Undoing Nature: The John Muir Trust's “Journey for the Wild”, the UK,Summer 2006

Abstract: I take as a point of departure for a discussion of the idea of nature the John Muir Trust's much publicised Journey for the Wild which took place in the UK during the summer of 2006. My objective is to explore how, at the same time that the “wild” was performed as a political category through the Journey, replicating the binary nature/society, prevalent norms of nature that depend on that binary, including, ironically, those of John Muir himself, were “undone”. I work with Judith Butler's (2004, Undoing Gender) ideas of “doing” and “undoing” gender and what counts as human, and her link between the articulation of gender and the human on the one hand and, on the other, a politics of new possibilities. Taking her argument “elsewhere”—unravelling what is performed as “wild” and what counts as “nature”—and using as evidence the art of Eoin Cox, the actions of journeyers, extracts from their diaries and from Messages for the Wild delivered to the Scottish Parliament, I suggest that the idea of a working wild points towards more socially just political possibilities than a politics of nature defined through a binary.     

美国迫使台湾当局从华南边境和沿海岛屿撤兵问题研究

肯尼迪政府时期的美国对华政策已经开始孕育着一些变革。其政府内部先后讨论过一些调整方案,但在国际国内各种复杂因素的制约下没有取得重大突破,其中台湾当局不断施加的干扰和阻碍是一个重要原因。在此时期,美国曾迫使台湾当局从缅泰老“金三角”地区撤军,并试图透迫蒋介石从金门、马祖等沿海岛屿撤防,双方施压与抗压、牵制与反牵制的互动关系十分明显。尽管美国政策设计者们已经认识到美国对华政策必须服务于美国和整个“自由世界”的广泛利益而非台北政权一家的利益,但实际上还是难以摆脱台湾当局的牵制。另外,更重要的阻力来自于美国国内政治的掣肘,而其政策调整的幅度局限于“两个中国”之类的方案,也是根本行不通的。     

The Clash of Interests: Commerce and the Politics of Trade in the Age of Anne

This article celebrates the contribution which Professor Holmes made to the field of British politics and society by the study of an important collection of political tracts. The compiler of the collection is identified as Sir Charles Cooke, one of the most significant commercial politicians of his day. The organisation of the collection illuminates the ways in which City politicians used various channels of information, both printed and personal, to support their political platforms. It also demonstrates how Cooke contributed to the defeat of the tories over the French Commerce Bill of 1713, by supplying key sources to combat the ministry's position. On a wider plane, although it suggests that partisan politics tainted all information advanced in the public sphere, this did not relieve political rivals of the need to establish the superior authority of their sources, and political success only saw Cooke redouble his efforts to gain as wide a base of information as possible. Statistical precision remained elusive, but his archive stands testament to a growing need for authority of source in a political world of party and vested interests.     

Justo Sierra O’Reilly and John L. Stephens: Translation,History, and Transnational Romanticisms in the Americas

In this article, I explore the crossroads that unite two important nineteenth-century travel writers from the Americas: John L. Stephens who traveled south from the U.S. to the Yucatán peninsula, and Justo Sierra O’Reilly who traveled north from the Yucatán to Washington D.C. By focusing on two writers from the Americas, my goal is to examine how Romantic aesthetics and ideologies took on new shapes through cultural exchange within the region. More specifically, I study how these two travel writers articulated and came to terms with what Stephen Bann has identified as two fundamental aspects of the Romantic period. The first is the ‘remarkable enhancement of the consciousness of history’ (Bann 1995 Bann, Stephen. 1995. Romanticism and the Rise of History. New York: Twayne. [Google Scholar], 4) evident in the importance of popular literary genres like the historical novel. The second is a new accessibility to texts and information that incorporated large groups of readers and made historical information more available. While Stephens demonstrates an at times romantic fascination with indigenous history constructed through the analysis of the ruins he visits, Sierra O’Reilly’s translation, at every turn, critically engages Stephens's historical conclusions, revealing interlocking and contested notions of history in the Americas.     

