‘It is the next best thing to a “chat” in St J squ’

Author(s):  
Jennifer Davey

At heart of this book lie thousands of letters sent to and from Mary. These letters have either been overlooked or underused by political historians. This chapter considers what Mary’s letters can tell us about Victorian political culture and it is divided into three parts. The first section charts the history of Mary’s archive. It draws attention to the uneven patterns of survival that characterize the archives of aristocratic women and stresses the importance of historicizing the archives used by historians of high politics. The second section explores how Mary used the letter as a political tool to amass and exercise political influence. The final section explores the composition and form of Mary’s political network. Using network analysis, it reconstructs Mary’s position in political society and plots her proximity to the networks that sustained political life at Westminster. Overall, it argues that a close reading of epistolary culture offers a valuable insight into the labyrinthine networks that sustained Victorian political life.

Author(s):  
Jennifer Nicoll Victor ◽  
Alexander H. Montgomery ◽  
Mark Lubell

This volume is meant to be a foundational resource on the study of networks in politics. This introductory chapter sets the stage for the chapters in this volume, which revolve around three central questions: What is political network analysis? How does it provide insight into important political phenomena? Why is it crucial for all political analysts to engage in network analysis? The opening argument is that networks are crucial for the study of politics and can bridge the micro-macro divide. After providing a brief history of the application of networks in political science, this chapter engages in a visual analysis of the development of the literature on political networks. This investigation shows the cross-cutting ties among academic subfields and highlights the central contributions to the literature. It also provides an overview of the chapters and concludes with the editors’ thoughts on the future of political network analysis.


Author(s):  
Sigrún Dögg Eddudóttir ◽  
Eva Svensson ◽  
Stefan Nilsson ◽  
Anneli Ekblom ◽  
Karl-Johan Lindholm ◽  
...  

AbstractShielings are the historically known form of transhumance in Scandinavia, where livestock were moved from the farmstead to sites in the outlands for summer grazing. Pollen analysis has provided a valuable insight into the history of shielings. This paper presents a vegetation reconstruction and archaeological survey from the shieling Kårebolssätern in northern Värmland, western Sweden, a renovated shieling that is still operating today. The first evidence of human activities in the area near Kårebolssätern are Hordeum- and Cannabis-type pollen grains occurring from ca. 100 bc. Further signs of human impact are charcoal and sporadic occurrences of apophyte pollen from ca. ad 250 and pollen indicating opening of the canopy ca. ad 570, probably a result of modification of the forest for grazing. A decrease in land use is seen between ad 1000 and 1250, possibly in response to a shift in emphasis towards large scale commodity production in the outlands. Emphasis on bloomery iron production and pitfall hunting may have caused a shift from agrarian shieling activity. The clearest changes in the pollen assemblage indicating grazing and cultivation occur from the mid-thirteenth century, coinciding with wetter climate at the beginning of the Little Ice Age. The earliest occurrences of anthropochores in the record predate those of other shieling sites in Sweden. The pollen analysis reveals evidence of land use that predates the results of the archaeological survey. The study highlights how pollen analysis can reveal vegetation changes where early archaeological remains are obscure.


Author(s):  
James A. Palmer

The humanist perception of fourteenth-century Rome as a slumbering ruin awaiting the Renaissance and the return of papal power has cast a long shadow on the historiography of the city. Challenging the view, this book argues that Roman political culture underwent dramatic changes in the late Middle Ages, with profound and lasting implications for the city's subsequent development. The book examines the transformation of Rome's governing elites as a result of changes in the city's economic, political, and spiritual landscape. It explores this shift through the history of Roman political society, its identity as an urban commune, and its once-and-future role as the spiritual capital of Latin Christendom. Tracing the contours of everyday Roman politics, the book reframes the reestablishment of papal sovereignty in Rome as the product of synergy between papal ambitions and local political culture. More broadly, it emphasizes Rome's distinct role in evolution of medieval Italy's city-communes.


wisdom ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-94
Author(s):  
Oksana PIETSUKH

This article focuses on the proxemics, oculesics and tacesics as nonverbal communication peculiarities in the UK parliamentary debates within the scope of parliamentary discoursology as a new branch of political discourse studies. It deals with studying of metonomy-based language representations of space used to name the MPs in the UK parliamentary debates. Here the visual characteristics and behavioral patterns influencing the role and participation of MPs in the debates are highlighted. The paper determines cognitive background and extralinguistic factors influencing the usage of naming models and colour determination of MPs in the parliamentary debates. Such debates represent the events regardless the party that gains majority in the UK parliament in the post-Thatcher period. It is concluded that nonverbal have become an inseparable part of parliamentary communication, serving as a special communicative code used by the MPs. The results stipulate further modelling of the parliamentary debates to build their interactive and cognitive models for better insight into the British political life and the British national character. The received knowledge is of particular importance for teaching country studies, history of the UK, political science and theory of speech communication.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 1115-1119
Author(s):  
Anser Mahmood

