The development of social pedagogy in Spain: The tension between social needs,political response and academic interests

The Spanish Civil War (1936—1939) interrupted the evolution and development of social pedagogy, which in Spain had reached similar levels as in other European countries. This was followed by a period when Spain was isolated from developments in social welfare and the changes that go along with the economic and social transformations of cities and give rise to community action, self-help and popular education programmes. The reinstatement of democracy and of new City Councils that are genuinely devoted to solve the problems of the population are the starting point for new social services, that is for social work and social pedagogy. Initially it was practical work that gave an answer to emerging demand, followed by theoretical analysis and efforts of conceptualisation. The professionals and later the universities lead the debate on methodology. The interest and involvement of the universities increased as the Diploma in Social Education was introduced as a new university degree.     

Selective Authenticity: Civil War Reenactors and Credible Reenactments

This article addresses authenticity and how it is selectively used by Civil War reenactors to create credible reenactments. The Civil War provides a structured set of scenarios for reenactors to use as a backdrop for their participation. Some use this backdrop to bring objects to the forefront and others use this setting as a way to interact with an audience person to person. This research indicates that authenticity may come through on different levels for individuals participating in the same activity. An authentic experience or object is authentic because it has an important immediate meaning. The objects and narratives displayed by reenactors may be set in specific history but this does not mean that these same objects and narratives are part of that history. This paper contributes to the study of authenticity by examining groups of Civil War reenactors and where their focus of authenticity lies whether it is on authentic objects or interactions.     

Sport and the Basques: Constructed and Contested Identities, 1876–1936

This article explores relationships between sport and the construction and expression of collective identities in the Basque Country of northern Spain. It focuses on the period between the restoration to the Bourbon monarchy in 1876 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War sixty years later, which was transitional in economic, social and political terms, with pockets of rapid industrialization and the rise of Basque nationalism. It identifies three kinds of relevant sporting cultures: the traditional, local and popular; the adaptive traditional which embraced the new worlds of commercialised leisure; and the imported codified sports, whether elite or commercial, from lawn tennis to football. A key conclusion is that, here as perhaps elsewhere, the new sporting cultures did more to divide the Basques than to unite them.     

The Health and Social Functions of Black Midwives on the Texas Brazos Bottom, 1920–1985

Abstract This paper concerns black midwives who practiced traditional medicine in six central Texas counties, mostly located on the Brazos River. During the years of hospital segregation following the Civil War, the black midwife performed two major functions. Through formal connections with white physicians who taught them the basics of obstetrical care, black midwives were able to provide a better level of health care for black women than otherwise would have been available. The same ties enabled the black midwife to secure assistance from whites for the rural black community. These arrangements improved the health and productivity of rural black families and lessened the severity of the caste system. A sharp decline in the use of black midwives occurred when desegregation reduced training opportunities and the market for their services.     

The slave trade in the western Sudan during the nineteenth century

The traditional historical narrative has tended to interpret colonization during the Civil War by simultaneously discounting African-American support for the policy and Abraham Lincoln's sincerity in offering it. Challenging these views, this paper examines new evidence of the U.S. government's efforts to enlist the pro-emigration minority of the free black community for a proposed settlement in British Honduras. For a brief period in 1863, black emigrationists including Henry Highland Garnet and John Willis Menard seriously entertained the Lincoln administration's colonization offers, spurred largely by their experiences with racial violence in the USA and the prospect of stronger political rights abroad.     

Standing their ground: Southern white hegemonic defense of place through camouflaged narrative continuity

Public relations research typically conceptualizes the practice as organization-centric by emphasizing strategies, tactics, and tools used to achieve objectives that advance organizational interests. Often less organizational but essential to understanding community self-governance, grassroots actors use public relations to defend, advance, or challenge ideographs such as freedom, democracy or environmental quality. The ideograph analyzed in this case is the postbellum narrative continuity of “Southern Heritage not Hate” which served as camouflage for redeeming the Lost Cause, the argument that the South did not lose the Civil War. This essay normatively identifies, interprets and judges public relations strategies southern advocates used to “stand their ground” by defining place as a cultural issue and source of relational agency. This grassroots public relations campaign sought to defeat the post-Civil War Reconstruction narrative continuity that fostered the societal agency of African Americans; postbellum activists re-imposed a narrative favorable to Southern white male hegemony. To stand their ground, “Southern” voices used military textuality, focused on CSA General Robert E. Lee, as narrative continuity during the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), Reconstruction (1865–1876), and Jim Crow (1877–1954). The term “camouflage” is used to explore this narrative and critically illuminate how text can define place so as to make it seem different than it is. Camouflage encodes messages differently to different decoders; it conceals as it reveals. Such strategies are typically more emergent contextually than the result of a grand plan. Through grassroots activism by groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans, what once was overt became covert regarding national military culture.     

