Letter Home Research Articles

The Learning and Transfer of Prosocial Behavior in Adventure Education: Effects of a Treatment Curriculum

The issue of learning transfer is of prime importance to adventure education programs (Gass, 1999). These programs are designed to promote a variety of personal development outcomes for participants, and a substantial amount of research has validated these outcomes (e.g., Hattie, Marsh, Neill, & Richards, 1997). However, in order for students to use the learning gained during their course, they must transfer the learning from a backcountry setting to their life post-course. Broadly speaking, learning transfer describes how learning achieved in one context can be applied in another context (Santrock, 2001). Literature suggests that three main influences of transfer are characteristics of (a) the student, (b) the training program, and (c) the transfer environment (Baldwin & Ford, 1988). Within each of these influences, there exist a number of specific mechanisms that may affect transfer. Key mechanisms include reflection activities, framing discourse in transfer-positive ways, goal setting, and using an action-plan to set goals for application (Burke & Hutchins, 2007; Cyboran, 2005; Gass, 1999; Foxon, 1994). Expedition behavior (EB) is a learning outcome used in many adventure programs such as the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). EB has been defined as a concern for others, coupled with the willingness to demonstrate this concern (Petzoldt, 1984). This construction of expedition behavior bears a strong resemblance to the construct of prosocial behavior (PSB). Prosocial behaviors are described as behaviors that are primarily aimed at benefiting others (Eisenberg & Fabes,1998; Staub, 1978). These behaviors can be described as sharing, comforting others, donating goods, and helping (Carlo et al., 2007). This purpose of this study is to measure the effects of a treatment curriculum on the learning transfer of prosocial skills following a twoweek long program with NOLS. The treatment curriculum incorporates a number of interventions that are designed to increase transfer, including: (a) a pre-course goal setting worksheet; (b) an intentionally framed positive learning environment discussion; (c) a case-study analysis; (d) creation of an action plan; (e) a journaling exercise; and (f) a letter home to parents. These interventions may be able to foster transfer of learning.

Book Reviews

Sergio Catignani, Israeli Counter-Insurgency and the Intifadas Review by Avi Kober Majid Al-Haj and Rosemarie Mielke, eds., Cultural Diversity and the Empowerment of Minorities: Perspectives from Israel & Germany Review by Nicole Dehan Jonathan B. Isacoff, Writing the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Pragmatism and Historical Inquiry Review by Motti Golani Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, From Empathy to Denial, Arab Responses to the Holocaust Review by Shlomo Aronson Kobi Michael, Between Militarism and Statesmanship in Israel: Military Influence on the Transition Process from War to Peace Review by Eyal Ben-Ari Rory Miller, ed., Ireland and the Middle East: Trade, Society and Peace Review by Jeffrey K. Sosland Benny Morris, ed., Making Israel Review by Neil Caplan Roby Nathanson and Stephen Stetter, eds., The Middle East under Fire? EU-Israel Relations in a Region Between War and Conflict Resolution Review by Tamir Libel Benjamin Orbach, Live from Jordan: Letters Home from My Journey through the Middle East Review by Chaim Noy Dina Porat, Israeli Society, the Holocaust and Its Survivors Roni Stauber, The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s Reviews by Esther Jilovsky Zohar Segev, From Ethnic Politicians to National Leaders—American Zionist Leadership, the Holocaust and the Establishment of Israel Review by Ariel Feldestein Sandy Sufian and Mark LeVine, eds., Reapproaching Borders: New Perspectives on the Study of Israel-Palestine Review by Itamar Radai Shifra Shvarts, Health and Zionism: Th e Israeli Health Care System, 1948–1960 Review by Judith T. Shuval

Letters Home: Banaras pandits and the Maratha regions in early modern India

AbstractMaratha Brahman families migrated to Banaras in increasing numbers from the early sixteenth century. They dominated the intellectual life of the city and established an important presence at the Mughal and other north Indian courts. They retained close links with Brahmans back in the Maratha regions, where pressures of social change and competition for rural resources led to acrimonious disputes concerning ritual entitlement and precedence in the rural social order. Parties on either side appealed to Banaras for resolution of the disputes, raising serious questions about the nature of Brahman community and identity. Banaras pandit communities struggled to contain these disputes, even as the symbols of their own authority came under attack from the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. By the early eighteenth century, the emergence of the Maratha state created new models of Brahman authority and community, and new patterns for the resolution of such disputes.

