'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

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

Storytelling, women's authority and the 'Old-Wife's Tale': 'The Story of the Bottle of Medicine'

The focus of this article is a single personal narrative – a Shetland woman’s telling of a story about two girls on a journey to fetch a cure for a sick relative from a wise woman. The story is treated as a cultural document which offers the historian a conduit to a past that is respectful of indigenous woman-centred interpretations of how that past was experienced and understood. The ‘story of the bottle of medicine’ is more than a skilful telling of a local tale; it is a memory practice that provides a path to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of a culture. Applying perspectives from anthropology, oral history and narrative analysis, three sets of questions are addressed: the issue of authenticity; the significance of the narrative structure and storytelling strategies employed; and the nature of the female performance. Ultimately the article asks what this story can tell us about women’s interpretation of their own history

Long Term Experiences of Tenants in Social Housing in East Kilbride: an Oral History Study

The aim of the project was to conduct an analysis of the extent to which the 'modern' homes of the new town of East Kilbride have met the promises of the original new town planners. It was their belief that high quality 'modern' housing in a planned environment would promote a sense of health and wellbeing amongst residents, improving their quality of life. By means of a series of in depth oral history interviews with long term residents this research probed people's subjective experiences of moving to the town, settling in and adapting, homemaking, leisure and community activities and their views on East Kilbride in 2011. The findings suggest high levels of aspiration amongst those who moved there and high levels of satisfaction with the quality of housing and the quality of life. East Kilbride offered space, new facilities and a sense of community. This was countered by the sense that today, growth of the town, the privileging of the private car and changes in home ownership and tenancy are altering the town's character so that the like-mindedness of earlier years is being replaced by individualism

Cumulative Constitutional Rights

Cumulative constitutional rights are ubiquitous. Plaintiffs litigate multiple constitutional violations, or multiple harms, and judges use multiple constitutional provisions to inform interpretation. Yet judges, litigants, and scholars have often criticized the notion of cumulative rights, including in leading Supreme Court rulings, such as Lawrence v. Texas, Employment Division v. Smith, and Miranda v. Arizona. Recently, the Court attempted to clarify some of this confusion. In its landmark opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court struck down state bans on same-sex marriage by pointing to several distinct but overlapping protections inherent in the Due Process Clause, including the right to individual autonomy, the right to intimate association, and the safeguarding of children, while also noting how the rights in question were simultaneously grounded in equal protection. The Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause are connected in a profound way, Justice Kennedy wrote. The Court did not, however, explain the connection. To redress harms to injured plaintiffs without creating doctrinal incoherence, courts need to understand the categorically distinct ways in which cumulative constitutional harm can occur and how these forms affect constitutional scrutiny. We argue that cumulative constitutional rights cases can be categorized into three general types and that these types need to be analyzed differently. The first type, aggregate harm, occurs when multiple discrete acts, taken together, add up to a harm of constitutional magnitude, even if each individual act, taken alone, would not. The second type, hybrid rights, occurs where a plaintiff claims a single action has violated rights under multiple constitutional provisions. If a court were to apply the proper level of scrutiny to the claims individually, however, none would result in redress. As a result, hybrid rights cases should not ordinarily result in relief. The third type, intersectional rights, occur when the action violates more than one constitutional provision but only results in relief when the provisions are read to inform and bolster one another. Our aim in this Article is to provide a framework courts can use to analyze cumulative constitutional rights. While courts should be open to conducting a cumulative analysis, when constitutional rights are mutually reinforcing those relationships should be clearly set out and defined

Mechanisms for Lasing with Cold Atoms as the Gain Medium

We realize a laser with a cloud of cold rubidium atoms as gain medium, placed in a low-finesse cavity. Three different regimes of laser emission are observed corresponding respectively to Mollow, Raman and Four Wave Mixing mechanisms. We measure an output power of up to 300 $\mu$W and present the main properties of these different lasers in each regime

Deregulation for Development: A Tale of Two States

Economic stress led South Dakota and Delaware in the early 1980’s to eliminate their usury laws and enact other enabling legislation in an effort to attract a new industry and new jobs to their states. Sufficient time has now elapsed to assess the success of the policies adopted by these two states. Evidence suggests that both states benefited from their deregulatory actions but in different ways. These successful deregulations provide an important lesson for state-level authorities responsible for determining the regulatory environment.Regional Development, Deregulation, State Government Public Policy

The Political Economy of Wage and Price Controls: Evidence from the Nixon Tapes

On August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon imposed the first and only peacetime wage and price controls in U.S. history. The Nixon tapes, personal tape recordings made during the presidency of Richard Nixon, are now available to the public and provide a unique body of evidence to investigate the motivations for Nixon’s macroeconomic policies. We have uncovered and report in this paper evidence that Nixon manipulated both monetary and fiscal policies to create a political business cycle that helped secure his reelection victory in 1972. Nixon was very knowledgeable about economic matters and understood the risks to the economy of his macroeconomic policy actions and the imposition of wage and price controls, but chose to tradeoff longer-term economic costs to the economy for his own short-term political gain.Wage and Price Controls, Political Business Cycle, Macroeconomic Policy