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Political mobilization by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was more widespread and important than most studies of the episode have acknowledged. Several decades later, the Church is again organized and active in opposing legal recognition of same-sex marriage. In this article, we explore why and how the Latter-Day Saints mobilized on these two issues. We argue that their mobilization can be understood through classic social movement theory, even though the Church is not an economic-based interest group. Furthermore, the Mormons' approach in fighting the ERA — drawing on centralized authority, tapping into established volunteer and communications networks, effectively channeling money and personnel to where they are most needed, and engaging in stealth politics (obscuring the centralized nature of apparently spontaneous action) — is echoed in the fight against same-sex marriage, even though the times and technology have somewhat changed the mobilization dynamic.

A biographical examination of Richard II's short life and reign which investigates his impact on issues such as religion, art, warfare and foreign affairs.

The reign of Richard II has been one of the most popular subjects of attention for medievalists in recent years. As a result of this renewed interest, the ‘tyranny’ of Richard II's final years has been resurrected in the past decade in a new form by R. H. Jones as well as in its more traditional guise which can be found in the pages of T. F. Tout by Caroline Barron. This resurrection has not, however, gone unchallenged. Richard G. Davies has recently demonstrated the inadequacies of such a view in relation to Richard II's ecclesiastical policy, and research is now under way in regard to both Ireland and the Ricardian household which seems to limit still further the confines of the ‘tyranny.’ At the very heart of this concept is the condemnation of the King by both his contemporaries and modern historians for his development of a large military establishment which he employed to enforce his own will. This establishment has been pictured as a praetorian guard composed of the very dregs of society and eager to join Richard in a policy of absolutism. The archers of the crown deserve study in any attempt to examine the royal military establishment and to assess the tyrannical intentions of this ill-fated ruler.Richard II, confronted with the recurrent efforts of a faction of magnates to control the governance of the realm, responded with an attempt to assert his personal will.

Richard II's attempt to transform his kingdom into an absolute monarchy has provided the basic outline for the traditional interpretation of the reign. The role of the royal household and especially of the chamber has always loomed large in such an interpretation. It was the subject of Thomas Haxey's famous complaint of 1397, and it had a special interest for Thomas F. Tout who undertook a very detailed study of Richard's reign in volumes three and four of his classic Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England. Tout credited the king's tutor, Simon Burley, with the development of the chamber staff as an instrument of royal tyranny: We may feel pretty sure that it was Burley's intelligence which developed the chamber into a special preserve of the court party, so that the chamber knights and esquires could always be trusted to further the wishes of the sovereign. There was no effort to make it an organized instrument of prerogative: it was rather the office which held the reserve of workers for the king's cause, who, as individuals, did what in them lay to carry out their master's wishes.

Contemporary society has discovered—or in some cases been forced to discover—the worth of women. Historians have provided valuable insights into the social, cultural, and legal status of women in an effort to highlight the roots of attitudes that have excluded women from positions of power in the western world. Much of this research has focused upon new ways of viewing history, and the fine series of monographsWomen in Culture and Societybeing published by the University of Chicago Press provides a prime example of the new awareness of the distaff side of history. Yet, little attention has been paid to some of the most basic assumptions of past generations of medieval historians about women and society. The claim that male chauvinist attitudes are founded in the primative Germanic concept of a warrior fraternity from which women were physiologically excluded from membership was already hoary when Fritz Kern published his classic account of medieval law and society in 1914. Thecomitatusband of Tacitus has been seen as a central component of the leitmotiv that produced chivalry. The chivalric love ethic has, of course, received great attention from women's historians, but the chivalric orders into which such views were distilled have been largely ignored.The traditional view of the chivalric orders as fossilized parodies of the values they espoused so eloquently advocated by Johan Huizinga'sThe Waning of the Middle Agesstill holds the field. Only in the last year have the chivalric orders been rehabilitated as genuine expressions of the human values of their age. The position of women within the tradition of the chivalric orders is worth a look for the intrinsic interest of the subject and for the insights that the investigation provides into the shifts in attitudes toward females over the centuries. The chivalric orders, and the Arthurian legends that inspired them, placed a high value on women, much higher than the earlier chansons de geste. While it is true that this tradition tended to place the lady upon a pedestal from which her daughters have fought to climb down, the greatest and longest lasting of these late-medieval chivalric fraternities, the Order of the Garter, also gave women a role in its celebrations.

The appeal for treason lodged against Sir Thomas Mortimer in the parliament of 1397 as well as the entire background to the event has been the subject of considerable confusion. Much of this confusion has been the result of poor communication within the historical community. The information has been available, but it has appeared in diverse places. Thus, the two most recent biographers of Richard II, Anthony Steel and Harold Hutchison, have each been puzzled by the appeal of Mortimer: “The reasons for his inclusion are not clear…”; “…a mysterious addition for which no satisfactory explanation has ever been offered.” Sir Charles Oman, however, offered an explanation over sixty years ago: “As a small supplementary addition to the appeals of the previous autumn, two noted supporters of Gloucester in 1387 were dealt with—Lord Cobham, and Sir Thomas Mortimer, who had murdered the constable of Chester at Radcot Bridge.” Oman was not quite accurate when he grouped Mortimer with Cobham. Although Sir Thomas was not included in the original bill of appeal, he was cited in the summary of the appeal and the subsequent processes of the autumn session of Richard II's last parliament; lord Cobham did not become involved until the parliament reassembled in the next year. Oman's explanation of the matter, however, is not vitiated by this error. It, therefore, deserves further investigation as a solution to the mystery of Mortimer's appeal.