A Founder: Aaron Wildavsky and the Study of Public Policy

During the decade of the 1960s a new social science discipline was created. Aaron Wildavsky, along with a small number of other scholars, began focusing their research on public policy studies and the analysis of governmental policy. This article discusses Professor Aaron Wildavsky's original interest in this field, how he institutionalized it by creating a Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and his major contributions to the emerging field. Aaron Wildavsky was one of the preeminent social scientists of the twentieth century, and this article is intended to explain why.     

Heritage in trust: Sustainable stewardship in transition?

Abstract

Frequently identified with ‘establishment’ values the National Trust has as often been a focus of critique as of celebration. This essay examines the Trust's changing relation to contested values of heritage as manifest in its acquisitions and management policies, in its engagement with environmental and social issues and an emerging politicisation which transcends a narrow, purely property‐based interpretation of its statutory purpose. Recent acquisitions challenge conventional perceptions of ‘natural beauty’ and ‘historic interest’. Organisational greening has precipitated a review of the implications of stewardship ‘in perpetuity’. Recognition of the needs of local communities and awareness of equal opportunities issues have prompted a reinterpretation of its founders’ concerns with access and enjoyment ‘for the nation’. These developments manifest an inchoate shift in the Trust's emphasis from the preservation of the status quo to engagement with change, both within the context of its own properties and in its relations to the wider society and environment. The Trust is unlikely ever to lead changes in public perceptions of heritage but neither is its role necessarily or irredeemably a wholly reactionary one. Inertial and cautious, the Trust reflects and articulates the shifting resolution of contested cultural values.     

Elizabeth Elstob (1674–1752): England's First Professional Woman Historian?

Elizabeth Elstob was a scholar of Anglo‐Saxon, who published two important books and was admired by the leaders of the new movement for Anglo‐Saxon studies in the early eighteenth century. She was able to be part of this community because her brother William encouraged and enabled it. His death in 1715 was a catastrophe, marking the end of her productive life as an intellectual and plunging her into poverty. She disappeared for almost twenty years, but was discovered and rescued by the first generation of bluestockings. A project she had begun – a history of intellectual women – was taken up and completed by George Ballard. His Memoirs of British Ladies(1752) included Elstob's memories about Mary Astell, and is, among other things, the single most important source of information about this pioneer feminist.     

The case of the nun Mettiyā reexamined: on the expulsion of a pregnant bhikṣuṇī in the Vinaya of the Mahāsāṅghikas and other Indian Buddhist monastic law codes

Indo-Iranian Journal -