Public Utterances Research Articles

Wittgenstein: Two Public Statements

russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 36 (summer 2016): 91 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036–01631; online 1913–8032 c:\users\ken\documents\type3601\red\rj 3601 077 red.docx 2016-04-01 10:08 aocuments WITTGENSTEIN:TWO PUBLIC STATEMENTS Kenneth Blackwell ittgenstein’s public statements are rare. In researching Russell’s bibliography and post-WWii actions I came across two new ones. The Report of the Conference on Academic Freedom (Cambridge: Heffer, 1935; B&R B58), which met at Oxford in August 1934, included “The Auckland Resolution ” (p. 80). Many British academics signed it, including “L. Wittgenstein”: 1. The university teacher has no less freedom of speech within the law than any other citizen, excepting that there is a special responsibility on him to weigh his public utterances. It must also be recognised that his position in the community may sometimes seem to him to involve a special obligation to speak and, indeed, to make a pronouncement not in accordance with the opinions and traditions of the majority of citizens. 2. The exercise of this freedom (as defined in Clause 1) and indeed, the obligation to speak should not place in jeopardy a university teacher’s tenure of his post or make him subject to supervision or correction by the governing authority. Russell did not sign it, presumably because he was not an “academic” at the time, though his speech appeared in the proceedings (see Papers 21: 65). The second statement is a memorial, presented 3 January 1946, to Prime Minister Attlee from “Save Europe Now”, Victor Gollancz’s organization to alleviate post-war German starvation. A ten-page mimeograph is in RA1 550. The many adherents are classified. Under Universities we find “Dr. L. Wittgenstein ”. Russell, now returned to academia, is under the Royal Society. Attlee rejected the request in a letter printed in The Times, 29 January 1946, although by April, as starvation worsened, the uk increased its relief. The text of the memorial, also signed by T. S. Eliot, Alys Russell, George Orwell et al., reads: Taking note of the statement by the Foreign Secretary on November 23rd that “Hunger and privation may bring a further terrific human loss more devastating even than the atomic bomb”, we earnestly beg that, without prejudice to the claims of special categories, such as children, nursing and expectant mothers, and heavy workers, general rations in this country should not be raised so long as there is famine on the Continent of Europe. t= ...

Wittgenstein: Two Public Statements

1. The university teacher has no less freedom of speech within the law than any other citizen, excepting that there is a special responsibility on him to weigh his public utterances. It must also be recognised that his position in the community may sometimes seem to him to involve a special obligation to speak and, indeed, to make a pronouncement not in accordance with the opinions and traditions of the majority of citizens. 2. The exercise of this freedom (as defined in Clause 1) and indeed, the obligation to speak should not place in jeopardy a university teacher’s tenure of his post or make him subject to supervision or correction by the governing authority.

The Dignity in Free Speech: Civility Norms in Post-Terror Societies

ABSTRACTIt is difficult to strike a balance between protecting freedom of speech and ensuring public safety. The attacks on 22 July 2011 in Norway, and the fear of terrorist acts inspired by public utterances on the Internet, have caused many to question whether and how we should regulate hate speech. In this article, we analyse the main arguments from the debate on freedom of speech in post-terror Norway, termed the ‘liberal’ and ‘harm’ (or ‘balance of harms’) arguments respectively. We propose a set of civility norms that may serve to uphold the wide freedom of speech advocated by the liberal argument, while being attentive to the real ethical challenges emphasised by the harm argument.

Silence, Cultivation, Cultural Heritage. Strategies of Identification in Discourses on the “German Past” in Hungary Since 1945

Avec une approche issue de la sociologie historique, cet article examine les conditions sociales de l’identification allemande en Hongrie après la seconde guerre mondiale. Il s’attache à la logique du discours sur la culpabilité collective, à travers l’analyse empirique non seulement de la politique hongroise de nationalité mais aussi des déclarations publiques dans le contexte des discours internationaux (européens) sur le passé, qui ont façonné la Hongrie depuis les années 1980. L’article propose une périodisation historique en fonction des différents types de discours et des stratégies d’identification. Il explique ainsi pourquoi aujourd’hui la question se pose désormais en termes de « mémoire des expulsions ».

