Beautiful Geography: The Pictorial Maps of Ruth Taylor White

This paper explores the career of Ruth Taylor White, an American cartographic illustrator who published a significant number of pictorial maps from the 1920s into the 1940s. Taylor White’s ‘cartographs’ (as she called them) were characterized by her signature bobble-headed cartoon characters who romped through colourful, attractive landscapes. These visually rich and highly narrative maps simultaneously strove for accuracy and engaged in profound stereotyping with regard to culture, race, gender and class. They reveal not only the aesthetic and conceptual preferences of their maker but also the cultural biases of their middle-class, white American audience.     

FROM BREXIT TO HEGEL

British idealism has led an ambiguous existence in any overview of British historical and political thought in the twentieth century. Seen partly as an alien Continental intrusion into presumably typical British priorities of empiricism, positivism, and utilitarianism, it was badly damaged by its putative associations with the military enemy of two world wars. Admir Skodo's meticulous study of British “idealist revisionists” during the postwar period 1945–1980 repairs this damage by showing the extended influence of that idealism as funneled through the “new idealism” of the interwar period represented mainly by the philosophers R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott. Skodo demonstrates how these idealist revisionists deeply influenced postwar British historiography by underscoring qualities of humanism, pluralism, and variety not characteristically associated with idealism, reinterpreted a range of important topics in British history from the Tudors through the English civil wars to the Victorian period, and came up with political theorizing that celebrated the postwar welfare state while indicating its vulnerabilities to an increasingly technologized society. Just as Skodo's protagonists negotiated the 1970s transition in Britain's turn to Europe, so his account proves stimulating for contemporary concerns regarding a post‐Brexit Britain. The final part of the essay therefore looks at some suggested models, such as the “Anglosphere” or a “Singapore in the Atlantic” for Britain, before concluding with reflections on the importance according to a Hegelian reading of the modern “rational state” of the continued influence of Oxbridge intellectuals on the evolution of British directions and goals since the Victorian age.     

The Darkest Corner: documenting institutional abuse and its consequences at the Abbey Theatre

Documentary theatre, as a theatrical genre, has not maintained a continuous presence in Irish theatre. The Darkest Corner series, produced in 2010 by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland's National Theatre is, therefore, one of the first examples of Irish theatre using the genre to address political and social issues. Presenting three plays, Gerard Mannix Flynn's James X, Richard Johnson's The Evidence I Shall Give and Mary Raftery's No Escape, the series examines the widespread abuse of children in state institutions. Before analysing the documentary play commissioned by the Abbey, Raftery's No Escape, this article will begin with an exploration of documentary theatre in Ireland. It will then examine the material used for the play, the Ryan Report, published following the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, something of great political and social interest to contemporary Ireland and, finally, the play itself.     

Arbeit und Zeit,Körper und Uhr: Die Konstruktion von ‚effektiver’︁ Arbeit im ‚Scientific Management’︁ des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts

The concept ‚Scientific Management’︁ was invented in 1910 for what was then called the ‚Taylor‐system’︁ of shop management. Frederick W. Taylor had developed his system to eliminate the “waste of human effort” mainly by “time study”, the analysis of the work of “first‐class workman” with a stop‐watch and the synthesis of standard times for given tasks which make the “waste” of effort visible and measurable. A reading of Karl Marx's work shows the “paradigm of productivity” governing mid‐century discussion of the value of labor. Time is a central element in the valuation of industrial labour, but only with Taylor the precision of the stop‐watch is introduced to observe and control the productivity of the body of the worker. As disciples of Taylor Frank and Lillian Gilbreth introduced motion studies and micromotion studies into Scientific Management. Their analysis of the motion of workers, technically assisted by high‐speed watches and cameras, goes beyond the surface‐observation of the first‐class workman to enable the design of efficient motion. The body of the worker is represented in lines of light and tables of data. The objects of desire are the time‐lines of efficiency and productivity. In both cases, Taylor and the Gilbreths, various observations further lead to the conclusion that science and schooling are an important historical background to the rise of Scientific Management that deserves closer inspection.     

