British Visitors Research Articles

The Portrayal of the Polish-Lithuanian Peasantry in the Memoir Accounts of British Travelers (1764-1795)

The article analyzes the descriptions of Polish-Lithuanian peasants found in travel literature penned by British visitors to Poland during the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski. It aims to present the literary image of peasantry and comment on the Britons’ attitude towards the problems they faced. The authors whose works are analyzed are William Coxe (historian and tutor), John Lind (associate of a Polish king), Nathaniel Wraxall (traveler and ex-merchant), James Harris (a future diplomat), Joseph Marshall (a mysterious figure, probably a merchant) and John Williams. Villagers are generally described as miserable human beings struggling with poverty, cruelly exploited by their lords in a condition resembling slavery. The authors’ attitude is sympathetic to the difficulties of peasant lives. Britons appreciated attempts to extricate them from their plight in the belief that emancipation was ethically desirable and would render their work more productive.

University student-led public engagement event: increasing audience diversity and impact in a non-science space.

There is a wealth of innovation in microbiology outreach events globally, including in the setting where the public engagement is hosted. Previous data indicate an underrepresentation of marginalized ethnic groups attending UK science-based public engagement events. This project engaged our student cohort, encompassing a diverse range of ethnic groups, to create an integrated art and science event within an existing series of adult education evenings. The study's objectives were to increase the proportion of visitors from marginalized ethnic groups and to gain a greater understanding of the impact of the event on the visitors' reported science capital. The participants' demographics, links to our students and University, and detailed impact on participants' science capital of the event were determined through analysis of exit questionnaires. There was an increase in the proportion of marginalized ethnic group visitors compared to similar previous events. A higher proportion of visitors from marginalized ethnic groups had links with our students and University compared to white/white British visitors. Elements of the exit questionnaire were mapped to the science capital framework and participants' science capital was determined. Both ethnically marginalized participants and white/white British visitors showed an increase in science capital, specifically dimensions of science-related social capital and science-related cultural capital, after the event. In conclusion, our study suggests that a student-led blended art and science public engagement can increase the ethnic diversity of those attending and can contribute towards creating more inclusive public engagement events.

‘We are Grateful for the Opportunity to Act as Ambassadors for Our Club and Our Country’: Sporting Hospitality during the Northern Ireland Conflict

Association football did not escape the destructive effects of the conflict in and about Northern Ireland from 1969. As ‘the troubles’ escalated through the 1970s, several international teams declined to visit Northern Ireland, adversely affecting the revenue and reputation of the Irish Football Association (IFA) and its affiliated clubs. British clubs cancelled pre-season friendlies in both Irish jurisdictions. To counteract the domestic game’s crisis, clubs across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland’s border counties pioneered a unique mode of sporting hospitality. While clubs’ officials, sponsors, and supporters were determined primarily to elevate their particular team, they shared with the Belfast football authorities a broader desire to promote the regional game. Hosting British opponents in European competition and pre-season friendlies, teams in the north of Ireland welcomed visitors with studied generosity. Coalescing around these cross-channel encounters, football officials from both sides of the Irish Sea asserted that sporting fraternity transcended ‘the troubles’. Trawling matchday programmes, the sports press, and the archives of football governing bodies in Belfast and Dublin reveals how Irish hosts and British visitors alike promoted their game as a cornerstone of a robust civil society capable of outlasting the Northern Ireland conflict.

The Ritual Solidarity of Masked Processions in Calabar, Cameroon, and Cuba

The Ritual Solidarity of Masked Processions in Calabar, Cameroon, and Cuba

British tourists’ adjustment to cultural expectations in Muslim-majority countries

While many studies have examined how people in host communities adapt to tourist cultures, limited research has considered tourist adaption to host destination cultures. Successful adaptation can help tourists have more satisfying visits, while maladaptation may seriously decrease satisfaction. It may also compromise the wider wellbeing benefits of taking a holiday. Using an approach based on grounded theory, this paper examines how tourists acquire the cultural knowledge needed to interpret hosts’ cultural expectations and the extent to which application of that knowledge results in successful adaptation. Based on insights from 20 interviews with British visitors to Muslim-majority countries, a conceptual model is developed to better understand cultural adaptation on the part of tourists. This is a necessary precursor to the provision of appropriate assistance to tourists to help them deal with any cultural stresses they encounter, which will help to address the adverse cultural impacts of tourism on host communities. • Tourists have a range of adjustment strategies they can adopt during their stay. • The strategy adopted determines the degree of interaction with local culture. • Uncertainties about cultural expectations can result in culture shock for tourists. • If stress cannot be alleviated by worry it can result in marginalisation but this is rare. • Destination organisations can implement measures to reduce acculturative stress.

Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages

Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages

English-Language Periodicals and Reading Rooms in Nineteenth-Century Italy as Spaces of Intercultural Contact and Exchange

This paper discusses the symbiotic relationship that developed between English-language periodicals published in Italy and major reading rooms in Rome and Florence. This relationship took various configurations – from Luigi Piale in Rome, who opened a reading room and published the weekly The Roman Advertiser, to the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence that provided access to the many English-language periodicals published in Italy – and created important spaces of transnational cultural interaction. The paper looks at the cultural practices and the forms of sociability represented by the reading of periodicals and the patronizing of reading rooms as ‘imported traditions’ brought to Italy by the many British cultured travellers and residents in the nineteenth century. It identifies the actors who promoted these cultural practices (editors, librarians, cosmopolitan intellectuals) and analyses their role as mediating figures who created in-between spaces where cross-cultural exchanges unfolded. The paper also discusses the broader transnational cultural dynamic at work as those cultural practices imported from England favoured a greater engagement of British visitors and expatriates with the Italian political and cultural environment.

Anglo-French neurological interactions in the 19th and early 20th centuries: Physicians, places and events.

The development of neurology as an independent discipline in the mid-19th century was considerably influenced by the almost simultaneous foundation of the Charcot School at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic and it's School at Queen Square in London in the 1860's. We have reviewed the early interactions between Charcot's school and the leading neurologists at the National Hospital and also discussed their neurological antecedents and subsequent links up to the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914. Earlier interactions involved Trousseau and Duchenne in France and Graves, Todd, Laycock and Allbutt in Britain. The French Brown-Séquard was one of the first two physicians appointed to the National Hospital. Charcot was a frequent visitor to Britain culminating in his influential role in the 1881 International Medical Congress in London. He first suggested the terms "Parkinson's Disease" and "Jacksonian Epilepsy". He attracted numerous British visitors to Paris and his studies of hysteria were influenced by Laycock, Todd and Russell Reynolds. Hughlings Jackson drew upon the anatomical studies of Gratiolet in his interactions with Broca and Charcot which influenced French views on aphasia, epilepsy and cortical localisation. Ball, an Englishman, was the first Professor of mental and brain diseases in Paris in 1877. Bruce in Edinburgh and Kinnier Wilson in London both maintained frequent contacts with Paris, where the latter first presented his studies of hepatolenticular degeneration in 1912. The Entente Cordiale of 1904 led to further interactions with the leading role of the French and British physicians Raymond and Duckworth. Two outstanding British women, Elizabeth Garrett and Blanche Edwards, qualified in Medicine in Paris with neurological interests. Our review emphasises the constructive influence of the French and British Schools on each other and thus on the development of neurology. The French influence was primarily the establishment of the anatomo-clinical method and the use of photographic illustrations in publications. The British School influence was its Clinical Assessment Skills and scientific studies of newly recognised diseases and concepts and its early development of neurosurgery.

Selling the Sights: The Invention of the Tourist in American Culture by Will B. Mackintosh

