Petitions to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from Local Governments, 1867–1877: A Case Study in Legislative Participation

1993 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-180
Author(s):  
Mary M. P. Stokes

In late twentieth-century English-speaking western democracies, the petition is almost exclusively a sporadic, exceptional, and marginal mode of political expression, its legitimacy as an instrument and indicator of public opinion superceded by elected professionals and ubiquitous polls; a tenuous survival from its origin as the universal form of civic supplication. Part and parcel of the democratic revolution that reached its apogee in the nineteenth century, this transition may not have been neatly contemporaneous with the constitutional changes to which it seems collateral. In a recent article in this review, David C. Frederick posited that petitioning effectively disappeared in the United States after the imposition of a “gag-rule” by Congress, imposed in the 1830s as a response to anti-slavery agitation by petition.

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel LaChance ◽  
Paul Kaplan

Reality television in the United States has often been understood to reinforce the punitive and neoliberal turns American political culture took in the late twentieth century. But in this article, we examine how it can work to unsettle as well as naturalize punitive and neoliberal ideologies. We do so via a case study of To Catch a Predator, a reality-based television program documenting the detection, legal apprehension, and extralegal punishment of adults seeking sex with teenagers. Both the appeal of the show and its susceptibility to the backlash that ultimately shut down its production, we argue, lay in a tacit invitation to viewers to imagine themselves as predators as well as parents or prosecutors.


2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-25
Author(s):  
Andrea Jain

This paper is an exploration of preksha dhyana as a case study of modern yoga. Preksha is a system of yoga and meditation introduced by Acarya Mahaprajna of the Jain Svetambara Terapanth in the late twentieth century. I argue that preksha is an attempt to join the newly emerging transnational yoga market whereby yoga has become a practice oriented around the attainment of physical health and psychological well-being. I will evaluate the ways in which Mahaprajna appropriates scientific discourse and in so doing constructs a new and unique system of Jain modern yoga. In particular, I evaluate the appropriation of physical and meditative techniques from ancient yoga systems in addition to the explanation of yoga metaphysics by means of biomedical discourse. I will demonstrate how, in Mahaprajna’s preksha system, the metaphysical subtle body becomes somaticized. In other words, Mahaprajna uses the bio-medical understanding of physiology to locate and identify the functions of metaphysical subtle body parts and processes in the physiological body.


1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mira Wilkins

A great deal of attention has recently been focused on the extent of Japanese direct investment in the United States. In the following historical survey, Professor Wilkins details the size and scope of these investments from the late nineteenth century, showing that Japanese involvements in America have deep historical roots. At the same time, she analyzes the ways in which late twentieth century Japanese direct investment differs from the earlier phenomenon and attempts to explain why it has aroused such concern among both business leaders and the general public.


2015 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Cumming ◽  
Grant Fleming

We examine the formation and growth of the distressed asset investment industry during the late twentieth century, with specific focus on the strategies of the leading firms. The distressed asset investment industry is dominated by firms based in the United States and is relatively concentrated, due in large part to early movers developing distinctive investment capabilities through participation in landmark transactions, relationship-specific resources, and exploitation of scale effects. We argue that the participation of these firms in the bankruptcy and corporate restructuring markets has resulted in private-sector workouts becoming more competitive and more efficient over the last thirty years, especially in the United States.


Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz

The Introduction provides an orientation to the book and its key questions: What did it mean to become “modern” in the early twentieth century? How did American ethnicities take shape in the years leading up to and after World War II? How did middle-class women experience and shape their changing roles in society, before the social revolutions of the late twentieth century? How are these things related? The Introduction also covers an overview of mahjong’s trajectory in the United States. It examines background related to the history of leisure, gender, and consumerism in addition to introducing key sources and methodologies. The introduction sets up the book to tell the story of mahjong’s role in the creation of identifiably ethnic communities, women’s access to respectable leisure, and how Americans used ideas of China to understand themselves.


2019 ◽  
pp. 77-88
Author(s):  
Keramet Reiter

This chapter provides an overview of the history of supermax prisons: facilities built across the United States in the 1980s and 1990s in order to hold “problem” prisoners, like gang members, the seriously mentally ill, the extremely violent, and those sentenced to death, in solitary confinement for months and years at a time. Since nearly every state opened one of these facilities in the late twentieth century, prisoners have litigated the constitutionality of the harsh conditions: no human contact, 24-hour fluorescent lighting, limited time outdoors. In spite of these conditions, supermaxes were not just another popular tough-on-crime innovation; state (not federal) prison administrators designed the first supermaxes with little public knowledge or oversight, in response to organized protests in prisons in the 1970s and 1980s. Although prisoners have sought to challenge these facilities, litigation has, in many cases, played a legitimizing in the history of supermaxes.


Author(s):  
James Barrett

Working-class formation in the United States was considerably complicated by waves of immigration from the mid nineteenth century down to the present. In some cases, the ethnic differences lead to conflict, in others to “ethnically hybrid” cultures based on class. Labor and radical organizations often played an important role in acculturating late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrant workers. The kind of ethic “niches” in earlier industrial occupational structures can also be found in the employment available to immigrants today. By the late twentieth century, union organization was also complicated by shifts in the occupational structure from manufacturing to service jobs, yet much of the meager growth in union organization in recent decades has come in service industries with heavy concentrations of immigrant workers.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike-Frank Epitropoulos ◽  
John Markoff

AbstractFrom its beginnings in eighteenth-century revolution through the great global wave of democratizations that began in the 1970s, the term “democracy” has been used in many different ways but always referred to a form of self-rule of a defined people on a defined territory. The very obvious web of transnational interconnection had by the late twentieth century raised important questions about what democracy could mean in the global era. Everyday speech in Greece has for several decades been taking note of this by referring to the President of the United States as the Planetarch, a major figure whom they had no role in selecting. We use interviews from just before the elections of 2008 that brought Barack Obama to office to explore what Greeks mean by this term and conclude by showing that it provides a framework for them to talk about his successor, President Donald Trump, as well.


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