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kirkland-bros-and-more · 1 year

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A few months ago I published some hcs in my Hetalia Amino account and I wanted to share them here since for my own mental health and to make the fandom a better place and help to the expansion of the Kirkland brothers supremacy, I feel obligated to publish this

Notice these are only my hcs!!

⚠️IMPLIES SOME SHIPS⚠️

•You don't have to agree with everything

•Also notice I don't have too many developed hcs to some of them, those are just idea I have

•I have re-written some of them

Republic of Ireland 🇮🇪

-His name would be Patrick Murphy (I like Seamus too) and he doesn't use the Kirkland as a surname because in my hcs I think they had their own surname before entering into the UK and took the Kirkland from England once they become part of the UK but once they become independent, no more Kirkland in their name

-He speaks in Irish Gaelic to Northern Ireland (The boy is learning) and Scotland (Irish and Scottish Gaelic are very similar) more to England's disgrace

-He is 28 years old in human age

-Birthday on the 17th March

-He is the oldest brother but he only plays the big brother role with Northern Ireland and Scotland since those two are the brother he is most closer to

-Ireland taught many things to Scotland when they were children, literally Ireland took care of him the best he could

-Playfull, noisy, extrovert with a great sense of humor and always ready to party

-His best friend is Spain (Catholic dorks and a shared hate for England helped in their friendship)

-Very religious, goes to church every Sunday

-He would never understand how Wales can get along with England

-He is very proud of Scotland and doesn't understand neither when did Scotland become the "big brother" of the family

-Really good dancer along with North and Scotland also has a great singing voice and likes to play instruments

Northern Ireland (I have very few hc of him since I used to think canon Scotland was Northern Ireland and the personality has changed a lot)

-The name I like to use for him is Liam Kirkland (also Connor as a name it's a nice option). Surnames I find quite difficult O'Neil? Gallagher?? Idk

-Youngest of the family, he is 17-18 years old in human age

-His birthday is the 3rd May

-The brothers are the only ones allowed to call him North

-He and other teenager countries like Iceland, HK, Latvia, Korea...have a group chat and occasionally they met and play just dance to see who is the best dancer

-He has a thing for Iceland but he is scared of telling him. Also if he asks for help (mostly Scotland which is a competely error) he knows Iceland's brother is Norway and he and Scotland are good friends so if Scotland knew about it, he would have Scotland and Norway trying to make their little brothers interact more alone together even though they know they are trying to help and better not to let know Ireland and England about this

-Good dancer too, Ireland and Scotland teach him pretty well

-Wales is the one teaching him magic

-When it's St Patrick's, he and Ireland dissapear, the rest of the brothers don't even try to know where they are the whole day but all they know is they go to parties and several pubs

Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

-Dylan (Kirkland) Llewellyn

-Middle brother, older than England and Northern Ireland and they don't know if Scotland is older or not but Wales prefers being the younger brother to Scotland and Ireland

-24 years old in human age

-Birthday is 1st March

-The easiest Kirkland to talk and have access to

-Lives in his own bubble but be careful

-Looks inoffensive, could be the worst when it's angry

-He owns a farm in the countryside of Wales where sometimes the rest of the brothers help with him

-Gets extremely competitive when rugby or football matches happen, especially during the 6Nations tournament

-He and New Zealand share the same braincell both love sheep and rugby, not a good idea to have them in the same room if there is a Wales vs NZ match

-He has the best singing voice among his brothers

-He knows all the words from How to train your dragon

-Wales fights with England about why he isn't represented in the UK flag and he would come to you and say the Welsh flag is the best in the world

England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

-We all know his name and age

-He has dated half of the world

-He spend his childhood mostly with Wales and France under the Roman Empire and later with Scotland and France

-Wales and Scotland taught him magic

-He doesn't call Northern Ireland big brother

-He would never admit it but he is glad he has the celtic brothers next to him, he really them but he would never tell them

-Sometimes he thinks about what could have been his life if he had lived with the rest of the Germanic brothers instead of the Celtic ones

-He knows he and his brothers are a bunch of proud people so that can explain all their fights

-He regrets what he had done to Ireland and Scotland, feels bad for Northern Ireland and doesn't understand why Wales kinda supports him but again he would never tell them

-If it was on his hands, he as a person, as Arthur Kirkland, as a brother, he would have given Scotland his independence long time ago but he knows that he can't do that as a human

-He appreciates Ireland for his sense of humour, Northern Ireland for bring some happiness to the house, Wales for trying to understand him and being like a brigde between England and Scotland fights and Scotland for making him strong

-He likes the time when they are all together singing, playing instruments or doing some magic

-He feels like a burden to them, all the troubles they had they can't forget and all the pressure he feels to show them he can be as strong as them, he doesn't understand what the brothers tried to make him to understand all these time

-He sometimes has nightmares where he lose the brothers and he wakes up and checks each bedroom to see if the brothers are there, sometimes also he feels so bad that he just lays in others bed looking for some brotherhood moments, normally Wales or Scotland

-The only time he apologised to Scotland for something he had done was when he said sorry to him for trying to destroy for centuries Scotland and France relationship.

England understood what he had done to them when he saw America trying to destroy England and Japan relationship.

England saw and felt what is was to lose someone you really loved and mean so much to you because of another person

-He doesn't want to admit he wants to be the younger brother of the family cause he failed as a big brother to America when he tried to prove Scotland he could be a better big brother than Scotland ever was and the fact Northern Ireland is around now making him the baby makes it more difficult

Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

-The name goes by Alistair (Kirkland) McKenzie

-Birthday is 30th November

-Has a deep voice

-26 years old

-He has been in love with France all his life since they were children

-Even though Ireland is the oldest brother and Wales could be but prefers to be a younger brother, he took the big brother role of the family

-Norway and Denmark fall in love with him at some point too but Scotland didn't feel the same to them and even though he knows that, they are his best friends (along with France)

-Most difficult brother to have access with, he is a very private and reserved person and only a few ones can see the Scotman in a very different way in terms of personality, he really needs to know if he can trust in them

-He is the best cooker in the family (Thanks France for this) but if he can fry something, he would do it

-He is proud of what England has become but not the way England used to gain that power

-Dare to touch one of them brothers and be prepared to run for your life, his family is extremely important even though he thinks they are a bunch of idiots

-Canada sees him as his real father, Scotland helped to "build Canada", their first minister was Scottish, etc the region of Nova Scotia, Scotland taught him so many things and Canada really appreciated that so Canada is always welcomed in Scotland's house.

Besides Scotland knew Canada was the little kid France was raising and in a difficult period of time where he couldn't meet his friend, he took care of Canada

-He and Wales sometimes do Pokemon fights with their pets, it's Nessie or the Unicorn agaisnt the Welsh Dragon, England and Northern Ireland got implied too and they end to make some Team Rocket

-Norway taught him some elemental magic related with the element of water and air

-He and the Irish speak to each other in Gaelic, much for Wales and England disgrace

-He always supports two teams: Scotland and the one playing against England

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silvestromedia · 1 year

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SAINTS FOR FEBRUARY 04

Bl. John Speed, 1594 A.D. An English martyr. he was a layman sometimes called Spence. He was executed at Durham for befriending Catholic priests. John was beatified in 1929 as one of the Durham Martyrs.

St. John Stone, 1538 A.D. John Stone (d. 1538) + Augustinian martyr, one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. He was a friar at Canterbury who denied the Supremacy Act of King Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547) and was arrested and executed by being hanged, drawn, and quartered at Canterbury.

St. Aldate, 600 A.D. Bishop and leader of Gloucester, England. Aldate's life is not detailed historically. He is is reported to have served as bishop of the region and to have roused the countryside to resist pagan invasion forces.

St. Liephard, 640 A.D. English martyred bishop, companion of King Caedwalla on a pilgrimage to Rome. Liephard was slain near Cambrai, France, and is revered as a martyr.

St. Modan, 6th century. Abbot and son of an Irish chieftain. He labored in Scotland, preaching at Stirling and Falkirk, until elected against his will as abbot of a monastery. Eventually, he resigned and became a hermit, dying near Dumbarton.

ST. JOSEPH OF LEONESSA, CAPUCHIN FRIAR Born in 1556, he went to Constantinople where he helped Christians who had been captured by the Turks. He tried to preach the Gospel to the Sultan, for which he was arrested, tortured and driven out. He travelled around Italy on foot, preaching the Good News to the poor, the sick, and prisoners.

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chl0writes · 2 years

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Bringing the Sarah characters to England.

Listen, I have NEVER written a headcanon in my life but I had a lot of fun! This is literally such a random idea I had but I couldn’t get it out of my brain so here we are. I hope you enjoy :)

Billie Dean Howard.

Billie Dean had travelled to London once before to film a special for her show.

She always talks about how amazing that trip was and how much she would love to return with you.

While you love living in LA, sometimes you find yourself feeling homesick. So when Billie Dean mentioned how much she enjoyed England, you just knew you had to fly home with her.

In London, you see all of the sights from Buckingham palace to the Tower Bridge.

You take bus tours and you take the boat to Greenwich.

Picnics in Hyde Park.

Listen, this lady cannot stand Primark. Far too rowdy and far to cheap for Billie Dean’s taste.

She will drag you around Harrod’s for hours.

She takes one look at the wetherspoons and it’s an immediate no. This is a lady of class, it’s dinner in The Shard or no dinner at all.

West End shows every night!

Billie Dean downs ginger shots from Pret like a PRO.

Lana Winters.

England wasn’t ever really a place that Lana had wanted to visit.

But, she soon changed her mind once she heard how passionately you spoke of your birthplace.

Lana had just published her fourth novel, and the idea of a long two month vacation seemed like the perfect way to celebrate and unwind.

You hire a car and you travel to different parts of the country.

You stay in London for the longest period of time as Lana enjoyed the culture and the diversity of the city.

You take her to as many quaint little book shops you can find and she falls in love with each and every one.

Seeing how much Lana enjoyed the city, you take her to places like Manchester and Liverpool.

She falls in love with Liverpool almost immediately!

The Beatles are one of Lana’s favourite bands so she particularly enjoys seeing all of the memorabilia and The Beatles themed pubs.

Lana’s next book would definitely be set in England.

Cordelia Goode.

Cordelia had always wanted to travel, but the coven and her supremacy kept her tied to New Orleans.

You have it all planned out, the girls are in on it. In October, the two of you would fly to England for her birthday.

You took the Supreme to York. She would love the sights and the scenery of Yorkshire, you were sure.

You went through the notorious ghost walks and she did not bat an eyelid. You on the other hand left clinging to the blonde for dear life.

Lunch in Public Gardens!

Driving out to pumpkin patches.

Is definitely disturbed by kebabs.

Cordelia spends hours picking out individual gifts for her girls. She wants to bring the coven here.

DESPISES the tales of the Pendle Witches.

Bette & Dot Tattler.

Bette jumped at the idea of travelling with you. Dot on the other hand, took quite some persuasion.

Big cities were a no-go for the twins, and growing up in a more secluded corner of England, you know the perfect place to take them.

The three of you were to spend the week in a log cabin in the countryside, far away from everybody.

Upon finding a cookbook, the twins practically made every single recipe in that book. It took several shopping trips but you were not complaining.

Every night ended by watching the sunset, and laying underneath the stars until the chill became too much.

Sally McKenna.

Being stuck in the Cortez, Sally can’t go anywhere.

There was not a chance in hell that you would travel that far away from Sally.

She is a complete sucker for your English accent.

She asks you so many questions about the places that you have been and the things that you have seen.

She could listen to you talk for hours.

Audrey Tindall.

The trip was pretty much inevitable considering you were both desperate to return to the UK.

What you don’t expect is to arrive and really impulsively buy a house in Sussex.

Did you both decide to uproot your life to England? Yes.

The first few months are complete chaos to be honest, but you expected nothing less.

Once settled, you did everything and anything you could. Theme parks, cinema trips and bowling.

Audrey LOVED the beach, so trips to places like Brighton and Blackpool were frequent.

You ate at all of your favourite restaurants and shopped in all of your favourite shops. The ones they didn’t have in the states.

Ally Mayfair Richards.

While Ally isn’t plagued by phobias anymore, she still feared flying. Like, a lot. It took a while for her to come round to the idea of travelling so far away, but she eventually did.

Oz would come along with you both.

The hotel has a spa, if Ally disappeared, that’s where she would be.

Ally doesn’t understand why there are no plug sockets in the bathroom. It winds her up.

Would be glued to the television screen when Come Dine With Me came on the hotel television.

You took Ally and Oz to different pubs and restaurants and she was not impressed by the quality of the wine in said pubs.

Is deeply disturbed by beans on toast.

The pair of you would take Oz to theme parks and the beach.

Wilhemina Venable.

You just knew that Oxford was the most perfect place to take Wilhemina. So much history, so much art.

You hired a car as you didn’t want Mina to be in pain after hours of endless wandering.

You went over the winter, the weather was not great but it made it all the more cozy when you were both cooped up in a cafe with a book and a cup of tea.

The pair of you spent hours in museums and art galleries.

You could see Mina’s face light up as she admired the architecture of buildings that had to be centuries old.

Appalled by tesco meal deals.

She could not stand English television, it was a sort of humour that she could not seem to grasp.

#sarah paulson x reader #sarah paulson #american horror story #billie dean howard #audrey tindall #wilhemina venable x reader #lana winters #cordelia goode x reader #headcanon #ally mayfair richards

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priorireverte · 3 years

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Congratulations Ash!

Your application for Ted Tonks has been accepted. And we have a simply, truly happy reunion of the formerly dead! Hooray! I’m so happy for the Tonks. Unless . . . things are never as easy or simple as they appear.

Please look to the checklist for the next steps and reach out if you have any questions!

OUT OF CHARACTER

NAME & PRONOUNS: Ash they/them

TIMEZONE: EST

ACTIVITY LEVEL: I’m a front end dev for a virtual event platform who works between 5-7 days a week but I’m usually active after 6pm and on weekends. I have slow weeks when on lighter projects and busier weeks when we have a lot of shows.

ANYTHING ELSE: N/A on triggers. I’ve been roleplaying on tumblr for i think 14 years? Too long.

CHARACTER DETAILS

NAME: Edward “Ted” Álvaro Sepulveda Tonks

BIRTHDATE: October 10th, 1952

DEATHDATE: March 15th, 1998

GENDER, PRONOUNS, and SEXUALITY: Cismale, he/him, flexible heterosexual.

BLOOD STATUS: Muggleborn

HOUSE ALUMNI: Hufflepuff

OCCUPATION: Prior to going on the run, Ted worked as a Broadcaster for the Wizarding Wireless Network. Upon return, he doesn’t have a career yet.

