A Usable Past: History and the Politics of National Identity in Late Victorian England

For the past two decades, issues of English national identity have provided a fertile field for historical investigation. In the late Victorian era, the development of professional standards of scholarship within the academy gave a new dimension to historical debates. The bitter quarrels about appropriate research techniques from the 1860s to the 1890s, among James Anthony Froude, Edward Freeman and John Horace Round, acted as a proxy for the vision of national identity that each historian espoused. After 1870, the development of a national narrative focused on constitutional history as its primary vehicle. The battle over historical reconstruction represented a surrogate for divergent views about political values and national identity. What sometimes seemed frivolous scholarly skirmishes, therefore, had a much greater political importance. As a result, the long feud had greater importance than the eccentric personalities of the participants appeared to indicate. For Froude, the Tudor age of discovery and religious reformation represented the best of English character. For Freeman, a strong Gladstonian Liberal, consensus and continuity over many centuries defined English history best. John Horace Round, a Conservative stalwart, thought that Freeman had slanted his historical conclusions to validate his Liberal politics and reinterpreted the Norman conquest to express his own political beliefs. Thus the quibbles about shield walls and other issues provided a terrain for the real cause of antagonism: different views of national identity that history furnished. Each historian constructed a usable past in order to justify contemporary discussions of national identity.     

The Life and Death of a Mycenaean Port Town: Kalamianos on the Saronic Gulf

In the late fourteenth century bc of the Aegean Late Bronze Age (LBA), a large walled settlement was established at Korphos: Kalamianos, on the Saronic Gulf coast of the Corinthia, Greece. Archaeological and geological work by the Saronic harbors Archaeological Research Project has succeeded in reconstructing the LBA coastline and likely harbor basins, as well as documenting the well-preserved plan of an entire Late Helladic town. Kalamianos was a short-lived maritime outpost, purposely founded as a component of state expansion in a climate of intense peer-polity competition in LBA (fifteenth–thirteenth centuries bc) Greece.     

'The Return of Ulysses': Gladstone, Liberalism and Late Victorian Politics

Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party, 1874–1886 . By T. A.Jenkins. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1988. vi, 328 pp. £32.50.
The Gladstonian Turn of Mind: Essays Presented to J. B. Conacher . Edited by Bruce L. Kinzer. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1985. xv, 294 pp. £35.00.
Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882–93 . By James Loughlin. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. 1986. 369 pp. No price given.
Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis: The British House of Commons in 1886 . By W. C. Lubenow. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1988. vii, 389 pp. £37.50.
The Gladstone Diaries with Cabinet Minutes and Prime Ministerial Correspondence, Volume IX, January 1875-December 1880 . Edited by H. C. G. Matthew. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1986. xcvii, 714 pp. £55.00.
Parnell and the First Home Rule Episode, 1884–87 . By Alan O'Day. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. 1986. x, 314 pp. £25.00.     

The Good Life in Victorian and Edwardian Surbiton: Creating a Suburban Community Before 1914

Abstract

Throughout their recent history suburbs and suburban society have been characterised by a number of writers — including historians — as being dull, detached, monotonous, lacking in community spirit and devoid of cultural activity. The aim of this article is to challenge these negative stereotypes by examining the reality of community life in the classic suburban town of Surbiton before 1914. It sets out a framework within which communities can be defined and analysed and argues that the criteria used to identify working class communities in the past are not necessarily applicable to more middle class suburban communities. The historical evidence for community life and identity in Surbiton before 1914 is provided by the existence of clubs and societies; sporting and leisure activities; participation in cultural events; support networks when necessary; multi-class activities; and enlightened middle class leadership.     

Frontier Life: Late Prehistoric Adaptations of the Kansas City Locality

Abstract

Late Prehistoric (AD 900–1500) adaptations along the lower Missouri River in the Kansas City locality include two distinct contemporaneous archaeological cultures, Steed-Kisker and Pomona. Both are reviewed with emphasis on interaction, change, and continuity. Evidence from other sites in northeastern Kansas, a prairie-woodland ecotone, points to interaction where their culture core areas overlapped, a locality that was a frontier throughout much of prehistory between cultures of the eastern woodlands and the Great Plains. Recent investigation of house remains at the Scott and Caenen sites, representing the Steed-Kisker and Pomona cultures respectively, provides significant insight concerning relations or lack thereof. About 130 years apart in time of occupation, they are only 350 m distant in Stranger Creek valley, the last major tributary of the Kansas River before its confluence with the Missouri River. Both illustrate the contrasting nature of these adaptations, specifically change from a Woodland adaptation represented by Steed-Kisker and continuity with respect to it represented by Pomona, which persisted longer. The possibility of assimilation of both cultures with the Oneota tradition during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is discussed.     

Form and deformity: the trouble with Victorian pockets

This essay explores the Victorian debate about the place of pockets in men's and women's clothing. By studying the representation of men as naturally pocketed creatures and the general denial of useful pockets to middle-class women, the essay demonstrates the tenacious cultural logic by which men's and women's pockets were imagined to correspond to sexual differences and to index access, or lack thereof, to public mobility and financial agency. Interconnected readings of visual art, essays, and novels show how the common sense about gendered pockets was utilized and promulgated in Victorian narratives. The question of who gets pockets is thus positioned as part of the history of gendered bodies in public space.     

楚、秦黔中郡略论——兼论屈原之卒年

古黔中即今湘西的沅水、澧水流域地区。约在宣王时,楚置黔中郡,郡治沅陵。在秦昭王三十年,秦取楚巫郡、黔中郡置秦黔中郡,郡治溆浦。面对国破家亡的局势,屈原于是年自沉汨罗。始皇二十五年,秦黔中郡被一分为三,至秦代已不复存在。