From Communal to Independent Manhood in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, ca. 1760-1820

This article discusses understandings of manhood in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By means of the voluminous diary kept by Simeon Perkins, a man of local prominence, it explores the social responses within this rural seafaring community to how men chose strategies for gaining social status, exercising public power, and juggling private interest and public service. Across northeastern North America, capitalist ideals of independent manhood were gradually replacing moral ideals of communal manhood, which ultimately strained networks of reciprocity both within and outside the family. Yet by placing Perkins alongside Benajah Collins, another prominent Liverpudlian, this article also reveals that those who drifted too far from morally grounded communal ideals of manhood continued to find themselves ostracized within their immediate communities.Comment la masculinité était-elle comprise à Liverpool, en Nouvelle-Écosse, à la fin du XVIIIe siècle et au début du XIXe siècle? Par l’entremise du volumineux journal intime tenu par Simeon Perkins, un personnage local, le présent article examine les réactions sociales au sein de cette collectivité rurale de marins à la manière dont les hommes choisissaient des stratégies pour obtenir un statut social, exercer le pouvoir public et concilier intérêt privé et service public. Dans tout le nord-est de l’Amérique du Nord, l’idéal capitaliste d’indépendance masculine a progressivement remplacé l’idéal moral de masculinité communautaire, ce qui a fini par mettre à rude épreuve les réseaux de réciprocité tant à l’intérieur qu’à l’extérieur de la famille. Pourtant, en traçant un parallèle entre Perkins et Benajah Collins, un autre éminent Liverpuldien, cet article révèle aussi que ceux qui se sont trop éloignés de l’idéal communautaire de masculinité basé sur la morale ont continué à se retrouver ostracisés au sein même de leur milieu immédiat

Contribution of Common Genetic Variants to Risk of Early-Onset Ischemic Stroke

Background and Objectives Current genome-wide association studies of ischemic stroke have focused primarily on late-onset disease. As a complement to these studies, we sought to identify the contribution of common genetic variants to risk of early-onset ischemic stroke. Methods We performed a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies of early-onset stroke (EOS), ages 18-59 years, using individual-level data or summary statistics in 16,730 cases and 599,237 nonstroke controls obtained across 48 different studies. We further compared effect sizes at associated loci between EOS and late-onset stroke (LOS) and compared polygenic risk scores (PRS) for venous thromboembolism (VTE) between EOS and LOS. Results We observed genome-wide significant associations of EOS with 2 variants in ABO, a known stroke locus. These variants tag blood subgroups O1 and A1, and the effect sizes of both variants were significantly larger in EOS compared with LOS. The odds ratio (OR) for rs529565, tagging O1, was 0.88 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.85-0.91) in EOS vs 0.96 (95% CI: 0.92-1.00) in LOS, and the OR for rs635634, tagging A1, was 1.16 (1.11-1.21) for EOS vs 1.05 (0.99-1.11) in LOS; p-values for interaction = 0.001 and 0.005, respectively. Using PRSs, we observed that greater genetic risk for VTE, another prothrombotic condition, was more strongly associated with EOS compared with LOS (p = 0.008). Discussion The ABO locus, genetically predicted blood group A, and higher genetic propensity for venous thrombosis are more strongly associated with EOS than with LOS, supporting a stronger role of prothrombotic factors in EOS.Peer reviewe

Working at the crossroads: Statute Labour, Manliness, and the Electoral Franchise on Victorian Prince Edward Island

This essay considers how conceptions of manliness shaped the electoral franchise on Victorian Prince Edward Island. Soon after its institution of responsible government, Prince Edward Island shifted away from a property-based franchise to one grounded in the performance of statute labour. Instead of heralding the male property owner, this new law championed the man who used his labour to faithfully serve and improve his community. Because of limited land distribution, bourgeois ideals of manliness based upon property ownership fit the conditions of the colony poorly. A statute labour franchise better reflected the gender ideals upheld by the Island’s unpropertied majority. Like all gender ideals, these standards were not accepted across Prince Edward Island unopposed.Cet article étudie la façon dont les différentes conceptions de la masculinité ont façonné la franchise électorale à l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard à l’époque victorienne. Peu de temps après l’avènement de la responsabilité ministérielle, le gouvernement de la colonie a délaissé la franchise basée sur la propriété au profit d’une franchise basée sur la participation des hommes à la corvée. Plutôt que de mettre à l’honneur l’homme-propriétaire, la nouvelle législation privilégiait l’homme qui mettant son travail au service de sa communauté. Étant donné la distribution limitée de la propriété sur l’île, les idéaux bourgeois entourant la masculinité, fondés sur la notion de propriété, ne correspondaient pas à la réalité sociale de la colonie. La franchise basée sur la corvée reflétait davantage les idéaux concernant le genre entretenus par la majorité de la population

The senate and the social majority: Johannes Theodorus Buys (1826-1893) and a 'meritocracy' in the Netherlands (1848-1887)

