Rediscovering the Aztecs and Mayas: Field Exploration, Archaeological Exhibits, and National Museums

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Gosner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Monumental Architecture ◽  
Southern Mexico ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
International Investors

In the last decades of the 18th century, with the visit in 1784 of José Antonio Calderón to the Maya ruins at Palenque and the discovery in 1790 of the statue of Coatlicue and the Stone of the Sun in the central plaza of Mexico City, the study of ancient Mexico entered a new era. In the century that followed, teams of field surveyors, mapmakers, graphic artists, and artifact collectors worked across central and southern Mexico as well as in Guatemala. Some were commissioned by the Spanish Crown or later by national governments; many arrived from England, France, Germany, and eventually the United States. Early on they worked side by side with geologists, geographers, and field biologists as part of natural history expeditions, accumulating collections of artifacts that would be displayed in curiosity cabinets and early museums alongside trays of colorful butterflies and stuffed tropical birds. And then, as foreign travel books won popular audiences in Europe and the United States, and as international investors arrived in Mexico and Central America, archaeology also was taken up by enthusiastic amateurs looking to sell books, build private collections, or organize international trade fairs. For serious students of ancient history, field exploration and advances in archaeological record-keeping transformed a body of research and scientific speculation that since the 16th century had been dominated by theologians, historians, and philologists, who studied Spanish chronicles and native language annals but paid scant attention to the remnants of material culture. In the process, Aztecs and Maya were rediscovered as historical subjects, their histories disconnected from that of contemporary Indian peasants and recast as rivals to the great civilizations of the Old World. Ruins of monumental architecture, recovered artifacts in sculptured stone or finely crafted metals, and ancient texts inscribed on wooden lintels and bark cloth were reclaimed as part of national patrimonies to be protected by new state agencies and displayed in modern museums. On January 20, 1911, the International School for American Archaeology and Ethnology formally opened in Mexico City, and this formative period in the archaeological study of ancient peoples ended. Manuel Gamio introduced the study of stratigraphy to fieldwork practices in Mexico and the discipline was transformed once again.

Rediscovering Blackstone: wpływ Williama Blackstone’a na rozwój amerykańskiej nauki prawa w recepcji Alberta W. Alschulera

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-185
Author(s):  
Edyta Sokalska
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
American Law ◽  
The Common

The reception of common law in the United States was stimulated by a very popular and influential treatise Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone, published in the late 18th century. The work of Blackstone strengthened the continued reception of the common law from the American colonies into the constituent states. Because of the large measure of sovereignty of the states, common law had not exactly developed in the same way in every state. Despite the fact that a single common law was originally exported from England to America, a great variety of factors had led to the development of different common law rules in different states. Albert W. Alschuler from University of Chicago Law School is one of the contemporary American professors of law. The part of his works can be assumed as academic historical-legal narrations, especially those concerning Blackstone: Rediscovering Blackstone and Sir William Blackstone and the Shaping of American Law. Alschuler argues that Blackstone’s Commentaries inspired the evolution of American and British law. He introduces not only the profile of William Blackstone, but also examines to which extent the concepts of Blackstone have become the basis for the development of the American legal thought.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ACCOUNTING AND INTERNAL CONTROL FOR THE NATIONAL LAND SYSTEM OF THE USA

1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-213
Author(s):  
Michael P. Schoderbek
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Internal Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Governmental Accounting ◽  
Land System ◽  
The Usa ◽  
And Control

This paper examines the early accounting practices that were used to administer the United States' national land system. These practices are of significance because they provide insights on early governmental accounting and they facilitated an orderly settlement of the western territories. The analysis focuses on the record-keeping and control practices that were developed to meet the provisions of the Land Act of 1800 and to account for land office transactions. These accounting procedures were extracted from the correspondence between the Department of the Treasury and the various land officers.

Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-23
Author(s):  
Roger Rouse
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Single Word ◽  
The Social ◽  
Made In

In a hidden sweatshop in downtown Los Angeles, Asian and Latino migrants produce automobile parts for a factory in Detroit. As the parts leave the production line, they are stamped “Made in Brazil.” In a small village in the heart of Mexico, a young woman at her father’s wake wears a black T-shirt sent to her by a brother in the United States. The shirt bears a legend that some of the mourners understand but she does not. It reads, “Let’s Have Fun Tonight!” And on the Tijuana-San Diego border, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a writer originally from Mexico City, reflects on the time he has spent in what he calls “the gap between two worlds”: “Today, eight years after my departure, when they ask me for my nationality or ethnic identity, I cannot answer with a single word, for my ‘identity’ now possesses multiple repertoires: I am Mexican but I am also Chicano and Latin American. On the border they call me ‘chilango’ or ‘mexiquillo’; in the capital, ‘pocho’ or ‘norteno,’ and in Spain ‘sudaca.’… My companion Emily is Anglo-Italian but she speaks Spanish with an Argentinian accent. Together we wander through the ruined Babel that is our American postmodemity.”