Reviewed by: Selling the Sights: The Invention of the Tourist in American Culture by Will B. Mackintosh Thomas Weiss (bio) Selling the Sights: The Invention of the Tourist in American Culture will b. mackintosh New York University Press, 2019 244 pp. When I first read Daniel Boorstin's remark in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Harper Colophon Books, 1964) that "the modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events" (79), I presumed he was reacting to a large number of tourists that had crowded in on his holiday, and I thought he was overreacting a bit. There are boorish tourists that make many of us cringe, but to ridicule an entire class of travelers seemed a bit much. Little did I realize that writers had reacted this same way over two hundred years ago, long before the swelling crowds had appeared at prominent tourist destinations. The details differed—Boorstin criticized the inauthentic while the earlier critics critiqued the useless and frivolous—but they shared the idea that travelers differed from, and were superior to, tourists. Selling the Sights is the history of how this basic dichotomy arose, why tourists came to be held in low esteem, and why that early opposition to tourism continues to shape our views about the meaning of travel today. At the start of the nineteenth century, very few Americans were touring and destinations were limited, primarily to mineral and hot springs, but after the War of 1812, the number of tourists and their destinations began to increase. In the mid-1820s, boosters began to collectively label these northern destinations the "Fashionable Tour" or the "American Grand Tour." The trends continued upward as additional destinations sprung up along the Fashionable Tour route, and travelers struck out for new territories in the Ohio River valley by the 1830s and the Great Lakes by the 1840s. All of this was driven by a number of factors: increased incomes; many improvements in transportation, including the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825; and, importantly in Mackintosh's view, the publication of guidebooks. Initially the guidebooks focused on providing information on how to get to the sights, but as the transportation system improved, they evolved into marketing the destination. Mackintosh stresses that these guidebooks were a strategy not only to [End Page 965] inform travelers but also, more importantly, to define their experience. The travelers' experiences were shaped by what they read in guides, which "covered a limited number of fixed routes, highlighted a handful of desirable destinations, and articulated an increasingly stable set of cultural meanings for those routes and destinations" (53). These books brought about a transition from an experience in which an individual made all the arrangements, and thus "produced" his or her own travel, to a system in which he or she purchased tickets on one or more modes of transportation. Mackintosh very deftly draws on some of the many travel diaries, memoirs, and essays produced by early travelers to show what this transition meant for them; what was gained and what lost; and how their expectations changed. By the 1830s, some travelers questioned the value of the experiences described in the guidebooks "because they seemed overly fashionable, superficial, and perhaps even dangerously meaningless." Those who continued to take the "well-beaten paths in order to have well-understood and fundamentally predictable experiences" came to be known as tourists (86). Numerous satirists, including Washington Irving and Mark Twain, had a field day with the topic, and Mackintosh presents a detailed and nuanced account of this literature and its changing focus over time. Interestingly, much of the satire written before 1850 was directed primarily at British visitors, especially those who wrote about their travels, because they were seen as "'gentry [who] regarded their trashy experiences as of so much moment to society at large that they absolutely committed them to print'" (123), and because they made some nasty or condescending remarks about the United States. With the satire having been aimed at British visitors, I wondered whether American tourists were as frivolous and "dangerously meaningless" as depicted; or whether there were only a few of them around, none of whom wrote...

Exploring the complexity of the individualistic culture through social exchange in online reviews

Online reviews have reshaped visitor economies. However, there is a lack of research regarding the motivations of visitors to write online reviews as most existing research disregards the cultural differences between individuals. This research investigates the motivations of museum visitors from individualistic cultures to write online reviews with the critique of Hofstede (1980) through the lens of Social Exchange Theory (SET). This study utilises the netnography methodology. One hundred and eleven detailed TripAdvisor reviews and ten email interviews were collected. Theoretically, we contribute to SET by developing a two-dimensional framework which indicates 1) that the complexity and heterogeneity of individualist culture were identified in the dimension of social exchange between the service provider and the visitors through online reviews; and 2) American and British visitors share similar individualist culture in the second dimension of social exchange between peers in online reviews. Practically, this research can benefit the online reputation management and expectation management for visitor attractions, with the goal of improving their visitor offerings and to minimise negative reviews.

Negotiating a Postmemory Dichotomy: Nostalgia and Aversion in Malta

The island of Malta has served as a strategic colony since the dawn of history. Since Phoenician and Roman times, the island has been an important base in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Its last colonisers, the British, spent about 180 years using the islands for their imperial needs. The official closing of the British base on 31 March 1979 heralded a new economic and social reality supposedly unhampered by the exigencies of foreigners. Two major post-memory reactions kicked in – nostalgia and aversion to ex-colonial life. The postcolonial Maltese generations exhibit a range of reactions oscillating between love and hate for the British. On the other hand, British ex-service personnel and their families have continued to feel an affinity with the island base which they had come to acknowledge as a second home. This allows for a new type of relationship between the Maltese people and their British visitors where issues of colonial post-memory are negotiated. These are seen at their best in the local tourism industry. Malta woos British tourists and goes to great effort to attract them. It uses to its advantage the colonial affinity to create an attractive destination for the British which benefits the locals and the Maltese economy. In Malta post-memory has evolved in line with necessity and expediency, where animosity, though manifestly tangible, has gradually morphed into a rather benign residue in the collective reaction to the colonial past.

