The Late Great Plot: The Official Delusion Concerning the Xhosa Cattle Killing 1856-1857

1895 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 253-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.B. Peires
Keyword(s):  
Economic Resources ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Belief Structures ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Military ◽  
European Technology ◽  
Significant Question ◽  
Do So

The very idea that the Xhosa chiefs and their allies engineered the great cattle-killing which finally broke their power seems so absurd that most people who hear of it dismiss it instinctively. And indeed, they are perfectly correct to do so. Yet the sheer mass of documentary evidence in support of the proposition is such that all historians who have come into contact with it have been forced to be more circumspect with regard to the “chiefs' plot.” We have to look very carefully at this evidence before we reject its conclusions, and once we have done so, we have to answer a further and even more significant question: If the “chiefs' plot” did not exist, why did the Colonial authorities maintain that it did? Paradoxically, we will discover that an investigation of the “chiefs' plot” can tell us nothing about the Xhosa or the cattle-killing, but it can tell us a great deal about the mind and methods of Sir George Grey, that colossus of early Victorian imperialism.After nearly seventy years of epic struggle, the catastrophic defeats of the Seventh (1846-47) and Eighth (1850-53) Frontier Wars finally broke the military capacity of the Xhosa people to resist the Colonial advance from the Cape of Good Hope. Their political structures fragmented by partial incorporation into the Crown Colony of British Kaffraria; their belief structures fractured by the victories of missionary teaching and European technology; the slender remnants of their economic resources decimated by the onslaught of the lung-sickness epizootic in their cattle from 1855, the Xhosa turned, as other peoples have done in like situations, to millennarian hopes.

scholarly journals Art. XX. An Account of the Religious Opinions and Observances of the Khonds of Goomsur and Boad

1843 ◽  
Vol 7 (13) ◽  
pp. 172-199
Author(s):  
Samuel Charters Maopherson
Keyword(s):  
General Interest ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
The Military

[Note. Several years ago, at the close of the military operations of the Madras Government in Goomsur, Captain (then Lieutenant) Macpherson executed by order of government a survey of the country, and in that service lost his health. From the Cape of Good Hope, whither he had gone for its recovery, he transmitted his notes on the religion of the Khonds to a relative in this country, who considered them to possess so much novelty and general interest, that he presented them to the Society, upon his own responsibility, and without the sanction of the writer: and a few additions having been since made, the paper is now laid before the public.]

The Historian’s Role, Public History, and the National Truth Commission in Brazil

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Viz Quadrat
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
Truth Commission ◽  
Final Report ◽  
Military Dictatorship ◽  
Brazilian Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
National Reconciliation ◽  
Do So

AbstractIn 2011, twenty-six years after the end of the military dictatorship, the Brazilian government took the initiative of implementing the right to memory and to the truth, as well as promoting national reconciliation. A National Truth Commission was created aiming at examining and shedding light on serious human rights violations practiced by government agents from 1946 to 1985. It worked across the entire national territory for almost three years and established partnerships with governments of other countries in order to investigate and expose the international networks created by dictatorships for monitoring and persecuting political opponents across borders. This article analyzes the relationship between historians and the National Truth Commission in Brazil, in addition to the construction of dictatorship public history in the country. In order to do so, the Commission’s relationship with the national community of historians, the works carried out, as well as historians’ reactions towards its works, from its creation until its final report in 2014, will be examined.

scholarly journals Taiwanese Identity – Past Factors and Present Circumstances

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Pawel Sendyka
Keyword(s):  
People’S Republic Of China ◽  
People's Republic Of China ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Taiwanese Identity ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Taiwan Strait ◽  
White Terror ◽  
Nationalist Government ◽  
The Military ◽  
Do So

Abstract Taiwan is an island that off the coast of China. To say that Taiwan is a country is to offend the Communist People’s Republic of China which claims sovereignty over the island and markets it to the world as a “renegade province” which must be re-united with the mainland, by force, if necessary. For people who know very little about Taiwan and its big neighbour across the Taiwan Strait this may even sound convincing, but the truth is more complex. In 1949 the nationalist government (Kuomintang or KMT) having lost the Chinese Civil War retreated from the mainland; the communists have never ruled the island. The settling of the Republic of China’s government in Taiwan and the era of “White Terror” was another one in a series of historical events that were fundamental in forming the modern Taiwanese identity. Whatever the proponents of “one China” claim, the truth of the matter is that there is a shift in attitudes of the inhabitants of Taiwan in how they feel about themselves (Taiwanese, Chinese or both). This is a crucial fact that will have to be acknowledged in the cross-strait relations. The identity argument as such, is independent of any historical claims. And this Taiwanese identity has been evolving and will continue to do so, shaped by the past and the most recent events like the Hong Kong protests, the pandemic, politics and the military aggression and intimidation by the People’s Republic of China. This article will examine these factors in turn.

“...LOCOMOTIVES WILL FREEZE, FAMINE IS COMING, AND THERE ARE CASES OF TYPHUS...”. RAILWAYS OF THE GREAT SIBERIAN CAMPAIGN 1919–1920

2021 ◽  
pp. 121-138
Author(s):  
Vasily Zh. Tsvetkov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Technical Condition ◽  
The State ◽  
Rolling Stock ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Eastern Front ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
State Archives ◽  
The Military

The publication of documentary materials reflects the history of the organization and conducting of the retreat of the units of Admiral A.V. Kolchak’s Eastern Front and the evacuation of civilian refugees from Omsk and other cities in Siberia in November 1919 – January 1920. The article considers the issues of the technical condition and operation of the TRANSSiberian railway and, in particular, the functioning of the rolling stock. Those aspects for the history of the Civil War in the East of Russia to this day remain poorly studied. Evidence is provided on the state of the military, refugee and civil trains, and about the situation of passengers. Consistently and with the involvement of documentary material, the stages of the preparation and implementation of evacuation measures are described, and the reasons for the failure of planned decisions are analyzed. The article presents evidence on the consequences of full-scale disaster with the railway accident that became part of the Civil War history in Siberia. The materials from the State Archives of the Russian Federation that have not been widely used in scientific research and have not been published yet, as well as some previously published documentary evidence, were used. The study of that aspect of the Civil War history in Siberia allows to get an idea of not only the military, but also of the political importance that the TRANS-Siberian railway played in the absence of developed transport communications in the East of Russia.

