Lathom House: The Northern Court

Abstract

Thomas Stanley is credited with the creation of a fine new house at Lathom when he was made earl of Derby in 1485. This house, according to the poets and writers if the 16th and 17th centuries, was a sumptuous and well-defended place surrounded by moats and with as marry as eighteen towers. Indeed, it was claimed that Henry VII, stepson if the first earl if Derby, based his design for Richmond Palace on Lathom. After the house had fallen to the Parliamentarians it is usually accepted that the place was razed to the ground and, since the latter years of the 18th century, there has been considerable debate regarding its location. Recent archaeological work at the site if a later house, designed by Giacomo Leoni, is now providing evidence to show that Leoni's building probably lay on the site of the earlier structure and that some if the medieval masonry was incorporated into the rubble fill if the 18th-century walls. This study now examines the evidence for the first earl of Derby's house and argues that Lathom should be considered amongst the most important late 15th-century houses in England and Wales.     

Enacting a Local Reform in the Age of Reform: A Salary for the Chairman of Middlesex Sessions

This article examines the unsuccessful attempts made from 1833 to 1842 by Middlesex's justices of the peace to obtain a local statute allowing them to pay a salary to their chairman. Instead of securing such an act, they had to settle for a statute enacted by the government, a statute authorising the government to appoint their chairman for judicial proceedings. The article uses the story of Middlesex's attempt to obtain a salary for the chairman to examine: justices' attempts to reform the office of chairman of county Sessions; the limited powers of justices in their county Sessions; and the centralising aspirations of central government. The statute that the government produced in 1844 originated as a public bill. In contrast, the statute that Middlesex had attempted to obtain originated as private bills. The statute enacted by the government contained defects that probably would not have marred a statute enacted under the rules governing private bills. So, this article uses the legislative misadventures of the government's bill to compare the procedures for enactment of public and private bills. The article therefore provides a case study of mid‐19th‐century legislative procedures governing enactment of local legislation, while arguing that, as of the mid 19th century, parliament had not developed procedures appropriate to both representative government and a centralising central government using public bills for local matters.     

‘Too Wild to Succeed’: The Occasional Conformity Bills and the Attempts by the House of Lords to Outlaw the Tack in the Reign of Anne*

By the late 17th century it had been largely established as a part of the ‘constitution’ that the house of commons played the leading role in proposing financial legislation and that the house of lords by convention could not amend such bills, but only accept or reject them. From the late 1670s, the practice developed of the Commons ‘tacking’ money or supply bills to other, controversial legislation, to try to ensure that the Lords would pass the whole bill. This underhand proceeding sometimes worked, but at other times the Lords amended the non‐monetary parts in such a way as to render the bill unacceptable to the Commons, but such actions sometimes resulted in the loss of financial legislation necessary for the king's government. From the 1690s, the whig‐dominated Lords attempted to ‘outlaw’ tory‐backed tacking by protesting at its unparliamentary nature. This culminated in a formal declaration by the House in 1702 of the unconstitutionality of tacking. The last major attempt at tacking took place over the Occasional Conformity Bills of 1702–4. The final bill of 1704 essentially failed, however, because of the party strengths in the Lords when the tories were outvoted by the whigs. The Lords, however, continued to condemn tacking until at least 1709.     

‘They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men’: Violence,Non‐Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era

This article explores how peaceful protest and armed resistance reflected and shaped certain gender identities in the southern US civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, and reveals much about the significance of violence for ‘marginalised masculinities’ within the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. In the Deep South, civil rights organisers found that their non‐violent strategy's connotations of effeminate submissiveness hampered attempts to win over black men to the movement's cause. Conversely, those African Americans who decided to use armed force to protect the movement against racist attacks were proud of their ability to defend themselves and their communities. A comparison of armed resistance efforts in southern civil rights campaigns with those of post‐1965 Black Power groups such as the Black Panther Party shows both commonalities and differences with regard to the inter‐relationship between self‐defence and gender. In the southern movement, the affirmation of manhood remained a by‐product of the physical imperative to protect black lives against racism. Among Black Power militants and their black nationalist precursors, self‐defence, while initially intended to stop police brutality and other racist oppression, ultimately became mainly a symbol of militant black manhood. The Black Power movement's affirmative message countered stereotypes of black male powerlessness and instilled a positive black identity into many activists, but the gendered discourse it produced also tended to perpetuate black women's subordination.     