"A Choice of Nightmares": The Ecology of Heart of Darkness

"A Choice of Nightmares":The Ecology of Heart of Darkness Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy (bio) Nature is at the heart of Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad's 1899 novel dramatizes modernity's destructive alienation from the natural world against the backdrop of the Congo's ecological collapse. More intimately, Heart of Darkness uses the competing constructions of nature in turn of the century Britain to haunt readers with a new vision of themselves. In 1899, British readers encountered nature in two primary roles: the passive object of imperial commerce and evolution's meritocracy of fitness. This essay will show these distinct attitudes shaping the novel, and then reveal a third role beyond them both, through which the novel destabilizes the framework of Victorian self-fashioning. Specifically, Conrad's novel offers a vision of landscape that challenges the colonizing subject's confidence, and, simultaneously, forecasts the brewing storm of ecological catastrophe. My reading parses the tangled relation between modern Europe's unfolding knowledge of nature and its changing knowledge of itself. In this sense Heart of Darkness is about the cultural boundaries that separate person from place, and more significantly about repositioning human beings within a new understanding of nature. [End Page 620] Ivory Heart of Darkness shows us a link between the moral and ecological limits of imperialism. A defining background issue for any reading of Heart of Darkness is that the Congo's ecosystem—the object of all this blasting and toting—had become an ecological disaster. Marlow's economic setting is focused on ivory, and just as the land has become "a vast artificial hole" under this European regime (16), the Congo basin's ecology has been disrupted by the compounded exploitation. Ivory is the resource in question for this novel. From 1875 to 1905, Europeans extracted 70,000 tons of ivory from the Congo every year. It decorated Victorian life from the billiard balls and walking sticks at the club, to the piano keys and chess pieces in the parlor, to the combs and crucifixes in the bedroom. And if ivory was everywhere at home, it's on everyone's lips in Marlow's Congo: "The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it" (23). But the elephant in the room, for all the novel's talk of ivory, is the distinct lack of elephants. There are shipments of ivory and commissions to be made, piles of ivory and dreams of ivory generated riches, but not a single elephant. Indeed, though Conrad mentions elephants in a letter home from the Congo, in the novel the word appears to have been hunted to extinction. Thus Conrad declares an absence. The work obsessively repeats one element to foreground the lack of its complement. The reader knows there is no ivory without elephants, but is led to imagine a landscape chosen for its bounty and at the same time lacking its originary force. When Marlow reaches the Inner Station, there is so much ivory that he wonders if the whole country has been emptied: "Ivory! . . . Heaps of it, stacks of it. . . . You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country" (48). So Marlow describes an economy whose fructifying power is extinct, and thereby renders an environment tipping toward collapse. In the actual Congo where Conrad worked for eight months in 1890, the ivory trade was already beginning to expire.1 Traders turned to digging for fossil ivory, and the ambitious were forced ever deeper into wild areas to find elephants. It seems one of English literature's grandest characters, Mr Kurtz, makes his fateful voyage to the Inner Station and all that rich country thanks to an ecological catastrophe occasioned by a culture of exploitation. Ivory is the text's most important and most contradictory symbol; it is the novel's objective-correlative of a western logic that shapes all relations between the human and nonhuman world into relations of profit.2 Moreover, ivory demonstrates the epistemology of separation that interprets human beings (and especially white ones) [End Page 621] as separate from the world around them. But there is...

A randomised control trial of the effectiveness of personalised letters sent subsequent to school dental inspections in increasing registration in unregistered children.

BackgroundRecent studies have cast doubt on the effectiveness and efficiency of school based dental screening programmes in improving dental attendance or improving dental health. In 2002 the National Dental Inspection Programme was introduced in Scotland which categorises children by their dental health and informs parents of the findings via a personalised letter home and encourages dental registration. In addition, epidemiological data for local and national planning purposes is collected. This replaced an earlier school screening system in Lothian where a generic letter urging registration was sent to children who were identified as not being registered with a dentist. The objective of this study is to compare dental registrations rates among unregistered children in these two school inspection systems with a system where letters were sent home but no dental inspection was carried out.MethodsThe study was designed as a single blinded, cluster randomised, controlled trial involving 12,765 12–13-year-old children attending all 65 state Secondary schools in Lothian and Fife during the academic year 2003/4.After stratifying for school size and range of social deprivation, schools were randomly allocated to one of four groups:1. 'Traditional' inspection, letter to unregistered children only,2. Letter sent home to unregistered children only, no inspection,3. National Dental Inspection Programme, letter to all children,4. Control group in which the children were neither inspected nor sent a letter.Dental Registration status was compared at baseline and 3 months post inspection.ResultsThe registration levels in both the 'Traditional' screening and the NDIP inspection groups rose 3 months post inspection (14% and 15.8% respectively) but were not significantly different from one another or the control group which rose by 15.8% (p > 0.05). The group who were sent a letter home but were not inspected also has a rise in registration levels of 18.1% which was not significantly different from either of the groups who were inspected or the control group (p > 0.05). The only significant predictors of registration were previous registration (p < 0.05) and within those who previously registered, the length of time since last registration (P < 0.001).ConclusionNeither of the two dental inspection methods nor a letter home to unregistered children resulted in a significant rise in registration rates in 12–13-year-olds compared to a control group of children who received no intervention.

