A park of the people: the demotion of Platt National Park,Oklahoma

Platt National Park, Oklahoma, was the smallest national park in the United States until it was combined with an adjacent, reservoir-centered recreation site in 1976 to form Chickasaw National Recreation Area. Set aside as Sulphur Springs Reservation by agreement with the Chickasaw Indians in 1902 and designated a national park in 1906, Platt is the only American national park to be demoted since World War II. The story of Platt's creation and demotion reflects the changing mission of the National Park Service (NPS), shifting images of nature and recreation among the American public, and broader social forces that frame park purposes. What started as local boosterism of hydrotherapy in cold mineral springs grew into one of America's most visited national parks by the 1920s. Despite its popularity, Platt lacked both scenic grandeur and political influence; it did not fit prevailing images of wild nature among NPS bureaucrats and the urban elite who formed the core of the environmental movement; it was too small, too humanized, and too ordinary. As images of people embedded in nature have gained wider acceptance in recent decades, would this small, geographically distinctive, and culturally rich “park of the people” have met a similar fate today?     

Fashioning Michael Field: Michael Field and Late-Victorian Dress Culture

This article explores how the late-Victorian poets Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote under the collaborative pseudonym Michael Field, used fashionable dress to construct and advertise their unique poetic identity. Using evidence from their journal Works and Days, I contextualise Bradley and Cooper's clothing in terms of late-Victorian dress culture, and the major dress reform movements of the nineteenth century. I demonstrate that Bradley and Cooper used fashion as a distinctively feminine way of participating in aesthetic culture, marking significant life events, and to advertise their poetic identity. This self-fashioning also exposed them to aesthetic scrutiny from their peers Oscar Wilde and Bernard Berenson. Finally, I argue that fashion played a crucial role in Bradley and Cooper's desire for one another – and that this desire can be understood in terms of erotic reciprocity.     

The Revenge of Practical Reason? A Review Essay On Gananath Obeyesekere's The Apotheosis of Captain Cook

The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. By Gananath Obeyesekere. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Pp. xvii + 251. Price $US 24.95.     

CANADA-JAPAN COAL TRADE: AN ALTERNATIVE FORM OF THE STAPLE PRODUCTION MODEL

The Innis model of staple production has been used as the framework for evaluating many Canadian resource trades. This paper argues that Japanese resource trade differs from that with Europe or the United States and that the distinct set of institutional arrangements governing Japanese resource trade requires the modification of the Innis model to recognize this new form of Canadian staple production and trade. The one billion dollars per annum Canada-Japan coal trade provides a detailed case study of the institutional complexity of Japanese resource trade, as revealed through corporate strategies, trade intermediaries, equity investment, loan arrangements, export contracts, and public infrastructure. Minority Japanese investments in joint ventures replace the dominant role of foreign capital in earlier versions of the staples model. The role of finance capital is highlighted by Japanese loans typically exceeding equity investments in size. The high transaction cost of negotiating hundreds of contracts is reduced through the use of sogo shosha (Japanese general trading companies) as intermediaries. Unequal relations are demonstrated by the greater risk borne by local investors as private firms provide equity and public institutions invest in infrastructure. The Quintette mine in northeast British Columbia highlights these risks. Overall, the complexity of the Japanese supply system reduces the bargaining power of any single supplier. However, the stability promoted by the security objectives of the Japanese supply system leads to long-term trading relations that can provide corporate cash flows and maintain community viability during cyclical downturns in the industry. Le modele d'lnnis sur la production des matieres premiéres a servi a analyser les effets du commerce des ressources naturelles au Canada. Le texte maintient que les echanges de ressources naturelles avec lelapon different de ceux qui lient le Canada aux Etats-Unis et à l'Europe, et que la particularité des structures servant à administrer le commerce avec le Japon nécessite une modification du modele d'lnnis vouéà l'analyse des effets de ce commerce. Le texte se penche sur le commerce du charbon entre le Canada et le Japon, dont la valeuratteint 7 milliard$ parannée. Cette étude de cas va permettre de saisir la complexité institutionnelle des échanges ayant trait aux ressources naturelles avec le Japon, perceptible dans les stratégies des corporations, la présence d'intermédiaires, les investissements, les modalités de prêts, les contrats d'exportation et les infrastructures. Les investissements minoritaires des japonais dans des entreprises conjointes remplacent le rôle dominant des investisseurs étrangers caractéristique des modeles antérieurs d'extraction des matieres premieres. Le rôle accru du capital financier est souligné par les prêts des japonais qui exddent habituellement leur achat d'actions. Les hauts cocits transactionnels lie's à la négociation de centaines de contrats est réduit par l'intermédiaire de sogo shosha (compagnies japonaises se spkcialisant dans les échanges entre corporations). Nous constatons l'exis- tence de rapports inégaux olj le gros des risques est assumé par les investisseurs locaux et les agences gou- vernementales qui assurent la mise en place d'infrastructures. La mine Quintette dans le nord-est de la Colombie-Britannique illustre bien ces risques. La complexité du systeme d'approvisionnement japonais réduit les atouts dans les négociations des fournisseurs pris individuellement. It demeure que la stabilité, qui découle des objectifs d'approvisionnement a long terme des japonais, permet d'établir des rapports d'échange durables qui garantissent aux entreprises des revenus persistants ainsi que la prospérité des localites olj se trouvent les opérations d'extraction. Ces localités se trouvent alors soustraites aux effets des cycles économiques.     