Of Male and Female Heirs; of English and Scottish Peerages: The Fine Tuning of the Peerage Bills of 1719

There were two versions of the Peerage Bill in 1719, one which was lost in the house of lords in April when the parliament was prerogued and one in December which was defeated in the house of commons. The first was constructed in debates in the Lords, in conjunction with the judges, based on resolutions introduced into the upper House by the duke of Somerset; the second was introduced into the Lords as a fully formed bill. Both bills underwent changes during their progress through the house of lords. The result was that the second bill differed significantly from the first. Based on the first bill, the second allowed for more peerages to be created, while trying to prevent the problems associated with female succession, particularly in the Scottish peerage, and more closely defining when a peerage had become extinct. This article is based on documents generated by the passage of the two bills through parliament which have not been studied before.     

THE 2010 ANTIPODE RGS‐IBG LECTURE Wars of Interpretations

Abstract: Since 2006, when Mexico's President declared war against the drug trade, the people of the northern Mexican border city, Ciudad Juárez, have been living through a record‐breaking escalation of violence, the occupation of their city by federal troops and police forces, unprecedented human and civil rights violations, and a pervasive experience of fear in public space. These events have occurred simultaneous to a devastating economic crisis. This paper asks the question, how can a feminist and Marxist geographer contribute to an analysis of what is happening in Ciudad Juárez? To address this question, I create a dialogue among activists in northern Mexico and post‐structuralist feminist and Marxist positions regarding the meaning of public fear in this city for the city's residents, for Mexico's democracy and for the making of public knowledge about the Mexico–US border.     

‘Chatham's Ghost’ and the Enduring Spectre of Lord Bute's Secret Influence: A Political Negotiation of 1778

Hints about the rise, fall, and reformulations of ministries were common currency in 18th‐century British political rhetoric. However, in 1778, chief among such rumours were three purported negotiations between the earls of Bute and Chatham, aimed at bringing one or both of them into administration. So damaging were these rumours to the political legacies of both individuals and their families, however, that they resorted to a ‘press war’ in order to absolve their respective kinsmen of any involvement. Drawing on previously neglected sources, this work examines these negotiations of 1778 and the subsequent press war in order to highlight the longevity, potency, and significance of the myth of Lord Bute's secret influence 15 years after his resignation from high office. In doing so, this work seeks to correct the common narrative that Lord Bute ceased to be a potent political symbol for constitutional issues following the publication of Edmund Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents in 1770. Far from being merely an anomalous and spontaneous revival of ill‐sentiments towards Lord Bute, this episode should be seen as a flashpoint in a process of vilification and traducement of the Scottish earl that had never, in fact, ceased and was symptomatic of the continuation of symbolic, or hieroglyphic, depictions of arguments concerning the significant constitutional issues which had been raised by Bute's political presence since the accession of George III.     

Protest Cycle,Political Violence and Social Movements in the Basque Country

A close look at the groups, organisations and social movements among which a terrorist organisation seeks refuge and support, will provide a fundamental and strategic view of its evolution. By means of the concept of a protest cycle, I analyse the relationship between political violence and social movements in the Basque Country. With the help of Tarrow's fundamental variables in the political structure, to which I have added the degree of consciousness‐raising and mobilisation in civil society, I aim to study the protest cycle of ETA's violence from its social origins at the start of the 1960s, through its consolidation in the 1970s, to its decline from the mid‐1980s onwards. The idea I will defend is that political violence should be seen as a form of collective action directed towards a mobilisation of society, and that its vicissitudes depend on the structure of interactions set up between the armed organisation, social movements and civil society.     

Students: Are they really so conservative?

In order to test the proposition that students in the late 1970s were markedly more conservative than the students of the late 1960s, a sample of 550 University of Queensland students was surveyed in September 1979 employing a questionnaire similar to that administered to 272 Queensland students in 1969. The contemporaneous campaign against the Queensland government's ban on street marches, providing as it did frequent opportunities for participation in protest, facilitated comparison at the level of participation in protest as well as that of attitudes. Although students’ political party preferences had moved to the left, the pattern of attitude change was less consistent, the most marked and consistent change being the decline in confidence in political authorities. Although students’ views of protest politics were no less favourable, their preparedness to participate had declined. Perhaps the most striking change was, however, the rise in interest and participation in politics amongst women.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 34, Number 2. April 2018