Writing Back: Letters Home, ‘European Impressions’ and Discourse Subversion in Emily Ruete and Zeyneb Hanoum

Writing Back: Letters Home, ‘European Impressions’ and Discourse Subversion in Emily Ruete and Zeyneb Hanoum

“Dissatisfied, Family-Hating Shrews”: Women Readers and Sylvia Plath's Literary Reception

In his 1976 review of Sylvia Plath's Letters Home for the London Observer, literary critic A. Alvarez begins his assessment of the work in question by observing Plath's recent appointment as, in hi...

Letters Home: Themes and Messages in Soldier Songs of the Second Iraq War

Country music has a long tradition of war-related songs dating back at least to the Civil War and is present today in the context of the current war in Iraq. Amid the many jingoistic songs in this category is a subgenre referred to in this study as “soldier songs.” Since WWII, soldier songs have retained an important place in country music during subsequent periods of war because of their personal reflections on the tragedies of war. The appearance of soldier songs in relation to the timeline of the war, in combination with the personality of the recording artist, is significant to how the audience receive the song. The main objective of this study is the analysis of the messages and contexts of modern soldier songs, which support the troops but not necessarily the war, and establish a sort of political middle ground that can be appropriated by both sides of the political spectrum.

Role-Playing the “Feminine” in Letters Home

Role-Playing the “Feminine” in Letters Home Wendy Whelan-Stewart U N I V E R S I T Y O F L O U I S I A N A A T L A F A Y E T T E Sylvia Plath’s corpus spans the gamut of genre classifications, all of which are dis¬ tinctly linked to the biographical. For instance, she is the author of not only “con¬ fessional” poetry, an autobiographical novel (a roman aclef), and short stories, but also of privately penned sketches, journals, and letters.* Three texts in particu¬ lar—none assembled for publication by Plath herself—are classified by publishers as autobiography: The Journals of Sylvia Plath, apartial collection of Plath’s jour¬ nal entries edited by Frances McCullough and prefaced vnth an introduction by TedHughes;TheUnabridgedJournalsofSylviaPlath,thecompletesetofaUof Plath’s extant journal entries; and Letters Home, aseries of personal letters written byPlathtoherfamilyyetcompiledandeditedbyhermother.Althoughreaders would be correct in understanding Sylvia Plath as the author of both the private journalsandthelettersshewrotetohermother,theywouldcommitanegregious error in assuming both works present aunified account of the writer’s life and that theLettersembodya“true,”evenhonest,SylviaPlath.AureliaSchoberPlath,who perhaps should be regarded as the true author of the text, relies on readers’under¬ standingofautobiographyasagenresothatherrepresentationofherrelationship withherdaughterwillrivaltheautobiographicalelementspresentinTheBellJar? Infact,SylviaPlath’sBellJar(publishedasfiction)andherJournalscanbereadin oppositiontoMrs.Plath’sLettersHome.Whatresultsisastrugglebetweenpubli¬ cations, all technically identified as autobiographical, to present Plath’s “real story.”Moreover,(mis)informedbyprevailingunderstandingsofautobiography, readersandMrs.PlathfailtoseethatinherlettersSylviaPlathdoesnotbearher soul or present an unadulterated glimpse into her life but instead performs for her audience (Mrs. Plath) the roles her mother wishes to see and manipulates her imagesothat,moreoftenthannot,sherepresentsanidealdaughter,student,or wife.ForPlath,stagingandperformancecannotbeseparatedfromautobiog phy in Letters Home. Fromthemomentofitsinception.LettersHomewasdesignedtoteUMrs. Plath’s story of her daughter and their relationship, rather than her daughter’s story.AfterSylviaPlath’spublicationofTheBellJarbyaBritishpressandhersub¬ sequent death in 1963, American publishers and writers began to hear of the book’s success and soon sought to publish it—despite Mrs. Plath’s strong misgiv¬ ings. In the end, however, she was forced to acquiesce to HarperCoUins and promptly came to resent their decision. In an interview from 1979 with The New York Times, Mrs. Plath not only revealed asense of injury in being identified by readersofTheBellJarasthenarrator’sdespisedmother,Mrs.Greenwood,butshe r a Intertexts ,Vo\. 