Jacques Aymar's spectacular feat of detection made him an instant celebrity; and it immediately sparked a huge controversy. The reason for the dispute centered around the fact that Aymar had tracked down the killers with a divining rod, a forked stick usually used in the dowsing trade to find underground springs and ores. The discussion sparked by Aymar's solution to the double murder provides a unique perspective on the creation of public opinion during the early stages of the age of Enlightenment. Several dowsers appeared during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, allowing some continuity to the debate over its validity. During the 1770s, the debate picked up steam again with the appearance of Dauphiné's other famed dowser, Barthelemy Bléton. Bléton received his most active individual support from a minor savant named Pierre Thouvenel.

This is the story of a culture war that pitted two mid-Victorian shibboleths against each other. By the 1840s, Britons prided themselves on their opposition to slavery, and were quickly coming to pride themselves no less on their commitment to free trade. Their insatiable appetite for sugar brought these peculiar British values into tension. Thanks to tariff protection, colonial sugar – “free” sugar after Emancipation in the British West Indies in 1833 – enjoyed a near monopoly on the British market. It lost that protection with the 1846 Sugar Duties Act, which opened the British market to Cuban and Brazilian sugar produced by slaves. Slave sugar poured into Britain while fresh slaves poured into Brazil and Cuba, and the British Caribbean fell into socio-economic turmoil. The plantocracy bitterly charged the imperial government of having abandoned not only them, but the freed slaves as well.Rather than being a simple story of how free trade (and the British consumer) beat abolitionism (and the purported interests of former slaves), this is instead a story of how the free trade v. abolition struggle intersected with several other cultural struggles. One is the struggle between planters and sugar monoculture on the one hand and peasant proprietorship and West Indian freedmen on the other. Another is the struggle between planters' socio-economic paternalism and the Whig-liberal government's doctrinaire commitment to “liberating” the consumer. Yet another is a struggle fought out within metropolitan political ranks: one that pitted those who felt abolition could be reconciled with free trade through armed suppression of the slave trade against those who were committed to pacifism and free trade. These struggles ended in a broad stalemate. Free trade's victory over abolition was not as decisive as it might have first seemed. Rather, a balance emerged between them – the sort of uncomfortable truce that ended so many culture wars in the “Age of Equipoise.”

Chapter 1 sets out to develop the theoretical framework for the book’s undertaking. It outlines a discourse theoretical approach for the critical analysis of normative change which builds specifically, but not exclusively, on the discourse theory developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The chapter argues that Laclau and Mouffe’s concepts of the destabilisation (dislocation) of discourses and their (re)construction through hegemonic struggles, provide useful tools to reconstruct processes of normative change. Moreover, the concepts of discourse and its constitution around a particular nodal point or empty universal are helpful to analyse in detail the ways in which (normative) meaning is produced and temporarily stabilized in relational systems of signification. The chapter also fleshes out the concept of the power and productivity of discourses which is central for a critical inquiry into the performance of social meanings. It shows how to question the empirical validity of social reality and examine the ways in which discourses produce one and simultaneously repress specific interpretations of the social world

Local authorities retained influence as new regimes emerged to create and implement housing policy in the local environment. This chapter looks at some of the main developments in this constantly shifting picture. It highlights a few difficulties faced by governments when confronted with economic and market problems and the ramifications of government policy, legislation and finance on local authorities and tenants. The President of the Local Government Board, Christopher Addison, framed the new Housing and Town Planning Act in 1919. Most of the housing legislation passed in the 1920s was designed to meet the general needs of the working classes. The 1935 Housing Act was aimed at addressing the problem of overcrowding. Under the 1952 Housing Act, the licensing system for private builders was relaxed and owner-occupation was encouraged. The 1988 Housing Act, and subsequent policies, represented a fundamental change to the entire structure of local government control over housing.

The introduction lays out the Korean context, the ethnographic moment as well as context, and the broader theoretical and methodological context. It situates Levine’s personal arrival in the field in Seoul and mobilises that into an entry point for broader theoretical and methodological conversations around hope, crisis, pragmatism, and democratic transition.