JOSEPH HENRY AND GEOLOGY AT PRINCETON

ABSTRACT The first documented geology lectures at Princeton were given in 1825 by John Finch (circa 1790–circa 1835), an English visitor to the United States. In the 1830s, John Torrey (1796–1873) delivered a few geology and mineralogy lectures at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), but Joseph Henry (1797–1878), Professor of Natural Philosophy at the College of New Jersey from 1832 to 1848, introduced the first repeated geology course. In the 1830s, the College of New Jersey instituted a handful of short courses on topics outside of the regular curriculum. Geology was assigned to Henry, owing to his geological experience with Amos Eaton (1776–1842) along the recently opened Erie Canal. Henry taught geology for the first time in August 1841, repeated the course in 1843, 1846, and 1847, and probably also in 1844, 1845, 1850, and 1851. Henry typically focused on geophysical aspects of Earth, such as internal heat and Laplace's nebular hypothesis. He also discussed the geologic time scale from Primitive to Alluvium and Diluvium with descriptions of rock types and fossil content of each group. The final lecture was normally devoted to paleontology. Henry relied on Eaton and Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864) for much of his information and took advantage of published cross-sections to explain structural features. The content and timing of the various offerings is reconstructed from Henry's various lecture notes, dated correspondence, and three student notebooks. The impact of Henry's course on students, himself, and the Smithsonian Institution is evaluated.

Anglophile Households and British Travellers in Late Eighteenth-Century Vienna: ‘A Very Numerous and Pleasant English Colony’

‘Anglophilia’ was a Europe-wide phenomenon during the eighteenth century, and in Austria and particularly Vienna this affinity for things and persons ‘English’ was widespread. For many British visitors in late eighteenth-century Vienna the attraction was apparently mutual. With remarkable consistency, both private correspondence and the published reports of British travelers included praise for the hospitality and openness of two Viennese households, those of the Thun and Pergen families. During several decades, until the early 1790s, a substantial if indeterminate number of British individuals and groups arrived in Vienna and received a consistently enthusiastic welcome in the residences of the countesses Thun and Pergen. Why a predilection for Vienna should have developed among visitors from the British Isles, which lacked a shared religion, dynastic connection, or ease of access to the Viennese capital, is a question that merits attention. Interactions that occurred in and around these anglophile households can serve as instructive examples of contemporary British-Austrian ‘sociability’ in action.

The Impacts of Perceived Crowding, and Atmospherics on Visitor Satisfaction at Cultural Heritage Sites: A Comparison of Turkish and British Visitors to Topkapi Palace, Istanbul

Cultural heritage sites impress the visitors by their ‘worth-to-see’ architectural characteristics and historical or cultural importance. Visitor experiences at cultural areas are also influenced by site atmospherics, and crowd, that form visitors’ overall satisfaction with the site. This study aims to examine the relationships amongst visitors’ crowding, and atmospherics perceptions, and overall satisfactions in a cultural tourism area. With this purpose, a survey was conducted at one of the most popular heritage sites of Turkey; Topkapi Palace, Istanbul. Data collected from 261 Turkish and 236 British visitors, who have seen the interior and exterior parts of the Palace. By factor analysis, atmospherics is found to have two dimensions, namely; service and spatial. Analyses results exhibit that both atmospherics dimensions positively affect visitor satisfaction, although perceived crowding has a negative impact or both nationalities. Findings of this study indicate that cultural heritage sites are the areas where domestic and foreign visitors may have similar kinds of perceptions and evaluations.

