Sacco and Vanzetti, Mary Donovan and transatlantic radicalism in the 1920s

In 1927 the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston following a murder trial that was widely denounced for its anti-labour and anti-immigrant bias. From 1921 the campaign to save the two men powerfully mobilised labour internationalism and triggered waves of protests across the world. This article examines the important contributions made by Irish and Irish-American radicals to the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign. Mary Donovan was a leading member of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, and a second-generation Irish union organiser and member of Boston's James Connolly Club. In the 1920s she travelled to Ireland twice and appealed to Irish and Irish American labour to support the campaign. At the same time, Donovan and many of the activists considered here held ambiguous personal and political relationships with Ireland. Transnational Irish radicalism in the early-twentieth century is most commonly considered in nationalist terms. Taking a distinctly non-Irish cause - the Sacco-Vanzetti case of 1920-7 - allows us to look from a different perspective at the global Irish Revolution and reveals how radical labour currents reached into Irish and Irish-American circles during the revolutionary era, though the response to the campaign also indicates a receding internationalism in the immediate aftermath of Irish independence

Liquid-core microcapsules: A mechanism for the recovery and purification of selected molecules in different environments

Liquid-core microcapsules can be described as miniature sized particles ( 1.2 l/hr of microspheres and > 2 l/hr of liquid-core microcapsules, and this can be easily and naturally elevated to higher volumes by increasing the number of nozzles on the encapsulator. Firstly the microcapsules were used as an innovative technique (known as capsular perstraction) to recover the commonly found pharmaceutically active compounds; sulfamethoxazole, metoprolol, furosemide, carbamazepine, clofibric acid, warfarin and diclofenac from water. The approach of preparing capsules with different solvents within their cores and combining them in water, contaminated with pharmaceuticals, enabled a rapid recovery of the drugs from this sphere. In addition the uptake of warfarin was examined to assess the conditions affecting mass transfer of the molecules into the capsules. It was subsequently determined that the stagnant organic layer was the main limiting factor. This part of the study emphasized how the characteristics (size and membrane thickness) of capsules can affect the removal rate of compounds into the liquid-core and also how the rate of extraction can be simply controlled by varying these parameters during the capsule manufacturing process. In a second application, the capsular extraction technology was further developed by adopting it as an aide for the recovery and purification of the antibiotic geldanamycin from Bennett’s medium. From this work it was shown how a small quantity of capsules was capable of rapidly extracting the molecule from the culture medium. Again the limitations to mass transfer were accessed, and it was discovered that the main rate limiting step was the external resistance outside of the capsules, which can be governed by controlling the outer turbulence. In a further development the capsules showed their potential to be used as a mechanism for concentrating, purifying and enabling crystallization of the extractant, using a very simplistic and straightforward procedure, which was not destructive to the microcapsules, hence enabling their continuous re-use. Finally the capsules were applied to a real-time situation, in order to examine the feasibility of using the simple, non-toxic and sterile technology as a novel in-situ product recovery technique, to improve the production and recovery yield of geldanamycin in cultures containing the bacterium Streptomyces hygroscopicus. Implementation of this approach resulted in the rapid removal of the metabolite from an environment which was causing its break-down and seriously affecting recovery yields. Extraction enabled the molecule to be transferred into a stable and secure domain, where it was protected from external influences. This removal improved overall net production by 30% compared to fermentations containing no capsules. Most importantly however, the capsule-facilitated recovery process acted as a methodology, which enabled high recoveries (> 53%) of the fermented geldanamycin to be obtained as highly purified crystals (> 97%) using a facile, inexpensive and reproducible process, which should be easily implemented at a lab-scale or industrial-level

Mature Meryl and hot Helen : Hollywood, gossip and the ‘appropriately’ ageing actress

In a 2009 article from the UK Guardian, Vanessa Thorpe writes: When a film star seduces someone 20 or 30 years their junior on screen, the audience doesn’t bat an eyelid. In fact, it is an established cinema convention. If the older star is a woman, however, public reaction is harder to predict. But now Hollywood, so long accused of sexism because of the way it treats female talent, finally seems prepared to tackle a subject once regarded as beyond the pale: sex and the sixty-something woman

