Home Town Research Articles

Introduction to Lajos Leopold Jr.’s Simulated Capitalism

“Anima Sola” (lonely soul) – this inscription can be read on the remains of Lajos Leopold Jr’s (1879–1948) tombstone in Cservolgy (at Totvazsony), a hamlet to the north of the Lake Balaton. Laszlo E. Bartfai who had acquired undying merit in the rediscovery of Leopold’s work wrote the following about him in 1987: “In Hungary his figure has been almost totally forgotten, together with his early work in sociology. The loss of memory is surely related to the fact that Hungarian sociology has always been primarily a movement and a discipline only in the second place.” He was an autonomous personality, he was in need for intellectual independence and he was in a peculiar social position. This means, that he was as a Jew (although later converted to Christianity) a prestigious member of the community led by the local gentry and intelligentsia. No doubt, all this, coupled with his daily life experiences drawn from his small home town kept him away from the mainstream of the fin de siecle Hungarian sociology that was increasingly becoming a political movement. His growing distance from the radical social science periodical entitled Huszadik Szazad [Twentieth Century] was already obvious by 1910. Leopold was born on 5 December 1879, in a big tenant family. Up to the early 1920s he lived in his place of birth, Szekszard, a small town of Tolna County known for its fertile soil and red wine, located in the southern part of Transdanubia. He spent the last five years of that period already in two residences, partly at home, and partly in the Hungarian capital, Budapest. In Szekszard, for some time he was a member of the board of directors of the local Credit Bank, linked to his family by many threads; and he was also a major cultivator on rented land at the nearby Ozsakpuszta. Towards the end of his period he was becoming an increasingly active member of the Agricultural Association of Tolna County. This situation may have inspired him for his early work on agricultural sociology in the 1900s, and to be active in the field of agricultural economy after World War I. He could be considered a sort of agrarian during the inter-war period, not only because of the scenes of his activity (the periodicals Koztelek [Public Plots], Gazdasors [Farmer’s Destiny] in Hungarian, Ignac Daranyi Society of Agricultural Science), but perhaps also of his identity. It was a long way to go from his youth linked to Twentieth Century and flirting anarchism to end up among conservative agrarians. It may appear to be long, but counting in decades it may not be

Quick Fixes and Student Potential

I’m living through educational quick fixes in my home town of New York City at a rate that surpasses anything I’ve ever experienced. But that doesn’t mean that what happened before should be viewed as the good old times. Many of the Klein-­Bloomberg fixes (Joel Klein is the schools’ chancellor, Michael Bloomberg the mayor) are merely new versions of old ones, intensified to meet the intensified demand for quick solutions. What’s new is the possibility of giving up on public schooling for one ver-­ sion or another of privatization. None of us who are contributing to this issue of Profession are satisfied with what education in America has achieved, above all for those kids who start at the bottom. Given the fairly stagnant rate of social mobility in our nation, they are likely to remain at the bottom unless dramatic change takes place both in their schooling and in the economy. In a society where schooling credentials are increasingly a stand-­in for all forms of merit, staying at the bottom may lead them into greater poverty, while climbing slightly up the schooling ladder may not put them much further ahead. We can devise a system that is fairer and offer kids access to their power as citizens, which in turn might help them find ways to make America more equitable and fairer. But tackling this job will require us to reframe what the purpose of public education is, so that all kids may par-­

Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors' Notes

Nótaí na nEagarthóirí:Editors’ Notes James Silas Rogers Emigration was a fact of Irish life for most of the past two centuries, and yet, at the "micro" level of the family, it has frequently been consigned to a cul-de-sac of silence and willful forgetting. Christine Cusick opens this issue with a memoir that tells of a moment when that wall of silence was lowered as, following the death of her mother, Cusick took time from her graduate studies to travel with her father and other members of her family to Ireland. Although there was no agenda to visit her grandfather's home town of Tourmakeady, County Mayo, the family found themselves inexplicably drawn there—where together, they faced an old and unadmitted wound that could, at last, begin to heal. These personal stories, Cusick reflects, should not—and probably cannot—be kept out of our academic postures. Currently editing a volume on Irish ecocriticism, Dr.Cusick wrote on the poet Moya Cannon in New Hibernia Review in 2005. Remembered today chiefly as the editor of genius who recruited the unknown Brian O'Nolan to write the "Cruiskeen Lawn" columns for the Irish Times, R.M. Smyllie assumed the editorship of what is now considered Ireland's national newspaper in 1934. Dr. Caleb Richardson describes the extraordinary transformation that Smylle worked on the paper over the next two decades. The paper he inherited was a fusty relic of a decaying Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, well on its way to irrelevance in national life. With panache and good humor, with an eye for journalistic talent, with political courage that included a willingness to take on the sacred cows of the new Free State, and with heroic eccentricity, Smyllie succeeded in "making the Irish Times matter to modern Ireland." Richardson is currently revising his dissertation, "That is Only War: Irish Writers and the Second World War," for publication. [End Page 5] Born in Listowel, County Kerry, in 1973, over the past decade John McAuliffe's steady contributions to poetry journals in Ireland, Britain, and the United States have confirmed the promise of his 2000 "Poet of the Future" award from RTÉ. Formerly director of the Dun Laoghaire Poetry Festival, and now teaching at the University of Manchester, McAuliffe has published two collections with Gallery Press, A Better Life, (2002) and this year's Next Door. In the new poems presented here, we find McAuliffe probing, with perceptive wit, contemporary tensions between motion, dislocation, and place: spotting himself in the rearview mirror in "Road Safety," or recording a hard slog through traffic to a family picnic in "A Hundred Towns." Yet, in poems like "A Minute," an elusive stillness also beckons: "before I fumble, in two minds, for the mobile / and directions, I've a minute to consider / the roads Sunday-quiet. . . ." It has become a truism to observe that the pastoral landscapes of Ireland often belie its violent past, as shown, for example, by successive waves of agrarian rebellion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The origins of one of the most violent of these rebellions are the concern of James S. Donnelly, Jr., in his essay on the early followers of "Captain Rock," the mythical leader of the agrarian upheaval of 1821–24. Donnelly shows that the ruthless behavior of the land agent Alexander Hoskins prompted a whole series of violent incidents on the estates of Viscount Courtenay around Newcastle West in County Limerick. The resistance to Hoskins and his assistants came not only from the many subtenants on Courtenay's estates but even, quite remarkably, from the Protestant middlemen whose interests Hoskins assailed. These events set off a much wider explosion of violence propelled by an incendiary combination of millennial predictions of Protestant doom, intense sectarian hostility, and a severe agricultural depression spanning the years 1819–23. Dr. Donnelly's numerous publications include such important works as The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork: The Rural Economy and the Land Question (1975); The Great Irish Potato Famine (2001); and the magisterial Encyclopedia of Irish History and Culture (2004), for which he served as editor-in-chief. Few American publications played the role of cultural...

Where Have All the Mill Towns Gone?

Yes, I wrote on this quite a few years ago, but I'm on the Chesapeake Bay fishing and running our crab pots near my home town. This was a proverbial mill town, so I am reminded of what we are missi...

EUFAMI congress

AbstractDelegates at a meeting in the home town of astronomer and mathematician, Nicolaus Copernicus, heard about the importance of family and the wider community to the recovery of people with severe mental illness.Tony Gillam, a mental health nurse specialist, reports on sessions he attended at ‘Touching the star’s the 4th EUFAMI congress, held in September in Torun, Poland. Copyright © 2007 Wiley Interface Ltd

