British Statesman Research Articles

Flesh, “Discovery,” and Loss in Colonial Sumatra: The Case of the Corpse Flower in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Botany

ABSTRACT: In May 1818, Joseph Arnold—a surgeon and naturalist working under British statesman Thomas Stamford Raffles—came across what he called the “vegetable of the prodigy world,” a flower so unbelievable in its size, putrid odor, and fleshiness that it would challenge the limits of floral life for colonial naturalists thereafter. Tracing the material history of the so-called corpse flower, Rafflesia arnoldii , over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its place—or lack thereof—in colonial collections, this article explores how natural historical knowledge develops when specimens cannot be fully collected, described, or possessed outside of the field. Facing a lack of physical evidence and the utter inability to preserve, pack, and ship the massive, stinking, and ephemeral corpse flower to Britain and Europe from its Sumatran home, naturalists like Arnold struggled with disbelief and self-doubt while moving through colonial networks of exploration, competition, and death in the rainforests of Southeast Asia. Loss, this article argues, held significant weight in colonial collecting, challenging notions of material abundance in herbaria and natural history museums.

Пародия как способ осмысления творческих поисков Бенджамина Дизраэли

The article is devoted to the study of the experience of parodic comprehension of the artistic discoveries of Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), an outstanding British statesman and talented writer, one of the founders of the socio-political novel genre in world literature. In the context of intensive study of the political activity and creative heritage of Disraeli, the parodic interpretation of the artistic reality of his novels in the work of the American writer Francis Bret Harte (1836–1902) is of particular interest. The critical and cognitive potential of Bret Harte's parody “Lothaw” from the series “Condensed Novels” is explored. The main methods of this research are cultural-historical, comparative-historical and intertextual analysis methods, as well as a receptive aesthetics method and biographical commentary.

Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Matthew Kelly

Reviewed by: Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland ed. by Matthew Kelly Siobhan Carroll (bio) Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Matthew Kelly; pp. xii + 231. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019, £75.00, $120.00. Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland brings together papers delivered at the 2016 Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland conference, the laudable goal of which was to "raise the profile of the environmental humanities in Irish studies" ("CFP Annual Conference 2016," The Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland [SSNCI, 2016]). From the quality and range of essays assembled in this collection, that goal would seem to have been accomplished. While not as comprehensive as its title implies, this collection contains a diverse set of well-researched essays that employ, with varying degrees of comfort, environmental and ecocritical approaches to traditional objects of study. Conference-derived essay collections are difficult beasts to manage. Stripped of their contextualizing discussions, individual essays can appear scattershot in their choice of topics and approaches. Thankfully, in this collection, editor Matthew Kelly has done an admirable job both in selecting high-quality essays and in assembling them into a coherent structure. His engaging introduction performs some heavy lifting, deftly summarizing ecocritical theory and Irish environmental history scholarship before erecting a useful scaffold for the diverse sets of essays that follow. For Victorianists looking for an overview of Irish environmental scholarship, Kelly's introduction will prove an invaluable read. The essays assembled in this book fall into three categories. The first section contains historical case studies on "the improvers" (8): that is, on the Irish writers and landowners [End Page 333] who contributed to the improvement of Ireland's agriculture. The second section features essays on the social construction of natural places in Ireland, while the third contains essays exploring individual authors' ecological representations. As this summary may indicate, the first section of the collection is the most coherent and the third the least, though its essays have much to offer readers interested in the authors in question. Of the "improvers" essays, the standout is David Brown's study of Henry John Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston, whose improvement campaigns Brown reads as an attempt to conquer natures both human and nonhuman. A prominent British statesman and an Irish landlord, Palmerston's correspondence and actions offer a window into the philosophies informing nineteenth-century attempts to transform the physical environment of Ireland. Brown writes with admirable clarity about Palmerston's projects and, in the last part of his essay, gestures provocatively toward the implications of the Irish improvement movement for the 1840s famine. Unusually for the historicist essays in this collection, Brown is also attentive to nonhuman forms of agency, observing the ways in which geological changes affecting Sligo influenced Palmerston's projects. Drawing on environmental history, Brown's essay models a historicist method informed by ecocritical theory, one that takes seriously Paul S. Sutter and William Cronon's proposition that human history and natural history cannot be disentangled. The book's middle section features essays on the social construction of environmental place. Highlights from this section include Kelly's essay on the politics surrounding the management of Killarney, Ireland's first National Park, and Juliana Adelman's essay on the animal geographies of Dublin. Kelly's essay traces the debates about the necessity of preserving Killarney through late nineteenth-century parliamentary discussions and newspaper articles. Alternatively constructed in the history as a "transnational commons" and as a distinctly Irish landscape vulnerable to exploitation by American speculators, Killarney National Park reflects changing views on Ireland's national and environmental identities (120). Adelman's essay on the animal industries of Dublin similarly focuses on the history of a particular space, while also offering the collection's most comprehensive and methodologically suggestive essay on the nineteenth-century Irish environment. Combining digital humanities techniques with traditional historical interpretation, and drawing on sources from James Joyce's Ulysses (1920) to project-generated maps, Adelman constructs a history of Dublin's animal infrastructures that encompasses issues of environmental justice, class, and changing social mores. Given the degree to which urban space is segregated from discussions...

