Producing liminal space: gender,age and class in northern Ontario's tree planting industry

Drawing upon qualitative data, this article examines how tree planters in northern Ontario, Canada engage with liminality in terms of gender, class, age and space. In doing so, it provides insight into concepts of gender liminality and the variegated experiences of males and females in liminal space. The article focuses on four aspects of the liminal engagement. First, the spaces of tree planting are liminal as they are marked by homelife and worklife, but dominated by neither. Second, gender performances are liminal, as males perform masculinities seldom necessary or appropriate – yet often valorized – in their permanent communities, while females (who make up nearly half of the workforce) are offered opportunities to work and succeed in a traditionally male industry. However, success often requires that they adopt certain masculine traits. Third, most tree planters are in the interstitial age of ‘youth’, somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. Finally, tree planters are generally members of affluent urban middle-classes, yet the work they perform is more readily associated with rural or peripheral working-classes.     

Holy cow!: the miraculous cures of animals in late medieval England1

Interactions between saints and animals have been the focus of modern scholarship, yet an important aspect has been neglected, namely that of the saint as healer of animals, when a third party has requested help on behalf of the animal. This article therefore examines, through examples drawn from saints' Vitae and other sources, the types of animals for which saintly intervention was sought, the ailments from which they suffered, and the form which their cure took, in order to understand why medieval people turned to the saints when their animals were ill. An examination of this relationship between saint and animal will not only elucidate the role of saint as thaumaturge, but will also shed light on the veterinary aspect of animal welfare.     

The bishop and the Basques: The diocese of Calahorra and the Basque provinces of Alava and Vizcaya under Bishop Rodrigo Cascante, 1147–1190

Under Bishop Rodrigo Cascante (1147–90), the northern Iberian diocese of Calahorra made its first significant administrative inroads into Alava and Vizcaya since its nominal assimilation of those Basque provinces around 1090. An examination into the fluctuating history of Calahorra's administrative penetration of its Basque provinces during this period highlights the extreme difficulty of this undertaking, which was severely hampered by the opposition of a strong Basque regional nobility. It also reveals a close connection between the fluctuations that characterized Calahorra's administrative fortunes north of the Ebro and the see's turbulent political context, defined by its position straddling a volatile frontier between Castile, Navarre and Aragon. Finally, it provides a useful opportunity to analyse Rodrigo Cascante's changing relationships with the secular powers that competed for the territory of his Riojan see. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the bishop of Calahorra was not a passive partner in these relationships, but actively adjusted his stance with respect to the crowns of Castile and Aragon, primarily in function of how well they did, or might, contribute to the realization of his Basque agenda.     

‘Everything is made of atoms’: the reprogramming of space and time in post-war London

From the middle of the Second World War until the early 1950s, architects, planners and designers in Britain made an unprecedented investment in reforming the built environment as a means to ensure a stable and secure post-war society. This essay considers the importance of movement, trajectory and repetition within this reconstruction vision and how the organisation of these things provided a basis for imagining a new form of consensual urban community. The essay begins by exploring how the County of London Plan (Abercrombie and Forshaw, 1943) and the Greater London Plan (Abercrombie, 1945) articulated a set of spatio-temporal logics, based on the prescribed trajectory of the individual embedded within a programme of quotidian repetitions. These logics suggested that urban space could be built to foreclose the possibility of historical conflict. The essay then explores the material design of two post-war exhibitions, Britain Can Make It (1946) and the Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition (1951), which offered visitors an experiential taster of what these new urban choreographies would feel like. To end, the essay explores the recurrent figure of the atom within post-war public pedagogy. Within this briefly ubiquitous mechanistic image lay an unacknowledged assurance about how hierarchical structures of movement and repetition sustained the material world, just as these things were being invoked to secure London's position across a range of scales from the local urban neighbourhood to the post-war Commonwealth.     

