223 research outputs found

    Adventurer, saint, celebrity: the Chevalière Deon's transgender selves

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    No other trans individual has left us as large a corpus of autobiographical writings as the French diplomat, spy and author the Chevalière Deon (1728-1810), who narrated her transition using a variety of genres: confession, sermon, epistolary exchange, dialogue and memoir. Unfortunately these writings have only recently begun to be studied by historians, and the vast majority remain unpublished. This essay explores how Deon has been represented by clinicians and historians, before exploring her presentation as adventurer, saint, and celebrity. It argues that rather than sifting Deon's archive for a single, enduring, ‘authentic self’, Deon can help us approach trans lives in less restrictive ways

    Mr five per cent: the many lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the world's richest man

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    At his death in 1955 Calouste Gulbenkian was one of the richest men in the world, known as "Mr Five Percent" on account of his personal holding of 5% of Middle East oil production. His fortune and art collection are now held by the Gulbenkian Foundation, one of the world's wealthiest philanthropies. The companies he helped to create - Royal Dutch-Shell and Total - count among today's oil "supermajors," and the international oil agreements he brokered continue to shape the economic and political fortunes of Iraq, Venezuela and other oil-producing countries across the globe. Gulbenkian's media-shy persona and preference for back-room deals lent him an aura of mystery which continues to this day. Though acknowledged as one of the heroes of the international story of oil by historians such as Daniel Yergin (author of "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power"), Gulbenkian's story has yet to be told

    The archaeology of plural and changing identities : beyond identification /

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    "The international group of contributions each illuminate how the various identifiers of race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, class, gender, personhood, health, and/or religion are part of both material expressions of social affiliations and transient experiences of identity. The Archaeology of Plural and Changing Identities: Beyond Identification will be of great interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, curators, and other social scientists interested in the mutability of identification through material remains."--Jacket.Includes bibliographical references and index.Beyond identification : an introduction / Eleanor Conlin Casella and Chris Fowler -- Medieval towns, modern signs, identity inter-spaces : some reflections in historical archaeology / Tadhg O'Keeffe -- "Either, or, neither nor" : resisting the production of gender, race and class dichotomies in the pre-colonial period / Lynette Russell -- Sexual subjects : identity and taxonomy in archaeological research / Barbara L. Voss -- The contribution of gender to personal identity in the southern Scandinavian Mesolithic / Robert A. Schmidt -- Identity politics : personhood, kinship, gender and power in neolithic and early Bronze Age Britain / Chris Fowler -- Homing instincts : grounded identities and dividual selves in the British Bronze Age / Joanna Brück -- "Games, sports and what-not" : regulation of leisure and the production of social identities in nineteenth century America / Eleanor Conlin Casella -- Changing identities in the Arabian Gulf : archaeology, religion and ethnicity in context / Timothy Insoll -- Caste in Cuenca : colonial identity in the seventeenth century Andes / Ross W. Jamieson -- Natural histories and social identities in Neolithic Orkney / Andrew Jones."The international group of contributions each illuminate how the various identifiers of race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, class, gender, personhood, health, and/or religion are part of both material expressions of social affiliations and transient experiences of identity. The Archaeology of Plural and Changing Identities: Beyond Identification will be of great interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, curators, and other social scientists interested in the mutability of identification through material remains."--Jacket

    Natural Histories and Social Identities in Neolithic Orkney

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    Contents:Beyond Identification: An Introduction.- Part I. Identity and Social Change. Medieval Towns, Modern Signs, Identity Inter-spaces: Some Reflections in Historical Archaeology.- "Either or Neither Nor": Resisting the Production of Gender, Race and Class Dichotomies in the Pre-Colonial Period.- Part II. Identity: Category and Practice. Sexual Subjects: Identity and Taxonomy in Archaeological Research. The Contribution of Gender to Personal Identity in the Southern Scandinavian Mesolithic.- Identity Politics: Personhood, Kinship, Gender and Power in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain.- Homing Instincts: Grounded Identities and Dividual Selves in the British Bronze Age.- Part III. Identity and Place.-"Games, Sports and What-Not": Regulation of Leisure and the Production of Social Identities in 19th Century America. Changing Identities in the Arabian Gulf: Archaeology, Religion, and Ethnicity in Context. Caste in Cuenca: Colonial Identity in the 17th Century Andes.- Natural Histories and Social Identities in Neolithic Orkney.- Index