The Death Penalty and Historical Change in Spain

This article studies the long duration of the death penalty in Spain until its abolition in the Constitution of 1978. After analysing the plurality of theoretical approaches and possibilities offered by archival sources and specialised historiography (particularly those produced by specialists in the history of law and social history), I synthesise the Spanish answers to the major questions posed in the international historiographical debate on this issue. I then review the formality and the religious and juridical content of these “ceremonies of torment” in order to understand the scope of the practice of the death penalty in processes of social change: what did political power transmit from the scaffolds and what type of social impact was generated by public executions? How did the institutions that exercised the death penalty evolve? Why, during the transition from the Old Regime to the liberal state, was the death penalty used more regularly than before? How many prisoners were in fact executed, for what crimes, and using what procedures and techniques? Finally, after confirming that in the decades straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the death penalty was on the decline, being counteracted by abolitionist discourse in the field of penal sentencing, I examine the functions played by political executions in the repressive dynamics of the Civil War and Francoism.     

Quaker mission in the Nigerian civil war and Ephraim Isaac’s mediation in the Ethiopian civil war: lessons in religious peacebuilding

ABSTRACT

Traditional peacekeeping discourse has ignored the role of religious bodies (or individuals) in conflict resolution, preferring to focus on the activities of skilled diplomats and negotiators. History suggests, however, that not only have religious bodies been engaged in peacebuilding efforts, they have produced some of the most rewarding successes. It is in this connection that the paper examines two notable case studies: the Quaker Mission during the Nigerian Civil War and Ephraim Isaac’s mediation effort during the Eritrea/Ethiopia conflict. Using both primary and secondary sources, a historical and comparative methodology is adopted. It argues that while the case studies differ in many respects, there is a convergence in methods which yielded positive results. The essay concludes that whether acting as a foreign mediator (as in the case of the Nigerian Civil War) or an indigenous one (as in the case of Ethiopia), the religious “tag” they carry gave them an added advantage in the mediatory role they performed. This is more so the case since these bodies demonstrated the spirit of nonpartisanship, empathy, integrity and credibility; all of which are necessities for achieving success in religious peacebuilding.     

ANTICIPATED MONEY, UNANTICIPATED MONEY, AND OUTPUT: 1873–1930

Unanticipated money does, and anticipated money does not, influence output for the period between the Civil War and the Depression. These conclusions, reached using a two-step econometric procedure, appear robust for a wide variety of measures of output and for two alternate definitions of money.     

'War Is Not a Map': Irish America,Transnationalism, and Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls

Abstract

This essay argues for a transnational reading of Irish novelist Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls (2007). It contends that O'Connor's revisiting of the period of the American Civil War and its aftermath begs all sorts of questions regarding Ireland and Irish America's historical and contemporary transnational intercessions and responsibilities. As Ireland underwent a period of unparalleled economic prosperity beginning in the mid-1990s, which most commentators attribute to successive Irish governments' commitment to globalization, it began to face new and pressing challenges in relation to its involvement with the rest of the world, particularly with regard to its stance on neutrality and recent immigrants to Ireland. I conclude that Redemption Falls reveals the complexity of Irish and Irish Americans' relationship to notions of whiteness and (racial) innocence and challenges readers to consider how Ireland will conduct its future relations with the global community both within and beyond its borders.     

The evolution of federal employment

The first federal employees (other than Founding Fathers) were clerks. As federal employment grew in the 1820s, its ranks came to be dominated by patronage workers. After the Civil War, bureaucrats slowly displaced patronage workers at the federal level. Now, federal employments are being privatized and the bureaucracy shrunk. I explain this evolution of federal employment with one simple model of politics in a changing environment. Politicians combine into political firms to promise benefits to subsets of voters in return for election. If elected, politicians provide the benefits as efficiently as possible. Thus, politicians choose the form and size of their political firms to maximize expected political profits. Environmental changes affect the choices. The breach of the Appalachians in the 1810s, defeat of the South in the Civil War and the simultaneous rise of big and transcontinental industry, and contemporary worldwide economic inte-gration (globalization) are three environmental changes that changed the efficient organization of federal political firms.     