Shakespearean tragedies stand out in the history of world’s literature for their influential language, insight into character and dramatic ingenuity. It can be safely established that all of the Shakespearean tragedies are based upon the notion that human benevolence is innate to man as man. The current study focuses upon the notion that the Shakespearean heroes are basically good and noble men whose tragic flaw leads to their obliteration. For instance in Macbeth, Lady Macbeth describes Macbeth as “too full o’ milk of human kindness”. The character of Macbeth gives the picture of dissolution within the individual. The character of Macbeth has been analyzed to assert that he seems to suffer from a variance between his head and heart, his duty and his desire, his reckoning and his emotions. A psychological insight to his character reveals that he knows from the first that he is engaged in a ridiculous act: a distressed and paradoxical struggle. With the aid of research methods including Case Study and Close Reading this Qualitative research highlights Macbeth’s lethal proceedings which not only obliterate his peace of mind but also bring turmoil to the macrocosm of the universe, and shows that along with the king he murders his sense of reasoning as well. Hence this study asserts the idea that Shakespearean heroes possess an inherent goodness corroded by the actions of fate or destiny thus resulting in their tragic downfall.


Author(s):  
Josh McLeod ◽  
Yvonne McLaren

Employment laws are put in place to protect employees from any mistreatment from their employers, and are a vital part of a country’s efforts to protect its citizens. Some countries are regarded as having very restrictive employment laws whilst others are regarded as more relaxed. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who analyse and compare employment protections in various countries, the UK, Canada and the USA have the most lenient laws whereas France, Spain and Turkey have the strictest. This chapter will focus on UK employment law, where workers’ rights can be traced back to the 1300s and significant changes are still occurring today. By examining the UK’s history of employment law, the contract of employment, corresponding rights and duties of both the employer and employee and the circumstances in which the contract of employment might come to an end, students will gain a valuable insight into a unique area of UK business law.


Author(s):  
Harlan Wilson

This chapter discusses how contemporary environmental political theories utilize “classic” or “canonical” texts in the history of political theory in the West from Plato to the twentieth century, primarily through appropriations and critiques of older conceptions of political society and “nature.” The chapter shows why appropriations and critiques of the works of older theories such as those of Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, Mill, Marx, and Arendt matter, and should matter, for the new subfield of environmental political theory. Even if older texts cannot provide definitive answers to current questions, they can inform and invigorate environmental discourse as well as exhibit its essential politicalness. Conversely, close reading of the canon can help generate further questions about humans’ relation to their environments, thus encouraging, it is hoped, a more vital green public sphere.


2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (0) ◽  
pp. 0-0
Author(s):  
Janina Kamińska

A 200-year history of the University of Warsaw invites to take a closer look at the student community. The years 1918–1939 were a period of an increased social activity of the students. This article presents some of the initiatives they were involved in, with special focus on “Brotherly Help”, an organisation that supported students who were less well-off. An insight into the student community of the years 1918–1939 reveals new capacities for research. The analysis could be expanded by such topics as: the students’ membership in other university organisations, their affiliation to scientific groups, or career path after studies. It is worth noting that many graduates remained actively involved in the social, cultural, and political life of Poland after their studies.


2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 257-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMMA HUNTER

ABSTRACTThe growing interest in citizenship among political theorists over the last two decades has encouraged historians of twentieth-century Africa to ask new questions of the colonial and early post-colonial period. These questions have, however, often focused on differential access to the rights associated with the legal status of citizenship, paying less attention to the ways in which conceptions of citizenship were developed, debated, and employed. This article proposes that tracing the entangled intellectual history of the concept of ‘good citizenship’ in twentieth-century Tanzania, in a British imperial context, has the potential to provide new insights into the development of one national political culture, while also offering wider lessons for our understanding of the global history of political society.


2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 39-74
Author(s):  
Devin Leigh

Abstract Bryan Edwards’s The History of the British West Indies is a text well known to historians of the Caribbean and the early modern Atlantic World. First published in 1793, the work is widely considered to be a classic of British Caribbean literature. This article introduces an unpublished first draft of Edwards’s preface to that work. Housed in the archives of the West India Committee in Westminster, England, this preface has never been published or fully analyzed by scholars in print. It offers valuable insight into the production of West Indian history at the end of the eighteenth century. In particular, it shows how colonial planters confronted the challenges of their day by attempting to wrest the practice of writing West Indian history from their critics in Great Britain. Unlike these metropolitan writers, Edwards had lived in the West Indian colonies for many years. He positioned his personal experience as being a primary source of his historical legitimacy.


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