Committing regicide: rebranding the Football Kingz

Abstract The New Zealand Knights Football Club was born out of the rebranding of the Football Kingz. Drawing on the concept of brand equity, this paper examines the management's attempts to manipulate the antecedents of brand equity. The paper draws attention to the difficulties of building brand equity after a rebranding exercise and highlights important implications for sports brand managers and for the way brand equity is conceptualised. (Submitted July 2006) Keywords Knights Football Club rebranding brand equity NSL Executive summary In 1999 the Football Kingz became New Zealand's first professional football club to compete in the Australian National Soccer League (NSL). Over the next five seasons the Kingz struggled to become a competitively and financially viable club. In February 2004 the club was sold to businessman Brian Katzen, whose intention was to enter the club in the re-launched Australian A-League. Upon the club's successful entry, the decision was made to enter an entity completely dissociated from the Football Kingz. In August 2005, after a complete rebranding process, the New Zealand Knights Football Club was poised to compete against the A-League's other seven clubs. Drawing on the concept of brand equity (Aaker, 1991) and the framework developed by Gladden et al (1998) and Gladden & Milne (1999), this paper examines the challenges of building brand equity following a revolutionary rebranding process. Specifically, the paper considers the management's attempts to manipulate the antecedents of brand equity identified by Gladden et al (1998) and Gladden & Milne (1999) as influencing the components of brand equity. The paper highlights the implications for sports brand managers and the way that brand equity is conceptualised in a sports-specific setting. Despite their best efforts, the club's management struggled to build brand equity and change the perception of the club among the sporting public. By the end of its inaugural season, the club had won only one game, spectator numbers were down dramatically and financial difficulties had resurfaced. Management were unable to capitalise on the antecedents of brand equity and in particular to capitalise on the antecedents of 'logo design' and 'star player'. The name and logo of the club have a tenuous connection to the club's home town, while the club's roster is dominated by low-profile foreign players. This meant that the club was unable to counteract negative influences flowing from the antecedents of 'tradition', 'media coverage' and 'success'. Consequently, with New Zealand players in the minority, no star player and a string of poor results, in the face of falling attendances the club struggled to provide an effective narrative to convince the public they should support 'their' team. For sports brand managers, the Knights' case has several implications. First, it highlights the difficulty of burying a brand. Although not helped by the club's playing record, arguably the problem was compounded by the degree of association between 'Knights' and 'Kings'. Second, the case emphasises the need for a club brand to have a strong narrative that connects the team to the community and to potential supporters. The case also indicates that brand managers must understand the factors that shape attachments to sports teams amongst their target market. Finally, from a research perspective, this case reinforces the usefulness of the brand equity framework and calls for further work along these lines. Introduction When do Kings become Knights? After a royal procession to the dungeons of the professional football game in this region, that's when. (Brown, 2005b) In 1999 a New Zealand-based professional soccer club made its first entry into the Australian NSL. Led by Wynton Rufer (whose goal had helped his Werder Bremen side win the 1992 European Cup Winner's Cup) and a roster of international players, the Football Kingz were to compete against the best club sides in Australia. …

Homemaking and Mature Age Gay Men ‘Down-Under’: Paradox, intimacy, subjectivities, spatialities, and scale

The article investigates homemaking processes of mature age gay men living in a provincial Australian town. All too often the experience of older gay men living in non-metropolitan centres has slipped the attention of scholars. The article draws on interview data collected in Townsville (Queensland, Australia) from ten men over 40 years of age who self-identified as gay. These men were asked to explain why they live in Townsville, their understanding of home, and if they understand Townsville as home. We investigate the spatialised understandings of home articulated by these gay men, focusing on two mutually constituted geographical scales: Townsville-as-home and house-as-home, including the material objects within domestic space. For older gay men to call a provincial town home is an ongoing, complex process of reconciling multiple and contradictory subjectivities across different geographical scales. How older gay men constitute Townsville-as-home provides important insights about both non-heterosexual life in provincial centres and how to conceptualise home—as a paradoxical space, contested site, and as multiscalar.

Teaching Hebrew to Palestinian Pupils in Israel

Hebrew as a second language is not only taught to Israeli Palestinians, but also to adult immigrants and their young children. However, in the case of immigrants the purpose is to replace their immigrant language with Hebrew, while among Israeli Palestinians it is acknowledged as additive. Hebrew is a compulsory language for Israeli Palestinian pupils. It is the dominant language in all domains of life in Israel, making it extremely difficult for Israeli Palestinians to function without sufficient competence in Hebrew outside their home towns and villages. However, the school curricula has not always considered the special needs of this population, and the contents and topics of Hebrew teaching instead emphasised culture and literature. This paper examines three major aspects related to Hebrew language teaching in Israeli Palestinian elementary schools: attitudes towards teaching Hebrew to Palestinians; Hebrew teaching goals and curricula; and the textbooks and their contents. Hebrew teaching in elementary schools is examined against the tensions produced by the challenges of the Palestinian minority in an ideologically Jewish state and of speakers of Arabic under a Hebrew hegemony.

