Young Clerk Research Articles

Unions, Strikes, Shaw (Unions, Strikes, Shaw: “The Capitalism of the Proletariat.”)

Unions, Strikes, Shaw (Unions, Strikes, Shaw: “The Capitalism of the Proletariat.”)

Proses Perceraian Dari Perkawinan Yang Tidak Terdaftar Di Pengadilan Agama Kelas IB Pariaman

This article aims to find out the factors that cause unregistered marriages, the process, and the legal consequences of divorce from marriages that have been legalized at the Religious Court class IB Pariaman. The problem is focused on divorce from unregistered marriages which is a real problem in society, especially in the area of the Religious Courts of Pariaman. To approach this problem, the research method used in this article is sociological juridical, namely field studies to obtain primary data in the field of law which will be analyzed with laws and regulations related to the divorce process in marriages that are not registered at the Pariaman religious court class IB. The data was collected through in-depth interviews with related parties, such as the young clerk of the legal division of the Class IB Pariaman religious court. In this in-depth interview, the questions were used as an interview guide and the mobile phone was used as a voice recorder during the interview and analyzed in a descriptive analysis where the research did not only provide an overview but also wrote down and reported an object that became a legal event which would draw general conclusions in the case. researched. This study concludes that the legal consequences that result in divorce from a marriage that has been entered into are in terms of child custody, such as losing the right to have a loss certificate, and in terms of inheritance, such as the wife not receiving inheritance rights from her husband.

Postcolonial Modernism and the Camera Eye: Eliot Elisofon's Photographs of African Art

Postcolonial Modernism and the Camera Eye:Eliot Elisofon's Photographs of African Art Emily Hyde (bio) 1959: The Atlantic magazine devotes its April issue to "Africa South of the Sahara." Articles on the politics of decolonization frame a large number of contributions on art and culture. A short story by Chinua Achebe appears alongside the work of Nadine Gordimer, Tom Mboya, Léon Damas, Léopold Sédar-Senghor, Amos Tutuola, and David Diop. "The Sacrificial Egg" is Achebe's first story published in the United States, and its timing supports the US release of his novel Things Fall Apart. Unlike that classic novel, the story begins in a recognizably modern Nigeria, with a young clerk named Julius Obi sitting alone in a colonial shipping office, gazing at his typewriter. But The Atlantic upstages this narrative by suspending a dark ovoid shape with curling horns above the title and author information, its square eye sockets emptying out onto a yellow block of color on the page behind it (fig. 1). It is a photograph of an Ogoni mask, and it is credited to Eliot Elisofon's 1958 book The Sculpture of Africa.1 In fact, photographs from Elisofon's book hang above all the fiction and poetry published in this issue of The Atlantic. This photograph does not, it almost goes without saying, illustrate Achebe's story, in which no mask explicitly appears, or the ethnic background of the author, which is Igbo. The connection appears to be purely visual: the mask is egg-shaped. Elisofon's photographs of African art appeared on the pages of American magazines throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, and as these photographs circulated in the mass media they illustrated two different histories. First, they were intended to enhance American understanding of the African continent, its [End Page 607] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Chinua Achebe, "The Sacrificial Egg," The Atlantic 203, no. 4 (1959): 61. From The Atlantic. © 1959 The Atlantic Monthly Group, LLC. All rights reserved. Used under license. history, and its peoples during the era of decolonization. But because Elisofon also reanimated early-twentieth-century ideas of modernist primitivism, his photographs simultaneously illustrated modernism's midcentury institutionalization in the United States. Understanding Elisofon's photographs in this period thus requires historicizing them on the news-driven pages of LIFE, The Atlantic, and THINK (IBM's in-house magazine). As Serge Guilbaut has memorably put it, New York stole the idea of modern art from Paris in this period, and Eliosofon's photographs of African art were part of this appropriation: against the backdrop of African decolonization, they reenacted modernist primitivism for American consumption in the mass media.2 As a result, though they appear to be very much of their midcentury time period, Elisofon's photographs [End Page 608] in fact counteract the progressive temporality underlying American reporting on the emergence of new, independent nations in Africa and their relation to the ascendant global power of the United States. On the whole, then, this article is about tangled temporalities: there are multiple pasts in the midcentury present of Elisofon's photographs; there is an inexorable sense of progress alongside clear evidence of stasis; there is repetition to the point of anachronism; yet there is very little of that form of temporality we call the future. For example, the photograph of the Ogoni mask that illustrated Achebe's story in The Atlantic was doubly anachronistic. Denying contemporaneity to Julius Obi and his typewriter, this primitivizing illustration is a throwback to a premodern African past, but only by way of early twentieth-century European modernism.3 Elisofon hits the double beat of this retrogressive temporality in his lengthy illustrated essay, "African Sculpture," which immediately precedes Achebe's story. There he argues that only wan imitations of traditional African art forms were currently being made, in 1959, mostly for tourists.4 But he also argues that traditional African art is only recognizable as Art because of its discovery by early twentieth-century modernist painters in Paris. Modernist primitivism relies on an origin story set in 1907, when Picasso encountered African masks at the Trocadéro Ethnography Museum in Paris, then renounced...

