Islands are usually thought of as being territorial-like continents, but on a smaller scale. Yet, they differ from continents in one fundamental regard: their relationship to water. Islands must be ...understood as ecotones, a concept of increasing importance to the environmental sciences in recent years, but not well known to island studies scholars. An ecotone is a place where two ecosystems connect and create a unique environment different from both. It therefore illuminates aspects of island life that are obscured when we treat islands as bounded territorial units constituting a singular ecosystem. Continents may contain one or more ecotones; but islands, especially smaller ones, are dominated by the ecotone where land meets sea. The littoral ecotone helps explain many of the distinctive qualities of island economies and the adaptability, dynamism, and resilience of island societies. It adds to the extensive revisionist literature that has already challenged the myth of island isolation, boundedness, and remoteness.
Did you know that...The "contemporary" fashion of living together before marriage is far from new, and was frequently practiced in earlier days...Self-divorce, although never legal, was once a ...commonplace occurrence...Marriage is more popular today than in the Victorian era...Marriage in church was not compulsory in England and Wales until the mid-18th century. These are just a few of the fascinating, and often surprising, revelations in For Better, For
Worse, the most comprehensive treatment to date of the history of marriage in a major Western society. Using fresh evidence from popular courtship and wedding rituals over four centuries, Gillis challenges the widely held belief that marriage has evolved from a cold, impersonal arrangement to a more
affectionate, egalitarian form of companionship. The truth, argues Gillis, lies somewhere in between: conjugal love was never wholly absent in preindustrial times, while today's marriages are less companionate than is commonly believed. Gillis also illustrates, in rich detail, the perpetual tension between marital ideals and actual practices. This social history of the behavior and emotions of ordinary men and women radically revises our perspective on love and marriage in the past-and the
present.
Speaking to history Cohen, Paul A
2008., 20100411, 2008, 2008-11-03, Letnik:
16
eBook
The ancient story of King Goujian, a psychologically complex fifth-century BCE monarch, spoke powerfully to the Chinese during China's turbulent twentieth century. Yet most Americans—even students ...and specialists of this era—have never heard of Goujian. In Speaking to History, Paul A. Cohen opens this previously missing (to the West) chapter of China's recent history. He connects the story to each of the major traumas of the last century, tracing its versatility as a source of inspiration and hope and elegantly exploring, on a more general level, why such stories often remain sealed up within a culture, unknown to outsiders. Labeling this phenomenon "insider cultural knowledge," Cohen investigates the relationship between past story and present reality. He inquires why at certain moments in their collective lives peoples are especially drawn to narratives from the distant past that resonate strongly with their current circumstances, and why the Chinese have returned over and over to a story from twenty-five centuries ago. In this imaginative stitching of story to history, Cohen reveals how the shared narratives of a community help to define its culture and illuminate its history.
Island Sojourns Gillis, John R.
Geographical review,
April 2007, Letnik:
97, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Islands have long held a central place in Western cultures' mythical geographies. They have been associated for centuries with heroic journeys and holy quests, imagined realms of magical ...transformations. Islands have also been sites of significant rites of passage, and they continue to perform this function in the modern secular world. Today, popular islomania is expressed in the frequency of seasonal sojourning on European and American archipelagos. No longer destinations of permanent residence, islands now provide access to a sense of temporal and spatial rootedness that is no longer available on mainlands. They loom large on the mental maps even of those who rarely, if ever, visit them.
Marriages of the mind Gillis, John R.
Journal of marriage and family,
November 2004, Letnik:
66, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Gillis discusses how marriage evolves from the 19th century up to the 21st century. Among other things, what appears to be happening today should be seen not as the exception but the norm in the ...treatment of marriage in human societies.
The globalization of the world economy since the 1970s has placed existing definitions of fatherhood under extreme pressure throughout the western world. At the high as well as at the low end of the ...social scale, men have found it difficult to fulfill the traditional breadwinner role. In all developed countries, there has been a growing incidence of what some have called `fatherless families' due to this and other causes. Many see this as a major crisis, requiring intervention and coercive measures. But, before we endorse these, it would be well to place this latest round of worries about `fatherlessness' in historical context and realize that the relationship between fathers and children has always been problematic.
When Dr Johnson made his famous eighteenth-century remark about second marriages being a triumph of hope over experience, his wit could easily have been directed toward the unions that Steven King ...has illuminated. It is never entirely clear why people marry or choose to marry the people they do, a situation that is as frustrating to historians as to friends and family. Marriage remains one of life's great mysteries, perhaps the last great mystery left to us. It fascinates and absorbs us, providing an inexhaustible audience for daytime soap operas and evening situation comedies. Romance novels top the fiction charts; and Hollywood returns to the theme time and again. Marriage fascinates precisely because it is so unpredictable, so much beyond our control. One would think that the riskiness of the lottery of love would frighten, even repel, us, but instead we are drawn to it as a gambler is drawn to the slots or the track. Love is, like gambling, a form of “deep play”, which reveals things about ourselves that we can only discover when we move from the world of choice to the realm of chance. Today, marriage is often the central episode in the stories we tell when we try to explain ourselves to ourselves and to others. It is the most elaborately celebrated and ritualized of all the events of the adult life course, the source of our most precious images and memories. Marriage is simply enchanting.
Current approaches for validation of EtO sterilization cycles identified in ISO 11135 and EN 550 are scientifically deficient and result in full cycle times that are too short. This review article ...identifies the scientific flaws promulgated in the standards that lead to overestimation of process lethality. The reasons for these deficiencies are design-of-experiment errors that either fail to mathematically account for lag factors or that treat dissimilar samples as a single statistical sample set. Industry's movement toward parametric release, based on erroneous assumptions where exposure time rather than equivalent time is used, may create serious problems. The authors discuss these errors in detail, as well as reasonable methods for correcting them based on formulae for integrated lethality. Application of these methods will allow more accurate calculations of process lethality that are supported by biological data and appropriate mathematical analyses.
Islands are usually thought of as being territorial-like continents, but on a smaller scale. Yet, they differ from continents in one fundamental regard: their relationship to water. Islands must be ...understood as ecotones, a concept of increasing importance to the environmental sciences in recent years, but not well known to island studies scholars. An ecotone is a place where two ecosystems connect and create a unique environment different from both. It therefore illuminates aspects of island life that are obscured when we treat islands as bounded territorial units constituting a singular ecosystem. Continents may contain one or more ecotones; but islands, especially smaller ones, are dominated by the ecotone where land meets sea. The littoral ecotone helps explain many of the distinctive qualities of island economies and the adaptability, dynamism, and resilience of island societies. It adds to the extensive revisionist literature that has already challenged the myth of island isolation, boundedness, and remoteness.
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