A Display Case for Everyday Wonders

Gunvor Nelson: most Swedes probably don't know the name. Even within Swedish film circles there has been a troubling lack of knowledge about Gunvor Grundel Nelson's importance to the medium. The University of Karlstad's 2002 hosting of an international conference and retrospective of Nelson's roughly twenty films and videos thus offered a welcome chance to introduce anew someone who is a leader within the international avantgarde. Nelson's work is deeply rooted in her homeland (and not least in her home town, Kristinehamn)-witness trace elements in many of the films she made even during the years she worked in California. The (characteristically bilingual) catalogue, Still Moving-I ljud och bild (Still Moving-In Sound and Image), published by Karlstad University in conjunction with the conference, with John Sundholm as editor, presents Gunvor Nelson's work from several points of view. It's clear how much in her life, as in her work, was unplanned, beginning with her study of art in the U.S. that led to her marriage to a San Francisco artist. Her work in film began almost accidentally as well: together with her friend and neighbor Dorothy Wiley (also married to an artist), Gunvor collaborated on the prize-winning Schmeerguntz (1963) (the title comes from her father's nonsense language: it's a homemade, German-sounding word for sandwich). Some argue that this film is an example of early feminist filmmaking; Nelson herself maintains that the film had no origin in feminist consciousness. For her it simply shows-sometimes straightforwardly, sometimes almost grotesquely-the physical experiences of women: we see pregnancy, morning sickness, the schmutz wiped from a baby's bottom, a discarded sanitary napkin, all cut together with advertising images of models and beauty contest contestants. At the time, San Francisco cinematheque curator Steve Anker wrote that Schmeerguntz created a rapidfire attack on the most cherished of all American icons: motherhood and the home.2 Nelson and Wiley's next collaboration resulted in Fog Pumas (1967). This film was also, in many ways, an attack on established conventions of film narrative, through characteristically surrealist images that undercut logical narrative connections while the film simultaneously conveyed a healthy, quotidian sense of comedy. The images joined together, tentatively, loosely, dreamily, absurdly. . . . Nelson begins to explore her own method of film expression in her next films (though she would also return to collaboration with Wiley). At first the results were uneven, as Nelson herself admits: . . . as I jumped into different projects I had to find what that particular film needed.3 Some viewers may have found her constant searching for new means of visual and auditory expression schizophrenic or a bit unstable.4 But the fact is that, over the years, this casting about has resulted in an impressive plainness and clarity of expression able both to cultivate repeating traits and to find new, unexpected, forms. Name Is Oona (1969) is one of the most memorable of her early films. Here Nelson's own daughter and a horse play leading roles. The sound track lingers in the mind, combined with the image track's dreamlike mystery: the insistent, rhythmic repeating of the title sentence, My name is Oona, Oona, Oona. Sound plays a key role in Nelson's later work as well, often in the form of peeled-off, dissonant resonances-vocal, instrumental, or everyday sounds-that either work together with the images or simply overpower them. With Nelson's films there is no clear hierarchy of expressive registers. The ten-minute film Take Off (1972) became a success: an obviously mature stripper is seen, first going through her anticipated routine, then stripping off her own body. One body part after another disappears as if in a Melies trick, calling silent film to mind. Take Off became the biggest success since Nelson's debut: clearly here, as in Schmeerguntz, she had brushed up against several touchy subjects and accurately sketched a portrait of the comparatively exposed position women occupy in commercial visual contexts. …

Tokens or Totems? Eccentric Props in Postcolonial Re-enactments of Colonial Consecration

