Intergenerational transmission of reproductive behavior during the demographic transition

New evidence from the Utah Population Database (UPDP) reveals that at the onset of the fertility transition, reproductive behavior was transmitted across generations - between women and their mothers, as well as between women and their husbands' family of origin. Age at marriage, age at last birth, and the number of children ever born are positively correlated in the data, most strongly among first-born daughters and among cohorts born later in the fertility transition. Intergenerational ties, including the presence of mothers and mothers-in-law, influenced the hazard of progressing to a next birth. The findings suggest that the practice of parity-dependent marital fertility control and inter-birth spacing behavior derived, in part, from the previous generation and that the potential for mothers and mothers-in-law to help in the rearing of children encouraged higher marital fertility.     

Nationalism, racism and propaganda in early Weimar Germany: contradictions in the campaign against the "black horror on the Rhine"

During the early 1920s, an average of 25,000 colonial soldiers from North Africa, Senegal and Madagascar formed part of the French army of occupation in the Rhineland. The campaign against these troops, which used the racist epithet ‘black horror on the Rhine’ (schwarze Schmach am Rhein), was one of the most important propaganda efforts of the Weimar period. In black horror propaganda, images of alleged sexual violence against Rhenish women and children by African French soldiers served as metaphors for Germany’s ‘victimization’ through the Versailles Treaty. Because the campaign initially gained broad popular and official support, historians have tended to consider the black horror a successful nationalist movement bridging political divides and strengthening the German nation state. In contrast, this essay points to some of the contradictions within the campaign, which often crystallized around conflicts over the nature of effective propaganda. Extreme racist claims about the Rhineland’s alleged ‘mulattoization’ (Mulattisierung) increasingly alienated Rhinelanders and threatened to exacerbate traditional tensions between the predominantly Catholic Rhineland and the central state at a time when Germany’s western borders seemed rather precarious in the light of recent territorial losses and separatist agitation. There was a growing concern that radical strands within the black horror movement were detrimental to the cohesion of the German nation state and to Germany’s positive image abroad, and this was a major reason behind the campaign’s decline after 1921/22. The conflicts within the campaign also point to some hitherto neglected affinities between the black horror and subsequent Nazi propaganda.     

Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria. Myth and Archive. A Theory of Latin American Narrative.

Abstract

Nigel Dennis, ed. El Epistolario (1924–1935). José Bergamín-Manuel de Falla. Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1995. 178 pp. Nigel Dennis, ed. En torno a la poesía de José Bergamín. Universitat de Lleida: 1995. 266 pp.

David K. Danow. The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque. The University Press of Kentucky, 1995. 153 pp.

Karl D. Uitti with Michelle Freeman. Chrétien de Troyes Revisited. (Twayne's World Author Series Revisited, 855) New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. xv + 169 pp.

Downing A. Thomas. Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press, 1995. xi + 195 pp. $49.95.

George May. La perruque de Dom Juan, ou du bon usage des énigmes dans la littérature classique. (Coll. Bibliothèque de l'Âge classique.) Paris: Klincksieck, 1995. 144 pp.

Norman Roth. Converses, Inquisition, and the Expulsion. University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. xv + 429 pp.

Simon Gaunt. Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature. (Cambridge Studies in French, 53) Cambridge University Press, 1995. x + 372 pp.

F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis, eds. A Handbook of the Troubadours. University of California Press, 1995. vii + 501 pp. $55.00 (HB) $22.50 (PB).     

The Italian welfare state after the financial crisis

The essential characteristics of the Italian welfare state as it developed after the Second World War generated social cleavages and inequities that affected the Italian economy and provided grist for future reforms. At the same time, the welfare state provided political actors with incentives and resources that constrained attempts at reform. With the financial crisis beginning in 2008, serious reform was no longer optional. But austerity politics have generated pressures for changes to the welfare state which are unlikely to moderate most of the underlying inequities generated by the post-war system. Going forward, Italian policymakers must chart a path that is informed by efforts to overcome the pathologies of the past without further undermining the social and economic health of the country.     

Teaching ethics when working with geocoded data: a novel experiential learning approach

Research ethics are not the favourite subject of most undergraduate geography students. However, in the light of increasing mixed-methods research, as well as research using geocodes, it is necessary to train students in the field of ethics. Experiential learning is an approach to teaching that is potentially suitable for teaching ethics. The aim of this article is to discuss how the experiential learning process in a course on Ethics & GPS-tracking contributed to the ethical awareness of third-year undergraduate geography students. We conducted a qualitative study in which we held four focus group discussions with two cohorts of students (2016 and 2017). We explored the students’ views on the learning environment in relation to ethics in GPS-based and mixed-methods research. Our findings show how an informal learning environment and collaborative learning in a small group contributed to deep understanding of research ethics. These aspects of the learning environment are tied to an ethical framework that consists of three dimensions: (1) the ethics of collaborative research between staff and students; (2) the ethics of privacy raised by the geo-technology adopted in this research case study; and (3) the ethics of the research process with respect to informed consent and data storage.     

Race,space, and agency in the international introduction industry: how American men perceive women’s agency in Colombia,Ukraine and the Philippines

The international introduction industry, more commonly known as the ‘mail order bride’ industry, is often portrayed in American media as a conduit of human trafficking or a ploy by women from ‘third world’ countries to gain access to American citizenship. This study addresses how men participating in the international introduction industry perceived the industry and the agency/sincerity of women who participate in it across three different geographic spaces, namely Ukraine, Colombia and the Philippines, and how these perceptions often adopt racialized discourses that portrays white Ukrainian women as sexy ‘scammers’, while women of color are more likely to be portrayed as victims of poverty and patriarchy. Based on empirical data collected on romance tours within all geographic spaces with male participants, I suggest that men’s racialized assumptions regarding women’s intentions within the industry, as well as what type of agency they possess, are heavily based on tropes of the third world as backwards, traditional, and static.     

Debating Natural Law in the Banda Islands: A Case Study in Anglo–Dutch Imperial Competition in the East Indies, 1609–1621

This article examines Anglo–Dutch rivalry in the Banda Islands in the period from 1609 to 1621, with a particular focus on the process of claiming initiated by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and English East India Company (EIC). Historians have paid little attention to the precise legal justifications employed by these organisations, and how they affected the outcome of events. For both companies, treaties with Asian rulers and peoples were essential in staking out claims to trade and territory. Because so many different parties were involved, individual documents had to serve multiple purposes, both on the ground in the East Indies and at the negotiating tables back in Europe. Whenever a VOC or EIC official presented a treaty to a Bandanese leader, he had to recognise local power structures in the Spice Islands, but also needed to consider his European competitors in the area, his superiors in Batavia or Bantam, and the company directors back in Amsterdam or London. Consequently, the safest and most reliable course of action was to make as many arguments as possible, piling them on top of one another. The result was an inherently messy process of claiming, yet one that was also clearly intelligible to most parties involved, including Asian rulers and peoples. A constantly changing legal suite extended to freedom of trade and navigation, contracts and alliances with native peoples, just war, conquest, actual possession, and the (perceived) surrender of native sovereignty to European authorities.