Remedial agents: missionary physicians and the depopulation of Hawai'i

This article examines the activities and perspectives of nineteenth-century American missionary physicians in the Hawaiian Islands. The physicians' attitudes toward Hawaiian morbidity and depopulation are viewed in relation to the greater missionary community's role in the political transformation of the island nation. The article argues that missionary physicians monitored and reported on Native Hawaiian depopulation (a result of introduced western diseases) while simultaneously advertising the islands' benefits to American consumptives, imperialists, and others. Mission doctors also failed to respond effectively to the greatest epidemiological crisis Hawai'i had ever faced: a venereal scourge with a resulting blight of Native Hawaiian infertility. As a result of these and other factors, American hegemony in Hawai'i by midcentury was a foregone conclusion.     

The Making of “World‐Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class

Urban India is undergoing transformation as formal electoral politics increasingly favors the new middle class. Scholarship tends to compartmentalize the politics of the new middle class and the poor, and this article focuses on inter‐class relations. By focusing on relations between street hawkers and the new middle class in Delhi, I show that rather than engaging in zero‐sum conflicts over urban space, conflict is typically over the terms of its use. The analysis shows that these classes are interdependent; the poor depend on the new middle class for their livelihoods, and the lifestyles of new middle class are enabled by services provided by the poor. While the poor enable and participate in Delhi's transformation into a so‐called “world‐class” city, the reconciliation of competing visions of urbanization—one geared toward social reproduction and the other subsistence—is what is at stake in contemporary inter‐class relations.     

Probing the reds and blues: Sectionalism and voter location in the 2000 and 2004 U. S. presidential elections

The election outcomes of a place hinge largely on what is within its political boundaries: economic, social, cultural, and other compositional factors facing voters. Yet, it is also important to investigate geographic context, both within and between places. This study presents renewed emphasis on two geographic factors that relate to electoral outcomes while controlling for compositional attributes: sectional distinctions and population density. Within different regions of the United States and across different locations (urban, suburban, and rural residents), there exist notable differences in presidential voting. Using survey and county-level data on the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections, this study evaluates the partisan preferences of voters from a regional perspective, and from a density perspective. The findings demonstrate independent relationships between section and voting, and location and voting. A major consequence of the distinctiveness of section and location in the face of migration effects (as noted by others) is the increased spatial polarization of the electorate's political preferences in these recent presidential contests.     

Dog Wars and Human Rights: Perceptions of Political Despotism at the End of the Ancien Regime

During the political crisis in the Salzburg archiepiscopacyat the end of the eighteenth century there was an increase inthe number of violent clashes between huntsmen and poachersin the forest areas. The huntsmen exacerbated the anger of therural communities by shooting dead any farm dogs they foundrunning free. The farmers, for their part, ignored the decreewhich had been in force since the sixteenth century that theyshould either chain their dogs up or restrict their freedomwith a Knüppel, a large piece of wood attached to the neckto hinder their chasing after game. These attacks by the huntsmenwere felt by the peasants to be an arbitrary abuse of politicalpower, and a threat to their farms. They were angered both thatthis limited the ability of the dogs to do their duty in guardingthe farms, and also by the way the dogs' natural guarding instinctswere being undermined. They thought of men and their animalsas different creatures, but they were forced to acknowledgethat the restriction of the dogs' freedom was also an attempton their own liberty. The Dog Wars crystallized a conflict aroundtraditional feudal symbols of subjugation. They show how theimages that the ruling and the ruled had of each other beganto crumble and give way to mutual mistrust. The Salzburg farmershad no need of revolutionary agitators to see that the archiepiscopalstate was moribund. They had their own yardsticks, first andforemost poaching, with which to measure the effective limitsset to their freedom by the state. They were not party to thecontemporary intellectual debates on human rights, but the violenceto their dogs was a clear sign to them of the revolutionaryspirit of the times. The notion of human rights did not enjoylinear growth, but itself progressed by way of conflict. Andthis notion should not be limited to the human condition only—itmust be extrapolated beyond the ideological fixations of thenineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the context of the historyof dogs—man's longest-standing companion, after all—‘human’rights take on a different hue, relativized and yet somehowmore clearly defined.