Historical Portrait Research Articles

An Historical Overview of Crime Prevention Initiatives in Canada: A Federal Perspective

The author provides an historical overview of crime prevention activities in Canada that have led to the federal government’s current direction in crime prevention policy. Drawing on more than 30 years experience as a federal public servant with the Ministry of the Solicitor General and Justice Canada, the author traces more than 100 years of Canadian federal crime prevention efforts, with an emphasis on both internal and external government documents and historic material from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. This brief history of crime prevention efforts in Canada shows a clear trajectory from the mid-1980s onward, towards support for more comprehensive and integrated community-based crime prevention activities. The interventions are increasingly aimed at community safety, health, and well-being while involving the police, other service providers, as well as community members in the process.

Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa (review)

Reviewed by: Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa Paul Bjerk Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa. Edited by Henri Médard and Shane Doyle. Athens: Ohio University Press; Kampala: Fountain Publishers; Oxford: James Currey, 2007. This new edited volume of essays by a remarkable collection of scholars is notable for its insights into unfree labor and trade in people in a region wholly separate from the Atlantic World that is, the main reference point for most people's conception of slavery. With few exceptions, the essays are excellent historical essays that provide a broad introduction to the Great Lakes region through the lens of slavery. Its geographical focus, in what is now Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, and the Eastern Congo, helps connect the history of slavery in Africa to debates going back to classical texts of Greece, Rome, Judea and Arabia, by re-engaging debates about the definition of slavery. As many scholars have noted, American chattel slavery was a historical outlier. The forms of domestic, military, and aristocratic slavery common in pre-colonial Africa accord more closely with slavery in most other times and places. But once this is acknowledged, we return to specific questions about the nature of slavery in the Great Lakes region. These questions require a return to the inconclusive debates of the 1970s by Orlando Patterson, Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, Claude Meillasoux, Joseph Miller, Paul Lovejoy, Patrick Manning and others that sought to define slavery in an African context. Henri Médard's introduction provides a helpful introduction to these debates. He states that no definition was imposed on authors, but rather that a general definition of slaves as "kinless outsiders" emerged (25). This is arguable, and it may have been helpful to have imposed a definition on the contributors if only to engage them in a more consistent debate. This question of definition lurks in the background of every essay, and is only rarely brought to the fore. Shane Doyle's chapter on demography, for example, does not address the centrality of demography in Atlantic studies as a way to measure the impact of slavery. A more explicit attempt to engage these debates would have made the volume far more valuable to broader audiences. That being said, one of the strengths of Slavery in the Great Lakes is that it is not written by specialists of slavery, but rather historians of East Africa who encountered slavery in their broader studies. This brings a refreshing variety to the essays that by itself is a powerful reminder of just how ambiguous a term Slavery is. Jan-Georg Deutsch proposes a new term for the study of African slavery, suggesting that slaves suffered most prominently from "radical uncertainty," they could never be certain whether they would be treated as kin or stranger (77). This insight suggests that the kinship-stranger continuum proposed by Miers and Kopytoff does not at all imply something benign (as it is unjustly accused) but that the language of kinship was both carrot and stick, offering reward but also threatening banishment, and was as fully coercive as the ideology of race in the Americas. The essays are useful historical portraits of the nineteenth century in the Great Lakes region, offering tantalizing insights into social structure and a taste of everyday life in societies that have often been studied from the top down. The essays reveal the nearly infinite gradations of freedom and dependency in a dynamic economy never defined by wage labor and its ideal of autonomy. Richard Reid explains that the term slavery "can reasonably be used to cover everyone from the humble bazaana—domestic female slaves—to certain bagalagala, the young and mostly male pages serving at the centres of political power," (147), while Edward Steinhart provides several more specific examples of servile labor in Buganda's neighbor, Ankole. Lurking behind these essays, often noted but never fully addressed is the application of Paul Lovejoy's "transformation" thesis that argued that external trade changed African slavery, and that the decline of external trade led to a rise of harsher forms of African slavery before colonial rule brought slavery to a gradual end. This question...

