Organizing From Diversity in the Name of Community: Lessons From the Disability Civil Rights Movement

The recent passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and other pieces of legislation affecting the disability community and other civil rights communities suggests a level of cohesion within the disability movement that blurs the reality and the power of the tensions which did and do exist. Examining the struggles to maintain an effective, cohesive entity provides an opportunity to explore the complexity of the disability movement as well as lessons for policy and program planning and for community organizing.     

A Taste for Mustard: An Archaeological Examination of a Condiment and Its Bottles from a Loyalist Homestead in Upper Canada

During the excavation of the Loyalist-period Butler Homestead site in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario a small cache of glass condiment bottles was discovered in a space identified as a larder or pantry. The form of the bottles suggests that they once contained dry mustard powder, the bottles of which are usually recovered from military sites when found in Canada. This paper examines the cultural history of mustard as a food and medicine, its role in eighteenth-century British cookery and agriculture, and demonstrates how this specific form of glass container tied a Loyalist household to local and international trade networks in British North America and England.     

Studies in British imperial history. Essays in honour of A.P. Thornton

This article examines the disputes amongst Irish Presbyterians about the teaching of moral philosophy by Professor John Ferrie in the college department of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution in the early nineteenth century and the substantive philosophical and theological issues that were raised. These issues have largely been ignored by Irish historians, but a discussion of them is of general relevance to historians of ideas as they illuminate a series of broader questions about the definition and development of Scottish philosophy. These are represented in the move from two philosophers who had strong connections with Irish Presbyterianism—Francis Hutcheson, the early eighteenth-century moral sense philosopher and theological moderate from County Down, and James McCosh, nineteenth-century exponent of modified Common Sense philosophy at Queen's College Belfast and a committed evangelical. In particular, this article addresses three important themes—the definition and character of ‘the Scottish philosophy’, the relationship between evangelicalism and Common Sense philosophy, and the process of development and adaptation that occurred in eighteenth-century Scottish thought during the first half of the nineteenth century.     

Modern revolutions: An introduction to the analysis of a political phenomenon

This paper provides an interpretation of the movement of Arendt's thought in her Denktagebuch, from 1950 to 1973. This movement results in an incipient political philosophy based on new concepts of freedom, equality, and solidarity. As a contribution to debates on the normative foundations of Arendt's political thought, the paper seeks to show that her incipient political philosophy is based on an ethical understanding of the human condition as constituted by its openness to the divine, the worldly, and the (human) Other. Despite its fragmentary nature and its politically problematic indebtedness to theological traditions, Arendt's private thought nevertheless allows us to rethink her place in the history of European ideas. Beyond that, it also provides a powerful alternative to the view that ethical and political thought must remain ‘political not metaphysical’.     

The Impact of Property Taxes and Property Tax Classification on Business Activity in the Chicago Metropolitan Area

The City of Chicago and the inner suburbs grew much more slowly than the outer suburbs in recent decades. In the central county of the metropolitan area, commercial and industrial property is "classified," in that it is assessed at a higher ratio of market value than residential property. Classification is not used in the surrounding suburban counties. The empirical analysis finds evidence consistent with the notion that property tax classification contributes to differential rates of economic growth. High property tax rates lead to significantly slower growth rates for employment, commercial property, and industrial property.