METODE PENGASUHAN ANAK PASANGAN PERNIKAHAN DINI (STUDI KASUS TIGA KELUARGA PERNIKAHAN DINI DI KECAMATAN PONJONG KABUPATEN GUNUNGKIDUL DAERAH ISTIMEWA YOGYAKARTA)

Abstract This research was conducted with the aim of describing the childcare methods carried out by three early marriage families in Ponjong District, Gunungkidul Regency. The background of this research is the existence of government policy in Law Number 1 of 1974 article 7 paragraph (1) concerning Marriage which explains the minimum age limit for marriage so that the benefit of the household is achieved, but the phenomenon of early marriage is still happening in the District of Ponjong Regency Gunungkidul, even able to maintain the household and be able to carry out childcare duties at a young age if reviewed psychologically immature mentally, emotionally, psychologically and physically. This type of research is a qualitative research with a type of case study research (field research). Determination of informants by purposive sampling. The subjects of this study were three families of early marriage, children of early marriage partners (if they were able to provide information) and the Young Clerk of the Wonosari Religious Court Law. Then, the object of research is the method of parenting early marriage partners. Data collection techniques used were observation, interviews, and documentation. While the data analysis techniques used are data reduction, data presentation and conclusion making. The results showed that the methods carried out by early marriage couples included exemplary education methods, methods through habituation, education methods through advice and dialogue, as well as education methods through the awarding and punishment. The three early marriage families apply a number of collaborative methods for parenting. Keywords: childcare methods, early marriage.

Newton Arvin and the Police: Contexts for The Scarlet Professor

Newton Arvin and the Police: Contexts for <i>The Scarlet Professor</i>

Putting the &lt;em&gt;Lydia&lt;/em&gt; to Sea: The Material Economy of Shipping in Colonial Philadelphia

Compelling portraits of merchant networks that knit together far-flung parts of the Atlantic world tell us only part of the story about the central role of commerce in the early modern era. It is also imperative for historians to explore how the far-reaching communications and markets that merchants knit together depended on the local material economies of port cities—the daily, personal, and local exchanges taking place at all social and occupational levels. This article looks at how one merchant in Philadelphia made myriad pragmatic choices that became essential for his rise from a young clerk to a successful merchant. It situates him among the dozens of counting rooms and retail shops nested in the dense crush of properties along the city's waterfront, where face-to-face negotiations of payments due, orders of goods, and deliveries of ship stores provided the sinews connecting merchants to Atlantic peoples near and far. In the intimate local surroundings of Philadelphia, city merchants procured marine insurance, created markets for bills of exchange, shared knowledge about prices and consumer preferences, built ships and outfitted them for distant voyages—in short, their great transatlantic networks of commerce depended on endless acts of pragmatic local negotiation.

The voice of the system

Abstract The disjunction of the visual and auditory elements of the film creates an impression that voices are totally independent of their sources. The dominant voice of a young clerk contrasted with calm, mumbling utterances of old petitioners becomes an acousmêtre and a representation of the system.