FACECLAIM: Pedro Pascal

CHARACTER BACKGROUND

POSTBELLUM

Ted had been on the run for seven months. Over half a year, without seeing his wife or daughter, spent in the countryside near his childhood holiday spots. Doing just a sad excuse of camping for what? To lose his life to a group of indoctrinated youth and the werewolf who turned his son-in-law?

The pain is the last thing he remembers. Ted was never a stranger to pain. Not during scuffles in primary school or stray hexes in the corridors of Hogwarts. Though he couldn’t say he had ever experienced pain like this, it wasn’t all pain. There was a warmth, not unlike the one he felt when falling asleep to his wife, that urged him to close his eyes. They hadn’t hurt Dean yet and that was the one thing Ted had wanted to make sure of. Not the boy, too young to be going through this. Just him.

Waking up in the Ministry had been a surprise. He expected death or a dungeon, tied to a tree if they were truly desperate, but he wasn’t chained or shackled. There were no ropes keeping him. Just a barrier and soft voices explaining his new reality. He laughed. It was all he could do really. Laugh at his luck, if that’s what it was. He had been brought up Catholic and, if he tried, Ted could still tell you the stations of the cross. He didn’t feel much like Jesus coming back from the dead. He hadn’t done enough with his life to claim that nor would he ever. But the irony of rising again, of another chance at life, got to him. Ted found himself praying before bed. Silently staring up at the ceiling, asking for the safety of his family. His wife, Dora, Remus, and his grandchild. If he recited his prayers, something he hadn’t done in nearly thirty years, perhaps he’d find them safe. Unchanged by the war and happy.

He finds himself running his hand over his throat or chest, searching for scarred skin. There’s no sign of his attack. No physical reminder of what ended his life and, he has to know, did it really end? Why was he given a second chance over so many others? He wasn’t a true Order member. He never fought back against blood supremacy in a strong way. Ted lived his quiet life with his family not wanting to make waves. He had just wanted to be happy.

If he could go back and do it all again, he still would have gone on the run. He would have resisted capture. Stood in front of Dean to give him a chance to run for it. He has regrets of course. Not being with his wife in times of terror and uncertainty. Missing the birth of his grandchild who is no doubt just as much of a terror as Dora had been. But his family’s safety matters much more than his own life does. Well, did.

PERSONALITY

If there’s anything Ted was, or is, good at it’s talking. He can tell a story with a smile clear in his voice and actions. Read an ad or two over the Wizarding Wireless Network like nobody’s business. That’s what he loves most, telling stories. His childhood was filled with stories of his parents’ time in Chile and new tales of Cornish mythology. Those words didn’t leave Ted as he grew older. He still turns to them in times of stress, taking the advice from their lessons to heart. He may know now that life can have struggles but he didn’t used dwell. If you’re a good person, you will have a good life. He knows music can tell a story in the best way. It doesn’t matter what language you speak or know. You can be countries away and hear a song written fifty years ago and the story is clear.

He’s rather gifted in charms, finding that when he discovered magic it was the least imposing course of study. Ted tries to find the beauty in all he can. Charms was just a class that made that easy. It’s how he became interested in broadcasting in the first place. He had fancied he’d be a writer, even though his speech was always better than his writing, but the intersectionality of older muggle technology and magic was too much of a puzzle to pass up.

He’s never been mindful when it comes to tidying up. He’s no tornado. As he’s gotten older, Ted is sure his ways of leaving things around the home and forgetting dates and times has been a constant aggravation to his wife. His sense of time was never good. He tends to get caught up in conversation, appreciating face to face interaction over anything. He always floo calls when you’re supposed to write. Andromeda has dragged him away from too many conversations when they were just supposed out for one errand.

Ted doesn’t know how to deal with loss. His father passed a few years into Dora’s childhood and he never spoke about it much. His mother moved back to Chile soon after. His solution was cooking as much of the food he had grown up with as possible. Playing the music his mother had blasting over the record player in the kitchen during his childhood. Teaching her all the tales he had been taught. All the little lessons he was given.

Inaction could be said to be one of Ted’s failures. He thinks, or thought, that no matter how bad things got there was always a light at the end of the tunnel. He supposes this ideal isn’t gone from him. He’s been given a second chance. Prior to death, he presumed you could muster through anything and if you stayed a good and kind person you could get through to the other side. He was taught God rewarded the good. It was why his parents had immigrated to England before he was born, why they were given the opportunity. They were good people. They deserved a chance to make something of themselves. It was why he and Andromeda were able to build a life together. But not joining the order and taking a stand against blood supremacists and extremists didn’t keep him safe the second time. It didn’t allow his family to be untouched by loss. Things hadn’t worked out until now.

BRIEF OVERVIEW OF FAMILY

Edward “Ted” Álvaro Sepulveda Tonks was born in Truro, Cornwall, England to two Chilean immigrants in the fall of 1952. His parents had moved to Truro prior to his birth for more opportunities. Although they named their son Edward in hopes of assimilation for him and his father anglicized their last name from Tolhauzsen to Tonks, Chilean culture was the main theme of their home. It was baked into every fiber of his being whenever he walked through the door. English was barely spoken in the household, only more so in the time that he and Andromeda lived with his parents. Bringing in take away had to be done under the cover of night or he faced his mother’s stern looks and even sterner words. His mother didn’t work in the traditional sense but as a homemaker excelled beyond compare. His father was an employee at a music store and eventually came to own it.

His parents are the reason Ted is and was so family focused. It was taught to him that family comes before everything and he carried that through with him to adulthood. They were the people who stood by you in all things. Eventually he came to understand that could apply to chosen families as well. It was strange for him to meet Andromeda and learn that not all families put the same values of love and care in places of high honor. Respecting your parents was highly important but loving them and receiving love in return was what that respect was built on.

Despite not growing up the richest, Ted never wanted for much. He was an only child who was rather dotted upon by his parents. To learn that he was a wizard might have been the only serious friction they went through. If not for the day his girlfriend showed up on his doorstep to tell him that she was pregnant. His parents grew to love magic when he came home for the summers and showed them what he had learned but as he grew older, Ted found it harder to see a life where he could stay in their world. In the muggle world at all. It would be like shutting a part of himself off. Like not living up to his full potential.

HISTORY

Hogwarts was a fantasy. There was no other way to describe it. It was nothing like Ted could every dream when he wondered why strange things always happened to him. When he was younger and broke his mother’s vase and it stitched itself back together. Or when he would run home from primary school and make it back in a fraction of the time it took to get there. The answer to any of his happy accidents wasn’t magic. It couldn’t be. And yet, it was. He just didn’t expect a different flavor of exclusion when Hogwarts was presented to him.

Injustice wasn’t unfamiliar to Ted Tonks. Growing up during the mid 1950s, he was used to seeing ‘Keep Britain White’ signs. His parents were strong and kept their heads up despite the riots and protests surrounding them. His father told Ted, stay kind and stay sharp. If you stayed kind, no one could go against you. If you stayed sharp, no harm would come to you. As Ted moved into the wizarding world, he learned that he would not be judged by the color of his skin or his family’s country of origin but his blood was still in no way pure. He leaned on his father’s words and was sorted into Hufflepuff.

Andromeda Black was another happy accident. He’d have had to be blind not to notice her. He didn’t count on her noticing him. He had gained a good group of friends just by his nature but their social circles never interacted. How could they? The segregation of houses, purebloods and non-purebloods, was a clear line. It was during classes that the line was able to be blurred. Mutual tutoring turned into secret meetings over the years. Promised whispers Ted told himself not to believe in or give hope to. It wasn’t until the day Andromeda stood on his doorstep looking very much not like herself, a year after they had graduated Hogwarts and continued seeing each other in secret, that Ted knew she was an inevitability. They weren’t married when Dora became even a speck on the horizon. He was still an intern for WWN at the time and she had given up her whole life for them. For their family. Ted wasn’t sure he would ever be able to sacrifice something that even slightly measured up to the gift she had given him.

Nymphadora wasn’t a name he chose. It wasn’t a name he would have thought of but his later years of Hogwarts had been marked with many nights in the Astronomy Tower learning all the stars from a girl named after one of them. It was certainly more regal than Ted would ever be. And if he happened to know of a certain saint with the same name and told his mother that Andromeda was thinking of converting to Catholicism, no one was the wiser.

Their small home in the country was never a place of worry or fear but some days when Andromeda left for St. Mungo’s, Ted worried until she was back safe and sound in his arms. It took eight years after his daughter’s birth for Ted to feel comfortable bringing her to work with him. To not look over his shoulder in the marketplace for fear someone would be looking for them.

After Dora had left Hogwarts and decided to become an auror, Ted began to worry again. He was good at hiding it. Puttering away in their little garden or forcing his wife to listen to his stories of the new musical group that was destined to become the next Weird Sisters. He kept as busy as he could, even if busy meant learning new recipes with Andromeda or spending nights in the backyard with their telescope. They could endure another war. He wasn’t worried about that. He was worried about Dora, full of her mother’s spirit and wit out there fighting it.

OOC EXPLORATION

WHAT ARE YOU MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO?

I think the idea of the dead coming back is such an interesting premise. We never get to learn more about the Veil or the Department of Mysteries and this is such a cool take. Ted is one of my favorite characters who I’ve never been able to portray at an older age.

Also, an rp that values writing over one-liners? Sign. Me. Up.

EXTRA FOR NON-BIO CHARACTERS

CHARACTER CONTRIBUTION

Ted Tonks is one of the many minor (minor) characters in the Harry Potter universe but his story is so interesting to me. To decide that he was going to marry a well-known pureblood woman and make a life with her in such a dangerous time is such a heavy decision. I think Ted can represent a lot of good natured and honest qualities, valuing love above all else. I’m truly excited, if I get the chance, to play with how those values can shift if he’s given a second chance at life. Will he be less hesitant than before? More likely to throw himself into the fray? Or will he be even more cautious at staying out of the affairs of others? Family is really the only thing he has left and I believe he cherishes it above all else.

PRESENT

Ted has been back for six days. He’s sat in the Ministry camp, and really what else can he call it? His cot isn’t comfortable, nothing like his bed at home but a supreme upgrade from the forests of England. He’s surrounded by old friends he had fallen out of touch with years ago. People he hasn’t seen since his own time at Hogwarts. There’s still only three people he desperately wishes to see. His wife, his daughter, and his grandchild. But something is wrong and Ted knows that. He hadn’t realized he died when they first told him. He just thought he had been tortured. There’s something in these Unspeakables’ eyes, in the lines of their faces, that tells Ted he had missed quite a lot. The other matter at hand is his wand. He hasn’t been given it back. It’s not odd for him to do things the muggle way. Before all of this, he took a sense of pride in doing things slowly. Taking his time to craft a dish or fold some clothes, it gave him time to think and pause. But since he was eleven years old, Ted has never been without his wand or without magic. When he lays in his cot at night, after a time of silent reflection and prayer that could better be described as a plea to whatever entity is out there, Ted focuses on the small bit of wandless magic he used to be able to do. A lumos he had to learn when Dora was young and used to come into their bedroom in the middle of the night. Eyes full of tears at the dreams of monsters in the dark, under her bed or in the hallway closet. When he was too groggy to grab his wand from the bedside table, a small ball of light at his fingertips was the next best thing. Now, he can’t even muster up the slightest of glow.

#prioriacceptance #ted tonks #edward tonks

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ritualpurposes · 3 years

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Why History is Important

This week has been a week of terrible takes on History, Politics and how the two intersect. From the appalling article in the Telegraph on how the “woke masses” are trying to sabotage Britain’s history (I won’t give this the dignity of a link, but it is easy enough to find), the continued harassment and vilification of Dr Corinne Fowler for her work on the Colonial Countryside Project, to the release of the utterly disgusting 1776 commission in the US and as always, the plethora of ‘hot takes’ on Tumblr, I am seething with rage.

This is a long one, apologies. I won’t go into Tumblrs approach to history, that has been better covered by others here, and here and honestly this rant is long enough as is.

Archaeology and history are inherently political, that is an inescapable fact. People are quick to turn up their noses at the subject of the past and say it has no bearing on the present, but that is a simplistic fantasy. The present is always built of the back of the past, our attitudes, our justifications, our worldviews are all artifacts of what has come before. And when our understanding of what came before is, shall we charitably say, flawed, that is dangerous. The links between the alt. right, white supremacy and fake, white –washed, hyper masculine ideas of the past are well documented. Many of these people justify their actions using versions of the past which to them are very real, ideas of a white ethno-state where the men were Men™. It should be noted, this isn’t a modern phenomenon, I’m pretty sure anyone who has had to sit through intro to archaeology has had to listen to at least once lecture on how Hitler used pseudo archaeology to justify his actions. And while academics can point out that Roman Britain was not white, or that the Vikings traded and intermarried with people from North Africa, these attempts are hindered, both by popular perceptions of the past, and by this idea that the left are attempting to rewrite history.

I find that last point difficult really to deal with, because it combines two opposing ideas, that historians want to make the past more ‘politically correct’ but also downplay the ‘greatness’ of whatever nation they are talking about by talking about the distinctly not political correct bits of history (colonialism and slavery). There is this overwhelming idea that adding any sort of nuance is the result of massive bias. And that any history that doesn’t make your nation look 100% the Heroic Good Guys is part of some sort of plot to undermine national pride and patriotism. The Tories are terrified we might remove statues of slavers, but in the same breath attack the National Trust for trying to talk about the Colonial legacies of their properties.

I think at this point it’s also worth discussing the difference between history and commemoration. I am 100% in support of removing statues, and of renaming streets etc. These things are not history, they are commemoration. History is found in museums, in books, in scholarship. History is knowledge, it is not objects but the context that surrounds them. The removal of a statue does not equal rewriting history, a statue, while an archaeologically interesting artifact, does not in and of itself tell us much. Its context is far more revealing. There is an idea in archaeology called object biography, that looks at how items change in meaning and use throughout their ‘lives’. Items are not static, just like ideas are not static. In the 19th century that statue meant something very different to the people who are around today. What we commemorate, and what commemorations we destroy tell us about society. If the history of Edward Coulston is so important (a man, who I had never heard of before the statue was thrown into the river, so clearly not a priority in English history), then put the statue in a museum with an information board. And if you are really worried about the destruction of history? Why don’t you spend your time and money instead ensuring archaeological work gets done ahead of development or making sure history departments are adequately funded. Interesting, the Torries, while very concerned about statues, are actively fighting those two measures. I know less about the Republican agenda, but looking at the 1776 project, I’m pretty sure that any concern they have for history is less about the past and more about preserving the status quo.

