scholarly journals Persistent farmland imaginaries: celebration of fertile soil and the recurrent ignorance of climate

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oane Visser
Keyword(s):  
Soil Fertility ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Climatic Factors ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Fertile Soil ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Climatic Risks

Abstract This article looks at how imaginaries of land and climate play a role in farmland investment discourses and practices. Foreign farmland investors in the fertile black earth region of Russia and Ukraine have ‘celebrated’ soil fertility while largely ignoring climatic factors. The article shows a centuries-long history of outsiders coming to the region lured by the fertile soils, while grossly underestimating climate which has had disastrous implications for farm viability and the environment. Comparisons with historical and contemporary literature on other regions (e.g. the US prairies and North Africa) suggest that the underestimation of climatic risks by newcomers is remarkably prevalent in resource frontiers.

scholarly journals Large-scale geographic survey provides insights into the colonization history of a major aphid pest on its cultivated apple host in Europe, North America and North Africa

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.G. Olvera-Vazquez ◽  
C. Remoue ◽  
A. Venon ◽  
A. Rousselet ◽  
O. Grandcolas ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Gene Flow ◽  
North America ◽  
Genetic Differentiation ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
High Genetic Diversity ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of

With frequent host shifts involving the colonization of new hosts across large geographical ranges, crop pests are good models for examining the mechanisms of rapid colonization. The microbial partners of pest insects may be involved or affected by colonization, which has been little studied so far. We investigated the demographic history of the rosy apple aphid, Dysaphis plantaginea, a major pest of the cultivated apple (Malus domestica) in Europe, North Africa and North America, as well as the diversity of its endosymbiotic bacterial community. We genotyped a comprehensive sample of 714 colonies from Europe, Morocco and the US using mitochondrial (CytB and CO1), bacterial (16s rRNA and TrnpB), and 30 microsatellite markers. We detected five populations spread across the US, Morocco, Western and Eastern Europe, and Spain. Populations showed weak genetic differentiation and high genetic diversity, except the Moroccan and the North American that are likely the result of recent colonization events. Coalescent-based inferences releaved high levels of gene flow among populations during the colonization, but did not allow determining the sequence of colonization of Europe, America and Morroco by D. plantaginea, likely because of the weak genetic differentiation and the occurrence of gene flow among populations. Finally, we found that D. plantaginea rarely hosts any other endosymbiotic bacteria than its obligate nutritional symbiont Buchnera aphidicola. This suggests that secondary endosymbionts did not play any role in the rapid spread of the rosy apple aphid. These findings have fundamental importance for understanding pest colonization processes and implications for sustainable pest control programs.

Halil İnalcık 1916? - 2016

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-165
Author(s):  
Linda T. Darling
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World History ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crucial Part

Halil İnalcık was born in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, into a refugee family, probably in 1916 (he did not know his birthday; in Turkey he adopted 29 May, in the US 4 July). He died at age 100 in Ankara on 25 July 2016, as the premier Ottoman historian in the world. To quote one of his students, “Professor İnalcık transformed the field of Ottoman studies from an obscure and exotic subfield into one of the leading historical disciplines that covers the history of the greater Middle East and North Africa as well as the Balkans from the late medieval to the modern period. He set the tone of debate and critical inquiry from the early modern to the modern period.” Born an Ottoman, he made Ottoman studies a crucial part of world history.

Literature’s Vexed Democratization

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Grossman ◽  
Juliana Spahr ◽  
Stephanie Young
Keyword(s):  
Racial Difference ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Barriers To Entry ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Educational Barriers ◽  
Online Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article examines the contradictions of the contemporary literary field that appears both increasingly capacious and more exclusionary than in the past. Discussing the expansion of publishing enabled by digital and online technologies, we note that these changes did not reshape the demographics of most published works in the US, which remain overwhelmingly white authored. We then turn to literary prizes as an indicator of who writes prestige literature, narrating the twentieth-century formation of a racially segregated field and its slow changes against the backdrop of publishing overproduction. Combining a history of prestige literary culture with a demographic analysis of prizewinning writers (1918–2019), we discuss how a mostly white, New Critic-dominated field became the much more diverse and wide-ranging scene of the present. While this area has importantly opened up to writers of different backgrounds, our data show that the inequities of earlier prizegiving now take shape as drastic educational barriers to entry. Observing that a great deal of contemporary literature dramatizes the peculiarity of performing racial difference—often under the auspices of white audiences—we argue that the path to “excellence” has never been more narrow for writers who are not white, and Black writers in particular.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

Migration and Modernities

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Geographic Boundaries ◽  
The Us ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Migration and Modernities recovers a comparative literary history of migration by bringing together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the uneven emergence of modernity. The collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrating how mobility unsettles the geographic boundaries, temporal periodization, and racial categories we often use to organize literary and historical study. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. In exploring these spaces, Migration and Modernities also investigates the origins of current debates about belonging, rights, and citizenship. Its chapters traverse the globe, revealing the experiences — real or imagined — of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.

