Mobilizing the Single-Case Study: Doug McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970

We apply a set of rules for theorizing developed to expand the rigorous methodology of quantitative research to Doug McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (1982). We contend that the strength and breadth of McAdam's data and his application of that data to refute extant theories combined with his new flexible—perhaps overly so—concepts allowed political process theory (PPT) to rise to prominence in the field. We find his book to be a good example of how a single-case study, despite its shortcomings, can play a crucial role in the development of theory and the emergence of influential research paradigms.     

African American Women and Power Politics in New York City, 1944–1972

ABSTRACT

Between 1944 and 1972, African American women from New York City ran for all levels of elected office, from City Council to the United States Presidency. In this article, I argue that World War II created unprecedented opportunities for women to enter politics. A study of postwar New York offers an excellent opportunity to examine how black women defied conventions of gender and race, challenging the pervasive image of the urban political operative, to advance in the city's tough electoral arena. They succeeded in overcoming the Democratic Party machine, Tammany Hall's, resistance to running black women. Once inside the system, despite significant obstacles, these women pushed to change the Democratic Party in important ways for women and for African Americans.     

Political Process and the Development of Labor Insurgency in Turkey, 1945–80

Much attention in recent political science and sociology has been given to the origins of social movements, revolutions, and other similar forms of contentious politics. Furthermore, unlike other areas of study in the social sciences, analysts of contentious politics have actively sought to draw insights from divergent theoretical approaches. Such an integrated approach to the study of social movements is offered by the political process model. This paper offers an empirical extension of the process model of social movement emergence to the case of the labor movement in Turkey. The predominant view of the labor movement in Turkey is one that sees the movement as relatively inconsequential to the development of state–society relations in that country. This conclusion is based on two lines of reasoning: first, the notion that the state granted labor rights and freedoms without a protracted struggle from below, and, second, the notion that the military coup of 1980 effectively crushed the Turkish labor movement. On the contrary, applying insights from the political process model better helps to explain why the 1960s and 1970s saw the development of an important labor insurgency in Turkey.     

Emigration State: Race,Citizenship and Settler Imperialism in Modern British History,c. 1850–1972

What role did migration play in the making of modern Britain? We now have a good sense of how ethnicity, class, religion and gender structured immigrants' experience and what impact they had on Britain's culture, society and economy. But as Nancy Green pointed out almost two decades ago, scholars of migration must focus on exit as well as entry. Such a call to study ‘the politics of exit’ is especially apposite in the case of the UK. For in every decade between 1850 and 1980 (with the exception of the 1930s), the UK experienced net emigration year on year. This article analyses this outflow of migrants to reveal a new vision of the UK as an ‘emigration state’. The article employs this concept to make a new argument about the formation of migration policy in the UK and offers a revised account of the geographical boundaries of the modern British state.     

Continuity and change in the regional stereotypes of southern college students, 1970–1987

This article examines the effects of the race and Hall of Fame membership of professional football players on the value of their “rookie” football cards. Several studies have examined the impact of race on the value of baseball cards, but only one paper has examined this topic among football card collectors. Data were derived from 177 black and white football players who are members of the NFL Hall of Fame or who have been on the final voting ballot for the Hall. All of the players in the sample started their careers after professional football became racially integrated. Data for each player's race, value of their rookie card, card availability (scarcity), performance, Hall membership, and position were obtained from secondary sources. The principle finding of the study is that when controlling for factors such as position, performance, and card scarcity, race applies an independent effect on the value of the rookie cards of NFL Hall of Fame members, but not among non-Hall of Fame cards. Speculation on why “race matters” and suggestions for future research are offered.     

‘Women of the Wild Geese’: Irish Women,Exile and Identity in Spain, 1750–1775

This study focuses upon the experiences of first and second generation Irish female migrants in Spain during the mid-eighteenth century. Recent scholarship has sought to place Irish migrants in Europe within a broad context of assimilation. The experience of Irish communities in Spain appears to have been particularly positive, with the Irish as a group being awarded equal citizenship at the beginning of the seventeenth century. However, the gendered experience of Irish assimilation into Spanish society has received limited scholarly attention. This essay analyses the experiences of two groups of Irish women living in Spain: women who lived in religious communities and the female members of one of the most elite families to have migrated from Ireland. The lives of the daughters of Ignatius White reveal the ways in which Irish women worked their way into spheres of power and influence, including the Spanish court. The networks and activities of these women show a crystallisation of the ambitions of many Irish from the first and second generation to be born in Spain. The relationship between these women, their kinship groups and their networks of power and influence offers a positive and successful example of Irish female migrant experience.     

Rituals of complicity,the ‘humanities’ rhetoric,and the closing of the South African mind

A mail survey undertaken in 1977 showed that a clear majority (64%) of final year students polled at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, answered in the affirmative to a question asking them whether they would permanently settle in a country other than South Africa. Almost all the respondents in the survey were desirous of change to the socio‐political structure of this country; in particular the Apartheid, pass laws, job reservation, educational and residential policies; although students expressing attitudes favourable to emigrating seemed to be slightly more concerned in this regard. Thus it appears that South Africa may lose many of those of its citizens who, if they remained, would be most likely to contribute to peaceful change.     

Networks,Communication and the Irish Protestant Diaspora in Northern England,c.1860–1914

This study seeks to explore transnational communication among migrants of the Irish diaspora through an examination of the Orange Order's networks. It draws upon rare local and district records and press accounts to explain the migratory links and social worlds of Orange emigrants from Ulster. The substance of the study echoes the findings of Canadian historians who have much richer records than exist in the public domain in Britain. It demonstrates how Orangemen in Ireland came to recognise the diasporic dimension of their movement, and how members used the Order to negotiate some of the pathways of migration that were an important feature of their lives, and in the lives of the working class more generally. The essay generally seeks to demonstrate that the Orange Order acted as a network of friendship, camaraderie and support for emigrants and immigrants in the British World in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.     