12, No. 1-2 2008 ©Texas Tech University Press I N T E R T E X T S 1 3 0 also disclosed her intention to rewrite the history of her relationship with Sylvia for readers: “When ‘The Bell Jar’ came out in 1971, it became avery hard time for me,” Mrs. Plath said. “It was accepted as an autobiography, which it wasn’t. Sylvia manipu¬ lated it very skillfully. She invented, fused, imagined. She made an artistic whole that read as truth itself. That’s why Ihad to have Sylvia speak in her truest voice, which Iknow comes through in these letters.” (qtd. in Robertson) LettersHomeappearedin1975withthewords“bySylviaPlath”placedimmedi¬ ately beneath the title. No doubt, Mrs. Plath wanted to legitimize the text and to inform the reading public that it was atruer autobiography than The Bell Jar. However, one cannot help but notice that Mrs. Plath rivals her daughter for author of Letters Home. She did not, for example, print all of the letters Plath wrote home to her, but selected and rejected letters to build acoherent (and possi¬ bly idealistic) mother-daughter narrative.^ In addition, Mrs. Plath grouped the lettersintochaptersrepresentingperiodsinherdaughter’slife,andsheprovided notonlyalengthyintroductionbutalsocommentariesframingeachchapter.Her voicecarefullyattemptstoguidethereader’sinterpretationofthemother-anddaughterrelationshipthatdevelops . Despite Mrs. Plath’s attempts to control her daughter’s texts, it becomes quicklyapparentthatSylviaPlath’sletterstohermotherarenotwrittenin“her truest voice.” Rather, Sylvia seems to adopt personae when addressing her mother. Throughout the course of her letter writing, she acts out roles acceptable for the young modernAmerican woman: the boisterous, flirty young college stu¬ dent and, later, the dedicated and companionable wife. Certainly, Sylvia Plath may have studied these personae in various ladies magazines, which she fre¬ quently read and submitted poems to and which also providedAmerican woman readers with acceptable images and narratives of the idealAmerican woman. By reading Plath’s letters to her mother alongside these narratives of the ideal woman providedbymagazineslikeLadies’HomeJournal,weareabletoseejusthowPlath adopts these personae and enacts them for her mother, who assumes the role of theintelligent(thoughdeceived)Americanwomanreader.Evidently,SylviaPlath felt comfortable...

Iraqis under the Occupation: A Survey of Documentaries

Since the U.S.-led of the willing invaded Iraq in March 2003, at least eighteen feature-length, nonfiction films about the invasion and its aftermath have received some kind of theatrical release. Several more, such as HBO's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007) and Last Letters Home (2005), have been financed by and shown on television, and a number of other feature-length and shorter films lacking theatrical distribution have premiered at film festivals, on television, or in independent theaters and have subsequently enjoyed a life on DVD (such as David O. Russell's Soldiers Pay [2004], a documentary follow-up to his magnificent fiction film about the first Gulf War, Three Kings [1999]). Taking into consideration only the feature-length films that have been shown in theaters in Manhattan over the past fouranda-half years, what is striking is not just their number more films have been made more quickly about the invasion of Iraq than any other military action in history but their diversity. Many are critical of the invasion and subsequent occupation. However, the targets of their critiques vary. Some take on the Bush administration {Fahrenheit 9/11 [2004], Uncovered: The War on Iraq [2004], No End in Sight [2007]). Others criticize the U.S. mainstream media's reporting of the war (Control Room [2003], WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception [2004]), U.S. private contractors such as Haliburton (Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers [2006]), and the wrongful imprisonment of civilians by coalition soldiers ( The Prisoner, Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair [2007]). Less censorious are a number that follow U.S. troops stationed in Iraq (Gunner Palace [2004], Occupation: Dreamland [2005], The War Tapes [2006]), as well as their difficult reentry into civilian life (The Ground Truth [2006]). They are also formally diverse, ranging from the talking head interview format of Uncovered and sarcastic voice-over style of Fahrenheit 9/11 to the cinema verite of Voices of Iraq (2004) and the lyricism of Iraq in Fragments (2006). The most extraordinary are those, such as the latter two, that attempt to capture the experiences and attitudes of Iraqis themselves, and it is in this respect that

