Gentlemen's Clubs Research Articles

Broadcasting to the ‘last outpost of the British Empire’: Anthony Lejeune, the man behind the SABC's English Service London Letter (1965–1995)

Anthony Lejeune, the son of an acclaimed British film critic, was born in 1928 and after attending the University of Oxford made his career as a London-based professional journalist, writing for the weekly intellectual journal Time and Tide and later for the Daily Express among others. He also wrote detective novels and in later life penned some very readable histories of the gentlemen's clubs of London. A chance meeting in London in the mid-1960s with Dewar McCormack of the English Service of the SABC led to Lejeune beginning to broadcast a weekly radio London Letter to South Africa every Sunday evening after the six o'clock news bulletin. London Letter was to last for nearly 30 years. The article chronicles Lejeune's career and looks at the background to the London Letter, exploring its contents and evaluating the nature of Lejeune's conservatism and his personal connections with much of the subject matter which he discussed.

A room of his own: a literary-cultural study of Victorian clubland

In nineteenth-century London, a clubbable man was a fortunate man, indeed. The Reform, the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Carlton, the United Service are just a few of the gentlemen's clubs that formed the exclusive preserve known as “clubland” in Victorian London-the City of Clubs that arose during the Golden Age of Clubs. Why were these associations for men only such a powerful emergent institution in nineteenth-century London? Distinctly British, how did these single-sex clubs help fashion men, foster a culture of manliness, and assist in the project of nation-building? What can elite male affiliative culture tell us about nineteenth-century Britishness? A Room of His Own sheds light on the mysterious ways of male associational culture as it examines such topics as fraternity, sophistication, nostalgia, social capital, celebrity, gossip, and male professionalism. The story of clubland (and the literature it generated) begins with Britain's military heroes home from the Napoleonic campaign and quickly turns to Dickens's and Thackeray's acrimonious Garrick Club Affair. It takes us to Richard Burton's curious Cannibal Club and Winston Churchill's The Other Club; it goes underground to consider Uranian desire and Oscar Wilde's clubbing and resurfaces to examine the problematics of belonging in Trollope's novels. The trespass of French socialist Flora Tristan, who cross-dressed her way into the clubs of Pall Mall, provides a brief interlude. London's clubland-this all-important room of his own-comes to life as Barbara Black explores the literary representations of clubland and the important social and cultural work that this urban site enacts. Our present-day culture of connectivity owes much to nineteenth-century sociability and Victorian networks; clubland reveals to us our own enduring desire to belong, to construct imagined communities, and to affiliate with like-minded comrades.

Public dining in Dublin

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the changing food culture of Ireland focusing particularly on the evolution of commercial public dining in Dublin 1700‐1900, from taverns, coffeehouses and clubs to the proliferation of hotels and restaurants particularly during the latter half of the nineteenth century.Design/methodology/approachUsing a historical research approach, the paper draws principally on documentary and archival sources, but also uses material culture. Data are analysed using a combination of hermeneutics (Denzin and Lincoln, O'Gorman) and textual analysis (Howell and Prevenier).FindingsThe paper traces the various locations of public dining in Dublin 1700‐1900 and reveals that Dublin gentlemen's clubs preceded their London counterparts in owning their own premises, but that the popularity of clubs in both cities resulted in a slower growth of restaurants than in Paris. Competition for clubs appeared in the form of good hotels. The Refreshment Houses and Wine Licences (Ireland) Act 1860 created a more congenial environment for the opening of restaurants, with separate ladies coffee or dining rooms appearing from around 1870 onwards.Originality/valueThere is a dearth of research on the history of Irish food and commercial food provision in particular. This paper provides the most comprehensive discussion to date on the development of commercial dining in Dublin 1700‐1900 and suggests that the 1860 legislation might be further explored as a catalyst for the growth of restaurants in London and other British cities.

AMY MILNE-SMITH. London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late Victorian Britain.

