Fighting for Conservation

Author(s):  
Benjamin Heber Johnson

This chapter looks at how conservationists seemed more and more optimistic about their influence and accomplishments. By 1910, it had become common for conservationists to use the word “movement” in both their public announcements and, unselfconsciously, in their private correspondence. The word “movement” clearly conveyed the idea that conservation involved a wide range of policies, attracted a diverse set of passionate supporters, and was converting the dubious and inspiring the apathetic. In national politics, conservation reached its height during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901–9). With the help of his trusted adviser Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt made conservation one of his leading causes.

Author(s):  
Thomas K. Ogorzalek

Recent electoral cycles have drawn attention to an urban–rural divide at the heart of American politics. This book traces the origins of red and blue America. The urbanicity divide began with the creation of an urban political order that united leaders from major cities and changed the Democratic Party during the New Deal era. These cities, despite being the site of serious, complex conflicts at home, are remarkably cohesive in national politics because members of city delegations represent their city as well as their district. Even though their constituents often don’t see eye-to-eye on important issues, members of these city delegations represent a united city position known as progressive liberalism. Using a wide range of congressional evidence and a unique dataset measuring the urbanicity of U.S. House districts over time, this book argues that city cohesion, an invaluable tool used by cities to address their urgent governance needs through higher levels of government, is fostered by local institutions developed to provide local political order. Crucially, these integrative institutions also helped foster the development of civil rights liberalism by linking constituencies that were not natural allies in support of group pluralism and racial equality. This in turn led to the departure from the coalition of the Southern Democrats, and to our contemporary political environment. The urban combination of diversity and liberalism—supported by institutions that make allies out of rivals—teaches us lessons for governing in a world increasingly characterized by deep social difference and political fragmentation.


Author(s):  
Billie Melman

Empires of Antiquities is a history of the rediscovery of the imperial civilizations of the ancient Near East in a modern imperial order that evolved between the outbreak of the First World War and the decolonization of the British Empire in the 1950s. It explores the ways in which near eastern antiquity was redefined and experienced, becoming the subject of imperial regulation, modes of enquiry, and international and national politics. A series of globally publicized spectacular archaeological discoveries in Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, which the book follows, made antiquity material visible and accessible as never before. The book demonstrates that the new definition and uses of antiquity and their relations to modernity were inseparable from the emergence of the post-war international imperial order, transnational collaboration and crises, the aspirations of national groups, and collisions between them and the British mandatories. It uniquely combines a history of the internationalization of archaeology and the rise of a new “regime of antiquities” under the oversight of the League of Nations and its institutions, a history of British attitudes to, and passion for, near eastern antiquity and on-the-ground colonial policies and mechanisms, as well as nationalist claims on the past. It points to the centrality of the new mandate system, particularly mandates classified A in Mesopotamia/Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan, formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire, and of Egypt, in the new archaeological regime. Drawing on an unusually wide range of materials collected in archives in six countries, as well as on material and visual evidence, the book weaves together imperial, international, and national histories, and the history of archaeological discovery which it connects to imperial modernity.


Africa ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Cinnamon

ABSTRACTThrough narratives of an anti-‘fetish’ movement that swept through north-eastern Gabon in the mid-1950s, the present article traces the contours of converging political and religious imaginations in that country in the years preceding independence. Fang speakers in the region make explicit connections between the arrival of post-Second World War electoral politics, the anti-fetish movements, and perceptions of political weakening and marginalization of their region on the eve of independence. Rival politicians and the colonial administration played key roles in the movement, which brought in a Congolese ritual expert, Emane Boncoeur, and his two powerful spirits, Mademoiselle and Mimbare. These spirits, later recuperated in a wide range of healing practices, continue to operate today throughout northern Gabon and Rio Muni. In local imaginaries, these spirits played central roles in the birth of both regional and national politics, paradoxically strengthening the colonial administration and Gabonese auxiliaries in an era of pre-independence liberalization. Thus, regional political events in the 1950s rehearsed later configurations of power, including presidential politics, on the national stage.


Author(s):  
Rob Jenkins ◽  
James Manor

This chapter examines how politics has affected public debates concerning India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA) and how best to reform it. Because of its immense size and scope, NREGA found itself implicated in a wide range of key national policy debates: from public finance to internal security to rural development. It has also produced changes in local political dynamics, in the political calculus of state-level leaders, in social interactions, and in perceptions of social status. This chapter addresses these issues through discussions of three thematic areas: corruption and governance; wages and work; and India's development paradigm. The revisions to NREGA's operational practices after the re-election of the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2009 are also examined.