Tyrtaeus and the Civilian Poet of the Crimean War

Recent scholarship has delved into the impact of newspaper press upon Crimean War poetry and highlighted the challenges of war representation facing non-combatant poets. The Crimean conflict (1854–56), this essay will show, was not only a ‘media war’ but also a ‘literary’ one, during which mid-Victorian commentators and poets consciously reworked an array of established traditions of war poetry, especially those of Tyrtaeus, the Greek martial poet of the seventh century, to negotiate the duties and artistic endeavours of the civilian poet. Tracing the construction of a ‘Tyrtaean’ tradition from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), it explores how a Romantic reworking of Tyrtaeus’ war songs served as a precedent for the civilian poets of the Crimean conflict, and how newspaper reports of the suffering of soldiers intensified a widespread scepticism of the civilian’s knowledge and bodily experience of war, which in turn instigated a reconfiguration of the ‘Tyrtaean’ poet. It argues that whilst the poetic efforts of Tom Taylor, Louisa Shore, and Alfred Tennyson to refashion the figure of the civilian manifest Crimean War poets’ anxiety about their non-combatant status and the use of poetry, they evacuated the ‘Tyrtaean mode’, a poetic mode intended to arouse people’s patriotic sentiment and exhort them to military action, forging a new image of war poet within their work marked by the civilian’s detachment from the spectacle of war and critical engagement with distant suffering.     

Walter Taylor and the history of American archaeology

Walter Taylor’s place in the history of archaeology is well secured. Not only is he noted for his uncredited anticipation of the theoretical and methodological innovations of the 1960s and 1970s in his infamous book A Study of Archeology, but he is also well-known for committing professional suicide by short-sightedly attacking numerous key figures in American archaeology for their methodological shortfalls, and yet never publishing a report utilizing his controversial method. Although these statements have inundated the historical literature on American archaeology, they are received wisdom rather than the reality of Taylor’s contributions to the field. Many aspects of Taylor’s conjunctive approach were at odds with the stated aims of processual archaeology. Although Taylor did not live up to his critics’ (or his own) demands for a grand display of his approach, he did on several occasions demonstrate its potential. The irony of Taylor in the history of archaeology is not that he was uncredited for his prescience or that his attacks on the archaeological establishment were a naïve failure; but rather that he receives too much credit for what he didn’t do, and not enough for what he did.     

‘Partially provided’: geography at the University of Toronto, 1844–1935

In universities, as in everyday life, there is a fundamental need for geographical knowledge, even when no formal departments exist to provide instruction. This need was true in the University of Toronto during the decades before Griffith Taylor was appointed in 1935 to the first university Chair in geography in English‐speaking Canada. Using matriculation and annual university course examinations, university calendars and the papers of President Falconer and Professors James Mavor and Harold Innis, I trace the development of geography at the University of Toronto from the mid‐nineteenth century to the arrival of Taylor. Courses taught in selected aspects of physical and human geography in the Departments of Geology, Political Economy and History are particularly significant. Underlying this instruction, and also the desire to establish a geography department, was an acute awareness of the fundamental importance of geography to help understand a large regionally complex homeland, and a wider world.     

Mill and Tocqueville: a friendship bruised

Having first met in 1835, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville began ‘an extremely interesting and mutually laudatory correspondence'; but their splendid friendship did not last. A popular thesis focuses on letters exchanged in 1840 to 1842 that reflect conflicting views on the Eastern Question and argues that Mill initiated the ‘strange interruption’. Given Mill's commitment to the ‘agreement of conviction and feeling on the few cardinal points of human opinion’ as a prerequisite of genuine friendship, such interpretation sounds plausible. However, circumstantial evidence, most notably Mill's willingness to have a frank discussion with Tocqueville on pending issues, contradicts the assertion that Mill was enraged by Tocqueville's 1841 letter. This essay suggests focusing attention on two additional cardinal differences between them—their contrasting views of François Guizot and confrontation vis-à-vis benevolent imperialism. Moreover, personal matters such as Harriet Taylor's dislike of Tocqueville and Mill's departure from the London and Westminster Review are also believed to have largely led to Mill discontinuing correspondence with Tocqueville.     

自由主义与加拿大宪政改革

在19世纪上半期加拿大建立责任政府的过程中,自由主义观念起了重要的促进作用.这不仅表现在自由主义思想对加拿大殖民地人政治意识觉醒的推动上,更表现在英国社会与政坛对英帝国与移民殖民地关系认识的改变上.由于美国独立的教训,维护帝国统一和防止殖民地与母国分离,曾是英国人心中一个不解的结.因此,旧观念支配下的英国统治集团,几乎一致地拒绝了达勒姆关于授予殖民地责任政府的建议.随着英国自身现代政党制度的确立和自由贸易的实现,新的自由主义帝国观开始形成,并直接推动了加拿大的宪政改革.