During colonial expansion the ceremonial insertion of archetypes of European civilisation into terra nullius served two opposing ends: to make visible territorial claims and to conceal the illegitimacy of these claims. While aware of this ambivalence, modern texts re-enacting colonial spectacles of territorial consecration are not always wholly critical of European cultivating zeal but may also trace a genuinely idealistic impulse in it. The films Fitzcarraldo and The Piano and the novels Oscar and Lucinda and Remembering Babylon are cases in point. They rewrite colonial history by telling intricately ironical stories of failure and ascribing special sacredness to the settings as well as to the mementos of the defeats they recount. CRUCIFIXES ON mountaintops are a common topographic feature of Alpine Europe. They were first erected in the fifteenth century either to mark crossroads and borders of pasture land or to avert natural catastrophes believed to be brought on by evil forces. During the plague epidemics between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, when fear of contamination caused people to shun larger congregations in the valleys, believers would gather around crucifixes in the mountains for mass, a practice which has been retained ever since. After World War II, the function of summit crosses changed again when the presence of the Allied Forces in Bavaria, the Tyrol and Northern Italy prevented homecoming soldiers from openly mourning their fallen comrades within the precincts of their home towns. Instead they took to the mountains, carrying with them crosses which they would erect on ever more inaccessible points as expressions not only of their faith but also of their patriotism. 1 Nowadays the history of mountaintop crucifixes is largely unknown to the general public; their ubiquity is readily taken for granted. The whole matter of mounting them, while once seen as a heroic personal feat, has become an entirely anonymous affair, a matter mainly of aeronautic exactitude. Mostly the crosses, no longer carved from wood but made from stainless steel,

Die Allgemeine Wehrpflicht in Russland: Zwischen militärischem Anspruch und zivilen Interessen

Universal Conscription in Tsarist Russia: Between Military Demands and Civil Interests Universal conscription was introduced in Russia in 1874 and completed the »Great Reforms» which had been started in 1861. After controversial debates war minister Dmitrij Alekseevič Miljutin wanted conscription to have as little effects as possible on civil life in the world's largest country, in order to prevent social unrest. A system of exemptions was applied to recruits considered to be indispensable in civil life. Any education obtained before mustering automatically reduced the duration of military service. In general, the conscription law made no exemptions for recruits of non-Russian or non-Orthodox origin. The principle of moving soldiers far away from their home towns and the ratio of 75% Russians and 25% non-Russians in the composition of military units were intended to respond to the army's multiethnic character. However, Jewish recruits suffered from systematic discrimination. Although Russia's imperial status was primarily based on its military power, universal conscription never included more than 30% of the annual number of potential recruits. Despite Miljutin's reform attempts, the fatal belief in the power of the seemingly inexhaustible human resources overshadowed all necessary reforms until the end of the Tsarist regime.

The Ultimate Destination of All Nursing: The Development of District Nursing in England, 1880–1925

Florence Nightingale is chiefly remembered for reform of hospital nursing in late nineteenth century, but scant attention has been paid to her involvement in establishment and development of district nursing throughout England. Nightingale believed that future of nursing lay in district nursing, with its dual aims of curative care and preventive education, yet historians of British nursing tend to concentrate on general nursing in hospital setting because that is where training occurred.1 District nursing, if it is mentioned at all in such studies, is seen as only a footnote to broader context of social history and philanthropy. The only official histories of district nursing were written by Mary Stocks and Monica Baly in 1960 and 1987, respectively,2and these two slim volumes remain main sources on Queen Victoria's Jubilee Institute for Nurses (QVJl), central body that standardized training and unified existing philanthropic schemes through its system of affiliation and inspection. Baly uses Stocks as her main secondary source, and although both books are factual and informative, their scope is limited by fact that they were commissioned to celebrate milestones in history of district nursing. They are, therefore, designed to be congratulatory and to emphasize positive progress over years. They concentrate on leading figures of movement, not on nurses themselves, and on details of politics and administration, not on day-to-day duties and problems involved in nursing sick poor in their own homes. It is aim of this article to help redress this imbalance in historiography of nursing. By examining Nightingale's views and aims, I argue that organizational structure of QVJI came closest of all branches of profession to her vision of future of nursing. The extent to which her theories were achieved in practice will be considered through analysis of Queen's Roll, which records personal and career details of each Queen's nurse. In particular, I will show how difficulties experienced in recruiting nurses for rural districts led to introduction of a second grade of district nurse, Village Nurse-Midwives. By analyzing records of District Nursing Associations in Gloucestershire, where rural branch of QVJI was founded, I discuss why QVJI failed to attract class of recruits Nightingale envisaged and how, nevertheless, it became central to national health and welfare policies. The Metropolitan Nursing Association By 1880s, Nightingale reforms had clearly had an effect on hospital nursing in England, despite entrenched views and professional jealousy of some doctors. The infirmary wards of workhouses had also been reformed and improved, and in rural areas almost 300 cottage hospitals had been established, which provided respite care for four to ten patients with a trained resident nurse and regular visits by a general practitioner. However, Nightingale herself believed that the ultimate destination of all nursing is nursing of sick in their own homes.3 As early as 1866, she had resolved to give herself to District Nursing.4 At that time, Nightingale was offering advice and support to William Rathbone, a philanthropic merchant who was establishing a scheme of district nursing in his home town of Liverpool. At Nightingale's suggestion, in 1862, Liverpool Training School and Home for Nurses was opened in connection with Liverpool Royal Infirmary. Thus, precedent was set that district nurses should be hospital trained, preferably under Nightingale reformed system, as well as being specially trained in district work. By 1867, city of Liverpool had been divided into eighteen districts, each with its own nurses. In 1868, Rathbone was elected a Liberal MP and consequently spent part of each year in London. The personal contact this enabled him to make with Nightingale led to a lifelong friendship and mutual admiration. …