Investment and Diversification in the American Whaling Industry

This article analyzes the connection between investment decisions and financing arrangements in the nineteenth-century American whaling industry. Managers of whaling ventures shared their risks by selling some equity claims but retained a substantial portion due to moral hazard considerations. As a result, they had little incentive to consider the covariance between their own returns, and those of others, in planning their voyages. This stifled diversity in whaling voyages and increased industry-wide risk. The analysis suggests a link between financial market development, or the extent of risk sharing in financial markets, and the range of economic activities pursued. n October 1851 news of the whaling fleet's summer season in the North Pacific reached American ports. The reports were devastating: due to the unexpectedly early incursion of ice in the Bering Straits, many of the vessels were badly damaged, and eight were lost. Conditions were so difficult that even the vessels that escaped serious harm were unable to pursue whales. In a letter home, the first mate of one New Bedford vessel described the ordeal:

Flying Close to Earhart Edge

Flying Close to Earhart Edge Derek Pollard Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home Rebecca Loudon No Tell Books http://www.notellbooks.org 38 pages; paper, $9.00 In RebeccaLoudon's new collection, Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home, conceit is everything . As the title suggests, Loudon presents the reader with a series oflyrical epistles, lists, and notes in the voice of one of our country's most cherished heroes, Amelia Earhart. The poems come to us from anebulous realmofhalf-light anddesertisle fantasia, perhaps even from beyond the grave. Obviously, the risks inherent in such a poetic undertaking are huge. Asinglemomentoffaltering andthecollectionwould collapse. Loudon's sense ofbalance and proportion, however, guides the poems expertly and safely to harbor. What's more, Loudon's poetic sensibilities, echoing the outrage and eroticism of Jorie Graham and Sylvia Plath at times, and the matter-of-factness of William Carlos Williams at others, navigate through the destabilizing mythos surrounding the historical Earhart. In a sense, the poems rescue the famed aviator from the mystery ofherown death, giving the reader asense ofEarhart's continuingpresence, even ifonly in spectral form. Consider diese lines from the first of two poems entitled "Father": My knees are bruised from rain. There is sea in my inner ear. I have caught a perfect orange fish. Sometimes this room is so small. One is reminded—artfully, it must be said—of the films ofTim Burton for all the dislocation and otherworldliness of this moment. How is it that Earhart's knees could be "bruised from rain" in a "room...so small"? The same question could be asked about the sea and the orange fish. Why is it that this room is "so small" only "sometimes"? Our discomfiture rests on the fluidity of the poem's location. Where are we to orient ourselves? Earhart's cockpit as her plane descends beneath the ocean's surface? On the shore of a deserted island following the crash? Inher childhoodroominAtchison , Kansas, as a young Earhart dreams herself into the future? We must also ask whether the speaker is living or dead or dying, and from whence is this voice issuing and where and when is it intended to be heard? Are we reading letters washed to shore in bottles? If so, when did these bottles arrive? If contemporaneously , then how do these poetic epistles engage our contemporary situation? Loudon knows her readers well in this regard: they love mystery and they love celebrity, especially in combination. What is most interesting is that, by moving Earhart's discourse into the realm ofpoetry, Loudon questions the morality—and the centrality —of those same predilections. Removed from the constraints ofprosaic functionality (Dear So and So, how is everything?), Earhart's epistles move us into an unmoored and contemplative realm of communicativeness in which we are forced to confront the impetus of our own desires. Just as Earhart's historical mystery fascinates us still, thesepoems raise more questions than they answer— orpropose to answer. In the context of Earhart's disappearance, a poem such as "From the Missing Diary," of which there are seven scattered throughout the collection (think of plane wreckage adrift at sea), forces us to question our own priorities, values, and value systems . Witness these lines: toilet tissue chocolate oranges yeast flour nails oil. A Williamsesque poem-note to be sure, but also a poem indicative of a survivor's attention to detail. By extension, such a poem begs the following quesDetailfrom cover tions of its readers: what is significant in our lives? What is not? In other words, given disaster and crisis, which is sadly the case for all of us, where do we choose to focus our attention? Do we choose the simplicity of ready-made distraction (the latest network news broadcast about Britney's parenting fiascos or Nicole Richie's umpteenth arrest), or do we engage in the tangled sorting ofourown lives and the lives ofthose close to us? How do history—both personal and global—and the present moment interact ? Why, Loudon asks, are these questions of such importance? Navigate is predicated upon such pointed inquiry . Just as Earhart's historical mystery fascinates us still, these poems raise more questions than they answer...