‘His Political Life Story Told in Pictures’: The Visual Construction of the Political Persona of Joseph Chamberlain

This article argues that the increasing use of press images around 1900 contributed to the construction of the political persona of the British Statesman Joseph Chamberlain. These images fused scenes from his public and private life and, paradoxically, the new focus on his private characteristics reinforced his public role. His private life did not replace his public side, nor was the private unrelated to politics as celebrity scholarship suggests, but these projected private characteristics widened the scope of what it meant to be a politician in a mass mediated environment. This argument is made through an analysis of the media context in which Chamberlain matured as a politician and the press images of his public and private life. Particularly the many (re)published images of Chamberlain during the ‘media event’ of his death in 1914 are used methodologically to trace the evolution of the visual depiction of politics through time.

William Gladstone and the Homeric Constitution

AbstractBetween 1858 and 1890 the British statesman William Ewart Gladstone produced five major works on the Greek poet Homer, in addition to a number of smaller articles and pamphlets on related subjects. Although these studies examined all aspects of the Homeric world in the minutest detail, the most enduring analysis concerned the politics of the poems. He considered Homer to stand at the fountainhead of the Western political tradition and therefore to be of the utmost importance for students of politics. Examining the tripartite division of the Homeric constitution between king, council and assembly, he went so far as to discern the distant ‘germ’ of the English constitution. Despite minor modulations, his political reading of Homer remained remarkably constant throughout his life, despite his own party‐political evolution from Tory to Peelite to Liberal. This article considers his reading of the Homeric polity and suggests that this continuity of analysis reflects a far greater and deeper constancy and stability in his own thought than many scholars have allowed for.

The Image of Ukraine in Great Britain during 1919–1920s

The article examines the evolution of the image of Ukraine in the intellectual discourse of the British Empire immediately after the First World War, i.e., during 1919–1920s. This period was marked, on the one hand, by the continuation of the national liberation struggle within Ukraine and, on the other hand, by discussions on the post-war arrangement of Europe and the world at the Paris Peace Conference. Great Britain, as one of the victors in the war, as well as one of the most powerful states at the time, took an active part in these discussions, and the future of Ukrainian lands significantly depended on its position. Therefore, it seems interesting to trace the image of Ukraine that has developed among British intellectuals and politicians at this time, because it also made impact on the attitude of British diplomats to the Ukrainian question at the Paris Peace Conference. To achieve that goal, the article will analyze the attempts of the UPR Directory to establish contacts with British diplomats, the works of the famous British geographer and geopolitician Gelford Mackinder, the views of a prominent British statesman of the 20th century, and during 1919–1920s the Minister of War Winston Churchill, a booklet on Ukraine, issued by the Foreign Office in 1920, as well as the position of the then first man in the UK, British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George. Such a comprehensive view will provide a better understanding of the British vision of the Central and Eastern Europe region in general, and Ukraine in particular, in the context of that time.

