Journals
2009 EN
Alice Jorgensen
Battle and warfare are prominent topics in Old English poetry, reflecting their importance to the self-conception as well as the practical concerns of the warrior class who governed Anglo- Saxon England. The representation of warfare in poetry constitutes both a codification of experience, a means of reflecting on contemporary events such as Scandinavian raiding and invasion, 1 and at the same time an idealization, part of a shared imaginary centered on the heroic, migration-age past, lordship and comitatus bonds, courage and violence, and the material culture of treasure, weaponry, and the hall (Howe 1989; Niles 2007; Tyler 2006). The poetry is traditional in its diction and themes. Old English poems portray battle and warfare in ways that are sometimes highly stylized but also have aspects of realism. The present essay focuses on one element of battle-description in Old English poetry that is both conventional and to some extent realistic: the portrayal of battle as noisy. Noise is a very common ingredient in Old English poetic battle scenes and perhaps an unsurprising one, but it is not inevitable. Classical and medieval Latin poetry often mention noise as part of battle, but historical writings do so much less often. Moreover, as we shall see, noise emerges in Old English battle poetry in distinctive and sometimes strikingly non-naturalistic ways. A focus on noise can afford an interesting avenue into Old English battle poetry for a number of reasons, of which I here highlight two. First, noise is a junction for the physical and psychological elements of battle. It is part of the sensory onslaught of war and can itself be regarded as a species of violence (Allen 2004:305), though it does not inflict bodily injury unless much louder than anything first- millennium technology could produce. William Ian Miller has pointed out the role of noise, along with other factors such as bloodiness, closeness, and visibility, in influencing our perceptions of actions or events as more or less "violent" (1993:65):
Center for Studies in Oral Tradition
Journals
2009 EN
Marcus Harmes
Bishops were among the most important instruments of royal, religious, national and local authority in seventeenth-century England and their influence can be felt acutely throughout the period. Bishops and Power in Early Modern England explores the role and involvement of Bishops at the very core of both government and belief in the early modern world. It probes the controversial topics which sparked parliamentary agitation, religious reform as well as actual war in this context, whilst arguing that episcopal writers claimed for themselves their identity as reformed agents of church authority. Charting the development of this identity over a hundred and fifty years, this book allows us to trace the history of early modern England from an original and yet hugely significant perspective.
Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Journals
2009 EN
Peter S. Carmichael
In a 1975 article on the place of yeomen farmers in a slave society, Eugene D. Genovese identified a critical question concerning the nature of the Old South. The issue, he wrote, is to explain "the degree of class collaboration and social unity" that existed among all whites, which to Genovese appeared "all the more impressive in the face of so many internal strains."1 Although some critics mistakenly charged that Genovese argued for non-slaveholder passivity in the face of planter hegemony, he was, in actuality, acknowledging that class relations were permeated with tension and discord, causing bitter resentments that occasionally flared into conflict among white folks. Yet Genovese never found evidence of a populist insurgency against slaveholder authority, a struggle in which the very basis of power was contested. He suggested what scholars such as Steven Hahn, Lacy Ford, and Stephanie McCurry have more recently developed with amazing sophistication that an intricate web of political, economic, and cultural relations bound whites together through shared material and ideological interests imbedded in human bondage. Although Genovese's interpretive framework of the antebellum white South has stood the test of time, scholars remain somewhat uneasy as to whether slavery transcended the great economic and political divide between rich and poor. Some historians are especially troubled by the image of a planter class lording over society from a mansion on the hill, where their paternalistic gestures inspired lock-step allegiance from those below. Jennifer R. Green's Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South and David Williams's Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War challenge the view of slaveholders as a uniformed and unified class who effectively instilled class discipline. While both authors compel us to think deeply about the nature of
Johns Hopkins University Press
Journals
2009 EN
Ned O’Gorman
This essay considers how C. D. Jackson, an associate of Eisenhower and political warfare specialist, worked in the 1950s to give compelling public form to a grand strategy of “liberation” in the Cold War. Jackson worked to ally liberation with U.S. political-economic adventures abroad rather than martial exploits. In so doing, he sought not only to disassociate liberation from catastrophic war with the Soviets, but also to win the Cold War by working to liberalize the world. Jackson’s approach thus sought to reconcile structural and contingent perspectives on Cold War strategy.