The Missionary Narrative as Coercive Interrogation: seduction, confession and self‐presentation in women’s ‘letters home’1

This article takes as its starting point the late nineteenth and early twentieth century missionary discourse of feminine self‐denial, and attempts to chart the ways in which it became a subversive theme in women missionaries’ ‘letters home.’ It argues that in the simultaneously public and private act of letter writing, women missionaries created complex sexual and political self‐narratives. By co‐opting the imperial rhetoric of a threatening, violent East, and then setting up their letters as conversations with an invisible interrogator, missionary women repeatedly forced their audiences to discover the various ways in which they had been seduced by this East, and had thereby deviated from accepted feminine norms. In the process, they both reinforced imperial notions of race and civilization and undermined the likewise imperial notion of protective domestic space.

Coughs in the classroom

Teachers come into contact with a variety of common illnesses in the classroom. But where is the line drawn between a letter home and more serious action?

Students’ Perceptions of Classroom Behaviour Problems and the Effectiveness of Different Disciplinary Methods

The purpose of the present study was to examine students’ perceptions of troublesome behaviour and the effectiveness of different disciplinary methods. To this end, 350 secondary school students completed the Classroom Behaviour Problems and Attitude Towards Disciplinary Methods questionnaire, and the results indicate that ‘talking out of turn’ was the only behaviour perceived by both teachers and students to be most troublesome and most frequent. Deterrents that were perceived as most effective included being sent to the principal’s office, detention, and getting an unfavourable report sent home. Regarding incentives, free time, a positive letter home, receiving a good mark, and getting a favourable academic report sent home were perceived to be most effective, while private praise and reprimands were also seen as an effective means for increasing appropriate behaviour. However, previous research suggests that teachers are choosing to use other strategies that are not seen by students as effective. Therefore, it was concluded that both teachers and students need to be educated regarding the results found in the current study, so that effective management strategies can be developed and used by teachers.

Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (review)

Reviewed by: Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai Carolyn Wakeman (bio) Robert Bickers . Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 410 pp. Hardcover $32.50, ISBN 0-231-13132-1. In Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai Robert Bickers, senior lecturer in East Asian and Colonial History at the University of Bristol, argues that "Shanghai puts the confusions of empire practice sharply into focus" (p. 12). Exhuming the life of an ordinary Briton lured to China in 1919 by a recruitment notice for the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP), Bickers explores the contentious, class-ridden entanglement of colonialist and colonized against the backdrop of China's emerging nationalism. The story of Robert Maurice Tinkler, he writes, "involves all the actors in the tale of empire, opponents, victims and collaborators, those to whom empire was done, and those who did it" (p. 5). In this richly nuanced "biography of a nobody," he traces the career of an unremarkable foreign cop to personalize the impact in China of Britain's empire in decline. An ironmonger's son from England's Lake District, Tinkler signed up for the Shanghai police force at age twenty-one, fresh from the trenches in France, one of two hundred thousand emigrants to leave the British Isles in 1919 for the outposts of empire, and one of seventy-four to join the SMP. "A white man can get a job out here" (p. 33) Tinkler wrote in his first letter home, awed by white privilege and power in foreign-administered Shanghai. Tinkler adhered to regulations, avoided petty corruption, stayed out of debt, rose steadily through the ranks, yet in the process developed a violent temper and a virulent racism. "I would like to have a go at these yellow Chinese swine," he wrote in 1921 (p. 122). "The way the foreign powers are 'crawling' to these damned yellow pigs is nauseating," he complained in a letter to his family in 1926 (p. 176). Soon Tinkler's outrage overwhelmed his professional duty and his judgment. Increasingly arrogant and abusive, he failed in 1929 to report the kidnapping of a Chinese caterer at the American Club, which brought demotion and transfer. After a formal reprimand, he handed in his resignation, resurfacing in 1935 as the labor supervisor of the China Printing and Finishing Company's Pudong plant, where ongoing worker disturbances and the provocations of the Japanese military occupation stoked his fury. Refusing to temper his belligerence or submit to the occupying authorities, he was killed in a melee with Japanese gendarmes in 1939. Like most newly arrived foreigners, Tinkler initially was captivated by the "Paradise of Adventurers," finding in this exotic Oriental setting the possibility of becoming "someone else" (p. 339). But he happened to arrive at a moment of accelerating nationalism, when Shanghai engaged in the heady task of commercializing modernity even as it birthed a new politics of public activism and a revolutionary [End Page 25] nationalism that threatened the colonial elite. "Into this changing and increasingly politicized city came the 1919 recruits to the SMP" (p. 62), asked to serve as bobbies on a Chinese beat and defend a political settlement increasingly under siege. Reconstructing the perspective of someone from the "other ranks of empire," Bickers documents the antagonizing conflict of daily encounters between the foreign enclave and the Chinese city. Ultimately it was not just individual servants of empire like Tinkler who were swept away by political change but the brash venture of Western imperialism in Asia. To differentiate the "mythic city" imagined and memorialized by expatriates from the urban reality against which it collided, Bickers guides us deftly through a wealth of local archives, PRO documents, newspaper reports, guidebooks, letters, family papers, and personal interviews to fashion a richly layered social history of Shanghai's foreign police. In the process he makes the scrutiny of sources an integral part of the narrative, deliberately involving readers in the challenge of constructing history. He relies on the thirty-six letters Tinkler sent to family members, the photograph albums he left behind, and a trove of indirect documentation gleaned from the SCMP files and the personal papers...