Colonialism as a continuing project: The portuguese experience

The end of the American Civil War began a lengthy period of Southern inferiority vis-?-vis the North-a period so lengthy that some Southerners argue that it lasts to this day. Not until Woodrow Wilson's election in 1913 did the United States have a Southern-born president after the Civil War. Southerners sought novel means to assert some degree of superiority over their Northern neighbors. College football became a primary means of reasserting a Southern sense of identity and superiority. In inter-regional games in the 1920s and 1930s, the martial spirit of college football allowed Southerners to reassert their sense of honor, which had been maligned since defeat in the Civil War. As Bertram Wyatt-Brown (1982) has shown, the concept of honor defined Southern males' outlook; secession from the Union and civil war occurred when Southerners perceived Abraham Lincoln's election to the Presidency as the culmination of anti-slavery assaults upon their honor. Such racial definitions of Southern identity became problematic as the civil rights movement gained impetus in the 1950s and 1960s. To remain competitive with teams from other regions, Southern football teams began to recruit black players; The University of Alabama fielded its first black football player in 1971. However, transition from segregation to inclusion has not been easy. Symbols of white Southern pride highlight lingering racial difficulties, as a 1997 controversy over use of the "Rebels" nickname and fans' waving of the Confederate battle flag at The University of Mississippi illustrates. Controversies like this raise troubling questions about Southern identity, namely "Whose South is it?" and "Can expressions of Southern nationalist feelings possibly escape racial implications?"     

‘Tuyaw’, a Reminder of the Dead or Another Way to Talk about the Weather in the Age of the Super‐Typhoon

In the wake of mass calamity, one can discern emergent specters of collective memory, trauma, and mourning over human death as well as the destruction of human dwellings. In the Philippines, a former Spanish and U.S. colony, recent history is resplendent with all manner of cataclysms ‐ from natural disasters (earthquakes, typhoons) to mass destruction during war (Spanish‐American War and World War II). This essay is concerned with the ways in which dreams and the dead are not just after‐effects of events in linear‐time nor exclusively human affects. Drawing on scholars of experimental ethnography and postcolonial film theory converging on Gilles Deleuze's “time‐image”, dreams authored by the dead here are engaged as agentive fabulators on decay, destruction, and loss – first on the local level of experiencing disaster but further connecting that more broadly to loss of heritage sites and the possible future prospect of serial calamity augured by neoliberal development and climate change in the Pacific.     

Publicizing atrocity and legitimizing outrage: Picasso’s Guernica

Picasso created his most famous painting, Guernica, in just over three weeks in 1937 after the bombing of the little town of Guernica, located in the Basque region, during the Spanish Civil War. Thousands of innocent people were injured or killed. In its sharp lines, its confusion and its distorted shapes, Guernica shows the suffering and pain of war. Rather than using color, especially vivid reds, Picasso used only black and white paint as symbols of death, mourning and tragedy. He believed that brighter colors might distract the viewer from the agony of the scene. In Guernica, most of the figures have open mouths; hear them shouting, groaning or screaming. The aim of this paper and its relevance to public relations is to examine whether and how visual communication can publicize and frame a military event, the character of military leaders, and warfare as a generic aspect of democratic self-governance. This paper proposes that rhetorical, discursive art can contribute impact to public relations efforts, by focusing attention, making issues public, and making informative, framing, and democratizing statements. Even more important is the ability of art to express moral outrage, especially when giving voice to muted interests.     

Review essay: Between two wars: The rise and fall of Chattel Slavery in Georgia

Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, 1750–1860. Julia Floyd Smith. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.

On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia. Clarence L. Mohr. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1986.     