Landlords, radicals and Irish emigrants in Argentina

[In the 1880s an Irish immigrant doctor in Argentina named John Creaghe sought to a build a Land League movement in his adopted home. The Irish Land League appealed to him because of its impact in Ireland, but more significant for him was the potential to deploy the same ideas and tactics to challenge the power of large landowners in Argentina, some of whom were Irish themselves. “Let it be known,” Creaghe wrote, “that there are no worse landlords in the world than the ignorant Irishmen who in former years were able to buy land and are now millionaires.” ...

Book review: Ribbon Societies in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and its Diaspora by Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild

In the 1810s, Ribbon societies appeared in Ulster, emerging from the aftermath of 1798, Defenderism and the sectarian tensions of the late-eighteenth century. Throughout most of the nineteenth-century Ribbonism, and anxieties about it, reached into multiple aspects of Irish society, yet very few people ever openly admitted membership and almost all evidence of Ribbon activities lies in police and court records. Varieties of Ribbonism have generated very rich historiography, but most historians have framed their studies within a particular chronological or regional framework. This engaging book by Kyle Hughes and Donald MacRaild presents the first full-length study that ranges across the nineteenth century and investigates multifaceted dimensions of Ribbonism in Ireland and the diaspora

Book Review - Gender in Physical Culture: Crossing Boundaries-Reconstituting Cultures

Scholars in sport, physical activity, and physical education have recently articulated the need for appreciative inquiries into the deconstruction and denaturalisation of gender because such work is integral for gender-inclusive spaces in physical culture. Thus, ‘Gender in Physical Culture: Crossing Boundaries-Reconstituting Cultures’ fills an noteworthy gap in research by detailing widely accepted social and cultural norms before problematising discourses where boundaries can be crossed. The authors are honest, reflexive, critical, engaging activists in gender-inclusive work and through this book successfully share insights into boundary-crossing in the space of physical culture. Altogether, this book proves to be a highly insightful and thought-provoking read

Anglo-American second wave feminisms: the ethics of heterogeneity

This thesis investigates debates and tensions in Second Wave Anglo-American Feminisms since the sixties. It interrogates claims that feminism is in crisis, and that the term 'feminism' itself is now semantically overburdened. Its chief purpose is to show that despite feminism's heterogeneity, there are central features of feminist politics which offer an oppositional identity to theorists concerned with exposing the way meanings of gender still shape society and academic discourse. The scope of this work extends from early Second Wave writings to current scholarly reflections on the interface between feminist and other critical theories. This study emphasizes that even the apparent 'anti-theory' thrust of early writers stand testimony to an abiding concern with theories of knowledge, power and representation. Even feminism's early antagonism to 'high theory' could be interpreted as a challenge to the means by which 'theory' is constructed. The first three chapters examine the emergence of a 'Second Wave' in feminist thought, and the various investments of its differing 'strands' in existing political and theoretical positions. Chapters Four and Five scrutinize what are deemed gaps or sites of conflict in Second Wave theory: theories of ideology, culture, sexuality and subjectivity. Feminism is arguably at its most radical and contentious where its methodology drifts furthest from the epistemological 'mainstream'. Chapter Six considers recent developments in feminist thought - many of which emerged during the writing of this work - illustrating a growing chasm between academic feminism and political feminism. The conclusion engages with critical discussions of feminism's alleged 'identity crisis', and the means by which feminist agendas are put to anti-feminist uses in face of a political swing to the Right in Britain and the USA. It suggests that the worst effects of a 'backlash' might be countered by greater attention to feminism's recent past. This is not to advocate nostalgia, but to indicate that feminism can learn from its past and present 'mistakes'. Recent questions are not new, but ones which merit ever more complex solutions, for the sake of feminism's survival as an autonomous and challenging philosophy