Gud Gii AanaaGung: Look at One Another

Abstract On the Northwest Coast of North America, artwork has always documented identity; relationships with each other, the earth, and the supernatural; and histories held by individuals, clans, or Nations—spanning back to time immemorial. Artists use local and introduced materials and embrace new mediums to represent how to make some sense out of the world. These artworks reflect complicated relationships that artists navigated with European and British explorers, settlers, colonial administrators, and visitors during a period when communities were grappling with fundamental changes in social practices and cultural expressions. Published histories of art from these regions represent historically selective collecting practices and inform what appears to be—but what was not—the full range of artistic production. Scholarship and exhibitions must represent the full range of aesthetic creations unstifled by biased conceptions of what constitutes Northwest Coast “art” in order to fully explore the cosmopolitan expressions of First Nations' imagery.

‘Good-bye Pompey, komm bald zurück’: Stevie Smith's Vision of Germany in Novel on Yellow Paper

In Stevie Smith's debut novel Novel on Yellow Paper, set in 1936, the narrator Pompey Casmilus recalls several trips to Germany she made in the years shortly before the rise of the Hitler regime. The memories of these German travels are linked to Pompey's love affair with a Swiss-German student named Karl with whom she has spent time in both England and Germany. The essay explores the significance of the German theme in the novel. This theme emerges in Pompey's memories of Germany and Karl, which at first glance appear to be random moments of recollection. However, the German theme also asserts itself in what I call Pompey's German voice, a distinct narrative voice that uses a specific German vocabulary and mimics German speech patterns, which appears at different points throughout the novel and is not exclusively linked to Pompey's memories of Germany. The essay argues that this narrative voice, the Karl-Pompey romance plot and the narrator's obsessive concern with Jewishness combine into an exploration of the Anglo-German relationship in the inter-war years and the attraction which Germany held for some British visitors during the 1920s and early 1930s, an attraction which is linked to previous literary explorations of the country by British writers such as D. H. Lawrence and which by 1936 has taken on an ominous significance as Pompey observes from afar the atrocities being committed within Germany in the name of the Hitler regime.

Measuring the relationship between tourism and walkability? Walk Score and English tourist attractions

ABSTRACT Walking is an important part of the tourist experience and a significant element of sustainable mobility. Although the concept of walkability has substantial health, social, economic and environmental dimensions for permanent residents, little attention has been given to the concept of walkability from a tourist perspective. This study examines the relationships between walkability and indicators of successful tourism as measured by visitor numbers and TripAdvisor reviews for leading English visitor attractions. Walkability is measured by using the Walk Score® index that assesses the walking potential of an origin point through a combination of the shortest distance to a group of preselected destination points, the block length and the intersection density around the origin. The Walk Score algorithm includes built environment characteristics but not route characteristics. The study found only weak relationships between walkability and visitor numbers and walkability and number of TripAdvisor ratings for the top 330 visitor attractions in England. No significant relationships were found for London's attractions although a weak relationship was noted between walkability and TripAdvisor ranking. It is concluded that tourism-specific assessments of walkability and transport choice are required if visitors are to be encouraged to engage in active transport at destinations.

"Networks of Diplomacy and Trade in the Contested Florida Borderlands"

