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The relative importance of heredity or environmental influence remains an enduring, hotly debated issue, while the legacy of scientific racism and sexism still tarnishes the twenty-first century. This unique study analyzes how theories of inherited difference - including race and gender - affected French social scientists in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The prevailing assumption has been that French ethnographers highlighted the cultural and social environment while anthropologists emphasized the scientific study of head and body shapes. Martin Staum shows that the temptation to graviate towards one pole of the nature-nurture continuum often resulted in reluctant concessions to the other side. Psychologists Théodule Ribot and Alfred Binet, for example were forced to recognize the importance of social factors. Non-Durkheimian sociologists were divided on the issue of race and gender as progressive and tolerant attitudes on gender. Recognizing this allows Staum to raise questions about the theory of the equivalence of all marginalized groups.
Anthropoligical instituitions re-organized before the First World War sometimes showed decreasing confidence in racial theory but failed to abandon it completely. Staum's chilling epilogue discusses how the persistent legacy of such theories was used by extremist anthropologists outside the mainstream to deploy racial ideology as a basis of persecution in the Vinchy era.
Martin S. Staum is professor emeritus of history, University of Calgary, and author of Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race and Empire, 1815-1848 and Minerva's Message: Stablising the French Revolution. A book launch is scheduled for November 4, 2011 at 3:00 p.m. in SS623, Department of History, University of Calgary.
This collection of unpublished talks on historical events by Frank Eyck serves as a companion volume to his autobiography, A Historian's Pilgrimage. For a less detailed but lively personal account of his life, the reader will find a CBC interview from the program Mountaintop Classics transcribed here. The essays reflect Frank's research and bast knowledge of European and contemporary world history, some of it based on his own experience. He was expert at asking salient questions, and would always weigh the available documents of the chosen theme and carefully argue the topic at hand, judging without being judgemental in order to elicit the essential historical truth. In his research, Frank naturally goes back to his roots: German (you might even say European), Jewish, and Christian.
"Through detailed archival research and acute assessment of the existing scholarly literature, Ken MacMillan has completely recast our understanding of the English Atlantic Empire in the first half of the seventeenth century. By unearthing the clear involvement of the Crown in the affairs of England's new western Atlantic settlements, MacMillan very effectively calls into question the prevailing assumption that settlement intially developed in conditions of virtual autonomy. Rather, from the outset permanent English colonizing was accompanied by the consolidation of forms of imperial governance to oversee the conduct of relations between metropolitan center and colonial periphery-an imperial consititution for the English Atlantic world." - Chris Tomlins, Chancellor's Professor of Law, School of Law, University of California, Irvine.
"Shipwrecks, tobacco, and convicts mix with charters, commissions, and committees in this readable exploration of the early Atlantic empire. Seen through MacMillan's larger lens, the darlings of American colonial history-Massachusetts and Virginia-are reduced persuasively to just another problem to be solved. The book brings to life the crown's efforts to respond coherently to the perplexing issues raised by English subjects sailing and settling an ocean away. The book should be required reading for any colonial historian whose eyes have blurred over a seemingly boring colonial charter!" - Mary Sarah Bilder, professor of Law, Boston College of Law School.
The Atlantic Iperial Consitution explores the relationship between the English Crown and the Atlantic colonial peripheries under the early Stuarts. Arguing against the common belief that the English government sat out the first generation of Atlantic activities, Ken MacMillan demonstrates that the king, his Privy Council, and various associated bodies became involved in the Atlantic enterprise when the king's sovereignty, the rights of his subjects, or the needs of state were at stake. From 1606 onward, crown intervention in Atlantic affairs or the needs of state were at stake. From 1606 onward, crown intervention in Atlantic affairs reflected a historically based, ideologically principled, and broadly consistent system of imperial governance that set a precedent for the relationship between center and periphery into the eighteenth century.
Ken MacMillan is an associate professor of History at the University of Calgary, Canada. He is the editor of John Dee: The Limits of the British Empire (2004) and author of Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576-1640 (2006).
Dr. David Wright is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Calgary. The History of China is now in its second edition.
In The History of China: Second Edition, readers will find a general survey of Chinese society's long history, ranging from accounts of ancient Chinese civilization, to coverage of the individual dynasties of imperial China, through China's whirlwind transition to modernity and its belated arrival in the international community. There is a new chapater that discusses the formidable challenges China faces in the 21st century, including overpopulation, environmental degradation, and social stability, and a final informative chapter on Taiwan since 1945.
Marian McKenna is an Emeritus Professor with the Department of History, University of Calgary.
This modern saga, embracing some fifty years of many of the most fateful, stirring events in Iceland's tumultuous history, deserves a re-telling for not only those of Icelandic descent, but for all those interested in the human condition and in these pioneering immigrants whose labors have helped to build the Canada and United States we know today.
Dr. Frank Towers, Professor, Department of History has also contributed to this collection of essays as well as worked with L. Diane Barnes and Brian Schoen to edited this book.
"Students and specialists alike will fine this collection extraordinarily helpful in placing the Old South within the modernizing world of of the nineteenth century. Engaging, insightful and provocative, these essays will become a familiar landmark in the historiography of the South."
- John Majewski, University of California, Santa Barbara
