Lincoln,Race, and the Spirit of ’76

Abstract

This essay examines how Lincoln dealt with race, slavery, and emancipation in antebellum America. It argues that despite a few controversial statements and policies regarding black Americans, Lincoln sought to preserve the American union and its system of self-government by reclaiming the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Unlike U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who exploited white bigotry in his promotion of local “popular sovereignty” as a solution to the slavery controversy, Lincoln highlighted the natural rights of blacks as a way to prevent the spread of slavery and thereby save what he would later call “the last best hope of earth.”     

Spaces of abeyance,care and survival: The addiction treatment system as a site of ‘regulatory richness’

This paper uses the changing landscape of the addiction treatment system as a way to understand broader trends in welfare state restructuring. Based on a case study of six detoxes in Winnipeg, Hamilton and Toronto (Canada), we seek to understand the degree to which the detox constitutes a space of care that reflects therapeutic aims of facility operators, a space of abeyance, control and containment for larger society, and a space of sustenance for individual clients. Further, we investigate how the shifting relationships between these roles provide insight into broader trends in the structuring and restructuring of the welfare state. Our empirical findings point to a multiple and reworked configuration within detox programs, while conceptually, our tripartite understanding of spaces of treatment serves to caution against totalizing accounts of current welfare state restructuring.     

‘This is disco-wonderland!’ Gender,sexuality and the limits of gay domesticity on The Block

Gay men have been positioned as arbiters of ‘desirable’ domestic style—a domestic imaginary epitomised through their presence as designers and participants on lifestyle television. This paper offers a post-structural critique, examining how the intersections of gender and sexuality shape the contours of, and public responses to, gay domesticity. I scrutinise one telling example: commentaries on the domestic design created by a gay couple on The Block, an Australian lifestyle-reality programme. Applying discourse analysis to the public reception of their design, I argue the acceptability of gay domesticity is proscribed by norms of sexuality and gender, and consequently gay domesticity must be understood in both normatively feminine and masculine terms. While the desirability of gay domesticity reflects a feminisation of gay men, it is also constrained by processes of masculinisation that associate gay men's domestic tastes with Playboy-style bachelor domesticity. Through bachelor domesticity, tropes of partying and seduction undermine traditional feminine homemaking and the heteronormative ideology of home championing privatised nuclear family life. Scrutinising the intersections of gender and sexuality thus reveals limits to gay domesticity, with implications for the cultural politics around mainstream acceptance of gay masculinity: gay men and their homes are welcome when they reinforce heteronormative ideals.     

The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity,Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914

In a Crystal Land: Canadian Explorers in Antarctica by Dean Beeby. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 262, illus., maps. £19.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–8020–0362–1.

Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth‐Century Montreal by Louise Dechêne, translated by Liana Vardi. Montreal and Kingston: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1993. Pp. xxi + 428, map, tables. £52.25 (hardback); £21.00 (paperback). ISBN 0–7735–0658–6; 0–7735–0951–8.

While the Women Only Wept: Loyalist Refugee Women by Janice Potter‐MacKinnon. Montreal and Kingston: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1993. Pp. xvi + 200. £29.70 (hardback). ISBN 0–7735–0962–3.

The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492–1992: A Regional Geography by Bonham C. Richardson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. vi + 235, maps, tables. £30.00 (hardback); £11.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–521–35186–3; 0–521–35977–5.

Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London's Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement 1786–1791 by Stephen J. Braidwood. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994. Pp. x + 324, maps. £16.50 (paperback). ISBN 0–85323–377–2.

The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. Volume I: From Early Times to c.1800 edited by Nicholas Tarling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xv + 655, maps, illus. £55.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–521–35505–2.

India's Colonial Encounter: Essays in Memory of Eric Stokes edited by Mushirul Hasan and Narayani Gupta. New Delhi: Manohar, 1993. Pp. vi + 412. Rs.400. ISBN 81–7304–007–9.

Welteroberung und Christentum: Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der Neuzeit by Horst Gründer. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1994. Pp. 751, maps and illustrations. DM 128. ISBN 3–579–00136–1.

Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo‐British Identity, 1689‐c.1830 by Colin Kidd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xiii + 322. £35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–521–43484‐X.