Amy Milne-Smith's book on gentlemen's clubs in late Victorian London is a useful addition to the literature on British elites. The governing class in Britain was not a narrowly aristocratic caste but a broader coalition of the well-educated and propertied, and it was in institutions like these clubs that aristocrats, leading professionals, and businessmen forged a sense of corporate identity as “gentlemen.” In this way, consciousness of class took on a particularly gendered form. In a series of thematic chapters Milne-Smith examines the efforts of club members to create a community of shared sensibility, starting with the processes by which clubs sought to exclude (“black ball”) those men whose status, character, manners, or politics did not pass scrutiny. Those accepted were “less defined by any formal sense of class than by a commonality of activities, lifestyle, and taste” (p. 37). Highlights of the book are the colorful accounts of the various transgressions of respectable masculinity that endangered club membership, ranging from Percy Douglas's public fistfight with his father to the member of the Savage Club who smuggled in his wife disguised as a man. Using bad language, treating servants poorly, drinking excessively, and incurring bad gambling debts were all deemed incompatible with gentlemanliness and merited disciplinary action. But the creation of a cohesive governing class rested on more than conforming to normative ideals, which leads Milne-Smith to an important argument. She claims that historians of men ought to be as sensitive to the importance of gossip as historians of women have been, because clubs were places where men shared rumors, stories, and jokes in a way that created and strengthened social networks. In order for these gossip networks to operate as mechanisms of social closure, however, their knowledge had to be kept secret, and so revealing to the public or the press what was heard in club conversation was considered a grave social offense. As a contribution to the history of privacy, this is timely.

Retail stores as brands: performances, theatre and space

The scholars of Consumer Culture Theory studies as well as practitioners have recognised the potential power of spatial design in stores in constructing and communicating retail brands. Retail space and the aesthetic structuring of a range of expressive artefacts have become the stage on which shop attendants perform. This paper focuses on how management and shop attendants of Dutch menswear fashion house Oger communicate and construct the Oger brand, with a special focus on the spatial settings of the retail store. This study shows how the management carefully combines elements generally found in Italian ateliers, English gentlemen's clubs and boardrooms. The symbolic message behind the spatial design of the Oger flagship store is that of human quest for wealth and fame removed from the everyday life. In addition to this earlier observed interplay between design, display and consumption processes, this study indicates the important role of shop attendants in constructing and communicating retail brands. By forging links with organisation studies, we show how retail management carefully designed, managed and orchestrated retail space, objects and shop attendants’ roles to construct and communicate the Oger brand. The selling of products through performances in designed theatres connects organisation and economic and aesthetic realms. Finally, the paper introduces “internal design proxemics” as an extra analytical concept of spatial settings.

No country for old men? The role of a ‘Gentlemen's Club’ in promoting social engagement and psychological well-being in residential care

Objective: Social isolation is a common problem in older people who move into care that has negative consequences for well-being. This is of particular concern for men, who are marginalised in long-term care settings as a result of their reduced numbers and greater difficulty in accessing effective social support, relative to women. However, researchers in the social identity tradition argue that developing social group memberships can counteract the effects of isolation. We test this account in this study by examining whether increased socialisation with others of the same gender enhances social identification, well-being (e.g. life satisfaction, mood), and cognitive ability. Method: Care home residents were invited to join gender-based groups (i.e. Ladies and Gentlemen's Clubs). Nine groups were examined (five male groups, four female groups) comprising 26 participants (12 male, 14 female), who took part in fortnightly social activities. Social identification, personal identity strength, cognitive ability and well-being were measured at the commencement of the intervention and 12 weeks later. Results: A clear gender effect was found. For women, there was evidence of maintained well-being and identification over time. For men, there was a significant reduction in depression and anxiety, and an increased sense of social identification with others. Conclusion: While decreasing well-being tends to be the norm in long-term residential care, building new social group memberships in the form of gender clubs can counteract this decline, particularly among men.