2018 ◽  
Vol 76 (10) ◽  
pp. 713-715
Author(s):  
Cátia Mathias ◽  
Antonio E. Nardi

ABSTRACT Aim: To describe the highlights in the personal, professional, and political life of the first Brazilian Professor of Psychiatry. Methods: The article draws on a wide range of documents: newspaper articles, documents of Brazilian medical institutions, scientific articles, theses, and books. Results: João Carlos Teixeira Brandão was a distinguished 19th-century Brazilian psychiatrist and leader of the institutionalization and consolidation of the field of Psychiatry in Brazil. He contributed to the recognition of the professional jurisdiction of the “alienist”, a specialized professional, qualified in clinical practice, diagnosis, and the definition of the boundaries between sanity and madness, based on scientific criteria, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Conclusion: This article highlights the key moments in the professional and political career of Professor João Carlos Teixeira Brandão, from his graduation from the Rio de Janeiro School of Medicine in 1877 to his death in 1921, when he was still active in national politics.


Author(s):  
Timothy Stanley

This chapter discusses the continued importance of a wide range of left politics as late as the 1970s in national politics. It shows how social democrats were able to infiltrate the Democratic Party in the post-Vietnam era and to move its domestic policy in a dramatically leftward direction. Operating in a period of fiscal restraint and rising conservatism, the chapter illustrates that even members of the American Left were prepared to play up to conservative and mainstream ideas and images to sell their revolutionary policies. They borrowed the language of the tax revolt and the New Deal to appeal to the floating blue-collar voter. However, their attempt to introduce European-style party control over policy proved counterproductive.


2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Otis L. Graham

The third Conservation movement was summoned to life between Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring (1962) and the Santa Barbara Oil Spill at the end of the movement-spawning Sixties, and would be called by a more nature-evoking term—environmentalism. Looking back from there, those of us with some historical memory were struck by how far we had come from the first Conservation crusade led by John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot, or the second led by FDR in the 1930s. In those early days they thought the problem was loss of forests, soil erosion, water and air pollution, and that the solutions were National Parks and National Forests watched over by civil servants in their gray or tan-brown uniforms, along with a Soil Conservation Service for farmers.


2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 318-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald J. Pestritto

AbstractThe American Progressive Movement argued for both a democratization of the political process and deference to expert administrators. Relying on the work of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the article endeavors to explore this tension and make some preliminary suggestions as to how it might be reconciled—at least in the eyes of its adherents—into a single democratic theory. Both Roosevelt and Wilson criticize the principles of the original Constitution for being insufficiently democratic and overly suspicious of the popular will, and they want to make public opinion a more direct force in national politics. Yet both are also suspicious of politics and its potential for corruption by “special interests,” and thus look for ways of empowering expert administrative agencies and insulating them from political influence. Wilson seems to understand the potential conflict between these two aims more than Roosevelt does, although both look to a popularized presidency as a means of reconciling consent and expertise.


2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony J. Nownes ◽  
Nurgul R. Aitalieva

What is the nature and extent of corporate leader involvement in American national politics? The results of a mail survey of nearly 100 such individuals show that leaders are quite active, devoting an average of nearly 1 hour per day to national political activity. We also show that corporate leaders engage in a wide range of advocacy activities. Monetary activities loom particularly large in the political lives of American corporate leaders, as large numbers are approached by members of Congress for contributions, and many who are approached answer the call. In addition, we find that corporate leaders, unlike advocacy professionals, do a great deal of their advocacy work in private; for the most part they eschew public activities such as testifying before congressional committees. Speaking to the question of which leaders are most politically active, our data evince a strong relationship between firm political activity and firm leader political activity. In sum, politically active firms have politically active leaders. We thus contribute to the ongoing academic discussion of corporate political activity by showing that the CEO's office is an additional locus of political power within business firms, and that CEO political activity is instrumental rather than consumptive in nature.


Author(s):  
R.W. Horne

The technique of surrounding virus particles with a neutralised electron dense stain was described at the Fourth International Congress on Electron Microscopy, Berlin 1958 (see Home & Brenner, 1960, p. 625). For many years the negative staining technique in one form or another, has been applied to a wide range of biological materials. However, the full potential of the method has only recently been explored following the development and applications of optical diffraction and computer image analytical techniques to electron micrographs (cf. De Hosier & Klug, 1968; Markham 1968; Crowther et al., 1970; Home & Markham, 1973; Klug & Berger, 1974; Crowther & Klug, 1975). These image processing procedures have allowed a more precise and quantitative approach to be made concerning the interpretation, measurement and reconstruction of repeating features in certain biological systems.


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