Saying the unsayable

After 1945 and the end of WWII, denying the Holocaust became an explicit taboo in most European countries. More specifically, in Austria, denying the Holocaust in public implies legal consequences: the so-calledVerbotsgesetzpersecutes any public utterances which even insinuate National Socialist ideology (utterances, symbols, songs, images) and the Holocaust denial. Naturally, it remains difficult for the courts to substantiate any accusations and to prove that somebody has actually uttered Holocaust denial if the meanings are only implied, inferred, or alluded to. Thus, in spite of such explicit sanctions, politicians of the far-right have found many coded and implicit discursive-pragmatic practices and devices of denying the Holocaust, even during parliamentary debates and official speeches. In my paper, I compare the “discourses about Holocaust denial” in Austria and the UK, in two case studies: the first one relates to the controversy about some utterances of Barbara Rosenkranz who stood as candidate of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) for election to Austrian Presidency in April 2010. Secondly, I focus on the debates triggered by Nick Griffin from the British extreme right party BNP, in and after his appearance in the prominent BBC 1 weekly showQuestion Time, in 2009. I apply the Discourse-Historical Approach in CDA for the detailed analysis of such recurring debates and foreground the patterns of a globalisedpolitics of denial.

For God and Ireland: The Fight for Moral Superiority in Ireland 1922–1932 by M. P. McCabe (review)

For God and Irelanet The Fight for Moral Superiority in Ireland 1922-1932. By M. P. McCabe. (Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Distrib. ISBS, Portland, OR. 2013. Pp. x, 310. $89.95. ISBN 978-0-7165-3162-3.)During an ineloquent but pious contribution to the parliament of the Irish Free State in June 1929, Fianna Fail's SeanT. O' Kelly asserted, We of the Fianna Fail party believe that we speak for the big body of Catholic opinion. I think I could say, without qualification of any kind, that we represent the big element of Catholicity (p. 244). The party he spoke for was then just three years old, and its parliamentarians had taken their seats only two years previously, but during the glorious centenary of Catholic emancipation, they were not going to be found wanting in expressions of the ferocity of their faith. Their holy declarations also fulfilled another purpose; just six years after the end of the civil war, it was necessary to begin the process of repositioning Irish republicans who had fought considerable verbal battles with Catholic bishops during that conflict.This book seeks to document and analyze these tensions in the first decade of the Free State's existence. The book's title is well chosen, given the frequency with which religious and spiritual images and words were used by republicans to justify their opposition to the compromise treaty signed with Britain to end the Irish war of independence in December 1921 and validate their civil war actions from 1922 to 1923.The author, writing his first book, succeeds in locating and unearthing fascinating private and public utterances and correspondence to underline the intensity of the religious and political battles being fought and the intricacies of ham-fisted and naive Vatican interventions in Irish politics during this period. But the book is severely undermined by uncertainty on the author's part about the craft of the historian. Instead of presenting his evidence with clarity as a worthy end in itself, he suffuses his narrative with unnecessary, clumsy assertions and generalizations and an immature judgmental tone.His contention is that there has been a tendency to grant the Catholic Church and especially its leaders, a large measure of amnesty regarding political activity during this period, and he refers bitingly to authors who have restricted themselves to abiding by the decisions of the [Catholic] Hierarchy (pp. 4-8), a dubious and unfair dismissal of the work of a previous generation of historians, produced when archival access was extremely limited, but work that has nonetheless paved the way for his. He favors histories that are genuinely objective and critical of the Catholic Church in its involvement in Ireland beyond the scope of religion (p. 6). There is a basic contradiction inherent in this assertion; it should not be the role of the historian to conduct research with such an agenda; what is required is presentation and analysis of the evidence as opposed to adopting a skewed and confrontational approach to the historic subject matter, fuelled by contemporary values. …

