The Irish rent … and mended: transitional textual communities in nineteenth-century America

In this paper, traditional folkloric forms that were ritualised and practised in pre-Famine Ireland are examined. So, too, are the strategies that storytellers employed in disseminating the imaginative aspects of the oral tradition to their audiences. Following the disruption of the storytelling tradition precipitated by the Great Famine and emigration, the fabric of Irish storytelling lay threadbare, both in Ireland and abroad. Of interest is the fact that in America the less “heroic” and more subtle strands of Irish folklore resurfaced in the theatrical venues that developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, namely, minstrelsy, Vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley. By the turn of twentieth century, the Irish were responding to other “heroic” depictions of themselves, not only with protestation but also with “tongue-in-cheek” laughter. Their grounding in a variety of folkloric texts in Ireland enabled them to transition to multiple kinds of accommodation and expressive resistance.     

Spatial variation in cervical cancer screening participation and outcomes among Indigenous and non‐Indigenous Australians in Queensland

Indigenous women continue to experience a disproportionately higher burden of cervical cancer than non‐Indigenous women in Australia. The National Indigenous Cervical Screening Project used probabilistic record linkage to combine population‐based administrative databases and identify Indigenous women on Pap Smear Registers. This study aimed to quantify the spatial variation by local government areas (LGAs) for Indigenous and non‐Indigenous women in Queensland in cervical screening participation rates and related outcomes. Empirical Bayes local geostatistical smoothing was performed to reduce the likelihood of spurious variation between small areas. The cohort included 1,091,260 women (2 per cent Indigenous) aged 20 to 69 with 2,393,708 Pap smears between 2006 and 2011. Indigenous women had smoothed LGA‐specific 5‐year participation rates (interquartile range (IQR) 38.9–53.3 per 100 eligible women) consistently lower than non‐Indigenous women (IQR 80.7–85.3). The non‐overlapping confidence intervals of these rates suggest that the Indigenous differential was significant. Compared with Indigenous women, non‐Indigenous women had consistently lower and more stable prevalence rates of histologically confirmed high grade abnormalities (IQR 8.0–10.1 versus 15.0–21.3 per 1,000 screened women). Although the LGA‐specific rates also suggest that a higher proportion of non‐Indigenous women were followed‐up within two months of an abnormal screening result, the wide confidence intervals for these estimates limit our ability to draw definitive conclusions about spatial patterns for this outcome. These findings highlight the importance of continued monitoring and ongoing efforts to identify drivers of these patterns and develop effective strategies to improve participation and potentially reduce the cervical cancer burden among Indigenous women.     

Nitrogen isotopes and the trophic level of humans in archaeology

Human and domesticate animal bone collagen δ¹⁵N values in prehistory differ generally by 3‰ or more from Neolithic to post- Roman times in Northwest Europe, leading to an assumed dietary animal protein fraction of 60–80% using a standard interpretation of δ¹⁵N values. We examine the assumptions on which this model rests and the limitations of our knowledge in the analysis of δ¹⁵N values in archaeology. We have developed a set of models which, with small changes made in assumptions (on the order of 1‰), can produce substantially lower estimates of the dietary animal protein fraction for given δ¹⁵N values. We consider the implications of various dietary animal protein fractions on agricultural carrying capacities and human population densities in prehistory.