Strange Death Research Articles

The Experiences of Grief in Bereaved Women Following the Death of Their Husbands During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Qom, Iran: A Phenomenological Study

Background and Objectives: The death of a loved one is one of the most difficult and stressful life events in the world. The effects of death caused by COVID-19 on the mental health of individuals and families are of great importance. This study aims to elucidate the experience of grief in bereaved women following the death of their husbands due to COVID-19 in Qom, Iran. Methods: In this phenomenological study, 12 bereaved women were selected using a purposive sampling method. The information was collected using semi-structured interviews until reaching data saturation. Results: The data analysis led to the extraction of 3 main themes and 10 sub-themes: Complicated grief (ambiguous loss, farewell with no embrace, grieving alone), unconventional grief (strange death, deviation from religious burial customs, virtual mourning), and grief outcome (spiritual experiences, moral panic, social stigma, distrust in healthcare providers). Conclusion: The grief of bereaved women due to the death of their husbands by COVID-19 differs from their mourning for the death caused by other diseases in two aspects. Firstly, according to the majority of women, the cause of death was unclear. This situation intensified their grieving and mourning. Secondly, due to the specific nature of COVID-19 and the necessity of quarantine, they were restricted from having funeral and religious mourning rituals according to the prevalent culture, which resulted in an incomplete mourning process. Gaining spiritual experiences is one positive aspect of grief in women. It is recommended to provide support and care by the healthcare system during pandemics for families, especially bereaved women, to reduce the negative effects of grief.

Letters From Incompleteness

In a series of letters to a faraway lover, an unnamed narrator attempts to make sense of his own internal struggles by fixating on the strange death of Kurt Gödel.

Douglas Murray's The Madness of Crowds

Douglas Murray, the author of The Strange Death of Europe (2017), and The Madness of Crowds (2019; 'expanded and updated edition' in 2020), is one of the leading journalists and authors in Great Britain in the fight of the centre-conservative intellectuals against the 'woke' ideologues. His latest book deals with four of the most controversial issues of today's 'identity ideology': Gay, Women, Race and Trans, showing that such unstable concepts cannot be the solid ground for any serious conversation, or for the social edifice. On the contrary, they are treated in such a way that the danger of totalitarian states is no longer unconceivable; what is more, with the cancel culture of today, it is more likely than not that it will cause a serious backlash in the future, which may reverse some of the advancements of the fight for rights of all kinds.

The Strange Death of Europe Immigration, Identity, Islam

This age created an ever evolving mobility that migration (either voluntary or forced) became a priority issue for policy makers. Therefore, nowadays objective evaluations or constructive analysis are welcome in terms of reflecting both home and host societies’ points. However, in The Strange Death of Europe organized within nineteen chapters, Murray who is also a journalist, aimed to display the changes of migration and their effects by observing (mostly) home societies.

The strange death, ongoing resurrection, and renewed life of John Tyndall

The strange death, ongoing resurrection, and renewed life of John Tyndall

Demagoguery as Pathology: Interpreting European Politics Today

The End of Europe by James Kirchick and The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray evince many of the very same political and discursive pathologies which they successfully diagnose in European politics. Both authors have discovered that Europe’s current situation is as much a result of irresponsible public policies and mismanaged crises as of a decay in European political thinking, a decay manifested in Europe’s ever-more simplistic, anti-deliberative—in a word, demagogic—public discourse. And yet, Europeans of today find themselves in a social, political, and economic crisis in part because they lack the discursive means to recognize and deliberate on the very crisis they are in. The result is a damaging political state of affairs which makes escape from itself nearly impossible—a political pathology. Kirchick and Murray do a fine job of capturing the true character of this discourse in their books, yet they do so by unwittingly reproducing it themselves, thereby revealing the difficulties inherent in reforming a political culture from within.

Books: The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam: A Book for Liberals to Read.

Murray Douglas Bloomsbury , 2018 , PB, 384 pp, £ 8.99 , 978-1472958006 Douglas Murray is a neoconservative journalist who writes for The Spectator . He used to run a think tank, the Centre for Social Cohesion,1 which was later subsumed into another think tank, the Henry Jackson Society. Among other activities, these think tanks feed news stories to tabloid and broadsheet press, contributing to the almost daily anti-immigration headlines that we have had for the last 20 years. He has now written a book about immigration into Europe that has been a bestseller and has been well reviewed by such luminaries as Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks.2 Murray argues that a post-Christian Europe has lost its identity. The current liberal consensus depends on talk about rights, yet rights, he argues, cannot exist unless they are guaranteed by a God who recognises the sacredness of individual life. On its own, a rights-based ethic will simply fail; it …

The strange death of multi-party Britain: the UK General Election of 2017

The UK General Election of 8 June 2017 was one of the most dramatic and unexpected in recent British history. The election was called early and came just a year after the 2016 referendum on Britain...