Stevens’ Everyday Trips in Ideas of Order

Stevens’ Everyday Trips in Ideas of Order Bart Eeckhout One of the better reasons for organizing academic conferences is that they allow people with special interests to meet and make serendipitous discoveries. So it was that Bonnie Costello and I ran into each other in the picturesque English seaside town of Brighton, late in August last year, when we found ourselves at the annual conference organized by the Modernist Studies Association. The topic of the conference was “Everydayness and the Event” and I had been invited to join a session entitled “Poetic Journeys into the Everyday.” Bonnie had seen the title of my paper, “Reverse Traveling: Wallace Stevens’ Everyday Trips Abroad during the 1930s.” She was eager to hear more as she was herself preparing to give a lecture at the Annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash on “Traveling with Wallace Stevens.” Our brief conversation sufficed to make us understand we were coming at our shared subject in very different ways. And so we decided to exchange drafts and run both essays back to back in the Journal. As a result, we are able to offer our readers a little treat to launch this issue: a double opportunity to travel around the world with Stevens—by train, boat, or imaginary balloon. Our Art Editor, Alexis Serio, chimed in beautifully by devising a cover image inspired by Stevens’ own imaginary-artistic travels to Rome. There is something obviously ironic and playful to this joint enterprise, since we tend to associate Stevens so much with the interiority and socially withdrawn quality of the lyricist’s meditative mind, not with any reportage about travels in the world. Our main image of Stevens is that of the elderly writer who composed the lion’s share of his poetry between the ages of 55 and 75 while living a life for which he almost deserved the nickname of “the hermit of Hartford.” Indeed, the association between Stevens and a homegrown brand of American writing in the tradition of such notorious stick-at-homes as Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson is made inevitable by the biographical fact that he never once traveled to Europe. In the end, he quipped that he had “never been closer to Europe than Staten Island” (qtd. in Brazeau 201). To be sure, Stevens did leave his country on two occasions, going on a seven-week hunting trip to British Columbia as a young clerk in a New York law office, and twenty [End Page 7] years later taking an elaborate cruise with his wife through the Caribbean. In his early years at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, he was also forced to travel a lot domestically for his job, as Bonnie reminds us at greater length in her essay. And in the 1920s and early ’30s, he was in the habit of making his well-known winter visits to Florida, most famously to Key West. But all of this is less than one would expect from a man who, for several decades, had the financial means to travel, had a large network of foreign correspondents, and had received his artistic formation as a cosmopolitan New Yorker, typically drawn to cultural products from anywhere around the world. Because we are so used to summing up this critical arc of Stevens’ entire “career,” we tend to forget that Stevens did not in the least plan his life to turn out the way it did. In “‘The Switzerland of the Mind’: Stevens’ Invention of Europe,” George Lensing retraces some of the early stages of the poet’s adult life. He usefully reminds us that soon after finishing his studies at Harvard, during his first year in New York City, Stevens was already making a note in his journal, saying, “I hope to get to Paris next summer—and mean to if I have the money” (qtd. in Holly Stevens 90). During his stretched-out engagement to Elsie Kachel, he liked to indulge in elaborate daydreams about pan-European travels, for instance in the following letter he sent her from New York: Bernard Shaw has just brought out a new thing in London called “The Admirable Bashville.” . . . Wouldn’t it be nice to live...

Fandom Before “Fan”

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA These are interesting times for reception theorists, especially those who study fandom, an extraordinary form of audiencing that includes everything from emotional attachment to performers to obsessive collecting. In particular, the nature of fandom’s extraordinariness has changed a great deal in the past several decades, thanks to the advent of the Internet and digital production. Previously “abnormal” fan practices have not only become more and more accepted but also explicitly supported and nurtured by new technologies and reframed by niche marketing. We live in an age when “following” a stranger because you “like” her or him represents a harmless form of networking. As Twitter encourages us, “Follow your interests.”1 What has fascinated me most, however, is not the specific quality of these shifts but rather the ways they have begun to shape our understanding of fandom as a historical phenomenon. When I talk to my students about fandom, they often marvel at what it must have been like before the World Wide Web. “How did fans find out about things?,” they ask. “Where did fan communities exist before Facebook?” As an ethnographer who did extensive fieldwork with popular music fans in the late 1980s and early 1990s—not that long ago—I was at first amused by the shaping the history of enthusiastic audiences Fandom Before “Fan”

