colonial New South Wales

Elizabeth Macquarie, a daughter of Campbell of Airds, was the wife of Lachlan Macquarie, the fifth governor of New South Wales (1810–21). The buildings of Argyll, Scotland, strongly influenced choices made by Elizabeth in the buildings erected during her husband’s 12-year administration of the colony. By examining these Scottish influences, through theories of landscape and the transfer of traditional, even “old-fashioned,” architectural styles to this far-flung colony, new layers of meaning embedded within the landscape of Sydney Cove are disentangled to reveal a deeper understanding of how British cultural identity was recreated on the far side of the world.     

Brief reflections on the journal Italianists keep

Abstract

The following three papers were given at a Round Table held at New York University's Casa Italiana in October 2005, chaired by Ruth Ben-Ghiat. As part of the events held to mark the tenth anniversary of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, we asked our three invited speakers – Raymond Grew, Elizabeth Krause and Paolo Macry – to comment on the directions taken by the JMIS in its first decade and to set out some objectives for the future.     

From golden hills to sycamore trees: pastoral homelands and ethnic identity in Irish immigrant fiction, 1860–75

The prose fiction that remembers the trials of starvation and eviction of the Great Famine (1845–50) often juxtaposes representations of blasted, infertile land with images of a green, idyllic Erin. Through a discussion of Mary Anne Sadlier's Bessy Conway (1861), Elizabeth Hely Walshe's Golden Hills: A Tale of the Irish Famine (1865) and John McElgun's Annie Reilly (1873), this article reveals that immigrant writers of the Famine generation often negotiate depictions of Famine-stricken wasteland with evocations of a pastoral homeland. In the case of the two Catholic novels, Bessy Conway and Annie Reilly, the pastoral becomes a point of ethnic identification through which the immigrants can recollect and reconstruct a sense of Irishness in exile. By contrast, Golden Hills, which focuses on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, does not lament the mass exodus of afflicted Irish: the novel rather envisions emigration as a way to regenerate Ireland as locus amoenus.