Joining the `Crusade against the Giants': Keir Hardie's Fairy Tales and The Socialist Child Reader

This article focuses on Keir Hardie's forgotten fiction and journalism for children, published in his paper The Labour Leader during the 1890s. It argues that Hardie's dialogue with child correspondents was shaped by a socialist periodical culture that redefined reading as a communal, political activity. Relating Hardie's appropriation of fantasy to that of a fellow socialist editor, John Trevor, the article examines the fairy tale as a propaganda tool in the process of `making socialists', but also questions the model of child readers as passive consumers, arguing that young readers were both empowered and controlled by Hardie's journalistic strategies.

Genealogies of Partition: History, History-Writing and 'The Troubles' in Ireland

Contemporary political disputes have a long history of expression and contestation through the genre of history-writing in Ireland. The role of history writing and political science writing during the nearly 40 years of the so-called 'Troubles' has been no exception to this. Battles between competing versions of what the conflict 'is about', mediated through academic and popular texts have themselves in turn become constitutive of it. This builds upon centuries of the representation of the complicated politics of this island as 'an issue' in British domestic politics - first 'the Catholic question', then 'the Irish question'. The location of political power outside the island for centuries has created successive battles for the representation of sectional interests in a metropolitan centre. The skills of propaganda, history writing, newspaper writing have consequently been deployed at a remarkable level of skill and intensity. In the recent period one of the consequences of this has been the removal from the debate of the actuality of partition; this builds upon a particular historical representation of partition as an historical inevitability. To seek to restore partition to the debate is not to call for its undoing but to recognise that seeking to circumvent debates about its origins in the key period of democratisation in Irish politics (1880-1920) has been counter-productive. This essay examines the genealogies of partition in Irish and international contexts in the light of these battles for representation, and aims to return a lost dimension to the debate about the so-called 'Troubles'in Ireland. The genealogy of partition is the issue that has been marginalised in academic study and this has affected both policy and politics.

La ofensiva cinematográfica de la URSS en la guerra civil española

This article explores Soviet cinema and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. The article focuses on three separate components of Moscow’s cinematic operations vis-à-vis the Spanish imbroglio: 1.) the distribution of Soviet-made feature films in the Loyalist zone, 2.) the production of Soviet propaganda newsreels on Spanish subjects intended for distribution within the Soviet Union, and 3.) the significance of the Spanish war for Soviet cinema throughout the balance of the Bolshevik period. The narrative and conclusions herein are supported by new research from archives in both Spain and the Russian Federation, as well as analyses of films rarely if ever discussed in the scholarly literature, either within film studies or twentieth century European history.

The Geography of Conflict and Death in Belfast, Northern Ireland

The conflict known as the oTroubleso in Northern Ireland began during the late 1960s and is defined by political and ethno-sectarian violence between state, pro-state, and anti-state forces. Reasons for the conflict are contested and complicated by social, religious, political, and cultural disputes, with much of the debate concerning the victims of violence hardened by competing propaganda-conditioning perspectives. This article introduces a database holding information on the location of individual fatalities connected with the contemporary Irish conflict. For each victim, it includes a demographic profile, home address, manner of death, and the organization responsible. Employing geographic information system (GIS) techniques, the database is used to measure, map, and analyze the spatial distribution of conflict-related deaths between 1966 and 2007 across Belfast, the capital city of Northern Ireland, with respect to levels of segregation, social and economic deprivation, and interfacing. The GIS analysis includes a kernel density estimator designed to generate smooth intensity surfaces of the conflict-related deaths by both incident and home locations. Neighborhoods with high-intensity surfaces of deaths were those with the highest levels of segregation ( 90 percent Catholic or Protestant) and deprivation, and they were located near physical barriers, the so-called peacelines, between predominantly Catholic and predominantly Protestant communities. Finally, despite the onset of peace and the formation of a power-sharing and devolved administration (the Northern Ireland Assembly), disagreements remain over the responsibility and ocommemorationo of victims, sentiments that still uphold division and atavistic attitudes between spatially divided Catholic and Protestant populations.