John Ashton (1952–2008)

Il Kalevala, O La Poesia tradizionale dei Finni, studio storico - critico sulle origini belle grandi epopee nazionali. DEL DOMENICO COMPARETTI. Firenze, 1891.

DER KALEVALA, ODER DIE TRADITIONELLE POESIE DER FlNNEN, ETC. Von DOMENICO COMPARETTI. (The authorised German edition.) Halle, 1892. By John Abercromby.

Vestiges de Paganisme dans la Région situé entre les cours supérieurs de l'oka et du Don. Par N. Troitzky. Congrès international d' Archiologie préhistorique et d' Anthropologie. Moscou, Août 1892, t. i. By A. C. Haddon.     

The royal Scottish geographical society 1884–1959: Early days of the society

The Royal Scottish Geographical Society was formed at a public meeting in Edinburgh in October, 1884, and in October, 1959 completed seventy‐five years activity. To mark the occasion a Reception was held in the Music Hall, George Street, Edinburgh, on October 22nd, with H.R.H. Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark as the principal guest. The Council invited the Honorary Secretary, Mr Donald G. Moir, F.R.S.G.S. to recall the events which led to the founding of the Society, and its early activities ; it was also resolved to publish with this article a list of the Society's Office Bearers since 1884.     

Reading the Cuban revolution from Bogotá, 1957–62

This article traces the evolution of Colombian responses to the early Cuban revolution. For the governing Liberal Party in particular, developments in Cuba only gradually came to be read in terms of the Cold War. Instead, Colombians primarily interpreted the revolution through the lens of their own recent post-authoritarian transition, as well as a commitment to inter-American diplomacy. Using Colombian, US, and UK government as well as press sources, the article challenges recent historiography on the Cold War in Latin America, to demonstrate how the Cold War was but one reading of Latin American politics in the era of the Cuban revolution.     

The evolution of the Chinese Communist Party's policy on the bourgeoisie (1949–1952)

From its very beginning, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had a shifting policy towards the bourgeoisie. Until the early 1940s, it maintained a relatively stable policy which successfully isolated the monied classes in China and helped it overthrow the rule of the KMT. But with the establishment of the new regime, the CCP Central Committee came under conflicting pressures: on the one hand it continued its former policy out of political expediency; on the other hand, based on traditional socialist political theory and Soviet experience, it kept a close watch on the bourgeoisie and even proposed targeting them as the chief enemy of next revolution. After the establishment of the PRC, as a result of the failing economy and the new government's lack of economic support and political experience, the CCP firmed up its policies on the bourgeoisie. However, with the bourgeoisie and capitalism still prominent elements in Chinese society, the communists became uncertain about which direction to take. As the CCP Central Committee had anticipated, officials of both the party and the government often gave way to corruption after taking over major cities. The Central Committee regarded this particular combination of money and power as a “violent attack” against the new communist regime by the bourgeoisie as a whole. In order to tighten its grip on national power, the Central Committee launched two anti‐corruption movements known as the Three‐Antis and the Five‐Antis. These movements were in fact aimed at the bourgeoisie as a whole, and succeeded in destroying the basis for capitalist business in the New China. Encouraged by this outcome, the CCP launched a policy of socialist transformation aimed at depriving Chinese capitalists of their means of production. Thus the CCP gradually and inevitably moved away from its original policy of cooperation with the national bourgeoisie.     

Cuban Miami on the Air: Narratives of Cubanía

Radio has been a fundamental aspect of Cuban culture on and off the island since the first broadcast in Havana in 1922. When Cubans fled the island after the revolution of 1959 for the USA, particularly Miami, radio quickly became a vital medium for navigating a new country and for consolidating a Cuban exile identity. Politically, radio in Miami has been an effective means for articulating hardline exile politics. But with generational turnover and increasingly moderate stances on Cuba by more recent arrivals and US-born Cuban Americans, how is radio changing? How are narratives of what constitutes cubanía – Cubanness – shifting in an increasingly diverse Cuban Miami? This article takes up these questions through an examination of an immensely popular morning program that aired in 2009 in southern Florida called the Enrique y Joe Show. I examine how the Enrique y Joe Show, produced and performed by US-born Cuban Americans, utilized a form of irreverent Cuban humor called choteo to represent and satirize the hardline Cuban exile politics that have been dominant on Miami's radio waves for decades. Ultimately, their performances deploy choteo to articulate Cuban American identity divorced from a particular political orthodoxy. The coda reflects on changes in Miami's radio landscape since 2009.