A Testimonial Dinner for Joseph I. Breen

A Testimonial Dinner for Joseph I. Breen Thomas Doherty (bio) On the evening of November 3, 1954, at Chasen's, the storied Beverly Hills eatery ("where the stars dine"), a group of friends and colleagues gathered to say farewell to Joseph I. Breen on his retirement as head of the Production Code Administration (PCA), the in-house censorship arm of the Hollywood studio system. Soaked in cigarette smoke, bluff camaraderie, and misty-eyed nostalgia, the soiree enacted a masculine rite of passage from a bygone era—not a modern roast, where the insults and vulgarities fly, and certainly not a raucous "gentleman's club" outing to ogle pole dancers, but a more restrained and sentimental confab befitting the early Eisenhower era, with the boys—they were all boys—waxing nostalgic and expressing a mushy affection not suitable for the button-down workplace. Well lubricated with sentiment but not, surprisingly, libations, it was the final gathering of the men who patrolled the moral terrain of Hollywood cinema—a posse once tall in the saddle, now feeling the reins slipping from their hands. Having written a cultural biography of Breen and his tenure at the PCA, I knew about the testimonial dinner, but only lately did I learn that an audio recording of the evening existed, preserved on 78 rpm records and presented as a memento to Breen. 1 Hollywood insiders all, the celebrants enjoyed pro bono access to the sound equipment and technical expertise of the major studios. The gift was a suitable state-of-the-art media souvenir for a man who had himself shaped the art of Hollywood cinema. Shortly after my book was published, I got an e-mail from Timothy Fitzgerald, a California-based buyer and seller of rare books and other collectibles. Fitzgerald said that he was in possession of a recording of the evening, discovered after a friend had invited him to rummage through a box of old 78 rpm records stashed in a garage. Among the detritus, he came across a four-sided gem: two red vinyl ten-inch records in the original package sent by William Gordon, Universal Pictures Co. Inc., to Mr. Joseph I. Breen Jr., 7201 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, 46, California (via transportation). All four labels read "Banquet Tendered Joseph I. Breen at Chasen's Nov. 3 1954." Fitzgerald graciously duped me a copy on CD. He has since sold the original records to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, where they may be accessed by scholars. Breen is a figure of some controversy in film studies, mainly for a series of anti-Semitic screeds he vented in private correspondence during the early 1930s. "These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence," he fumed in 1932 in a letter to the Reverend Wilfrid Parsons, SJ, editor of the Jesuit weekly America. "Ninety-five per cent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the earth." 2 That same year, to his friend and patron Martin J. Quigley, editor of the influential trade weekly Motion Picture Herald and coauthor of the Production Code, Breen also expressed his loathing for Hollywood Jewry. "The fact is these damn Jews are a dirty, filthy lot. Their only standard is the standard of the box-office. To attempt to talk ethical value to them is time worse than wasted." 3 No wonder that today, film historians routinely label Hollywood's censor an "extreme anti-Semite," a "rabid anti-Semite," and "notoriously anti-Semitic." 4 My own take was more nuanced. Breen wrote what he wrote, but he was also an early supporter of the Hollywood anti-Nazi League for the Defense of Democracy, the animating center for the town's anti-Nazi activism in the 1930s; a warm friend to Hollywood Jews such as the producers Sam Spiegel and Joseph Pasternak; and a vigilant expunger of any whiff of anti-Semitism on the Hollywood screen, particularly after World War II. At his funeral in 1965, several of his Jewish friends served as honorary pallbearers. Whatever the verdict on Breen's...

“Un Embarras de Richesses”: Making the Most of the Royal Photographic Society Collection, 1970–80

The Royal Photographic Society (RPS) was instituted as a learned society in 1853. By the 1970s, it was viewed as little more than a gentleman's club: part of the Establishment against which angry young independents kicked. Recent re-evaluations of the 1970s appear to have done little to change this view, and yet such a diagnosis fails to recognize the fluidity of boundaries within the photographic world during that time, and refuses to acknowledge the calls for change that occurred within the Society. Against the backdrop of an emerging New British Photography, this essay offers one history of the RPS between 1970 and 1980, drawn from the Society's minutes and other contemporaneous documents. It demonstrates the ways in which the RPS tries to redefine itself as a consequence of changes in photographic education, the establishment of photographic galleries and organizations, the provision of Arts Council funding, and a burgeoning interest in the value of vintage prints. It argues that when the RPS is forced to leave its Mayfair premises owing to rising inflation and fears of bankruptcy, it ceases to view its world-class collection as “un embarras de richesses” or a “liability,” but as a potential source of revenue that might save the Society.

