'There is many a thing that can be done with money': women, barter and autonomy in a Scottish fishing community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Representations of Shetland womanhood have a place in our understanding of gender relations in this island community but not the place one might expect. Far from conforming to the image of the brazen fishwife and the exploited preindustrial handknitter, women in these occupations exhibited a degree of independence perhaps unexpected in a society so dominated by the farming-fishing economy. Yet the particular demographic characteristics of Shetland—a society in which women far outnumbered men—created a situation whereby women marked out a role for themselves that traversed both private and public domains. The sheer fact of male absence (due to seasonal fishing trips and more lengthy whaling and merchant shipping voyages) created a society with very particular labor characteristics, which gave women a degree of economic and, more significantly, cultural power. This power rested on women’s skills and endurance as domestic producers, their active role in the market as traders and marketers of goods, and their place in the community as possessors of certain kinds of knowledge or cultural capital

Leavitt path algebras: the first decade

The algebraic structures known as {\it Leavitt path algebras} were initially developed in 2004 by Ara, Moreno and Pardo, and almost simultaneously (using a different approach) by the author and Aranda Pino. During the intervening decade, these algebras have attracted significant interest and attention, not only from ring theorists, but from analysts working in C$^*$-algebras, group theorists, and symbolic dynamicists as well. The goal of this article is threefold: to introduce the notion of Leavitt path algebras to the general mathematical community; to present some of the important results in the subject; and to describe some of the field's currently unresolved questions.Comment: 53 pages. To appear, Bulletin of Mathematical Sciences. (page numbering in arXiv version will differ from page numbering in BMS published version; numbering of Theorems, etc ... will be the same in both versions

Family History: Inside and Out

The twenty-first century has seen the dawn of a new era of the family, an era that has its roots in the twentieth. Many of the social and scientific phenomena of our time - same-sex couples, in vitro fertilization, single-parent families, international adoption - have inspired changes in the law. Legal change has encompassed both constitutional doctrine and statutory innovations, from landmark Supreme Court decisions articulating a right to procreate (or not), a liberty interest in the care, custody, and control of one\u27s children, and even a right to marry, to state no-fault divorce statutes that have fundamentally changed the way married couples dissolve their legal relationships. But thus far, no legal scholar has attempted to write a comprehensive history of twentieth-century family law. To be sure, many excellent books have been written on particular aspects of the twentieth-century story. Inside the Castle: Law and the Family in 20th Century America, by Joanna Grossman and Lawrence Friedman, however, is the first book to my knowledge that attempts to provide a comprehensive social history of twentieth-century family law in the United States. The goal that Inside the Castle articulates is to look inside the home, inside the castle; to map a century\u27s worth of dynamic change (p. 22). The central claim of the book is that the rapid social change that occurred during the twentieth century forced the law to adapt in correspondingly sweeping ways

Revisiting Akenfield: forty years of an iconic text

Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, now forty years old, is generally acknowledged as one of the most influential books in the field of oral history. First published in 1969, Akenfield is a classic which still has the power to move the reader with its unsentimental, straightforward descriptions of a rural life that was hard, unremitting and something to be endured. This evocative portrait of life in an East Anglian village illustrated the potential for a new kind of history which told the stories of ordinary folk in their own words. To the twenty-first century reader it is a powerful description of a world we have lost. In this article I want to revisit Akenfield as a classic of British oral history, to examine how its reception and use has mirrored trends in oral history practice in the UK, and to reposition it as a text which can have a lot to say to oral historians today. For 40 years Akenfield has acted as a lightning rod, attracting criticism and praise in equal measure but always reflecting the obsessions of the oral history community. Akenfield should not just be seen as an exemplar of a certain kind of oral history practice that was path-breaking and yet not quite professional enough as some have intimated. Rather, I suggest that it can still teach us a lot about how to write history using oral narratives and dare I say it, offers a masterclass in the writing of a history which speaks to its readership

The 'unseamed picture': conflicting narratives of women in the modern European past

This article arises from a personal journey through writing the history of women and gender in modern Europe. Other historians of Europe will no doubt recognise my experience of being pulled in different directions, between the general and the particular, the overarching interpretation and the closely researched case study, because it is part and parcel of being a 'Europeanist' someone with expertise in one part of the continent who is then almost honour-bound to be able to write about Europe as a whole, a task becoming increasingly difficult, maybe impossible, in view of the changing boundaries of Europe in modern geopolitics