Michigan State University
Journals
2009 EN
Marissa López
69 on teaching, including the use of business quality control notions about production, training, and profits. This chapter also outlines the goal for this text: “To illuminate the neglected role of teacher trade unions [and] to analyze their potential power to win an alternative type of education” (to read this first chapter for free go to www.newpol.org ). Chapters in Part II present the troubling experiences of individuals in countries across the globe. Most disturbing is the story from Namibia by John Nyambe, which analyzes what happened when the World Bank sought to cut public expenditure on education and increase class size to 40-50 students or more. These cuts challenge Namibia’s efforts to promote learnercentered pedagogy. Stories from Mexico, Denmark, and the West Indies are equally disturbing and present different ways in which public education is under attack. A more heartening story comes from Alvaro Moreira Hypolito in Brazil in his chapter “Educational Restructuring, Democratic Education, and Teachers.” Here we learn how a dedicated group of parents and community leaders brought about effective, meaningful changes by taking up their authority and creating a coalition of leftist parties. By joining forces, workers, parents, and community leaders used their influence to ensure that the Escola Plural Program meets the needs and ideals of the local population. Additional accounts of teacher and community resistance to the global assault on teaching come from Chicago, St. Lucia, Australia, South Africa, Germany, and Israel. These accounts illustrate ways in which the neoliberal and social conservative assaults are framed but also resisted by local community actions. Rob Durbridge’s essay, “Challenging Neoliberalism: Education Unions in Australia” describes how teacher unions work in solidarity with other unions to fight for views that are supported by the general public, even though these views may go beyond the boundaries of union interests per se. One example was the success the unions had in protesting Iraq’s 1991 occupation of Kuwait and the 2003 war in Iraq. By anatomizing the insidious education goals of the neoliberals and giving voice to global stories of resistance against the assault on teaching, Compton and Weiner’s collection helps the reader identify and contextualize events in the United States that may otherwise remain camouflaged and muffled in silence. It is this power, hearing from those outside of the United States, that makes this text a “must read” for teachers, teacher educators, future teachers, parents, and anyone concerned about social justice and education for “the public good.” For continued updates on teacher struggles around the world visit Compton’s website at www. teachersolidarity.com.
University Library System
Journals
2009 EN
Merritt Roe Smith
According to Daniel Walker Howe, the three decades between the end of the War of 1812 and the end of the Mexican War (1848) witnessed “the transformation of America.”1 Of what did this transformation consist? What drove it? What were its larger implications? These questions lie at the very center of historical writing about the early and middle decades of nineteenth- century America. Howe’s monumental effort goes far in answering them. In the process, he upends several well-known interpretations of the so-called Jacksonian period
Johns Hopkins University Press
Journals
2009 EN
Neil Duxbury
This study presents the mid-twentieth-century English lord of appeal, Lord Wright, as an innovative traditionalist judge. Judges have a duty to be creative, Wright believed, but only within the framework of existing legal authority. Wright explained his innovative traditionalist perspective in relation to precedent, public policy, and legislation, and he illustrated his perspective particularly by way of contributions to decisions on worker compensation, commercial contracts, restitution, and international criminal law. He was not always a bold judge, as is especially evident from his contribution to Liversidge v. Anderson. But his efforts to develop the law without undermining established precedents and statutory authority could be subtly effective. In contract and tort decisions, he consistently argued that personal liability should attach only to outcomes that could reasonably have been expected to come about. He was realistic, and believed courts must be realistic, about the tendency of the business world to be guided primarily by its own norms. He incisively criticized implied contract theory and advanced a conception of unjust enrichment that, in England, was considerably ahead of its time. In employment law, he added a twist to freedom-of-contract reasoning, arguing that if it is permissible for individuals to use their economic advantage to impose contractual terms on weaker parties, then it should also be permissible for those parties to combine and gain the upper hand. After World War II, he argued that the positive laws necessary for punishing war criminals already existed. This study draws these arguments together in an effort to capture Wright's judicial style and to show that some of his contributions to legal thought and doctrine run deep and are historically significant.
University of Toronto Press
Journals
2009 EN
Nandana Bose
In this article the author examines political censorship of three Hindi films made in the 1990s: "Khalnayak," "Bombay" and "War and Peace." She contends that the films, released in an era of significant political activity by right wing Hindu political parties in India, were subject to state censorship in order to placate those organizations and their nationalistic message.
University of Texas Press
Journals
2009 EN
Catherine Waters
When Dickens sent George Augustus Sala as a special correspondent to Russia just after the end of the Crimean War, he launched him in what was to become his best-known role as a journalist. Comprising twenty-two articles which appeared in weekly instalments from 4 October 1856 to 14 March 1857, Sala's essays are of interest not only for their representation of one of the significant geographical and cultural "others" of the mid-Victorian imagination, but for their distinctive style, which is vibrant and polyglot, eschewing political analysis and statistical information in favour of the flâneur's "gastronomy of the eye" – the vivid metropolitan travel writing so popular with mid-nineteenth-century readers.
Johns Hopkins University Press
Journals
2009 EN
Jennifer Terry
Claudia Carreon has trouble remembering. The thirty-four-year-old native of Nogales, Mexico, was riding in a fuel convoy through Baghdad in June 2003 when it collided with an Iraqi truck. She was part of a U.S. Army National Guard transportation company, having enlisted in 2000 with hope of achieving U.S. citizenship and other benefits promised in exchange for her military service. Less than a month after the accident, she was demoted from the rank of Specialist to that of Private First Class for failure to follow an order.