Fear and loathing in Kansas City: Political harassment and the making of moderates in America's abortion wars (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The pro‐life movement regularly employs tactics of political harassment in its campaign against abortion. As the murder of the controversial abortion doctor George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, demonstrated last year, such tactics often betray a potential for violence. This paper explores how the militant tactics of the pro‐life movement in the 1990s have contributed to the formation of a ‘new’ political identity in Kansas politics: that of the moderate Republican. But for those that seek to counter‐mobilize against the Christian right, the political stakes remain high.     

Going round in circles: Some new evidence for population in the later middle ages

The Myntling Register contains some little known and, in some respects, highly unusual demographic evidence relating to the period from around the later fourteenth century up to the 1970s and to the wealthy Lincolnshire Priory of Spalding. It is in the form of hundreds of ‘family trees’ relating to the villein families of the priory's major manors. It has evidence of interest to economic historians of medieval England on several fronts, the three of which dealt with here are proportions of males to females, percentages of females marrying, and most particularly numbers of surviving children per family. This evidence, whilst by no means perfect, is of a much more direct kind than that often used in attempts to calculate later medieval population. As such it has a contribution to make to the very vexed question of later medieval demography.