Broken brotherhood: the rise and fall of the National Afro-American Council

Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American gives a comprehensive account of the National Afro-American Council, the first truly nationwide U.S. civil rights organization, which existed from 1898 to 1908. Based on exhaustive research, the volume chronicles the Council's achievements and its annual meetings and provides portraits of its key leaders.Led by four of the most notable African American leaders of the time - journalist T. Thomas Fortune, Bishop Alexander Walters, educator Booker T. Washington, and Congressman George Henry White - the Council persevered for a decade despite structural flaws and external pressures that eventually led to its demise in 1908.Author Benjamin R. Justesen provides historical context for the Council's development during an era of unprecedented growth in African American organizations. Justesen establishes the National Afro-American Council as the earliest national arena for discussions of critical social and political issues affecting African Americans and the single most important united voice lobbying for protection of the nation's largest minority. In a period marked by racial segregation, widespread disfranchisement, and lynching violence, the nonpartisan Council helped establish two more enduring successor organizations, providing core leadership for both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League.Broken Brotherhood traces the history of the Council and the complicated relationships among key leaders from its creation in Rochester in 1898 to its last gathering in Baltimore in 1907, drawing on both private correspondence and contemporary journalism to create a balanced historical portrait. Enhanced by thirteen illustrations, the volume also provides intriguing details about the ten national gatherings, describes the Council's unsuccessful attempt to challenge disfranchisement before the U.S. Supreme Court, and sheds light on the gradual breakdown of Republican solidarity among African American leaders in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Frank Findings: Frank Parsons and the Parson Family

The historical portrait of Frank Parsons in terms of his early years and family life has endured considerable speculation based on limited information. At the 100th anniversary of his death, new information has emerged to refute some of the widely held claims about Parsons and his family life. It is time to move beyond the confines of secondary sources to primary sources of information about Parsons. The legacy of Parsons deserves a more thorough and accurate examination.

Sob o signo de Darwin? Sobre o mau uso de uma quimera

No ano de 2003 Francisco de Oliveria publicou um artigo intitulado "O Ornitorrinco" no qual fez considerações críticas sobre a conjectura politico-social daquele momento histórico. Tal artigo é permeado por um paralelo entre o evolucionismo darwinista e a visão do autor sobre a sociedade brasileira contemporânea. Entretanto, ao fazer tal analogia ele incorre numa série de equívocos teóricos sobre a teoria evolucionista. Tais equívocos consistem, em grande parte, numa substuição indevida entre aquilo que ficou conhecido como Darwinismo Social e a teoria neodarwinista como entendida pelos seus atuais proponentes. O presente trabalho identifica estes equívocos e os contextualiza dentro da teoria neodarwiniana. Além disso, fazemos um recorte histórico do processo de formação do pensamento evolucionista para enfatizar que a associação entre biologia e darwinismo social é mais complexa do que geralmente se assume.

Integrating institutional, relational and embodied structure: an emergentist perspective1

This paper begins to develop an emergentist and realist account of normative social institutions. The argument is developed as a response to Lopez and Scott's historical portrait of the debate on social structure as a dialogue between two different concepts of structure: institutional structure and relational structure, integrated more recently through the concept of embodied structure. The paper argues that all these approaches tend to neglect the idea of structure as a whole and suggests that we cannot understand social structures without recognizing the nature of the corresponding wholes, and how they relate to the human individuals that comprise them. Such a perspective makes clear that embodiment alone is inadequate as a means of integrating institutional and relational conceptions of structure. For a fuller resolution, we must set social structure in an emergentist framework, which can reconcile the complementary roles of institutional structure, relational structure, and indeed embodiment, as aspects of the production of social structures as wholes.

黒田智著, 『中世肖像の文化史』, ぺりかん社, 二〇〇七・二刊, A5, 四七八頁, 八二〇〇円

黒田智著, 『中世肖像の文化史』, ぺりかん社, 二〇〇七・二刊, A5, 四七八頁, 八二〇〇円

F. THOMAS LUONGO. The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 233. $39.95

F. Thomas Luongo's book follows in a distinguished line of scholarly research that has attempted to free Catherine of Siena from the hagiographical shrine in which she has been encased ever since Raymond of Capua, her confessor, spiritual advisor, and biographer, wrote the Legenda maior, the vita meant to serve the cause for her canonization, which occurred in 1461. Beginning in 1921, and followed up with subsequent publications in 1930 and 1948, French scholar Robert Fawtier launched his attack on the Catherinian hagiographical tradition. More recent scholars such as Sofia Boesch Gajano, Odile Redon, Suzanne Noffke, and Karen Scott, while abjuring Fawtier's polemics, also have argued in various ways that Raymond's Catherine is a hagiographical construct composed with an agenda, not a historical portrait. In search of the historical person rather than the saint, they have read Raymond's vita against Catherine's own letters in an attempt to reconstruct her life and reassess her spirituality, along with the public nature of her mission or apostolate. In this slim volume of five chapters, Luongo does this, too, but he moves the discussion forward in a welcome and innovative way by historicizing Catherine in the social and political culture of late medieval Siena. Luongo also intends his work to stand as a critique of the voluminous scholarship on female sanctity that has appeared in the wake of Caroline Walker Bynum's influential book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987). He argues that much of the recent work on sanctity privileging gender as the primary category of analysis has had the unfortunate effect of deracinating holiness from its local context, simplifying and reifying it rather than complicating our vision of it. To rectify this problem, his study plants Catherine Benincasa firmly back into the Sienese soil of the fourteenth century.