"Networks of Diplomacy and Trade in the Contested Florida Borderlands" Diana ReigelspergeriD When Cuban engineer Antonio de Arredondo debarked from his ship and set foot on the docks in St. Augustine in August of 1736, he might have been surprised by the three British ships he likely noticed in port.1 Unlicensed trade with British ships was illegal in the Spanish colonies, although smuggling and contraband trade were common. The city of St. Augustine, the capital of Spanish Florida, was isolated from regular Spanish commercial traffic and had long relied on illicit trade to fill the gap when supplies ran short. Nevertheless, the openness of these operations might have caught Arredondo's attention. If the large number of foreign ships did not surprise him, then the stores openly selling British goods and British citizens wandering the city certainly would have. Spanish authorities in Florida were in the midst of tense negotiations with the British over the settlement of Georgia, the colony recently established to the north. Arredondo had been sent by the governor of Cuba to order the governor of Georgia, James Oglethorpe, to withdraw from Georgia completely. He was also there to survey the Florida fortifications in case the conflict devolved into war, and he might have found it alarming that British visitors could easily explore the city and do the same. Or perhaps he was not surprised at all. Arredondo had also been given a secret directive to investigate the administration of Florida's governor, Francisco del Moral y Sánchez, for openly violating trade laws, mismanaging religious affairs, and imprisoning anyone who opposed him.2 Governor Moral y Sánchez had assumed leadership in Florida in 1734, in the midst of a decade shaped by border conflicts. Spanish maps had once claimed most of the eastern seaboard as "La Florida", but these claims had been dramatically reduced by encroaching English settlement over the years. This circumscription of Spanish territory culminated in 1713 with the end of the War of Spanish Succession. British invasions had reduced effective Spanish control to the capital at St. Augustine and its immediate surroundings. In the subsequent years, royal authorities labored to repopulate the colony and fortify it against European rivals and their indigenous allies, though with limited success.3 In 1733, the establishment of Georgia added a new facet to the Anglo-Spanish conflict over territory in the Southeast. British settlers and soldiers were closer than ever before. [End Page 511] British agents expanded their trade networks with the native chiefdoms of the region, undermining the Spanish sphere of influence.4 Yet even as the contest for territorial control developed, St. Augustine also became enmeshed in the rapidly growing trans-imperial economy that connected so many parts of the Atlantic world. Both legal and illicit trade expanded.5 Despite trade regulations, this commerce became central to the economic success (and sometimes survival) of colonies with limited resources like Florida and Georgia. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Florida routinely relied on British trade goods. Such trade was also beneficial to larger colonies like South Carolina that enjoyed having local export markets.6 Had Arredondo seen four, five, or even six ships in the harbor, it might have been a typical day. The presence of many foreign ships in colonial Florida has long been recognized by historians.7 In the surviving records of maritime traffic, the names of ships and ship captains change frequently, giving the impression of a diversity of traders in the customs and naval logs. Records of ship owners, however, reveal that the bulk of the city's commerce was influenced by a small handful of merchants. Each of these merchants operated multiple ships that travelled all over the eastern seaboard and the Caribbean, making regular stops in St. Augustine. The unusual administration of Governor Moral y Sánchez enabled them to gain a foothold within the Spanish community itself by setting up resident agents and permanent stores. As a result, some of them became enmeshed in the political and commercial landscape of the colony. In the case of the Florida-Georgia border negotiations, commercial networks facilitated diplomatic relations. As the Spanish and British moved closer to war...

Empire, Repetition, and Reluctant Subjects: British Home Movies of Kenya, 1928–72

ABSTRACTThis article examines efforts by a range of British visitors to produce ‘home movies’ or amateur film of Kenya from 1928 to 1972, and attempts by both the British film-makers and Kenyans to navigate and influence this production. By bringing cine-cameras to Kenya to record images to be consumed back in the metropole by family and friends as ‘holiday films’, these British visitors laid bare what a number of historians have identified as the ‘imperial gaze’ that defined both colonial and post-colonial conceptions of Africa. Colonialism’s obsession with ordering and positioning bodies within a projected image of power and control made cinema the perfect vessel for such an exercise, while amateur film, with its often clumsy framing and highly personal interaction between the film-maker and the film subject, grants us unique insight into the sometimes coercive, transactional and forced efforts involved in projecting such an image. The amateur films that sit at the centre of this article, which were produced by British visitors to Kenya both before and after independence, offers us the opportunity to examine the wide range of behaviours of both the film-maker and the filmed which underpinned the production of repetitive imperial image-making in colonial and post-colonial Kenya.

Representations of Hungary and Transylvania in John Paget’s Travelogue

Abstract Hungary was an important destination for British travelers in the nineteenth century, whose travel accounts provide intriguing insights into the cultural and political climate of the period. John Paget’s journey was meticulously recorded in his extensive book entitled Hungary and Transylvania (1839) that served as a travel guide for other British visitors after him. Paget, who took part in the 1848/49 War of Independence, and became a “Hungarian,” opened Europe’s eyes to the Hungarian people and their country, destroying several false myths that existed about Hungarians in Western Europe, thus attempting to shape up a more favorable picture about them. The present paper examines a few questions regarding the representation of Hungary and of Transylvania in general in the travelogue: how did Paget describe particular cities and regions, the inhabitants, as well as their everyday life? I will attempt to look at the (changing) images of Hungary and Transylvania in Paget’s writing, as well as to offer an insight into Hungarian society and culture in the nineteenth century as contrasted to English culture and politics.