Schools, Poverty, and the Achievement Gap

LAST June, representatives from more than 20 countries and several international agencies came together under the midnight sun in Trondheim, Norway, to discuss the challenge of creating greater in the outcomes of This meeting, sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Norwegian Ministry of Education, was the culmination of several years of work on the theme of equity in education. The OECD will shortly issue a report titled No More Failres, replete with analysis and recommendations on how to improve in educational outcomes. The concern for raising the bar and closing the in educational outcomes is now widespread around the world. Kappan readers will be familiar with the debate on the achievement gap, especially in the context of No Child Left Behind. In Europe, the results of (Programme for International Student Assessment--www.pisa.oecd.org) brought the issue into stark relief as well. PISA, a large, carefully designed study now involving more than 40 countries, tests 15-year-olds in reading, science, and mathematics. There have been two rounds of results so far, in 2000 and 2003, with a third due to be released this December. The findings of have been striking and consistent. Some countries that thought they were doing well educationally found that they had not only poor overall results but also very large gaps between their highest- and lowest-achieving students. In Germany, the phrase PISA Schock has come into the language as a sign of how serious the problem is. In contrast, some other countries, such as Finland, Korea, and--yes--Canada, showed very high overall results and much smaller gaps in their achievement distribution. The reality, in and in every other assessment of student outcomes, is that socioeconomic status remains the most powerful single influence on students' educational and other life outcomes. This is true in Finland and Canada as well as in the U.S. and everywhere else. Where you are born and grow up matters enormously to what you are able to be and do. A recent study in my home town of Winnipeg, using a database of all children born in the city in 1984, showed that, whereas 89% of all students writing the grade-12 language exam passed, only 12% of students whose families had received social assistance in the previous two years passed the exam.1 Indeed, a large proportion of this group was either a year or more behind or out of school entirely. Although the achievement gap in Canada is smaller than in the United States, it is far from trivial. UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre recently released a report with the fascinating title of Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries (www.unicef-irc.org/publications). Using a rich array of data, it compares the situation of children in Canada, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and 18 other European countries on six dimensions, including material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviors and risks, and young people's subjective sense of well-being. No country ranks high on all six dimensions. The Netherlands gets the best overall score. Canada's average ranking across the six areas is 12th, while the U.S. and the U.K. are at the bottom. And the kicker is that the report concludes: Variation in government policy appears to account for most of the variation in child poverty levels between OECD countries. No OECD country devoting 10% or more of GDP to social transfers has a child poverty rate higher than 10%. No country devoting less than 5% of GDP to social transfers has a child poverty rate of less than 15%. (2) About 15% of Canadian children live in poverty, defined as living in a household with income less than 50% of the national median. What makes the Canadian situation galling is that in 1989 the Parliament of Canada passed a unanimous motion to end child poverty in the country by the year 2000. …