From Competition to Cooperation: A History of Canada–US National Park Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terence Young ◽  
Alan MacEachern ◽  
Lary Dilsaver
Keyword(s):  
National Parks ◽  
National Park ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Us ◽  
Park Service ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Flow Of Information ◽  
The Relationship

This essay explores the evolving international relationship of the two national park agencies that in 1968 began to offer joint training classes for protected-area managers from around the world. Within the British settler societies that dominated nineteenth century park-making, the United States’ National Park Service (NPS) and Canada’s National Parks Branch were the most closely linked and most frequently cooperative. Contrary to campfire myths and nationalist narratives, however, the relationship was not a one-way flow of information and motivation from the US to Canada. Indeed, the latter boasted a park bureaucracy before the NPS was established. The relationship of the two nations’ park leaders in the half century leading up to 1968 demonstrates the complexity of defining the influences on park management and its diffusion from one country to another.

Functioning of Ukrainian Bureau in Washington D. C. (March 1939 – May 1940)

2019 ◽  
pp. 142-157
Author(s):  
Danylo Kravets
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
College Degrees ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
General Functioning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Governmental Institutions ◽  
History Of Journalism ◽  
The Military

The aim of the Ukrainian Bureau in Washington was propaganda of Ukrainian question among US government and American publicity in general. Functioning of the Bureau is not represented non in Ukrainian neither in foreign historiographies, so that’s why the main goal of presented paper is to investigate its activity. The research is based on personal papers of Ukrainian diaspora representatives (O. Granovskyi, E. Skotzko, E. Onatskyi) and articles from American and Ukrainian newspapers. The second mass immigration of Ukrainians to the US (1914‒1930s) has often been called the «military» immigration and what it lacked in numbers, it made up in quality. Most immigrants were educated, some with college degrees. The founder of the Ukrainian Bureau Eugene Skotzko was born near Western Ukrainian town of Zoloczhiv and immigrated to the United States in late 1920s after graduating from Lviv Polytechnic University. In New York he began to collaborate with OUN member O. Senyk-Hrabivskyi who gave E. Skotzko task to create informational bureau for propaganda of Ukrainian case. On March 23 1939 the Bureau was founded in Washington D. C. E. Skotzko was an editor of its Informational Bulletins. The Bureau biggest problem was lack of financial support. It was the main reason why it stopped functioning in May 1940. During 14 months of functioning Ukrainian Bureau in Washington posted dozens of informational bulletins and send it to hundreds of addressees; E. Skotzko, as a director, personally wrote to American governmental institutions and foreign diplomats informing about Ukrainian problem in Europe. Ukrainian Bureau activity is an inspiring example for those who care for informational policy of modern Ukraine.Keywords: Ukrainian small encyclopedia, Yevhen Onatsky, journalism, worldview, Ukrainian state. Keywords: Ukrainian Bureau in Washington, Eugene Skotzko, public opinion, history of journalism, diaspora.

Epidemics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Preventive Measures ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Race Ethnicity

This book challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics. From an interdisciplinary array of scholars, a consensus has emerged: invariably, epidemics in past times provoked class hatred, blame of the ‘other’, or victimization of the diseases’ victims. It is also claimed that when diseases were mysterious, without cures or preventive measures, they more readily provoked ‘sinister connotations’. The evidence for these assumptions, however, comes from a handful of examples—the Black Death, the Great Pox at the end of the sixteenth century, cholera riots of the 1830s, and AIDS, centred almost exclusively on the US experience. By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics, reaching back before the fifth-century BCE Plague of Athens to the eruption of Ebola in 2014, this study traces epidemics’ socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture. First, scholars, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics: their remarkable power to unify societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion. Second, hatred and violence cannot be relegated to a time when diseases were mysterious, before the ‘laboratory revolution’ of the late nineteenth century: in fact, modernity was the great incubator of a disease–hate nexus. Third, even with diseases that have tended to provoke hatred, such as smallpox, poliomyelitis, plague, and cholera, blaming ‘the other’ or victimizing disease bearers has been rare. Instead, the history of epidemics and their socio-psychological consequences has been richer and more varied than scholars and public intellectuals have heretofore allowed.

Consensus by Schooling and Power: The Indoctrination of the Elites

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louçã Francisco ◽  
Ash Michael
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Government Institutions ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Chapter 7 describes the origins of the Chicago School and its successful projection into the hearts and minds of the global ruling class. Working chronologically, there is a description of how this program took root in Chicago and how some of its central figures, Friedman and Harberger, undertook a hemispheric campaign to capture both academic and government institutions. A history of the deregulation movement in the US and case studies of Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil highlight the breadth and depth of the campaign. The chapter closes in Europe where the neoliberal insurgency faced more-developed social states. Its success varied in Britain, France, and Germany.

The Dilemma between Aligned Expectations and Diversity in Innovation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timur Ergen
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Synthetic Fuel ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Technology Policies ◽  
Lock In ◽  
Innovation Processes

This chapter brings together arguments from economics, sociology, and political economy to show that innovation processes are characterized by a dilemma between the advantages of aligned expectations—including greater coordination and investment—and those of diversity, including superior openness to new technological possibilities. To illustrate the argument, the chapter discusses a historical case involving one of the largest coordinated peace-time attempts to hasten technological innovation in the history of capitalism, namely the US energy technology policies of the 1970s and 1980s. Close examination of the commercialization of photovoltaics and synthetic fuel initiatives illustrates both sides of the dilemma between shared versus diverse expectations in innovation: coordination but possible premature lock-in on the one hand, and openness but possible stagnation on the other. The chapter shows that even the exploration and interpretation of new technologies may be as much a product of focused investment as of trial-and-error search.

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