The History of Angola

Author(s):  
Jeremy Ball

Angola’s contemporary political boundaries resulted from 20th-century colonialism. The roots of Angola, however, reach far into the past. When Portuguese caravels arrived in the Congo River estuary in the late 15th century, independent African polities dotted this vast region. Some people lived in populous, hierarchical states such as the Kingdom of Kongo, but most lived in smaller political entities centered on lineage-village settlements. The Portuguese colony of Angola grew out of a settlement established at Luanda Bay in 1576. From its inception, Portuguese Angola existed to profit from the transatlantic slave trade, which became the colony’s economic foundation for the next three centuries. A Luso-African population and a creole culture developed in the colonial nuclei of Luanda and Benguela (founded 1617). The expansion of the colonial state into the interior occurred intermittently until the end of the 19th century, when Portuguese authorities initiated a series of wars of conquest that lasted up until the end of the First World War. During the 20th century, the colonial state consolidated military control over the whole territory, instituted an infrastructure of administration, and developed an economy of resource extraction. A nationalist sentiment developed among Luso-African thinkers in the early 20th century, and by the 1950s these ideas coalesced into a nationalist movement aimed at independence. Simultaneously, anticolonial movements developed among mission-educated elites in the Kikongo-speaking north and in the Umbundu-speaking central highlands. Portugal’s authoritarian New State leaders brutally suppressed these disparate nationalist movements during more than a decade of guerrilla war. A revolution in Portugal in 1974 ushered in negotiations leading to Angolan independence on November 11, 1975. Competing nationalist movements, bolstered by foreign intervention, refused to share governance and as a result plunged Angola into a brutal civil war that lasted until 2002.

Author(s):  
Mariana P. Candido

European colonial powers established the contemporary boundaries of Angola during the Conference of Berlin (1884–1885). However, colonialism dates to the 15th century, when Portuguese merchants first contacted the Kingdom of Kongo along the Congo River and established early settlements in Luanda (1575) and Benguela (1617). Parts of the territories that became known as Angola in the early 20th century have a long history of interaction with the outside world, and as a result European primary sources provide much of the information available to historians. The reports, official correspondence, and diaries were produced by European men and are therefore problematic. However, by reading against the grain scholars can begin to understand how women lived in Angola before the 20th century. Some, such as Queen Njinga, had access to political power, and others, such as Dona Ana Joaquina dos Santos e Silva, enjoyed great wealth. Kimpa Vita was a prophet who led a movement of political and religious renewal and was killed as a result. Most women never appeared in historical documents but were fundamental to the economic and social existence of their communities as farmers, traders, artisans, mediums, and enslaved individuals. The end of the slave trade in the 1850s led to the expansion of the so-called legitimate trade and plantation economies, which privileged male labor while relying on women’s domestic contributions. The arrival of a larger number of missionaries, colonial troops, and Portuguese settlers by the end of the 19th century resulted in new policies that stimulated migration and family separation. It also introduced new ideas about morality, sexuality, and motherhood. Women resisted and joined anticolonial movements. After independence, decades of civil war increased forced displacement, gender imbalance, and sexual violence. The greater stability at the end of the armed conflict may favor the expansion of women’s organizations and internal pressures to address gender inequalities.


Author(s):  
Margarita Y. Dvorkina

The article is devoted to the memory of Lyudmila Mikhailovna Koval (October 17, 1933 – February 15, 2020), historian, Head of the History sector of the Russian State Library (RSL) and the Museum of Library history. The author presents brief biographical information about L.M. Koval, the author of more than 350 scientific and popular scientific works in Russian and in 9 foreign languages. She published 29 books in Publishing houses “Nauka”, “Kniga”, “Letniy Sad”, ”Pashkov Dom”, most of the works are dedicated to the Library. Special place in the work of L.M. Koval is given to the Great Patriotic War theme. The article considers the works devoted to the activities of Library staff during the War period. L.M. Koval paid much attention to the study of activities of the Library’s Directors. She prepared books and articles about the Directors of the Moscow Public and Rumyantsev Museums and Library from the end of the 19th century and almost to the end of the 20th century: N.V. Isakov, D.S. Levshin, V.A. Dashkov, M.A. Venevitinov, I.V. Tsvetaev, V.D. Golitsyn, A.K. Vinogradov, V.I. Nevsky, N.M. Sikorsky. The author notes contribution of L.M. Koval to the study of the Library’s history. Specialists in the history of librarianship widely use bibliography of L.M. Koval in their research. The list of sources contains the main works of L.M. Koval, and the Appendix includes reviews of publications by L.M. Koval and the works about her.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-277
Author(s):  
Khalad Maliyar ◽  
Patrick Fleming ◽  
Boluwaji Ogunyemi ◽  
Charles Lynde

