A Legal History of Intimate Deception

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-133
Author(s):  
Jill Elaine Hasday

This chapter places modern law in historical context. Over the course of the twentieth century, some legal remedies for intimate deception disappeared or became much less valuable. First, starting in 1935, a wave of state “anti-heart balm” laws abolished causes of action for seduction and breach of promise to marry that some women had been using to sue intimates who deceived them. Courts then interpreted anti-heart balm statutes expansively, relying on the laws to block a wide array of claims against deceptive intimates. Second, changing norms about race and gender left judges unwilling to grant redress for some types of intimate deception that they had once been willing to remediate. Third—and most significant in diminishing the volume of litigation—the advent and swift spread of no-fault divorce starting in 1970 meant that securing an annulment or fault-based divorce because of intimate deception became a much less valuable remedy.

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 283
Author(s):  
Michèle Powles

This article traces the development of the New Zealand jury system. Most noteworthy in thisdevelopment has been the lack of controversy the system has created. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the pursuit of equality in the legal system generally led to debate and reform of juries in relation to representation, race and gender.


Author(s):  
Ignacio de la Rasilla

Summary This article examines the long-forgotten first book-length treatise on international law ever published by a woman in the history of international law. The first part places Concepción Arenal’s Ensayo sobre el Derecho de gentes (1879) in the historical context of the dawn of the international legal codification movement and the professionalisation of the academic study of international law. The second part surveys the scattered treatment that women as objects of international law and women’s individual contributions to international law received in international law histories up to the early twentieth century. It then draws many parallels between Arenal’s work and the influential resolutions of the first International Congress of Women in 1915 and surveys related developments during the interwar years. The conclusion highlights the need of readdressing the invisibility of women in international legal history.


2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 566-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raúúl A. Ramos

This article explores the usefulness of Chicano/a history to teaching and representing the nineteenth-century history of northern Mexico, U.S. imperial expansion, and the constructed nature of borders. Typically considered a twentieth-century discipline, Chicano/a historians have a long history of engaging the subject in the nineteenth century. This focus dovetails with recent critical works on race and gender in the U.S. West as well as transnational approaches to history. This article makes the case that the perspective on the nineteenth century provided by Chicano/a historians forces readers to reframe their understanding of the sweep of U.S. history.


Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam

After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. This book charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man's evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. The book reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity's problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, the book shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee–human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, the book argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.


Author(s):  
Wakoh Shannon Hickey

Mindfulness is widely claimed to improve health and performance, and historians typically say that efforts to promote meditation and yoga therapeutically began in the 1970s. In fact, they began much earlier, and that early history offers important lessons for the present and future. This book traces the history of mind-body medicine from eighteenth-century Mesmerism to the current Mindfulness boom and reveals how religion, race, and gender have shaped events. Many of the first Americans to advocate meditation for healing were women leaders of the Mind Cure movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. They believed that by transforming their consciousness, they could also transform oppressive circumstances in which they lived, and some were activists for social reform. Trained by Buddhist and Hindu missionaries, these women promoted meditation through personal networks, religious communities, and publications. Some influenced important African American religious movements, as well. For women and black men, Mind Cure meant not just happiness but liberation in concrete political, economic, and legal terms. The Mind Cure movement exerted enormous pressure on mainstream American religion and medicine, and in response, white, male doctors and clergy with elite academic credentials appropriated some of its methods and channeled them into scientific psychology and medicine. As mental therapeutics became medicalized, individualized, and then commodified, the religious roots of meditation, like the social justice agendas of early Mind Curers, fell away. After tracing how we got from Mind Cure to Mindfulness, this book reveals what got lost in the process.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-180
Author(s):  
Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik

Abstract This article addresses the practices of collecting Chinese objects that were brought to the territory of present-day Slovenia by sailors, missionaries, travellers, and others who travelled to China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time, this territory was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; we will, therefore, begin with the brief historical context of the Empire and its contact with China, followed by a discussion on the nature of collecting Chinese objects in Slovenian territories at that time. We will further examine the status of the individuals who travelled to China and the nature and extent of the objects they brought back. The article will also highlight the specific position of the Slovenian territory within the history of Euro-Asian cultural connections, and address the relevant issues—locally and globally—of the relationship between the centres and peripheries with regard to collecting practices.


