Royal Grief in England, 1485–1640

This essay explores recorded responses to bereavements within the Tudor and early Stuart royal families. It recognizes that customs and conventional expectations may to a large extent have concealed, or distorted the representation of, individual experiences. Thus kings customarily passed their sorrows in seclusion after the death of a spouse. (Monarchs occasionally sought to exercise this privilege more informally and less successfully when favourites died.) Accounts of how kings and queens behaved when they lost sons tended to emphasize manly fortitude and womanly sorrow, but also revealed more complex reactions. Condolences addressed to members of the royal family during this period shared certain conventional themes. New in James I's reign was the outpouring of verse in which the grief of the king, the queen and their children was sympathetically imagined by poets.     

China, France Co-organize Art Exhibition in Beijing

A Sino-French painting exhibition featuring impressionist and modern art opened at the National .Art Museum of China in the early spring of 2006. The exhibition, named ＂Ici, La-bas＂ （Here, There） features masterpieces of Chinese painter Ding Tianque and French painters, France Mitrofanoff and Francis de Lenclos.     

God's Tribunal: Guilt,Innocence, and Execution in England, 1675–1775

This paper explores the ways in which the early modern English execution functioned as a forum in which various, and often competing, notions of guilt and innocence were expressed. In the context of a culture which placed an inordinate emphasis on the significance of the behaviour and last dying words of men and women teetering on the brink of ‘Judgement and Eternity’, the gallows became, in essence, ‘God's tribunal – the site where solemn oaths and supernatural signs could trump the rulings of secular courts. And it was here that the condemned could proclaim not merely his or her individual innocence of a specific crime, but raise larger questions of relative societal guilt and sinfulness and social justice by invoking the disparity between man's justice and God's.     

Middle-Class Fathers,Sons and Military Service in England, 1914–1918

The figure of the hyper-patriotic middle-class father, happy to sacrifice his sons to the war, while remaining snug at home, was a recurrent feature of post-First World War literature. This article places this view of wartime fatherhood under scrutiny, suggesting that middle-class fathers with sons of military age rarely behaved as straightforward enforcers of the state’s call to arms. Alongside expressions of vocal pride in sons who conformed to the manly ideal by volunteering, there were resistance, silence and fear, while support for sons who sought to avoid enlistment was a good deal more evident than any determination that sons should do their ‘bit’ at all costs.     

College Students’ Perspectives in Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) in Malaysia,Singapore, England,and the US: Formative Evaluation Insights and Implications

The purpose of this study was to elicit college students’ knowledge and perceptions about sexually transmitted infections (STIs), attitudes and practices regarding condom use, and information about what educational and prevention materials that they think would be most effective for their peers. As part of a larger study, data was collected using focus groups and questionnaires. While American and Malaysian college students in the US participated in the focus groups, the open-ended questionnaire was emailed to college students recruited in Malaysia, Singapore, and England. Participatory communication was used as the theoretical framework to generate information and message concepts necessary for the design of effective health education and promotion materials. This study revealed that college students, regardless of nationality, should be informed and educated of the STIs problem on a gradual basis through various means and communication channels.     

＂New Beijing, New Olympics＂ Displayed in Sydney

The annual Sydney Royal Agriculture Exposition took place in the Olympic Park last April, one of the large-scale public events organized by Sydney Municipal Government which attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. At the exposition this year, the exhibition ＂New Beijing, New Olympics＂, co-organized by the State Information Office of China and the Information Office of Beijing Municipality, was displayed, which added much glamour to the event.     

Hand Fans： Small in Size, Big on Value

Hand fans are almost obsolete as a way of cooling, but are quickly turning into decorations or works of art. In recent years,fans are a dark horse in the auction market, with more people interested in collecting the hand-held device. Long ignored by collectors, this form of art has grown in popularity. In particular, fan paintings by well-known artists have the greatest potential.     

The Meaning of Urban Violence in Africa: Bulawayo,Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1960

Until recently the abundant literature on South African urban history has seen violence in towns and cities in terms either of anti-colonial protest or of labour consciousness. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission defined the urban violence with which it was concerned as exclusively political. More recently, however, questions of spatiality, township culture, generation, and gender have offered alternative or supplementary explanations.