Psoriasis is a chronic, inflammatory disease with a varying degree of clinical presentations. Managing psoriasis has always been arduous due to its chronicity and its propensity to relapse. Prior to the development of targeted biologic therapies, there were few effective treatments for psoriasis. Ancient psoriasis therapies included pinetar, plant extracts, psychotherapy, arsenic, and ammoniated mercury. In the 19th century, chrysarobin was developed. Then, in the early half of the 20th century, anthralin and coal tar were in widespread use. In the latter half of the 20th century, treatments were limited to topical first-line therapies, systemic drugs, and phototherapy. However, as the treatment of psoriasis has undergone a revolutionary change with the development of novel biologic therapies, patients with moderate to severe psoriasis have been able to avail therapies with high efficacy and durability along with an acceptable safety profile. This article is a brief historical review of the management of psoriasis prior to the inception of biologics and with the development of novel biologic therapies.


Author(s):  
Daniel Beben

The Ismailis are a minority community of Shiʿi Muslims that first emerged in the 8th century. Iran has hosted one of the largest Ismaili communities since the earliest years of the movement and from 1095 to 1841 it served as the home of the Nizārī Ismaili imams. In 1256 the Ismaili headquarters at the fortress of Alamūt in northern Iran was captured by the Mongols and the Imam Rukn al-Dīn Khūrshāh was arrested and executed, opening a perilous new chapter in the history of the Ismailis in Iran. Generations of observers believed that the Ismailis had perished entirely in the course of the Mongol conquests. Beginning in the 19th century, research on the Ismailis began to slowly reveal the myriad ways in which they survived and even flourished in Iran and elsewhere into the post-Mongol era. However, scholarship on the Iranian Ismailis down to the early 20th century remained almost entirely dependent on non-Ismaili sources that were generally quite hostile toward their subject. The discovery of many previously unknown Ismaili texts beginning in the early 20th century offered prospects for a richer and more complete understanding of the tradition’s historical development. Yet despite this, the Ismaili tradition in the post-Mongol era continues to receive only a fraction of the scholarly attention given to earlier periods, and a number of sources produced by Ismaili communities in this period remain unexplored, offering valuable opportunities for future research.


Author(s):  
Dmitriy Mikhel

The problems of epidemics have increasingly attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. The history of epidemics has its own historiography, which dates to the physician Hippocrates and the historian Thucydides. Up to the 19th century, historians followed their ideas, but due to the progress in medical knowledge that began at that time, they almost lost interest in the problems of epidemics. In the early 20th century, due to the development of microbiology and epidemiology, a new form of the historiography of epidemics emerged: the natural history of diseases which was developed by microbiologists. At the same time, medical history was reborn, and its representatives saw their task as proving to physicians the usefulness of studying ancient medical texts. Among the representatives of the new generation of medical historians, authors who contributed to the development of the historiography of epidemics eventually emerged. By the end of the 20th century, they included many physician-enthusiasts. Since the 1970s, influenced by many factors, more and more professional historians, for whom the history of epidemics is an integral part of the history of society. The last quarter-century has also seen rapid growth in popular historiography of epidemics, made possible by the activation of various humanities researchers and journalists trying to make the history of epidemics more lively and emotional. A great influence on the spread of new approaches to the study of the history of epidemics is now being exerted by the media, focusing public attention on the new threats to human civilization in the form of modern epidemics.


2006 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Egidio Nardi

This article aims to describe important points in the history of panic disorder concept, as well as to highlight the importance of its diagnosis for clinical and research developments. Panic disorder has been described in several literary reports and folklore. One of the oldest examples lies in Greek mythology - the god Pan, responsible for the term panic. The first half of the 19th century witnessed the culmination of medical approach. During the second half of the 19th century came the psychological approach of anxiety. The 20th century associated panic disorder to hereditary, organic and psychological factors, dividing anxiety into simple and phobic anxious states. Therapeutic development was also observed in psychopharmacological and psychotherapeutic fields. Official classifications began to include panic disorder as a category since the third edition of the American Classification Manual (1980). Some biological theories dealing with etiology were widely discussed during the last decades of the 20th century. They were based on laboratory studies of physiological, cognitive and biochemical tests, as the false suffocation alarm theory and the fear network. Such theories were important in creating new diagnostic paradigms to modern psychiatry. That suggests the need to consider a wide range of historical variables to understand how particular features for panic disorder diagnosis have been developed and how treatment has emerged.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Sonia Santos Gómez