I grew up in America. I took AP US history, and I remember having to write papers about how the Civil War was absolutely not about Slavery. I guess that doesn’t seem that harmful in and of itself, but let’s trace this bit of revisionism through shall we. The Civil war was over States rights, that doesn’t sound too bad. I mean I may not agree with the South, but is it really a moral issue to say that the Federal Government shouldn’t be able to override what individual States want? After all States are very different, what is good for New York might not be so good for Georgia. Ok, so using that logic I don’t really see what’s wrong with flying a confederate flag, I mean it can’t possibly be a symbol of oppression, because the Civil War *wasn’t* about Slavery. So I don’t see why people are getting all upset, it is simply a statement that States Rights are important.

Add to this the general romanticized picture of the Confederate South in the media and you suddenly are looking at a very different picture of the past, supported by, of all things, the fucking AP US History curriculum. The Confederates are seen as tragic heroes, on the wrong side of history perhaps, but with a point, fighting for a way of life. And from there it doesn’t seem too far a leap to what happened on January 6 does it? I’m not saying all media should demonize the South, but I think removing Slavery from the Civil war is dangerous and false representation of History, and one that directly plays into the Civil Unrest we are seeing at the Moment.

So that brings me back to the 1776 commission. It was published as a direct response to the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project sought to center slavery and its effects on American history. This is hugely important, and a weirdly contentious issue. The echos of slavery are still present in the USA, in the form of institutionalized racism, voter suppression, and increased levels of police brutality among other things. It is, at best impossibly naive and at worst actively malicious, to try and consider US history without dealing with the brutal legacy of slavery. And yet, this project was deemed to be ‘UnAmerican’ and ‘revisionist’. How dare any history of America undermine the idea that America is, and has always been, A noble nation that has never done anything wrong ever. To return briefly to my own experiences with AP US History, our textbook said we didn’t lose Vietnam (My father who was a war correspondent in Vietnam had some things to say about that comment). The myth of American Exceptionalism runs deep. The 1776 commission, which I have not brought myself to read in its entirety, is a horrific example of it. It justifies slavery, it states that “as a question of practical politics, no durable union could have been formed without a compromise among the states on the issue of slavery.”, states racism ended in 1964, and that Christianity is the reason we have secular law.

Why does this scare the shit out of me? Why do I care what people believe happened 200 years ago? Because if people truly believe that America can do no wrong, that patriotism means never questioning that we really will live in Trump’s America. Because if Slavery was justified, and racism doesn’t exist anymore than clearly we don’t have to do better, and any complaints are communist plot. Because if Empire really did make England Great then why should we not continue in the same vain? History is grand! Let us live in the Good Ol’ Days!

History is messy. History is unpleasant. History doesn’t fit into simple narratives of good and bad, because people don’t fit into those categories. And while I agree it is impossible to teach history without some bias (interpretation being a key part), we need to accept our past. If we want a brighter future we need to confront where we come from. We need to fight the false narratives prevalent in our culture, be they the idea that Game of Thrones is a good picture of Medieval England or that the Civil War was over a simple ideological difference and not the lives of thousands of enslaved peoples. The best bit of advice on history I ever got was from my high school teacher “If you want to live in the past you haven’t been paying attention”, I think about that statement a lot. The past has power, let us not pretend otherwise.

#History #Archaeology #America #England #1619 project #1776 project #psudoarchaeoloy #archaology #current events #Culture wars #Personal I guess

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innuendostudios · 5 years

Video

vimeo

[edit: the video was false-flagged as “hatespeech” on YouTube, so I have swapped the embed with a mirror on Vimeo. I will swap them back when I get the YouTube version reinstated/replaced in a re-edited form.]

It would not be possible to continue The Alt-Right Playbook without sitting down and defining fascism, so here we are. I know I said the next one would be shorter, and I was proven a damned liar. Maybe the next one! As ever, keep this series, and all my other videos, coming out steadily by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

"Fascism" is a term I've heard thrown around since I was a kid, but, most of the time, idiomatically. "Fascist" is what you called your Type A, passive-aggressive roommate: "Stop being such a fascist, Debra." Through osmosis, I knew its literal meaning was among a cluster of related words: Authoritarianism, totalitarianism, white supremacy, nationalism, dictatorship. But, for much of my life, if you pressed me to define any of these words, I could have only said, "You know, Nazis. Hitler, the Gestapo... you know, Nazis!"

This colloquializing of fascism, and its association with the cultural shorthand for pure evil, makes it very hard to discuss as an ideology, because even using the word, "fascism," sounds both hyperbolic and like a punch below the belt. To call a person, group, or idea "fascist" is to exaggerate for the purpose of dragging them.

Counterintuitively, this prevents us from criticizing fascist groups, even though most everyone agrees fascism is terrible, because, saying it, you sound ridiculous. You’re talking about Indiana Jones villains. So I'm going to be using the word, "fascism," kind of a lot in this video, hoping that we can semantically satiate it just enough that its connotative meanings - irreverent sarcasm and the envisioning of stormtroopers - are dulled to the point that we can talk about fascism as a system of beliefs, and as a mode of political organizing, and about who practices it today.

Our work necessitates a conversation about fascism; specifically, white fascism.

(Fascism, fascism, fascism.)

I. Fascism

Central to fascism is the belief that some people are more deserving of power than others, and that society’s appropriate structure is a hierarchy where increasingly smaller groups of betters rule over the lessers. This is not unique to fascism; this is the organizing principle of many social systems.

The difference between systems is whom each hierarchy says should be at the top. In a feudal monarchy, the top is the king and his family, and they get there by royal bloodline. In a capitalist free market (*cough*), people earn their place at the top by success in business. In fascism, the ones at the top should be “us,” whomever “us” happens to be, and they should get there by any means available.

The most succinct definition of fascism comes from Roger Griffin: “palingenetic ultranationalism,” a wonderful term because it fits a great many ideas into only two roots and a bunch of affixes, and a terrible one because both words need definitions of their own. (That’s not how efficiency works, Rog!)

So, OK: Palingenesis is the idea of rebirth, with some frankly Biblical overtones. The word “palingenesis” is used to refer to reincarnation, or the remaking of the world after Judgment Day. In terms of fascism, it is the notion that “we,” as a unified people, are ancient, that our former glory has waned, and that we are due to rise again. The implications that this rebirth will come by purging the world in fire with boiling seas and a blood-red sky are not entirely accidental. It is the granting of “us” with mythological importance.

Nationalism is, in the broadest sense, thinking of oneself through the lens of national identity. A single person holds a lot of identities: White, male, gamer, New Englander, cyclist, sports racer, and so on. Nationalism is the lens through which thinking of oneself as, for instance, American, is distinct from being Canadian, Liberian, Chilean, and that putting stock in this distinction is desirable. This can play out a lot of ways: Nationalism can be a colonized people forming an identity distinct from the ruling class and arguing that this people should have its own state, as in the American or Haitian Revolutions; Black nationalism has argued, at times, that Black Americans, while coexisting with other Americans, should maintain a distinct identity rather than be assimilated into white culture; and where Black nationalism has also sometimes argued for the repatriation of Black Americans to African nations, white nationalism typically argues that whites should have a nation of their own, not by returning to Europe, but by removing non-whites from the US (something Native Americans have opinions about). This would be an example of ultranationalism: The emphasizing of national identity as among the most, if not the most, important.

(These are not rare traits, and I want to stress that it is not the presence but the confluence of them that gives fascism its character.)

So, palingenetic ultranationalism: The belief that the nation is of the utmost importance, that the people running the nation should be a narrowly defined “us,” and that “we” should rule because it’s, more or less, our destiny.

The religiosity of this framing is intentional. Most hierarchical systems will make some case for why society should be structured a certain way: The king has been groomed for his role since birth, Steve Jobs did real good at the business factory. Fascism suspends the need for explanation: We belong at the top because we just do. Destiny. When pressed, fascists will offer pseudo-rational justifications for why they should be in charge which fall apart under the barest scrutiny, but debunking these claims is largely ineffective because, while they follow the cadences of reasoned argument, they’re operating on the level of emotion, faith, and a sense of belonging.

There’s a reason fascist regimes rely heavily on propaganda: Propaganda traffics not in arguments but in symbols. For the Nazis, it was the German soldier; for the Soviets, it was the worker. Propaganda relies on inspiring imagery that evokes cherished aspects of the culture, like the family or the countryside - “the babe in his cradle is closing his eyes, the blossom embraces the bee” - and ties those images to fascist ideals - “but soon, says a whisper, arise, arise, tomorrow belongs to me.” All of this is meant to make one swell with pride in such a way that it’s very hard to think about what is actually being said. Racist caricatures of Black and Jewish people - or whomever is “not us” in a given system - serve the same purpose by evoking hatred, or fear of what might happen to “us” if “they” were in control.

Jason Stanley calls this “affective override,” the moment where emotion shuts down critical thinking. If you’ve ever had a conversation with a conservative about, like, healthcare or something, and after a few exchanges they’re chest-beating about how “this is the nation of freedom and choice, the greatest nation that ever was, and I’m not going to let you take from me my god-given…” you’ve seen this in action. Fascism depends on this passionate fervor because it can’t convincingly pretend to be rational. The reason why one particular “us” should be at the top of the hierarchy, or why there should even be a hierarchy in the first place, is arbitrary. It’s that way because a particular “us” wants it that way.

II. Authority

We usually associate fascism with the image of state violence, be it the punishing of The Other, the policing of citizens, or the conquering of other nations, and, while this is almost always the case, fascism is not, as a rule, militant. In practice, fascists are not authoritarians or pacifists. For that matter, they're not capitalists or anti-capitalists. They're not statists or anarchists. They're not monarchists, oligarchists, or plutocrats. They are Whatever Puts Us In Power-ists.

For instance: Capitalism is a hierarchical system, and so fascists will often try to influence policy such that the capitalist hierarchy starts to resemble the desired fascist one, but only until the point that it stops suiting their needs. The “us” of fascism is always defined by essential qualities like race or heritage, qualities that don’t change. A poor person can become less poor, but a Black person can’t become less Black, so, no matter how biased and stratified capitalism becomes, so long as it is still technically possible for someone from the lower classes to rise above their station, there will come a time when fascists must leave capitalism behind in favor of a system fully without social mobility.

Similarly, if fascists have the ability to take governmental control through nonviolent means, they will often do so - remember, Mussolini took power in a coup but Hitler was elected. If democracy and nonviolence can be put to fascist ends, they will be. But instituting a system that benefits the few while the many suffer and where, by design, no one suffering is allowed to improve their situation, might as well be writing ad copy for guillotines, and that’s how you get the SS. So, yes, fascist power trends towards authoritarianism because, on a long enough timeline, it will be the only way fascism can maintain itself.

But, also, fascists and authoritarians think power, brutality, and subjugation are sexy in more or less identical ways, so, while not all authoritarians are fascists, most fascists are authoritarians. And state violence is often a way of getting people invested in a hierarchy that doesn’t directly benefit them: “You may not be at the top, but if you’re somewhere around the middle, we can employ you as military or police to keep the lower classes in line.” Many people will relinquish their rights to fascists in exchange for being “the arm of the law,” and, the more powerful the state becomes, the more vicarious power they get to wield. So long as they’re not at the bottom, they have some investment in the system continuing as is, because it authorizes them to fuck people up.

The other way fascism justifies itself to the masses is to insist that the only alternative is death. “We are a great and noble people with an illustrious history, and if we achieve our fated rebirth we will form the most glorious nation in all of history and take our rightful place as world leader, and if we fail we will be eradicated.” There is no in between. “They are coming for us, they are everywhere, we can beat them, but this is the only way.” Race war is the usual go-to, claiming Black people are savages and razing our cities to the ground is their nature, or that they want revenge for slavery (which, I mean…). Sometimes they go with a Jewish conspiracy as revenge for the Holocaust. Or both at the same time. Right now Islamophobia’s in fashion. Each depends on downplaying slavery or the Holocaust or the Crusades as the horrific acts that they were, insisting that the crimes are greatly exaggerated by history, because these are all pretty damning counterarguments to “us” being the greatest people who have ever lived.

III. Whiteness

Race is like gender and money: It’s real, but only because we make it real. But fascism necessitates the belief that whatever makes “us” us is not only extremely real, in the biological and/or spiritual sense, but that people can be ranked by it. And, when stacking the hierarchy, white fascists put themselves at the top. So: What is whiteness?

The short answer is that whiteness is whatever it needs to be. Whiteness was created to differentiate one people from the people they were oppressing. Whiteness is a means to an end. The people most fixated with the definition of whiteness are racists, but there is no anti-racist definition. Racists invented whiteness, and all white people are folded into it.

And the way white people conceive of whiteness is fundamentally different from how they conceive of other races. A common example of this phenomenon is Barack Obama: Obama had one Black parent and one white parent. But, while he can call himself the first Black President, he could never call himself a white President. (Or, well, he could call himself whatever he wanted, but white people wouldn’t agree, and no one would treat him like a white President.) White people are only white if they’re purebreeds, or if non-whiteness is far enough back in their family tree that one can pretend it isn’t there. These rules of purity don’t apply to other races: When Black and white people have children, those children are allowed to be Black, or any number of (often racist) terms for mixed-race children. But, whatever they are, they can’t be white.

This frames interracial families as an increase of one race and a decrease in whites. So, by this logic, where other races spread, whiteness has to be maintained.

White people don’t consider whiteness a race; it is the absence of race. The undiluted form of which all other races are deviations. And, if it goes, it can’t be brought back.

This is, of course, nonsense. It’s a bunch of made-up rules to justify white supremacy. There’s only so long fascists can insist, “If we don’t strike first, they’re going to kill us all,” before people start to notice that the race war they’ve been promising for a century doesn’t seem to be happening. So, then, the terms have to be updated: Now the existential threat is a generational project. Now Black people even existing near white people is the race war. They’re literally going to fuck us out of existence.

And, because whiteness is made up, it can be endlessly redefined. A tension inherent to fascism is that rather a lot of people are required to bring it into existence, but, by design, only a small number of people will run it once it exists. So, commonly, the definition of “us” is broadened while building coalitions, and gets progressively narrower the more fascist society becomes.

White fascists in the US and Europe go back and forth on whether or not Jewish people get to be white. For a while it was kiiiind of a soft yes, and now it’s tipping the other way as they gain influence. Ethnic groups formerly considered non-white, like Italians and the Irish, became white when white culture feared marginalized immigrants might ally with slaves in revolt.

Bigotry is intersectional; there aren’t a lot of single-issue bigots, people who hate Mexicans but fight for everyone else’s rights. People generally don't apply this hierarchical thinking to just one aspect of their lives. So - commonly - racism is comorbid with anti-Semitism is comorbid with misogyny is comorbid with transphobia is comorbid with homophobia is comorbid with religious intolerance. I mean, just listen to a Klansman talk about Catholics sometime, or, better yet, don’t. Any marginalized group may be inducted into the tribe to consolidate against a common enemy, but, should that enemy be defeated, the inductees become the new enemy.