O regionalności XVII-wiecznych kazań pogrzebowych. Część II: druki poznańskie

In the 17th century funeral sermons were one of the most frequent forms of public utterances. More than 600 funeral sermons were published in Poland at that time. They were issued by publishing houses scattered all over Poland, and thus each region had its representation in this output. Consequently, funeral sermons are a good source for studies into regional differences in the Polish language of the 17th century. The article deals with this problem on the example of Great Polish prints issued in 17th-century Poznan publishing houses of: the Wolrabs, Wojciech Regulus, Wojciech Mlodujewicz, Wojciech Laktanski, Jan Rossowski, the Printing Office of Lubranski Academy and the Printing Office of SocietatisIesu. The analysis of texts revealed that they manifest the most typical features of the general Polish of that time, but simultaneously the regional features, differential in character (as for example the inflectional suffix -ej of feminine hard-stem nouns: type glowej), as well as frequentative (as for example the exchange of i and y for e before consonants l, l: type zrobiel). And although the discussed texts were written not only by the authors originating from Great Poland, they are characterized by common linguistic features. Thus, it must be admitted that the employees of printing firms – the editors, proof-readers, typesetters – played a significant role in the final linguistic creation of the 17th-century printed text.

Party Polarization and the Ascendance of Bipartisan Posturing as a Dominant Strategy in Presidential Rhetoric

How do changes in the intensity of party conflict shape presidents' public presentations of self? Are presidents' public statements about parties and partisanship consistent with their political maneuvers behind the scenes? When do presidents have incentives to obfuscate about their party leadership efforts? Drawing on comprehensive data on presidents' public utterances about the parties and on qualitative information about presidents' strategic incentives and activities, this article shows that presidents have responded to increasing partisan polarization among members of Congress and party activists by adopting a more bipartisan leadership posture. The evidence suggests that presidents' increasing invocation of bipartisan themes does not mean that presidents have become more consensus‐minded; rather, presidents use bipartisan rhetoric strategically, in an effort to cultivate support from voters disaffected by partisan conflict.

The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics by Christopher Childers (review)

The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Politics. By Christopher Childers. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2012. Pp. 334. Cloth, $39. 95.)Reviewed by Amy S. GreenbergChristopher Childers has written the first monograph tracing the evolution of the concept of popular sovereignty from the establishment of the Southwest Territory in 1790 through the start of the Civil War. Most analyses of territorial expansion date the origins of popular sovereignty to the 1840s. But this latest offering from the University of Kansas Press series American Political Thought makes a compelling case that the idea as employed in the 1840s was the product of decades of debate and constitutional interpretation. The author argues that territorial expansion was a southern ideal as early as the 1780s, and that because territorial self-government, prior to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, always resulted in the expansion of slave territory, both northerners and southerners understood the idea as explicitly proslavery.With the northern appropriation of the concept in the 1840s, however, a crucial schism emerged over the point at which a territory became imbued with sovereignty. Northerners like Lewis Cass and Stephen A. Douglas declared that settlers, acting through their territorial legislature, could decide on the status of slavery when they wished, while southerners maintained that the status of slavery could only be determined upon the drafting of a state constitution. Doughfaces embraced popular sovereignty in the hopes of appeasing the South, but the resulting crisis, Childers argues, destroyed the bisectional Democratic Party, removed the South from the political mainstream of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian era, and fostered the growth of a virulently radical form of southern politics designed to uphold states' rights (4). The author asserts that this crisis over popular sovereignty, rather than any of the other divisions of the era, became the key wedge dividing North and South. Sectionalism and the issue of Southern rights exploded over popular sovereignty before a drop of blood was shed in Kansas.Both the methodology and sources employed here-by and large public utterances of nationally prominent politicians and newspaper editors-are extremely traditional. This is not to say that the analysis is outdated. Although heavily influenced by David M. Potter's The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York, 1961), Childers is fully conversant in the relevant recent secondary literature, particularly works by Michael Morrison, Matthew Mason, and John Craig Hammond. Indeed The Failure of Popular Sovereignty ofi ers a novel interpretation of the role of slavery in territorial expansion. Popular sovereignty, the author argues, became the South's true manifest destiny.The great strength of this work is its narrative. The author links discrete moments together in a manner that highlights the continuity of a particular strain of political thought. The first chapter of the work, which traces the idea and practice of popular sovereignty in the early American territories, is perhaps the most illuminating. Childers convincingly shows that southerners never respected the Northwest Ordinance's ban on slavery, but instead assumed that the states created in the territory would ultimately determine the status of slavery within their boundaries. Clearly many of the settlers in Illinois and Indiana did not consider the Northwest Ordinance's ban on slavery as final, and the author does a wonderful job placing the continued presence of slaves in Illinois and Indiana in the larger context of popular sovereignty. Nor were questions of self-government resolved at later points: They arose every time the United States added territory to the nation. …

Speech acts and performances of scientific citizenship: Examining how scientists talk about therapeutic cloning.