Urban homesteading and intensive mothering: (re) gendering care and environmental responsibility in Boston and Chicago

In this article, we explore how normative ideologies of good mothering are being reproduced and contested through urban homesteading, a sustainable lifestyle that emphasizes household self-provisioning. Urban homesteading practices may include gardening and urban agriculture, canning, and pickling, and a variety of do-it-yourself and craft projects. Based on qualitative research with 19 urban homesteading households with children in the Boston and Chicago Metropolitan areas, we argue that urban homesteading discourses and practices reflect and align with intensive mothering ideologies in the United States. Intensive mothering ideologies encourage a selfless devotion of physical, emotional, and mental energy to childrearing, and are often associated with individualized, privileged, and gendered subjectivities. We find these intensive mothering ideologies especially visible in the ways that mothers perceive and respond to environmental risk by adopting and enacting urban homesteading labors. We also note that the choice to respond to risk by homesteading is often, but not always, mediated and animated by economic, temporal, and social privilege. In this way, urban homesteading and surrounding discourses may inadvertently raise the bar of ‘good’ motherhood in ways that demand more of women and marginalize or burden mothers with less resources and privilege. However, rather than dismiss homesteading entirely on these grounds, we suggest that it may be possible to harvest impulses of care, connection, and collectivity associated with homesteading in ways that benefit rather than burden all mothers.     

Leaving on a Jet Plane: Polarization,Foreign Travel,and Comity in Congress

No political observer, politician, or political scientist doubts that party polarization has weakened the social fabric of Congress. Measuring that effect, however, is exceedingly difficult. In this article, we operationalize the congressional social fabric by examining the foreign travel behavior of members of Congress over time. We evaluate the social disintegration in Congress by examining if and whether changes in member travel can explain why the social connectedness of members has waned. Using a unique dataset of foreign travel for House members from 1977 to 2012, we find that Republican House members, in particular, have altered their foreign travel patterns. Ideologically extreme members have always been less likely to take foreign trips, but extremely conservative Republican have become much more likely to travel only with co-partisans as polarization has increased in Congress. Ideologically moderate Republicans, while still traveling as members of bipartisan delegations, have also increased their willingness to travel only with fellow Republicans. Our results suggest that bipartisan foreign travel is a victim of the partisan war waging in Congress.