George Thompson,transatlantic abolitionism,and Britain in the American Civil War

The British abolitionist George Thompson was an unequalled public face of the Northern states in Britain during the American Civil War. Capitalising on his reputation from decades of anti-slavery activism stretching back to the 1830s, Thompson lectured convincingly to a variety of British audiences on the emancipationist potential of the war, encouraging them to lend their support to the Northern cause. Revealing his continuing intellectual debt and personal connections to the American abolitionists around William Lloyd Garrison, this article uses Thompson’s activism to emphasise the continuing importance of transatlantic Garrisonian ideology and networks in a period that historians have previously characterised as a ‘rupturing’ in the movement.     

Dirty Birds,Filthy Immigrants,and the English Sparrow War: Metaphorical Linkage in Constructing Social Problems

The role of metaphor in the construction of social problems has often been neglected. Yet we believe that the use of metaphorical linkage can help explain how social problems become defined. To explore the role of metaphorical linkage, we examine a controversy that shook the American ornithological world of the late 19th century: The Great English Sparrow War. English sparrows were originally imported to the major American cities of the East, in the early 1850s, to control the infestation of trees by dropworms. These birds adapted successfully, and by the mid-1870s they began to be perceived as a menace to the American ecosystem. As a consequence, a vigorous debate began as to their usefulness or harmfulness, which often exceeded the bounds of scientific discourse. We argue that this controversy over the English sparrow was linked to the controversy over “the new immigration.” A post-bellum America faced the task of rebuilding its moral boundaries after the disruption of the Civil War and in the face of millions of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and the Orient. The opponents of the English sparrow drew their imagery from the nativism (anti-foreignism) of the day. They defined the bird as: (1) a foreigner, (2) that competes unfairly with native birds, (3) that has an immoral character, and (4) that needs to be eliminated from the American community of birds. Examining the metaphorical linkages among public concerns of the same period, we suggest, is a fruitful way of examining social problems.     

Between martyrology and historiography: Elias Tcherikower and the making of a pogrom historian

This article examines the dialectical relationship between martyrology and historiography, religion and secularism in the works of the Russian‐Jewish historian and communal activist, Elias Tcherikower. Tcherikower, although a disciple of Shimon Dubnov, who maintained a commitment to a positive portrayal of Jewish life in the Diaspora, championed what Salo Baron called “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” the view that understood Jewish history as consisting primarily of a series of persecutions. From World War One onward, Tcherikower romanticised Jewish martyrs and argued that religious and cultural renaissance followed on the heels of persecution and martyrdom. This preoccupation with the relationship between Jewish martyrdom and cultural creativity inspired Tcherikower first in his role as an historian of the pogroms of the Russian Civil War and then as a leader of YIVO. Until the eve of World War Two, Tcherikower believed that modern Yiddish scholarship served the same transcendent purpose as had Torah study in the past and that Jewish historiography could inspire the Jewish people in the same manner as had pre‐modern martyrology. Tcherikower’s work thus provides a fascinating case study of the persistence of traditional religious conceptions in twentieth‐century East European nationalist Jewish historiography.     

Exceptionalism and Internationalism: The Origins of American Social Science Reconsidered

This paper examines the international context in which American social science was institutionalized in the generation after the Civil War, following the foundation of the American Social Science Association in 1865. The ASSA was modelled on an influential British forum, founded eight years previously, the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. A comparison of these two organisations from the 1860s to the 1880s allows consideration of British intellectual and political influences on the first American social scientists. It also helps in the identification of the social and political attitudes of the well-born, cosmopolitan, and high-minded American reformers attracted to social science at this time. The theme of American exceptionalism has recently been emphasized when considering the motives and intentions of early social science in the United States. It is argued here that the replication in America of models of the new discipline which were first developed in Britain, is indicative also of a self-conscious internationalism among the American social-scientific community of this period. In addition to an institutional comparison, the article examines the careers and ideas of several representative figures in this process of Anglo-American liberal transference, among them the physician Dr. Edward Jarvis, the feminist Caroline Healey Dall, the jurist David Dudley Field, and the famed British interpreter of American experience, James Bryce.     

Beyond cultural competence: language access and Latino civil rights

Social services remain largely unresponsive to the values and needs of Latino families, who often need Spanish-language services. This article discusses access to linguistically appropriate services, not just as a culturally competent practice, but also as a civil rights issue. Spanish speakers have protection from discrimination in federally funded human services under Title VI of the Civil Rights Law of 1964. The article discusses implications for all aspects of private and public child welfare, including investigations, foster care, family preservation, adoption, and quality assurance.