The current state of the radical left and, more broadly, politics in Scotland has its roots in the unique set of political, economic and intellectual conditions found in the 1960s and 1970s. Where mainstream accounts of the origins and development of Scottish nationalism - and its increasing popularity on the left - emphasise political and economic origins in these decades, this chapter emphasises the equally crucial intellectual developments of the period. Khruschev’s ‘secret speech’, ‘de-Stalinization’ and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 engendered a growing plurality of perspectives on the European left, and it was under these new conditions that the British left increasingly questioned Stalinist orthodoxies, and established critiques of labourism and the ‘British Road to Socialism’. The search for alternatives to the classical Marxist, social democratic and Soviet canons led to a new theoretical heterodoxy, bringing Gramscian and world-systems theories to the fore along with a more politically ambiguous conception of the ‘national question’. This chapter integrates an analysis of the intellectual development of left-wing Scottish nationalism with a consideration of the growth of its influence within the labour movement during the 1960s and 1970s.

The eleventh chapter assesses the utility of cooperation theory to explain the peace process in Northern Ireland. This theory stresses the interconnectedness of leaders’ decision-making and the complexity associated with the emergence of cooperation. This theoretical approach stresses the possibility of actors learning to cooperate with others who have differing or competing interests, thus, emphasizing adaptive rather than rational policy-making. Negotiators representing different states and groups in Northern Ireland came to their decisions and policy choices based on the expected reaction of others. The complexity of this interaction came to be appreciated by the actors themselves. While historically cooperation theory explained state behaviour, the cooperation that led to the signing and implementation of the Agreement required a pattern of coordinated cooperation among numerous actors, including historic rivals.

Beate Neumeier focuses on ghostly apparitions and monstrous creatures like witches and devil-dogs in Renaissance plays from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale to Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Middleton’s Changeling, and Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton. Drawing on Todorov’s concept of the fantastic and Kristeva’s notion of the abject, she focuses on the nexus between cognitive and affective uncertainties in conjunction with a historical analysis of the impact of notions of vision, death and desire for the negotiation of early modern boundaries between spirit and matter, the human and the non-human and its gendered implications in connection to the emergence of tragicomedy as a hybrid genre.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains why, in 1960, the outbreak of the Congo crisis and its successive internationalisation through UN intervention was an important question for Anglo-American relations. By framing the Congo crisis as a key turning point in the process of decolonisation, it highlights the agency of the UN and the Afro-Asian bloc in accelerating the anti-colonial campaign and attempting to reshape the relationship between North and South. The chapter sketches the broader context of Anglo-American relations, as well as establishing the nature of the partnership, as it existed between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and afterwards with President John F. Kennedy. The book highlights the changing nature of the UN from 1960 to 1961.

Discussions of art at the Crystal Palace have largely focussed on sculpture and architecture from the past contained in its Fine Arts Courts. This chapter explores the role of art via a different trajectory using the paper trail of popular culture contained in the Daily Programme of events and the Crystal Palace’s own magazine, to reveal its connections to two artists who worked at the Palace around 1900. Drawing on contemporary popular journalism of the period, this chapter engages with representations of the artists Bertram Hiles and Herbert Beecroft as part of commercialised forms of leisure available at the Crystal Palace. The case studies of these two artists temporarily working in residence at Sydenham brings into focus the role of the Crystal Palace in modern consumer practices that in turn embraced the visual pleasures of gazing and looking. Far from the high moral tone of the original Hyde Park enterprise, the work of Hiles and Beecroft fused the visual pleasures offered by art with popular entertainment.

Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE) and several dozen American private voluntary agencies extended their services from Europe to Asia during the 1940s and early 1950s. South Korea, once it was freed from Japanese colonial rule, was one of the first non-European countries to receive post- war relief from the United States. Korea's economy was depressed, education levels were low, and the brain drain caused by colonial occupation had severely weakened its leadership basis. Hence, Western experts from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) and the Allied forces agreed that external help was needed. In January 1953 CARE was informed that the State Department had given the green light for the Korean children's choir to come to the United States.

Michael Cronin opens this chapter by observing that the greatest threat to Irish society has been the dominant discourse of neo-liberalism and the Market, which has come to be the deity to which all must bend. The Irish Church has traditionally been associated with a regime of fear and punishment, which is somewhat paradoxical given that the founding message of Christianity is one of hope, of the end of fear. In Cronin’s view, a more radical move for a Church, which has been brought to its knees by a multiplicity of cultural factors, would be to embrace empathy and a politics of hope, which might consist of no longer saying ‘No’, but ‘Yes’. The affirmation of justice for all, a more equal sharing of wealth, the creation of a climate where difference is embraced, these are the life-affirming and Christian principles on which the future of Irish Catholicism should be based.

How do actors settle contentious territorial issues – particularly the delimitation of their mutual borders? This chapter uses interview data to examine this broad question within the context of Northern Ireland. The issue-based approach to conflict suggests that states handle territorial disputes via more aggressive foreign policies than disputes over non-territorial issues. This perspective therefore predicts protracted negotiations and violence in Northern Ireland, but Irish nationalists redefined the territorial basis of the conflict to allow a peace agreement to emerge. Selectorate theory predicts that leaders will be constrained in negotiations by what their constituencies want. The interview data in this chapter suggests that political elites negotiating the Agreement were very conscious of the need to both lead and follow their constituencies in the peace process.

Amplified telephony was introduced to the UK by the General Post Office in an attempt to provide ‘hard of hearing’ individuals access to telephone communications during the inter-war years. In defining deafness as an inability to engage with telephony, the Post Office used this technology to construct new thresholds of hearing loss. Through exploring the development of amplified telephones for ‘deaf subscribers’ I show how telephony was used as a tool in the categorisation of disability and how, in turn, telephone users modified such technology to fit their personal needs and identities. A growing number of histories of disability examine the multiple ways in which social contexts shape disability and ability. This analysis provides a new perspective on the fluid, technology influenced definitions of hearing and deafness. By conceptualising the amplified telephone as a prosthetic, this analysis uncovers some of the ways in which hearing and deafness were socially and technologically constructed in interwar Britain. Study of early twentieth century telephony redefines the relationship between technology, communications, and disability, broadening our historical understanding of deafness in particular.

This chapter explores the role pain played in stock trade discourses in the early modern Dutch Republic. It reviews a rich collection of visual material, poems, theatre plays and other literary texts about the Amsterdam stock exchange and stock trade to help us trace the pain spots of stock trading. A bigger contrast with the cultural representation of stock trade in the 1720s is hardly conceivable. Suddenly, the quiet stock exchanges and other trade locations have become the field of uncontrolled violence and severe suffering. The wind trade inspired playwrights to innovative stagings. Research in the city archives and in stock trade treatises like Confusion de Confusiones teaches us that we should not ask why stock trade suddenly started to hurt around 1720, for it always did hurt, despite all the serene depictions of the stock exchanges.