Justice Hugo Black and His Law Clerks: Match-Making and Match Point

Justice Hugo Black and His Law Clerks: Match-Making and Match Point TODD C. PEPPERS* Introduction What greater or better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth? —Marcus Tullius Cicero1 Much has been written about Supreme Court law clerks and the important role that they play in assisting the Justices processing the work of our nation’s highest court. While law clerks in the late nineteenth century pri­ marily served the role of stenographers and research assistants, today these young men and women—all recent graduates of elite law schools—work in close quarters with their in­ dividual Justices, reviewing petitions for writ ofcertiorari, preparing the Justices for oral ar­ gument, and assisting in the drafting of legal opinions. At the end of their clerkships, the clerks find that they are faced with a dizzying selection ofjob opportunities—from teaching at a top law school to becoming a highly com­ pensated associate at an elite law firm (withthe attendant six-figure signing bonus) or working for the federal government. As a scholar who has studied law clerks for the last decade, I have found that often the most fascinating aspect of the “clerkship institution” lies not in the job duties or subse­ quent professional achievements oflaw clerks, but in the personal bonds that form between a small handful of the Justices and their clerks. While the modern Supreme Court Justice is authorized to hire four law clerks each Term (the Chief Justice can employ five clerks), in the early decades of the twentieth century, the JUSTICE HUGO BLACK AND HIS LAW CLERKS 49 Justices hired only one or two clerks per Term. The combination ofa smaller staff, fewer lawclerk responsibilities, and home offices for the Justices meant that the clerks had the rare opportunity to interact with their Justices in less formal and more relaxed settings. Thus, we have wonderful stories of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and his “legal secretaries,” who balanced the Justice’s checkbook, accompa­ nied him on sightseeing jaunts, and reveled in the Magnificent Yankee’s “tall talk” of the Civil War. Or tales of Felix Frankfurter and his clerks, with whom he fiercely debated the finer points of art, music, and politics while embracing them as surrogate sons. Even the poor souls who clerked for James McReynolds have left behind invaluable glimpses into the personal life of their employer, such as the recently published diary of former law clerk John Knox and his captivating account of suf­ fering through a year with the grouchiest man to have sat on the Supreme Court Bench. After reviewing the law-clerk files in the personal papers ofJustice Hugo Black, as well as talking with his children and his former law clerks, it became quickly apparent that the Black law clerks were also fortunate enough to have enjoyed a warm and lasting relationship with their Justice. While a few former Black law clerks have written about their working relationship between the Justice and his law clerks, this article briefly discusses two main elements ofthe clerkship experience that have not been fully fleshed out: the Justice’s role as an Alabama-born Pygmalion to a generation of young clerks and the important role that tennis played in the clerkship experience. Mr. Justice Black and His Clerks Like other Justices on the Supreme Court, Jus­ tice Black hired law clerks to assist with the work of the Court. Each year, his law clerks would assist in reviewing cert, petitions, do­ ing legal research, and editing opinion drafts. These job duties, however, were only one di­ mension ofthe Black clerkship. As the Justice himself once remarked to a law-clerk appli­ cant, “I don’t pick my law clerks for what they can do for me, I pick my law clerks for what I can do for them.”1 And what the Justice could “do for them” extended beyond legal training. Hugo Black, Jr. explains that his father took a personal in­ terest in all ofhis young clerks and “attempted to change their lives.”2 “[H]e was truly inter­ ested and concerned about the way they con­ ducted their private lives as well as the way...

The Play and Meaning of Courtoisie in Romanz de un Chivaler et de sa Dame et de un Clerk

The Play and Meaning of Courtoisie in Romanz de un Chivaler et de sa Dame et de un Clerk Carol Parrish Jamison Romanz de un Chivaler et de sa Dame et de un Clerk is pervaded by ambiguous generic cues that have long been problematic for scholars attempting to classify it. The level of the language and the status of the characters are consistent with the romance tradition, yet the lover's triangle and ultimate focus on adultery are in keeping with the fabliau. The thirteenth-century manuscript containing the text, Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 50, is a miscellany that offers a variety of genres and thus few external clues about the genre of this particular tale. The language of the manuscript is Anglo-Norman, and the status of the handful of Anglo-Norman texts sometimes classified as fabliaux is itself a subject of debate.1 For these reasons, some fabliau [End Page 1] scholars only reluctantly classify Romanz as fabliau, while others omit it altogether.2 The most immediate problem with classifying the text generically, however, is the occurrence of the term "romanz" in the title, a designation that some translators choose to omit altogether. Melissa Furrow argues against an omission of this term; she takes issue with the theory that generic distinctions in the Middle Ages were not meaningful, claiming instead that "we need to make allowance for the possibility that [the term romanz] might be both purposeful and playful."3 Furrow limits her short discussion to the title of this work alone, urging manuscript readers to take heed of "the occasional use of generic terms in manuscript contexts."4 As Furrow notes, the title is indeed significant to a reading of the narrative. A playful tale is insinuated by the reference to the clerk in the title, indicating that he is a key player and rendering oxymoronic the reference to "romanz."5 However, the title is equally meaningful in juxtaposing the terms "romanz" and "clerk," an indication of a liminal text that might rework or expand upon conventional romance traditions. In fact, Romanz de un Chivaler et de sa Dame et de un Clerk is a liminal text, one in which romance conventions appear alongside fabliau conventions and are thus called into question. Despite its courtly emphasis, the essential plot of Romanz de un Chivaler et de sa Dame et de un Clerk is typical of the fabliau genre. The cast of characters includes a well-esteemed knight, his beautiful wife, a demoiselle who is the wife's lady in waiting and also the sister of the knight, and a lascivious young clerk. The plot unfolds in typical fabliau fashion as the young clerk falls in love with the wife. Meanwhile, the demoiselle becomes enamored with the clerk but does not reveal her love. After the clerk claims to succumb to lovesickness, the demoiselle convinces the [End Page 2] wife to allow her to visit the clerk, to see if she can offer him any relief. When the clerk reveals that he is in love with the wife, the demoiselle is disappointed but relays the message to the wife, who expresses concern for the welfare of the clerk and visits him herself. After some persuasion, the clerk convinces the wife to succumb to a sexual liaison.6 The subsequent climactic actions are often considered the most important textual elements in the fabliau, the more bawdy elements belonging to those tales deemed most typical to the genre. Despite the bawdy sexual situation, Romanz de un Chivaler et de sa Dame et de un Clerk is particularly rich in courtly details and lacks obscene language. Most intriguing in this work is the repetition of the actual term courtoisie, which appears in various forms six times in the course of the text. The historian Maurice Keen defines courtoisie in simple terms as "manners fitting to a court."7 Kathryn Gravdal explains that the term courtois evolves to encompass—in addition to appropriate courtly manners—generosity, good looks, and piety. These traits are possessed inherently by the noble characters that populate the medieval romance and serve to distinguish nobility from peasantry.8 In the fabliau tradition, however, characters who...