    Music and elite identity in the English country house, c.1790-1840

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    In this thesis I investigate two untapped music book collections that belonged to two women. Elizabeth Sykes Egerton (1777-1853) and Lydia Hoare Acland (1786-1856) lived at Tatton Park, Cheshire, and Killerton House, Devon, respectively. Upon their marriage in the early nineteenth century, they brought with them the music books they had compiled so far to their new homes, and they continued to collect and play music after marriage. I examine the vocal music in Elizabeth’s and Lydia’s collections, and I aim to show how selected vocal music repertoires contributed toward the construction of landed elite identity in these women and their husbands, concentrating on gender, class, national identity and religion.In chapter one, I concentrate on songs that depict destitute and suffering individuals to move both listeners and performers to compassion. The songs are topical and provide insights into contemporary understandings of sympathy and landed elite responsibility for the distressed. In chapter two, I focus on the ingoing and outgoing movements of music in the country house, and the consumption of foreign music in the home. I divide the chapter into two sections, first examining Elizabeth’s Italian vocal music that she collected during her girlhood years in London and York in the 1790s. The Italian music that Elizabeth brought to Tatton complemented other Italian objects and items in the home. Italian culture appealed to the Egerton family both before and after Elizabeth and Wilbraham married. In the second section, I investigate Lydia and her family’s journey to Vienna for the Congress in 1814-1815. Lydia took away with her a book of vocal music to remind her of home in a foreign environment. While away in Vienna, the Aclands attended concerts and music salons, and they purchased music books to bring back home to add to their collection. In the final chapter, I concentrate on the man of the house at music and I consider the social expectations, duties and responsibilities that had befallen our landed elite men, Thomas Dyke Acland and Wilbraham Egerton. I discuss Thomas’s and Wilbraham’s musical engagements and occasions for performing music, and how men’s music-making contributed to a masculine identity.By placing the vocal music in broader social and cultural contexts, reading personal correspondence, newspaper articles, account books and diaries, we can begin to understand what our families thought about music, and how they used and experienced music in and around their homes, forming an important part of their lifestyle

    Introduction

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    Cross-dressing author, envoy, soldier and spy, Charles d'Eon de Beaumont's unusual career fascinated his contemporaries and continues to attract historians, novelists, playvtrights, filmmakers, image makers, cultural theorists and those concerned with manifestations of the extraordinary. D'Eon's significance as a historical figure was already being debated more than 45 years before his death. In 1763, a hostile writer predicted that d'Eon's memory would be associated with dishonour and scandal for both himself and France: 'Il outrage la France jusques dans les siecles a venir.'... Le Livre du Plenipotentiare [i.e. d'Eon's Lettres, mlimoires et nligociations] sera un monument eternel de Ia division des Ministres Francois ... Les Historiens diront que son administration etoit mauvaise ... que dans cette Cour tout etoit livre a la cabale eta la prevention. Les Annales d'Angleterre citeront ces endroits, pour ... le Tableau de la France sous le regne de Louis XV. Cest ainsi que le plus petit mortel deshonore souvent un grand Etat, et le fletrit jusques dans la derniere posterite. [He outrages France right up to centuries to come: ... The book of the Plenipotentiary will be an eternal monument to the division of French ministers ... Historians will say that its administration was bad ... that in that Court everything was given up to faction and prejudice. The Annals of England will cite those places for ... the picture of France under the reign of Louis XV. This is how the smallest of mortals often dishonours a great State, and blackens it for the whole of posterity.