Medical Confidentiality after Patient Death in Selected Civil and Common Law Systems

Abstract The paper presents problems related to medical confidentiality after the patient’s death. The reasons for the waiver of this secret need to be considered. To this end, the authors analysed Polish regulations of medical law and then compared them to selected European regulations: French and English law. The inspiration for describing these two legal orders were two media-highlighted cases of the publication of medical diaries after the deaths of people holding the highest state offices: Lord Moran and Dr. Claude Gubler. The first doctor published his memoirs concerning the state of health of the English statesman of World War II – Winston Churchill, while the second published his memoirs after the death of the French President – François Mitterrand. The authors describe the reaction of the law to these breaches of secrecy after the deaths of the patients, and confront them with the current regulations. The whole is crowned with conclusions resulting from the comparison of Polish, French and English law. The paper uses the dogmatic-legal and comparative methods.

Gardens of happiness:

ABSTRACT Sir William Temple, an English statesman and humanist, wrote “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus” in 1685, taking a neo-Epicurean approach to happiness and temperance. In accord with Pierre Gassendi’s Epicureanism, “happiness” is characterised as freedom from disturbance and pain in mind and body, whereas “temperance” means following nature (Providence and one’s physio-psychological constitution). For Temple, cultivating fruit trees in his garden was analogous to the threefold cultivation of temperance as a virtue in the humoral body (as food), the mind (as freedom from the passions), and the body-economic (as circulating goods) in order to attain happiness. A regimen that was supposed to cure the malaise of the Restoration amidst a crisis of unbridled passions, this threefold cultivation of temperance underlines Temple’s reception of China and Confucianism wherein happiness and temperance are highlighted. Thus Temple’s “gardens of happiness” represent not only a reinterpretation of classical ideas, but also his dialogue with China.

Черчилль и дипломатия саммитов: Модели военного времени для поддержания послевоенного мира

Winston Churchill’s participation in the Yalta Conference became one of the most controversial episodes in his long career. However, the most prominent British statesman of the 20th century consistently argued before and after 1945 for summit diplomacy as a key tool for effective alliances and defusing the risk of war. After returning to power in 1951, Churchill had become the first proponent of détente, but as the Cold War intensified found his suggestions for a new summit rejected by both the White House and the Kremlin. There are lessons for today's political leaders from Churchill’s subtle and realistic approach.

Pitt on a Pedestal: Sculpture and Slavery in Late-Eighteenth-Century Charleston1

On July 5, 1770, South Carolina raised its first public sculpture. Representing the English statesman William Pitt the Elder in the mode of a classical orator, the marble statue stood on a pedestal at the intersection of Meeting and Broad Streets, in Charleston’s historic Civic Square. This essay reconstructs the significance of its location and its competing meanings within the colonial slave city. It examines how the statue functioned to reflect the racial politics of elite Charlestonians while illuminating the cultures of surveillance, discipline, and display that linked black and white bodies. At the symbolic center of the urban landscape, the figure of Pitt exposed the implicated nature of neoclassical sculpture and transatlantic slavery.

China in the Radical Enlightenment Context of the English Battle of the Books

Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment revives a significant intellectual connection between the Dutch scholar Isaac Vossius (1618–1689) and the English statesman and essayist Sir William Temple (1628–1699). Their connection had several strands but centered on a shared, even credulous, enthusiasm for China, which Jesuit missionaries were introducing to Europe's intellectual class with accelerating detail and sophistication from the mid-seventeenth century on. Vossius was at the vanguard of those turning the reports from China into challenges to a range of orthodox positions, and Temple followed and in a sense outdistanced Vossius by arguing that the Chinese had realized utopia "without temples, idols, or priests." This essay shows that a group of self-consciously Newtonian Anglicans made the heterodoxy being advanced with evidence from China a central reason for initiating the battle with Temple, and that, regardless of the war's other, perhaps safer, fields, charges of religious heterodoxy remained near the center of the Newtonians' understanding of the Ancients v. Moderns Controversy, even beyond Jonathan Swift's satiric send-up.

