The survival of PCR-amplifiable DNA in cow leather

We have investigated the survival of PCR-amplifiable mitochondrial and nuclear DNA in a small number of modern and medieval bovine leather samples. The results of this preliminary investigation demonstrate that, while no nuclear DNA can be PCR-amplified from any of the specimens, mitochondrial DNA can be amplified from all samples. To investigate this contrasting pattern of DNA survival further, we have vegetable-tanned cow skin in our own laboratory, and directly assayed the survival of PCR-amplifiable mitochondrial and nuclear DNA at each step of the process. The results indicate that nuclear DNA is reduced to sub-amplifiable levels as a result of the tanning baths, whereas amplifiable mitochondrial DNA survives the complete process. Our results suggest that old and archaeological bovine leather may represent a useful source of genetic information, although this information will most likely be limited to that which can be gained from mitochondrial DNA.     

"A wealth of historical interest": the medical artifact collection at the University of Western Ontario

Along with a teaching collection, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, began accepting medical artifacts for a historical museum in the early 1920s, although it never developed into more than an unofficial collection until the 1970s, when it was transformed into the Medical Museum and Archives at the University Hospital. In the 1990s, the artifacts were dispersed among several local institutions. The remaining objects at the university have been now reorganized as the Medical Artifact Collection. While these objects were once used to educate students about the practice and philosophy of medicine, they are now used to teach students about local, medical, Canadian and public history.     

Recent Issues in the Archaeology of the Mimbres Region of the North American Southwest

Archaeological research in the Mimbres region (southwestern New Mexico) has focused on the post-A.D. 500 ceramic/agricultural occupations, especially the Mimbres Classic period (1000–1130). This work has advanced general anthropological issues regarding mobility, land use and human impact, and the concept of abandonment. Deeper understandings of some of these issues require more detailed demographic estimates, which in turn are dependent on methodological advances, particularly studies of site use life. Research on the production and distribution of Mimbres pottery—famous for its naturalistic black-on-white designs—is advancing rapidly. Although the designs have been well illustrated and much discussed, more systematic anthropological research on Mimbres design style is badly needed. Various aspects of Mimbres social and ideational realms (e.g., household and community organization, social hierarchy, the symbolism of the pottery designs) have received some attention but await new perspectives derived from current social theory.     

Evaluating Stakeholder Participation and Influence on State-Level Rulemaking

Despite sustained attention to the role of stakeholders in policymaking—both in legislative and regulatory venues—we lack a systematic understanding of whether and when stakeholders wield influence over decisions. This is particularly true regarding state-level rulemaking in the United States, which has become an important venue of policy action as federal policymaking is increasingly stymied. Although the specifics of the rulemaking process vary to some degree across states, determining whether common patterns of stakeholder influence exist across states and issue areas can advance our understanding of regulatory institutions more broadly. This study contributes to the growing body of scholarship on state-level rulemaking by analyzing the ways in which stakeholders participate in rulemaking processes and the effects on rulemaking decisions of such participation in three policy domains across five states. We find that while industry may be influential during rulemaking across cases, consequential opportunities for non-industry stakeholders to influence regulatory decisions also exist.     

Troubled Traditions: Female Adaptive Education in British Colonial Africa

This article examines African female education reform between the wars as a conjuncture of transnational philanthropic initiatives and state and missionary objectives on the ground. Through a comparative treatment of four schools in West, East and South-Central Africa, it shows that the search to recover and re-create the authentic African subject was a gendered process that aimed to critique one brand of colonialism (settler and industrial capitalism) by bolstering another (indirect rule). The schools at Achimota (Gold Coast), Kabete (Kenya), Hope Fountain (Southern Rhodesia) and Mbereshi (Northern Rhodesia) all idealised women’s traditional education as the key to offsetting the dangers of modernisation and preserving the integrity of the social body, and ‘adapted’ their curricula accordingly to their perception of women’s normative economic and social roles. However, the internal contradictions of this project stymied any possibility of implementing it in a cohesive way, and even its advocates and architects were often forced to admit the limits of tradition as a coherent logic or redemptive force. The gendered contours of adaptation, therefore, showed the potential of education to destabilise as much as to reinforce the shifting paradigms of the colonial project.     

Womanliness in the Slums: A Free Kindergarten in Early Twentieth‐Century Edinburgh

This paper considers the intersection of Spiritual Motherhood, early childhood education and child welfare in early twentieth‐century Edinburgh. Its focus is St Saviour's Child Garden (SSCG), which opened in the Canongate, in November 1906, part of the Free Kindergarten movement that emerged in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century. The paper focuses on the SSCG's founder Lileen Hardy, in order to trace the development of this new approach to child welfare and women's work in Britain. It discusses her training at the Sesame House for Home‐Life Training in London, her move to Edinburgh, and the network of predominantly women reformers, whose interests ranged from urban reform to medical welfare, she found there. It shows how this network facilitated the founding of the SSCG and discusses the form it took and Hardy's implementation of a modified form of Froebelian praxis. In so doing its concern is to show how Free Kindergarten forms part of a wider history of social welfare and urban reform as well as to the history of early childhood education, and to move attention away from the men usually associated with innovations in Scottish social reform like Patrick Geddes, and onto a group of women who created a women and child‐centred proto‐Welfare State in pre‐First World War Edinburgh.