    One Nation Divided by Slavery: Remembering the American Revolution While Marching toward the Civil War

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    https://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/abolitionism/4/thumbnail.jpgThe centrality of the American Revolution in the antebellum slavery controversy In the two decades before the Civil War, free Americans engaged in “history wars” every bit as ferocious as those waged today over the proposed National History Standards or the commemoration at the Smithsonian Institution of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In One Nation Divided by Slavery, author Michael F. Conlin investigates the different ways antebellum Americans celebrated civic holidays, read the Declaration of Independence, and commemorated Revolutionary War battles, revealing much about their contrasting views of American nationalism. While antebellum Americans agreed on many elements of national identity—in particular that their republic was the special abode of liberty on earth—they disagreed on the role of slavery. The historic truths that many of the founders were slaveholders who had doubts about the morality of slavery, and that all thirteen original states practiced slavery to some extent in 1776, offered plenty of ambiguity for Americans to “remember” selectively. Fire-Eaters defended Jefferson, Washington, and other leading patriots as paternalistic slaveholders, if not “positive good” apologists for the institution, who founded a slaveholding republic. In contrast, abolitionists cited the same slaveholders as opponents of bondage, who took steps to end slavery and establish a free republic. Moderates in the North and the South took solace in the fact that the North had managed to end slavery in its own way through gradual emancipation while allowing the South to continue to practice slavery. They believed that the founders had established a nation that balanced free and slave labor. Because the American Revolution and the American Civil War were pivotal and crucial elements in shaping the United States, the intertwined themes in One Nation Divided By Slavery provide a new lens through which to view American history and national identity.</p

    Dead Time by C. Conlin / Shelter by J. S. Lee

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    Conlin, Christy A. Dead Time. / Lee, Jen S. Shelter. Single Voice Series. Toronto: Annick Press, 2011. Print. It is difficult to say which of these brief cold showers will leave you feeling happier to leap back into the warmth of the everyday. Presented back-to-back in a single volume, both novellas share an unhappy preoccupation: picking apart the threads of the past in order to untangle – or at least understand – the enmeshments the present. The narrator of Dead Time is Isabella, a teen awaiting trial for a crime which, she repeatedly insists, she did not commit. It was her boyfriend who murdered the interloping Lulu; as soon as he confesses his guilt, Isabella will be released from the grim “youth center” where she awaits trial. Author Christy Ann Conlin deploys the first-person voice masterfully— Isabella’s rage beats palpably from the page, and we are righteously indignant on her behalf. Yet the further she beckons us into her memory, recounting the events antecedent to Lulu’s murder, the uglier and less justifiable her anger becomes. So gradually is the reader’s sympathy eroded that the story’s final twist – though dimly visible all along – still manages to come as a surprise. Though more straightforward than its companion novel, Jen Sookfong Lee’s Shelter is no less dispiriting in its outcome. We begin at the unhappy end: our narrator, Abby, weeps alone on a park bench. Even before her latest catastrophe, it would seem she has plenty to cry about: maimed by debt, her parents abide in private misery, leaving Abby to run a singularly thankless household. Her only solace is a volunteer job at the local animal shelter, where she meets a beguiling young man named Sean. We know Abby’s infatuation with Sean will end badly, but the form and flavour of this badness is not revealed until Abby fully unspools her dismal yarn. Though hampered by some awkward turns of phrase- “… it feels like he’s always been part of me, like an elbow” - the story succeeds as a meditation on the blurred line between the security of a shelter – be it a house, a family, or a lover — and the confinement of a trap. Pitched at mature but not necessarily avid readers, Annick Press’s Single Voice Series entices with the promise of gritty, fast-moving narratives packaged in a clever two-for-one reversible format. Both Dead Time and Shelter are certainly gritty and, at less than 100 pages a pop, fast enough to read in one go. It is unclear, however, what the effect on their intended audience might be. Comfortless in their brevity, joyless in their details, these novels do little to stir the imagination or assuage the loneliness of the young reader. At best, they offer a frisson of discomfort, a chilling affirmation of vague adolescent unease: the world is indeed out to get you.Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Sarah Mead-Willis Sarah is the Rare Book Cataloguer at the University of Alberta\u27s Bruce Peel Special Collections Library. She holds a BA and an MLIS from the University of Alberta and an MA in English Literature from the University of Victoria.