Scientists play an important role in framing public engagement with science. Their language can facilitate or impede particular interactions taking place with particular citizens: scientists' "speech acts" can "perform" different types of "scientific citizenship". This paper examines how scientists in Australia talked about therapeutic cloning during interviews and during the 2006 parliamentary debates on stem cell research. Some avoided complex labels, thereby facilitating public examination of this field. Others drew on language that only opens a space for publics to become educated, not to participate in a more meaningful way. Importantly, public utterances made by scientists here contrast with common international utterances: they did not focus on the therapeutic but the research promises of therapeutic cloning. Social scientists need to pay attention to the performative aspects of language in order to promote genuine citizen involvement in techno-science. Speech Act Theory is a useful analytical tool for this.

Introduction to Special Issue on Human Rights

The federal government refused to embrace the recommendations of the Brennan Report in April 2010, so that Australia remained the only common law liberal democracy without a bill of rights. There were extensive pre-emptive justifications for this stance, based in the theory that the common law provided sufficient protection, and that consequently a bill of rights was unnecessary. Chief Justice Spigelman had been a considerable proponent of this view, with support from Chief Justice Gleeson and his discussion of the principle of legality, the requirement that Parliament speak clearly and unequivocally if legislation is to overturn common law rights. The Commonwealth Attorney-General, Mr Robert McClelland, signalled where the matter would finish many months before the final announcement, when he addressed the Castan Centre for Human Rights on 17 July 2009 in terms of the utility of the common law as a protection for human rights. These public utterances beg the question as to what it is that is being protected, and how the common law is alleged to perform the necessary work.

On their best behaviour? Newspaper journalists' coverage of women municipal candidates in Alberta

Do women in municipal politics encounter the same level of media bias as women in national politics? Does every type of newspapers exhibit a bias against women municipal politicians, if at all? These questions guided a study of how three daily and three community newspapers portrayed women council candidates during the 2007 Alberta municipal elections. Using content and discourse analysis, the study compared how journalists reported on female and male candidates’ personal traits such as age, appearance, family situation, gender, and emotions as well as their policy ideas and public utterances. Results from the study indicate that while local women politicians do face a subtle sexism, the media environment they encounter while campaigning is generally more gender-neutral and hospitable to them than the one awaiting women vying for elite national office. Thus, women contemplating a bid for council should not be concerned that local journalists will obsess about their looks or otherwise overtly disadvantage them before prospective voters.

Life experience and the value‐free foundations of Blumer's collective behavior theory

Herbert Blumer stated throughout his long career that his ideas regarding collective behavior originated with his introduction to pragmatist philosophy under the auspices of G. H. Mead at the University of Chicago. Blumer's biography, however, presents a different picture. Firsthand experiences with mob behavior, collective outrage, and the fallout associated with Blumer's public utterances early in his career may have had significant impact on the eventual corpus of collective behavior.

'We take academic freedom quite seriously': How university media offices manage academic public communication

Universities, as part of their remit as public organizations, encourage academics to disseminate their research, engage with communities and contribute to public policy formulation and debates. University media offices, whose role and size have grown as universities have developed a more systematic, wide-ranging approach to media communication, have emerged as important organizational gatekeepers, intermediaries and managers in the 'zone' of university-public exchange. There are many pressure points related to the negotiations of university-public exchange. University media offices are uniquely placed within this zone – they are the site where these problematic intersections both emerge and are reshaped. Drawing on research into media policy, communications and management practices at Australian universities, this article explores, using interviews, the strategies adopted by a sample of media offices as they disseminate information about the university, manage contact between journalists and academics and influence university-based contributions to public speech. It finds a spectrum of practices of surveillance and regulation ranging from tight management to relatively loose governance and varying levels and types of policy implementation. We also found that, while all universities exert strict control over official announcements that claim to 'speak' for them, university media offices operate in different ways according to their location, size and remit within the university and their universities' particular histories and current place and trajectory within the national – and, increasingly, global – higher education sector. It is concluded that, especially with the spreading use of online and social media, attempts to manage public utterances by academics are increasingly problematic, so that 'light touch' management approaches are as much an acknowledgement of the inefficacy of more interventionist approaches as enthusiastic endorsements of the publicly engaged university.