“You Gained Honor for Your Profession as a Brown Nurse”: The Career of a National Socialist Nurse Mirrored by Her Letters Home

“You Gained Honor for Your Profession as a Brown Nurse”: The Career of a National Socialist Nurse Mirrored by Her Letters Home

Creative ways with buttons

Make a collection of buttons, with as many different sizes, colours, shapes and textures as you can. Send a letter home to parents and ask them to send any spare buttons in as well.

George Eliot and the British Empire by Nancy Henry (review)

Reviews Nancy Henry. George Eliot andthe British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. xü + 186. $50.00. In the introduction to her monograph, Nancy Henry claims that she is presenting "a new George EHot, whose imagination and aesthetic principles were shaped by her experiences as a reader and reviewer of colonial Uterature, a colonial shareholder, a stepmother to colonial immigrants, and, ultimately, a critic of colonial war" (6). Henry's research has been extremely thorough, and by a careful accumulation of biographical detaüs she demonstrates the extent of EHot's connections with the British empire. She succeeds in giving us a much clearer and fuUer picture of this aspect of George EHot's Hfe and work. Henry characterizes her method as a combination of cultural studies, Hterary criticism, and biographical analysis (4), but she seems most comfortable with the latter. In fact, part of her argument is that the methodology which dominates in post-colonial studies has, to its detriment, neglected biographical evidence. The impact of the Hterary criticism in the book is lessened by the rather idiosyncratic organization, with brief critical analyses interspersed amidst the historical and biographical material. Even when the critical passages are put together, the Hterary criticism in George Eliot andthe British Empire remains underdeveloped. After a short introduction, Henry discusses EHot's reviews of travel books and guidebooks about the colonies, and related reviews and articles by G. H. Lewes. This gives rise to a brief consideration of "manliness and coloniaHsm," one of the many topics touched on in this sometimes divagating book Chapter Two, '"CoUeagues in Faüure': Emigration and the Lewes Boys," teUs the fascinating but sad story of Thornton and Herbert Lewes, EHot's stepsons. Their emigration to Natal is set in the context of popular Uterature about the empire, some of which — e.g., R. M. BaUantyne's The Worldof Ice (1860) — we have evidence that Thornie had read. Henry compares Lewes with other Victorian fathers, notably Dickens and TroUope, who arranged for the expatriation of their younger sons as a means of trying to preserve for them a class position which they could not maintain in the home country. The tale of Thornie and Bertie's experiences veers between tragedy and farce in a manner that recaUs an Evelyn Waugh novel; the teenaged Thornie is chagrined when one of his prized guns is run over by a wagon shordy after his arrival; instead of estabHshing himself as a gendeman farmer, he enHsted in the Natal Frontier Guard, but faüed 104volume 30 number 1 Reviews to receive the grant of land he hoped for as a reward for his service in the Basuto War. After Thornie was joined by his younger brother, they purchased some land, but their efforts at farming seem to have been rather incompetent. One letter home reports "We regret to state that the magnificent mud mansion of the Messrs Lewes of the 'FaU of the Assagai' was totaUy consumed by fire on Saturday the 22ndJune" (71). The brothers both died at an early age, and EHot was left to support Bertie's widow and children, who eventuaUy traveUed to England at the time of the Zulu war. A third chapter is devoted to EHot's extensive colonial shareholding; Henry notes that the relevant financial records have not been reprinted in the standard scholarly editions of EHot's letters and papers, unlike the records of her Hterary earnings. We thus have a detaüed knowledge of how much she made from her writing, but the way that she invested that money has been obscured. This chapter includes some commentary on "BrotherJacob," one of the more neglected texts in EHot's oeuvre. Henry also has some perceptive remarks connecting the recurring conjunction of parents, cftildren, and money anxieties in EHot's fiction to her famüy responsibüities and the investments she made in order to be able to meet those responsibüities. Another of Henry's aims in George Eliot andthe British Empire is to refute, or at least compHcate, a now widespread view of EHot as an imperiaHst, based on a reading of DanielDeronda which originates with Edward Said in TheQuestion of Palestine (1979). In claiming...

