Margaret Beaufort,Royal Tapestries,and Confinement at the Tudor Court

The English royal household ordinances document the important role tapestries played in Tudor court ceremony. This paper re-examines one specific aspect of the 1493 ordinances: whether or not Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, dictated the textile practices surrounding royal childbirth. Once widely believed to have done so, scholars have abandoned the idea for lack of evidence. The issue is more complicated than it seems, in part because of longstanding bibliographic error and also because texts associated with two events involving Margaret — the birth of Princess Margaret and the publication of William Caxton’s Blanchardyn and Eglantine — suggest that she was highly attuned to the importance of royal spectacle as mandated by the household ordinances.     

Timor-Leste’s foreign policy approach to the Timor Sea disputes: pipeline or pipe dream?

Over recent years, Australia and Timor-Leste’s bilateral relationship has been consumed by contested maritime boundary claims in the resource-rich Timor Sea. Intractable disagreements over the right to build a petroleum export pipeline have led Timor-Leste to reinvigorate its pursuit of permanent maritime boundaries as ‘a national priority’. This article examines Timor-Leste’s interests in the Timor Sea and assesses its strategies for achieving its foreign policy goals. It argues that Timor-Leste’s attainment of its stated goals relies on Australia shifting its Timor Sea policy, which has been largely consistent since the 1970s. Timor-Leste’s key strategy is a public diplomacy campaign that positions permanent maritime boundaries as the final stage of its independence struggle, and presents Timor-Leste as owning the disputed Greater Sunrise gas field under international law. While the public diplomacy campaign aims to win enough Australian ‘hearts and minds’ to put pressure on the Australian government, it ultimately fails to negotiate the strategic and historical realities of the interests that define Australia’s realpolitik approach to the Timor Sea.     

Diamond Mining in Canada's Northwest Territories: A Colonial Continuity

Abstract: The Canadian diamond industry has been lauded as a new approach to resource extraction, one whose institutions are characterized by a greater attention to Indigenous rights and the environment. However, an institutional analysis obfuscates the terrain of unequal relations that is the context for the Canadian diamond boom; an analysis of the effectiveness of social and environmental policies in relation to the extraction of diamonds in the Canadian North suggests that there is an intent on the part of those instigating this extraction (that is, the Canadian state, Canadian capitalist interests and international capitalist interests) to protect the Northern environment and to provide economic benefits to Northern Indigenous communities. This piece argues, instead, that this assumption is erroneous and that the Northern mining industry is part of Canada's project of internal colonization of Indigenous communities, a project that has intensified and expanded in the neoliberal era.     

The Boundaries of Women's Power: Gender and the Discourse of Political Friendship in Twelfth‐Century England

The discourse of friendship was an integral part of political language and interaction in twelfth‐century England. Because the qualities that made a good political friendship – loyalty, wise counsel and generosity, among others – corresponded so closely to the criteria for successful lordship, historians often used the quality of a king's friendship as a signifier for the quality of his rule. Yet their treatment of women's political friendship was markedly different. The discourse of friendship therefore provides a window into the larger struggle over the representation of gender and rulership in twelfth‐century historical writing in England, reflecting chroniclers’ anxiety about female sovereignty. Twelfth‐century historians depicted women's participation in political friendship as acceptable only within certain circumscribed boundaries that corresponded to the sanctioned political roles for women in general. Otherwise, chroniclers attempted to efface the existence of women's political friendship, sometimes describing the same situations in different language depending on whether the main participant was male or female. Chroniclers also represented women as arbiters of friendship, showing men how better to conduct their relationships either through direct instruction or counter‐example. In both cases women reinforced male friendship, either by being excluded from it, or by demonstrating the correct way to carry it out.     

Assessing Effectiveness of Veto Threats in the Bush Administration (1989-1993): Preliminary Evidence from Case Studies

Presidents have many tools in the policy-making process. One of the most powerful of these is vetoing legislation. Although presidents can veto legislation at will, the use of the veto is costly as it can be perceived as a sign of weakness. Veto threats may provide the president with a bargaining tool relying on the power of the veto without incurring its costs. This article provides a framework for understanding the use and effectiveness of veto threats. First, the present understanding of the use of veto threats is discussed, including the conditions under which they are most likely to occur and to be effective. Next, we provide a conceptualization of the context in which a veto threat is issued and the result of such a threat. Finally, using the Bush administration (1989-1993), we illustrate two possible results with case studies of civil rights and child care legislation.     

Integration of Complementary Archaeological Prospection Data from a Late Iron Age Settlement at Vesterager—Denmark

The complementary use of various archaeological prospection data sets offers a series of new possibilities for the investigation of prehistoric settlements. In addition to the separate interpretations of the single methods, the implementation of image fusion provides an additional tool to obtain an even higher degree of data integration during the interpretation process. To investigate some possibilities and risks of image fusion, a procedure frequently used in the medical field but rarely applied in archaeology, various algorithms inside a dedicated MATLAB toolbox TAIFU (Toolbox for Archaeological Image FUsion) were tested on the geophysical prospection data from an Iron Age settlement near Vesterager in West Jutland, Denmark. The Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology had conducted large-scale, high-resolution ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and magnetometry surveys at the site in 2014, based on its discovery by the Ringkøbing Museum through aerial photos and the results of a follow-up excavation in 2009. The aim was to determine if, and to what extent, geophysical prospection together with a novel integrative interpretational approach was able to add more detailed information to an already known prehistoric settlement. Results yielded a variety of deeper insights into the separate farms (dated to around AD 400), including the discovery of several new structures and more information about the construction of the longhouses, as well as a first suggestion on how to implement image fusion into the process of analysis and archaeological interpretation of geophysical data sets.     

Expert Policy in Juvenile Justice

Policy design and analysis is conducted primarily by professional experts who often use objectively-defined criteria in the selection of those eligible for a policy and objective measurements to evaluate the effectiveness of a program. Juvenile justice policies, such as Juvenile Intensive Probation Supervision (JIPS), often are developed by experts who aim at correcting individual problems of youths rather than identifying problems with the structures of our society. Policies such as JIPS do not encourage participation of the recipients or of the wider community. In essence, the experts are removing power from already powerless youths and citizens, and thus are placing it in the hands of a few who are viewed as knowing what is best for everyone. As such, policies developed by experts often do not encourage democracy and citizenship. This articles suggests how youths, their families, parents, and communities can and need to become empowered in order for justice and democracy to prevail.