Driven by Basic Research

Are nations investing too little in basic research? In the context of the global debt crisis, several industrial countries have reduced their funding for this research. Even though the new understandings produced by this kind of science have long been the driving force behind an enormous number of key developments in society and the business world, many politicians seem to be entirely unaware of its importance beyond simply increasing the world's store of knowledge. Yet 400 years ago, a visionary political leader, the British statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon, emphasized that “Science discovery should be driven not just by the quest for intellectual enlightenment, but also for the relief of man's estate.”

Consumer Democracy vs. Good Governance

“Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”, Churchill famously said in the House of Commons in 1947. The prestige of the great British statesman who held forth when the empire was already on its last legs was such that democratic institutions have scarcely evolved as the world moved on, even after the end of the Cold War.

Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft (review)

Reviewed by: Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft Sonja P. Wentling Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft. By Michael Makovsky. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. 368 pp. $35.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper). An adage attributed to British statesman Benjamin Disraeli became at various times Winston Churchill’s mantra for his attitude toward Jews and Zionism: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations [End Page 486] deal with the Jews.” Yet as Michael Makovsky points out in his meticulous examination of the often controversial statesman, Churchill’s record on Jews and Zionism was uneven, even erratic at times, but nonetheless firmly rooted in his weltanschauung. Churchill’s Promised Land doesn’t have the anecdotal elegance of the writings by official Churchill historian Martin Gilbert, but Makovsky’s work skillfully integrates Churchill’s evolution on Zionism within the worldview of a statesman who became the last and most fervent advocate of Great Britain’s imperial mission. Makovsky’s work is not a political history of Great Britain’s policies on Zionism during the first half of the twentieth century and pays only scant attention to Churchill the statesman. Rather, as the author explains in the book’s preface, his investigation is one of Churchill’s mind and how Zionism reflected his complex outlook on the world and history. Churchill was deeply steeped in the Victorian past but possessed a clear and often unpopular vision of the present and the future. His dedication belonged to the advancement of civilization and the preservation of the British Empire. Hence, Makovsky concludes, Zionism was not a core belief, but rather a sentimental cause that blended “a myriad of complex considerations—racial, ideological, civilizational, humanitarian, paternal, personal, historical, romantic, mystical, and religious” (p. x). Churchill’s infatuation with Jewish restoration to their ancient homeland began as early as 1906, when the Zionist movement itself was still in its infancy and most British Jews were not favorably disposed toward the idea of a Jewish homeland. In his bid to represent Manchester North West in Parliament, Churchill found himself courting the divided Jewish community there, openly espousing great sympathy for Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms and throwing his support behind Territorialism, a movement in favor of Jewish settlement in British East Africa and backed by Jewish financiers like Lord Rothschild, while at the same time pursuing the political support of Zionists. According to Makovsky, Churchill was philo-Semitic, which was rooted in his father’s admiration for the Jews and the late Benjamin Disraeli, but not immune to manipulating Jewish causes in order to advance his own career. Zionism, he concludes, was not at the center of Churchill’s concern, but the “seeds” for his future involvement were “planted” (p. 39). Yet, as the author cautions in the beginning, Churchill’s trajectory on Zionism was far from even or predictable. The friend of the Jews and early sympathizer of a Jewish homeland completely ignored the 1917 Balfour declaration, a milestone in Zionist history and a public [End Page 487] expression of Great Britain’s commitment to supporting the realization of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Even more telling, his once philo-Semitic sentiments turned sour, and his sympathy for Jews gave way to anti-Semitic rhetoric about alleged Jewish power in the face of Bolshevism, popular conspiracy theories as espoused in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and rising British anti-Semitism. Again, we learn that Churchill’s view of Zionism was affected by his larger weltanschauung, which Makovsky describes as an “anti-Bolshevik fixation” (p. 84). Weakened politically by the precipitous decline of the Liberal party of which he was a member at the time, Churchill appeared to exploit the general phobia of Bolshevism and alleged Jewish power to secure his own political fortunes. His most controversial statements came in the form of a pamphlet titled “Bolshevism versus Zionism,” in which he echoed popular anti-Semitic arguments, while at the same time extolling the virtues of Zionism as an expression of positive Jewish internationalism and a symbol of Jewish unity and glory. Makovsky does a marvelous job in integrating Churchill’s Zionism into the latter’s worldview on civilization...