Cover caption, volume 34 issue 2 Front Cover: School shootings Student lie‐in at the White House to protest gun laws, 19 February 2018. The demonstration was organized by Teens For Gun Reform, an organization created by students in the Washington, DC area in the wake of the 14 February shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Earlier on the day of the shooting, the priest at the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe mused during the Ash Wednesday ritual whether valentine hearts and bouquets of red roses could coexist with ashes on foreheads and reminders of human mortality. Could love and death be partners? As the congregation exited the church, mobiles rang with news of yet another school shooting and the deaths of 14 high school students and three teachers trapped inside an elite high school in suburban Florida. The gunman was a high school reject and white supremacist. It was the 292nd school shooting in America since Sandy Hook, the tiny tot massacre of 2013. Yet America's presidents and political leaders across the political divide remain hostage to the National Rifle Association's mantra: more automatic rifles equals more security, now including in US schools. State laws prevail over executive orders. Currently 14 states in the US arm teachers and 16 states allow local school boards to decide whether to do so. But one thing has changed as the survivors of the school massacres and their young followers have taken the reins. Beginning on 14 March, thousands of students from elementary and high schools have begun to march out of their classrooms. A new and powerful civil rights movement is spreading across the nation. Meanwhile Trump and his education secretary are proposing to target poor, black and Latino students, to undo President Obama's policies that protected male minority students from disproportionately harsh ‘zero tolerance’ school policies. In this issue, Scheper‐Hughes considers school shooting antecedents, beginning with the misfired Clinton campaign against youth violence. Back Cover: ESTHER GOODY (1932–2018) Esther Goody during fieldwork in Ghana, 1957. Esther Goody was a member of one of the most famous husband‐and‐wife teams in anthropology. She devoted her working life to the study of northern Ghana's peoples and to synthesizing social anthropology and social psychology.     

THE VIETNAM WAR

This article investigates the role of the Vietnam War in Danish and Norwegian politics. We argue that Danish and Norwegian membership in NATO and an unstable parliamentary situation may explain why these countries, unlike Sweden, did not take on the lead in the international protest against the war. Non‐socialistic coalitions came to power in Norway and Denmark in the latter half of the 1960s which to an extent explains why the social democratic parties in both countries became more critical of the US. By the end of the 1960s, foreign policy as well as public attitudes towards the war converged in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and in all three countries powerful protest movements emerged that were remarkably similar. The Vietnam War strengthened the left in general and promoted a leftist politics of solidarity that influenced Swedish, Danish and Norwegian foreign policy‐making of the 1970s.     

Raise your voices! Civilian protest in civil wars

Under what conditions do protests occur in civil wars? Evidence from case studies suggests that protests can indeed play an important role in contexts of civil wars, with civilians using respective tactics both against the state and rebels. We argue that localities experiencing armed clashes are likely to see protest events in the same month. Civilians conduct protests due to battle-related changes in the local opportunity structures and grievances related to losses experienced through collateral damage. Using spatially disaggregated data on protest and battle events in African civil wars, we find support for our hypothesis that battles trigger civilian protests. This effect is robust to the inclusion of a comprehensive list of confounding variables and alternative model specifications, including the use of different temporal and spatial units. Our findings highlight the role of the civilian population and the spatial relationship between war events and protests in civil wars.     

‘God'll Send the Bill to You’: The Costs of War and the God Who Counts in W. T. Stead's Pro-Boer Peace Campaign

W. T. Stead's 1899–1900 weekly newspaper, War against War in South Africa, sets out to persuade its readers of the financial, spiritual, and moral costs of war and in doing so urges them to participate in an oppositional ‘peace war’. It conflates the economic and the spiritual in presenting to its readers accounts of the South African war that emphasize the price to be paid for unjust bloodshed. This article examines the ways in which Stead uses the idea of counting in both its senses – of mattering and enumerating – alongside the idea of moral accountability, to make his case against war and for peace as part of a larger narrative of brotherhood and bloodguilt. I argue that his campaign failed to achieve its ends at least in part because, despite the sensationalist power of each item in his account, the final bill, addressed ambiguously to the individual, the government, and the nation, is unimaginably vast and morally unpayable. His newspaper and other anti-war publications offer a graphic account of the wrongs of war, yet their gothically inflected religious imagery of judgement and guilt work in unresolvable tension with their message of rational individual action against the national project of the war.     

‘I Just Like to Kill Things’: Women,Men and the Gender of Sport Hunting in the United States, 1940–1973

This paper examines women's place in sportsmen's magazines and their role in the creation of sport hunting's image in the post‐war United States. It argues that sport‐hunting women were not challenging post‐war constructions of femininity or domesticity. Nevertheless, sportsmen attacked women's attempts to construe hunting as heterosocial recreation, fearing that they would undermine hunting's cultural significance. Instead, the dominant, male‐authored discourse connected authentic hunting to a new post‐war formulation of masculinity that revolved around militarism and the emotional bonds between men developed through battlefield experiences. This analysis takes seriously both men's and women's interpretations of a cultural practice historically associated with one sex, in order to reveal how gender identities are constructed and contested.