Gl'Ingannati and its French Renaissance Translation

The article outlines the ideal Spain, as suggested by Ángel Del Río and M. J. Benardete in their essay in El concepto contemporáneo de España: Antología de ensayos (1895-1931). To these authors, Spain consists of a kind of modernist subjectivity that opposes the official Francoist Spain. The motherland so desired by Benardete and Del Río is an ethical construction set on a humanist base, unifying the domestic and the European, tradition and modernity—one that does not exclude but integrates. The discourse represents the political thinking of liberal nationalism diffused by the Center of Historic Studies or the philosophy of Ortega and Gasset.     

Compare and contrast: understanding Irish migration to Britain in a wider context

This article explores the potential for comparative research across different migrant groups. Research on migration is often weakened by the marked tendency to use a single ethnic/national group as the unit of analysis. Analysing migration from the experiences of a particular ethnic group may exaggerate ethnic exceptionalism and understate the extent to which experiences are shared across different migrant groups. My recent experiences on a range of research projects with diverse migrants to London made me think about similarities with the Irish, but each in different ways. However, there is a dearth of comparative analysis in relation to the Irish experience in Britain. On the one hand, there are many studies of Irish migrants, but these tend to focus solely on the Irish or else examine the relationship between Irish migrants and the ‘native’ British population. There has been little work on how the Irish relate to other migrant groups within British society. On the other hand, studies of other migrant communities rarely refer to the Irish as a comparative group. The article explores the reasons for the dearth of comparative work involving Irish migrants in Britain. In so doing, it considers some of the benefits and challenges of going beyond the ‘ethnic lens’. What would be gained but also lost by viewing Irish migration to Britain through a more comparative perspective? I explore how such comparative analysis might contribute, firstly, to a wider understanding of migration processes, experiences and inter-migrant relations, and, secondly, to a fuller appreciation of varied dimensions of migratory experiences in Britain. These issues are considered through a comparison of Polish and Irish migration to Britain.     

《类说》所收唐人笔记小说异文的史料价值

曾慥的《类说》是宋代一部重要的类书,历代学者颇为重视,征引较多,但系统的研究却极为少见。以其收录的唐人笔记小说为例,通过《类说》所收条目与原书单行本或丛书收录本比对,可以整理出《类说》独存之书、独存之条、内容互异等三种情况。其中异文共有书六十三种,条目八百七十三条。本文举要探析了这些异文条目的史料价值,认为《类说》具有考证辨疑的重要学术价值。     

Six theses on waste,value, and commons

The origins of capitalist value theory lie in transformations of property through enclosure of ‘commons-as-waste’ and practices of ‘commoning’ that supported these. These processes, repeated with difference, remain with us. Capitalist value production becomes a structure of necessity in societies that are profit seeking rather than needs oriented; the history of capitalist value is one of the unrelenting attempts to subordinate needs-oriented forms of value production to its accumulative logic. In the process, it continuously casts certain people, places, and conducts as wasteful, superfluous, or residual. In short, capitalist value constantly battles to assert its normative superiority over and autonomy from other forms of value production that interweaves with it. Waste, immanent to capital's becoming-being, poses a jeopardy to capital accumulation: it is, on the one hand, capitalist value-in-waiting and on the other hand, it is an omnipresent logic of dissipation that evades or exceeds capital's dialectic, threatening its legitimacy and existence.     

Atlas of the United States

In an attempt to distinguish between regional physical geography and the Soviet school of landscape science, the author defines the study objects of the two disciplines and provides a useful review of the present state of landscape science in the Soviet Union. Physical geography is said to be concerned with study of the entire geographical shell of the earth, ranging from the troposphere to the bottom of the layer of sedimentary rocks in the earth's crust. Landscape science focuses on the so-called landscape sphere, which is defined as the portion of the geographical shell that lies at or near the surface of the earth and is imbued with present-day life. Although some Soviet geographers treat the term “landscape” as a broad conceptual term (similar to climate), most investigators tend to give the term a classificatory or typological connotation, regarding landscape as the basic unit in a classification of natural geocomplexes. One landscape school focuses on the morphological structure of landscape, the other on model-building of the landscape mechanism.     

