State,peasant, mosquito: The biopolitics of public health education and malaria in early republican Turkey

State officials in early republican Turkey framed malaria as both a medical and a political issue. In doing so, they engaged in public health education campaigns not only to resolve medical concerns but also to better govern the country's population and promote a broader modernist agenda. This article employs primary sources from Turkish archives and other collections in order to examine the governmental and the biopolitical implications of this experience. We thus scrutinize the civilizational discourse employed by politicians and physicians as they dealt with this “village disease,” the peoples who they encountered—and taught, and the obstacles that they perceived to exist within the traditional curative beliefs and practices found throughout rural Anatolia. Emphasizing modernist ideals in their medicine as much as in their politics, we conclude that health officials' lessons for waging an effective “war” on malaria targeted not just the disease but also its perceived societal sources of origin and—hence—the very populace it presumably sought to protect.     

The historical geography of 1 Kings 9:11–14

ABSTRACT

1 Kings 9:11–14 relates Solomon’s sale of the land of Cabul to Hiram, king of Tyre. Commentaries and studies on this pericope have dealt with its linguistic and historical aspects without reaching consensus on where this land was, what the term ‘Cabul’ actually means, or even whether these verses preserve an actual historic event from the 10th century BCE. This article addresses these issues through a more systematic presentation of the archaeological remains and geographic realities in the Galilee, and in so doing, offers a more contextually derived understanding of the events recorded in 1 Kgs 9:11–14 than has heretofore been offered.     

Constitutionalists,Despots, Whigs,and Revisionists: Tudor Parliamentary History in the 20th Century

The 20th century was the great age of Tudor parliamentary history. This essay examines the contributions and profound changes to the field made by the leading historians of the era, especially Sir John Neale and Sir Geoffrey Elton. Taking as its starting point the whiggish ideas of Stubbs's Constitutional History of England, it traces the impact of A.F. Pollard, G.M. Trevelyan, and Sir Lewis Namier on the field. At its core, though, lie the often acrimonious differences of opinion between Neale and his pupil, Elton. For Neale the Elizabethan parliaments were characterised by an increasingly puritanical Commons eager to wrest control of debates on religion and the succession away from the queen. In so doing this created a constitutional clash that would eventually lead to civil war in the mid 17th century. This ‘orthodoxy’ was savagely critiqued by a revisionist ‘school’ led by Elton that dismantled the interpretation of Neale and replaced it with an institution that was not dominated by political conflict but by largely consensual politics. It was also a position that gave equal weight to the Lords and to the importance of the business of parliament – legislation. The revisionists were masters of critique and highly effective at demolishing Neale, but did little to replace his theories or to explain religio‐political conflict – in doing so it could be argued that they killed the subject. The essay ends by suggesting some new approaches to Tudor parliaments that could help revitalise the subject.