The Convertible Saint: Expeditus through Time and Space

Expeditus, a Roman soldier who was for centuries simply a name on a list of early Christian martyrs, took on new life in the late eighteenth century in a Catholic cult that expanded greatly in the late nineteenth century and has continued to spread since then. His name linked him with time and the answering of prayers for urgent causes in particularly modern ways, despite growing scholarly scepticism about him. His unforgettable image — a Roman soldier crushing a crow or raven underfoot — has been adopted by Italian fascists and practitioners of Haitian vodou, among many others. Expeditus?s popularity on the internet is only the latest version of this unusual devotion.     

Spectres of Pan-Islam: Methodological Nationalism and British Imperial Policy after the First World War

In the aftermath of the First World War, British officials were forced to contend with a threat that seemed to undermine their empire from India to Egypt. The anti-colonial revolts that spread across the world in this moment were caused by many factors from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to far more local concerns. However, many British officials imagined these contemporaneous revolts to be caused by a pan-Islamic conspiracy. The threat of pan-Islam was inflated in the minds of these officials in large part because it fundamentally contradicted their conception of how politics should be ordered on a global scale. This article suggests that the spectre of pan-Islam helped to crystallise a methodological nationalism in imperial policies over Muslim populations. The amorphous spatiality of pan-Islam redoubled a growing commitment to bounded national spaces as a natural unit of political activity. To those officials obsessed with pan-Islam, it was so frightening precisely because it questioned the spatial paradigm through which they understood the world. Other officials saw pan-Islam as a minor nuisance, because they believe that such transnational politics could not possibly survive in a world inherently ordered into contiguous nations. The threat of pan-Islam helped to push both sets of officials into a methodological nationalism, but some saw nationalism as inevitable while others feared that Islam was a compelling threat to a European-dominated inter-national order.     

Losing the Blanket,Building a Fence: Australian Anxiety and the End of Military Colonialism in Malaysia

From 1955 to 1988, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) maintained a large airbase in Northern Malaysia. For the first 15 years of its existence, RAAF Butterworth had a modest and incomplete perimeter fence. With the end of British military colonialism in Malaysia and Singapore following the implementation of the ‘East of Suez’ policy, the Australians became preoccupied with their physical security and the role of the perimeter fence. By exploring the adoption of practices of exclusion via physical barriers in the wake of British withdrawal, this paper argues that the changing psychological outlook of Australian military officials reflected broader Australian anxieties about their own sense of ‘Britishness’ and the nation’s place in a decolonising Asia. As the Australians lost their British ‘blanket’ they built a fence.     

Recruiting,Grooming, and Reaping the Rewards: The Case of GOPAC in the 1992 Congressional Elections

Candidate selection is an important avenue for parties to influence elections, yet political scientists know little about which candidates are recruited to run and groomed to win. We hypothesize that parties focus their pre-general election activities on ideologically compatible candidates with high qualifications in competitive districts, but opt for more moderate candidates in districts with weak party support. We exploit a unique data source: FEC records indicating which candidates received instructional audiotapes from GOPAC, a political organization run by future House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Using these tapes as indicators of recruitment and grooming, we find that the party behaved pragmatically, recruiting conservatives in Republican districts, but setting aside ideological considerations elsewhere. We also find that personal qualifications of candidates played an inconsistent role, bolstering the likelihood of recruitment, but having no effect on GOPAC's support once the filing deadline had passed. Finally, we show that GOPAC's intervention was beneficial to the leader: candidates aided by GOPAC demonstrated greater loyalty to Gingrich while in office.     

Comparative Macroscopic and Microscopic Gunflint Use-Wear Analysis

ABSTRACT

The present research is focused on a morphological and microscopic comparative analysis of the gunflints of the fur trade component of the Horseshoe Bay site (21CA201), Leech Lake, Cass County, Minnesota. Background information pertaining to the Horseshoe Bay site is followed by the research methodologies utilized in the current analysis of the gunflints. Morphological and microscopic patterns of use wear have identified two different functions for gunflints. The results of the analysis indicate that (1) gunflints can potentially retain use-wear associated ferric depositions for an extended period of time; (2) the ferric depositions retained on archaeologically recovered gunflints display diagnostic striation patterns and microspherule attachment remnants that match replicated samples; (3) gunflints utilized for fire starting in conjunction with a fire steel display morphological characteristics that can be visually identified; and (4) gunflints were utilized for the purposes of fire starting in northern Minnesota during the period circa 1784 to at least 1853.     

The legacy of Atatürk: the limits of conditionality in Turkish European Union membership negotiations

There exists a significant and sustained difference between the ability of the European Union to successfully socialise those member states who have joined since the fall of Communism, and its apparent inability to similarly socialise Turkey. Despite some impressive legal and constitutional reforms since 2001, a key shortcoming remains, the unwillingness of many in the Turkish judiciary to implement those revised standards in a consistent way. Existing explanatory accounts of this inability would focus on the credibility of the Union offer of membership, the duration of negotiations or the importance of Turkish domestic standards. None of these, however, are able to account for why Turkey seems to occupy a half way position, exhibiting reformed laws but unreformed legal practice. To address this shortcoming this article shall combine existing scholarship on the importance of domestic normative contestation within Turkey with an appraisal of the shortcomings of the Union's conditionality policy itself that emerge from the conceptual studies of conditionality.