A Multi-ethnic City in Transition: Vilnius's Stormy Decade, 1939-1949

An American historian traces major changes in the demographic character of Vilnius during 1939-1949, a period encompassing the dislocation of its population and destruction during World War II as well as the city's ethnic and physical transformation prompted by incorporation into the USSR. More specifically, the paper, based in part on archival material, details and contrasts the circumstances prevailing during several distinctive periods in the city's mid-20th century history (September 1939-June 1941, June 1941-July 1944, and July 1944-1949), when it was exposed to five successive state jurisdictions (Poland, Lithuania, twice USSR, and Nazi Germany) and became the new Soviet capital of Lithuania. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O15, O18, R14. 1 figure, 89 references.     

Abstracts of Articles

ANDREW BREEZE, ‘Arthur’s Battles and the Volcanic Winter of 536–37’. A mega-eruption of 535 in the Americas produced a volcanic winter in 536-37, with crop failure throughout the Northern Hemisphere. It thus reveals a Welsh annal for 537 on 'mortality in Britain and in Ireland’ as referring to famine, not plague. Mention in the same annal of Arthur’s final battle at Camlan, located at Castlesteads on Hadrian’s Wall, will further point to a campaign by starving North Britons under Arthur's leadership to seize food-supplies from their neighbours. The extreme weather phenomena of 536-37 also suggest that Gildas wrote his De Excidio in the summer of 536 (as implied by David Woods of Cork), because in chapter 93 of that work he alludes to a ‘thick mist and black night’ sitting ‘upon the whole island’ of Britain, but says nothing on the harvest failure which it led to. We may infer as well that the Britons defeated the Saxons at ‘Mount Badon’ in north Wiltshire in early 493, because Gildas declares that the battle was won at the time of his birth, forty-three years and a month before he was writing.’

DAVID M. YORATH, ‘Sir Christopher Moresby of Scaleby and Windemere, c. 1441–99’. To date, researchers have little cared for Sir Christopher Moresby of Scaleby and Windermere (c. 1441–99), Member of Parliament for Westmorland, conservator of the peace with Scotland, escheator of Cumberland and Westmorland and steward of Penrith. There exists no ODNB article or source-based examination of his career — only a brief, error-strewn note in J. B. Wedgwood’s ‘Biographies of the Members of the Commons House 1439-1509’. This is unfitting, for it is clear there was a mastery of technique about Moresby — something that not only ensured his survival during one of the most turbulent periods in English history, but also made him an indispensable political figure, regardless of regime. What follows is an examination of his hitherto unstudied career, with some remarks on wider developments pertinent to the history of the North West.

VICTORIA SPENCE, ‘Adapting to the Elizabethan Settlement: Religious Faith and the Drive towards Conformity in Craven, 1559 to 1579’. This article explores the reception in Craven to Elizabethan religious reform. Until the 1569 Rebellion the interpretation of the Elizabethan Settlement was broad, pragmatic and accommodating. Following Elizabeth’s excommunication and the stringent enforcement of conformity, Catholics, supported by Marian and seminary priests, resorted to recusancy and a separate Catholic identity. Archbishops Grindal and Sandys installed university-educated preaching clerics to establish and promote conformity in the northern diocese. Many were Puritan nonconformists who felt reform was incomplete, and opposed a hierarchical Church with surviving Catholic rituals. Increasingly confessional identities diverged, although eventually the majority of the Craven laity adapted and conformed.

IMOGEN PECK, ‘The Great Unknown: The Negotiation and Narration of Death by English War Widows, 1647–60’. The truism that death is life’s only certainty may have seemed far from obvious to the women of mid seventeenth-century England. For the conditions of the British Civil Wars, in addition to causing significant physical destruction, also brought much uncertainty to the lives of the civilian population, who could struggle to ascertain whether men serving in the wars were alive or dead. Drawing on the relief petitions of war widows and court depositions from the northern counties of England, this article explores the impact this uncertainty had on the wives of Civil War soldiers. In particular, it focuses on the strategies women used when navigating the problem of how they could know, or prove, that their husbands were dead, the ways they narrated and interpreted the loss of a spouse, and the predicaments faced by ‘phantom widows’: those women who believed their husbands to have been killed in the wars, only for them to return home alive sometime later. In doing so, it illuminates a little-studied dimension of female experience during the revolutionary period, while also contributing to our understanding of early modern mentalities more broadly, and, in particular, attitudes to death and civil war.