A Jewish Dialogue with Howard Thurman: Mysticism, Compassion, and Community

A Jewish Dialogue with Howard Thurman: Mysticism, Compassion, and Community Edward K. Kaplan Forged in the crucible of a rural, segregated African‐American community in Florida, and nourished by closeness to the Divine Presence, the spirituality of Howard Thurman (1899‐1981) is governed by a deep, abiding inwardness, a solitary relation with God, which nourishes responsiveness to other people. He was a mystic who translated “the experience of love” into realistic, dynamic connections with fellow human beings. His ethical gift did not necessarily lead to social action, however. By temperament Thurman was not a militant. Solitude remained his distinctive mark and the slow, introverted flow of his written and spoken meditations appeals to our essential loneliness, probing our tender spots, allowing us to face pain and disenchantment with a gentle courage.1 Dialogue was Thurman’s essential mode of communication, one to one conversation, which he might then translate into prayers, sermons, meditations, or other public utterances.2 I was privileged to know Howard Thurman—and Mrs. Sue Bailey Thurman, whose vivid independence completed her husband’s optimism with a sharp critical edge. To help convey my particularly Jewish response to his thought, I share one intimate conversation with him. In 1981, I visited Dr. Thurman at his home in San Francisco. By that time he was dying from a cancer which afflicted him for several years, and I expected him to be quite weak and unable to spare much time. The opposite occurred. Thurman sat with me for over three hours and systematically asked me to review my most compelling life tasks: my divorce, my relationship with my young son, my writing, my teaching, and my mother’s recent death. At that point, I expressed my mixed feelings about her, and especially my doubt about whether she truly loved me. Thurman stared at me silently and then said, “All mothers love their children.” In anguish I asked how he could know that. “Because she gave birth to you,” he replied. I responded skeptically, “That is just a pure biological fact.” Thurman, more frail than I had ever seen him, but so much stronger than I was during those intense hours, slowly gazed at me and answered, “There is no such thing as a pure biological fact.” And still looking straight at me, he threw out his long arms and burst into exuberant laughter. I looked at this man I knew for over twenty‐five years, since my high school days, felt his deep understanding of me, and I burst into tears. Thurman’s confidence in the Divine Presence within all human beings had convinced him of my mother’s ability to love. His confidence in me challenged my ability to accept her, and to love her, as she truly was. From inwardness to compassion Beyond such individual encounters, Thurman’s skill as rhythmic, poetic writer and speaker helped form around him an interreligious, interracial and international community, from Rankin Chapel at Howard University, to the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, to Marsh Chapel at Boston University. As for my growing Jewish identity, it was Howard Thurman’s gentle, meditative style that nurtured my attraction to spirituality as such. His gentle probing put me in touch with a hunger for God. His keynote phrase, “How good it is to center down!” places us where we are, a calm amidst personal turmoil. During my high school and college years (c. 1955‐1964), conversations with Dr. and Mrs. Thurman, and steeping myself in his writings and recordings, prepared me to understand the religious thinker and social activist, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), Professor of Jewish Ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, whom I met in 1966 while studying for a doctorate in French literature at Columbia University. Thurman’s universal witness had opened me to Heschel, who became my ancestral model. More on that later. So seductive, in fact, was Thurman’s “inward journey” (the title of his early, signature volume), that I was often tempted to remain alone, with or without God. The artist’s poetic prose and his soothing, earthy voice (available on recordings) meets us and accepts us...

