Front doors to freedom,portal to the past: history at the Ellis Island immigration museum,New York

Heritage sites and museums play a significant role in the production and legitimization of historical knowledges and social identities. The potential for these institutions to act in ways that maintain deep‐rooted inequalities in the relative power of social groups has long been noted by academic commentators. A critique of the role of museums in reproducing ‘official’ histories is now well established. In this paper we explore new ways of conceptualizing and empirically exploring the production and politics of museum histories. By tracing the historical development of museums, we explore the power play between individual actors and institutions involved in production of the museum, and the multi‐vocal histories and landscapes which result from the interaction between these actors. We illustrate these arguments through a case study of Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York Harbor.     

Reinventing the penitentiary: Punishment in Florida, 1868–1923

This study of the origins and development of Florida's state prison system, and the shift from the penitentiary to convict leasing in the 1880s, examines the relationship between penal practice in one Southern state and Foucault's conception of penal modernity, and the connections between race and gender and leasing. It argues that convict leasing which emerged from the failure of the penitentiary in Florida, reflects the continuity of an older model of punishment centering on punishing the body physically. Discipline and surveillance were essential features of Florida's convict lease system, but the absence of massive walls, individual cells and regimes of silence meant this Southern model conducted on private turpentine farms and phosphate mines was very different from the original Auburn and Pennsylvania penitentiaries.     

Military geography: A review

Through sixty years of chequered fortune the Magazine showed the impact of current history, notably during the 1914‐18 war when a few authors, notably Newbigin, Chisholm and Mackinder, wrote fine articles on current international problems. From 1919 many studies of geography as a whole and of its various branches appeared, a number of them given as presidential addresses to Section E of the British Association. The tradition of publishing local research studies was maintained and developed from the 1930's, both for Scotland and for areas elsewhere.     

Round Kangchenjunga

From about 1700 onwards, several maps were produced showing the supposed position of the “Highland Line” — the boundary between Highland and Lowland Scotland. The paper assesses the cartographic evidence for the relative positioning of this division within Scotland apparent in a number of maps dating from 1700 to 1895. Several other sources are used to determine the accuracy of these mapped lines in relation to the actual extent of the Gaelic language in that period.     

The rhetoric of consensus

Bob Hawke has used the notion of consensus in three distinct ways. The term was first employed as a polemic to discredit the Fraser government and establish Hawke's claim to the ALP leadership. It then became shorthand for the political program Hawke put forward during the 1983 election campaign. Finally — and perhaps most ambitiously — it sought a new philosophical twist for Australian politics. By 1985, however, the concept lacked credibility and was quietly abandoned as polemic, program or government philosophy. The rhetoric of consensus, for all its success, was short‐lived in its usefulness.