At its inception, the Irish Free State faced an apparently intractable housing problem that required immediate action. This article examines the legislation enacted in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on its impact on local authority housing in Ireland's provincial towns. Whereas the 1932 Housing Act has generally been heralded as the start of a concerted attack on the slums, this assertion is re-evaluated in the context of the debates of the 1920s. Following an overview of the national situation, a case-study of Ballina, Co. Mayo, explores the impacts of the housing drive. State-aided housing schemes made a significant contribution to the housing stock between 1923 and 1940. Although characterized by contemporary media as a triumph, however, the housing drive raised many issues including build quality, costs, opposition and social segregation. The article considers some of these challenges and raises a number of questions for future consideration.

In July 2012, a landmark hearing before the High Court in London found that the British government had a case to answer concerning human rights abuses, including torture and rapes, allegedly perpetrated by British colonialists in Kenya, during the Mau Mau counterinsurgency of the 1950s. Among the four elderly Kenyan claimants in court that day was a Kikuyu woman, Jane Mara, whose testimony related the sexual abuses she had suffered. Jane had been only 15 years of age, in 1954, when she was accused of being a Mau Mau sympathizer, and along with other villagers, she was taken for interrogation. The experience Jane Mara recounted was horrific. Beaten repeatedly by her inquisitors, she was then pinned to the floor by four African guards who held her thighs apart, while another guard forced a glass bottle into her vagina, using the sole of his boot to direct the bottle deeply into her. The pain was excruciating, and Jane realized that the bottle had been heated. When this ordeal came to an end, she was compelled to sit and watch as the three other young women were subjected to the same torture.

The 1819–1822 overland Arctic expedition led by John Franklin was one of the most disastrous in polar history. In 1821, 20 men travelled to the Arctic Ocean by way of the Coppermine River; only nine of them survived. John Richardson's expedition journal, as published by C. Stuart Houston in 1984, is incomplete. There are no entries between 7 and 29 October 1821, even though five of the 11 deaths (some or possibly all of them by murder) occurred during this critical period. The omission of these events from the journal on which Houston's edition was based has raised suspicions that the account published in Franklin's 1823 narrative may be inaccurate. This article prints the ‘missing’ journal entries, which were located in the files of the Colonial Office, and analyses the differences between these previously unknown entries and the 1823 account.

Portugal has developed an active Antarctic programme over the past decade. Here, we examine Portuguese Antarctic activity using a variety of bibliometric measures, showing that Portuguese scientific output has grown substantially faster than the field as a whole, with quality remaining broadly constant. Antarctic science made up a growing percentage of overall Portuguese research, up to 0.14% of all papers in 2016—a level comparable to many other nations with well-established research programmes. Alongside this, Portugal has increasingly engaged in policy discussions and produced policy papers for Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings, some of which were based on Portuguese environmental science. The Antarctic Treaty reserves decision-making powers to ‘Consultative Parties’—those who have been recognised as demonstrating substantial research activity in the continent. Our data indicates that Portugal is currently the fourth most productive non-Consultative Party, and has similar or greater output than several Parties who have already attained consultative status—its publication record is similar to that of the Czech Republic, which became a Consultative Party in 2014. The rapid growth of Portugal's Antarctic research may make it well placed to consider attaining consultative status to the Antarctic Treaty in the near future.

In 2010, after many interviews by the Qikiqtani Truth Commission (QTC), the Qikiqtani Inuit Association released a report to help the public understand the impact of tuberculosis on the Inuit and thereby promote reconciliation, a goal shared by this study. In this paper, I discuss a corpus of about 28 letters by an Inuit patient named Genevieve Aupidlak who was treated at the Brandon Sanatorium from 1954 to 1957. The letters have been transcribed from old syllabics and translated. Aupidlak's story shows not only the suffering of Inuit in southern sanatoria but also the role of Christianity and that of some missionaries—such as Father Thibert—in supporting Inuit resilience. Aupidlak's letters illustrate how Inuit used their Christian faith to survive and how they ascribed healing power to Christian prayer and confession, in keeping with a much older shamanic pattern.

While Nozick and his sympathizers assume there is a widespread anti-hedonist intuition to prefer reality to an experience machine, hedonists have marshalled empirical evidence that shows such an assumption to be unfounded. Results of several experience machine variants indicate there is no widespread anti-hedonist intuition. From these findings, hedonists claim Nozick's argument fails as an objection to hedonism. This article suggests the argument surrounding experience machines has been misconceived. Rather than eliciting intuitions about what is prudentially valuable, these intuitive judgements are instead calculations about prudential pay-offs and trade-offs. This position can help explain the divergence of intuitions people have about experience machines.

Phonology is a rapidly changing and increasingly varied field, having traveled quite some distance from its original structuralist and generative underpinnings. In this overview I address the status of underlying representations (URs) in phonology, which have been rejected by a number of researchers working in different frameworks. After briefly discussing the current state of phonology, I survey the arguments in favor of vs. against URs, considering recent surface-oriented critiques and alternatives. I contrast three straightforward abstract tonal analyses against the potential arguments which accuse URs of being (i) wrong, (ii) redundant, (iii) indeterminate, (iv) insufficient, or (v) uninteresting. Identifying two distinct goals in linguistics which I refer to as determining ‘what’s in the head?’ vs. ‘what’s in the language?’, I suggest, responding to some rather strong opinions to the contrary, that URs are an indispensable and welcome tool offering important insights into the typology of phonological systems, if not beyond.

In 1881–1882, Marx undertook extensive historical studies, covering a large part of what was then known as “world history”. The four large notebooks with excerpts from the works of (mainly) two leading historian of his time, Schlosser and Botta, have remained largely unpublished. In this article, Marx’s last studies of the course of world history are contextualized: Marx’s previous historical studies and his ongoing, but unfinished work on the critique of political economy. The range and scope of his notes is astoundingly broad, going far beyond European history and actually covering many other parts of the world. Marx’s focus in these studies supports the interpretation offered in the article: that the author of “Capital” was fascinated by the long process of the making of the modern states and the European states system, one of the crucial prerequisites of the rise of modern capitalism in Europe.

This article assesses current and proposed European Union (EU) climate and environmental law, and the legal instruments associated with the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), to see whether soil carbon sequestration is sufficiently promoted as a promising example of ‘climate-smart agriculture’. The assessment shows that current and proposed policies and instruments are inadequate to stimulate large-scale adoption of soil carbon projects across Europe. Given the identified structural flaws, it is likely that this is true for all climate-smart agricultural practices. An alternative approach needs to be developed. Under EU climate policy, agriculture should be included in the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) by allowing regulated industries to buy offsets from the agricultural sector, following the examples set by Australia and others. The second element of a new approach is aimed at the CAP, which needs to be far more focused on the specific requirements of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Yet, such stronger focus does not take away the need to explore new income streams for farmers from offsets under the ETS, as the CAP will never have sufficient funds for the deep and full transition of Europe’s agriculture sector that is needed.