In Silico Studies in ADME/Tox: Caveat Emptor

There is great appeal, scientifically, financially and temporally, for the use of predictions in the drug metabolism and toxicology evaluations used, and in many instances, required, in chemical compound design and development. Indeed, there have been great strides in hardware and software development, as well as many scientific advances that have made predictions not only feasible but in many instances, accurate, when compared with data acquired from lengthy and costly human or animal studies. However, despite the wide array of available software capable of making predictions in the fields of ADME/Tox, the user needs to err on the side of caution when attempting to fit their data from a new structural entity into a database where the learning set may be somewhat or even grossly different from the new entity. There must be a great deal of thought given to what programs are to be utilized as well as to the robustness of the data being entered - there is still no replacement for the expression “garbage in, garbage out”. Further, decisions must be made as to whether the predictions made by the software are superior to other ways of gaining human predictions from in vitro and in vivo ADME/Tox information - if acquiring in vitro data is easier (high throughput) and more reliable, then maybe a new predictive software program is not the best answer, but it if is, we need to choose wisely. Acceptance of predictive software is difficult but it will, eventually, be well worth the effort. Until that time, the end-user needs to go into the prediction business with his or her eyes wide open as to the potential pitfalls and ramifications of an over exuberance of predictions. “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results”. Winston Churchill (1874-1965). British Statesman.

<i>Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention</i> (review)

FREEDOM'S BATTLE: THE ORIGINS OF HUMANITARIAN INTER VENTION. By Gary J. Bass. New York: Alfred J. Knopf, 2008. Pp. x + 509. ISBN 978 0 307 26648 4. $35.00 / Can $40.00. For Freedom's battle once begun, Bequeath'd by bleeding Sire to Son, Though baffled oft is ever won. (The Giaour, 123-25) The author of this book is an Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and his work addresses one aspect of the rapidly expanding, cross-disciplinary field often broadly described as 'ethnic conflict'. There are many reasons for ethnic conflict - religious, racial, linguistic, cultural and tribal, among others. Since the end of World War II, academics and others have struggled to identify the initial causes and signs of incipient ethnic conflict, the reasons for the indescribable barbarism and savagery that erupts and the manner by which such conflicts may be prevented or, once commenced, ended. Humanitarian intervention is broadly defined as the use of armed force by one or more sovereign nations to prevent the slaughter or suffering of innocents in another sovereign nation. Such intervention is one method of terminating the bloodshed once it has begun. Bass argues that humanitarian intervention in its current form developed in the early nineteenth century, and that 'the diplomats of a century and three quarters ago were negotiating many of the same questions that Bill Clinton faced in Bosnia and Rwanda and that George W. Bush faced in Congo and Darfur'. His book presents Lord Byron in a new light. It is Bass's position that 'Byron did not live long enough to fully realize his abilities either as an artist or as a political leader, but he died as the poetic hero of the first modern humanitarian intervention'. The dust jacket of this work is a reproduction of the famous painting, The Reception of Lord Byron at Missolonghi by Theodoros Vryzakis, now at the National Gallery in Athens. The title comes from Byron's The Giaour and the three lines quoted above stand alone on a preliminary page following the dedication page. The lines are followed by the inscription: 'Posted by a Solidarity activist, in the Lenin Shipyards, Gdansk, Poland, 1980' (Peter Cochran advised me that the Polish translation posted at the shipyard was by Adam Mickiewicz). Byron's efforts on behalf of the Greek patriots seized hold of the European imagination and his acts and legend flow through this book. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Gladstone, in his great Midlothian Campaign that toppled Prime Minister Disraeli, successfully urged intervention to end the 'Bulgarian atrocities'. Gladstone roared that 'Lord Byron brought to this great cause and to the dawn of emancipation [of the East] not only the enthusiasm of a poet, or the reckless daring of a rover' but he also 'treated the subject with the strongest practical good sense, and with a profound insight which has not been shamed by the results'. Gladstone hoped that Byron's deeds and words 'may yet supply a guiding light to some British statesman'. Gladstone's language was aimed directly at Disraeli who, in his youth, had idolised Byron. The book begins with a 50-page introduction in which the author sets out his three basic themes. First, he addresses the question: 'why do we let evil happen?' Second, he argues that 'freedom at home can help promote freedom abroad'. Third, he argues that 'there is something to be learned from the way that diplomats in the nineteenth century managed the practice of humanitarian intervention'. To set the stage for the development of his themes, Bass explores the concepts of fundamental human rights, imperialism or aggression masquerading as humanitarian intervention and, perhaps most interesting, the enormous impact that a free press had and still has in instigating intervention. The introduction is followed by three sections in which the author provides extensive historical and political analyses of three nineteenth-century interventions by European powers into the Ottoman Empire. …

