Southern Pennine Brass Bands and the Creation of Northern Identity,c. 1840–1914: Musical Constructions of Space,Place And Region

In spite of being a national form of music-making, the brass band movement is accepted — almost without question in the popular imagination — as working class and northern. Hence, in 1974, Peter Hennessy described a band contest at the Albert Hall: ‘A roll call of the bands is like an evocation of industrial history. From Wingates Temperance and Black Dyke Mills to more modern conglomerates .... Grown men, old bandsmen say, have been known to cry at the beauty of it all …. Of all the manifestations of working-class culture, nothing is more certain than a brass band to bring on an attack of the George Orwells. Even the most hardened bourgeois cannot resist romanticising the proletariat a little when faced with one.(The Times, 11 Oct. 1974) This stereotype, which emerged in the nineteenth century, generated the following questions about northern identity: what elements in the brass band movement created this reportage of northern bandsmen and how did bands, which thrived in large numbers in the Southern Pennines, emerge as a musical and cultural metonym of the industrial landscape? This article explores notions of music-making and the creation of a musical space, place and region through the reporting of brass bands c. 1840–1914.     

First comprehensive peat depositional records for tin,lead and copper associated with the antiquity of Europe's largest cassiterite deposits

Tin, as a constituent of bronze, was central to the technological development of early societies, but cassiterite (SnO₂) deposits were scarce and located distantly from the centres of Mediterranean civilizations. As Britain had the largest workable ore deposits in the ancient Western world, this has led to much historical speculation and myth regarding the long-distance trading of tin from the Bronze Age onwards. Here we establish the first detailed chronology for tin, along with lead and copper deposition, into undisturbed ombrotrophic (rain-fed) peat bogs located at Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor in the centre of the British tin ore fields. Sustained elevated tin deposition is demonstrated clearly, with peaks occurring at 100–400 and 700–1000 calendar years AD – contemporaneous with the Roman and Anglo-Saxon periods respectively. While pre-Roman Iron Age tin exploitation undoubtedly took place, it was on a scale that did not result in convincingly enhanced deposition of the metal. The deposition of lead in the peat record provides evidence of a pre-Roman metal-based economy in southwest Britain. Emerging in the 4th century BC, this was centred on copper and lead ore processing that expanded exponentially and then collapsed upon Roman colonization during the 1st century AD.     

The fallen hero: masculinity,shame and farmer suicide in Australia

The drought-stricken Australian rural landscape, cultures of farming masculinity and an economy of value, moral worth and pride form a complex matrix of discourses that shape subjective dynamics that render suicide a possibility for distressed farmers. However, the centrality of a ‘mental health’ perspective and reified notions of ‘stoicism’ within this discursive field operate to exclude consideration of the ways in which cultural identity is linked to emotions. To illuminate and explore complex connections between subjectivity, moral worth and affect in relation to understanding farmer suicide, this article draws on theory and literature on agrarian discourses of masculine subjectivity and shame to analyze empirical data from interviews with farmers during times of environmental, social and economic crisis. The idealized notion of the farming man as ‘Aussie battler’ emerges from romantic agrarian mythology in which pride and self-worth are vested in traditional values of hard work, struggle and self-sacrifice. However, the structural context of agriculture, as it is shaped by the political economy of neoliberalism, threatens farm economic viability and is eroding the pride, self-worth and masculine identity of farmers. The article suggests that the notion of the ‘fallen hero’ captures a discursive shift of a masculinity ‘undone’, a regress from the powerful position of masculine subjectivity imbued with pride to one of shame that is of central importance to understanding how suicide emerges as a possibility for farmers.