The Zeppelin in the Sky of the Mind

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Froula
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Total War ◽  
Aerial Warfare ◽  
Global War ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Modern Warfare ◽  
The Military ◽  
Bernard Shaw

While First World War historians often emphasize civilians’ experience of ‘war at a distance’, the military dirigible floated over the divide between civilian and soldier, brought aerial warfare to Britain’s island fortress, and inaugurated a mode of modern warfare that defies spatial and temporal containment. This essay foregrounds the zeppelin’s psychic impact on the civilian imaginary from 1914 through the Spanish Civil War to the Blitz, tracing its conceptual and aesthetic representation in diaries, letters, novels, essays, and plays by Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Rukeyser, Julian Bell and others. These writings document an unending European-civil-imperial-global war in which aerial technologies at once enlarge human powers almost beyond imagining and dwarf them to the point of negation. Inspiring both wonder and the new terror of total war, the zeppelin created a permanent change in civilians’ psychic weather and remains an inescapable presence in the sky of the mind.

scholarly journals A discipline for the avoidance of unnecessary assumptions

1971 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Scalar Case ◽  
Mean Square ◽  
William Of Ockham ◽  
Know How ◽  
Mathematical Formulas ◽  
The Subject ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Available Information ◽  
Do So

Although unnecessary assumptions are something we all try to avoid, advice on how to do so is much harder to come by than admonition. The most widely quoted dictum on the subject, often referred to by writers on philosophy as “Ockham's razor” and attributed generally to William of Ockham, states “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”. (Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.) As pointed out in reference [I], however, the authenticity of this attribution is questionable.The same reference mentions Newton's essentially similar statement in his Principia Mathematica of 1726. Hume [3] is credited by Tribus [2c] with pointing out in 1740 that the problem of statistical inference is to find an assignment of probabilities that “uses the available information and leaves the mind unbiased with respect to what is not known.” The difficulty is that often our data are incomplete and we do not know how to create an intelligible interpretation without filling in some gaps. Assumptions, like sin, are much more easily condemned than avoided.In the author's opinion, important results have been achieved in recent years toward solving the problem of how best to utilize data that might heretofore have been regarded as inadequate. The approach taken and the relevance of this work to certain actuarial problems will now be discussed.Bias and PrejudiceOne type of unnecessary assumption lies in the supposition that a given estimator is unbiased when in fact it has a bias. We need not discuss this aspect of our subject at length here since what we might consider the scalar case of the general problem is well covered in textbooks and papers on sampling theory. Suffice it to say that an estimator is said to be biased if its expected value differs by an incalculable degree from the quantity being estimated. Such differences can arise either through faulty procedures of data collection or through use of biased mathematical formulas. It should be realized that biased formulas and procedures are not necessarily improper when their variance, when added to the bias, is sufficiently small as to yield a mean square error lower than the variance of an alternative, unbiased estimator.

‘Looks Red’ and Dangerous Talk

Philosophy ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 70 (274) ◽  
pp. 545-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. J. C. Smart
Keyword(s):  
Frank Jackson ◽  
David Armstrong ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Do So

This paper is partly to get rid of some irritation which I have felt at the quite common tendency of philosophers to elucidate (for example) ‘is red’ in terms of ‘looks red’. For a relatively recent example see, for example, Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter, ‘An Objectivist′s Guide to Subjectivism about Colour’. However rather than try to make a long list of references, I would rather say ‘No names, no pack drill’. I have even been disturbed to find the use of the words ‘looks red’ that I am opposing ascribed to me by Keith Campbell in his useful article ‘David Armstrong and Realism about Colour’. I am not saying that such talk is necessarily wrong. Talk of ‘looks red’ may be a way of harmlessly referring to the behavioural discriminations with respect to colour of a human percipient. Where it is dangerous, at least to those of us who wish to argue for a broadly physicalist account of the mind, is that it may have concealed overtones of reference to epiphenomenal and irreducibly psychic properties of experiences. Moreover even if it does not do so it may be fence sitting on this issue and liable to misinterpretation.

The Guerrilla Movement in Northwest China: The Origins of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region (Part I)

1966 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 63-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Seldon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Northwest China ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Secret Societies ◽  
Rugged Terrain ◽  
Loess Hills ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Military ◽  
Great Wall ◽  
Guerrilla Movement

The loess hills of northern Shensi below the great wall, unsurpassed in their poverty and primitiveness in all China proper, are a traditional haven for rebels. Remote from major provincial power centres, this rugged terrain provides ideal sanctuary for roving armed bands. Here Li Tzu-ch'eng launched his campaign to overthrow the Ming, only to be thwarted by the Manchus after taking Peking in 1644. Much of the region was devastated by Moslem rebels in the mid-nineteenth Century, and in the chaotic final years of the Ch'ing, t'u-fei, (bandits) formed from the ranks of the military, secret societies and a population frequently on the brink of starvation, roamed unchecked. One early twentieth-century British observer described the area's reputation this way: “In the mind of the average Chinese of the Eastern provinces…north Shensi is a nest of plunderers lost in a wilderness.”

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