THE ENDURING POWER OF RACISM: A RECONSIDERATION OF WINTHROP JORDAN'S WHITE OVER BLACK

As a history of the origins and development of American racism, White over Black received great acclaim upon its publication in 1968. Deeply researched and covering some 650 pages, it eschewed professional jargon and offered a deft prose style and close attention to matters of sexuality in revealing the origins and lasting influence of racist attitudes arising from Englishmen's impressions of blacks before they became, preeminently, slaves in North America. Jordan's careful weighing of evidence and causation made readers appreciate what he believed his evidence repeatedly demonstrated about white Americans’ attitudes toward African‐Americans: “the power of irrationality in men.” Despite the initial acclaim and scholarly achievement, White over Black soon lost pace with the curve of politics and academic fashion. By the mid‐1970s, the post‐World War II liberal consensus on racial issues had disintegrated, and professional historians were writing principally for other professional historians. Within a decade after its publication, White over Black was relegated to the wasteland of the “suggested supplemental reading list.” However, the book's grasp of the fundamental historical issues requiring explanation has received recent affirmation from influential scholarly and political quarters. A dispassionate review of the literature leading up to and following White over Black's publication indicates that Jordan's emphasis on the causal contribution of racist attitudes to the rise of African slavery in British North America was on target. Moreover, Jordan's appreciation that academic historians should write for nonprofessionals is now widely held inside the academy. The historical accuracy and cogency of expression of Jordan's perspective on race and slavery make White over Black worth reexamining.     

THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE: ENGLISH OBSERVATION OF IRISH SOCIAL CUSTOMS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Abstract

In seventeenth-century cheap print on supernatural themes, the reader is often struck by gaps, silences, and things that do not quite add up. The article explores ways of reading between the lines to expose and perhaps make sense of these discontinuities. It asks what cultural work is performed by the supernatural in such texts, and speculates on the uses served by ghosts, fairies and demons both in the self-representation of subaltern, often female, individuals and in the textual strategies of the pamphlet writers.     

What is Waste that We Should Account for it? A Look Inside Queensland's Ecological Rucksack

While most Australians are conscious of the amount of waste that they place in garbage bins, relatively few would be aware of the waste that is generated in the course of producing the goods and services that they consume. This ‘embodied waste’ makes up a large part of the ‘ecological rucksack’ of those goods and services. This study develops a waste account for Queensland, using the ecological rucksack framework to illustrate patterns of waste production in the Australian economy. It classifies wastes both by type and broad sector of production. The study finds that the Queensland economy generated more than four billion tonnes of waste during the 2006–2007 financial year. The largest waste streams are produced at the resource extraction and distribution stages, and are predominantly materials that are disposed of without being used or are lost through inefficient use. The majority of the waste is produced upstream of the point of consumption and a large part is associated with materials produced for export.     

The Effects and Defects of Nuclear Cosmogeny

Joseph Masco suggests that nuclear weapons have become the icon of American technological superiority in the post-World War II era, and that their manufacture has transformed our worldview. Insofar as this is true, the production, testing, and use of such weapons has exposed the United States of America's experiment in freedom and equality to some of its most brilliant and most tarnished moments. The five volumes considered in this review explore some of the reflections from that patina and uncover many layers of tarnish that accompanied the transformation of the United States into a nuclear super-power.