In his study on the Constitution, published in 1883–1887, the famous Dutch legal mind Buijs wrote a paragraph about the Senate, discussing the controversial reasons for its existence, why it was full of contradictions and what a better senate would look like. It was a Fremdkörper, not considered useful by the Dutch reformer Johan Rudolph Thorbecke (1798–1872), in addition to being undemocratic. Its foundations were controversial, even vague, and were based on distrust. The Senate was powerful in theory but weak in practice. The senators themselves were chosen from a moneyed elite. After briefly comparing senates in different countries (the House of Lords in England and the Senates of the United States, Belgium and Denmark), Buijs formulated what a useful senate should look like. Instead of representing a ‘money-aristocracy’, senators should be chosen from the most authoritative of people – the best elements among the population. The aim of such a senate should be that the population, the ‘social majority’, could really trust that they were ruled by wise men, making universal suffrage superfluous

Reforming senates in the post-revolutionary North Atlantic world: an introduction

The introduction shows that the establishment and the reform of these upper legislative houses have followed remarkably parallel trajectories. Senate reforms emerged in the wake of deep political crises within the North Atlantic world and were influenced by the comparatively weak positions of small powers. Reformers responded to crises and constantly looked beyond borders and oceans for inspiration to keep their senates relevant

Loci associated with ischaemic stroke and its subtypes (SiGN): a genome-wide association study

BACKGROUND: The discovery of disease-associated loci through genome-wide association studies (GWAS) is the leading genetic approach to the identification of novel biological pathways underlying diseases in humans. Until recently, GWAS in ischaemic stroke have been limited by small sample sizes and have yielded few loci associated with ischaemic stroke. We did a large-scale GWAS to identify additional susceptibility genes for stroke and its subtypes. METHODS: To identify genetic loci associated with ischaemic stroke, we did a two-stage GWAS. In the first stage, we included 16 851 cases with state-of-the-art phenotyping data and 32 473 stroke-free controls. Cases were aged 16 to 104 years, recruited between 1989 and 2012, and subtypes of ischaemic stroke were recorded by centrally trained and certified investigators who used the web-based protocol, Causative Classification of Stroke (CCS). We constructed case-control strata by identifying samples that were genotyped on nearly identical arrays and were of similar genetic ancestral background. We cleaned and imputed data by use of dense imputation reference panels generated from whole-genome sequence data. We did genome-wide testing to identify stroke-associated loci within each stratum for each available phenotype, and we combined summary-level results using inverse variance-weighted fixed-effects meta-analysis. In the second stage, we did in-silico lookups of 1372 single nucleotide polymorphisms identified from the first stage GWAS in 20 941 cases and 364 736 unique stroke-free controls. The ischaemic stroke subtypes of these cases had previously been established with the Trial of Org 10 172 in Acute Stroke Treatment (TOAST) classification system, in accordance with local standards. Results from the two stages were then jointly analysed in a final meta-analysis. FINDINGS: We identified a novel locus (G allele at rs12122341) at 1p13.2 near TSPAN2 that was associated with large artery atherosclerosis-related stroke (first stage odds ratio [OR] 1·21, 95% CI 1·13-1·30, p=4·50 × 10-8; joint OR 1·19, 1·12-1·26, p=1·30 × 10-9). Our results also supported robust associations with ischaemic stroke for four other loci that have been reported in previous studies, including PITX2 (first stage OR 1·39, 1·29-1·49, p=3·26 × 10-19; joint OR 1·37, 1·30-1·45, p=2·79 × 10-32) and ZFHX3 (first stage OR 1·19, 1·11-1·27, p=2·93 × 10-7; joint OR 1·17, 1·11-1·23, p=2·29 × 10-10) for cardioembolic stroke, and HDAC9 (first stage OR 1·29, 1·18-1·42, p=3·50 × 10-8; joint OR 1·24, 1·15-1·33, p=4·52 × 10-9) for large artery atherosclerosis stroke. The 12q24 locus near ALDH2, which has previously been associated with all ischaemic stroke but not with any specific subtype, exceeded genome-wide significance in the meta-analysis of small artery stroke (first stage OR 1·20, 1·12-1·28, p=6·82 × 10-8; joint OR 1·17, 1·11-1·23, p=2·92 × 10-9). Other loci associated with stroke in previous studies, including NINJ2, were not confirmed. INTERPRETATION: Our results suggest that all ischaemic stroke-related loci previously implicated by GWAS are subtype specific. We identified a novel gene associated with large artery atherosclerosis stroke susceptibility. Follow-up studies will be necessary to establish whether the locus near TSPAN2 can be a target for a novel therapeutic approach to stroke prevention. In view of the subtype-specificity of the associations detected, the rich phenotyping data available in the Stroke Genetics Network (SiGN) are likely to be crucial for further genetic discoveries related to ischaemic stroke