‘If your daughters are inclined to love reading, do not check their Inclination'

This paper examines attitudes to the education of children in elite families in eighteenth-century Scotland revealed in various letters, private papers, and memoirs. It takes as its starting point Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s famous advice to her daughter, Mary Stuart, Countess of Bute (1718-1794), on the education of her granddaughters. Lady Louisa Stuart, one of those six granddaughters, went on to become a writer as well as an avid reader, and later recalled the childhood pleasures of reading books from her grandmother’s vast library. Provision for the education of her daughters and grandchildren, at home and abroad, can also be traced in some detail in the meticulous Household Book and notebooks kept by Lady Grisell Baillie (1665-1746). Her daughter Griseld, Lady Murray (1693-1759), later commemorated her famous mother’s commitment to education. Attitudes to reading, learning languages and education through travel to Europe can be traced in the private papers of these families, and in the views of the children who went on to express their appreciation in memoirs and biographies published in honour of their mothers and grandmothers

War of words: Daniel Defoe and the 1707 Union

The Union of Scotland and England on 1 May 1707 was – and for some still is – undoubtedly contentious. This essay takes a close look at the language Defoe employed in his History of the Union, the language of persuasion, and perhaps also of propaganda, and in particular at some of the rhetorical figures and strategies he had refined as a journalist and pamphleteer. Some of the language he used provoked a small pamphlet war, in which his very words were flung back at him. In the second part of this essay I consider how Defoe handled outstanding Scottish historical grievances at the time of the Union, by examining his account of one of the most contentious political issues of the day, the Darien disaster, before offering some conclusions about the insights afforded by such a historical linguistic analysis

Rural workers would benefit from unemployment insurance modernization

Rural workers stand to benefit from the modernization of unemployment insurance (UI) to cover part-time workers, which is an opportunity for states under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Plan (ARRA). Rural workers are more likely to work part-time, and many states that do not provide UI benefits to part-time workers have higher than average proportions of rural residents

Effects of halo triaxiality, anisotropy and small scale clumping on WIMP direct detection exclusion limits

Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) direct detection experiments are closing in on the region of parameter space where neutralinos may constitute the Galactic halo dark matter. Numerical simulations and observations of galaxy halos indicate that the standard Maxwellian halo model is likely to be a poor approximation to the dark matter distribution. We examine how halo models with triaxiality and/or velocity anisotropy affect exclusion limits, before discussing the consequences of the possible survival of small scale clumps.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, to appear in proceedings of "IDM 2002, 4th International Workshop on the Identification of Dark Matter" v2: added 2 footnotes and a referenc