International Law and Human Plurality in the Shadow of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin

Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin were witnesses to the twentieth-century. They both experienced the dislocating transformations on the European continent as a consequence of two world wars, lost their states as well as their homes in this process, narrowly escaped the clutches of the Nazi extermination machine, and made it to the New World through sheer luck and fortuitous circumstance. Their thought is marked by the cataclysms of the last century, and they have in turn emerged as indispensable interlocutors for all of us in understanding this past. Arendt and Lemkin were contemporaries and there are astonishing parallels in their early biographies. She was born in Hannover in 1906 (d. 1975) and grew up in Koenigsberg in East Prussia. After WWI, the Polish Corridor was created and cut East Prussia and Koengisberg off from the rest of Weimar. In 1945, Koenigsberg was occupied by the Soviets and renamed “Kaliningrad.” Lemkin was born in Bezwodene in 1900, then part of Tsarist Russia. Between the two World Wars (1918–1939) Bezwodene became part of Poland, and today is Bezvodna in Belarus. When Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo in the Spring of 1933 and was forced to flee to Paris via Prague with her mother, she had been carrying out research in the Prussian State Library at the request of Kurt Blumenfeld on anti-Semitic measures undertaken by Nazi nongovernmental organizations, business associations and professional clubs to exclude Jewish members. Her Zionist friend, Kurt Blumenfeld in turn, was preparing to present this material at the 18th Zionist Congress. During those very same years, Ralph Lemkin was a young clerk in the Polish State Prosecutor’s office who had been collecting documents on Nazi war legislation, particularly those affecting cultural, linguistic, religious activities and artifacts of cultural and religious groups. In 1933, he had sent a paper to a League of Nations conference in Madrid, in which he proposed that “the crimes of barbarity and vandalism be considered as new offences against the law of nations.”1 In 1939, he fled from Poland and reached Stockholm, where he continued to do extensive research on Nazi occupation laws throughout Europe. On April 18, 1941, he arrived in the United States via Japan. That very same year, Arendt and her second husband, Heinrich Bluecher, arrived in New York via Portugal. Yet in contrast to Arendt, who acquired world-wide fame after her arrival in the USA with her many works and university appointments, Lemkin, after the general acclaim he received with the passage of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations in 1948, fell into obscurity and died a lonely death, destitute and neglected in New York in 1959. It is certainly fascinating to speculate whether these Jewish refugees, who were caught up in the great dislocations of their time, ever met one another in some location or association in the United States. We just don’t know. What is even more astonishing is the lack of any discussion in Hannah Arendt’s work of Lemkin’s great book on the concept of genocide,2 nor any evidence that Lemkin knew Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, which certainly was the most powerful historical documentation and philosophical analysis in the early 1950s of the unprecedentedly murderous character of the Nazi regime. Arendt and Lemkin appear to

Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History

JLn the mid-nineteenth century, the New York Tribune's Horace Greeley exhorted young American men bereft of family and friends to go west to build their homes and make their fortunes. In 1859, the journalist traveled to the region to observe the fruits of his advice. He did not necessarily find there what he had hoped. On the Great Plains en route to the Rocky Mountains, for example, he learned hundreds of prospectors had recently gone bust at the Colorado gold diggings, deserted the region in droves, and consequently faced unemployment and other sufferings. Yet Greeley reported his encounter with only one such individual, a young clerk with whom he had supped at Station 9 of the Pike's Peak Express and, who having frozen his feet on the winter journey out, had had enough of gold-hunting, and was going home to his parents in Indiana. . The morning following Greeley's repast with the clerk, and only after they had departed in opposite directions, the New Yorker learned something astonishing about his new acquaintance: I was apprised by our conductor, exclaimed Greeley, that said clerk was a woman!1 This otherwise terse anecdote contains complex nineteenth-century ideas about sex and gender and their relationship to the American West as both place and process.