scholarly journals The State of Clinical Librarianship in Canada: a Review of the Literature, 1970–2013

2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Halbert
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Literature Search ◽  
The United States ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Job Titles ◽  
Medical Librarian ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

This paper examines the history of clinical librarianship in Canada from 1970 to 2013 as seen through the lens of practitioner narratives and published literature. While no reviews of clinical librarianship in Canada were found in the literature search, there were many project descriptions in articles and published reports that have provided insight into the field during its formative period in Canada from the 1970s. In addition to tracing narrative histories from 1970 to 2013, the author has continued to wonder why these important stories have never properly been told. Was it because the scope of clinical librarianship, its expected and embodied professional duties, was not regulated (as it is in the United States and United Kingdom)? Is it because the American Library Association accredited library schools in Canada do not offer appropriate curricula and professional training? It seems clear that some librarians in Canada were pioneers in the way that Gertrude Lamb was in the United States, but they did not call themselves clinical librarians. Consequently, they opted for more generic job titles such as medical librarian and health librarian. Whatever the reasons for this, it is within this framework that the author begins an exploration of clinical librarianship in Canada. The paper's aim is to provide a view into clinical librarianship in Canada back to the 1970s to ensure the story is properly told.

Siegfried Giedion, Modernism and American Material Culture

1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Tallack
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Space Time ◽  
World War ◽  
Federal Institute ◽  
Teaching Position ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
New Tradition

The Swiss architectural critic and historian of technology, Siegfried Giedion, was born in 1893 and died in 1968. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941) and Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1948) are his two most well-known books and both came out of time spent in the United States between 1938 and 1945. World War Two kept Giedion in America though he, unlike many other German-speaking European intellectuals, came home and in 1946 took up a teaching position at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich where he later became professor of art history. While in the United States he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1938–39), saw them in print as Space, Time and Architecture, and also completed most of the research in industrial archives and patent offices for Mechanization Takes Command. These two books are an important but, for the past twenty years, a mostly neglected, analysis of American material culture by a European intellectual, whose interests in Modernism included painting — notably Cubism and Constructivism — as well as architecture and planning. The period which saw the publication of Giedion's key works is, itself, an overlooked phase in the trans-Atlantic relationship between Modernism and modernization.

Did the United States Plan an Invasion of Mexico in 1927?

1973 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 454-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Horn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Circumstantial Evidence ◽  
American Intervention ◽  
Secretary Of State

For many years the vague notion has circulated that the United States and Mexico were on the verge of war in 1927. Howard Cline (1965: 209) cited unspecified “Mexican sources” as purportedly revealing that Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and Ambassador James R. Sheffield in Mexico City were “purposely trying to provoke some Mexican act that could be used as a pretext for American intervention.” Former Mexican President Emilio Portes Gil (1964: 396) went further and insisted that American warships had actually mobilized for intervention, only to be thwarted by an “imperturbable” President Calles. These and other such assertions have never been thoroughly analyzed on the basis of available American diplomatic and military records. This article attempts to demonstrate that intervention was highly unlikely. Moreover, circumstantial evidence and logic combine to suggest that the administration of Calvin Coolidge never seriously considered such a move and that rumors of intervention were founded more upon Mexican suspicion and mistrust than upon realities in Washington.

Inca Aesthetics and Scholarly Inquiry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Herring
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Scholarly Inquiry ◽  
Andean Culture

This chapter discusses the interpretive challenges that art historians and anthropologists have faced in approaching Inca intellectual and artistic achievements, which do not fit comfortably in Western categories. George Kubler took up the question of Inca art in the mid-twentieth century, creating a space in art history for studying the Incas. This development occurred at a time when archaeologists such as John Rowe worked to place the Incas within the broader context of Andean civilizations, and structuralists like Tom Zuidema were beginning to challenge historical narratives in search of underlying elements of Andean culture. The scholarly interest in Inca art, material culture, and intellect was but one aspect of the Inca focus of that time, as artists found inspiration in Inca ruins and museum galleries in the United States, and other countries began to exhibit Inca artifacts as an art to be approached on its own terms.

Anti-Americanism in Retreat: Jack Lang, Cultural Imperialism, and the Anti-Anti-Americans

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Kuisel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
American Film ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Movie Star

This chapter details the rise of anti-Americanism in France, in particular French socialist minister of culture Jack Lang's attack against American popular culture. Lang began by refusing to attend the American film festival at Deauville in September 1981; several months later he gave a notorious address denouncing American cultural imperialism at a UNESCO conference in Mexico City; and then he tried to organize a global “crusade” to combat cultural imports from the United States. Lang was a flamboyant young politician whose movie-star good looks, iconic pink jacket, dramatic initiatives, and hyperactive ways won him both admiration and ridicule. He presided over the Ministry of Culture from 1981 to 1986 and again from 1988 to 1993.

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