Crazy World (review)

Reviewed by: Crazy World Laurence Raw Crazy World. Adapted by Barış Erdenk from The Insane of Valencia by Lope de Vega. Van State Theatre at the Şinasi Sahnesi, Ankara, Turkey. 3 April 2009. The Insane of Valencia differs from many of Lope de Vega’s most well-known comedies that deal with the power of love (for example, The Idiot Lady). In terms of theme and structure, it is closer to The Dog in the Manger; its use of parody and burlesque satirizes a society preoccupied with hollow notions of class and behavior. The Insane of Valencia is set in a lunatic asylum, where the inmates assume and cast off various roles as they act out a series of dramatic performances for their own benefit. Using both a translation by Adalet Cimcoz and quasi-Brechtian staging techniques, director Barış Erdenk updated the play in an attempt to explain the economic crisis that dominates the headlines in contemporary Turkey, despite Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s insistence that the country has at last “turned the corner.” In Erdenk’s view, the crisis had two principal causes: mistrust of foreign investment, and corrupt politicians. The first of these was clearly apparent in a comic set piece, in which one (unnamed) cast member impersonated a Japanese entrepreneur vainly trying to communicate with prospective Turkish clients. In spite of his gestures of politeness—inclining his head, smiling, or standing to attention like a soldier—no one seemed either willing or able to engage with him. Eventually, he was bundled unceremoniously offstage by two police officers. The scene had some good-natured fun at the expense of the Japanese, who were identified in a program note as representatives of the kind of global capitalism that caused the crisis in the first place. Erdenk also indicated that while the business community had plenty of opportunity to improve the economic situation—through trade agreements, for example—its underlying suspicion of foreigners impeded the success of such initiatives. The consequences of this lack of cross-cultural empathy were emphasized in a dumb-show sequence (repeated throughout the production), in which several actors dressed in rags shuffled across the stage. They were the new underclass: traders who had nothing to sell, shop owners forced to leave their premises, and migrants who had traveled from the east to the big cities (Ankara, Istanbul) in the west in search of work, but found nothing available. Nothing—not even hope—could sustain them now; their hopeless expressions suggested that all they had to look forward to now was a painful half-life in poverty. In Erdenk’s production, politicians were clearly to blame for this crisis. This was suggested through quasi-Brechtian techniques; for example, by having the actors periodically step out of their roles, turn toward the audience, and comment on what they had just performed. They accused several ministers of siphoning off public funds into their bank accounts, while claiming in their public utterances that they were working in the public interest. One actor stressed that such hypocrisy is not just characteristic of Turkish politicians; recent media revelations show [End Page 105] that similar practices exist the world over. What happens in contemporary Turkey is a microcosm of the situation in other countries, whether in the West or elsewhere. Click for larger view View full resolution The Van State Theatre Company in Crazy World. (Photo: Yaşar Santoprak.) To strengthen the production’s sociopolitical purpose, Erdenk deliberately discouraged audience identification with the characters onstage. This was evident on several occasions, when the actors interrupted the performance to deliver long, mock-Petrarchan speeches in praise of courtly love, laced with lyrical metaphors and aphoristic reflections. There seemed no particular reason for them to do this other than showing off. The same also applied to the musicians, who sat just to the right of the stage playing a variety of tunes: Spanish dances, Turkish folksongs, and satirical poems delivered in Sprechstimme (“speech-voice,” or a melody spoken at an approximate pitch, not sung). They began to play at inopportune moments—during the middle of a dramatic speech, for example—in a brazen attempt to solicit our attention. Although this strategy irritated...

A Real Portrait of the Concept: Women Empowerment

In India, women have been greatly praised in the literature and religion as ‘Devi’ or ‘shakti’ or ‘ardhangini’ and a portion of a man, however, by the contrivance of this civilisation, this slice or part of man has assumed a very little proportion of the whole of man by reducing woman to an appendage of his life, a parasite, a domestic animal, a pleasure resort. This is true story of man-made civilisation wherein lies the tragedy of woman. The life of average Indian women is still governed by customs, habits, prejudices and unwritten codes of conduct. The Indian society is averse to treating a women as a human being. The researcher here observe that the legal equality which women enjoy under the Constitution and the special privileges are all in papers. Though in their public utterances, men praise the concept of equality and show concern that women should be able to avail of their constitutional and legal rights, yet at heart they are the most conservative. The judiciary is not sympathetic to the women’s cause. She has to undergo sex determination test to know the gender of the child. She is teased on streets, harassed everywhere, molested in public places but she is mum because of the fear of retaliation from the offender. Most crimes against women go unreported. Eve teasing and sexual harassment is bitter reality but it is true that women are being insulted almost everyday, everywhere and everytime. It is an almost a torture for a woman to walk alone on the road. Eve-teasing are almost recognised as a male sport. The victim of offence are mostly modest and shy girls or young women of respectable families. The poor victims dare not protest in order to avoid creating a scene o attracting a crowd on the spot.Incidents of indecent Representation of women are shameful. The condition of women in India cannot be improved by any single method or merely by pronouncing the word ‘Women Empowerment’. There is need to change the traditional mental set-up which is deep rooted in the minds of women only then this concept can turn into reality.I still keep asking myself the same question, and so do many of us: Are women getting their due share in the society? Swami Vivekananda had said, 'That country and that nation which doesn’t respect women will never become great now and nor will ever in future and in pursuit of making India a great nation, let us work towards giving women their much deserved status.' A lot is still to be done, miles to go….