This Side of the Mountain

THIS SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN George Brosi In June, my wife, Connie, and I traveled to California for Commencement at Stanford University. It was a thrill to attend both the main ceremonies at Stanford Stadium and the Biological Sciences program on campus. There, Paul Ehrlich, the only professor who didn't wear a cap and gown, "hooded" our son, Berry, recognizing him as a PhD. Then Ehrlich made a quick exit back to his office. At the stadium, the Commencement Address was delivered by Dana Gioia, since 2003 the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose last poetry book, Interrogations at Noon, won the National Book Award. Gioia, who was Berry's professor for a poetry class when he was an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, delivered a memorable address. His main point was that our society has given a diminishing prominence to the arts in recent decades. One of the strong points of his remarks was that he placed the blame on all segments ofsociety, including his own. What can be done? Like Dana Gioia, I believe we all bear a significant responsibility. How proud I am that Berea College is one of the few undergraduate institutions in America to sponsor a literarary quarterly and that the Director of the Appalachian Center here, Chad Berry, has made it possible forAppahchian Heritage to bring a featured author to the campus four times a year, so that the power of our magazine is made more personal and brought closer to home for the Berea community. One of the best recent examples of individual effort to highlight the arts was the work that Neva Hamilton and others in the St. Paul, Virginia, area did to include a literary reading in the schedule for the Clinch River Days in their home town early this June. We all need to support political leaders who support the arts, and all of us need to be alert to opportunities not only to attend, but to fund and even to create literary events that enliven and elevate our culture. ...

Homeward Bound or Housebound?

Homeward Bound or Housebound?

Gilles Caillotin, Pèlerin: Le Retour de Rome d'un Sergier Rémois, 1724 (review)

Reviewed by: Gilles Caillotin, Pèlerin: Le Retour de Rome d'un Sergier Rémois, 1724 Francis W. Nichols Gilles Caillotin, Pèlerin: Le Retour de Rome d'un Sergier Rémois, 1724. Edited and presented by Dominique Julia. [Collection de l'École Française de Rome, no. 356.] (Rome: École Française de Rome. 2006. Pp. iv, 395. €48.00 paperback) Gilles Caillotin, a master artisan of serge wool cloth, left his home town, Reims, on foot, June 17, 1724, as a pilgrim, first to the tomb of Charles Borromeo in Milan, then to the Holy House of Loreto near Ancona on the Adriatic, finally by way of Assisi to Rome. After spending seventeen days in Rome fulfilling pilgrim devotions, he returned to Reims, taking notes as he traveled. Eventually, about 1732, he composed an account of this pilgrimage, to which he added several other regional pious journeys, apparently working from notes he himself had taken, but also augmented with passages copied from other travelers' guides. His account of the Reims-to-Rome trip and his stay there has been lost, but the return has survived. This return trip is here elegantly edited by Dominique Julia, and lavishly furnished with an introduction, copious footnotes providing detailed explanations of places, persons, and events mentioned in the text, and an extensive Postface, where she discusses eighteenth-century pilgrim society, the characteristics of the text itself, and other details of Caillotin's experiences of journey, hospitality, and fellow travelers, as well as a sketch of his person and character. For a modern reader it seems a formidable trip: more than 1000 miles on foot, averaging seventeen miles a day going and twenty returning (included crossing the Alps). He had his hat and cape, his bag of essentials, and his staff, but little else. We learn where he stopped each day (a nice map of the itinerary is included)—usually staying in pilgrim hospices, but sometimes in the open air—and we hear about other pilgrims from all over Europe, as well as about a few shady characters that he met along the way. With difficulty, he recovered his papally blessed rosary, with holy medals attached, that had been stolen by one pseudo-pilgrim. We hear about other travelers (he was almost never alone): AWOL soldiers, professional pilgrims (one making his seventh trip to Rome to fulfill other people's vows), pilgrims already at Compostela, a [End Page 659] drunk priest, a Protestant minister supposedly on his way to Rome to adjure his heresy. Julia tells us, based on pilgrim hospice records, that eighteenth-century pilgrims were mostly young men, though both younger and older men and even women (usually with families) were also on the road. Caillotin was then a typical pilgrim: twenty-seven years old, single, coming from a lower middle-class family of cloth artisans, pious, and, we would have to conclude, tough, though perhaps afflicted with scrofula. His passport (included with twenty-three other illustrations inserted into this journal) along with other Reims archival documents reveal that he was baptized December 1, 1697, was about five-feet-six-inches tall, never married, and died at forty-nine, July 11, 1746. Caillotin was close to Jesuits in Reims, perhaps educated by them, and was a member of a Jesuit Marian congregation of sergiers, which probably facilitated his finding lodging. He was a fervent Counter-Reformation Catholic, disdainful of superstitious practices but enthusiastic about relics, indulgences, and other forms of Catholic piety. He also shows himself a fierce anti-Jansenist and a stout supporter of the pope. Since he stayed in Rome with a Christian Brother (one of the first followers of St. John Baptist de La Salle), he may also have attended their school in Reims. Here is an admirable fragment of eighteenth-century European culture and religion viewed from below, thus complementing more elite accounts from above. Francis W. Nichols Saint Louis University Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press