Academe and Empire: Some Oversees Connections of Aberdeen University 1860–1970 by John D. Hargreaves. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1994. Pp. x + 142. £8.95. ISBN 1–85752–220–6.

Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904) by Julia A. Clancy‐Smith. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994. Pp. xxiii + 370. $45.00. ISBN 0–520–08242–7.

Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820–1939 by Cecillie Swaisland. Oxford: Berg Publishers/University of Natal Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 186, illustrations. £25.00 (hardback); £10.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–85496–745–1; 0–85496–870–9.

God's Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster by Donald Harman Akenson. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 404, maps. $32.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–8014–2755‐X.

Regiments: Regiments and Corps of the British Empire and Commonwealth 1758–1993. A Critical Bibliography of their Published Histories. Compiled and published by Roger Perkins, Newton Abbot, 1994. Pp. 806. £92.50 (hardback). ISBN 0–9506429–3–2. Available from Roger Perkins, PO Box 29, Newton Abbot, Devon TQ12 1XU.

The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 by David Omissi. London: Macmillan, 1994. Pp. xx + 313. £45.00. ISBN 0–333–55049–8.

Public Health in British India: Anglo‐Indian Preventive Medicine 1859–1914 by Mark Harrison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xviii + 324. £19.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–521–46688–1.

Hong Kong in Chinese History: Community and Social Unrest in the British Colony, 1842–1913 by Jung‐Fang Tsai. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Pp. xvix + 375, maps. $52.00. ISBN 0–231–07932‐X.

European Imperialism, 1860–1914 by Andrew Porter. Basingstoke, London: Macmillan, 1994. Pp. xiii + 119, maps. £5.99 (paperback). ISBN 0–333–48104–6.

Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918 by Robert H. MacDonald. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Pp. viii + 259. £22.75. ISBN 0–8020–2843–8.

The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux by James O. Gump. Lincoln, Nebraska and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 178, maps. £23.95 (hardback). ISBN 0–8032–2152–5.

A History of Ethiopia by Harold G. Marcus. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of Calfornia Press, 1994. Pp. xv + 261, maps. $35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–520–08121–8.

Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936, by Paul E. Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendorn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xvii + 391. £45.00 (hardback); £16.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–521–37469–3; 0–521–44702‐X.

The Atlantic Provinces in Confederation edited by E. R. Forbes and D. A. Muise. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 628. $60.00 (hardback); $29.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–8020–5886–8; 0–8020–6817–0.

Australian History in New South Wales 1888 to 1938 by Brian H. Fletcher. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1993. Pp. vii + 228. $24.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–86840–269–9.

Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend by Alistair Thomson. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. vi + 282; photographs. £18.95 (hardback). ISBN 0–19553491–3.

Broken Promises: Popular Protest, Indian Nationalism and the Congress Party in Bihar, 1935–1946 by Vinita Damodaran. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 398, 5 maps, 3 figures, 18 tables, 3 appendices. £18.95. ISBN 0–19–562979–5.

Rajani Palme Dutt: A Study in British Stalinism by John Callaghan. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993. Pp. xi + 213. £19.99. ISBN 0–85315–7790.

Immigration, Ethnicity and Racism in Britain, 1815–1945 by Panikos Panayi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Pp. vi + 170. £29.99 (hardback); £7.99 (paperback). ISBN 0–7190–3697–6; 0–7190–3698–4.

Macmillan by John Turner. London: Longman, 1994. Pp. vii + 302. £24.99 (hardback); £10.99 (paperback). ISBN 0–582–21880–2; 0–582–55386–5.

The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan by Robert J. McMahon. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 431, maps. £25.00. ISBN 0–231–08226–6.

The Twilight of British Ascendancy in the Middle East: A Case Study of Iraq, 1941–1950 by Daniel Silverfarb. London: Macmillan, 1994. Pp. xii + 306, 2 maps. £34.00 (hardback). ISBN 0–333–62525–0.

The Wars of French Decolonization by Anthony Clayton. London: Longman, 1994. Pp. x + 234, maps. £32.00 (hardback); £11.99 (paperback) ISBN 0–582–09802–5; 0–582–09801–7.

Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government by Nicholas Thomas. Oxford: Polity Press, 1994. Pp. viii + 238. £45.00 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–7456–0871‐X; 0–7456–1215–6.     

The ‘Linchpin for Success’? The problematic establishment of the 1965 Race Relations Act and its Conciliation Board

The 1965 Race Relations Act was the first legislation directed towards outlawing racial discrimination and racial incitement in Britain; but it has been almost universally criticised as weak, narrow and ineffectual. This article focuses on an area not adequately discussed in the existing literature—the debate about, and impact of, replacing initial criminal sanctions with American-styled conciliation and civil remedies, and subsequent creation of conciliation machinery. It argues that the protracted process of forming this Board had a greater impact upon the Act’s success than has been previously acknowledged, as it demonstrated the bipartite lack of desire to address the politically unpopular issue of race and immigration, thus creating further disillusionment towards the British state. Rather than being the ‘last step’ in such legislation, as desired by many at the time, its weaknesses and limitations stimulated criticism and increased political action, leading to subsequent broader legislation in future years.     

The ‘Obstacle of Sex’. Christina of Sweden and Her Aspirations to the Polish–Lithuanian Throne

An important field of research related to early modern sovereignty is the topic of female political authority. This article aims to utilise the category of gender to analyse potential obstacles that Queen Christina of Sweden had to overcome in order to obtain royal dignity in an elective monarchy, the early modern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Could the election of a female monarch constitute an acceptable and functional alternative for the Catholic and conservative noble society of this vast composite state? Former examples of Jadwiga of Anjou (1384) and Anna Jagiellon (1576) elected and crowned Kings of Poland seemed to suggest as much. The case of Christina's aspirations is all the more interesting, as her prominent supporter during the royal election of 1669 was the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Clement IX. It is, in fact, the diplomatic correspondence created by the papal Secretariat of State that constitutes the historical basis for the research presented here.     

Writing History,Making ‘Race’: Slave-Owners and Their Stories†

This article uses the database created by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project (www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs) which documents the recipients of the twenty million pounds paid in compensation to the slave-owners at the time of abolition, as a starting point from which to explore some of the implications of the flow of human and financial capital to Australia in the 1830s and 1840s. Once the Caribbean was no longer a place to make a fortune, descendants of slave-owners chose this new colony of white settlement as the next frontier of empire. Colonial officials, sheep farmers and writers were amongst those who attempted to make a new life, carrying with them attitudes to racial difference which inflected their understanding of Aboriginal peoples.     

Unnatural discourse. ‘Race’ and gender in geography

Geographers’ long‐term involvement in the construction ‘race’ and gender has occurred through literally and metaphorically mapping out the world in ways that highlight, perpetuate and naturalize difference. This paper provides a critical analysis of the naturalization of these categories by revealing parallels in their social construction and in the ways in which they have been independently conceptualized. The focus is on the extent to which ‘race’ and gender as social constructs have been, and are, predicated upon biological categories. We argue for a conceptualization which, while eschewing notions of essentialism and determinism, integrates the biological and social, recognizing that distinctions between the biological and cultural are invariably socially constructed. We also highlight the extent to which social constructions are political constructions, sexism and racism being modes of thought which construct the body for ideological ends. We begin to chart the political strategies whereby dominant notions of the biological and cultural can be unnaturalized, thus challenging the ways in which ‘race’ and gender are used to create social identities and to maintain relations of domination. In an attempt to develop an alternative to strategic essentialism, we focus on the practice of unnatural discourse, of imposing disorder on dominant discourses through, for example, practices associated with the unnatural, the unnaturalization of everyday language, the unnaturalization of landscapes upon which gendered and racialized relations are played out, the questioning of our disciplinary codes and the unnaturalization of vision by developing new ways of seeing the racialized and gendered embodiment of subjects.     