We can see the history of social progress in the US as successively disenfranchised groups demanding and, sometimes, gaining their rights one by one, with reactionaries trying to beat back the tide. Transphobia is recently rampant in fascist circles and conservative politics because, with the legalization of same-sex marriage, the battle against homosexuality is thought to be lost - or, at least, at a ceasefire. This gives some cause to welcome gay transphobes into the ranks. But, should they seize enough power to strip what few protections trans people have gained recently, and the alliance is no longer useful, their gaze refocuses, and it’s last hired, first fired for the homosexuals. And then the African-Americans, and then the women, and on and on, stripping rights from social groups in the order opposite to which they were gained, like the plot of Final Destination 2.

IV. Goals

You might be thinking the endgame here is a nice, homogenous group of white men to sit at the top of the pyramid, and the white fascists would be thinking the same. But, in reality, there is no endgame. It’s not like, if the fascists get their ethnostate, they’re just gonna call it a day. It’s the flaw in obsessing over racial purity: Whiteness is defined by what it’s not. If it isn’t contrasted with something else, it ceases to be an identity. So, if the whites kick all the non-whites out of their country, suddenly the Irish and Italians aren’t white anymore. And then maybe the albinos, or the brunettes, or the Virginians, it doesn’t matter, the rules are made up. One way or another, the pyramid grows thinner.

The authoritarian mindset is one that just likes stripping rights from people. Leave authoritarians no one to strip rights from and they start stripping them from each other. (And yes, that’s what the research says.) The other outlet for this restless energy is war, invasion, colonization: Deport all the Mexicans and then follow them into Mexico. Go seeking an Other to define yourself against.

You’ve maybe noticed that these three drives - the seeking out of conflict, the need to subjugate more and more people, and the shrinking of one’s base of power - is not a recipe for success. Most hierarchical systems seek equilibrium, finding the point where the masses are just happy enough that they don’t disembowel you. But the trajectory of fascism is to make enemies, cast out allies, narrow the gene pool, and stuff your ill-gotten wealth into the military until you’re fully stocked with the kinds of weapons that ensure mutual destruction.

I’m not the first to say: white fascism is a suicide cult.

The history of fascism is one of atrocity followed by failure followed by disgrace, so modern fascists operate in a cycle of constant reinvention as they try to distance themselves from movements that came before. The ideology doesn’t change, but the rhetoric does, primarily by stealing rhetoric from the Left, because it’s, flatly, more popular. White nationalists calling themselves “identitarians” is an appropriation of progressive identity politics. The rhetoric of “white power” is an intentional bastardization of Black power movements. Even the Nazis, while installing a dictatorship, knew to call themselves socialists, and, despite German antifascism being formed predominantly by socialists and the first death camp being originally built to throw communists in, some people still believe this?

This appropriation of rhetoric is how each generation of fascists rebrands itself. “We’re not like those fascists who got hanged for what they did; we’re young, hip, and successful! Come back, baby, it’ll be different this time.”

V. The Administration

So, with all this explanation of what fascists believe and how they operate, I hope it’s clear that there is no workable definition of fascism that does not include the Alt-Right. They are, to the letter, a white fascist movement. That’s neither a diss nor an exaggeration, it’s a simple statement of fact.

So, then, to ask the trickier question: “Is the current administration fascist?” And, well, that depends on where you draw the line between “fascist” and “opportunist.”

Consider the evidence: The administration has staffed multiple fascist figureheads. It’s repeated a number of fascist slogans. It employs a nationalist thinking in which the nation should always get more out of any deal than the other participants. It holds the hierarchical belief that the President need not follow the same laws as the citizens. It relies on fear and demonization of a racial Other and portrays their mere presence in society as an invasion. It permits and makes justifications for violence against dissenters. It threatens to strip rights from opponents and members of the press. It relies on nostalgia for a mythologized past to sell a narrative of cultural rebirth. And its followers are intersectionally bigoted against women, the poor, Muslims, Black people, trans people, and queer people.

The only hesitance I feel around saying “this is fascism” centers around intent. How much of what they do and say do they believe in, and how much is just riding a wave of fascist sympathy to fuel a narcissistic lust for power and ram through policies that make them rich? But, ultimately, while there is some tactical value in this distinction - you have to deal with an opportunist differently from a true believer - in most contexts, the difference doesn’t matter.

Many will just tell you, “The correct term for ‘Nazi sympathizer’ is ‘Nazi,’” but if you won’t take that leap, consider this: Even if they have no particular plan or aptitude for creating a fascist government, any body in power that uses fascist rhetoric, lays the groundwork for future fascism, and empowers fascist movements needs to be at least viewed through the lens of fascism. Whether or not they’re fascists in their hearts is a question for historians. Whatever they are, they are, some percentage of the time, doing fascism. And, for our purposes, that's all we need to know.

#video essay #the alt-right playbook #alt-right

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stanicrowe · 5 years

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Ugh had such a scary but also moment of "realising things" when I was in Welsh countryside. I'm not typically around like ppl with right wing and white supremacist views. It's not uncommon in the smaller villages where I live in Engalnd but the hard right around me is associated with a working class and disenfranchised type (not that this dials down the fear) and the working class energy of migrants and poc seem to balance it out (my area is a labour area). What was really eerie was hearing from Welsh young people how they knew about how intensely the people in their villages wanted brexit. Like they used the ballot boxes as like a kinda silent army of white supremacy and of british empire... I had taken an edible so it did make the entire situation seem much more dystopian and like uncovering the secrets of highly organised white supremacy in england and wales... I dunno it's just like that breed of wealthy silent and racist tories feels even more kinda catastrophic because the paranoia makes you think how many steps away are we from the kind of genocide black and poor people have been dealing with for centuries, rearing its head again in a new way with new language

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argyrocratie · 5 years

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Some remarks on the making of the British

Let us have a closer look on how the British were made. Where shall we start? Stonehenge and King Arthur? The Celtic tribes in Britain did not refer to themselves as Britons and did not think of each other as fellows; King Arthur is a myth. Maybe the Battle of Hastings? A massacre, because two ruling elites had a conflict about land and about who was allowed to exploit the peasants – what a nice point to start. How about the Founding of the Church of England? A King who wanted a male heir and took the chance to get supremacy on the church (and the wealth of the clergy) plus a Queen who used the protestant belief to stabilise her reign, that’s for sure a reason to cherish a nation! Might Cromwell and the First Revolution be something to start with? Of course, especially the invasion of Ireland and the colonial, quasi-racist regime. A landmark in English and Irish history for sure. Shall we continue with the union between England and Scotland, where the Scottish nobility was bribed by the English crown – if you cannot beat them, buy them! It was of course not done to unite all ‘British brethren’, but so England could get rid of a competitor and a permanent threat on the British Isle and to allow the Scottish bourgeoisie to get their deal when Britain started to conquer its Empire. One could continue certainly, but it would only lead to one conclusion: Britain, as every other nation, is a product of bitter fights, massacres, wars, class struggles, economic interests, monarchical strategies and even mere coincidences.

When the process of nation building started, no one thought of a nation-state, but it was its result – with all the consequences. Kings and Queens might have had in mind prestige, holding court and loyal subjects, priests upheld the Virgin Queen versus Virgin Mary, aristocrats and merchants cared about wealth. It ended up in a state that had one goal: national success. Convinced of a special white protestant mission, scared of their French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, and other competitors, interested in loyal subjects and soldiers, the ruling elites of Britain did all they could to spread ‘Britishness’. For over 200 years, Britishness meant Englishness because of the economic, political and cultural dominance of English gentry and bourgeoisie. It was taught in schools, preached in Anglican and dissenter’s churches, portrayed in art and literature, transported even by advertisements for Olde English products and so on. The invention of a national heritage was not a conspiracy but based on conviction.

But one has to forget and forgive if one really wants to love one’s country. That is what national history is about – to encourage everybody to see the history through national glasses: Think of Britain as it is portrayed in the upper class kitsch of English countryside in summer. Do not think of all the people who died in the making of Britain. Or if you do, then do not see it as the bloody suffering, the hunger, the terror, the cynical use of human lives by politicians, capitalists, kings, nobles, generals – see it as ‘a heroic sacrifice for all of us’. And do not dare to ask who is ‘us’.

Some people now might say: right you are, Britain is made up. England, Scotland, Wales, Ulster and/or Ireland – that is the real thing! With the decline of the Empire new nationalism began to succeed in Britain, partly invented, partly revived – and today discussions about identity, devolution and a possible break-up of Britain catch public attention. But this is no way out of hell, rather it is a prolongation and intensification: One can show that what is true for British history is also true for the details of the history of the ‘four nations on the British Isles’. It does not make sense to wonder about national identities and mourn about hidden and suppressed national history. It would be better to have a closer look at what the politics of nation-states is about. The answer to that does not lay in history.

- Why anti-national?

#britain #british #nation #nationalism

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 7 years

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The Reproduction of Public Dependency

The depression that wracked the U.S. between 1873 and 1878 left charity officials convinced that there were few truly deserving dependents. Economic turmoil left approximately three million people without work, many for several years, and industrialization and urbanization made the issue far more visible to charity officials. Veritable armies of tramps and vagrants roamed the countryside even after the economy began to rebound in 1879. Workers protested drastic pay cuts and unemployment by the tens of thousands, most notably during the massive general strikes of the Great Upheaval in 1877. Professional charity reformers and state charity officials rejected workers' contention that no jobs existed, as well as the notion that massive industrialization had created structural unemployment. Instead, "the most prominent economic theories of the era" supported charity officials' views that workers were merely lazy. As historian Paul Ringenbach explains, "Classical economists, both in Europe and the United States, treated unemployment as a transitory and essentially insignificant phenomenon.... The responsibility for sustained idleness, therefore, rested largely on the shoulders of the working class itself." Accordingly, local and state charity officials offered aid erratically. Poorhouse keepers continued to require that able-bodied men first complete a work test by chopping wood or breaking stones. State after state, meanwhile, passed or strengthened vagrancy laws that criminalized public dependency and tramps searching for employment. Massachusetts passed the first vagrancy act in 1866. Modeled on the infamous Black Codes of the South, the act enforced six months' labor in a workhouse or house of correction for convicted vagrants and vagabonds. This act, ironically, was enacted just a month after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, "thereby voiding the southern Black Codes which, among other things, had punished free slaves for vagrancy and idleness. At the very moment when Republicans in Congress were enshrining the legal supremacy of free labor as a cornerstone of Reconstruction, their brethren in Massachusetts were engaged in constructing an apparatus of labor compulsions." Pennsylvania followed in 1871,1876, and 1879; Illinois in 1874 and 1877; New York in 1880 and 1885, and the other New England states throughout the 1870s. Members of the newly formed state charity boards and professional charity reformers—especially those involved with the new "scientific charity" movement—redefined beggars as "swindlers" who refused to do their proper share of work in exchange for alms. As Amy Dru Stanley suggests, advocates of scientific charity "convert[ed] a dependency relation into a relation of contract." Charity officials and professional charity reformers would maintain their skeptical view of the poor and public dependents well past 1900.

The growing influence of hereditarian thought—especially degeneracy theory intensified the fears of charity officials and professional charity reformers about public dependents. Professional charity reformers like Lowell believed that socially undesirable behaviors like intemperance or prostitution were hereditary in nature. A tendency towards public dependency, therefore, could be passed down to children. A poor environment, moreover, contributed to an individual's degenerate state and would be reflected in future generations. Likewise, a moral environment could potentially improve a family's germ plasm.This mixture of environmentalism and hereditarian thinking reached its peak in Richard L. Dugdale's 1877 tract, "The Jukes": a Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity, which traced a 1,200 member clan of drunkards, thieves, bastards, beggar prostitutes, syphilitics, and murderers. In a manner reminiscent of Howe's 1848 report on idiots, Dugdale stressed "human cost accounting" and argued that the 1,200 members of the Jukes clan had cost New York more than $1.3 million over the past 75 years.

During the mid-to-late 1870s, state charity officials in New York and other states even adopted a pejorative, hereditarian view of the deserving poor. This transformation is perhaps best illustrated by Charles S. Hoyt's exhaustive 1876 survey of county poorhouse inmates, "Report on the Causes of Pauperism." Hoyt, the secretary of the State Charities Board (SBC), argued that the "the number of persons in our poor-houses who have been reduced to poverty by causes outside of their own acts is, contrary to the general impression, surprisingly small." Accordingly, the Board began experimenting with requiring county poorhouses to extend work programs to public dependents—even the traditionally deserving and partially disabled poor. SBC member Martin B. Anderson, for instance, contended, "We believe that work should be provided for weak-minded and partially infirm paupers, even if it shall return no profit to the counties. The inmates of our poor-houses will always be healthier and happier when employed than when idle."

Leading professional charity reformer—and advocate of scientific charity— Josephine Shaw Lowell played a key role in popularizing charity officials' harsher vision of public dependency and the deserving poor. In 1876, at only 33 years of age, Lowell became the first woman to be appointed to the New York State Board of Charities. Her appointment derived largely from her 1876 report on able-bodied paupers for the New York State Charities Aid Association, which many professional charity reformers saw as "a model of the new social-scientific approach." As Waugh explains, Lowell's report blended statistics and anecdotes in order to discover "the 'truth' about public dependency. Once the truth was made manifest, its scientific aura of 'neutrality' would impress both legislators and the public to approve the needed reforms." Lowell lambasted charity officials' current approach to public dependency. She suggested that charity policy effectively told "the vicious and idle: 'We will board you free of cost, if you will only come and stay among us.' The money wasted in this way is the least of the evils of the present system; the corrupting influence of these worthless men and women, as they pass from town to town, lodging among the people, must be incalculable."

Historians have dismissed Lowell as a harsh elitist obsessed with restoring order, yet her legacy is more complex. As historian Joan Waugh explains, Lowell reflected her family's history of "conflicting traditions—elitism versus democracy, exclusiveness versus inclusiveness, paternalism versus liberalism." On the one hand, Lowell believed strongly in building voluntary, rationalized charity programs, as did most of other professional charity reformers in the late nineteenth century. She shared with other leaders of the scientific charity movement a "didactic impulse...'to instill' in the urban poor worthy values" and a devout belief in the moral value of work, and an environmentalist faith that properly structured institutions could prevent degeneracy. On the other hand, despite her Brahmin background, Lowell and her family held "an inclusive vision of American society—a vision at odds with the paternalistic exclusivity of many of their peers." Lowell maintained her family's radical political traditions, which extended from her father's financing of the Utopian Brook Farm community and her entire family's active role in the abolitionist movement to her later support for mothers' pensions, the living wage, binding arbitration, and the Homestead Strike. Lowell's work on the feeble-minded, however, represented her more elitist, exclusive side.

