The geography and natural resources of Bolivia

This paper tries to show the main thread of Scottish national identity in the nineteenth century and how Scotland's close connection with the empire did not asuage Scottish desires to retain a national identity. The paper tries to illustrate that the interpretation of the union connection by the Scottish political classes was central to the understanding of Scotland as a nation during the period. Examples are also provided of the way in which the union could be questioned in this century, but this was with the caveat that this would necessarily be limited; for such was the extent to which national identity was played out on an imperial stage. Although Scots never lost sight of their distinctiveness, any extension of the critique of union would have ultimately worked against their ability to confidently display their identity as they did quite successfully in the nineteenth century.     

Intolerable Cruelty： Marriage,Law, and Society in Early Twentieth-Century China

In Intolerable Cruelty： Marriage, Law, and Society in Early Twentieth-Century China, Margaret Kuo argues that legal reforms allowed wives in the Republican era unprecedented opportunities to leave abusive or undesirable marriages. In addition to reevaluating Republican-era law, Kuo significantly contributes to scholarship by acknowledging the agency of the wives who brought forth their cases in court. In contrast to CCP scholarship that ＂has worked to expunge GMD contributions＂ to women＇s rights and family law （p. 12）, Kuo argues that the Republican era offered flexible solutions during ＂an important transitional period＂ （19. 198）.     

The Authority of Age: Institutions for Childhood Development in China, 1895−1910

The structure of aged-based education and the science of childhood development were introduced to China in the last decades of the Qing dynasty. Drawing on period textbooks, journal articles, and school documents for women and children, this study argues that the theory of childhood development helped shape socialized play and citizenship training in new schools. These new institutions followed scientific insights about childhood development in terms of both physical and emotional growth. Educators hoped to found schools that would inculcate respect for political authority within the classroom, and administrators took unprecedented steps in documenting and regulating children. Schools not only became places for disseminating learning, but also centers for gathering information about children and their families, as well as about childhood itself. The production of knowledge and the institutionalization of schools for preschool children helped usher in new trends that denaturalized childrearing outside of the family domain.     

Gao,Yunxiang, Sporting Gender.＂ Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making during China＇s National Crisis, 1931-45

In Sporting Gender.＂ Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making During China＇s National Crisis, 1931-45, Yunxiang Gao argues that standards of waif-like beauty in the 1920s gave way to a new aesthetic of robust and athletic femininity （jianmei） in visual media in the 1930s. Female athletes challenged traditional norms by exposing themselves and bearing their skin in public, but they navigated between the politically acceptable ＂New Woman＂ model and the socially subversive ＂Modem Girl＂ model.     

‘… For it was founded upon a Rock’: Gibraltar and the Purposes of Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

In 1853–54, cholera in Britain forced the leadership at the tiny British fortress colony of Gibraltar to make a choice. Should the colony quarantine ships from Britain or leave the maritime frontier open to ships from the metropolitan centre of empire? The first choice secured imperial communication between London and the Rock, but it also jeopardised Gibraltar's land access to Southern Spain, as the failure to quarantine British ships would surely force Spanish authorities to close their border to protect against pandemic disease. Contrapuntally, the decision to protect Gibraltarian trade with Spain undermined any substantive claim to British ‘control’ over its colonial possession. The choice here was highlighted by Gibraltar's colonial governor, General Sir Robert Gardiner, who insisted that Gibraltar be governed as a British colony and kept open to the colonial centre at all costs, and Gibraltar's merchant community, a group that feared the economic consequences of a frontier closure at Gibraltar enough to favour keeping the Rock's quarantine policies in line with Spanish regulations rather than those set by Britain. As a result of this medical dispute, Gibraltar became a pivotal location, a metonym for a much broader conversation about the uses and purposes of Britain's overseas empire in the middle years of the nineteenth century.