Theodore B. Wilcox: Captain of Industry and Magnate of the China Flour Trade, 1884-1918

DanielJ.Mei?ner Theodore ?. Wilcox Captain ofIndustry andMagnateofthe China Flonr Trade,1884-1918 The situation now awaits theman. Another Governor C.C. Washburn [who] would lead theAmerican millers to a glorious trade conquest, beside which the achieve ments of thepast would he dwarfed into insignificance. "There is the east; there is theOrient," should be the watch-word of theAmerican miller. . . . What iswanted today in themilling trade isjust one largeman. . . . ? The NorthwesternMiller, 18971 ^^^P^hat "one large man" eager to mount the podium of en trepreneurial greatness was already prepared to accept one of themost singular commercial challenges of the era: cultiva tion of the tremendous flour markets of China. Theodore Burney Wilcox?an ambitious New England bank tellerwho had become an aggressive Portland businessman ? had systematically built his flour milling company into one of themost successful enterprises on the Pacific Coast. Like other great "boomers" of the Gilded Age, however, his goal was not one merely of success but also of empire. He envisioned a vast milling conglomerate that would draw upon the boundless wheat sup plies ofOregon's Willamette Valley and the Palouse in easternWashington to provide flour for the insatiable millions of Asia. Given Wilcox's busi ness acumen, tenacity, and temperament, few of his contemporaries enter tained any doubt that he would ultimately achieve his objective. 518 OHQ vol. 104, no. 4 ? 2003 Oregon Historical Society OHS neg.,OrHi 24259 i^&% f t**?****?*^ Great stockpiles ofbagged wheat testify to the productivity ofOregonfarmers who supplied themills of Theodore Wilcox s flour empire. The path to such lofty aspirations began inAgawam, Massachusetts, where Wilcox was born on July8,1856, toHenry and SarahWilcox. "Thede," as he was known as a child, grew up in a hard-working, middle-class fam ily. At theageoffive, he lostthethumband indexfinger ofhis right hand in a hay-cutter accident. Resilient and undaunted, he overcame his im Meissner, Theodore B.Wilcox 519 pairment by learning towrite equally well with either hand. After gradu ating from public high school, he entered thework force as an office boy in the Hampton National Bank ofWestfield, Massachusetts. The position did not suit him well. Ambitious even as a teenager,Wilcox sought chal lenge and responsibility but was resigned by his youth and handicap to running errands and sweeping floors. An early opportunity to advance arosewhen theprincipal tellerfellillandWilcox volunteeredtofill the position. He demonstrated to hesitant bank administrators that despite his injured hand he was able to count bills quickly and accurately, and he proved so competent at the task that he was promoted to clerk, a position he held for the next five years.2 In 1877,Asahel Bush II, co-director of the Ladd & Bush banking firm in Salem, Oregon, was traveling on the East Coast in search of a talented, adventurous young man to fill a vacant position in the firm's Portland bank. When Bush met Wilcox at theHampton Bank, he was so impressed by the young clerk's "enterprise and ability" that he immediately offered him the job.3 Wilcox accepted without hesitation, and at the age of twenty two set sail for Portland - a small town an entire continent away that offered precisely the mix of stability, challenge, and prospects that he deemed necessary to fulfillhis own potential.4 Wilcox settled in rooms above the bank and started working the teller window. His efficiency and sound judgment soon drew the attention of the bank president, William Ladd, who began seeking his advice on business investment opportunities. LikeWilcox in temperament, Ladd had been an adventuresome New England farmer,who in 1851at the age of twenty-five had set sail for the West Coast tomake his fortune ? not in the rugged gold fields ofCalifornia like somany others but in supplying miners head ing out from Portland.5 Selling everything from shaving soap to blasting powder, he quickly expanded his small business into a thrivingmercantile enterprise.6 In 1852, he formed theMessrs. Ladd & Tilton Company with San Francisco merchant and boyhood friend Charles Tilton; the follow ing year, they erected the firstbrick building inPortland near the corner of Front and Stark. As Portland grew, the company expanded; and in 1859, the partners founded the Ladd & Tilton Bank, capitalized with $50,000 of...

The London YMCA: A Haven of Masculine Self-Improvement and Socialization for the Late-Victorian and Edwardian Clerk

During the late-Victorian and Edwardian era British clerks were under considerable strain to construct a positive masculine identity and experience. Their middle-class contemporaries overwhelmingly portrayed them as marginal figures and, to some degree, clerks’ work and home experiences corresponded to this portrayal. Clerks were, however, by no means passive victims and sought to improve their occupational, social, and masculine experience within fin-de-siècle society and counter the widespread satirical depiction of them as emasculated “little men.” The London YMCA offered not only a number of services of a self-improving, fraternal, and associational nature to young clerks to better their material, social, and masculine conditions but clerks themselves impelled the YMCA to offer services that addressed their own distinct lower-middle-class needs.