The Strange Death of Prerogative in England

This paper questions the continued existence of prerogative as a meaningful juridical category within UK constitutional law. It constructs a concept of prerogative out of canonical definitions, themselves instructive but incomplete, at the core of which is the idea of prerogative as a special category of executive power that evokes a special authority to which other political agents ought to defer. In light of recent prerogative cases, the paper advances two possibilities. A moderate reading suggests that prerogative has now become a special category of executive power that may evoke a special authority to which the court may in appropriate cases defer. A stronger reading advances the idea that prerogative is no longer a special category, but rather an inchoate set of executive capacities to which deference in general terms ought not to be given. It concludes by suggesting that we need to update our conceptual vocabulary. Just as we now speak about the executive’s general administrative powers of contract and agency, we should prefer the terminology of the general executive powers of government to the vocabulary of royal prerogative.

The strange death of Tory Liverpool: Conservative electoral decline in Liverpool, 1945\u20131996

In modern discourse, Liverpool is a by-word for anti-Tory sentiment, yet the city has not always been so inhospitable for the Conservatives. From the mid-18th century until the 1970s, the Conservatives dominated the city council and often held over half of Liverpool’s parliamentary constituencies. Whilst popular opinion ascribes Conservative decline in Liverpool to Margaret Thatcher, Conservative Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, it began a decade before Thatcher gained power. This article argues that Conservative decline in Liverpool was due to the increasing inability of socialisation to create new Conservative voters, coupled with dissatisfaction with the Heath government and a rejection of unresponsive local party machines. The Liberal Party, through their use of pavement politics, were able to exploit these issues. Their 1973 local election victory allowed them to displace the Conservatives as the main opposition to Labour in most of the city, thus beginning the strange death of Tory Liverpool.

The Strange Death of the Law Merchant

The Strange Death of the Law Merchant

Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

The strange death of number controls in England: paradoxical adventures in higher education market making

The paper analyses the impact of a higher education (HE) funding mechanism, the ‘High Grades’ policy, introduced as part of a student number control regime in England that was introduced in 2012/13 and withdrawn after only two years. This marked the end of an experiment in market making based on quality and price within a fixed student number cap. The paper analyses the impact of policy in key areas of institutional behaviour, which, taken together, illustrates why the specific HE market mechanism failed, and how longer term marketisation is affecting the different institution types in the sector in ways inimical to autonomy, equity and social justice. The paper concludes that the policy failed due to an overreliance on ideologically driven policy levers that failed to reflect the subtlety and nuance of the English HE market.

Andrew Lang and Scottish Historiography: Taking on Tradition

The career and posthumous reputation of Andrew Lang (1844–1912) call into question Scottish historiographical conventions of the era following the death of Sir Walter Scott which foreground the apparent triumph of scientific methods over Romance and the professionalisation of the discipline within a university setting. Taking issue with the premise of notions relating to the Strange Death of Scottish History in the mid-nineteenth century, it is proposed that perceptions of Scottish historiographical exceptionalism in a European context and presumptions of Scottish inferiorism stand in need of re-assessment. By offering alternative readings of the reformation, by uncoupling unionism from whiggism, by reaffirming the role of Romance in ‘serious’ Scottish history, and by disrupting distinctions between whig and Jacobite, the historical works and the surviving personal papers of Andrew Lang cast doubt on many conventional grand narratives and the paradigms conventionally used to make sense of Scottish historiography.

Cosmo Innes and the Defence of the Scotland’s Past, c. 1825–1875 by Richard A. Marsden (review)

