The Irish rebellion of 1798

The Rebellion in Wicklow 1798 Ruan O'donnell, 1998 Dublin, Irish Academic Press pp.441, ISBN 0.7165.2659.X, £39.50 (hb)

On the Road to Rebellion: The United Irishmen and Hamburg 1796–1803 Paul Weber, 1997 Dublin, Four Courts Press pp.205, ISBN 9.781851.82311.6, £30.00 (hb)

The Summer Soldiers: The 1798 Rebellion in Antrim and Down A. T. Q. Stewart, 1995 Belfast, The Blackstaff Press pp. 294, ISBN 0.85640.558.2, £12.99 (pb)

1798: Rebellion in County Down Myrtle Hill, Brian Turner & Kenneth Dawson (eds), 1998 Gortrush, Colourpoint pp.286, ISBN 1.898392.44.7, £8.99 (pb)

The Sites of the 1798 Rising in Antrim and Down Bill Wilsdon, 1997 Belfast, The Blackstaff Press pp. 191, ISBN 85640.615.5, £7.99 (pb)     

Common Roots and Entangled Limbs: Earth First! and the Growth of Post-Wilderness Environmentalism on California's North Coast

Conflicts over the protection of redwood trees on California's North Coast are often depicted as following the trajectory of the radical wing of the larger American environmental movement, in which "radical" refers to the sharpness of the boundary drawn and defended between human despoliation and pure nature or "wilderness." Earth First!—an environmental organization characterized by their slogan, "No compromise in the defense of Mother Earth!"—is often depicted as simply the leading edge of this deepening rift between nature and culture. I argue, on the contrary, that the Earth First! branches on California's North Coast should be understood as making bold, if incomplete, attempts to cast off the problematic nature–culture dichotomy and to define social justice and ecological health as struggles with a common root. By moving beyond wilderness, the North Coast Earth First! offers the promise of a truly radical movement, by which I mean one which truly confronts capital's interlinked degradation of both natural and human communities. This article examines the efforts by the North Coast Earth First! to inscribe a new community of activists and timber-workers joined in the struggle to contest corporate claims on the redwood forest. It explores the ambiguous effects of activists' "embodied" and "home-based" practices on this budding alliance, particularly the ways in which such practices also have alienated workers by redefining the redwood forest as the exclusive property of the activists' themselves.     

The collective capitalism of Northeast Asia and the limits of orthodox economics

In an effort to offer a more balanced assessment of Northeast Asian political economy than is typically found in the conventional neo‐classical tradition, this paper highlights forms of business collectivism and state‐economy interaction that have, arguably, played an important role in Northeast Asian economic dynamism. Beyond this, there is an account of why mainstream economic analysis has been so one‐sided in its analysis of Northeast Asia. A number of policy implications are also drawn from the analysis.     

Changing queenships in tenth-century England: rhetoric and (self-)representation in the case of Eadgifu of Kent at Cooling

The charter now known as Sawyer 1211 contains a detailed account of an intergenerational property dispute between Queen Eadgifu and her rival Goda, concerning the possession of two Kentish estates. Typically, the charter has either been understood as evidence of dispute settlement or to establish facts about Eadgifu that are otherwise unattested. This article argues that Sawyer 1211 has further value when approached as a narrative which drew upon Eadgifu’s memories and oral testimony. Read in this way, it reveals a (self-)representation of her legal agency that has important implications for the understanding of early English queenship.     

Constructing Sustainable Rural Landscapes: Oil Mallees and the Western Australian Wheatbelt

This paper considers the landscapes of the Western Australian wheatbelt and the possibilities for sustainability signified by the Oil Mallee Project. The Oil Mallee Project aims to develop commercially viable tree crops for the low rainfall wheatbelt region as a means of profitably managing dryland salinity. Interviews with farmers and other stakeholders in the Oil Mallee Project and agriculture are analysed to reveal important elements of landscape construction in the wheatbelt and stages in the emergence of the Project. These elements include historical land clearing, international chemical and machinery companies and the technologies they supply, land of marginal economic productivity, global food markets and alley farming systems. The paper uses material semiotics and actor‐network theory in describing the networks of relationships that shape wheatbelt landscapes. Breakdowns in the dominant networks of industrial agriculture provide spaces for the Oil Mallee Project to build relationships that reconnect industrial systems to the specific ecology of the wheatbelt landscape. However, the networks of industrial agriculture remain powerful and the Project has worked strategically to become integrated with existing agricultural systems, rather than aiming to directly resist or entirely displace dominant patterns of production in the wheatbelt.     

‘Mother's Little Helper’: The Crisis of Psychoanalysis and the Miltown Resolution

This paper examines the discourse surrounding the release in 1955 of Miltown, America's first psychotropic wonder drug. According to many histories of psychiatry, Miltown heralded the arrival of a new paradigm in treating psychiatric patients – as a drug that operated on a neurochemical level, it was argued to replace a psychoanalytic approach with its focus on the mother‐child relation. Between 1955 and 1960, articles about pharmaceutical miracle cures for mental illnesses filled mass‐circulation news magazines and top fashion magazines. Through analysis of these representations, this article shows how the newly discovered pills came to be associated with existing concerns about conditions problematically referred to as ‘maternal conditions,’ ranging from a woman's frigidity, to a bride's uncertainty, to a wife's infidelity. Using these representations, the paper demonstrates how in American popular culture, psychoanalytic notions of motherhood prevalent in the 1950s shaped early understandings and uses of psychotropic drugs.