Forward,Ever Forward: a reading of Robert Harris,Photographic Album of South African Scenery,Port Elizabeth,c.1880–1886

Early copies of the Photographic Album of South African Scenery that was published between c.1880 and c.1888 by Robert Harris in Port Elizabeth consisted of 28 double-card pages with two, occasionally one, tipped-in photographs per page. During the near-decade of its production, the number of images increased, printed captions replaced handwritten captions and both the selection and arrangement of images became gradually more coherent and programmatic. The paper interprets these changes as Robert Harris’s attempt to construct a public identity for South Africa at the moment its economy and society were being transformed by the diamond mines at Kimberley and elsewhere that constitute the focus of the later form of the form Album. In the developed form of the Album, a narrative progression is suggested to move from Cape Town and the Western Province, to Port Elizabeth and the Eastern Province, to the Kimberley Diamond Fields, Natal, etc. In order to read this journey critically, the paper is arranged to demonstrate the constituent parts of this journey in the representation of cities and towns, laid out in grid plans on the African veld; the depiction of individual buildings with their expressive vocabulary of architectural style; and the idea of commerce – represented in street scenes, markets and seaports – and the facilitation of commerce through roads, bridges and mountain passes. The disproportionately large number of photographs of Kimberley, with both its mining operations and no less than three commercial markets, underlines the significance of commerce and industry in the new South African identity. The emphasis on commercial achievement in the Album leaves an obviously subordinate role for images of nature in both agriculture and landscape. Farming is represented through such exploitative practices as forest clearing and hunting, rather than the developed forms of agriculture of wine farming, sheep farming and wheat farming. And landscape in the Album is either a landscape subdued to the wants and needs of a settler population that would bludgeon its way through mountain passes or divert the course of rivers to facilitate commerce, or a landscape that is defined by the imported aesthetic conventions of the picturesque and sublime. Similarly, grouping the photographs of indigenous peoples that are scattered throughout the Album, one may see that their representation is entirely instrumental, divided crudely into roles of either war-like barbarians or pliant labourers. In these ways, the Photographic Album may be understood as a true mirror of the colonial achievement.     

‘What the country wanted’: The houses of parliament,the press and the origins of media management in Britain,c. 1780–1900

This paper considers a topic that has received scant attention in the historiography of public relations: official attempts to manage the press in Britain in the Houses of Parliament in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Existing accounts of the emergence of government public relations in the UK have tended to focus on the civil service in the first half of the twentieth century, but this article sheds light on a series of earlier developments, including the allocation of seats for reporters in the viewing gallery of the Commons in 1803, the construction of dedicated Reporters’ Galleries in both parliamentary chambers in 1847–52 and the creation of a Westminster Lobby in 1884. Taken together, these reforms improved journalists’ access to parliament in an era in which direct governmental control over newspapers lapsed. Yet, they also allowed politicians to influence media commentary by determining who was permitted access to parliament and what type of content made its way into print. A case can thus be made that Westminster, not Whitehall, played host to the earliest official attempts to manage the media in Britain, and this has important repercussions for current understandings of public relations history.     

Master–Horse–Slave: Mobility,Race and Power in the British West Indies,c.1780–1838

This article examines a particular social practice that attracted attention from visitors to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British West Indies: enslaved footmen accompanying white riders on horseback, often seeking to keep up by holding onto the horses’ tails. Referred to here as ‘master–horse–slave’, this is interpreted as a ‘hybrid co-mobility’ (or co-present mobility involving humans and animals). The article argues that master–horse–slave was a manifestation of slavery as everyday social practice. More broadly, the article argues for the importance of practices of mobility as significant features of Caribbean slave societies and the place of animals in these.     

“Where the Measureless Ocean between us will Roar”: Scottish Emigration to New Zealand,Personal Correspondence and Epistolary Practices,c. 1850–1920

Personal correspondence is a unique source for migration historians in that it opens an unprecedented inroad into the interior world of migrants. Letters are more than simple means to add colour to historical analysis. By exploring the diverse range of epistolary practices among members of New Zealand's Scottish community, this study takes agency as its point of departure. In so doing, it focuses on the multifaceted roles of letters in the context of emigration. Not only did they record experiences and emotions, they also served as practical means of adjustment by facilitating continuity. They allowed Scots to keep in contact over vast distances, fostered networks and provided a potent platform for the expression of memories.     

Colonial collaborators: Britain and the Catholic Church in Trinidad,c. 1820–1840

Trinidad, a predominantly Catholic and Francophone island, became a British colony in 1802. The lynchpin of the Catholic Church’s authority and influence in the region, Trinidad’s religious culture was defined by powerful racial tensions. Francis de Ridder, a Roman Catholic priest, was born in 1800 to a slave mother and a Belgian-born planter father. As a priest and free person of colour in Trinidad between 1825 and the early 1830s, his experience reveals much about the complex, yet collaborative relationship that existed between the Catholic Church and Britain’s colonial office. This relationship, which expanded significantly between 1820 and the early 1840s, was informed by demographic change and the reorganization of ecclesiastical structures. The de Ridder case is used here as a springboard for exploring some of the ways that slaves and free people of colour were excluded from religious practice and Church authority structures. In working closely with colonial officials on the ground in Trinidad, these Catholic leaders, who were often bishops or their coadjutors, embedded the Church within the governing structures of elite white society. What emerges is a picture of a Church whose missionary leadership actively pushed non-whites to the periphery of the story of its global spread.