Toward a Geography of American Civil Religion

The concept of civil religion has been of considerable interest to students of American culture during recent decades. Little attention has been given, however, to regional variations in the practice of American civil religion. The purpose of this study is to explore basic patterns in the popular observance of the Bicentennial, as one possible approach to understanding the geography of American civil religion. The study is based on the register of Bicentennial events compiled by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration during 1975 and 1976. Findings indicate that the strongest commitment to public celebration of the Bicentennial occurred in a large region reaching from the western prairie states across the Great Plains into the northern Rocky Mountains. This commitment was expressed both in the region's large number of Bicentennial events and in the distinctively celebrative quality of many of those events. Civil religion's prominence in this region probably reflects several factors: the importance of religion generally in providing a sense of community in a region characterized by cultural isolation; the effect of rural and small-town conformity and the influence of a regional culture that is closely tied to the traditional mainstream of American culture.     

Editor's Introduction

Hannaford, Ivan. Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996. xvii + 448 pp. including chapter references and index. $19.95 paper.

Hoberman, John. Darwin's Athletes: How Sports Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. New York: Houghton Miffin, 1997. xxvi + 341

Williams, Vernon J., Jr. Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. ix +152 pp. including chapter references and index. $34.95 cloth.

Wolpoff, Milford and Rachel Caspari. Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 463 pp. including chapter references and index. $26.00 cloth.     

Covering up spying in the ‘Buster’ Crabb Affair: A note

Abstract

F EWER COLD WAR myths are more enduring in the United Kingdom than that of ‘Buster’ Crabb. In April 1956, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) coaxed Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, a naval frogman from the Second World War, out of retirement to dive under the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze, while it was docked in Portsmouth. It had brought the Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin and the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita S. Khrushchev, to the United Kingdom on a state visit. The operation, routine by all accounts, ended in both personal and diplomatic failure. Fourteen months later, the decomposed body of a frogman washed up in Chichester harbour. Despite the British government’s hope that the discovery might be the end of the affair, it fired up the conspiracy theorists, who alleged that the body could not be Crabb’s; that, in fact, he had been kidnapped, taken to the Soviet Union, and renamed Korablev.¹ The government did little to dispel such myths. A few days after Crabb’s disappearance, The Times succinctly summed up the situation: ‘official reticence about the activities which led to the death of Commander Crabb has caused much speculation.’² Curiosity was further piqued a few days later when the prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, stated m the house of commons on 9 May that ‘it would not be in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his death.’³     

Late Devonian thelodonts (Agnatha) from the Gneudna Formation,Carnarvon Basin,Western Australia

Dermal denticles of two thelodont agnathans, Australolepis seddoni gen. et sp. nov., and a possible nikoliviid gen. et sp. indet. are described from the Gneudna Formation, a marine sequence of interbedded limestone and shale exposed on the eastern edge of the Carnarvon Basin, Western Australia. The age and significance of these new forms are discussed. The Gneudna Formation is Late Devonian, probably early Frasnian, which, if confirmed, makes these the youngest thelodonts known to date.     

Large freshwater plesiosaurian from the Cretaceous (Aptian) of Australia

Benson, R.B.J., Fitzgerald, E.M.G., Rich, T.H. & Vickers-Rich, P., 2013. Large freshwater plesiosaurian from the Cretaceous (Aptian) of Australia. Alcheringa 37, 1–6. ISSN 0311-5518

We report a large plesiosaurian tooth from the freshwater early–middle Aptian (Early Cretaceous) Eumeralla Formation of Victoria, Australia. This, combined with records of smaller plesiosaurian teeth with an alternative morphology, provides evidence for a multitaxic freshwater plesiosaurian assemblage. Dental and body size differences suggest ecological partitioning of sympatric freshwater plesiosaurians analogous to that in modern freshwater odontocete cetaceans. The evolutionarily plastic body plan of Plesiosauria may have facilitated niche differentiation and helped them to exclude ichthyosaurs from freshwater environments during the Mesozoic. However, confirmation of this hypothesis requires the discovery of more complete remains.

Roger B.J. Benson [roger.benson@earth.ox.ac.uk], Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3AN, UK; Erich M.G. Fitzgerald [efitzgerald@museum.vic.gov.au], Thomas H. Rich [trich@museum.vic.gov.au], Museum Victoria, GPO Box 666, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia; Thomas H. Rich and Patricia Vickers-Rich [pat.rich@monash.edu], School of Geosciences, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia. Received 30.10.2012; revised 27.1.2013; accepted 31.1.2013.