The Peculiar Life of Sundays (review)

Reviewed by: The Peculiar Life of Sundays Alexis McCrossen The Peculiar Life of Sundays. By Stephen Miller. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2008. Pp. x, 310. $27.95. ISBN 978-0-674-03168-5.) Stephen Miller’s The Peculiar Life of Sundays is a general-interest book that provides snapshots of the Sundays of a handful of Anglo-American figures based on their personal diaries and public utterances. The title refers to Wallace Stevens’s characterization of Sunday in a personal letter. The book opens with a description of Billie Holiday’s classic rendition of “Gloomy Sunday,” but then contrasts Sunday gloom (and even suicide) with a recent poll’s discovery that more than three-quarters of Americans find Sunday “the most enjoyable day of the week”(p. 2). The introductory chapter moves without resolution between tropes of Sunday Gladness and Sunday Gloom, a pattern that characterizes the book as a whole. Woven into the book is an overview of the civic and religious regulation of Sunday since Constantine. The book’s central chapters survey the Sundays of a dozen or so historical figures, wherein Miller demonstrates his strength as a gentle interlocutor and synthesizer. The final chapter, about contemporary Sundays, quietly laments the loss of the Sabbath. The Peculiar Life of Sundays is not a book that scholars should add to their shelves, as it makes no new contribution to our scholarly understanding of Sunday, religion, Sabbatarianism, or Anglo-American culture. What is more, it is peculiar in its preoccupation with all things “pagan.” The book is laced with the word: for example, “Emersonian paganism” (p. 247),“a pagan great awakening” (p. 197), and Stevens’s embrace of “paganism” (p. 214). The lengthy list of entries under paganism in the index, at three-and-a-half inches long, outstrips the other entries, including those for Lord’s Day, Sabbatarianism, and Puritanism. It seems that Miller is aware that “pagan” is inaccurate: he notes that it “was initially a pejorative term” that “some historians are wary of using” (p. 58). Would that he had been. Nevertheless, Miller is a sympathetic reader of diaries, letters, essays, memoirs, and poetry. His discussion about Samuel Johnson’s Sunday dilemmas, including a transcription of 1755 resolutions forming, in Johnson’s words, “a scheme of life for the day” (pp. 101–02), is fascinating. However, Miller’s interpretations founder because he employs a typology of Christian commitment that in the end does little to explain why Sunday poses so much hope and so much despair for so many people. In his view, those who despaired in Sunday had little faith and were even pagans. Had Miller looked [End Page 580] more carefully at the rhythm of work and rest that his historical subjects encountered, rather than at where they belonged on a calculus of Christian commitment, he might have been better able to explain their particular outlooks concerning Sunday. For example, doing so likely would have enhanced Miller’s interpretation of Thoreau’s sly affront to the Sunday-Sabbath, for in nearly every written word, Thoreau challenged the American devotion to a narrowly defined field of work. In all, The Peculiar Life of Sundays exemplifies one problem with nonfiction trade publications, particularly those undertaken by university presses: because the authors do not know enough about the subject that they have decided to write about, they lean too heavily on inappropriate sources (The Wall Street Journal for ideas about religion, for example), borrow too liberally from the work of others, and use anachronistic terms. None of these alone is a grievous misstep, but in the end together they point to the failure of an underprepared author and a profit-driven press to do justice to a subject and thus to the reading public as well as the scholarly community. Alexis McCrossen Southern Methodist University Copyright © 2009 The Catholic University of America Press

