Healing Charms in Use in England and Wales 1700–1950

The collection and analysis of Anglo-Saxon and early medieval healing charms has long generated an active interest in their content and application. However, despite the quite extensive ethnographic evidence concerning the content of healing charms in use from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, there has been no attempt, so far, to make an extensive collection of charm formulae from this period. This paper seeks to begin that task. It is hoped that this inventory, not only serves to highlight an important aspect of the English and Welsh tradition of folk medicine, but also serves to indicate the long history of that tradition. An examination of these charms also provides an illustration of the importance of the written word in the transmission of popular knowledge.     

The Politics of the Good Samaritan

Abstract

Liberals usually misconstrue the recent political movements, worldwide, that have been motivated by fundamentalist religious ideologies. We often dismiss the representatives of these movements both morally and intellectually as fanatic, benighted anachronisms that cling to medieval absolutes. We would be better served, however, if we regard these movements and their representatives in the light of Reinhold Niebuhr's psychology of sin. The purpose of such a construal would not be the cheap, ironical pleasure of accusing fundamentalists of sin, but to provide a more nuanced grasp of their beliefs and behavior, and to open a more promising avenue in our attempts to defuse the furor and mitigate the damage caused by their movements on the national and international stage.     

“From one April to another”: remembering and acknowledging the Holocaust in the poetry of Michael Longley

Michael Longley has written and spoken of the responsibility to commemorate the Holocaust in a manner which is free from historical or political distortion. This article will consider his poetry about the Holocaust in the light of these statements, arguing that the epigraph in Gorse Fires (1991) from the work of Paul Celan provides an indication of Longley's strategy. The close association of elegy and botanical life in Longley's work manifests in the reconfiguration of remembrance poppies in relation to Celan and the Holocaust. The article discusses Longley's work in relation to Ireland's refugee policies during the Second World War, with recourse to the poems “Buchenwald Museum” and “Poppies”. Finally, the article considers Longley's personal link to the Holocaust through his friend Helen Lewis. The representation of the Holocaust in Longley's poetry is always associated with other traumatic events and this article extracts the threads which entangle Longley's evocations of historical violence.     

Higher ground: The archaeology of North American platform mounds

Platform mounds, as forms of monumental architecture, have long been central to inquiries into Native American social complexity. The archaeological literature produced over the last 5 years that pertains to North American platform mounds in the Southeast and Southwest is reviewed. Chronologies, forms, and functions of platform mounds are summarized. There are similarities in the platform mound characteristics and construction sequences found in both regions. It is proposed that these characteristics reflect similar social processes of integration and differentiation.     

Identifying Areas with Elevated Disease Incidence Rates Using Empirical Bayes Estimators

Using maps of observed disease incidence rates to identify regions with potentially elevated risk may be misleading due to the instability of the observed rates in regions with small populations. We use a simulation study to examine the use of maps based on observed incidence rates in identifying such high-risk areas as compared to maps based on empirical Bayes and constrained empirical Bayes rate estimates. In addition, because the existence of clusters of areas with elevated risk violates the usual distributional assumptions underlying the empirical Bayes approach, we also examine the robustness of the estimates and the impact of incorrect assumptions on identification of high-risk regions. The simulation results indicate that the observed incidence rates were quite sensitive in terms of identifying areas with truly elevated rates. However, due to the instability of the observed rates, maps based on observed incidence incorrectly identified areas as high risk more frequently than did maps based on the estimators. The standard and constrained empirical Bayes estimates were more stable than the observed rates even when based on incorrect distributional assumptions. The standard empirical Bayes estimates, however, were oversmoothed in that too few areas were identified as having elevated risk. The constrained empirical Bayes approach provided sensitivity closer to that of the observed rates yet with the percentage of areas incorrectly identified as high risk equal to that of the standard empirical Bayes estimates. We illustrate an application of these results with an analysis of the geographic distribution of brain cancer mortality among counties in Ohio.     

Time travel,labour history,and the null curriculum: new design knowledge for mobile augmented reality history games

This paper presents a case study drawn from design-based research (DBR) on a mobile, place-based augmented reality history game. Using DBR methods, the game was developed by the author as a history learning intervention for fifth to seventh graders. The game is built upon historical narratives of disenfranchised populations that are seldom taught, those typically relegated to the ‘null curriculum’. These narratives include the stories of women immigrant labour leaders in the early twentieth century, more than a decade before suffrage. The project understands the purpose of history education as the preparation of informed citizens. In paying particular attention to historical themes that endure over time, the game aims to draw connections between historical and contemporary narratives of diverse and disenfranchised populations. The study discusses new design knowledge for addressing such narratives. Self-reflexivity, the technique of revealing the means of production of the game technology itself can be used to spotlight contemporary issues of disenfranchisement. Supra-reveals, historical thematic foreshadowing, can help establish key links between themes of disenfranchisement of diverse groups in the past and those in the present. These techniques used together, and the subsequent curriculum, brought focus to teaching issues of diversity and disenfranchisement typically written out of curriculum.