This article moves from the South African historiography to the less well known history of Southern Rhodesian towns and townships. In particular it focuses on Rhodesia's main industrial centre, Bulawayo. Between 1929 and 1960 there were four dramatic events in Bulawayo which involved varying degrees of violence. These were the ‘faction fights' of December 1929; the railway strike of 1946; the general strike of April 1948; and the so-called zhii riots of 1960. There have recently been authoritative analyses of the 1946 and 1948 strikes. This article therefore concentrates on the events of 1929 and 1960.

The 1929 ‘faction fights' have been claimed for political economy by a classic article which sees them essentially as a response to changing patterns of colonial labour exploitation; the 1960 riots have been claimed as the first achievement of confrontational African nationalism in Southern Rhodesia. This article argues that an alternative explanation can be found in internal African struggles for dominance of an emerging black urban culture. It analyses the 1929 violence as a struggle between ‘stylish’ young labour migrants and a longer established township elite. It analyses the 1960 riots as a ‘war’ between the township poor and the newly prosperous traders and rentiers. Both episodes greatly complicated the prospects for a unitary urban nationalism or for effective and combined labour action.     

Christianity and Humanitarianism in the Doukhobor Campaign, 1895–1902

This article examines the campaign undertaken by British Quakers in the 1890s to defend the Doukhobor sect of Russian Christians. The notion of humanitarian sympathy is too often applied as if it were a constant. Quakers are seen by many as exemplars of humanitarian action. By contrast this article argues that the concern that led to defend the Doukhobors came from very specific images of Christian suffering, and that the campaign to defend the sect was shaped by religious, not humanitarian, aims and methods and the particular history and repertoire of Quaker campaigning. It contributes to the history of humanitarianism by showing how humanitarian campaigning derives from the social and cultural history of various actors, and how humanitarian activity is coloured, at all levels, by its social and ideological positioning.     

Educating the Secular Citizen in English Schools, 1897–1938

This article examines secularists’ efforts over 41 years to shape civic morality and civic culture in their own image. Through pressure groups – the Moral Instruction League (1897–c.1923) and the League of Nations Union (1919–1938) – activists aimed to create secular citizens in English schools. In so doing, they aimed to act as ‘agents of secularisation’. Some (limited) political influence was achieved, and their publications reached many thousands. Yet campaigners were unable to unite a majority of Christians, or even all secularists, behind their proposals. The process of forming the non-Christian citizen proved a complex one, involving shifting alliances, dialogue and compromise.     

Mental illness,late capitalism,and the socioeconomic “psychopath” in CBS’s Elementary

This article focuses on representations of mental illness on U.S. network television, particularly the “police procedural” Elementary. As a modern interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes character, Elementary is unique in emphasizing the detective’s struggles with drug addiction and mental illness, as well as a long road of recovery where intellectual labor is instrumental and “therapeutic” (rather than stressful and alienating). Despite its critical acclaim, Elementary’s progressive portrayals of symptoms of mental illness in Holmes are complicated by the series’s stereotypical depiction of villains that are “mad men,” “lunatics,” and “psychopaths” driven by financial gain and individual greed. The “acceptability” of mental illness in the series is measured by a character’s compliance with the dominant social order. While Elementary provides some positive messages about mental illness, its socioeconomic commentaries individualize “madness,” violence, and the pitfalls of late capitalism to support an increasingly problematic narrative of neoliberalism and mental health.     

Special Needs,Cheerful Habits: Smoking and the Great War in Britain, 1914–18

This article applies an interpretive anthropological and phenomenological approach to the Great War in Britain, 1914–18, focusing on the cigarette as a cultural artefact and material commodity, and smoking as a cultural motif and social practice. The primary material featured includes personal correspondence from soldiers and civilians, newspaper articles, advertising and fictional literature. The fundamental task carried out by this study is the connection of developments in technology and distribution accelerated by the Great War, with smoking as a practice bound up with the social, cultural and material conditions in which those on the front found themselves.