CONOR O’BRIEN, ‘Attitudes to St Cuthbert’s Body during the Nineteenth Century’.

St Cuthbert’s tomb in Durham Cathedral was opened in 1827, occasioning the start of a cycle of polemic and counter-polemic between Protestant and Roman Catholic writers throughout the rest of the century. The excavation of 1827 aimed to disprove the medieval legends about the incorruption of Cuthbert’s body, but it (and the many texts which debated its findings throughout the course of the nineteenth century) must be understood in the light of local religious controversy as much as of Victorian antiquarianism. The texts which addressed the issue of Cuthbert’s body in the years which followed were concerned with religious, as well as historical, truth and reveal shifting attitudes in both the Anglican and Catholic communities to the role of saints, miracles and relics within their own forms of Christianity. While this paper mainly concerns a comparatively small element of Victorian religious debate, one focused upon issues of local interest and identity, it problematises some of the traditional paradigms used to understand nineteenth-century scholarship. Not the increasing secularisation of historical practice and antiquarianism, but the continuing, albeit changing, importance of Durham’s patron saint, is the most striking feature of the dispute.

EDWARD M. SPIERS, ‘Yorkshire and the First Day of the Somme’. Given the prominence of the First Day on the Somme in the UK’s collective memory of the First World War, it is timely to reconsider the impact of that disastrous battle upon Yorkshire, a county that contributed more fighting units (c. 20 per cent), and suffered more casualties, than any other county in the United Kingdom. The fighting experiences of Yorkshire units ranged from utter disaster (not even reaching their own front line), and suffering the largest proportion of casualties of any unit in the British army, to making the largest gains of ground on the day. The spread of bereavement, however, was far from uniform, and so partly on account of the units engaged, and their recruiting whether pre-war (where regular) or wartime (in the case of Kitchener’s Service battalions), losses were concentrated within the West Riding. Moreover, despite the heavy losses within the “Pals” battalions, the legendary burden of bereavement within local communities did not apply uniformly because some units in 1916 were nothing like the “Pals” of 1914. The process of releasing details about deaths over days and weeks, with a huge ‘missing’ sub-group, robbed the First Day of anything like the significance it now holds. The dominant Press narrative, supported by letters from the front, remained overwhelmingly positive about the battle, the role of Yorkshire units and the prospects for the war itself. Political, military and religious elites reinforced this narrative at the two-year anniversary of the outbreak of the war, which coupled with the reception of the film, ‘Battle of the Somme’, assisted in sustaining the coping mechanisms within the country.     

Creating a Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations An Exercise in Multinational Interdisciplinary Cooperation

This major international history project succeeded because of the goodwill, commitment, and collaborative endeavor of a team of researchers drawn not only from different countries but also from different disciplines. Its immediate product is a recently published book, HISCO: Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (van Leeuwen, Maas, and Miles 2002). The authors describe the substantive issues, methodological questions, and practical arrangements behind the HISCO scheme, which is a classification tool designed to enable researchers working with historical occupational titles in a variety of linguistic and geographical contexts to communicate with each other and to make international comparisons across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in social, economic, and other fields of history. HISCO is rooted in the 1968 version of the International Labour Organisation [then known as Office]'s International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO68) (ILO 1969). This means that in addition to comparing historical information across national boundaries, we can establish linkages between historical and contemporary data sets. The authors also note some recent developments on the application of HISCO in historical research.     

Rebuilding the Great Britain Historical GIS,Part 1: Building an Indefinitely Scalable Statistical Database

Abstract

The Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GIS) has been rebuilt around a single central table holding all statistics in one column, currently containing 14,541,491 data values. This architecture enables extremely flexible data handling, but requires that the context of each data value be captured entirely as metadata. Statistical reporting areas are defined via an ontology of administrative units, in which hierarchical relationships are compulsory while boundary polygons are optional. What a number measures is recorded via a relational implementation of the Data Documentation Initiative standard, locating each value within an n-dimensional matrix, or nCube, whose dimensions are variables such as age, gender, and occupation. The data library can be extended to additional countries or more statistical topics without adding any database tables.