The historical dimension of French geography

In France, the study of history behind regional geography has suffered a long decline since the late nineteenth century, but a new historical dimension is beginning to emerge. In the nineteenth century, historians showed how much regional character owed to remains from antiquity while historical geographers traced the history of exploration and discovery from ancient to modern times. Vidal de la Blache integrated historical reconstruction with social analysis in the study of regions. Vidal's followers not only characterized the distinctiveness of regional features but also demonstrated that differences in regional ways of life were more pronounced before industrialization and urbanization than later. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, historical investigations by geographers were neither sufficiently comprehensive nor sufficiently rigorous to explain spatial patterns. Historians of the Annales school obtained deeper understandings of social and economic changes and took a broader view of long-term psychological, cultural and geographical changes. Their interpretations of agrarian structures illuminated problems fundamental to the development of European civilization. In the 1970s, reacting against mechanistic analyses of spatial organization, young scholars again turned to historical geography to examine problems of social evolution. At the moment, this revival of historical interest among geographers has not attracted much attention from historians.     

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.     

On the Fractal Measurement of Geographical Boundaries

This paper has two main objectives. First, we review and evaluate four different computational methods for measuring the “fractality” of cartographic lines: these are known as the structured walk, the equipaced polygon, the hybrid walk, and the cell count methods. Second, because previous research has restricted the focus of fractal measurement exercises to isolated physical entities, the subject of our empirical study concerns the urban area of Swindon, United Kingdom, that comprises a mosaic of contiguous land-use parcels. In technical terms, the results pinpoint some of the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the four methods, whilst our substantive conclusion is that fractal dimension appears to be a function of both scale and land-use type in our geographical study.     

Minimum-Cost Distances in Spatial Analysis

An axiomatic approach to distance is developed which focuses on those behavioral concepts of distance related to movement in space. In particular, spatial movement by behaving units is postulated to involve a choice from among some set of abstract trips in space, and implicitly, to involve the minimization of some relevant notion of trip costs. In this context, the relevant behavioral notion of distance in space is taken to be the minimum-cost distance generated by this choice process. These trip-cost concepts extend the classical notions of paths, path lengths, and shortest paths in metric spaces. Hence many of the analytical results of the paper involve extensions of classical shortest-path distance properties to minimum-cost distances. In addition to these extensions, a characterization theorem is given which specifies the possible functional relationships between trip costs and their associated path lengths. These relationships include most functional forms which are commonly employed in the literature.     

Reviews

Australian

Bateman W. R. G. and Ward M. W. (eds), Australia's Offshore Maritime Interests, Canberra, Australian Centre for Maritime Studies, 1985, pp. 122. $15.00 (paper)

Stephen Castles, Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope and Michael Morrissey, Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia, Sydney, Pluto Press, 1988, pp.152. $14.95 (paper)

Roger Gibbins, Federalism in the Northern Territory; Statehood and Aboriginal Political Development, Darwin, North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, 1988, pp. 148. $14.00 (paper)

Dean Jaensch and Peter Loveday (eds), Challenge From The Nationals: The Territory Election 1987, Darwin, North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, 1987, pp. 226. $20.00 (paper)

Constance Lever‐Tracy and Michael Quinlan, A Divided Working Class, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988, pp. 338. $29.95 (paper)

Peter Loveday and Peter McNab (eds), Australia's Seventh State, Darwin, The Law Society of the Northern Territory and the North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, 1988, pp.322. $24.00 (paper)

Geoffrey Skene, Specialities of the House, Department of the Parliamentary Library/Australasian Political Studies Association, 1988, pp.59. $10.00 (paper)

Comparative and international

Chris Bellamy, The Future of Land Warfare, London and Sydney, Croom Helm, 1987, pp.302. £29.95 (cloth)

Cathy Downes Strategic and Defence Studies Centre Research School of Pacific Studies The Australian National University

Melanie Beresford, Vietnam: Politics, Economics and Society, London, Frances Pinter, 1988, pp.242. $19.95 (paper)

Vernon Bogdanor (ed.) Constitutions in Democratic Politics, Gower, for the Policy Studies Institute, Aldershot, 1988, pp.395. $59.00 (cloth)

Barry Coldrey, Faith and Fatherland: The Christian Brothers and the Development of Irish Nationalism 1838–1921, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1988, pp. 338. £27.50

John Connell, New Caledonia or Kanaky? The Political History of a French Colony, Canberra, Australian National University, National Centre for Development Studies, Pacific Research Monograph No. 16,1987, pp.493. $25.00 (paper)

Michael Spencer, Alan Ward and John Connell (eds), New Caledonia: Essays in Nationalism and Dependency, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1988, pp.253. $ 19.95 (paper)

Leon Epstein Political Parties in the American Mold, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1986, pp. 440. $US27.00 (cloth).

Keith Ewing, The Funding of Political Parties in Britain, Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 264. $70.00 (cloth)

Richard Higgott (ed.), New Directions in International Relations? Australian Perspectives, Canberra, Department of International Relations, Australian National University, 1988, pp. 223. $10.00 (paper)

Michael J Sheehan, Arms Control; Theory and Practice, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp. 188. $34.95 (paper)

Political theory and methodology

Boris Frankel, The Post‐Industrial Utopians, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987, pp. 303. $29.95 (paper)

P. Gottfried and T. Fleming The Conservative Movement. Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1988, pp.125. US$7.95 (paper)

Peter C. Ordeshook, Game Theory and Politics: An Introduction, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp.511. $47.00 (paper)

A. Teichova, M. Levy‐Leboyer & H. Nussbaum (eds), Multinational Enterprise in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 396. $107.00 (cloth).