Once on the State Board of Charities, Lowell redefined the question of custodial care for the feeble-minded in such fearful terms that neither the board nor the legislature could dismiss the issue. In fact, Lowell's first presentation on the topic in January 1878 proved so convincing that board secretary Charles S. Hoyt immediately arranged for her to meet with Wilbur and the Syracuse trustees and ordered 1,000 copies of Lowell's report printed. Although the text of Lowell's report has not survived, her message can be pieced together from the Syracuse asylum's annual report for 1878 and speeches in

which she used a similar methodology. As the Syracuse trustees recounted, Lowell documented that in county poorhouses, "carelessness in the administration...in the matter of a proper and rigid separation of the sexes" contributed to high rates of illegitimate births among "imbecile and idiotic females." Such women, Lowell argued, were easily seduced. Their children invariably "became a permanent burden upon the counties." Feeble-minded women were even more vulnerable outside local poorhouses, although the story ended the same way: with mother and child "abandoned to the charge of the county authorities. Lowell thus suggested that by failing to control feeble-minded women, local poorhouses were reproducing public dependency, a notion anathema to charity officials. Lowell's highly gendered understanding of public dependency and feeble-mindedness, moreover, proved influential in the formal eugenics movement that developed after 1900.

In order to establish a custodial asylum, Wilbur reluctantly joined forces with Lowell. Wilbur believed that a specifically eugenic institution was not necessary, since he thought that idiots rarely reproduced. Nonetheless, Wilbur began to work with Lowell. Her help—along with Wilbur's carefully cultivated relationship with the State Board of Charities and, in particular, his strong public support for the board in its battle with the superintendents of insane asylums in the mid-1870s—proved decisive. In June 1878, the legislature approved an $18,000 appropriation for the new institution. Later that year, the New York State Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women opened its doors in the Finger Lakes town of Newark under the supervision of Wilbur and the Syracuse trustees.

Reflecting Lowell's defining influence on the new asylum, lawmakers and the state board of charities declared that the Newark asylum would serve only women of child-bearing age, and only those capable of useful work. Moreover, inmates could not leave the asylum if they became self-sufficient, nor could relatives easily extract them from the institution. Newark asylum did not have a commitment law until 1914. Nevertheless, inmates' families had a hard time retrieving them; moreover, many inmates had no relatives with whom they could live. In 1909, for instance, relatives gained the release of just seven inmates out of a total population of 817. Superintendent Edwin T. Dunn transferred two inmates to state insane asylums, released one to a county superintendent of the poor, and ruled one inmate ineligible (perhaps she had reached menopause). Wilbur, however, carefully followed legislators' mandates. The official circular that he sent to all county superintendents of the poor during the late 1870s and 1880s stated that "young and healthy" women would receive priority for admission. Moreover, he rejected women whom poorhouse officials classified as "unteachable." Wilbur's successors at Newark maintained these admissions policies.

To a certain degree, however, Wilbur's vision of the ideal custodial asylum shaped life at Newark. Following Wilbur's 1873 outline for a custodial program, the State Board of Charities planned that the more capable inmates would help to care for the less capable. Accordingly, Wilbur sent the Newark asylum a mixture of higher-grade and lower-grade inmates from Syracuse and the country poorhouses—from which the vast majority of inmates arrived. This policy presaged Charles Bernstein's admissions strategies once he took over as superintendent at the Rome asylum in 1902. Only 8.21 percent of inmates admitted to Newark in 1883 and between 1886 and 1920 came directly from Syracuse. Reflecting the fact that the majority of inmates came directly from county poorhouses, most of the approximately fifteen women admitted in 1881 arrived without even a change of clothing. Superintendents also noted that they had to teach most inmates how to do domestic work. SyracuseIn practice, women with epilepsy, cerebral palsy, various types of paralysis, and chronic diseases made up a considerable proportion of Newark's population (one-third in 1881). Superintendents and the board repeatedly complained that the county superintendents of the poor sent potential inmates because they were insane, delinquent, aged, or otherwise troublesome, instead of idiotic, imbecilic, or feeble-minded women. Despite provisions in Newark's by-laws barring women with epilepsy and the establishment of the Craig Colony for Epileptics in 1894, Newark asylum seems to have always had a considerable number of inmates with epilepsy, a variety of physical disabilities, and chronic health conditions. The asylum's superintendents lauded the caretaking abilities of inmates who, at times, watched over as many as seventeen inmates—work that not only reduced costs but also addressed superintendents' continual problems with retaining employees. The superintendents of idiot asylums in New York and other states—and indeed state institutions in general—could rarely match the going wage rates Wages at the Newark asylum were significantly lower and hours were longer than at other nearby jobs. In 1906, for instance, the gardener received $50 but could earn $75 elsewhere. Superintendents also often found that "higher-grade" inmates were more interested in caring for "unteachable" inmates than employees. Trent reports, "Higher functioning inmates, in contrast, not only tolerated the monotony and unpleasantries but, indeed, seemed to thrive on them." Although most professional charity reformers deplored such practices in the country poorhouses and state insane asylums, having inmates care for each other became increasingly common in state idiot asylums and institutions for the feeble-minded across the nation during the late nineteenth century.

But whereas Wilbur primarily used occupational training programs to make his students self-sufficient enough to return to their families, state charity officials used inmates' labor at Newark to provide care on the cheap. In its 1879 report to the legislature, for instance, the State Board of Charities explained that at Newark, "the various household occupations necessary in so large a family [will] be done, as far as possible, by the inmates, for economy's sake...."34The first superintendent of Newark, C. C. Warner—the former superintendent of the poor for the well-regarded Onondaga County Almshouse—required all inmates capable of any type of work to labor. By 1886, inmates were making all of the clothes for the 134 residents; in 1893, inmates produced 713 dresses, 519 chemises, and 43 strait-jackets, among other items. Other inmates worked in the kitchen, laundry, canning room, and bakery and, after 1907, in the garden. By 1907, Superintendent Winspear (the third head of the asylum) proudly reported that more than 90 percent of inmates were working. He noted that "about fifty per cent [were] capable of doing very good and remunerative work under proper direction." Indeed, Winspear planned to ensure that "every inmate not actually ill shall be occupied every day at some suitable work or exercise." He intended to occupy inmates who were not capable of working full-time—namely, "low grade girls" and inmates in ill health—with "walking parties."

Newark superintendents' extensive use of inmate labor significantly reduced costs and, thereby, the cost of their dependency on the state of New York. Given that institutional expenses remained a potent political issue well past the turn of the century, the frugality of Newark's superintendents undoubtedly pleased the state charity officials and legislators. Overall, Newark's cost of maintenance (excluding clothing) was just 68 percent of that at the Syracuse asylum, thanks to inmates' work. In 1909, for instance, inmate labor reduced the cost of clothing by nearly half (the asylum spent $4,109.20 on materials for clothing; the matron, meanwhile, valued inmates' labor in the sewing rooms at $3,486.61). Inmates also produced $600.21 worth of canned goods ranging from strawberries and plums to floor wax and lard, helped raise $2,483.57 in farm produce, and helped save $2,116.07 in provisions and $1,189.06 in household stores. Overall, inmate labor reduced expenditures on food, household supplies, and clothing by nearly 22 percent in 1909 (including salaries, managers' expenses, and miscellaneous items, inmate labor reduced costs by just over 15 percent). Thus, for inmates at Newark, work constituted a civic obligation to be self-sufficient—or at least reduce the cost of their dependency. Nonetheless, unlike at the Syracuse asylum, inmates' labors did not provide them with a path to discharge.

In contrast to Wilbur, superintendents at the Newark asylum did not believe that productive inmates could be safely discharged; indeed, Newark superintendents' hereditarian concerns led them to retain nearly all inmates. Trustees and superintendents alike continually harped on the relatively small number of inmates who had children before they entered the asylum and the lack of sex segregation in poorhouses (the annual reports usually reported that 20 to 25 percent of inmates had been mothers, but cited a rate of 50 percent in 1898). In 1889, the asylum's trustees described the institution as serving "Imbecile women in our State, born in alms-houses and never having had any other home, have been mothers from once to four times." The four "higher grade" inmates whom W. L. Willett discharged in 1892 represented a rare exception. Willett later reported that all four had obtained "good places to work through the efforts of the superintendents of the poor of the counties from which they were committed." Willett later received "good reports" from the former inmates. Nine inmates were released to their relatives in 1894 after improving considerably; most became self-sustaining. A few others were dismissed in 1912 because they were no longer seen as "menace[s] to society," but these discharges appear to have all been rare exceptions. In total, women discharged as not requiring custodial care, not imbecilic, much improved, and improved made up 64 or 10.18 percent of the 599 discharges between 1894 and 1920 (most women were classed as "improved"—39, or 6.51 percent). Six inmates (were discharged after gaining writs of habeus corpus. Between 1879 and 1920, the Newark asylum had a discharge rate of only 3.92 percent. In contrast, the Syracuse asylum had an overall discharge rate of 9.37 percent between 1882 and 1920, nearly 2.4 times greater than Newark (discharge data is not available for 1879, 1880, or 1881). Male pupils at Syracuse were forty percent more likely to be discharged than female students. Moreover, the largest group of discharges at the Newark asylum (28.38 percent of the 599 discharges between 1894 and 1920) represented inmates who had reached menopause.

Newark superintendents' habit of abruptly dismissing inmates at menopause did not ease families' attempts to absorb their relatives. In contrast to Wilbur, Newark superintendents paid little attention to whether their families could receive them (inmates whose relatives could not take them were sent to their county poorhouses). In 1894, Mrs. Elizabeth Goodings, for instance, wrote to the State Board of Charities begging that Superintendent Winspear not discharge her daughter: "I am totally without income (77 years of age) and dependent on my soninlaw [sic].... He will not be wiling to receive Emily into his home.... It would break my heart if my oldest child should be obliged to go to a county house or an insane asylum.... Does it not seem cruel to throw these children back into the condition from which you have taken them...[?] With the exception that they cannot propogate [sic] their kind, will not there last condition be as sad as their first?]”

Newark's pioneering model of custodial care—preventing the "feeble-minded" from reproducing public dependency while demanding that they fulfill the civic obligation to be self-sufficient—had a nationwide impact on how lawmakers and charity officials dealt with people labeled feeble-minded. Superintendents at the Newark asylum proved that, if inmates were carefully selected for their ability to be producers, custodial care was cheaper than educational idiot asylums. At Newark, moreover, inmates' labor helped to defray the cost of their own public dependency on the state—an approach that legislators in many other states found attractive. Indeed, the deserving, disabled poor were becoming undeserving, burdensome dependents whom charity officials expected would become at least partly self-sufficient.

The New York State Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women at Newark provided charity officials and lawmakers with a cost-effective means of addressing a new policy problem: how to prevent the reproduction of public dependency by people labeled as feeble-minded. Nonetheless, the asylum was too small to house all feeble-minded women of child-bearing age. Nor could the asylum accept women who "aged out" or homeless male graduates of Syracuse. Finally, like the Syracuse asylum, the Newark asylum did not provide a solution for what to do with people who could not work—those who were labeled "unteachable" or were too ill. All of these factors would lead lawmakers to establish the Rome State Custodial Asylum for Unteachable Idiots in 1894.

- Sarah Frances Rose, No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1850-1930. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2008. pp. 67-82

#vagrancy #public dependency #deserving poor #heredity poverty #the asylum #19th century america #new york history #work cure #the asylum as prison #the prison as asylum #great confinement

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lodelss · 3 years

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Laurie Penny | Longreads | June 2020 | 21 minutes (5,360 words)

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” — Winston Churchill, unpublished memorandum

“Will Mockney for food.” — Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. III

This is a story about a border war. Specifically, a border war between two nations that happen, at least in theory, to be precisely the same place. One of them is Britain, a small, soggy island whose power on the world stage is declining, where poverty, inequality, and disaster nationalism are rising, where the government has mangled its response to a global pandemic so badly that it’s making some of us nostalgic for the days when all we did was panic about Brexit. The other is “Britain!” — a magical land of round tables and boy wizards and enchanted swords and moral decency, where the sun never sets on an Empire run by gentlemen, where witty people wear frocks and top hats and decide the fate of nations over tea and biscuits.

One is a real place. The other is a fascinatingly dishonest, selective statement of fact, rather like describing how beautiful the countryside was in the antebellum American South. A truth so incomplete it’s worse than a lie.

Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die. The U.K. is unique among modern states in that we not only buy our own hype, we also sell it overseas at a markup. “Britain always felt like the land where all the stories came from,” an American writer friend told me when I asked why she so often sets her novels in Britain. Over and over, writers and readers of every background — but particularly Americans — tell me that the U.K. has a unique hold on their imaginations.

That hold is highly profitable. Britain was kept out of recession last year by one industry: entertainment. Over the past four years, the motion picture, television, and music industries have grown by almost 50 percent — the service sector, only by 6. So many shows are currently filmed in England that productions struggle to book studio space, and even the new soundstages announced by London Mayor Sadiq Khan in 2018 will be hard-pressed to keep up with demand. As historian Dan Snow pointed out, “[O]ur future prosperity is dependent on turning ourselves into a giant theme park of Queens, detectives, spies, castles, and young wizards.”

There is hope: the statues are coming down all over Britain, starting in Bristol on June 7, 2020. Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down a monument to slave trader Edward Colston, who is remembered for how he lavished his wealth on the port city and not for the murder of 19,000 men, women and children during the Middle Passage. Colston’s statue was thrown into Bristol Harbor, where it remains. In Oxford, students demanded the removal of monuments to Cecil Rhodes, the business magnate and “architect of apartheid” who stole vast tracts of Africa driven by his conviction in the supremacy of Anglo-Saxons. In Parliament Square, fences have been erected to protect Winston Churchill himself, the colonial administrator and war leader whose devoted acolytes include both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Young Britons are demanding a reckoning with a history of colonial conquest, slave-trading, industrial savagery, and utter refusal to examine its own legacy.

Meanwhile, the economic disaster of a no-deal Brexit is still looming and Britain has the highest COVID-19 death toll in Europe, putting further pressure on an already-struggling National Health Service. Under Boris Johnson’s catastrophic leadership, or lack thereof, there are no signs of changing tactics on either. Fantasy Britain is having a boomtime. Real Britain is in deep, deep trouble.