Tempera painting on canvas has played multiple functions throughout the history of painting. They were used to cover altars in Lent, to make canopies and ceilings for beds, to act as organ doors, etc. In the 19th century and in the earlier 20th century, they were used as adornment on walls of palaces and theatres, as well as sceneries in the latter ones. Generally, this kind of tempera painting shows large proportions, which demanded a specific methodology of execution. Treatises of the epoch display how the painter, provided with paintbrushes of long handles, as brooms, walked on the canvases while the execution lasted. At that time, pigments derived from the activity of modern industry were already in use, in combination with other materials traditionally used in the previous centuries. This article presents the working methodology and materials used in tempera painting on canvas, mainly during the 19th century, providing a knowledge base for this subject.


Diacronia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gheorghe Chivu

The history of the verbal forms sum and sunt, introduced into the literary writing by the Transylvanian Latinist School, reveals a winding process in the elaboration of certain cultured norms proper to the modern literary Romanian. Not at all linear, this process was concurrently influenced by two, often divergent, tendencies that were active from the end of the 18th century up to the beginning of the 20th century: the use of some cultured forms, borrowed from Latin or created according to Latin patterns; and the revitalization of certain linguistic forms with regional diffusion. Initially proposed as literary pronunciations, the two verbal forms were soon adopted and used as etymological graphic forms that corresponded to sîm and suntu from certain conservative patois. During the second half of the 19th century (sum), and during the first decades of the 20th century (sunt), the two graphic forms became orthoepic norms as well, due to the phonological tradition of the Romanian writing.


Author(s):  
Luidmila Pastushenko

The article presents the first attempt of a complete and systematic analysis of historic and theological publications of teachers and pupils of the Kyiv Theological Academy in the second half of the 19th – beginning of 20th century in the field of studying the history of relations of Catholicism and Protestantism with Orthodox on the Ukrainian lands. The specifics of Kyiv academic historians studies was determined by the social and-political circumstances in the middle of the 19th century and denoted by an attempt to comprehend this issue in the perspective of the history of interconfessional relations of two Western Christian traditions with the eastern tradition of Orthodoxy in the historical gap of the 16th – 17th centuries – the period of the largest confrontation in confessional relations in Ukraine. The author clarifies the characteristic features of researching the question of inter-confessional interaction in the 15th – 17th centuries, which are expressed in attempts to describe the coexistence of three denominations as multidimensional and provoking а variety of different interpretations. Historical studies present the attempt to show confessional interaction in the political and legal aspects and to provide historical interpretations to the ground of philosophy of history. The article proves the tendency of Kyiv academic researchers to move away from the established Russian historiography of the 19th century view at confessional relations in Ukraine through the prism of hard confrontation and outline in religious life Ukraine conditions and circumstances of inter-confessional dialogue. Also, historians in their studies repeatedly note the significant educational and outlook influence of Western Christian denominations on the formation of educational, cultural, theological, literary traditions in Ukraine.


2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (51) ◽  
pp. E7118-E7127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Laurent Casanova

The key problem in human infectious diseases was posed at the turn of the 20th century: their pathogenesis. For almost any given virus, bacterium, fungus, or parasite, life-threatening clinical disease develops in only a small minority of infected individuals. Solving this infection enigma is important clinically, for diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, and treatment. Some microbes will inevitably remain refractory to, or escape vaccination, or chemotherapy, or both. The solution also is important biologically, because the emergence and evolution of eukaryotes alongside more rapidly evolving prokaryotes, archaea, and viruses posed immunological challenges of an ecological and evolutionary nature. We need to study these challenges in natural, as opposed to experimental, conditions, and also at the molecular and cellular levels. According to the human genetic theory of infectious diseases, inborn variants underlie life-threatening infectious diseases. Here I review the history of the field of human genetics of infectious diseases from the turn of the 19th century to the second half of the 20th century. This paper thus sets the scene, providing the background information required to understand and appreciate the more recently described monogenic forms of resistance or predisposition to specific infections discussed in a second paper in this issue.


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