Irrational amusements,theatre law,and moral reformers in nineteenth-century America: implications for later popular music study

This paper considers several case studies of conflicts between moral reformers active in US cities and venues catering to working-class audiences from the 1860s to 1880s. For moral reformers, theatrical entertainments, particularly forms with no educational or moral purpose, were deeply corrupting and threatened not only the well-being of the individual, but also that of the nation. These case studies show that tensions emerged when popular styles sought to expand their audience beyond their traditional patrons or to move into respectable areas of the city – in other words, when they did not stay in their traditional place. This is also true of the many hybrid musical forms that combined European-based folk or religious styles with African-American music. Forms such as jazz and rock ‘n’ roll did not elicit significant protest until they began to find an audience in northern cities among middle- and lower-middle-class youth. Exploring how laws were changed in response to earlier conflicts adds a crucial historical perspective to popular music studies, which tends to remain firmly focused on music from the mid-twentieth century onwards.     

Charlotte Sophia Burne: Shropshire Folklorist,First Woman President of the Folklore Society,and First Woman Editor of Folklore. Part 1: A Life and Appreciation

Charlotte Burne (1850–1923) served the Folklore Society (FLS) for forty years. She was editor of the massive Shropshire Folklore (1883–6), and the second revised edition of the FLS's only official guide, The Handbook of Folklore (1914). She authored over seventy folklore papers, notes and reviews in Folklore and its predecessors, as well as several articles in newspapers and magazines; she was the first woman editor of this journal (1900–08) and the first woman President of the FLS (1909–10). This appreciation is the first part of a two-part study of her life and works. The second part will be a provisional bibliography of her published works.     

Medieval Britain in 1967

Abstract

Almost 180 years of scholarship on the Lewis chessmen have given us a solid foundation of understanding, primarily based upon their art-historical analysis. Taking a more interdisciplinary approach (combining elements of art history with archaeology and history), this paper focuses on some over-looked themes — primarily the archaeological, gaming and political contexts of the 12th- and 13th-century North Sea world — and some more familiar themes but in a new light. We suggest a more fluid composition and function of the gaming hoard, with at least four sets of chessmen from the same workshop conceivably made for use in Lewis, possibly in the early 13th century.     

Navigating the “International Dots and Dashes”: David W. McFadden's Great Lakes Suite and the Canada–US Border

In Great Lakes Suite (1997), David W. McFadden fictionalizes his travels around three Great Lakes bisected by the Canada–US border. McFadden both uses and subverts generalizations and stereotypes as the text destabilizes categories of sameness and difference, illustrating an unsettled and unsettling Canada–US relationship. McFadden demonstrates that the “hospitable” relations between Canada and the US are rife with power imbalances: the positions of host and guest, and relations of hospitality and hostility, do not remain fixed, often undermining the Canadian host position. Writing in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, at the time of US intervention in Nicaragua, and leading up to the Free Trade Agreement (FTA), McFadden demonstrates that power constitutes the clearest distinction between Canada and the US. In the midst of Canadian struggles for political and economic power, McFadden uses an ironic humor to reclaim a cultural power for Canada as he argues in favor of maintaining the border.     

Examining the memorialscape of occupation and liberation: a case study from the Channel Islands

This paper introduces the concept of the ‘memorialscape’ as a tool for studying the inter-relationship of memorials within a single rural or urban environment or landscape. Using a case study of the British Channel Islands, where the number of memorials relating to the German occupation of 1940–1945 has increased greatly since 1985 (the 40th anniversary of liberation), I examine the active role these memorials have played in changing the occupation narrative of the islands. This paper will also explore the importance of memorial marginality and centrality; memorial inter-visibility; the difference between the memorialscape of the capital towns of Guernsey and Jersey and the groups they commemorate; and the narrative that the resulting memorialscape produces.