* * *

I was homesick. That’s my excuse. I had been in Los Angeles for six months, writing for TV shows set in England. I woke up every day 5,000 miles from home, in a city of sweltering tarmac and traffic jams and palm trees, to try and explain how British people speak and think. I fell asleep every night to the radio from home, listening to the logic of xenophobia capture the political mainstream as my country circled the drain. I watched my British friends who are Black or brown or who were born overseas trying to stay brave and hopeful as racism became more and more normalized. I was homesick, and people do silly things when they’re homesick.

So yes, I went to see the Downton Abbey movie.

Specifically, I went to the Downton Abbey Experience, a special screening where you could spend a few hours in a mocked-up Edwardian drawing room, nibbling on tiny food and pretending to be posh. I was expecting it to be rubbish, forgetting that this was Los Angeles, where talented actors and set dressers can be had on every street corner. I couldn’t help but be a bit charmed by the commitment: the food was terrible, but two of the waiters had concocted an elaborate professional-rivalry backstory, and the accent-work was almost flawless. It really did feel as if you’d stepped, if not into Downton itself, then certainly onto the show’s set. And I finally understood. The way Americans feel about this is the way I feel about Star Trek and schlocky space opera. This is their escape from reality. This is their fandom. Not just Downton Abbey — “Britain.”

I do try to resist the temptation to make fun of other people who take uncomplicated joy in their thing. The British do this a lot, and it’s one of the least edifying parts of the national character. Fandom is fine. Escapism is allowed. No semi-sensitive soul can be expected to live in the real world at all times. But watching the whitewashed, revisionist history of your own country adopted as someone else’s fantasy of choice is actively uncomfortable. It’s like sitting by while a decrepit relative gibbers some antediluvian nonsense about the good old days and watching in horror as everyone applauds and says how charming.

I decided not to be charmed and sulked on an ornamental sofa, angrily eating a chocolate bonbon and resenting everyone else for having fun. This was where I met the only other British person in the room, a nice lady from Buckinghamshire in a fancy dress. What did my new friend think of the event? “I don’t like to complain,” she said, “but I’m sitting here in a ballgown eating bloody bread and jam. Honestly, it’s not worth the money.”

Which was the second-most-British thing anyone said all evening. The most British thing of all had been uttered half an hour earlier, by me, when it dawned on my friend and me that we really should have worn costumes. “It’ll be alright,” I said, “I’ll just take my accent up a bit posher and everyone will be pleased to see us.” Living in a place where all you have to do is say something in your normal accent to be told you’re clever and wonderful is all very well, until you start believing it. This is as true in politics as anywhere else: just showing up and being relentlessly British at people does not constitute sociopolitical strategy. It doesn’t even constitute a personality. I know that there are a lot of British expats who will be cross with me for giving the game away, and chaps, I really am so terribly, terribly sorry. But you and I both know that someday we’ll have to go home, and people won’t automatically be pleased to see us just because we said some words.

This is as true in politics as anywhere else: just showing up and being relentlessly British at people does not constitute sociopolitical strategy.

I write for TV shows set in Britain, or a fantasy version of it, and American Anglophilia is endlessly fascinating to me, as it is to most British expats. It comes in a few different flavourways (ed.: Normally we’d edit this to the u-less American spelling, but in this particular case it seemed appropriate to let it go). There’s the saccharine faux-nostalgia of Downton fans, the ones who love The Crown and afternoon tea and the actual monarchy. They tend to be more socially conservative, more likely to vaporize into angry drifts of snowflakery at the mere suggestion that there might have been brown people in the trenches of the First World War. But there is also a rich seam of Anglophilia among people who are generally suspicious of nationalism, and television is to blame for most of it. The idea of Britain that many Americans grew up with was Monty Python, Doctor Who, and Blackadder; today it’s Downton, Sherlock, Good Omens, and The Great British Worried-People-Making-Cakes-in-a-Tent Show. And of course, Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, which technically take place in Middle-earth and Westeros but, in practice, are set in the version of medieval Britain where all epic fantasy tends to settle — in days of olde when knights were bold and brown people didn’t get speaking roles but dragons were fine.

(No British expat can honestly criticize a franchise like Downton for taking advantage of the North American fascination with Englishness, not unless we can say we’ve never taken advantage of it ourselves. Occasionally we catch one another at it, and it’s deeply embarrassing. Not long ago, waiting for coffee in the morning, I listened aghast as an extremely pretty American lady with her arm around an averagely-attractive Englishman explained that their dog was called something not unlike Sir Humphrey Woofington-Growler. “Because he’s British — my boyfriend, I mean.” Said British boyfriend’s eyes were pinned on the middle distance in the full excruciating knowledge that if he’d given a dog a name like that at home, he’d have got a smack, which would have upset the dog.)

Lavish Britscapist vehicles like Downton Abbey, The Crown, and Belgravia are more popular with Americans than they are at home. Trudging through Finsbury Park in London on a cold morning last Christmas, a poster advertising The Crown had been gleefully tagged “royalist propaganda” by some local hero with a spray can. My American friends were confused when I explained this to them. “Don’t you like your royal family?” They asked. No, I explained. We like Hamilton. The stories we export lay bare the failing heart of Britain’s sense of itself in the world — the assumption that all we have to do, individually or collectively, is show up with a charming accent and say something quaint and doors will open for us, as will wallets, legs, and negotiations for favorable trade deals.

This is a scam that works really well right up until it doesn’t.

* * *

It was irritatingly difficult to remain uncharmed by the Downton Abbey movie. I found myself unable to work up a sweat over whether there would be enough lawn chairs for the royal parade, but I rather enjoyed the bit where the Downton house staff, snubbed by the royal servants, decided to respond with kidnapping, poisoning, and fraud. There was also a snide rivalry between butlers, a countess with a secret love child, a disputed inheritance, an attempted royal assassination, a perilous tryst between closeted valets, a princess in an unhappy marriage, and Maggie Smith. It was disgustingly pleasant right up until its shameless closing sequence, where fussy butler Mr. Carson and his sensible housekeeper wife had a conversation about whether the Abbey would last into the next century. Yes, said Mr. Carson, sending us off into the night with the promise that “a hundred years from now, Downton will still be standing.”

And there it is. It’s not a good or noble or even an original lie, but it’s at least told with flair. As the British Empire went ungently into its good night offscreen last century, many great English houses were repurposed, sold, or demolished in part so that families did not have to pay inheritance tax on the properties. Highclere Castle — the estate where Downton Abbey was filmed — is an exception and remains under the stewardship of the Earls of Carnavron, who live on the estate. They can afford to do this because a lucrative show about a lost and largely fictional age of aristocratic gentility happened to be filmed on the grounds. Let me repeat that: the only way the actual Downton Abbey can continue to exist is by renting itself out as a setting for fantasies of a softer world. Which is, in microcosm, the current excuse for a government’s entire plan for a post-Brexit economy. With nowhere left to colonize, we gleefully strip our own history for the shiniest trinkets to sell. The past is a different country, so we’re allowed to invade it, take its stuff and lie relentlessly about the people who actually live there.

It’s not a good or noble or even an original lie, but it’s at least told with flair.

The uncomfortable truth is that America doesn’t love Britain the way we want to be loved. That white-innocence fantasy of rolling lawns and ripped bodices is only palatable (and profitable) because Britain doesn’t have much actual power anymore. Our eccentricities would be far less adorable if we still owned you. If we were still a military-industrial juggernaut on the scale of Russia or China, if we were still really an imperial power rather than just cosplaying as one for cash, would the rest of the world be importing our high-fructose cultural capital in such sugary sackloads?

I don’t think so — and nor does Britain’s current government, the most nationalist and least patriotic in living memory, which has no compunction about turning the country into a laundry for international capital and flogging our major assets to foreign powers. American businesses already have their eyes on the National Health Service, which will inevitably be on the table in those trade deals a post-Brexit British economy desperately needs. In one of its first acts in power, the Johnson administration shoved through a controversial arms deal selling a major defense company to a private American firm, which is somehow not seen as unpatriotic.

This summer, Black Lives Matter protests are boiling around a nation that has never reexamined its imperial legacy because it is convinced it is the protagonist of world history. Conversation around what “British” means remains vaguely distasteful. “Culturally our stories are of plucky underdogs,” historian Snow told me. “But actually our national story was of massive expenditure on the world’s most complex weapon systems and smashing the shit out of less fiscally and technological societies.”

“Nations themselves are narrations,” wrote Edward Said, pioneer of postcolonial studies. Britain’s literary self-mythologizing spans several centuries. During the Raj, teaching English literature to the Indian middle and ruling classes was central to the strategy for enforcing the idea of Britain as morally superior. The image of Britain that persists in the collective global unconsciousness was founded deliberately to make sense of the empire and romanticize it for ordinary British citizens, most of whom had neither a complete understanding of the atrocities nor the voting rights that would make their opinion relevant. Britain wrote and rewrote itself as the protagonist of its own legends, making its barbarism bearable and its cultural dominance natural.

Bad things happen to people who have never heard a story they weren’t the hero of. I try not to be the sort of person who flashes the word “hegemony” around too much, but that’s what this is and always has been: a way of imposing cultural norms long after we, as my history books delicately put it, “lost” the British Empire. The stories are all we have left to make us feel important.

The plain truth is that Britain had, until quite recently, the largest and most powerful empire the world had ever known. We don’t have it anymore, and we miss it. Of course we miss it. It made us rich, it made us important, and all the ugly violent parts happened terribly far away and could be ignored with a little rewriting of our history. It continues to this day with tactful omissions from the school syllabus — in 2010, Education Secretary Michael Gove, later one of the chief architects of Brexit, pushed to teach British children a version of the “exciting and appealing” Imperial history that cast their country as heroic. According to one 2016 study, 43 percent of the British public think the Empire “was a good thing.” For most British people, the Empire came to us in pieces, in jingoistic legends and boys’ adventure stories with as many exclamation points as could be crammed on one book cover. The impression I was given as a schoolgirl was that we were jolly decent to let the Empire go, and that we did so because it was all of a sudden pointed out that owning other countries wholesale was a beastly thing to do — of course old boy, you must have your human rights! Really, we were only holding on to them for you.

The last time Britain truly got to think of itself as heroic on the world stage was during the Second World War. The narrative with the most tenacity is the “Blitz Spirit” — of a plucky little island standing firm against impossible odds, pulling together while hell rained down from above, growing victory gardens and sheltering in the stations of the London Underground. Those black-and-white photographs of brave-faced families wrapped in blankets on the train platforms are instantly recognizable: this is who we are as a country. Most Britons don’t know that soldiers from the colonies fought and died on the frontlines in France. Even fewer are aware of the famine that struck India at around the same time, leaving a million dead, or of Britain’s refusal to offer aid, continuing instead to divert supplies to feed the British army as the people of India starved.

What all of this is about, ultimately, is white innocence. That’s the grand narrative that so many of our greatest writers were recruited to burnish, willingly or not. White innocence makes a delicious story, and none of its beneficiaries wants to hear about how that particular sausage gets made.

* * *

Many of the biggest narrative brands of Britain’s fretful post-colonial age are stories of a nation coming to terms with the new and eroding nature of its own power, from James Bond (a story about a slick misogynist hired by the state to kill people) to Doctor Who (which I will defend to the death, but which is very much about the intergalactic importance of cultural capital). We are a nation in decline on the international stage; that’s what happens when a small island ceases to own a third of the earth. Rather than accepting this with any semblance of grace, we have thrown a tantrum that has made us the laughing stock of world politics, the sort of tantrum that only spoiled children and ham-faced, election-stealing oligarchs are allowed to get away with.

In this climate, the more pragmatic among us are seeing that what we actually have to offer the rest of the world boils down to escapism. Fantasy Britain offers an escape for everyone after a hard day under the wheel of late-stage capitalism.

There’s no actual escape, of course. Good luck if you’re a refugee. Since 2012, the conservative government has actively cultivated a “hostile environment” scheme to make life as difficult as possible for immigrants, highlights of which include fast-tracking deportations and vans driving a massive billboard reading “GO HOME OR FACE ARREST” around the most diverse boroughs in London. Seriously. If you want to escape to actual Britain you need at least two million pounds, which is how much it costs for an Investor Visa. Non-millionaires with the wrong documents can and will be put on a plane in handcuffs, even if they’ve lived and worked in Britain for 50 years — like the senior citizens of the Windrush generation who came to Britain from the West Indies as children with their families to help rebuild the nation after the Second World War. In the past five years, hundreds of elderly men and women, many of them unaware they were not legal citizens, have been forcibly deported from Britain to the Caribbean. The subsequent public outcry did almost zero damage to the government’s brand. In 2019, Johnson’s Conservatives won a landslide victory.

“Take your country back.” That was the slogan that Brexit campaigners chose in 2016. Take it back from whom? To where? It was clear that the fictional past that many Brexit nostalgists wanted to reclaim was something not unlike the syrupy storylines of Downton Abbey — quiet, orderly, and mostly white. But to make that story work, British conservatives needed to cast themselves as the plucky underdogs, which is how you get a Brexit Party representative to the European Parliament comparing Brexit to the resistance of “slaves against their owners” and “colonies … against their empires,” or Boris Johnson bloviating in 2018 about Britain’s “colony status” in the EU (although he also believes that it would be good if Britain was still “in charge” of Africa).

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

What really won the day, though, was the lie that leaving the EU would leave us with 350 million pounds per week “to spend on the NHS.” Boris Johnson rode up and down the nation on a big red bus emblazoned with that empty promise. The British people may not trust our politicians, but we trust our National Health Service — almost all of us, from across the sociopolitical spectrum, apart from some fringe internet libertarians and diehard neoliberal wingnuts, most of whom, unfortunately, are in power (though they couldn’t get there without promising to protect the NHS).

After the COVID-19 lockdowns end, Brexit is still happening. The actual changes don’t come into effect until 2021, and Boris Johnson, whose empty personal brand is forever yoked to this epic national self-harm project, is clearly hoping to sneak in a bad Brexit deal while the country is still reeling from a global pandemic. Leaving the EU will not make Britain rich again. It will not make us an imperial power again. In fact, the other nations of Europe are now taking the opportunity to reclaim some of the things we borrowed along the way. Greece wants the Parthenon Marbles back, more than two centuries after a British tourist visited Athens and liked them so much he decided to pry them off and ship them home. Spain has made noise that it wants Gibraltar back, and we’ll probably have to give it to them. So far, the only way in which Britain is returning to its days of High Victorian glory is in the sudden re-emergence, in communities ravaged by austerity, of 19th-century diseases of poverty, and now of the highest rates of COVID-19 infection in Europe, after Johnson’s government pursued a disastrous “herd immunity” strategy that transparently invited the elderly and infirm to sacrifice themselves for the stock market. British kids are not growing up with a sense of national heroism; they are growing up with rickets and scurvy. As a great poet from the colonies once wrote, it’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is for the sneering Eton thugs you inexplicably elected to stop stabbing you in the back.