Reviewed by: Cosmo Innes and the Defence of the Scotland’s Past, c. 1825–1875 by Richard A. Marsden Peter C. Grosvenor (bio) Richard A. Marsden, Cosmo Innes and the Defence of the Scotland’s Past, c. 1825–1875 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. xi + 365. $144.95/£80. Scotland commanded the world’s attention during the country’s independence referendum in September 2014. Despite the 55 percent to 45 percent rejection of independence, it has retained that attention with the Scottish National Party’s sweep of 56 out of 59 Westminster parliamentary seats in the May 2015 UK general election. [End Page 433] Yet political nationalism of the separatist variety is a recent phenomenon in Scottish history, with no concerted and sustained challenge to the Anglocentric Union until the 1930s and no significant political breakthrough until the late 1960s. There has been a major scholarly effort to explain the relative historical lateness of Scottish nationalism’s emergence. Much of that effort has been concentrated on the historiography of Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when political nationalisms were ascendant elsewhere in Europe, as manifested in the revolutions of 1848. The established view within this scholarship is that Scotland failed to continue Sir Walter Scott’s project of countering the anglicizing forces of the Enlightenment by asserting Scottish distinctiveness within the context of the Union. This is held to be particularly evident in absence of a robust and distinctively Scottish national history, as is argued in Marinell Ash’s seminal text The Strange Death of Scottish History (1980). Dr. Richard A. Marsden, who teaches in the School of History, Archaeology, and Religion at Cardiff University, has entered this historiographical dispute with a meticulous study of Scottish antiquary Cosmo Innes (1798–1874). An advocate and judge by profession, Innes was a prolific editor of Scottish historical documents, with an emphasis on the medieval period, whose work earned considerable respect in both Scotland and England. Marsden’s study places Innes “at the forefront of a small group of antiquaries and historians who sought to make their fellow Scots more aware of and thus more appreciative of their own history” (297). The ideological framework provided by the Enlightenment produced a Scottish historical scholarship in which Scotland’s history was presented as a story of progress from the inferior and more primitive conditions of the past to the celebrated achievements of the present. The past, in other words, was something from which to escape. In particular, the pre-Reformation period was denigrated for a backwardness that was explained in terms of the constraints of Catholicism. Marsden demonstrates that Innes, whose political sympathies lay with the Whigs in politics, worked within this Enlightenment framework. At the same time, he was influenced by the early nineteenth-century resurgence of interest in Scottish distinctiveness and by a resistance to assimilation into English culture. By mid-century, these trends were manifesting themselves in the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, which in turn prefigured the campaign for a Secretary of State for Scotland in the 1870s and, ultimately, the movement for Home Rule within the United Kingdom in the 1880s. While accepting the essential Englishness of the British Constitution, Innes set about establishing the Scots as something more than North Britons. His philosophy of history acknowledged historical specificity: the recognition that different peoples had different needs at different points in the past. Consequently, past institutions and practices were to be presented [End Page 434] not as historical blind alleys but as crucial and indispensible steps towards Scotland’s modernity. In this way, Innes attempted to reconcile progressivist and romanticist historical scholarship. This text is a valuable addition to the study of nineteenth-century Scottish historiography and adds to our understanding of the character of Scottish national awareness and political nationalism. Marsden supplies chapters which examine in detail Innes’s work on Acts of the Scottish Parliament, burgh sources, ecclesiastical cartularies, university records, family papers, manuscript facsimiles, illustrations, and photography. The appendix of “Innes’s Periodical Contributions” will be of particular interest to readers of VPR. Innes was a frequent contributor to periodicals during the 1850s and 1860s. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals attributes to...

The Theory and Trend of Microhistory: History of Medicine

Microhistory, first developed in the 1970s, is the study of the past on a very small scale applying zoom-in methodology. Although microhistory had been introduced to Korea during the late 1990s, there still exists much of misunderstanding and confusions surrounding its nature. Microhistory is to be distinguished from the monographs which deal with petty subject, or from the history of everyday life, and from the case studies. In the field of the history of medicine, there are not many microhistories proper. Several works that claim to utilize microhistorical approach, could not be categorized as microhistory because they carry strong characteristics of macrohistory, specifically those of the disciplinary history or the case studies. The well known work of Harold J. Cook, Trials of an Ordinary Doctor, is not an exception. These studies fail to materialize the critical mind of microhistory that pursues to write a history from below and to restore the agency of obscure people. However, Guido Ruggiero's "The Strange Death of Margarita Marcellini," David Cressy's Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale clearly demonstrate the attributes, characteristics, and methodologies of microhistory. These studies well display the emphasis of microhistory, which reveal the complexity of early modern medicine, and the complicated function of individual relationships within each and every social setting. Recently, some scholars begin to suggest that the rigid definition of microhistory should be softened, arguing that there could be various types of microhistory. The history of medicine has many advantage of aptly applying many virtues of microhistory: the de-territoriality of diseases, the peculiar elements of the training and practice in hospitals and medical schools which call for anthropological survey, and the possibility of utilizing doctor's records that contain the confessions of the patients. Also, medical historians need to expand the scope of medical provider for their analysis, incorporating pseudo-medical doctor. The essential property of microhistory should be found in its request for various new subjects and fresh perspectives.

Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw, The strange death of Labour Scotland, reviewed by Lindsay Paterson

Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw, The strange death of Labour Scotland, reviewed by Lindsay Paterson

Alejandro Quiroga, Football and National Identities in Spain. The Strange Death of Don Quixote

Hace algunos anos, la esfera publica se lleno de profetas y expertos que exaltaron la llegada arrolladora de la era de la globalizacion, llamada a superar las viejas identidades y politicas nacionales en un mundo de mercado mundial, desregulacion financiera, crecimiento economico y sin alternativas al paradigma del libre mercado corporativo. En medio de la lacerante crisis economica que esta sirviendo de coartada para imponer un retroceso de derechos sociales sin precedentes, resulta evidente...

The Strange Death of Dutch Tolerance: The Timing and Nature of the Pessimist Turn in the Dutch Migration Debate

In this article we explain why the Dutch nativist turn from the 1990s onwards was nourished both by the political left and the right and what the role was of specific Dutch developments in secularization and libertarian attitudes

The strange death of UK civil defence education in the 1980s

In the cold war, the United Kingdom government devised a number of public education campaigns to inform citizens about the precautions that they should undertake in the event of a nuclear attack. One such campaign, Protect and Survive, was released to the general public and media in May 1980. The negative publicity this publication received is considered to be a reason why a successor publication was never released despite the increased risk of nuclear attack. Using recently released records from the UK National Archives the paper considers that, aside from this explanation, interlocking institutional objectives, rather than simply inertia, provide an explanation for this hiatus.