As a college student in the U.S. in the 1980s, I first became aware of Take Back the Night. In countless cities, towns, and campuses across the U.S., feminist organizations coordinated these annual events to protest violence against women. Participants—typically women (and often intentionally and exclusively women)—gathered for night-time marches and rallies to speak out against rape and other forms of sexual assault and to assert that women should have the right to occupy public spaces and travel at night without fear.
Continue reading Imagining a Transnational and Transhistorical Movement Against ViolenceMonth: January 2022
Perspectives on Political Parties in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Since the emergence of the first nation states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, political parties have become one of the most important and influential actors in Western political systems. It is hard to imagine a functioning Western democracy without the presence of political parties, yet they have always been accompanied by criticism and rejection. As parties developed into elementary components of constitutional states and their tasks and responsibilities expanded, an intense theoretical preoccupation with the potential dangers they posed took place, especially in Britain.1 This debate about parties was marked by conflicting views, but the repetition and recurrence of similar lines of argument by authors at different times throughout the nineteenth century is striking.
Continue reading Perspectives on Political Parties in Nineteenth-Century Britain- See, for example, Arthur Aspinall, ‘English Party Organization in the Early Nineteenth Century’, English Historical Review, 41 (1926), 389–411; J. A. W. Gunn, ‘Party before Burke: Shute Barrington’, Government and Opposition, 3/2 (1968), 223–40; id., Factions No More: Attitudes to Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth-Century England. Extracts from Contemporary Sources (London, 1972); Paul Webb, ‘Political Partiesand Democracy:The Ambiguous Crisis’, Democratization, 12/5 (2005), 633–50, at 633–4. [↩]