Corporate Domesticity and Idealised Masculinity: Royal Naval Officers and their Shipboard Homes, 1918-39

This article explores the interrelationship of masculine identity and corporate domesticity through the example of Royal Naval officers and the quarters they occupied on board ship during the 1920s and 1930s. Through a case study of a surviving warship, it establishes the linkages of this environment to a wider upper-middle-class world of public school common rooms, gentlemen's clubs and family homes. It analyses the role of this shipboard domesticity in defining the idealised and class-specific persona of the naval officer: constructed through foregrounding approved qualities (such as dutifulness, restraint and self-discipline), and suppressing characteristics considered problematic (for instance, introspection, individualism and intellectualism). The article also evaluates the tensions generated by these impersonal and unreachable standards, and the simultaneous ability of the naval home to support corporate and individual behaviours at odds with the officer ideal. The final section explores the gendered nature of these spaces. It argues that while the shipboard home was essentially a male one, the dynamic it engineered between rival ‘male’ and ‘female’ domesticities was invariably relational. Officers’ communal quarters were routinely used to support and intensify oppositional understandings of masculinity and femininity. Nonetheless, attempts to dispute these boundaries and to internalise feminised qualities of sentiment, attachment and dependency can be detected in the privatised domesticity of the cabin.

Letters

Letters Richard Pipes, William McGaughey, William Palmer, Charles Pete Banner-Haley, Eric Arnesen, J.G.A. Pocock, and Beverley Southgate The Evolution of the History Department To the Editors: I read with much interest William G. Palmer's article in the June 2009 issue on the evolution of history departments in the United States. It does contain one factual error, which I would like to correct. Professor Palmer asserts that the first female senior history professor appointed by the Harvard history department was Angeliki Laiou, who joined it in 1983. In fact, this distinction belonged to the English medievalist Helen Cam, who was appointed Zemurray Radcliffe Professor in History thirty-five years earlier and served until her retirement in 1954. I believe she was the first female professor in Harvard's history. Richard Pipes Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of History Emeritus Harvard University To the Editors: William G. Palmer may not realize that not everyone considers the evolution of the history department "from gentleman's club to professional body" a sign of progress. Higher education is and has always been about social advancement. In that context, the type of historian who did not engage in scholarly research but instead taught undergraduate courses, provided agreeable company at lunch, and was steadfastly loyal to his college or university was closer to what the consumers of this product—the students and parents—actually wanted than the "professional" who got published with at least two favorable reviews. The "dollar-a-year men," so despised by Palmer, were living examples of love for the subject. Students could respond to that on a human level. But then academic authorities, too full of themselves, demanded professionalism and higher quality, which, of course, meant hiring more Jews, women, and blacks. Behind the cloak of "merit," the era of brass-knuckled politics had arrived. And now we have history curricula focused excessively on slavery, mistreated women, and the Holocaust. I would hesitate to call "professional" this demographically selfish approach to history. Students now go to college because they think they must go there to find a job, not because they have any illusions of becoming a gentleman or a lady. The original reason for going to college has disappeared—and some day society will catch up with that fact. Enjoy the boom times while they last. William McGaughey Minneapolis, Minnesota To the Editors: I would like to thank Richard Pipes and William Mc Gaughey for their comments. I am pleased to accept Pipes's correction that the first woman to hold a senior appointment in the Harvard history department was the medievalist Helen Maud Cam, not, as I had it, the Byzantinist Angeliki Laiou. In my own defense I can say that Cam received a university chair specifically designed for women. Thus, had it been up to the department to use one of its own positions to hire her, it would not have happened. In the case of Laiou, her appointment was made by the department and, I thought, more revealing about its hiring practices. But on this point Pipes is indisputably correct; Helen Cam was the first woman to hold a senior appointment in the Harvard history department. McGaughey offers a by now familiar complaint, that history departments have sacrificed dedication to teaching to the almighty deity of research. The evolution that I described in history departments between 1940 and 1980 is therefore not evolutionary. Things were better in the bygone days when faculty members cared about students and teaching, instead of selfishly pursuing their own research. McCaughey's criticism is weakened by several incorrect assumptions. I don't think there is any reason to think that faculty members from earlier generations did not publish a great deal because they were such dedicated teachers. And there is considerable evidence that persons who excel at research are often very good teachers. In the book on which my article was based, I discuss teaching in the Harvard history department of the 1930s. It is clear that several of the department's best teachers, Frederick Merk, Charles McIlwain, and William Scott Ferguson, were among its most distinguished scholars. Two other teachers who were extremely popular with Harvard history students in...

