'Splendid display; pompous spectacle': historical pageants in twentieth-century Britain

This article examines the organisation, nature and content of historical pageants in twentieth-century Britain. Focusing on four pageants at St Albans, Hertfordshire – in 1907, 1948, 1953 and 1968 – it considers the selection of historical episodes that were depicted, the role that pageants played in the life of the community, and the ways in which the relationship between past and present was presented. Pageants functioned as both education and entertainment, and were significant events in the creation of the public image of the city, although they could also provoke local controversy and dissent. They promoted a strongly local sense of identity, and civic pride was perhaps even more important to the post-war pageants than to those staged in the Edwardian period, as communities such as St Albans negotiated a period of rapid development and change in the 1940s and 1950s. However, the large-scale civic pageant that characterised the first half of the twentieth century rapidly declined in the late 1950s and early 1960s, proving less adaptable in the context of the cultural upheavals of the period. Subsequent pageants were on a much smaller scale than those that were staged before the mid-1950s, and adopted a different attitude to the national and local past

Fellowship, Service, and the \u27Spirit of Adventure\u27: The Religious Society of Friends and the Outdoors Movement in Britain, C. 1900-1950

This article considers the involvement of members of the Religious Society of Friends in various manifestations of the outdoors movement in early twentieth-century Britain. It examines the Edwardian \u27Quaker tramps\u27 and their role in the \u27Quaker renaissance\u27, and goes on to consider the influence of Friends in organisations such as the Holiday Fellowship and the Youth Hostels Association, as well as interwar Quaker mountaineers. It argues that, while the outdoor activities of the Quaker renaissance were essentially internal to the Religious Society of Friends, a wider conception of social service took Quakers beyond the boundaries of the Society in the interwar period, resulting in a more profound influence on the outdoors movement. These activities of Friends were associated with the promotion of the \u27social gospel\u27, and represented a significant strand of Quaker service in the first half of the twentieth century

The Long-term Evolution of the Galactic Disk Traced by Dissolving Star Clusters

The Galactic disk retains a vast amount of information about how it came to be, and how it evolved over cosmic time. However, we know very little about the secular processes associated with disk evolution. One major uncertainty is the extent to which stars migrate radially through the disk, thereby washing out signatures of their past (e.g. birth sites). Recent theoretical work finds that such "blurring" of the disk can be important if spiral arms are transient phenomena. Here we describe an experiment to determine the importance of diffusion from the Solar circle with cosmic time. Consider a star cluster that has been placed into a differentially rotating, stellar fluid. We show that all clusters up to ~10^4 solar masses, and a significant fraction of those up to ~10^5 solar masses, are expected to be chemically homogeneous, and that clusters of this size can be assigned a unique "chemical tag" by measuring the abundances of <~10 independent element groups, with better age and orbit determinations allowing fewer abundance measurements. The star cluster therefore acts like a "tracer dye", and the present-day distribution of its stars provides a strong constraint on the rate of radial diffusion or migration in the Galactic disk. Sellwood & Binney have argued for strong radial transport driven by transient spiral perturbations: in principle, we could measure the strength of this migration directly.Comment: ApJ, in press; 15 pages, 9 figures (ApJ format

Inequality and Economic Growth Over the Business Cycle: Evidence From U.S. State-Level Data

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the empirical relationship between income inequality and economic growth using U.S. State-level data during the post-war period. The use of state-level data provides a sample that is relatively homogeneous in many non-economic characteristics, unlike the international data used in most previous work. Building upon prior research, this study addresses the issues of potential non-linearities in the relationship between inequality and growth, the influence of the cyclical condition during the year sampled, and possible bias in the measurement of economic growth. We find, using GMM estimators, that inequality is harmful to growth, and that the deleterious effects of inequality are greater for lower income states.

Victorian Philanthropy and the Rowntrees: The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust

Through an examination of the establishment and early grant-making priorities of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, this article explores the development of Quaker philanthropy in Britain in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, especially in the context of the long-standing Quaker interest in adult education. It locates Joseph Rowntree\u27s view of philanthropy in the wider contexts of the changing patterns of Victorian and Edwardian philanthropic theory and practice, the nineteenth-century growth of Quaker social concern, and the changing perceptions of the problem of poverty during Rowntree\u27s lifetime. It argues that the motives underlying the establishment of the Charitable Trust were predicated on an essentially Victorian conception of the role of the philanthropist, modified by Rowntree\u27s own experience of the changes within the Society of Friends during the nineteenth century

The Magic Lantern and the Cinema: Adult Schools, Educational Settlements and Secularisation in Britain, c. 1900-1950

This article examines the impact of an increasingly secularised demand for adult education in the first half of the twentieth century on two movements with which Quakers were closely associated: the adult schools and the educational settlements. It argues that the educational settlements, originally established to extend and enhance the work of the adult schools, were better able to accommodate to a secularised climate, and this ensured their survival. Neither movement flourished in the same way as the secular Workers\u27 Educational Association and adult education provided by local education authorities, and this reflected the weakness of religious adult education in a climate of secularised demand among adult students

Narrative, Ethics, and the Development of Identity

The terms “narrative” and “development” would appear to be difficult to relate to one another. While “narrative” frequently connotes movement backward in time and would thus seem to be a retrospective concept, “development” connotes movement forward in time and would thus seem to be a prospective concept. In this article, I seek to rethink both of these terms in such a way as to render them more compatible. In doing so, I focus on the idea of narrative identity, which, I suggest, is not only about the self but about the other-than-self, especially those goods that draw the process forward

Mixing Them Up: Group Work with NESB Students

This paper describes the implementation of a Problem-Based Learning assessment in a postgraduate ICT fundamentals subject. With an entirely international student cohort drawn from 14 countries, many students had never participated in group work. To facilitate student adjustment into the Australian educational environment, and develop understanding of the role and importance of group work, students were educated in group work theory prior to engaging in the group work process. The experiences of both teaching staff and students identified a number of positive outcomes resulting from this approach