As it happens, I want my country back, too. I have spent enough time baking under the pitiless California sunshine. I have been to Hot Topic. I’m stuck in the States until the lockdowns end, but want to go back to the soggy, self-deprecating country I grew up in, the country of tolerance and diversity and kind people quietly getting on with things, the land of radio sketch comedy, jacket potatoes, decent bands, and basic decency.

I know that that country, too, is imaginary; just as imaginary as any of the “Rule Britannia” flag-waggery. I don’t believe that Britain is Great in anything but name, but I do believe it can be better. I do not care to be told that I am any less of a patriot because I choose to know my country, or because I can imagine a future where we do more than freeze in the haunted house of our past glories, stuffed with stolen treasures and trapdoors we never open. It’s where I’m from, where my family and friends live, and where I hope to grow old and die. It worries me that we have not even begun to develop the tools to cope with our material reality, one in which we are a rather small rainy island half of whose population currently hates the other.

* * *

Since we’re all talking about myths and revisionist history and the Blitz Spirit, here’s something else that never makes it into the official story.

Those working-class Londoners sheltering in tube stations during World War II? They weren’t supposed to be there. In fact, the British government of the late 1930s built far too few municipal shelters, preferring to leave that to private companies, local government councils, and individuals and when the first bombs first fell, the hardest hit areas were poor, immigrant, and working-class communities in the East End with nowhere to go. Elite clubs and hotels dug out their own bomb shelters, but the London Underground was barricaded. On the second night of the Blitz, with the flimsy, unhygienic East End shelters overflowing, hundreds of people entered the Liverpool Street Station and refused to leave. By the time the government officially changed its position and “allowed” working-class Londoners to take shelter down among the trains, thousands were already doing so — 177,000 people at its most packed.

Eventually it was adopted into the propaganda effort and became part of the official mythos of the Blitz, but the official story leaves out the struggle. It leaves out the part about desperate people, abandoned by their government, in fear of their lives, doing what they had to — and what should have been done from the start — to take care of each other.

This failure is the closest thing to the staggering lack of leadership that Britain, like America, has displayed during the weeks and months of the coronavirus crisis. As I write, more than 42,000 British citizens have died, many in our struggling NHS hospitals and countless more in care homes. On the same January day that the Brexit treaty was signed, Boris Johnson missed the first emergency meeting of COBRA, the government’s effort to determine a response to rumors of a new and horrifying pandemic. Johnson went on to miss four subsequent meetings, choosing instead to go on holiday with his fiancée to celebrate Brexit as a personal win. As vital weeks were squandered and the infection reached British shores, it emerged that the country was singularly underprepared. Stocks of protective equipment had been massively depleted because, with everyone’s attention on Brexit, nobody had bothered to consider that we might have to deal with a crisis not of our own making. Worse still, the National Health Service was chronically underfunded and hemorrhaging staff, as migrant doctors, nurses, and medical professionals from EU countries fled a failing institution in a hostile culture. In the years following the Brexit referendum, over 10,000 European medical staff have reportedly left the NHS.

Over 10 years of wildly unnecessary cuts to public services, successive Tory governments deliberately invoked the Blitz Spirit, promoting their economic reforms with the unfortunate slogan “we’re all in this together” — as if austerity were an external enemy rather than a deliberate and disastrous choice imposed on the working poor by politicians who have never known the price of a pint of milk or the value of public education. Today, it is perhaps a signal of the intellectual drought in British politics that the slogan “We’re all in this together” has been recycled to flog the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Their other slogan — plastered resentfully on podiums after a decade of decimating the health service — is “Protect the NHS.” The National Health Service is perhaps the last thing that truly unites every fractured shard of the British political psyche, and the Tories hate that, but 10 years of gutting hospitals, scrapping social care schemes, and blaming it all on the very immigrants who come from overseas to care for us when we are sick has not made the British love socialized medicine any less. Every Thursday night across Britain, since the lockdowns began, the whole country comes out to applaud the healthcare workers who are risking their lives every day to fight on the front lines of the pandemic. The mumbling rent-a-toffs the Tories shove up on stage to explain the latest hopelessly ineffectual lockdown strategy have no choice but to clap along. Because, as the murals mushrooming up around the country attest, the best stories Britain tells about itself have never been about Queen and Country and Glory — they’ve always been the ones where the broke, brave, messed-up millions of ordinary people who live here pull together, help each other, and behave with basic human decency.

* * *

I’m not arguing for us all to stop telling stories about Britain. For one thing, people aren’t going to stop, and for another, stories by and about British people are currently keeping my friends employed, my rent paid, and my home country from sliding into recession. And there are plenty that are still worth telling: if you want to shove your nose against the shop window of everything actually good about British culture, watch The Great British Bake-off. If you like your escapism with a slice of sex and cursing and corsets, and why wouldn’t you, curl up with the criminally underrated Harlots, which does an excellent job of portraying an actually diverse London and also has Liv Tyler as a trembly lesbian heiress in a silly wig. And if you want to watch a twee, transporting period drama with decent politics, I cannot more heartily recommend Call the Midwife, which also features biscuit-eating nuns and an appropriate amount of propaganda about how the National Health Service is the best thing about Britain.

I was supposed to be home by now. Instead, I’m in quarantine in California, watching my home country implode into proto-oligarchic incoherence in the middle of a global pandemic and worrying about my friends and loved ones in London. Meanwhile, my American friends are detoxing from the rolling panic-attack of the news by rewatching Downton Abbey, The Crown, and Belgravia. The British film industry is already gearing up to reopen, and the country will need to lean on its cultural capital more than ever.

But there is a narrative chasm between the twee and borderless dreamscape of fantasy Britain and actual, material Britain, where rents are rising and racists are running brave. The chasm is wide, and a lot of people are falling into it. The omnishambles of British politics is what happens when you get scared and mean and retreat into the fairytales you tell about yourself. When you can no longer live within your own contradictions. When you want to hold on to the belief that Britain is the land of Jane Austen and John Lennon and Sir Winston Churchill, the war hero who has been repeatedly voted the greatest Englishman of all time. When you want to forget that Britain is also the land of Cecil Rhodes and Oswald Moseley and Sir Winston Churchill, the brutal colonial administrator who sanctioned the building of the first concentration camps and condemned millions of Indians to death by starvation. These are not contradictions, even though the drive to separate them is cracking the country apart. If you love your country and don’t own its difficulties and its violence, you don’t actually love your country. You’re just catcalling it as it goes by.

There is a country of the imagination called Britain where there will never be borders, where down the dark lane, behind a door in the wall, David Bowie drinks gin with Elizabeth Tudor and Doctor Who trades quips with Oscar Wilde and there are always hot crumpets for tea. This idea of Englishness is lovely, and soothing, and it makes sense, and we have to be done with it now. If Britain is going to remain the world’s collective imaginative sandbox, we can do better than this calcified refusal to cope with the contradictions of the past. We can liberate the territory of the imagination. We can remember what is actually good about Britain — which has always been different from what was “great.”

* * *

Laurie Penny is an award-winning journalist, essayist, public speaker, writer, activist, internet nanocelebrity and author of six books. Her most recent book, Bitch Doctrine, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

Editor: Michelle Weber Fact checker: Matt Giles Copyeditor: Ben Huberman

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angrycollectordaze-me-blog · 5 years

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Paper代写：The influence of the church of England on the rise of cities

下面为大家整理一篇优秀的paper代写范文- The influence of the church of England on the rise of cities，供大家参考学习，这篇论文讨论了英国教会对城市兴起的影响。英国城市的蓬勃兴起，教会起着积极作用。基督教教义主张平等自由，提倡诚实守信、遵守规则、遵从内心的选择，这为城市兴起奠定了思想基础；教会作为宗教中心，引领消费集中，促使工商业汇集，为城市发展奠定了物质基础。另外教会还插手经济，提出促进经济发展的手段和策略，推动了英国城市的兴起。早期教会具有城市性，教会与城市联系密切；有的宗教中心直接发展为城市，教士的文化教育活动推动英国城市的阶层流动，从而带动了英国城市的兴起。

In the 12th and 13th centuries English cities flourished and the church played an active role. The Christian doctrine advocated equality and freedom, and advocated honesty and honesty, abiding by rules and following inner choices, which laid the ideological foundation for the rise of cities. As a religious center, the church leads the consumption concentration, promotes the industry and commerce to gather, and lays the material foundation for the urban development. The church also got involved in the economy, proposing the means and strategies to promote economic development, and driving the rise of British cities. The early church has the city nature, the church and the city close connection; some religious centers develop directly into cities, and the cultural education activity of priests promotes the class flow of British cities, thus driving the rise of British cities.

With the fall and collapse of the Roman empire, the development of British cities was interrupted. In the early days of Anglo-Saxon, most cities were already dead, and real cities were dead. This period experienced the conflict of tribal states, the invasion of foreign tribes and the war of secession, followed by the urban demise, which was called the dark and backward era by historians. In the 12th century, British cities sprang up everywhere. What prompted the rise of British cities in the 12th and 13th centuries? As we go back to the cities of late Anglo-Saxon England, the church was beginning to take shape, it was becoming organized, and it became a powerful social force in England. The domestic research on the medieval church of England is weak, especially the research on the influence of the church on the rise of cities in the 12th and 3rd centuries. This paper explores the positive influence of church on the rise of medieval British cities, which is undoubtedly of academic significance.

The doctrine is the most core part of religion. The well-known image of conservative and greed in the medieval Christian church is deeply rooted in people's hearts. After colluding with the king, the church oppresses the poor people, such as teaching people to meek, learn to endure and obey orders. However, the positive side of the doctrine is worth advocating.

Christianity emphasizes the concept of equality of all people, natural law and fraternity. The concept of equality and autonomy inherited from ancient primitive society, classical society and even Christianity in the middle ages laid the ideological foundation for the birth of medieval cities in Western Europe. In primitive times, people had simple ideas about the equality between tribal members. Economically, cities represent commerce; Politically, the city was an autonomous community, anti-feudal. Citizens demand equality, and then the judicial power, the power of autonomy. The doctrine of equality before god, which is universal and covers all, provides a theoretical basis for the equality needed for the development of industry and commerce.

Christian doctrine advocates freedom. "The medieval city originated from the classical era and the combination of justice and Christianity and the integration of rationalism. In the western medieval era where the belief in supremacy not only existed, but also existed from weakness to strength. Eventually, universal rationality was established and prevailed in the heyday of the middle ages." At the same time, a sense of self-determination to pursue the individual is also emerging. British cities were anti-feudal, and with the strength of capitalism, a third tier grew out of the cities and seized power as a representative of the whole population. In the 12th and 13th centuries, British cities developed on the basis of this trend of pursuing freedom and breaking away from the feudal bondage. This concept of freedom became an important ideological condition for the rise of cities.

Many scholars argue that Christianity before the reformation was opposed to profit motive and even that the church was hostile to business. French historian Henry skin reina has summarize characteristics of the late middle ages in this sentence: "traders rarely make god happy, even can never make god pleasure". This seems to me to be a clear bias against the church, because under god, the merchants did make money, there were many successful cases, and they were the driving force of urban development. The church implicitly promoted the emancipation of the business mind, "human beings are no longer dependent on the bounty of nature, but are starting from scratch to try to construct a new and manageable order."

Christianity began to spread in England in 597 when augustine was sent by the Pope to preach in what was then the kingdom of Kent. By the eighth century, England had 17 bishops, four in the north and 13 in the south. These places are not only religious centers, but also a collection of handicraft products. Some scholars believe that since at least the 8th century, these cathedrals and monasteries have been distinguished from surrounding villages and have the characteristics of "city". How does the church promote economic growth, and thus the rise of cities? The author analyzes from subjective and objective aspects.

Objectively, the great religious center is a considerable consumer community. Religious people make up the majority of consumers in British cities represented by London, and purchases account for the absolute amount of business. Church people not only need all kinds of daily necessities, wine, used to decorate the church exquisite handicrafts and other luxury goods, also need to temporary factotum servants, these requirements constitute a large and attractive market, landless peasants, slaves, and craftsmen and businessmen, servants, and the beggar flocked to look for opportunities. In addition to the church's own demand, increasing of pilgrims gathered city also, for those relics along a place of pilgrimage route and with saint church or monasteries prosperity of commodity economy, Susan Reynolds called "pilgrim trade". The market developed and the economy boomed. Excavations of the monasteries of the eighth and ninth centuries, such as hartlepool and whitby, revealed the existence of handicraftsmen in a variety of industries, where foreign trade and local trade were active. These excavations show the importance of religious institutions for early urban development.

Subjectively, the church collects various benefits such as tolls from the market. In the eighth century, for example, because the property of bishop Worcester and his cathedral was a salt producing center, the church's two boats ply the salt trade between London and Worcester, and were exempt from passing taxes along the way. In the second half of the ninth century, etelfrid and her husband Ethel authorized Worcester bishop wofetz and his church to receive half of the proceeds of the market. Such wealth encouraged local artisans and merchants, and there were countless businesses in the name of the church. A typical example is that the abbot of st albans established a market there in 968. Apart from providing construction materials to the businessmen who had come to live in the area, he made other attractive terms for them to conduct business. His descendants followed his example and continued to develop local industry and commerce. The abbot, Leopold, even improved the roads to London, building Bridges and cutting down bushes that impeded traffic.

At the beginning of its emergence, the church has the character of city, which is the foundation of the church's existence and an important place for its dissemination. "Early Christianity was an urban religion, it was urban, not rural, and its spread between the city and the province was along the waterway," says historian Thomas Thompson in his medieval history of economic society. Urban in the church have embodied in the "new testament", from the era of Jesus and the le loi province countryside farmer's religious city of Paul's world religions, Christianity produced change, compared to Jesus quoted familiar things in life such as crops, and the birds of the air as a metaphor, Paul cited many times in the metaphor of the original city and market.

As the core of the church, the clergy plays an important role in urban development. Professor li zenghong pointed out in his analysis of the social classes of London in the 13th and 15th centuries that: "the priest is a very important social class in the medieval British society, as well as an important class in the medieval London society. The clergy gradually established an independent administrative system, constantly improved the Christian theology, and systematically and orderly instilled the Christian theology and doctrines into all social strata. Catholic priests were the only social class to have received education, and they played an important role in England's cultural communication and national administration. As a way to acquire knowledge, the priest plays an important role in the cultural construction of the city. Since education could cultivate people's ability, in the early middle ages, education was monopolized by the church, and the important positions were those of Catholic priests and archbishops. People who had the need for education became dependent on the church, which triggered the urban class flow, and class flow gave rise to new cities. Furthermore, as more people flooded into the city, stimulated by education, the size and number of cities grew accordingly.