Edward Kelley’s Danish treasure hoax and Elizabethan antiquarianism

ABSTRACT

In 1583, Edward Kelley claimed to have made a number of archaeological discoveries on Northwick Hill in Worcestershire, including a forged document, the “Northwick scroll”, purportedly giving the location of treasure hidden by the Danes. The scroll was subsequently deciphered by Kelley’s employer, John Dee. Kelley’s hoax, which had to fool one of the country’s most learned men, was carefully constructed and drew on recent antiquarian work. However, Kelley also relied on older traditions of magical treasure hunting, thereby combining two apparently antithetical approaches to the past. The article uses the example of Kelley’s hoax to argue that hoaxes served a useful and illuminating function in the early development of archaeology by testing the boundaries of plausibility. Furthermore, Kelley’s synthesis of learned antiquarianism and treasure hunting challenges the view that Elizabethan antiquaries were unwilling to excavate. Kelley’s methodologies in constructing the hoax echoed those of William Camden and others by linking excavated objects with chronicles and landscape features to create an integrated account of an imagined past. However, the hoax’s success also rested on Dee’s willingness to become a treasure hunter, demonstrating that elite learned antiquarian endeavours were not always distant from the aims of traditional “hill diggers”.     

Alan Wilson – contributions to research on population and migration

ABSTRACT

This article reviews Alan Wilson's research on population and migration in the 1970s and the 2010s, which supplements his principal contribution - mathematical modelling of urban and regional systems. In the 1970s, drawing on input-output models of economies and working with Philip Rees, Wilson established the accounting basis for Andrei Rogers' multi-regional projection model, adding international migration. Innovative methods were developed to complete demographic accounts, where there were data gaps. In the 2010s, working with Adam Dennett, Wilson systematized methods for estimating migration flows between regions in Europe, employing his family of spatial interaction models. The key aim of both research strands was to ensure that no information was ignored to ensure consistency in population and migration models. The influence of Wilson's contributions to research on population and migration is traced through a survey of subsequent research.     

The Rebel Chief Whip: The Role of Leslie Wilson in the Fall of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1922

This article explores the crisis within the Conservative Party in 1922 over the continuation of the coalition with Lloyd George's section of the Liberal Party, focusing on the actions of the Conservative chief whip, Leslie Wilson. Previously unused papers relating to Wilson's career shed new light on his role in the fall of the coalition. Wilson co‐ordinated opposition to the continuation of the coalition in its existing form, helping to solidify the group of junior ministers opposed to Lloyd George into a cohesive and powerful faction, which then forced the Conservative Party leader, Austen Chamberlain, into making concessions. Above all, Wilson was influential in forcing Chamberlain to agree to a meeting of MPs at the Carlton Club on 19 October 1922, at which the rebels won a decisive victory, causing the resignation of Chamberlain as party leader and Lloyd George as prime minister, in one of the most important events in modern British political history.     

A VENGEFUL EDUCATION? URBAN REVANCHISM,SEX WORK AND THE PENAL POLITICS OF JOHN SCHOOLS

This article considers how useful the urban revanchism thesis is in helping us understand the John School, a “mobile” educational programme that has been rolled out in the United States, Canada, the UK and South Korea which teaches those arrested for soliciting for the purposes of buying sex the negative consequences of their actions. The article begins by unpacking the urban revanchism thesis and bringing it into dialogue with ideas on punishment. It then draws on a case study of one English John School in the anonymized town of Redtown. It demonstrates that the operations and rationales of the Redtown John School have traces of revanchism and that they are also infused by ideas and practices of care. As a result it argues that the urban revanchism thesis illuminates some important aspects of the Redtown John School while silencing or misreading others. The article concludes therefore by calling for future research to think more broadly about punishment (rather than revanchism) in the city and its entanglements with care.     

John Robinson's ‘State’ for the General Election of 1774

This note prints two documents of the 1774 general election compiled by John Robinson, secretary to the treasury. One is a list of the old house of commons in the summer of 1774, prior to its dissolution. MPs are listed, from the government standpoint, as Pro, Hopeful, Doubtful and Con. The other document is a list of the constituencies with the same political designations for MPs, both for the existing house of commons and the expected new House: no names are given for actual or prospective MPs. The election saw an unusually large number of contests, with 183 seats at stake in 102 constituencies, a higher total than has hitherto been known.