Past Imperfect (Journal)
Not a member yet
269 research outputs found
Sort by
Alice Hunt, The Drama of Coronation: Medieval Ceremony in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
No full text
Community, Confederation, and Corpus Christianum: Defining "Gemeinde" in Huldrych Zwingli\u27s Thought, 1525-1531
No full textThis essay investigates Zwingli\u27s lexicon relating to "Gemeinde" (community) in his writing and provides an in-depth look at how this concept shaped the Reformation in Zurich and the Swiss Confederation. Far from the reductive idea of community which was limited to one\u27s confraternity, guild, or network of kinship, Zwingli\u27s concept of community was inherently linked to the Confederation and the broader corpus christianum. Through baptism and the Lord\u27s Supper, all those Swiss living in accordance with Scripture became members of a larger transcendental Swiss community. The Reformation of the Confederation, for Zwingli, became a precondition for remaining God\u27s elect
David Wright, Downs: The History of a Disability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
No full textAndrew Biro (ed.), The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).
No full text“A “Canadian Bethesda”: Reading Banff as a Health Resort, 1883-1902
No full textWhen two railway workers discovered Banff’s hot springs in 1885, an isolated mountain siding quickly became the object of national and international interest. This paper highlights a hitherto neglected factor in the creation of Canada’s first national park: the rich nineteenth-century health theories and philosophies, particularly medical geography, that invested the springs and the surrounding environment with salutary properties and drove Banff’s early development as a health and pleasure resort. Before the conservation movement took a firm hold of the national park mandate, the region’s physical, psychological, and moral health benefits were the focus. The curative mineral springs, pure air, and ennobling scenery intrigued a financially struggling government, a powerful railway company, and work-weary urbanites alike, and the vision of a luxury hotel and bathing resort soon expanded to a vast and healthful adventure playground. Banff was at once a region to be civilized and developed into a modern resort, and a natural antidote to the evils of modern life. Canada’s national park system originated in the popular and profitable association between health and the natural environment; medical and environmental histories are inextricably linked in the study of Banff’s first two decades
The Alberta Eugenics Movement and the 1937 Amendment to the Sexual Sterilization Act
No full textThe scholarly study of eugenics legislation in Alberta has been seriously limited as research has focused on the province’s original Sterilization Act, passed in March 1928, and on the political, social, and economic conditions of the 1920s. Although the 1928 Act was of great significance, being the first sterilization law passed in Canada, it was its 1937 amendment and the permitting of involuntary sterilizations that made the Alberta eugenics movement truly distinct. During the late 1930s, a time when the great majority of regional governments were either decommissioning or disregarding their sterilization laws due to a lack of funding, the discrediting of scientific racism and an increase in public protest, Alberta expanded its own legislation. Although similar laws were met with fierce opposition in other provinces and in the United States, this new amendment of 1937 remained largely unopposed in Alberta.
As a result of such narrowly focused research, the explanations for why the Act was amended and why resistance to non-consensual sterilization remained minimal during the 1930s have been based almost entirely on political and social assumptions and not on sound evidence; explanations have proven to be exaggerated, inaccurate, and misleading. By dismissing the preconceived notions and arguments of the past we are left with a new grounding from which to build future propositions and with a new set of sharpened questions to help determine why the Alberta government, and presumably its people, were willing to support such regressive legislation when it was being ignored and rejected elsewhere. By doing so new theories arise, such as the influential role of individual personalities within the provincial government and the Alberta medical community, the definition and diagnosis of “mental deficiency” in Canada, and the means by which political resistance could be expressed