Laying it down in stone: delimiting and demarcating Iraq's boundaries by mixed international commission

Mixed international commissions have been centrally involved in shaping the outer margins of the state territory of Iraq over the last century and a half. Laborious Anglo-Russian efforts to narrow the traditional Perso-Ottoman frontier in the seventy-year period before the Great War contrasted with the League of Nations' ostensibly speedy treatment of Iraq's more arbitrary northern and north-western territorial limits in the early inter-war years. Most recently, a team appointed by the UN Secretary-General finalised definition of Iraq's international boundaries with Kuwait when the emirate was liberated from Iraqi occupation in the spring of 1991. This article scrutinises the role played by these bodies in the boundary evolutionary process from a review of their primary records. It highlights the fact that the evolution of Iraq's (and those of its Ottoman forbears) international boundaries to the east, north and west was rarely straightforward and reflected both regional considerations and imperial contexts. The problem of reconciling inadequate textual definitions with features on the ground has been a constant phenomenon. Deciding whether commissions actually delimited or demarcated territory was as valid a question following the UN's Iraq–Kuwait settlement as in the mid-nineteenth century. Whether many historical treaty delimitations were ever designed to be anything more than territorial allocations is another theme explored in this article.     

The lenses of nationhood: an optical model of identity

ABSTRACT. This paper tries to make the case for a model of political identity based on an optical metaphor, which is especially applicable to nations. Human vision can be separated into sentient object, lenses and inbuilt mental ideas. This corresponds well to identity processes in which ‘light’ from a bounded territorial referent is refracted through various lenses (ideological, material, psychological) to focus in certain ways on particular symbolic resources like genealogy, history, culture or political institutions. Distinguishing between referent, lenses and resources helps us more precisely situate many hitherto disparate problems of national identity. These include the ‘ethnic‐civic’ dilemma, the mystery of national identity before nationalism, and the relationship between local and national, and individual and collective, identities. The model also clarifies the place of universalist ideology, which currently fits poorly within the leading culturalist and materialist theories of nationalism.     

The Office of Housekeeper of the House of Lords

This note illustrates one aspect of the process whereby the palace of Westminster evolved from a royal residence into the seat of parliament, explains how the housekeeper of that palace came to be associated with the house of lords and lists the holders of the office from the 16th to the 19th century.     

The Parliamentary Organisation of the Whig Junto in the Reign of Queen Anne: A Further Note

The parliamentary organisation of the whig Junto in the reign of Queen Anne was far superior to that of the tory party. At the centre were the meetings in which three or four of the five members of the Junto were present together with some of their followers. Evidence of such meetings is rare but here is presented a letter giving the details of a meeting of all five in April 1713 at the home of Lord Somers, together with their ally, the tory earl of Nottingham, probably to discuss the forthcoming peace proposals, to end the war of the Spanish Succession, and the protestant succession to the British throne.     

A Pocket Borough? Reformed Politics in Ripon, 1832–67

This article examines the political history of the parliamentary borough of Ripon between the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Second Reform Act of 1867. It challenges the notion that Ripon remained a ‘pocket borough’ during this era; rather, the Reform Act rendered Ripon's politics much more open, vibrant and participatory than they had been during the ‘unreformed’ era. In demonstrating this, the article calls into question the alleged prevalence of ‘pocket boroughs’ in the reformed era.     

城市居民环城游憩距离选择的实证研究——以长沙市为例

本文通过抽样调查所获取基础数据,对城市居民环城游憩距离选择进行了实证研究,发现城市居民环城游憩活动并不完全符合距离衰减规律,而是存在出游理想距离。理想距离范围内是城市居民到访率最高的区域,形成环城游憩密集带。通过理想距离与游客性别、年龄、收入、文化程度、职业等交叉列联表分析,得出城市居民出游理想距离选择的差异性。在此基础上,本文探讨了城市居民环城游憩活动理想距离的形成机理,认为这是在各种因素共同影响下,在三大作用力系统——推动力系统、阻碍力系统、交互力系统相互作用下的一种均衡结果。