The Death of Frank Wilson: Race,Crime, and Punishment in Post-Civil War Pennsylvania

In 1877, Frank Wilson, an African American man, was executed for murdering a white tramp in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This article examines the trial, punishment, and press reporting of the case in the evolving context of race and criminal justice in post-Civil War Pennsylvania. It presents three main findings. First, it documents evidence of racial discrimination and wildly disproportionate rates of African American arrest and imprisonment in Harrisburg and surrounding counties comparable to earlier research focused on the largest northern cities. Second, it shows that views on law enforcement were diverse within both white and black communities and shaped by the exigencies of local and national party politics. Third, it makes the case that African American experiences of law enforcement in northern states are better understood as part of a national criminal justice culture than in distinctively regional terms.     

Staging the Interior: The Public and Private Intimacies of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle's Domestic Lives

‘Home’ is one of the most evocative and comforting words in the English language. It produces, at least in its idealized form, notions of safety, comfort, privacy, individuality and communion with family and friends. The supposed autonomy or permanence of home, however, is undermined frequently throughout one's life course revealing instead spaces of interactionism, public disturbance, discomfort, conflict, labour, stress and even violence. Reading Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle's voluminous letters one reads the emotional and psychological importance of ‘home’ and the vital necessity of the ideal world apart. The middle-class home was meant to stage a domesticated and comfortable private haven, withdrawn from public view and distant from the imperatives of the economy and politics, however, the house was also the physical representation, the outward ‘sign’, of the Carlyles' public identity. How the House looked and functioned – externally and internally – represented the Carlyles to the outside world. Home was, as Walter Benjamin alluded, like a sheltered theater box from which the occupants looked at the stage of the outside world and also the stage upon which the outside world cast its own critical eye on the action within. The necessities of life and the public fascination with the interior signify that private and public are largely mutable concepts. Any clear distinction between inside and outside, private and public are complicated as we look at the intimacies of the Carlyles' lives.     

The Archbishop of York and Anglo–American RelationsDuring the Second World War and Early Cold War, 1942–1955

This article addresses the relationship which developed during the Second World War and first decade of Cold War between the Foreign Office and one of Britain's leading Anglican clerics, Cyril Forster Garbett, archbishop of York 1942–55, widely respected as a liberal and the "conscience of the nation." It offers a model case study of relations between church and state by drawing upon state papers as well as upon ecclesiastical ones. It illustrates how religion was a crucial propaganda tool, advocating the defence of Western civilization and Christianity against first the paganism of Nazi Germany and then the atheism of Soviet Russia. Garbett's evolution from a domestic cleric concerned with social deprivation to an ecclesiastic statesman and Cold Warrior, reveals the significance of the religious component in Anglo–American relations. The presentation of the alliance as a crusade bonded together the two nations despite the differing political outlooks of their respective peoples.     

The Trouble with Propaganda: the Second World War,Franco's Spain,and the Origins of US Post-War Public Diplomacy

This paper explores the internecine conflict that characterised and undermined US propaganda toward neutral Spain in the Second World War. These tensions primarily confronted those who saw US propaganda as an ideological weapon of mass persuasion in a crusade against Fascism with those who defended that US informational and cultural operations should be subservient to traditional diplomacy, and so be limited to explaining US foreign policy and advancing bilateral friendship. In addition, the article argues that the unambiguous subordination of propaganda to diplomacy that characterised US public diplomacy during the cold war was one of the lessons learnt out of the civil war that US propagandists fought over Spain between 1941 and early 1945.     

Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator,SJ, ed., Reconciliation,Justice, and Peace: The Second African Synod

Abstract

The World Social Forum (WSF) emerged in Brazil from a network of grassroots anti-globalization activists and campaigners as an alternative to the World Economic Forum. The WSF focuses on human development in the holistic sense of "social capital" and provides a forum for Southern perspectives to be heard. From its birth, faith-based organizations have been prominent in the WSF. The seventh World Social Forum (WSF) took place in Africa in January 2007. Just before that event, theologians attending the WSF held a pre-meeting of the World Forum of Theology and Liberation (WFTL). This paper offers a brief outline of the World Forum of Theology and Liberation: the event, the programme, an assessment, recommendations for future Forums and transcending moments of the event. In so doing it attempts to express the suffocated cry of an Africa, in large measure, ignored and forgotten.