Academic literature on the topic 'William Grant Broughton'

Page’s first large-scale ballet, La Guiablesse, is most famous for its casting of a twenty-three-year-old Katherine Dunham. Produced for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, A Century of Progress, the ballet featured Page as the She-Devil, opposite an otherwise all-black cast. Later, Page asked Dunham to assume the title role and to restage the ballet for the Chicago Grand Opera; then, the mentor turned the performance rights to the ballet over to her mentee. La Guiablesse was quite a feat of intercultural communication: a Martinique folk tale recorded by Lafcadio Hearn, an immigrant European American folklorist; envisioned as a ballet scenario by Page, a globe-trotting Midwestern choreographer; given life as a ballet score by William Grant Still, an African American composer with classical and jazz roots; and made into choreography in a process that blurred authorship between white choreographer and black performer and her troupe. This chapter “re-choreographs” the ballet through an intertextual reading of the original folktale, the music score and recording, the ballet scenario, the choreographer’s notebook, and Chicago reviews and press coverage, considering the subtext of the ballet within the frame of what each of the collaborators brought to the project. Page’s previous excursions into world dance, Hearn’s cross-cultural studies of folklore, Still’s trajectory as a composer who strove to fuse musical classicism with African American idioms of the blues and jazz, and Dunham’s education and early successes figure into the picture, as do the contexts of the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago jazz scene of the period.

Abstract This conceptual chapter introduces pragmatism and looks at its history, starting from the Greek use of the word before quickly turning to the philosophical tradition that bears its name, with a focus on William James. The chapter then examines the legal pragmatists, including Dewey, Grey, Farber, Posner, Radin, and Sullivan, who brought pragmatism to the practice of jurisprudence. Though law was previously a sphere reserved for grand theory and absolutes, pragmatism eventually made inroads. Finally, the chapter makes a theoretical departure from legal pragmatism and brings pragmatism to the regulatory world. The text then explores the theoretical underpinnings of the concept in dialogue with empirical examples, thus substantiating the need for the conceptual move.

The focus of this chapter is on the increasingly difficult relationship between Prideaux and William Laud, Oxford’s chancellor from 1630 and Canterbury’s archbishop from 1633. It describes a series of initial minor conflicts culminating in the much larger conflict of 1631, when Prideaux appears to have promoted an unsuccessful Calvinist rebellion against the growing Arminian presence within the university. Particular attention is paid to the enmity between Prideaux and Peter Heylyn, Laud’s leading henchman, who maliciously foisted on Prideaux radically sabbatarian views designed to turn his puritan supporters against him. A related conflict set Prideaux against his College for the first and only time in his life. Laud was also at odds with Prideaux over relations with the foreign Protestant churches, which Laud wished to keep at arm’s length but which Prideaux supported––though not to the extent of giving his backing to the ecumenist John Dury, who vainly sought Prideaux’s help in promoting the reunion of the churches. The chapter also analyses Prideaux’s opposition to the heretical Socinians and, unrelatedly, to Laud’s revision of the university statutes, the culminating triumph of his chancellorship and one which, in 1636, brought the king to Oxford for a grand celebration.

This chapter seeks to chart the lively debate about the evolutionary origins and development of morality as it occurred at the Metaphysical Society, a debate that began with the first paper delivered at the Society in 1869 and, after the intervention of several subsequent papers on the topic, came to an end in 1875. Proponents of an evolutionary ethics included the Darwinians John Lubbock and William Kingdon Clifford, while the critics included the journalist and editor Richard Holt Hutton, the classicist Alexander Grant, and the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick. Much of the debate focused on competing interpretations of the historical record and the nature of historical evidence itself. For the critic of an evolutionary morality, the evidence for the origins and development of morality had to be sought in written records; for the proponent, the evidence needed to be sought much further back in time, in the era known as ‘prehistory’. This important distinction brought to the fore a related area of contention, namely the relationship between civilized European and contemporary aboriginal societies, and what that relationship meant for understanding the deep history of human moral development. The debate largely came to an end when Sidgwick challenged the unjustifiable normative claims that were often embedded in evolutionary descriptions of the origins and development of morality. He showed that a supposedly naturalist account of ethical principles was just as fraught as was the intuitionist account it sought to critique.

Shortly after the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster in Sheffield, England, sixteen people brought actions claiming to suffer a “nervous shock” as a result of learning from the media about the fatal human crush that occurred during a soccer match. The plaintiffs, most of whom were relatives of the victims, demanded compensations as secondary victims, arguing that their injury was within the “immediate aftermath”—a category recognized by British law as having been involved in the consequences of a tragic event. The court rejected the claim, but not before speculating on the hypothetical possibility of a traumatic live broadcast. Numerous claims for psychiatric injury had been filed prior to this case, yet this is probably one of the first to consider whether media could cause trauma to viewers, and consequently be compensable by law. Were such a case to be heard today, however, it might find support from recent developments in psychiatric research. For there is now a growing acceptance among mental health experts that trauma could transfer, under certain conditions, through visual media. Referring to notions such as “distant trauma,” “traumatic media exposure,” and “vicarious traumatization,” clinicians and researchers are now willing to acknowledge that witnessing disastrous events through the media could cause a reaction that complies with existing PTSD clinical criteria. How did this development come about? How does such mediated trauma manifest itself? What are its social, legal, and moral consequences? And what are the implications for our understanding of both media and trauma? These are the questions this chapter sets out to explore. Psychiatry has long been in the business of understanding how external violence affects mental processes. While operating under various nomenclatures, modern conceptions of trauma have dovetailed with modern developments in technology and warfare. As already noted earlier in this book, trauma is a central theme in the grand narrative of the shock of modernity.