Castles,castellans and the structure of politics in Poitou, 1152– 1271

By the middle of the twelfth century Poitou had been divided into small units of local control, known as castellanies. A castellany was the territory surrounding a castle; within it the castellan exercised military, judicial and economic powers. Between 1152 and 1271 the control of castles in Poitou experienced a development of three stages, moving from single-castellany holdings by the province's fifty leading families via regional lordships pieced together by four of these families to country-wide hegemony by the count. The progressive consolidation of castle-holding corresponded to the development of political life. The chaotic political conditions of the second half of the twelfth century were replaced by the leadership of the regional lords after 1200, which in turn gave way to the unchallenged authority of the count after 1242. The logic of this tripartite development explains the achievement of Alphonse of Poitiers, count from 1241, in turning Poitou from a region of chronic turbulence into a well-governed country. This paper emphasizes the role of the regional lords as the bridge between extreme fragmentation of authority and effective centralization.     

Soldiers under the Skin: Diversity of Race,Ethnicity, and Class in the Illinois National Guard, 1870–1916

A close examination of the Illinois National Guard (ING) between 1870 and 1916 demonstrates that contrary to the commonplace assumption of a homogeneous, white, middle class, native‐born membership, the ING had a very heterogeneous membership, drawing in rural and urban men, and men from an array of ethnicities, races and economic circumstances. Information on 2245 members drawn from enlistment data and the federal census, combined with evidence drawn from a wide variety of textual sources firmly establishes that this organization attracted men from a broad range of backgrounds. The ING stands out against other male‐only organizations of its time as an organization whose membership was consistently drawn from a broad cross‐section of the American population. The Illinois National Guard of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offered an organization that could unite many American men across cultural and social boundaries at a time when there was much to divide them.