Reminiscences of graduate medical training in Colombia.

Historical portrayal of how the formation of higher medical education, post-graduated specialties, developed in Colombia, dating from 1940 until 1992. In 1992 the Colombian government organizes Higher Medical Education by Law N° 30 passed on the 28 of December of 1992. In the article the author expresses how more organized this education may have become it may have lost some of its mystic and ethical vitality.

Rx for Survival: A Global Health Challenge (review)

Reviewed by: Rx for Survival: A Global Health Challenge Anne-Emanuelle Birn Rx for Survival: A Global Health Challenge. Narrated by Brad Pitt. WGBH/NOVA Science Unit and Vulcan Productions, 2005. 6-part miniseries, each program 60 min. $39.95. In November 2005, public television stations across the country aired a six-part documentary series titled Rx for Survival: A Global Health Challenge. Produced by WGBH and Vulcan Productions, and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Merck Company Foundation, the series aims to raise awareness of the "greatest challenges in global health and the people meeting them." Each episode follows a set of seemingly intractable problems—smallpox, AIDS, river blindness, obesity, poor access to medical services, malaria, contaminated water . . .—and the difficult, but ultimately successful, struggles of ingenious scientists, public health administrators, and committed community health workers, past and present, to combat them. The miniseries is a pricey affair, with extensive footage from far-flung locales, dozens of expert interviews and intimate firsthand accounts, fancy graphics depicting the immune system in action, and occasional fear-provoking subliminal messages. All the while, an ethno-techno musical score conveys a mood of alternating despair and hope. Of particular interest to historians are the numerous "historical" reenactments of health plights and triumphs, designed to reveal transportable lessons regarding global health developments over time. Raising awareness of global health among the U.S. public and politicians is a worthy cause: with U.S. overseas development assistance at just 0.16% of gross national income, the country trails virtually every other OECD member in addressing global inequalities and their health consequences. The slick marketing [End Page 442] campaign surrounding the documentary—including its narration by a decidedly perplexed Brad Pitt, a high-profile global health conference, a companion book and Web site, and the publication of a Gates Foundation–sponsored special issue of Time Magazine (followed, predictably, by Time's naming of Bill and Melinda Gates, together with rock star Bono, as its "persons of the year")—might be forgiven had Rx for Survival depicted global health in analytically sound terms. Instead, the series intersperses simplified narratives of health heroes and scientific ingenuity (Jenner, Snow, Pasteur, Yersin, Lazear, Goldberger, Fleming, etc.) with horror-flick accounts of superbugs (episode 2), "deadly messengers" (episode 4), and new threats (episode 6)—such as MDR tuberculosis, MRSA, West Nile Virus, SARS, avian influenza. In repeating these simplistic formulas to demonstrate the connections between disease problems of developing countries and emerging "risks" in the United States, the series misses the true challenge of global health: the importance of integrating technoscientific developments with sociopolitical improvements. For example, as relentless polio vaccinators wend their way through open cesspools and extreme misery in Indian villages (episode 1), it is only delivering the vaccine that matters—no reference is made to the enormous local resources consumed by this campaign (the most expensive in world history) and its displacement of other, far more pressing, causes of childhood death and disability. We learn that crowded shantytowns in Lima provide ideal circumstances for the spread of tuberculosis, but Rx for Survival does not address the causes of or the solutions to the poor living conditions (a cornerstone of public health, past and present), focusing only on whether Partners in Health's Jim Kim will prove that it is possible to treat MDR tuberculosis with expensive, second-line drugs "borrowed" from Harvard hospitals and "smuggled" through Peruvian customs. For classroom use, the series would work ideally for a critical media studies course—but as history of medicine, it is almost embarrassing: a hagiography long gone from the profession punctuates the narrative. History of medicine is stripped of context and serves only to justify technological breakthrough as the motor of history. Many of the complex arguments of interviewed historians—such as Howard Markel, Randall Packard, and Alan Kraut, among others—are selectively used to dramatize the role of individuals at the expense of the social, economic, and political imperatives that framed the emergence and implementation of public health innovations. Some of the reenactments are corny, such as Pasteur's interaction with a roomful of anticontagionists, or ophthalmologist Alfred Sommer's historical portrayal of himself as...

