Academic literature on the topic 'Peace officers, biography'

Abstract Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the cultural significance of Catherine Marsh’s popular evangelical biography of Hedley Vicars, a British officer killed during the Crimean War (1853–1856). However, scholars have not systematically examined the ways in which Marsh’s hagiographical portrait of this officer – who, in the eyes of many contemporaries, was the epitome of the ‘Christian soldier’ – was drawn into religious debates following its publication in December 1855. A crucial part of its reception history thus remains incomplete. Building on secondary literature which has recently opened new avenues for the fruitful investigation of the interface between religion and war in Victorian culture, and employing hitherto untapped sources, this article advances fresh perspectives on the place of Vicars’s ‘Christian soldiership’ in wartime religious thought. The article situates Marsh’s Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars within the context of debates on the lawfulness of war for Christians in general, and on the justice of the Crimean War in particular, before tracing the deployment of the religious and heroic themes of the Memorials by pro-war clergy against peace advocates. The article then explores the peace movement’s critiques of Marsh’s Memorials which sought to undercut the idea of the ‘Christian soldier’ and to demolish the argument that Vicars’s martial valour and fervent piety affirmed the compatibility of war, soldiering, and Christianity. The result is an account which demonstrates the centrality of religious debate to contemporary understandings of a war which helped to define the Victorian era.

Artiklen beskriver bl.a. forskelle på spejder- og woodcraftbevægelserne og diskuterer friluftsliv ud fra den grundantagelse, at friluftsliver bygger på mere end fysisk bevægelse.A different outdoor life and an alternative biology: on primate research, the nature of scouting, and woodcraft folk. Outdoor life is not only a complex of physical activities, as the term ‘scouting sports’ may have us believe. Outdoor activities are connected with concepts of nature and with certain forms of knowledge that are also fundamental to the natural sciences. This article approaches this complex relation through the biography of the animal. Since the 1960s biologists have used fieldwork to “discover” and reconstruct the life histories of chimpanzees. The significance of these biographies for biological research is that they open the way for a revision of scientific method. And they allow a fresh retrospective look at scouting history. The Boy Scouts movement was started around 1900-1910 by Ernest Thompson Seton, an American author of animal novels, and the British military officer Lord Baden-Powell. The two founder figures represented different ways of relating to nature. The multiplicity that existed between the role models of “the soldier” and the “Red Indian” can also be found in early Danish scouting, where different emphases were placed by Cay Lembcke and by Hans Hartvig-Møller. The practical choice between “war in nature” and “peace with nature” was linked to contradictions in the understanding of nature. Nature was an arena on the one hand for struggle for the survival of the fittest – on the other for dialogue with the animal as ‘the other’.