La música en el barrio como elemento de afirmación identitaria (El ejemplo de Vallecas)

A number of cultural and sociological features give the neighborhood of Vallecas a strong identity and personality. From a cultural perspective, two musical genres, flamenco and rock-and-roll, greatly contributed to this idiosyncrasy ever since immigrants from other parts of Spain started to settle in large numbers in the district in the early 1900s. Coming most of them from Andalusia, the first waves of immigrants brought with them flamenco, which they developed and spread, thereby helping them cope with their sense of having been uprooted from their home towns and villages because of their migration. By contrast, the children of these immigrants, born in Vallecas, rejected this music that their parents would play and listened to, embracing rock-and-roll instead. For them, rock-and-roll became a new basis on which to assert the identity of their own generation as well as a means for socially expressing themselves and participating in the larger society.

Flora Nwapa and Oguta’s Lake Goddess

The home of Nigeria's renowned Marxist anthropologist, Ikenna Nzimiro, and of the country's ``first lady of letters,'' Flora Nwapa, is Oguta, a sprawling commercial centre situated on Oguta Lake near the confluence of the rivers Niger and Urashi. Both authors have described their home town in their own diverging perspectives. While Nzimiro's account focused on the town's political organization and questions of state formation and authority, Flora Nwapa was a novelist concerned primarily with women's issues. She engaged her home town's custom and religious beliefs centring on the pre-eminent lake goddess, Ogbuide, in her quest to champion womanhood. This paper examines how the novelist took certain artistic liberties and critically deconstructed local custom in her cause to promote women. While Nwapa's primary concern was women's reproductive rights and welfare, she also cherished Oguta culture, voiced her critique with caution, and was increasingly critical of foreign intrusions.

Terence James Gallivan

After wartime service in the Royal Navy as leading sick berth attendant, Terry Gallivan qualified from Cardiff University in 1953 and was a house officer at the Royal Gwent Hospital...

Regional patterns in the experiences and treatment of the sick poor, 1800–40: rights, obligations and duties in the rhetoric of paupers

This article focuses on three individual paupers who wrote a series of letters about sickness to their home towns in Essex, Northamptonshire and Lancashire. While it would be wrong to claim that the rhetoric and strategies employed by the three writers are representative of all pauper writers, they are representative of those who wrote multiple letters to their parish of settlement and a detailed exposition of their writing can tell us much about sickness and its relief by communities in the last decades of the Old Poor Law. While sick paupers have largely escaped historiographical attention in a literature that has tended to focus on the elderly, widows, children and the unemployed able-bodied man, more detailed study of the life- and dependency-cycles of poor people is beginning to show that sickness was the pivotal experience of people on the margins and that sickness relief swallowed up a very sizeable chunk of poor law resources in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The strategies, thoughts and experiences of the sick poor are thus not just important in their own right, but also for what they tell us about the sentiment of communities towards the poor and the experiences of paupers in those communities.