Inhibiting Institutional Inertia: Squaring Iron Triangles While Reforming Welfare

The enduring slogan preceding the passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was “to end welfare as we know it.” Common political wisdom is that, measured in caseload numbers and by welfare-to-work efforts, the reform was an unmitigated success. This paper takes a look into what Blank (2002) calls the “black box” of policy adjustments at the level of the welfare managers and the frontline bureaucracy. An analysis of their incentive structure reveals explanations of how the institutional resistance to change was defused. It also implies a specific policy toolbox for situations in which the reduction of the bureaucracy itself is part of the objective of welfare reform. A combination of block-grants, devolution to the smallest feasible structural level and vigorous competition by private sector providers would ensure a higher likelihood of success under this scenario. Power has only one duty—to secure the social welfare of the People. (Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), British statesman)1 Welfare is hated by those who administer it, mistrusted by those who pay for it and held in contempt by those who receive it. (Peter C. Goldmark Jr, NY State Budget Director, as quoted in the New York Times, 24 May 1977)2

Commentary: Proportion not the cause of beauty but of health?

Body proportions have come of age in the medical and epidemiological research communities. The article in this issue by Ferrie et al. 1 examines the association between leg length and trunk length to coronary heart disease (CHD) in the latest phase of the Whitehall II study, a prospective survey of the health of British civil servants. This is one of many studies published in the last decade to focus on the length of body segments in relation to health. Decomposing stature into its major components is proving to be a useful strategy to assess the antecedents of disease, morbidity, and death in adulthood. A concern with body proportion has deep roots in European history. In the 15th Century, Leonardo da Vinci developed canons (rules) for the representation of the human body proportion in art and Albrecht Durer devised technology to draw both the canonical forms and many variations as observed in nature. Edmund Burke, the British statesman and philosopher, published in 1756 the essay, The Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful. One part of this is titled, ‘Proportion not the Cause of Beauty in the Human Species.’ Burke argued that people with body proportions outside the canon might still be considered beautiful. He held the human leg to be especially handsome, ‘I believe nobody will think the form of a man’s leg so well adapted to running, as those of a horse, a dog, a deer, and several other creatures; at least they have not that appearance: yet, I believe, a well-fashioned human leg will be allowed to far exceed all these in beauty.’ One is left to wonder which human legs are ‘well-fashioned.’ Perhaps Burke meant those that are relatively straight and long—contraindicating rickets, suggesting good health and nutrition in childhood, and predicting fecundity in adult women. Ferrie and colleagues report that leg length is inversely associated with CHD risk factors in middle-aged men and women. The strength of this finding would likely be increased had the authors used the sitting height ratio (SHR), calculated as (sitting height/stature · 100). The SHR provides a better account of body proportion variation standardized against total stature. In our research using data from the United States National Health and Examination Survey (1988–94) we find stronger correlations for SHR than leg length with body mass index and sum of skinfolds. Leitch 4 was, perhaps, the first medical researcher to propose that a ratio of leg length to total stature might be a good indicator of nutritional history and health. Noting the wellknown cephalo-caudal gradient in growth, Leitch (p. 145) wrote, ‘. . . it would be expected on general principles that children continuously underfed would grow into underdeveloped adults . . .with normal or nearly normal size head, moderately retarded trunk and relatively short legs.’ Reviewing the literature available at the time, Leitch found that improved nutrition during infancy and childhood did indeed result in a greater increase in leg length than in total height or weight. Longer-legged children were also less susceptible to bronchitis, which was then a scourge of poorly fed children. A recent spate of research on body proportions and health finds that poor nutrition and health during pregnancy and during the first 6 years of life post-partum result in fetuses, newborns, infants, and children of reduced body length, mostly due to reduced leg length. High risk behaviours, such as smoking during pregnancy, also reduce height and especially leg length of offspring. The alterations in body proportions are likely due to competition between body segments, such as trunk versus limbs, and organs for the limited nutrients during growth. 5