From Gentleman's Club to Professional Body: The Evolution of the History Department in the United States

From Gentleman's Club to Professional Body: The Evolution of the History Department in the United States

Club Talk: Gossip, Masculinity and Oral Communities in Late Nineteenth‐Century London

Gossip is not only a guilty pleasure; it is also an important tool of social control. Nowhere is this more evident than in the nineteenth‐century gentlemen's clubs of London. This article looks at the private lives of elite men whose gossip helped shape class and gender ideals. Archival documents, private memoirs and periodical literature provide both an insider and outsider vision of a very private world. Looking at how men gossiped points to codes of gentlemanly behaviour, the importance of homosocial life, and the place of oral culture in a modern, literate age.

Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: economic evidence for human estrus? ☆

To see whether estrus was really “lost” during human evolution (as researchers often claim), we examined ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by professional lap dancers working in gentlemen's clubs. Eighteen dancers recorded their menstrual periods, work shifts, and tip earnings for 60 days on a study web site. A mixed-model analysis of 296 work shifts (representing about 5300 lap dances) showed an interaction between cycle phase and hormonal contraception use. Normally cycling participants earned about US$335 per 5-h shift during estrus, US$260 per shift during the luteal phase, and US$185 per shift during menstruation. By contrast, participants using contraceptive pills showed no estrous earnings peak. These results constitute the first direct economic evidence for the existence and importance of estrus in contemporary human females, in a real-world work setting. These results have clear implications for human evolution, sexuality, and economics.

Horace and the Construction of the English Victorian Gentleman

The reading, criticism, and imitation of particular classical authors formed natural part of self-construction for the elite classes in Victorian England, since the centrality of classics in the education of the period ensured that these texts were key element in contemporary self-fashioning. (1) In this paper I look at the role in this self-fashioning of Horace, in some ways the most congenial of Latin authors for Victorian elite subjectivity. Unlike his fellow Augustan poet Vergil, (2) Horace remained popular among general as well as scholarly readers in Victorian England. (3) Although there are several reports by famous literary figures that they were put off Horace in youth by unimaginative school tuition, (4) the centrality of Horace the curriculum of the newly influential elite English public (private) school (5) was clearly one root cause of this popularity. Fundamental here was the reception and construction of Horace as an honorary English who represented the values of the male and homosocial Victorian English elite: moderation, clubbability, leisured gentility, patriotism, and (even) religion. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as one of its definitions of the term gentleman (s.h.v. 4, a) a man of superior position in society, or having the habits of indicative of this; often, one whose means enable him live in easy circumstances without engaging in trade, man of money and leisure. This is roughly how I will use the term here, adding some of the moral ideals and high culture be found in, for example, the celebrated view of the Victorian given in J. H. Newman's The Idea of University (first published 1852): a cultivated intellect, delicate taste, candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life. (6) As we shall see, both aspects--leisured and genteel wealth, cultured behavior and manners--make Horace an especially attractive ancient author for the Victorian male elite. The wide range of Horace's poems, even within the single genre of lyric, the Odes being in the Victorian period (as always) the most read of his works, meant that he could be appropriated and reprocessed by the English elite for wide range of purposes. But the key factor was the gentlemanly status conferred and implied by knowledge of the poet-cultural capital, use Pierre Bourdieu's term (Bourdieu 1984, 53-4). Clive Newcome in W. M. Thackeray's The Newcomes (1855) acquires enough classics at Grey Friars (based on the English public school Charterhouse) in the 1820s to enable him quote Horace respectably throughout life (ch. 8), the mark of and elite member. Horace, in fact, provides the route into the gentlemanly club, literally so in Ronald Knox's Let Dons Delight (1939), set in senior common room in the University of Oxford in 1938 but reflecting established Victorian and Edwardian ideas: God knows why it should be so, but as matter of observation it seems me quite certain that the whole legend of the 'English Gentleman' has been built upon Latin and Greek. A meets B on the steps of his club and says: 'Well, old man, eheu fugaces, what?' and B says 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,' and the crossing-sweeper falls on his knees in adoration of the two men who can talk as learnedly as that. (7) This entertainingly absurd exchange of random Horatian tags, dimly recalled from elite education, takes place on the steps of London gentleman's club, which constitutes the metropolitan analogue of the select Oxford college common room in which the framing conversation itself takes place. It shows both that Horace represented natural talisman for the elite and (behind the evident irony) how little knowledge of the poet was actually required for such social acceptance. Horace's elite status is also clear from the other side of the sociological tracks. Several characters in Victorian literature seeking intellectual self-improvement and consequent increase in social standing use Horace as potential way success. …