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF SHIءI MODERNISM: MORALITY AND GENDER IN EARLY 20TH-CENTURY LEBANON

This article contributes to the history of Shiء Islam in Lebanon under the French Mandate by looking at Shiءi religious and cultural engagements with the problem of gender. In the first section, religious treatises written by ءulamaʿ in the context of a politicized “culture war” waged over the proposed reformation of ءAshuraʿ mourning practices during the 1920s and 1930s are analyzed to elucidate the relationship between idealised gender behavior and religious practice. In the second section the Shiءi modernist monthly journal al-ءIrfan is utilized to show how it advocated certain “proper” roles for men and women in an adequately pious Shiءi society. Finally, jokes and other materials published in al-ءIrfan are examined to demonstrate how multifaceted gender norms were in Shiءi Lebanon. These sources paint a rich historical portrait of Shiءi cultural politics by complicating conventional conceptualizations of Shiءi society under the Mandate and illustrating how Shiءi cultural identities have been produced and negotiated over time.

O Brasil jagunço: retórica e poética

After the works of authors like Euclides da Cunha, Caio Prado Jr. and Oliveira Vianna, banditism has won, in the novel Grande sertão: veredas, by Guimarães Rosa, a representation that matches its importance in Brazil's everyday life. With the ficcional narration of the jagunços'war (i.e., bands of criminals fighting for power in the central area of the country around 1900), the novel offers a portrait of Brazil which evokes structures that remain present nowadays. The concept of the "jagunço system", introduced by Guimarães Rosa, turns the novel into a form of research that overcomes the best sociological and historical portraits of Brazil. The fact that the narrator is himself a jagunço, a "literate jagunço", not only offers an inside view of the world of crime, but also exposes the mechanism of the jagunço institution by picturing the rhetoric between the bosses and their subordinates.

African children in the British slave trade during the late eighteenth century

This article argues the African children were quite commonly made victims of the slave trade and were transported across the Atlantic to slave societies in the Americas in significant numbers. It sketches a historical portrait of the experiences of African children during both the process of enslavement in Africa and the middle passage. Its focus is on the key slave trading areas of the British slave trade between 1775 and 1807.

ARIADNE AND THE RIPPLED NOSE: PORTRAIT LIKENESSES IN MIDDLEMARCH

LOOKING BACK to an earlier moment in its own cultural history, no Victorian novel works harder than Middlemarch at the integration of art and life, in terms of both the issues it addresses and its method of composition. Central to this effort is the art-related sequence (chapters 19–21) in which Will Ladislaw encounters the newly married Casaubons on their honeymoon in Rome. In the Belvedere Gallery of the Vatican with a painter friend, Will discovers Dorothea standing lost in thought near a famous Hellenistic sculpture of a sleeping, bare-breasted woman. Struck by the congruity of poses in two such different figures, Will's friend Naumann is on fire to paint Dorothea, and a few days later, rather in spite of himself, Will brings the Casaubons to Naumann's studio. Here, in one of the most broadly comic scenes in the novel, the painter persuades Casaubon to pose as Thomas Aquinas for a historical portrait, slyly securing his sketch of Dorothea during breaks in the sitting. Throughout the sequence, Will engages in aesthetic discourse first with Naumann, then with Dorothea, introducing her to the hugeness of art and, incidentally, to the smallness of her husband.

South Asians in East Africa (1880-1920) with a Particular Focus on Zanzibar: Toward a Historical Explanation of Economic Success of a Middlemen Minority

Abstract The main object of this article is to falsify the common historical portrait of South Asians in Zanzibar and East Africa. Most studies, a-priori, assume the outstanding business success of the Asian minority in East Africa. In explaining this success, they emphasize common explanations and theories for their economic success, like hard work, having a superior business mind, using their ethnic resources for capital accumulation and knowledge of (international) markets. In this article I attempt to explain the success of South Asians in Zanzibar, East Africa, from a historical point of view. My main argument is that South Asians started with a far more favorable socio-economic position as compared to their African counterparts. They were more than Swahilis, accustomed with a money economy and the concept of interest. In addition, they knew how to read, write and produce account books. Finally, they had access to the rulers, and were able to negotiate profitable terms of trade. Nevertheless, many were not successful at all and went bankrupt. Therefore, the success of South Asians in East Africa may be explained as the outcome of a 'trial and error' process. The successful remained in East Africa, whereas others left. India remained a safety net for those who did not make out as well as a source for new recruitment of traders, shopkeepers and clerks.