The Past and Future of the Psychology of Science

As the British statesman Edmund Burke once wrote, “Those who do not know history are destined to repeat it.” (Not to be confused with George Santana's comment: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”). The fact is that the history of the psychology of science has been a struggle for existence. If we wish to move away from struggle and toward a comfortable existence, then we need to learn lessons from the other disciplines that successfully have made the transition from fledgling field to fully established scientific discipline. The history, philosophy, and sociology of science are just such established disciplines.

The Art of the Tale: Story-telling and History Teaching

The Art of the Tale: Story-Telling and History Teaching * David M. Kennedy All good stories begin the same way: “once upon a time.” In that very first phrase of so many of the tales we all heard as children, and later re-told to our own children, we find not one but two signals of the relationship between storytelling and history teaching. One is the explicit mention of time (and the implication that the moment in question was in the past). The other is the somewhat less obvious but equally important reference to the uniqueness of the story that is being introduced in that venerably ritualized idiom: “once” upon a time, a reminder of Heraclitus’s dictum that we can never step twice into the same river, that all events are discrete, and understanding their singularity is close to the essence of the historian’s craft. There may be twice-or even thrice-told tales—indeed the re-telling, or, as we sometimes say, the re-vising, of well-established historical tales is in some ways our principal professional pursuit. But the repetition is in their telling, not their happening. And that emphasis on the telling reminds us that understanding and developing point of view, or perspective, is just as central to the historian’s art as is the establishment of empirical, factual accuracy. The storyteller, and where he or she sits, is no less important than the story itself. Allow me to re-tell one of the tales from the inventory of stories that make up my own teaching repertoire. It begins, of course, like this: once upon a time . . . there was a customer who wanted his laundry done. . . . Mine is a historical story, meaning that it concerns real people and real events. But to tell it well, I suggest, requires marrying to the techniques of the historian the techniques of the professional storytellers among us—the novelists. The great English statesman and writer, Thomas Babington Macaulay, said that “when history is properly written, there will be no need for novels.”A version of that same thought frequently enters our common speech. It usually takes the form of a comment about a work of historical scholarship that “it reads like a novel.” That remark has long intrigued me. What does it mean? It is obviously intended as a compliment paid to the particular work at hand—a book that is easy to read, fetching, appealing, a page-turner, interesting! But, by inference, that kind of remark is simultaneously intended as an indictment [End Page 462] of most specimens of historical writing for not reading like novels at all, indeed for sometimes testing the very definition of readability. The complimenter who utters that phrase, however, also implicitly presumes—and I think rightly—that there is some kind of deep affinity between novels and histories, that they may be properly assimilated to one another. Though who among us has ever heard someone make the inverse case, i.e., praising a novel for “reading like a history?” I might add (parenthetically) that the indictment of much historical writing (and teaching) for its unreadability or general inaccessibility is especially apt when it is applied to history textbooks, works that are often cast in that peculiarly repellent variant of the historian’s idiom that Frances Fitzgerald some years ago, in America Revised, called “textbook prose.” Fitzgerald did concede that there might be exceptions to the rule of “textbook prose.” As she put it: “American history texts are not . . . by their nature dull. They have achieved dullness.” What might explain that . . . achievement? And, by extension from the pages of the textbooks to what happens in our classrooms, what might explain the common reaction from students that history is a dull subject? To paraphrase Fitzgerald: history—one might well say especially American history—is not by its nature dull. By what means, therefore, has our guild contrived to give an apparently convincing impression that it is? Is there something to be learned from the nature of the novel, and the novelist’s craft, about how we might breathe more vitality and interest into our subject? Can my story of the customer’s laundry—which begins...