Official Responses to Foreign Travel at the British Foreign and India Offices before 1914

Before 1914 several government departments dealt on a routine basis with Britons travelling worldwide. The contexts were extremely varied and ranged from royal travel to scientific discovery, to espionage and affected those undertaking private travel as well as those on official business. This study focuses particularly on the consular tour, on outrages committed against British travellers, and on the issue of travellers bearing arms, often for sporting purposes. By examining the administrative arrangements of the Foreign and India Offices for dealing with such issues it seeks to illuminate the way in which officials from these departments perceived the overseas. The shared assumptions that existed were, in part, inculcated in the leading public schools and universities and were reinforced in the gentlemen's clubs of London's West End and in various learned societies. This article explores a neglected aspect of the official mind at a time when assumptions of British pre-eminence were beginning to be challenged.

A Flight to Domesticity? Making a Home in the Gentlemen's Clubs of London, 1880–1914

I 1888 The Society Herald described the typical day of a young bachelor: “He breakfasts, lunches, dines, and sups at the club. He is always at billiards, which he doesn’t understand, he writes innumerable letters, shakes hands a dozen times a day, drinks coffee by the gallon, and has a nod for everybody. He lives, moves, and has his being within his club. As the clock strikes 1 a.m. his little body descends the stairs and goes out through the big front door like a ray of moonlight, and until the same morning at ten of the o’clock no human being has the slightest knowledge of his existence or his whereabouts.” For this man, as for hundreds of other upper-class men in London, clubland constituted an entire world. For thousands more, clubs formed the backdrop of their lives; in the middle of the city, clubs afforded private spaces dedicated to relaxation and camaraderie. Both married and single men regarded their club as a central part of their lives, functioning as a surrogate home. According to contemporary ideals, the family was supposed to act as the space of refuge from the chaos of the hectic modern world, and yet in the late nineteenth century clubs were taking over this essential role. John Ruskin’s classic definition of the home centered on its role as a shelter from the physical and emotional toils of the world. John Tosh notes that in

Pictorialism and industry: Alvin Langdon Coburn in Manchester

In the early 1920s, Alvin Langdon Coburn made a series of photographs in the city of Manchester, England. This little known work was commissioned by local industrialists, elected officials and a gentleman's club. Coburn's photographs illustrated the sponsor's promotional books and brochures. These photographs of the city open up a number of issues which are addressed in this essay: the attraction of pictorialist photography to Manchester's industrialists and leaders, the integrity of an artist's commercial work, notions of worker-employee relations, and the connection between the use of photography and the changing economic fortunes of Manchester.

Editors from A to B

Daily Mai columnist McKay believes that "those who can, do, and those who can't edit"! Here he recalls editors he has known and writes: "In my experience there are two distinct types of editor - Alpha and Beta, if you like. Alphas are hard-driving individuals who are at their papers for 12 hours a day and do not generally accept invitations to appear on TV or waffle on the radio. Betas lunch out regularly and often view editorship as a mean of widening their acquaintanceship and raising their public profile... they lead with a light hand on the tiller, taking themselves off to restaurants or gentlemen's clubs at around 1pm, coming back after three and going home long before the presses roll."

