Because my expertise is in early American history, I will concentrate on Larry Kramer’s portrait of pre-Revolutionary popular constitutionalism, which acts as a baseline against which to measure nineteenth-century developments. Before examining pre-Revolutionary constitutionalism, however, I want to note two features of Kramer’s style of historical argument that make the book a particularly sop...

IT is difficult to imagine a case more deserving of detailed historical analysis than that of John Roberton (1776-1840), a surgeon who practised as a specialist in the treatment of venereal disease in two European capitals' yet is linked to a subject, medical police, which, on close examination, occupied a fraction of his known professional life. Despite his widely published popular works on ve...

Widow remarriage practices in the Punjab-Haryana region of northern India are described as frequently mismatched and undesirable alliances, without widow choice, which serve to support the practice of polygamy. The average spacing between arranged spouses could be 10 years, with the younger spouse being the brother-in-law (this customary practice of remarriage within the husbands' family is ca...

The last decade has witnessed the emergence and aesthetic maturation of amateur multimedia on an unprecedented scale, from video podcasts to machinima, and Flash animations to user-created metaverses. Today, especially in academic circles, this pop culture phenomenon is little recognized and even less understood. This paper explores creativity in amateur multimedia using three theorizations of ...

Taking all matters into consideration, the poor woman of this country should be an object of compassion rather than of our contempt The stimulus given to India by British example, and capital employed for the education of Indian females, is not among the least of her beneficial operations. The time will come when their worth shall be duly appreciated by the daughters of India; and then, should ...

This article critically examines the development of an innovative approach to educational broadcasting in post-apartheid South Africa. Examining the policy background and the public debate sparked by the controversial drama series, Yizo Yizo, it is argued that the spatial restructuring of media markets re-articulates the sites and scales at which media practices and citizenship are connected. Y...

In Ruth Rendell’s 1988 London mystery House of Stairs, the narrator suggests a startling sea change in the world of Huntington’s disease (HD). “The newspapers and television and magazines have been full of Huntington’s lately,” she observes. “Huntington’s has become a fashionable disease, displacing multiple sclerosis and even schizophrenia in the public’s curiosity.” [1]. She refers, no doubt,...

One idea that sticks in my mind from my undergraduate course in science fiction is that in order to write SF, you need strange people, strange things or strange places; however, if you have strange people doing strange things in strange places, the result is a confused reader. The position of first-year university students is analogous: too often they are having to write in new and challenging ...