The church city is the typical representative of the medieval British cities, and takes the lead in the development of other cities. In addition to handicraftsmen and small merchants, the city also has bishops, priests, monks and other ecclesiastical figures, and some officials and officials in the city are also mostly priests. In addition, if the city is a college town, there will be many church students. "There are a number of English cities, first cathedrals or monasteries, and then a great number of business people, which gradually grow into cities. By the 9th century, as an important religious center, the city of Canterbury had a habit of requiring the eaves of houses to be two feet wide. Because of his political importance, Canterbury became one of the earliest coin minting points in the country. It was on the main road from London to the coast, which was mentioned as a market in the 8th century, and portus in the 9th century, so you can see its commercial status. Church cities had a certain size in the Anglo-Saxon period and were protected by the crown, and by the 12th and 13th centuries, with the growth of church power, church cities led to the rise of English cities.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, British cities developed under the combined role of the crown, economic development and church. The church's role as an initiator, communicator and participant is not the image of greed, corruption and conservatism that people assume. The doctrine has an imperceptible positive impact on the germination of urban industry and commerce, and the church's own economic development has led to the development of British cities. As a religious center, the cultural activities of the church city played a radiating role. It can be said that the early church played an important role in promoting the rise and development of British cities in the 12th and 13th centuries.

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silvestromedia · 3 months

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SAINTS FOR FEBRUARY 04

St. Liephard, 640 A.D. English martyred bishop, companion of King Caedwalla on a pilgrimage to Rome. Liephard was slain near Cambrai, France, and is revered as a martyr.

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gwilkesdesign1x1 · 7 years

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Character Development

Rebecca

01 / BASICS

Full Name: Rebecca Valirya Wilkes Nickname: None Sex/Gender: Female Birthday: 22nd September 1980 Age: 17 Astrological Sign: Virgo Occupation: Currently a student at Hogwarts Spoken Languages: English, with a little French and Italian; she is also studying Mermish Sexual Orientation: Straight/ heteroflexible Birthplace: London, England Relationship status: Single

02/ PHYSICAL TRAITS

Race: Human Ethnicity: White British/European Hair Color/Style: Dark brown, wavy, nearly waist-length; usually left loose Eye Color: Green Accent: Estuary, though very relaxed after years of mingling with accents from all over the British Isles Height: 5′9″ Tattoos: None Piercings: Just one in each earlobe. Unique Attributes: A birthmark on her left thigh in the form of a small, oddly pigmented patch of skin. Defining Gestures/Movements: She folds her arms when nervous or angry. Posture: She is generally quite graceful and straight-backed, although as she gets older she has developed a habit of trying to make herself appear smaller.

03 / PERSONALITY TRAITS

Pet Peeves: She gets very irritated when people display a complete lack of common sense. Hobbies/Interests: She likes swimming and playing Gobstones, is a keen reader, and has begun experimenting with water Charms. Special Skills/Abilities: She has an unusual affinity with water magic. Likes: Mint ice-cream, the sound of flowing water, picking fruit in the orchard at home Dislikes: Bullies, oranges, people insulting her father, attracting attention Insecurities: She’s afraid of losing whatever acceptance she has among her schoolmates, and that if her father was ever forced into a position where he would have to choose between her and Voldemort, he wouldn’t choose her. Quirks/Eccentricities: Dressing in Muggle clothes; this is partly a way to honour her mother. Strengths: Courageous, devoted and loving, open-minded Weaknesses: Overly cautious, stubborn Speaking Style: Usually she speaks clearly and evenly, but when under stress she tends to falter and stammer. Temperament: Rebecca is generally a quiet, even-tempered girl, although if particularly upset or outraged she has trouble holding it back.

04 / FAMILY & HOME

Family: Gideon Wilkes (father), Scarlette Melnyk (mother, deceased) How does she feel about her family?: Rebecca is very close to her father; he is the only family she really knows, as her grandparents passed away when she was very small and her mother’s side of the family are very distant. She adores her father, although she knows her beliefs seriously clash with his. As for her mother, Rebecca wishes she had known her, and thinks of her as someone to be proud of. How does her family feel about her?: Gideon loves his daughter more than anything else in the world. He has done his best to raise her well, and would do anything to keep her safe. He knows she doesn’t believe in pureblood supremacy, and fears losing her if she joins the fight against his master, but he can’t bring himself to make her give up her cause. Pets: A tawny owl named Nataliya. Where does she live?: Her address outside school is the ancestral Wilkes mansion in Winchester, England. What is it like there?: The area is quiet, set on the outskirts of the city, with few passers-by and a lovely view of the surrounding countryside. Description of her home: It is a sprawling, three-storey mansion set in its own sizeable grounds. Over 200 years old, it is decorated richly but with good taste. The gardens are well-kept and include an orchard of apple and pear trees along with several fountains and a small herb garden. Description of her bedroom: It’s a large, luxurious room on the second floor of the family home. Decorated in pastel colours, and filled with beautifully carved oak furniture, the room is light and airy, even with the grand old four-poster bed against one wall.

05/ THIS OR THAT

Introvert or Extrovert?: Rebecca is somewhere in the middle; she’s rather reserved, but will happily talk to people and make new friends if there’s no hostility. Optimist or Pessimist?: She’s reasonably optimistic, but she doesn’t like to ignore the reality of things either. Leader or Follower?: She’s not exactly a natural leader, but she’ll step up and take charge of a situation in an emergency. She tends to be a little bit of a loner. Confident or Self-Conscious?: She’s quite concerned about what others think of her, as she has a number of different people to try to get along with, so she can be quite self-conscious. Cautious or Careless?: She is definitely a cautious person. Religious or Secular?: Secular. She was never raised in any religion. Passionate or Apathetic?: She is a very passionate young woman and will risk a lot for something she cares about. Book Smarts or Street Smarts?: Definitely book smarts. She’s lived a sheltered life and while she is very clever, she’s not always the quickest at thinking on her feet. Compliments or Insults?: Compliments. She hates bullying and doesn’t like name-calling even in jest. Pajamas or Underwear?: She always sleeps in pyjamas or nightdresses.

06 / FAVORITES

Favorite Color: Pale yellow. Favorite Clothing Style/Outfit: She likes simple but flattering outfits, and has developed a fondness for Muggle clothing despite her father’s disapproval. Favorite Bands/Songs/Type of Music: She will enjoy most kinds of music, but particularly likes the Weird Sisters and similar groups. Favorite Movies: A Little Princess, which she saw once when she was in her mid-teens. Favorite TV Shows: She’s never watched television. Favorite Books: A series of adventure novels set in India, centred on a fictional witch named Sandhya. Favorite Foods/Drinks: She can usually be tempted by Indian food, though anything too spicy puts her off, and anything mint-flavoured. Favorite Sports/Sports Teams: She’s not much of a sporty person, though she’ll cheer for her Quidditch team at school. Favorite Actors/Actresses: She doesn’t know enough about any to have a favourite. Favorite Time of Day: She likes early mornings; they’re quiet and have their own special beauty. Favorite Weather/Season: She has a preference for cool, cloudy days, or thunderstorms, and loves spring. Favorite Animal: She’s very fond of her owl.

07 / MISCELLANEOUS

Fears/Superstitions: She doesn’t really have any superstitions, but she’s very frightened that the delicate balancing act she’s doing is going to collapse; she can’t help her anti-Voldemort friends with her influence if she’s denounced as a blood traitor, but she also can’t risk her father’s reputation either. Political Views: She’s most definitely a liberal-minded girl, willing to open her mind and accept many different points of view. Religion/Philosophy of Life: This is a topic she’s never thought much about. She just wants to get along with everyone and figure things out as she goes. Allergies: None. Addictions: None, though her fondness for mint ice-cream comes close. Best/Worst School Subject: Her best subject is Ancient Runes, while her worst used to be Divination and is now Herbology. How does she get money?: Her father is very wealthy and gives her a generous allowance. How is she with technology?: She can operate simple things without too much trouble, but anything too complex gives her trouble.

08 / PAST & FUTURE

Fondest Memory: Playing with her father in the garden as a little girl. Deepest, Darkest Secret: As far as she’s concerned, the dual role she has to play as both a devoted daughter of a Death Eater and a loyal member of the anti-Voldemort movement. Dream Vacation: She loves the idea of exploring Europe, and maybe even visiting the Ukraine, her mother’s homeland. Best thing that has ever happened to this character: Finding a friend she can confide in about everything that’s worrying her. Worst thing that has ever happened to this character: Learning the truth about her father and the terrible things he’s done. What does she want to be when she grows up?: She doesn’t really know yet. She thinks she’d like to help people, but she doesn’t have any very well-formulated ideas. Perfect Date: Spending an afternoon with someone she likes, and who likes her, somewhere in an area of great natural beauty, preferably near a waterfall or river.

#headcanons #my beautiful daughter: about Rebecca #dumbledore's army: rebecca's schooldays #song of defiance: rebecca speaks

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cwba2a · 7 years

Text

Research notes for The Victorian Era:

General:

It began on the 20th of June 1837 and ended on the 22nd of January 1901: the era of Queen Victoria's reign.

During this age, Britain was considered the most powerful country in the world. By the end of Queen Victoria’s era, it was believed that 1/5th of the planets surface and 1/4 of the worlds population obeyed to the queen.

Britain had a great status as the financial capital of the world.

Life expectancy was only in the high 30′s around the time of 1837, but would rise to the high 40′s by the end of 1901.

The Industrial Revolution:

The Industrial revolution was a time in which machinery began to integrate and improve the lives and forms of manufacture for the people. The British Industrial Revolution occurred somewhere between 1760 and 1840.

Agriculture vastly improved, producing a significantly higher margin of crops which could go to feed a wider nation. Even though urbanization and industrialization were were also improved, agriculture showed the most promise for employment and stability being supported by industry.

Owning land was considered of high significance during this era, and the aristocracy (the highest class of social society) and gentry (the next class down) owned much of the countryside, and their tenants farmed and reared livestock. Southern and Eastern England specialized in grain, and Scotland in breeding cattle and sheep.

Manufactured goods suddenly spiked in popularity due to more capability of manufacture and increased foreign marketing.

Water and animal power was replaced with steam and rotative engines. Coal was used to create the steam power that a lot of industries depended on.

Manchester was the most potent British manufacturer of the cotton industry, and Dewsbury became known as the recycle center for cotton, making old cotton into blankets and other woolen goods.

Many people moved to urban areas looking for work, and whilst some people lived very wealthy, others tend to live in horrible conditions.

Ship owners and merchants dominated in this era, making large amounts of money.

With a large amount of money being reeled in from many businesses, banking was also a business to grow in order to support.

Disease:

The UK’s population at the beginning of the Victorian era was 25.5 Million, and had increased to 41 Million by her death in 1901.

Tuberculosis: claimed 60-70 thousand lives for each decade of Victoria’s reign.

Cholera: claiming tens of millions of people, scientists at the time could not figure out what it was that was causing the disease to spread.

Typhoid: Washing hands seemed to be one thing that Victorians lacked in, at least the ones that were spreading this disease.

Smallpox: Responsible for 400,000 European deaths a year, and for a third of all human blindness.

Scarlet fever: easily treatable today, but the lack of penicillin in the production of antibiotics, it wasn’t treatable back then.

Measles: A horrific disease to acquire, yet a simple jab is enough to keep it at bay in today’s world of modern medicine.

Politics:

Women could not legally vote in parliamentary elections until almost 17 years AFTER Queen Victoria’s death.

The quality of political debates in Victorian Britain was considered to be very high. In fact, the struggle for political supremacy between William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli is known as “the most sophisticated political duel in the nation's history”.

Fashion:

Despite a woman’s assumed position in society to be prim and proper, women’s clothes were often deemed to be over exaggerated and flamboyant.

Corsets were often worn by Victorian women, which would damage their rib cages and internal organs and make breathing difficult.

Women had fairly long and curly hair in this era, and would wear extensions to fit, as well as fake leaves and flowers.

Make up was usually only worn by upper class who would attend theaters. Pale skin was deemed to be the image of beauty for a women.

Skirts were worn large and wide in the Victorian era, and quite literally as well. Metal crinoline cages were worn underneath skirts to make them stand out.

A proper gentleman was not seen outside without a hat, and the proper hat at that. Men had different hats for different occasions.

Men did not wear much jewelry, and their dress code was as simple as the right jacket, boots and hat for the right occasion.

There are 4 coats a Victorian man must have, which are Morning, Frock, Dress and Overcoat.

Men often participated in sports, and even shooting required a full attire for the occasion.

Other interesting facts:

Children under 10 working as chimney sweeps wasn’t abolished until 1864.

26th May 1868 had the last public hanging, which was off Michael Barrett

Bank holidays were introduced in 1871, allowing banks to close for a few days a year.

In 1876, Alexander Bell invents the telephone.

References:

BibliographyBBC (2011a) History - overview: Victorian Britain, 1837 - 1901. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/overview_victorians_01.shtml (Accessed: 31 January 2017).

BBC (2011b) History: Victorians. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/ (Accessed: 31 January 2017).

British Museum (2009) The industrial revolution and the changing face of Britain. Available at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/publications/online_research_catalogues/paper_money/paper_money_of_england__wales/the_industrial_revolution.aspx (Accessed: 31 January 2017).

Engineering Explained (2016a) 4 reasons why the rotary engine is dead. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3uGJGzUYCI (Accessed: 31 January 2017).

Engineering Explained (2016b) How rotary engines work - Mazda RX-7 Wankel - detailed explanation. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_1934370735&feature=iv&src_vid=v3uGJGzUYCI&v=sd6pJtR4PaY (Accessed: 31 January 2017).

McAlpine, F. (2010) Five horrible diseases you might have caught in Victorian England. Available at: http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2013/04/five-horrible-diseases-you-might-have-caught-in-victorian-england (Accessed: 31 January 2017).

Monet, D. (2016) Women’s fashions of the Victorian era: From hoop skirts to Bustles - 1837 - 1901. Available at: https://bellatory.com/fashion-industry/Fashion-History-Victorian-Costume-and-Design-Trends-1837-1900-With-Pictures (Accessed: 31 January 2017).

Victoriana Magazine (2016a) How to dress like a Victorian. Available at: http://www.victoriana.com/Mens-Clothing/How_to_Dress_Like_a_Victorian_Man.html (Accessed: 31 January 2017).

Victoriana Magazine (2016b) Victorian clothing for men. Available at: http://www.victoriana.com/Mens-Clothing/ (Accessed: 31 January 2017).

Citations, Quotes & AnnotationsBBC (2011a) History - overview: Victorian Britain, 1837 - 1901. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/overview_victorians_01.shtml (Accessed: 31 January 2017).

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