Race, Power, and Sociability in Alexander Hamilton's Records of the Tuesday Club

Although David S. Shields laments that people who own a copy of Dr. Alexander Hamilton's (1712-56) The History of Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club (1756) constitute a [v]ery select group (xxiii), Hamilton's writings are regularly culled by cultural historians looking for details about colonial life. The fact that Hamilton's two major works--History, a rendition of annals of his gentleman's club, and Itinerarium (1744), a travel narrative of his journey from Maryland to what is now Maine--are kind of texts that used to be ignored by students of literature attests to strong historicist impulse in cultural studies. Hamilton's major works circulated only in manuscript and were published long after their author died. Partly because he wrote just for himself and a specific coterie, his works are nowadays poorly understood--unfortunately so, because he has many more readers today than during his lifetime. This essay seeks to put interpretation of Hamilton on a better footing by focusing on two junctures in his writings where there seem to be glaring incongruities, where opinions of character, Alexander Hamilton (or his club pseudonym, Loquacious Scribble), are at odds with same character's more general views, as well as at odds with apparent opinions of historical Alexander Hamilton. I will not argue that Hamilton's characters are merely fictional nor try to show how contrary opinions do not conflict; instead, I will seek to elucidate logic governing these contradictions. The inconsistencies arise from clash of antagonistic ideologies that Hamilton held simultaneously. How he negotiated collisions has far-reaching implications for how ought to understand Hamilton's writings. The first apparent contradiction occurs in Itinerarium. Klaus H. Schmidt points out that, on one hand, narrator makes repeated slurs on women and racial minorities; on other, the self-same narrator defends women and members of ethnic groups against racism and sexism (161). Schmidt focuses his analysis on women and ethnic groups such as Dutch, arguing that inconsistencies stem from Hamilton's as a cosmopolitan gentleman (162). Yet he does not elaborate specifically how such self-fashioning might lead to irreconcilable attitudes toward people of African descent and slavery. Hamilton owned a slave, Dromo, and his general attitude is as unsurprising as it is unpleasant. While traveling in New York, for example, Hamilton tells a tale of a doctor with a violent antipathy to green peas. When served them despite instructions to contrary, doctor runs away. It is rather amusing to read that, as a result of strange doctor's sudden departure, we had a good dish of pease ... which otherwise should not have tasted. However, it is not amusing to read that blame is to be placed on a stupid negroe wench (85). Typical of a slave owner, Hamilton is untouched by his slave's exertions. For example, once when falls to ground in middle of a road, horse and baggage and all, Hamilton remarks that this sight made him think about his own state of health (193). A more compassionate person would have expressed concern for Dromo's well-being. At another time, is enlisted to help free an anchor. Again, description bears little sympathy for his slave's struggles, instead focusing on Dromo's supposedly savage origin: Dromo grinned like a pagod as he tugged att cable or like one of his own country idols (78). Comparing to a heathen deity is telling, since was a Christian. While in Philadelphia on a Sunday, Hamilton says he intended to go to church, but was diverted from my good purpose by some polite company. Dromo, on other hand, very piously stept into Lutheran church to be edified with a sermon preached in High Dutch, which, I believe, when dressed up in fashion of a discourse, he understood every bit as well as English (24). …

Security Analysis Matters Where Alcohol Is Commercially Sold: Expert Opinions and the Relevance of Security Practices in the Alcohol Service Industry

This article considers the role of security analysis mainly in civil litigations involving the sale, service, or provision of alcoholic beverages in commercial venues, eg bars, dance halls, gentlemen's clubs, and similar places. Security experts may be retained to evaluate facts and evidence when it is alleged that unlawful service of alcohol resulted in intoxication and a subsequent death or injury from a criminal attack or automobile accident. This article summarizes approaches taken by security experts for litigation which undertakes investigation of how a customer was permitted to reach or exceed the legal level of intoxication (ie 0.08–0.10 grams/deciliter (g/dl) depending on the jurisdiction). It also discusses areas of weak or non-existent security practices which give rise to a plaintiff's allegations of negligent conduct in selling or serving alcohol, suggesting that aggressive and consistent implementation of key prevention strategies may reduce exposure to litigation.