Navigating the Print Line: Shaping Readers' Expectations in Booker T. Washington's Autobiographies

Navigating the Print Line: Shaping Readers’ Expectations in Booker T. Washington’s Autobiographies BOOKER TALIAFERRO WASHINGTON WAS NOT AN EASY PERSON TO KNOW. “He was wary and silent,” recalled W. E. B. Du Bois. “He never expressed himself frankly or clearly until he knew exactly to whom he was talking and just what their wishes and desires were.” A skillful diplomat, Washington mastered the prickly art of sycophancy. Tactfully, he navigated the precarious minefield, the problematic “color-line” to use Du Bois’s words, in America. In her Works Progress Administration interview, Sarah Fitzpatrick expressed a more pragmatic view of the late African American leader. Booker T. Washington, the former Alabama slave recollected, “wuz a wise man . . . he al’ays let de white man shine, so he could live an’ wurk he’er.”1 More recently, Louis R. Harlan likened him to the artful Br’er Rabbit of African A N T O N I O T. B L Y Antonio T. Bly is an Assistant Professor of History at Appalachian State University. His work explores the interplay between African American Studies and the history of the book in America. A version of this article was presented at the SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) 9th Annual Conference at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, on July 22, 2001. Much like Booker T. Washington, I am indebted to my ghostwriters. In that regard, I would like thank William Carroll, Joanne M. Braxton, and Robert A. Gross, all of whom have encouraged my interest in Washington. I also wish to thank the anonymous readers of the Alabama Review and of course its editorial staff, especially Carey Cauthen. As always, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my wife Donnamaria who has endured me, my work, and has commented on several drafts of this article. 1 Interviews with former slaves were recorded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), 1936–38. WPA interviewers were instructed to record the dialect used by these former slaves as they recounted their experiences in order to capture the “essential truth” present in their words. “These life histories [were] taken down as far as possible in the narrators’ words. . . . Rich not only in folk songs, folk tales, and folk speech but also in folk humor and poetry, crude or skillful in dialect, uneven in tone and treatment, they constantly reward one with earthy imagery, salty phrase, and sensitive detail.” Works Progress Administration for the District of Columbia, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves (Washington, D.C., 1941), viii–x. J U L Y 2 0 0 8 191 American folklore who used craftiness to outsmart his adversaries and deference to achieve influence and sway. Those who have taken Washington’s “conventional public utterances,” he went on to explain , “as evidence of a simple mind have underestimated the man. He manipulated platitudes as though they were checkers in the game of life, sometimes crowning platitude on platitude to increase their force. His aim was not intellectual clarity, but power. His genius was that of stratagem.”2 Perhaps nowhere is Washington’s genius better exemplified than in his autobiographical work. Shortly after he rose to prominence in 1895, Booker T. Washington set about publishing two different accounts of his life story. Autobiography, he believed, gave him an opportunity to spread his philosophy of industrial education, thrift, and progressive social reform. To that end, the principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute employed two separate ghostwriters to assist him in the work, two copyeditors to oversee the proofs, and two publishing firms who commanded different segments of the book industry. In true Washingtonian fashion, the Wizard, as many of his contemporaries dubbed him, had two separate audiences in mind when he decided to write. In 1900, The Story of My Life and Work appeared in print. It was written primarily for rural, southern African American readers. Less than one year later, Doubleday, Page, & Co. published Washington’s Up from Slavery. It was written largely for urban , northern whites.3 2 W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an...

Lincoln, Race, and Slavery Before 1858: The Key Documents

Typically, students learn about Abraham Lincoln's views and policies regarding slavery and race as they were formulated after his emergence on the national stage during and after his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858 and especially during his presidency. Lincoln, however, stated on a number of occasions that he had always hated slavery. This teaching strategy focuses on the years before the Lincoln Douglas debates and on his public utterances on slavery and race, beginning with his first public statement in March 1837, when he was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives. His private views, as Michael Ryan-Kessler suggests, had a much longer history than that. One might ask: How did Lincoln, born in a slave state and raised in a southern midwestern culture that was virulently racist, emerge so differently from most of those with whom he grew up? And why Stephen Douglas, a native of Vermont, never publicly challenged the morality of slavery?