2019 ◽  
pp. 134-138
Author(s):  
Quincy D. Newell

After her death, Jane James faded into obscurity until the late twentieth century, when she gained new fame. Mormons used her story to reimagine their church as racially diverse and Joseph Smith as racially egalitarian. For historians of American religion and others, James’s story gives the history of Mormonism from below and shows the limits of Mormonism’s democratizing impulse. It illustrates the variety of Mormon religious experience and shows the limits of focusing on temple rituals and priesthood. James’s Mormonism differed from that of other Latter-day Saints and thus illustrates how race and gender shaped ways of being Mormon. James also shaped Mormon history in subtle but crucial ways. Her presence in present-day LDS discourses suggests that she has finally achieved what she worked so hard for during her life: Mormons of all races now hold her in “honourable remembrance,” as her second patriarchal blessing promised her.


Water Policy ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 489-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Schreiner ◽  
Barbara van Koppen

The aims of the new water policies and laws of post-apartheid South Africa are to contribute to the eradication of the country's widespread poverty and to redress historical race and gender discrimination with regard to water. After placing these policy and legal changes in a historical context, the paper discusses their operationalization and impact during the first years of implementation. Three key aspects are highlighted. The first aspect concerns internal changes within the implementing government department, the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF). The second aspect regards water services and sanitation directly targeted at poor women and men. Lastly, the paper discusses the emerging equity issues in public participation processes, as an illustration of the new approach to integrated water resources management.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 304
Author(s):  
Flavio A. Geisshuesler

While the work of the Italian historian of religion, Ernesto de Martino (1908–1965), has frequently been compared to that of Mircea Eliade, Claude Lévi-Strauss, or Clifford Geertz, he has hardly received any attention in anglophone scholarship to date. Taking an all-but-forgotten controversy between de Martino and Eliade at a conference on parapsychology in France in 1956 as its starting point, the article fills part of this lacuna by first reconstructing the philosophical universe underlying the Italian thinker’s program of study. In the process, it introduces the reader to three Weimar scientists, who have never before been inserted within the canon of the study of religion, namely the parapsychologist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1929), the anthropologist Leo Frobenius (1873–1938), and the biologist and philosopher Hans Driesch (1867–1941). Contextualizing these thinkers within their historical context, it becomes clear that they were part of a larger scientific crisis that affected the Western world during the first half of the twentieth century. Finally, the article uncovers surprising affinities, particularly the fact that the Romanian thinker had his very own parapsychological phase during his youth.


2006 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-150
Author(s):  
Jerri Daboo

The Routledge Performance Practitioners series, edited by Franc Chamberlain, is a new set of introductory guides to a range of key figures in the development of twentieth-century performance practice. Each book focuses on a single practitioner, examining his or her life, historical context, key writings, and productions, and a selection of practical exercises. These concise volumes are intended to offer students an initial introduction to the practitioner and to “provide an inspiring spring-board for future study, unpacking and explaining what can initially seem daunting” (Merlin, ii). The list of practitioners in the complete series include Stanislavsky, Brecht, Boal, Lecoq, Grotowski, Anna Halprin, and Ariane Mnouchkine, thus examining a range of performance styles and practices, creating a valuable overview of the development of performer training through the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Such interest in the history of specific approaches to training performers has been addressed in other volumes, such as Twentieth-Century Actor Training, edited by Alison Hodge (New York: Routledge, 2000), and Acting (Re)considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, edited by Phillip Zarrilli (London: Routledge 2002). Both those collections contain in-depth chapters focusing on aspects of the selected practitioners' theoretical and practical approaches to the principles and concerns in their work. Where the books in the Routledge Performance Practitioners series differ is that they offer a more general overview of the practitioner in one volume, and in addition to the historical context, they provide a set of practical exercises that can be carried out by the student or teacher, as well as by the actor or director. The books are well presented, divided into clear sections, with relevant photographs and diagrams. There are also sidebars providing definitions and further information on key figures and terms mentioned in the main text. This review covers the first four books in the series, examining the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Michael Chekhov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Jacques Lecoq.


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