On Narco‐coyotaje: Illicit Regimes and Their Impacts on the US–Mexico Border

Many have debated whether or not human smugglers, known as coyotes, are involved with drug trafficking organizations. Scholars have largely rejected so‐called “narcocoyotaje”, however; we hope to problematize this narrative by adding a new theoretical layer to the discussion. Namely, we explore the ways in which different criminal activities produce hierarchies and control illicit activities within the clandestine geography of the US–Mexico border. These “illicit regimes” operate against the State, creating a hierarchy that dominates other illicit activities in order to maximize profit, avoid detection and consolidate power. While other studies have explored the relationships between the State and illicit practices this article takes the relationship between two illicit industries as its object of study. Doing so will help us move past the simply binary question about whether or not coyotes are involved with drug cartels, and allows us to understand what is being produced by this relationship, and its consequences for everyone involved.     

Colonising Italians: Italian Imperialism and Agricultural ‘Colonies’ in Australia, 1881–1914

The historiography of Australian imperialism before the First World War has often neglected a context wider than the relationship with Great Britain. Yet this era also implicated non-British governments and their emigrants. Despite their small numbers, Italian settlers are significant for highlighting Italy's empire-building and Australia's struggles for national and imperial unity. Italy's foreign policies after 1901 opened commercial opportunities across its diasporic networks, which included subsidising agricultural ‘colonies’ in Australia. The contemporary discourses of sectarianism and racism voiced before Federation articulated political and popular resistance against Italian immigrants. The rhetoric shifted after Federation as state governments examined the issue of land tenure for closer settlements (small agricultural farms), appealing to an argument about serving unemployed Australians before approving foreign settler schemes. The history leading up to two Italian projects in Western Australia and Queensland in 1907 allows reflections on Italy's diaspora colonisation and Australian responses to foreign imperialism.     

The Conte-en-vers: Expanding Stith Thompson's X-File of Obscene Motifs

The conte-en-vers is a narrative dealing with bawdy subjects presented in verse form and with a certain elegance of expression that contrasts markedly with its licentious content. La Fontaine's Contes, provide material through which to explore bawdy stories that were circulating during the seventeenth century. Furthermore, La Fontaine's followers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries afford a rich source from which to glean information about erotic folktales current in France during that period. The conte-en-vers genre is of special significance to folklorists because the authors incorporated current folklore motifs into their tales, making of them an important, though neglected, repository of folklore during three centuries. The conte-en-vers provides a corpus which facilitates the task of filling in Stith Thompson's blank category of obscene motifs, X700-749 “Humor Concerning Sex.”     

Race and politics in Milwaukee

Peter Eisenger. Poverty, Race, and the Politics of Integration. New York: Academic Press.     

How to Handle a Liberated Woman

Abstract

In this article, the author presents a strategy for designing relational databases with the program FileMaker Pro (FileMaker) to study the histories of individuals and organizations. The approach facilitates efficiency in inputting data and flexibility for constructing statistical analyses from the raw data. The key feature of the strategy is to define the basic unit of observation in the database in terms of an agent, an event, and a date. Given that programs such as FileMaker can easily sort data by agent and date, once one structures the data correctly, he or she can construct well-ordered event histories for agents, even if the researcher enters the data in an unordered fashion. By using events that happened to an agent at a particular time as the basic unit of observation, one maintains maximum flexibility to do statistical analysis that aggregates basic data in different ways. This article illustrates the power of the approach by outlining ways to analyze changes in geographic distances between two events marking the life histories of chemists.     

Mapping a New Kind of European Boundary: The Language Border between Modern France and Germany

ABSTRACT

During the nineteenth century, Europeans became fascinated with the idea of locating and mapping the borders between their languages. The barrier of language offered a new way of seeing, dividing and organizing European land according to cultural differences. The cartographic techniques that Europeans invented to map their language borders involved a combination of linguistic surveys, on-site observations and collaboration with locals. Once printed, language maps found a broad public audience and helped to structure debates over cultural identity in European borderlands. This article explores the nationalist and regionalist motivations behind linguistic map making along the French-German border, one of the most disputed in modern European history.