Latin American Dictatorship in Erich Hackl's Novel Sara und Simón and Miguel Asturias's El Señor Presidente

When Austrian writer Erich Hackl's novel Sara und Simon was published in 1995, the truth about the military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 was not widely known. The majority ofthe Argentine military had notyet admitted that approximately thirty thousand people had been made to disappear, among them children as well as adults. In order to understand Hackl's intention in writing this novel it is important to know that, until that time, the majority ofArgentines continued to support the military's declaration that the reports ofthese disappearances were pure fiction: Den Aussagen der uberlebenden Opfer hatte die Mehrheit der Argentinier kaumBeachtung geschenkt.Die Mutterund Grosmuttervon Verschwundenen, die jeden Donnerstag vor dem Prasidentensitz auf der Plaza de Mayo fur die Herausgabe ihrer Kinder demonstrieren, nannten viele nur 'locas,' Verruckte. (Mein Gefangnis 200). The majority ofArgentines hardly paid attention to the statements ofsurviving victims. The mothers and grandmothers ofthe vanished were called crazy, because they were demonstrating every Thursday in front of the Presidential Place for the return oftheir children.1 Once the dictatorship came to an end, the failure of the courts to prosecute military officials intensified the people's reluctance to accept what had happened under their rule. After military tribunals in 1985 rejected the cases against the generals, the civil courts took them over. Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky has described the trial: The members of the military juntas who had made the entire society tremble untiljust a few years before rose respectfully to their feet on the order ofa young clerk each time the members ofthe federal chamber that was judging them returned to the courtroom. But all nine denied having ordered the use ofmethods that were injurious to human rights. They did not acknowledge the facts and accused the concentration camp survivors of fabricating their testimony about a descent into hell. They even suggested mat theirjudges were also part ofa sinister conspiracy against the virtuous guardians ofthe nation. Ifany mistake had been made, it was the responsibility oftheir subordinates. (97) Nevertheless, between April and September of that year, nine highranking military officials were forced to resign. Moreover, after listening to the testimonies of the victims, the civil judges condemned the two highest-ranking generals of the army, Videla and Massera,2 to life in

John Skelton, Thomas More, and the 'lost' history of the early Reformation in England

John Skelton, Thomas More, and the 'lost' history of the early Reformation in England* At some time during 1528 the poet John Skelton and the lawyer and politician Sir Thomas More turned their literary attentions to the same subject, the trial for heresy of a young scholar, Thomas Bilney, which had taken place during the last week of November and the first week of December, 1527. Both writers attacked Bilney in print, although neither named him outright, in texts which justified his prosecution and eventual recantation, More in a prose work, the Dialogue concerning Heresies (published in 1529), Skelton in a much neglected verse diatribe, the Replycacion Agaynst Certayne Yong Scolers Abjured ofLate (published by Pynson, almost certainly in 1528). What could have brought about this unlikely coincidence of interest? William Nelson, writing earlier this century, seems to provide the most plausible answer with the suggestion that Skelton and More were consciously writing 'in tandem' as two elements in 'an officially inspired, concerted, attempt to destroy the heretical movement in England with the weapon of Eloquence'.1 But, if this was indeed the case, it only raises further related questions. W h y should 'officialdom' (whether in the form of Cardinal Wolsey, the de facto head of the Church in England, Cuthbert Tunstal, the Bishop of London, or even Henry VIII himself) have focused its attention upon the fate of one lone scholar who had, after all, already renounced the heretical beliefs alleged against him and done penance before the Cross at St Paul's on 8 December 1527? W h y should they have felt that commissioning More and Skelton to attack Bilney would have the effect of 'destroy[ing] the heretical movement in England'? And what significance might this have for our understanding of the early years of the Reformation in England? What follows will suggest answers to each of these questions in turn. * A version of this paper was originally given at the 'Piety and Dissent in Late Medieval England' session of the 25th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan, in May, 1990. I am grateful to the session organisers, Dr John J. McGavin and Dr Brian J. Golding of the Wessex Medieval Centre, for the opportunity to air these ideas in that forum; and to the Department of English, University of Queensland, for a grant towards the cost of attending that conference. Thanks are also due to an anonymous Parergon reader, whose helpful comments have helped to clarify a number of the ideas contained in the paper. 1 W . Nelson, John Skelton, Laureate, Columbia, 1939, pp. 217-19. The best treatment of Skelton's Replicacion is V.J. Scattergood's 'Skelton and Heresy', in Early Tudor England, ed. D. Williams, Woodbridge, 1989, pp. 157-70. 76 G. Walker As I have argued elsewhere,2 Bilney's case and the problems it created were a product both of the peculiar character of the defendant himself and the circumstances under which he was brought to trial. Had Bilney been tried even three years earlier, his case would have aroused far less concern than it did in the final months of 1527. For in 1526-27 the minds of the ecclesiastical authorities were collectively concentrated upon the question of heresy in a way in which they had not been in previous years. Until that time the heretical problem had largely been confined to scholarly circles and to isolated pockets of practical dissent. What changed things was the publication, in 1526, of William Tyndale's English translation of the N e w Testament with its contentious Lutheran glosses and overtones, which threatened to open up heretical ideas to the unprotected laity, and the discovery of what appeared to be a substantial cell of heretical students at Wolsey's Cardinal College, Oxford, and at Cambridge, in the summer of 1527. So at the very time when it seemed most necessary to combat the spread of heretical ideas, it seemed that the young clerks who would, by and large, have to spearhead the Church's efforts in that direction, were wavering in their loyalties and threatening to exacerbate the problem. Bilney's trial, then, provided the Church with something of...