Nature as a theme in Canadian literature

The relationships of people with the natural world are expressed in diverse ways, including painting, photographs, sculpture, song, video, and literature. In this document, we review historical and contemporary portrayals of nature as a theme in Canadian literature. Our assessment is intended to explore how Canadians have articulated their feelings about nature through literary expression, and to thereby gain insight into their empathy for natural ecosystems and native species, and their concern about damage caused to those values. We begin with a broad overview of nature as a theme in cultural expression, including overarching ones in Canadian literature, and discuss the influential literary views of Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood, and their critics. We then examine the expression of nature within seven focal areas: early aboriginal expression, narratives of explorers, stories of settlers, the genre of animal stories, 20th-century poetry, recent aboriginal literature, and environmental ideas in contemporary prose. We identify six dominant themes of the expression of nature in Canadian literature: (1) humans as a part of nature; (2) a bounty of natural resources; (3) fear of an adversarial wilderness; (4) improvement of nature; (5) regret of environmental damage and perhaps despair of the future; and (6) love and respect of species and natural landscapes. Finally, we discuss how nature as a theme embedded in Canadian literature can be harnessed to further the compelling objectives of environmental literacy by providing sympathetic insights into the relationships of people and society with the species and ecosystems with which they share Canada.Key words: nature, literature, culture, Canada, environmental literacy.

Clinical psychologists across the years: The division of clinical psychology from 1960 to 2003

For more than 40 years researchers have studied the members of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Division of Clinical Psychology to obtain information about their demographic characteristics, educational experiences, theoretical orientations, employment settings, professional activities, publication histories, and career satisfactions. We summarize the results from the most recent study (N=694, 46% return rate) in the historical context of the previous findings, dating back to 1960. We provide both contemporary and historical portraits of American clinical psychology. Among the most notable trends are a steady increase in female psychologists, a decline in psychological assessment in general and projective testing in particular, the modal eclectic/integrative orientation being rivaled by the cognitive orientation, a pattern of high career satisfaction, and continued enthusiasm for the Boulder model.

Organized Resistance and Black Educators’ Quest for School Equality, 1878–1938

Historical accounts of advocacy for equality in educational facilities and resources for Blacks during de jure segregation in the South have generally minimized, or ignored, the role of Black educators. This article challenges the omission of Black educators in the historical portrait by providing a historical analysis of four periods of teacher activism in Georgia prior to Brown. Results indicate that, through their organizational structure, Black educators consistently advocated for improved facilities, bus transportation, longer school terms, high schools, and better salaries. Although the success of their activities was mediated by the Southern political context of the era in which they advocated, the Black teachers’ organization was the most organized agent for change throughout this period.

Organized Resistance and Black Educators’ Quest for School Equality, 1878–1938

Historical accounts of advocacy for equality in educational facilities and resources for Blacks during de jure segregation in the South have generally minimized, or ignored, the role of Black educators. This article challenges the omission of Black educators in the historical portrait by providing a historical analysis of four periods of teacher activism in Georgia prior to Brown. Results indicate that, through their organizational structure, Black educators consistently advocated for improved facilities, bus transportation, longer school terms, high schools, and better salaries. Although the success of their activities was mediated by the Southern political context of the era in which they advocated, the Black teachers’ organization was the most organized agent for change throughout this period.

COVER ARTICLE: History and Lore of Sesame in Southwest Asia

Abstract The purpose of this work is to present a botanical, cultural and historical portrait of sesame use in Southwest Asia, from earliest time to the present. The crop's domestication and subsequent dispersal are reviewed from the archaeological literature and early texts. The introduction of sesame represents an agricultural innovation in Southwest Asia, since as a ‘tropical’ warm weather crop, sensitive to freezing temperatures, it is successfully grown in the region as a summer crop, by selecting cultivars that mature early. Its seeds are used as food and flavoring. The chief constituent of the seed is its prized oil, 45–60 % by weight that resists oxidative rancidity. It is used as a salad or cooking oil, an ingredient in cosmetics, in the manufacture of soaps, pharmaceuticals, and lubricants, and was formerly used as a lamp oil. The press cake remaining after the oil is expressed is a nutritious livestock meal. Information about medieval cultivation practices and evidence of its use in early centu...