In nineteenth-century The Hague, the French opera performances in the Royal Theatre were the most important occasions during the winter season at which men and women from almost all social ranks experienced a strong sense of social cohesion in a common leisure pursuit, albeit one in which social hierarchies were clearly demarcated. This article analyses the changing social composition of the opera audience through analysis of subscription and admission records, and evaluates the changing composition of the audience in relation to changes in taste, theatre architecture and policy. Although it was almost impossible to exploit financially and was also a constant object of political, musical and moral criticism, the French opera succeeded in maintaining its central position in The Hague's musical and social life throughout the nineteenth century.

Living in close relationship with the Siberian environment, for several decades the Tungus (Evenk and Even peoples) have been noticing numerous changes in climate, flora and fauna. Based on fieldwork among reindeer herders, hunters and fishermen in Yakutia, the Amur region and Kamchatka, this paper explores how climate change is perceived, and how it causes economic, social and ritual changes. It questions the modifications of the economic and religious human-environment relationships through various aspects. It analyses the indigenous perception of a link between the environment and identity and the indigenous notion of adaptation and vulnerability. It also compares their adaptive strategies that either use old techniques, or trigger mutations. In this context, the notion of reciprocity seems to be disappearing and a new notion of time-space in managing the environment is appearing. This paper analyses the religious changes, such as the creation of new rituals and millenarian narratives or the rebirth of shamanistic legends.

The article describes investigations that highlight snow-avalanche events that have not been reported in historical records. While historical sources are most often the basis for all natural hazard and risk research, alternative methods based on geomorphic investigations are often neglected. Here, we emphasise the use of geomorphic evidence to improve our knowledge of the maximum runout distance reached by snow avalanches as well as the frequency of the events. Investigations were carried out in remote, avalanche-prone areas, where the geomorphic evidence has not been disturbed or removed. Dendrogeomorphic investigations supply annual resolved records of avalanche winters up to the age of the investigated tree stand: over 120 years in northern Iceland. The study of snow-avalanche transported debris may be used to map the extent of the potential snow-avalanche deposition zone, and offer relative dating on a secular scale; stratigraphic profiles do provide results on long timescales, but only provide relative dating. The article discusses the relevance of each method, and concludes that the combination of the three methods can improve the common risk-mitigation approach based on historical records.

This article explores the portrayal of Mussolini in film and television drama. It considers the contexts in which films and mini-series were made from the 1970s and the problems faced in bringing the Duce to the screen, mostly in dramas that stressed the final phase of his rule. Despite efforts to ensure authenticity in the reconstruction of locations, events and people, there was a notable emphasis on the private and personal dimensions of the dictator's life, a sphere in which screenplays had to indulge in invention in keeping with the practices of all ‘biopics’. The resulting ‘screen Mussolini’ is more human and potentially more sympathetic than the Mussolini of historiography. In a situation in which the legacies of Fascism and anti-fascism are still debated, this media construction has been controversial. The article assesses, using textual analysis, the meanings of the different representational solutions deployed in the films and considers some of the issues involved in playing Mussolini.

Wildlife plays a significant role in the development of tourism in Nunavut. A certain amount of tourism in the Canadian Arctic depends on the wealth and uniqueness of the wildlife in the polar region. Two different forms of tourism based on Arctic wildlife can be distinguished: wildlife viewing and sport hunting. Both of these forms of tourism question the link between the different uses of the resource and the perceptions of wildlife. Based on an analysis of multiple information sources (literature review, newspaper analysis and semi-structured interviews), this article examines the emergence of wildlife as a tourism resource for Inuit communities and questions the issues linked to the emergence of this resource use. Using the example of polar bears, the article focuses on tourism dynamics. The article concludes that the polar bear sport hunting resource has evolved along with the changing environment. This tourism resource could be reinvented, with investments targeting other forms of tourism, such as wildlife viewing, which seems to better fit Westerners’ expectations, but is not necessarily a more environmentally friendly type of tourism.

“Crime is a great leveller,” stated Western Australia's The Inquirer in October 1853. “Policy requires that we should convince the native population that in our Courts of Justice they really are what we profess and tell them they are—the equals of the white man, whatever they may be elsewhere.” The Inquirer was responding to a case that had just come before Perth's Quarter Sessions, in which John Jones was tried for the murder of Neader in the colony's southwest. Jones was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to transportation for life. Given that Australia's colonies were notable for their failure to bring settlers to trial for violence against Aboriginal people, it is significant that The Inquirer's editor did not regard Jones' conviction and sentence as a sign that the Courts of Justice were working as they professed to do. The charge was one of wilful murder, and the evidence indicated that “if ever a foul and deliberate murder was committed, it was on the occasion which led to this trial.” The verdict that Jones was guilty only of manslaughter, he continued, was indicative of the jury's disregard of the law's impartiality when a white man was on trial for the murder of an Aboriginal man. If the law was to make a distinction between white and black, “let it be declared: but to say there is none, and to act as if there were, is a mockery.”

