Voices of Refugee Women: Adaptation and Identification

ABSTRACT

Refugees and other displaced people have been the object of much research related to how people are adapting. Few have focused specifically on women even though women and children are by far the majority of refugees in general and especially in Utah. One of the few focused on narratives of newly arrived women refugees. Narratives are an important method for hearing authentic lived experiences versus assuming researchers can know the answers. However, questions arose about how those narratives might change after being in the U.S. for a longer period of time. Eleven refugee women who had been in the U.S. longer than 10 years were interviewed for this study.

Narratives allowed us to present this scholarship in a way that is accessible to anyone. Five themes were found: language, education, family, assistance, and transition. These themes demonstrate both the resilience of the women and the difficulty and complexity of long-term adaptation.     

Free Trade and Print Culture: Political Communication in Early Nineteenth-Century England

This article highlights the potency of traditional popular print culture as a form of political communication for one of the pioneering campaigns of the nineteenth century: the free trade agitation of the 1840s. Contributing to recent debates about Victorian political communication, it challenges the view that the spread of literacy and print replaced a more traditional, inclusive, hybrid style of communication. The use and adaptation of broadside culture that blurred literacy, orality and visuality proved to be a more effective means of communicating free trade to popular audiences than ‘modern’ methods of political communication such as official newspapers or mass propaganda. Joseph Livesey, the most successful free trade populariser, was able to bridge the gap between free trade and Chartism, by drawing on elements of radical print culture, while seeking to shift them onto a more respectable trajectory. Livesey and cheap free trade print culture anticipated the shift from popular radicalism to popular liberalism in political culture and popular politics that occurred after 1850.     

Great Expectations? Childhood,Family, and Middle-Class Social Mobility in Nineteenth-Century England

ABSTRACT

Existing histories of social mobility have focused on adults and on measuring the achievement of individual upward mobility. However, children and families were central to mobility strategies. Using the papers of the Heywoods of Bolton, this article examines how the families of the industrial middle class endowed their offspring with the goods and character needed to secure their social standing, highlighting the emotional intricacy of these processes. It demonstrates that such families conceived of social mobility as a familial project and that rather than pursuing upward mobility, their chief objective was to guard against social decline.     

Writing for Relief in Late Nineteenth-Century Dublin: Personal Applications to the Mansion House Fund in 1880

Focusing on a collection of personal applications made to the Dublin Mansion House Fund in 1880, this article explores the perception and experience of poverty and distress in late nineteenth-century Dublin. Despite the recent expansion of welfare history in Ireland, historians have been slow to examine urban poverty from the perspective of the poor. The article discusses some available sources and assesses the insights such material can provide into the situations facing and strategies adopted by the poor and vulnerable.     

Prisons before Modernity: Incarceration in the Medieval Indo-Mediterranean

Over the course of the sixth/twelfth century, a new literary genre entered the Eastern Islamic world: the Persian prison poem (?absiyyāt). Far from being an isolated event, the prison poem was forged when punishment came to be reconfigured as incarceration. This development was reflected in literary texts extending across South Asia, Azerbaijan, and continental Europe. Locating the institution of the prison outside European modernity, this study traces the material grounds for this new literary form and situates this archive globally. Concomitantly with studying the medieval literature of incarceration, it evaluates the Indo-Mediterranean as a discursive rubric for the study of pre-modern literary cultures.     

Teachers Initiating Conversations About Race and Racism in a High School Class

This qualitative study explores the techniques, materials and processes of a Black teacher and a White teacher who introduced issues of race and racism in their team-taught high school class. The teachers explicitly put the issues of race and racism on the table, asked questions that challenged students to think about the topics, and used race-related curricular materials and assignments. The teachers' initiative encouraged the students in the class to speak out about the language and meaning of race and racism.     

A Tale of Two Funerals: Civic Ritual,Public Mourning and Community Participation in Late Nineteenth-Century Middlesbrough

In the late nineteenth century, British funerals became increasingly rational as they began to strip away the excesses of Victorian custom. Yet imposing public funerals for well-known figures continued to take place. Historians have previously underestimated the entertainment value which a public funeral could offer. As this article demonstrates, attendance at such funerals could only be guaranteed if the occasion held particular emotional resonance, personal appeal or came with a degree of novelty. Focusing on Middlesbrough in 1889, the circumstances surrounding two particular funerals are considered in order to understand both local shifts in values and priorities concerning death ritual, as an indicator of a broader national trend.