James McNeill Whistler in Chile: Portrait of the Artist as Arms Dealer

The colorful and controversial life of American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler took many twists and turns. One of the most dramatic and least explicable of the turns came in 1866, when he traveled to Valparaiso, Chile. Generations of Whistler biographers have been puzzled by the reasons for this sojourn, but a recently discovered collection of documents provides significant clues for solving the mystery. Whistler, it seems, had become involved in a scheme to provide weapons to the Chilean navy in a war against Spain. The scheme turned into a fiasco, dashing Whistler’s hopes of handsome financial profits, but his weeks in South America significantly shaped his development as an artist.     

A Voice in the Nation: Women Journalists in the Early Nineteenth‐Century South

Recent work on southern women and intellectual life in the nineteenth‐century South has focused on women novelists. Relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to literary periodicals as important vehicles through which women earned financial reward and often regional or national reputations as authors and editors. Perhaps most significantly, southern women viewed periodicals as opportunities to speak out boldly on politics and current events, much more so than in the novel. The wide availability after 1820 of magazines and newspapers, made possible by their low cost and portability, provided the perfect forum for women who wished to push against traditional gender boundaries. In examining southern women’s contributions to early nineteenth‐century periodical culture, one sees a vital part of the foundation being laid for later movements for women’s suffrage.     

Exchange networks of the Early Bronze Age Gulf: The imported ceramics from Kalba 4 (United Arab Emirates)

Imported ceramics from Early Bronze Age contexts in southeast Arabia illustrate a complex multidirectional network of material and social interactions at this time. Significant socioeconomic changes that occurred in the Hafit (3200–2800 B.C.) and Umm an-Nar (2800–2000 B.C.) periods have been linked to external demand for copper, which is argued to have stimulated a change in subsistence patterns. Similarly, disruption to long-distance exchange networks by external factors has been cited as driving change at the end of the Umm an-Nar period. Archaeological evidence from the region suggests a shift in the direction of exchange from Mesopotamia to the Indus occurred around the middle of the third millennium B.C. However, a recent analysis of Mesopotamian historical sources has highlighted the scale of state-organised textile production for export to the lower Gulf in the later third millennium B.C. The site of Kalba 4 has a stratified sequence of occupation deposits dating from the Umm an-Nar and Iron Age (1300–300 B.C.). In this study, a typological analysis of imported ceramics is used to locate the Kalba in the chronological framework of the region and discuss the changing networks of long-distance exchange that were operating. The imported pottery at Kalba 4 indicates that the inhabitants of the site were exchanging goods with a range of polities, including southern Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley (Meluhha), southeast Iran (Marhashi) and Bahrain (Dilmun). A significant quantity of Late Akkadian ceramics at the site suggests it became an important location for Mesopotamian trade at this time.     

Arts and culture in an era of austerity: key stakeholder views on the current and future Australian context

The arts and culture sector in many countries faces major challenges, as a consequence of ongoing austerity measures and changes in the ways in which the arts are experienced. In major nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom and in several European countries, there is considerable pressure to look for new ways of surviving in an age of consumerism, accountability and rapidly changing technologies. On the other hand, many Asian countries have invested heavily in building their arts and culture sector as part of the new twenty-first-century economy. The arts and culture sector in Australia faces serious challenges at present, including ongoing fiscal pressures, an absence of any national cultural policy and disruption as a consequence of changing governments. In order to explore these issues, interviews were held with 22 key leaders from a range of Australian organisations associated with arts representation, funding, policy and advocacy. The findings highlight both the challenges and opportunities facing Australia towards what may be considered the next wave of innovation and change.