This study examines the change in visitor pattern since 1968 at the Ukrainian Vernadsky station (formerly the British Faraday station), one of the most popular Antarctic research stations that support non-governmental visits. The station became one of the major tourist destinations as a result of the revision of tourism policy following the transfer of the station from the UK to Ukraine in 1996. Since then a considerable increase in the number of both cruise ships and yacht visits have been observed. The longest time series of data on non-governmental activity at a research station in Antarctica has been collected from 1968 to 2010. This study examines site-specific guidelines at the station and indicates policies for better visitor management within the Antarctic Treaty System.

On Good Friday of 1973, members of San Francisco's homosexual community staged a public demonstration amidst the skyscrapers in the business district. Shen Hayes, described as a “frail nineteen-year-old,” claimed to embody the suffering of the city's gay population. Hayes dragged a telephone pole “cross” on his back while throngs of protesters cheered and chanted. The local minister leading the action likened gays’ lack of rights to murder, and the caption accompanying Hayes’ photo in the newspaper claimed that he and other gay Californians had been “crucified.” Despite, despite the protest's religious intensity, its objective was secular. Activists had convened to oppose discrimination against those workers whom Pacific Telephone & Telegraph (PT&T) had labeled “manifest homosexuals”: employees and job applicants who either claimed or seemed to be gay.

The methodology of socially-oriented observations (SOO) started to be developed within the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007–2008 PPS Arctic project. The main objective of SOO is to increase knowledge and observation of changes in quality of life conditions and to reveal trends in human capital and capacities. SOO are needed also to assess and monitor trends in resilience and sustainability of coupled socio-ecological systems and to predict changes. Moreover they should help to identify and monitor the implementation of local plans and adaptation strategies that will stimulate human capital improvement and act not only as the agent of economic modernisation, but as important directions for building resilient socio-ecological systems. The first experiments to implement SOO methodology were carried out in the municipal regions of the Russian north in different biomes (from coastal tundra to southern taiga zone) of Murmansk, Arkhangelsk Oblast and the Republic of Komi. SOO approaches, based both on local people's perceptions and statistics, help to identify the main issues and targets for life quality, human capital and environment improvement and thus to distinguish the most important changes and trends for further monitoring. Key issues were identified in the state of human capital and quality of life conditions: depopulation, increasing unemployment, aging, declining physical and mental health, quality of education, loss of traditional knowledge, marginalisation etc. Human induced disturbances such as uncontrolled forests cuttings and poaching are increasing while observed changes in climate and biota have become additional factors influencing land use and overall sustainability. The main aim of this paper is to show how the methodology of SOO may help to delineate main thresholds arising within socio-ecological systems for their resilience assessment.

The Supreme Court's decision in Lochner v. New York (1905), invalidating an act limiting working hours for bakers as a violation of contractual freedom, has come to symbolize an era in constitutional law. The period covers the years from the end of the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era. Its chief characteristic, according to its critics, is the judiciary's hostility to progressive labor legislation. Statutes intended to protect vulnerable classes from the ravages of industrialization were routinely defeated in the courts. Progressives pioneered an interpretation in which Lochner became a leading “anticanonical” case, wrongly deploying the doctrine of substantive due process to shield inherited distributions of wealth and power. The time is long past when scholars characterized the era as a product of judges' reactionary commitments to laissez-faire or, worse, to Social Darwinism, following Justice Holmes's quip, dissenting in Lochner, that “the Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics.” Contemporary scholars have reconstructed the period's jurisprudence, finding in it a principled commitment to a conception of justice grounded in the Founding. The most widely accepted explanation, developed by Gillman's influential study, is that substantive due process embodied a principle of neutrality requiring courts to distinguish the authentic public aims of legislation from illegitimate attempts to advantage some classes at others' expense. An alternative explanation is that judges, drawing on the theory of natural rights, developed the doctrine of substantive due process to limit government's discretion to encumber prepolitical rights to private property and liberty of contract.

On 27 January 2011, the Fort Severn Cree nation presented its perspectives on the management of wabusk (Cree term for polar bear meaning the great wandering one) or polar bear (Ursus maritimus) to the international community. The following article provides an overview of the events that have transpired since the Conférence internationale mondes polaires held in Paris, France, on 26–28 January 2011. It begins by discussing the current state of the southern Hudson Bay polar bear sub-population and describing Cree interactions with polar bears before highlighting how the Fort Severn Cree nation is developing a co-management strategy through the indigenous stewardship model for polar bear management in its traditional territory in northern Ontario, Canada.