Ludwig Knoop, ‘The Arkwright of Russia’

Abstract

Piece-rate arrangements in the British cotton weaving industry were anomalous in that they prescribed a weekly wage based on output. Although, to some extent, output reflected the work done by the weaver, it was also governed by technical and other factors which were beyond the weaver's control. A wage system which emphasized the repair of broken threads and the replenishment of empty shuttles would have been preferable since these were the principal elements of the weaver's work. The absence of a clear relationship between effort and reward confounded attempts to increase productivity in cotton weaving between the wars, and was a particular obstacle to the adoption of the 'more-looms' systems. This article explores the anomalies and the issues to which they gave rise, both at industry level and in a local context characterized by the manufacture of diverse fabric types. It concludes that there was an uncritical acceptance of traditional wage arrangements, reinforced by a fear that fundamental change would destabilize an already fragile system of industry level (that is, across the cotton weaving industry as a whole) bargaining.     

‘Impressions of Weird Fate’: Revision and Crisis in ‘The Lady of Shalott’

Alfred Tennyson disliked the engraving of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ produced by William Holman Hunt for the 1857 Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems, accusing the artist of taking too many liberties in depicting the Lady’s hair and the threads of her weaving as ‘wildly tossing’ around her. This essay traces the histories of both Hunt’s image and Tennyson’s text, arguing that the poet’s objection is grounded in the fact the engraving reproduces the fierce agency that characterizes the Lady in Tennyson’s 1832 original but not his 1842 revision. That pattern of revision, I suggest, reflects the poet’s distress over the 1833 death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam and is motivated by his new ways of thinking, in the wake of that catastrophe, about the crisis of desire and the perpetual trauma of communication between the living and the dead.     

‘Playtime in the Borderlands’: Children's Representations of School,Gender and Bullying through Photographs and Interviews

Photography has been commonly used as a research tool in studies of childhood/children. However images of school children in official documentation are rarely taken or chosen by children and may not reflect their real experiences. This research considered the photographs taken by year six primary school children of their school and the images they chose to represent themselves. Subsequent interviews with children revealed attitudes to school, the importance of playground relationships in the construction of gender, leading to the concept of ‘borderlands’ inhabited by some boys who adopt non-hegemonic masculinities.     

The ‘arc of instability’ and Australia's strategic policy

The proposition that Australia faces an ‘arc of instability’ to its north has been an important feature of the Australian strategic debate in the early twenty-first century. Prompted by worries in the late 1990s over Indonesia's future and East Timor's uncertain path to independence, the ‘arc’ metaphor also encapsulated growing Australian concerns about the political cohesiveness of Melanesian polities, including Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. While tending to overlook the divergent experiences of countries within its expanding boundaries, the ‘arc’ fed from Australia's historical requirement for a secure archipelagic screen. As such it has became an important weapon in the debate over whether the locus of Australia's strategic priorities should be increasingly global in the ‘war on terror’ period or remain closer to home in the immediate region. The ‘arc of instability’ metaphor was consequently adopted by leading Australian Labor Party politicians to argue that the Howard Coalition government was neglecting South Pacific security challenges. It became less prominent following the Howard government's greater activism in the South Pacific, signalled by Australia's leadership of the East Timor intervention in 2003. But its prominence returned in 2006 with the unrest in both Honiara and Dili. In overall terms, the ‘arc of instability’ discussion has helped direct Australian strategic and political attention to the immediate neighbourhood. But it has not provided specific policy guidance on what should be done to address the instabilities it includes.     

Colonies and Colonisation in Bulwer Lytton’s The Caxtons,A Strange Story and The Coming Race

Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, an eminently popular novelist, published The Caxtons in 1849. Though sub-titled A Family Picture and mainly concerned with domestic life, it included a lengthy disquisition on colonisation and emigration, its value to British society and its role in extending civilisation by spreading ‘God’s law, improvement’. His colonial example was ‘Australia’. A Radical MP in the 1830s, but opposed to the encroachment of ‘democracy’ and supportive of the Corn Laws, in the early 1850s Lytton turned to the Conservative Party. In 1858–59 he served as secretary of state for the colonies. In the light of his experience, his view of Australia and of self-governing colonies was modified, as A Strange Story (1862) shows. But in 1871, in The Coming Race, an elaborate satire on democracy and egalitarianism, he made a distinct addition to the colonial theme of The Caxtons. He did not doubt that ‘improvement’ and colonisation produced evidence of ‘the triumph of civilization’, but a metaphor embedded in the later novel indicated the inevitability of displacement of aboriginal inhabitants by Anglo-Saxon settlers.