    The association between chronotype and wages at mid-age

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    Funding Information: We thank all cohort members and researchers who participated in the 46y study. We also wish to acknowledge the work of the NFBC project center. NFBC1966 received financial support from University of Oulu Grant no. 24000692 , Oulu University Hospital Grant no. 24301140 , ERDF European Regional Development Fund Grant no. 539/2010 A31592 . Conlin thanks OP Group Research Foundation for personal research grants. We thank editor Jörg Baten and two anonymous referees for valuable comments. We also thank participants at the Finnish Society for Health Economics - Health Economics Day 2022 for feedback. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The AuthorsSleep has been shown to affect economic outcomes, including wages. The mechanisms by which sleep affects wages remain unclear. We examine the relationship between chronotype – morning larks, evening owls – and wages at mid-age. We propose a novel model relating chronotype to wages in consideration of human, social, and health capital constructs. Empirically, we explore the effects of chronotype mediated through life course choices, such as work experience, trust, and health behaviour. The data come from the 46-year-old follow-up study of the Northern Finland Birth Cohort (1966) and from registers of the Finnish Tax Administration. We find evening chronotype to have a significant indirect negative effect on wages, which occurs through accumulating less work experience and through poor health outcomes. The effect is largest for male workers, with a total indirect effect on average wages of − 4%. We also provide evidence that chronotype has a long-term association with wages between 29 and 50 years of age. We conclude that evening-type workers are less suited to typical working hours and accumulate less human, social and health capital which in turn negatively affects their wages. Our findings are of great socio-economic importance because evening chronotypes make up a significant part of the population.Peer reviewe

    Value versus growth on the Finnish stock market

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    The author carries out the study in order to investigate the performance of value stocks versus growth stocks on the Helsinki stock exchange throughout the years 2015 and 2019. It is important to find out whether the superior returns exist when the whole investment capital is put into the value portfolio or the growth portfolio and during different circumstances such as boom and bust periods as well as different economic cycles. The stocks are classified into two portfolios consisting of purely value stocks and growth stocks based on fundamental financial ratios including price-to-earnings ratio (P/E), price-to-cash-flow ratio (P/CF), market-to-book value (MTBV) and price-earnings-growth ratio (PEG). If the stocks score low on these ratios, the stocks are considered to be value stocks. On the contrast, if the stocks score high on these ratios, they are considered to be growth stocks. The holding periods for these portfolios are 6 months, 12 months (1 year), 36 months (3 years) and 60 months (5 years). Average annual returns (also known as non-risk-adjusted returns or absolute returns) and risk-adjusted returns belonging to the portfolios are compared. In general, the growth portfolios yield higher returns than the value portfolios in most cases, during almost all investment horizons and for almost all variables, except for PEG, which always experiences the opposite. The similar scenario occurs when it comes to boom and bust periods as well as different economic cycles. More significantly, the Betas are always lower for the portfolios that experience higher returns. The findings of this research does not completely confirm the results of the previous studies conducted on the same topic. While the old studies are in favour of the contrarian investment strategy in value stocks, these empirical results suggest to go for the confronting investment strategy in growth stocks. The phenomenon of having high returns without high risk does not necessarily deny the well-rooted financial theories such as Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) or the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) due to the fact that not all risk are reflected in the Beta. Moreover, behavioural finance, especially investors’ irrationality, can be used to potentially explain the existence of the superior returns. The conclusion drawn is that depending on different variables and different investment horizons, investors should use different strategy of investing in value stocks or growth stocks in order to gain the highest possible returns
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