The Cook, the Photographer, and Her Majesty, the Allotting Agent: Unsettling Domestic Spaces in E. Jane Gay's With the Nez Perces

JANE E. SIMONSEN The Cook, the Photographer, and Her Majesty, the Allotting Agent: Unsettling Domestic Spaces in E- Jane Gay's With the Nez Perces Between 1889 and 1 892, a reform-minded eastern woman named E. Jane Gay took over 400 photographs on and around the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho Territory. Gay went to the reservation as the companion of Alice Cunningham Fletcher, who was appointed government agent in charge of allotting homesteads to the Nez Perces under the auspices of the Dawes Severalty Act (or General Allotment Act) of 1887. The logic underlying the Dawes Act rested firmly upon evolutionary beliefs that positioned the Euro-American patriarchal, property-owning family at the pinnacle of "civilization" and drew its definitions of racial progress from this model. Many of Gay's photographs validate these beliefs, depicting "civilized" Nez Perces with their frame homes, and recording Nez Perce tools, clothing, and other materials in settings that scientifically abstract them from their cultural usage. As the allotting party's unofficial photographer, Jane Gay documented aspects of life on the reservation as object lessons representing both the Nez Perces' "barbaric" past and evidence of a "civilized" future. Gay's equation of domesticity with civilization aligns her with other late-nineteenth-century reformers who believed that the gendered power relations inherent in Victorian domesticity were crucial to evolutionary progress. Contemporary historians, such as Anne McClintock, Arizona Quarterly Volume 58, Number 2, Summer 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 54 Jane E. Simonsen have argued that these gendered dynamics were also crucial to the formation of empire. The Anglo-American family home represented an order in which the struggle for survival depended upon men's work and accumulation of property and in which women were thought to function primarily in a reproductive capacity, laboring quietly to reproduce the household and its citizens. By imagining that the different races were part of an extensive "Family of Man" differentiated by their places in an evolutionary hierarchy, Victorians legitimated imperial power by placing Anglo-Saxonism at the top of the familial order, in the place of the patriarch. Imperialism, McClintock argues, was imagined as "coming into being through domesticity," an assessment that is borne out by the Dawes Act, which sought to convert Native Americans into farmers and farmwives by assigning them homestead plots and forcing children into Indian schools meant to teach them the social and work roles deemed proper to each gender (McClintock 32).' E. Jane Gay's photographs and letters, however, not only document social and governmental insistence upon organization in the nation's interior, but also expose some of the absurdities of the beliefs that supported U.S. social and political order. In a letter home to her niece, Gay referred to one of her photographs, titled Seat of War, Survival of the Fittest, Arch of Triumph, as an "object lesson" (Ms. 65) (figure 1). The photograph, an abstract image of three chairs grouped together, whimsically situates the grandiose ideologies of imperialism, evolution, and nationalism on the most benign and broken-down of objects. The titles Gay bestowed upon these chairs rely on potent nineteenth-century terminologies of power, difference, and hierarchical ordering that were used to legitimate the Dawes Act's "civilization" policies. Gay's photograph unsettles the dynamics of that policy, however, for the chairs are broken and the familial relationships they symbolize parody the order implied by evolution and imperialism. Gay's letter indicates that the vacant chairs represented the three members of the unconventional —and non-patriarchal—household to which Gay belonged while living and working on the reservation.2 The backless "Seat of War" is the chair of allotting agent, anthropologist and assimilation crusader Alice Fletcher. The "Survival of the Fittest, " divested by all but one upright, almost vicious-looking post, belonged to the Cook, Jane Gay herself, who was Alice Fletcher's domestic partner at home in Washington , D.C, as well as during the four seasons they spent in Idaho. E. jane Gay's With the Nez Perces 55 Figure ?. E. Jane Gay, Seat of War, Survival of the Fittest, Arch of Triumph. Courtesy of Idaho State Historical Society. And the...