Visual function of young clerks in a bank

Visual function of young clerks in a bank

The English Language Teaching Program for the Other Americas

One of the most significant guarantees for enduring Pan American unity is the growing interest in the study of the languages of the Americas. Now for the first time the study of French as a second language is being supplanted in the United States by the study of Spanish and Portuguese, and in the other American republics, by the study of English. We in the United States are becoming aware of the life and thought of our neighbors to the South through the medium of their great literary masterpieces, their current publications, and, best of all, through direct communication. Correspondingly, our neighbors are gaining an understanding of us through their increasing familiarity with our language and writings. No interpreter or translator can ever be so effective as this direct contact made possible only by knowledge of another's language. In the United States, few are the wide-awake communities which cannot boast of at least one group of adults who are voluntarily dedicating time and energy to the study of Spanish or Portuguese, whether for economic, political, cultural, or academic reasons. The motive for the study is immaterial. The important thing is that we are acquiring a medium through which we can learn to know our neighbors. In our colleges and universities there is a spontaneous swing from other foreign languages toward Spanish and Portuguese. The study of Portuguese in the United States has increased 187 per cent in one year, while the study of Spanish in Texas, for example, has become a required subject in the curriculum of the elementary schools, where this year 250,000 elementary-school children are receiving instruction in Spanish. Such early training, oriented toward the other Americas as it is, and received during this important formative period of a child's development, is likely to create a lasting interest in the Spanish language and things Latin American. The enthusiasm in the United States for the study of Spanish and Portuguese has its counterpart in the American republics in the widespread and growing interest there in the learning of English. In some countries the study of English is obligatory in the national schools; in others, where the foreign language to be studied is elective, there has been a tremendous shift from French to English. The demand among adults for instruction in English is overwhelming. Like us, the Latin Americans are motivated by various interests: the taxi-driver is looking toward future tourist trade; the dean of the School of Medicine wants to be able to read our medical journals; the student hopes to be eligible for one of the numerous Inter-American scholarships; the young clerk seeks an implement for economic advancement; the literati desire to read Poe and Whitman in the original; the government official has his eye on a post in the United States or a tour of this country; and the young seiorita wants to be able to talk the language of Hollywood or to learn the words of our popular songs. Again the motive is immaterial. The thing that counts is the fact that these neighbors of ours, in learning our language, are

Negro Youth and the Educational Program of the Y.M.C.A.

For ninety-six years the Young Men's Christian Association has promoted a youth program. The outstanding characteristic of this program has been its adaptability. When the Association was organized in the early part of the nineteenth century it was recognized that an important need of young men in the rapidly growing urban centers of England and America was for a medium through which they might get the strength which comes from association to help them continue their religious life amidst the distracting and unChristian influences which surrounded them. Just how real was this need is clearly indicated by the rapid growth of the Movement. Founded by twelve young clerks of drapers' establishments in London in 1844, these associations spread rapidly over England and just eight years later the first Y.M.C.A.s were organized in the United States. What is probably more remarkable is the fact that it was only nine years after the founding of the Y.M.C.A. in London, England, that the first Y.M.C.A. to serve Negro men and boys was organized by Negroes in Washington, D.C.' The principal emphasis in the program of the Y.M.C.A. during these early years was very definitely on evangelism. It had no other purpose than to serve the religious life of young