The Renaissance revival of the classics was a revival of the classical sense of plagiarism, which was clear and explicit. Don Cameron Allen discovered a flagrant example of plagiarism in that indispensable classic of Elizabethan literary criticism, Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia. Christopher Ricks finds a general tendency to excuse or overlook or argue away plagiarism. If Luminalia constitutes plagiarism, so does William Shakespeare's use of old plays like Hamlet, old romances like Romeus and Juliet, old novels like Rosalynde. Plagiarism is the symptom, not the disease: the attack on plagiarism becomes almost at once an attack on Virgil, Ovid, and Aristotle. That is the disease: literature, culture, and the classics are precisely the problem. Sir Thomas Browne's gives a compendious list of classical offenders, including many of the monuments of ancient literature, history and science: Aristotle, Pliny, Lucian, Apuleius, Aelian, Athenaeus, "and many more".

By the middle of the eighteenth century, and as European colonialism became a dominating political force, the naked body had come to represent the savagery and backwardness of colonized and colonisable peoples. Whether depicted as noble savages attuned to the natural world or as wild peoples beyond the remit of civilization, to Britons the state of nakedness increasingly signified distance from civilization and reason. This chapter explores that linkage, firstly through eighteenth-century British representations of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, and then through an examination of British discourse concerning dance, where an explicit and often alarmed sexualization of the state of undress was paramount well into the twentieth century.This essay proposes, above all, that nakedness is not a simple description nor a state of being but a contested historical marker with very particular and peculiar ties to the generation of ideas regarding the British self and the foreign or colonial other in the British imperial context.

Harry Pace's violent, controlling behaviour motivated by sexual jealousy fits a common pattern across cultures and eras. However, assumptions about gender, marriage and violence were changing in the inter-war period, and press stories of wives' suffering at the hands of deceitful, unreliable or violent husbands were commonplace. Harry's brutality and Beatrice Annie Pace's suffering shaped their respective press personae. Advertisements for Beatrice's Sunday Express series were headed '18 years of hell' and featured a photograph of Beatrice writing her memoirs. Beatrice's public persona was, ultimately, more than a little ambiguous. Not only had she exchanged 'the deep black which she wore all through her long ordeal' for 'a pretty flowered frock of some light summery material', but the children 'are better dressed then ever they have been in their young lives'. In 'A talk to wives' and 'A talk to those about to marry', she gave advice to young women.

This chapter outlines the key role played by decolonisation, the ends of empire, and the emergence of independent Africa in shaping Ireland's post-war identity. Missionary links fostered an interest in, and a sense of responsibility towards, Africa, and connected Irish actions with African nationalist aspirations. An official emphasis on the shared legacies of empire created a self-defined post-colonial identity for the state. This chapter links these nation-level currents of debate with an evolving international narrative in which circumstances allowed the ‘fire brigade’ states a disproportionately forward role in international politics. It shows how involvement in debates on African decolonisation at the UN allowed those states to marry national values with the assertion of diplomatic independence. It identifies an important shift between the imperial and post-imperial eras: as Africa's political status changed, the ‘fire brigade’ states adapted accordingly, not least by re-directing their focus to the field of foreign aid. In the midst of those changes this chapter explores a theme that is at the heart of this book: the marriage of idealism, pragmatism, national concerns and international trends that shaped small state identities in the Cold War.

This chapter features First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) service with two new projects as well as their plans for new expansion. The first project was the establishment of an ambulance convoy in Calais for the Belgians, known as the Corps de Transport Militaire Belge, FANY Unit 5. The second project was a new hospital for the French at Port à Binson that became known as L'Hôpital Auxiliaire 76 and took over the old Lamark name FANY Unit 1. The chaos among the French troops in early summer caused a lull in casualties and no big convoys of troops arrived at Binson until a very large contingent arrived from Verdun in August. The chapter explores the concept of authority in terms of both power within the organization and the relationship of women to masculine authority in the context of war.

King Alfred was enthusiastically drawn upon in the nineteenth century as a model scholar for the people. The development of Alfred's role from regnal to moral exemplar may have owed something to the growth of publishing for children during the nineteenth century. The generosity of the impoverished king to the disguised saint proved a popular subject for Victorian visual artists. In his 1900 history Alfred to Victoria, George Eayrs claimed that Alfred and his line 'must be acknowledged the strongest of the several strains which have combined to produce that distinctive type, the Englishman'. The nineteenth-century fascination with Alfred's youthful vices contrasts starkly with eighteenth-century authors' apparent embarrassment about the subject. In Joseph Cottle's 1801 Alfred: An Epic Poem we seem to see the turning point between the dominant eighteenth-century tendency to depict Alfred as a wooing lover, and the burgeoning nineteenth-century desire to portray him as the ideal husband.