Sir Edward Grey: The Private Life of a Foreign Secretary

ABSTRACT

This article examines the private life of Sir Edward Grey in order to explore some of the contradictions in Grey's character that continue to interest biographers and academics: he was apparently without ambition yet he pursued a successful political career; he longed to live his life in the country but spent much of it working in London; he was a man whose reputation was built on honesty and integrity but recent studies hint at extra-marital affairs and illegitimate children. It shows that Grey had an aptitude for public life and a desire to satisfy a sense of public duty but was reluctant to become defined by it, having other passions as countryman and naturalist. But the balance in his life between work and leisure became increasingly strained due to the pressures of a ministerial career and the changing nature of politics. It also finds that Grey's personal life was not without colour, even if not all the infidelities attributed to him seem credible. In addition the article contributes to the debate over whether Sir Edward Grey was an ‘ambitious political operator’ or a ‘gentleman amateur’.     

The Historian and the Church

DEREK BEALES AND GEOFFREY BEST, eds. History, Society and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp. x, 335. $49.50 (US).     

Working the Waste Commodity Frontier: Metabolic Value and Informal Waste Work

Ambitions for a European “circular economy” imply waste is becoming an important “commodity frontier”. Increased recycling in Europe has been accompanied by a proliferation of informal waste work. “Southern” geographies of informal recyclers provide resources for interpreting this phenomenon but studies of a commodity frontier in urban waste have tended to focus on moments when informal waste workers are displaced by capital intensive waste management systems. I draw on concepts in world-ecology and materialist ecofeminism to explore the proliferation of informal waste workers in Barcelona and the way their (re)production produces “Metabolic Value”. Informal waste work is shown to emerge and persist as part of a commodity frontier process—where the appropriation of unpaid work from non-commodified spaces is the hallmark of how capitalism secures “Cheap Nature”. The study suggests that, rather than internalising ecological costs, recycling often rests on the appropriation of value from uncommodified spaces.     

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.     

The Task of the Historian

Book reviewed in this article:
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography     

The Rolt Memorial Lecture, 1978 Sir Humphry Davy: His Life and Work

Abstract

Sir Humphry Davy, a largely self-taught genius of humble birth, made major contributions to the development of chemistry, physics, geology and natural history in the early nineteenth century. Much of his research was directly beneficial to various industries principally agriculture, mining and metallurgy, electro-chemicals and leather processing. He is best remembered for his miners' safety lamp and the story of its development forms the core of this paper.     

创新：思想政治工作的生命力

当前,复杂的国际环境、经济与社会的发展变化以及科学技术的日新月异,决定了思想政治工作必须按照新的时代特征要求进行不断创新。在创新过程中,思想政治工作必须遵循党性原则、历史继承性原则、实践性原则、社会化原则、民主化原则和科学化原则。只有这样,才能不断地增强思想政治工作的效能及其生命力。