This essay explores the relations between age and socio-intellectual status within the rabbinic study house. In the first part of the essay, we examine the notion that Torah-learning protects one ...from the afflictions of old age, an idea for which there are immediately apparent parallels in Greek and Roman philosophical literature. In the second part of the essay, we maintain that the ethos of an ageless society of learners not only generates statements about the old never getting truly old, but also creates a social setting in which the young cannot be truly young. We conclude with an analysis of a short story by S.Y. Agnon (‘The Good Years’) that builds on these Talmudic tropes, but takes them in a new direction.
Como viviam os africanos e seus descendentes no Sul da Bahia entre o final do século XIX e início do XX? Este livro é um convite para conhecer o cotidiano de trabalho, festas, lutas judiciais, ...práticas culturais e religiosas. Tomando como marco a abolição, recorre a variadas fontes, analisando duas décadas anteriores e posteriores desvelando centelhas de experiências e reivindicando um lugar para esses sujeitos na Historiografia Regional.
The snowstorms of 1888 caused unprecedented damage in the recent history of Asturias. This research, based on an analysis of historical sources, investigates the response of the affected society. It ...examines both the response of the state organisations, and the adaptation and risk management strategies of those who lived in the most affected areas. The results show poor management of the crisis by the authorities, who focused their efforts on restoring rail and road communications and offered scarce economic aid. In the mountain areas, however, a communal work culture and neighbourhood solidarity, were useful from the organisational point of view, and can be considered the most efficient palliatives and the only immediate responses capable of reaching the entire affected territory.
The first book to reveal the private life of an Englishwoman whose contribution to the recording of Egypt's ancient past has long been overlooked An Artist in Abydos is the first book to recognize ...Broome's great contribution to the work done during this golden age of excavation in Upper Egypt. In this remarkable account, Lee Young tells the story of Myrtle Broome, who died in 1978, largely through her letters. An only child and a prolific writer, Broome wanted her parents to know every facet of her life in Egypt. Her frequent letters to them vividly capture life in the villages, the traditions of the local people, the work of artisans, such as weaving and pot-making, and festivals, ceremonies, and music. In fascinating detail, the letters also depict Broome's living conditions providing us with a personal account of what it was like to be an English, working woman living abroad in Egypt in the 1930s. Myrtle Florence Broome was born in 1888 to artistically inclined middle-class parents in the district of Holborn in London. Between 1911 and 1913, she studied at University College London under the legendary Sir William Petrie. In 1927 she was invited to join the excavations at Qau el-Kebir as an artist for the British School of Archaeology in Egypt, later traveling, in 1929, to work at the now famous Seti Temple in Abydos for the Egypt Exploration Society. Broome spent eight seasons there, copying the painted scenes in the Temple. Regarded then as one of the greatest copyists working in Egypt, she left invaluable renditions of some of ancient Egypt's most beautiful monuments. An Artist in Abydos is an important book celebrating the contributions of an under-recognized woman artist during the golden age of excavation in Egypt.
The paper explores the history of the Serbian Progressive Party in the Kingdom of Serbia from 1887 to 1896. After the fall of the government of Milutin Garašanin in June 1887, the Serbian Progressive ...Party ended among the opposition parties. After the fall of the Progressive Party from power, the first coalition liberal-radical government was formed, headed by Jovan Ristić. The Progressive Party members and supporters were persecuted by the ruling People's Radical Party. The Progressive Party lost the voters and deputies in the National Assembly, which suggested that it would not be able to recover for an extended period. However, less than two years later, in May 1889, the Progressive Party managed to organize a General Assembly, attended by over 2,000 members, who adopted the party program and statute which did not differ substantially from the one from 1881. It was quite obvious that the party leadership wanted to show that the Progressive Party did not disappear from the political scene, but that it temporarily withdrew to reconsolidate and focus on gathering voters. Yet, due to the unrest that erupted in Belgrade during the party assembly, the Party leadership announced in June 1889 that the Progressive Party would temporarily suspend its activities. As the withdrawal from the political scene did not produce any results, the Party leaders decided to resume the Party's activities, hoping that the situation would eventually change in their favor. In the September 1890 elections, the Progressive Party won one parliamentary mandate, which went to the Party's leader, Milutin Garašanin. In the National Assembly, his political struggle against the ruling Radical Party government was hardly observable, but his articles published in the Progressive Party newpaper 'Videlo' (Daylight) had a much greater impact on the readers. During the minority liberal government of Jovan Avakumović, in 1892-1893, there were attempts to reach an agreement on a pre-election coalition between the Liberals and the Progressives against the Radicals, but these attempts failed. After the coup of 1st April 1893, when the Radicals regained power, it was quite clear to the Progressive Party leaders that they could not fight the Radicals on their own. The idea of forming a new political grouping of liberals and progressives was soon abandoned. After the 1888 Constitution had been repealed and the 1869 Constitution had been reinstated, King Alexander tried (with the assistance of rare non-partisan people) to avoid the intransigence of the Progressive Party leaders and the supremacy of the Radicals. After the period of several neutral governments headed by Đorđe Simić (January - April 1894), Svetomir Nikolajević (April - October 1894), and Nikola Hristić (October 1894 - July 1895), the Progressive Party government headed by Stojan Novaković (July 1895 - December 1896) was formed. This government initiated a change in the Constitution but the idea was not upheld by King Alexander, as the Liberals and the Radicals did not agree to instituting the constitutional reform under the administration of the weakest party in the country. In such circumstances, Novaković resigned on 29 December 1896. The next day, the Progressive Party was dissolved by the decision of the Party leadership.
The 1888 Ritter Island volcanic sector collapse triggered a regionally damaging tsunami. Historic eyewitness accounts allow the reconstruction of the arrival time, phase and height of the tsunami ...wave at multiple locations around the coast of New Guinea and New Britain. 3D seismic interpretations and sedimentological analyses indicate that the catastrophic collapse of Ritter Island was preceded by a phase of deep-seated gradual spreading within the volcanic edifice and accompanied by a submarine explosive eruption, as the volcanic conduit was cut beneath sea level. However, the potential impact of the deep-seated deformation and the explosive eruption on tsunami genesis is unclear. For the first time, it is possible to parameterise the different components of the Ritter Island collapse with 3D seismic data, and thereby test their relative contributions to the tsunami. The modelled tsunami arrival times and heights are in good agreement with the historic eyewitness accounts. Our simulations reveal that the tsunami was primarily controlled by the displacement of the water column by the collapsing cone at the subaerial-submarine boundary and that the submerged fraction of the slide mass and its mobility had only a minor effect on tsunami genesis. This indicates that the total slide volume, when incorporating the deep-seated deforming mass, is not directly scalable for the resulting tsunami height. Furthermore, the simulations show that the tsunamigenic impact of the explosive eruption energy during the Ritter Island collapse was only minor. However, this relationship may be different for other volcanogenic tsunami events with smaller slide volumes or larger magnitude eruptions, and should not be neglected in tsunami simulations and hazard assessment.
In Atomic Bill
, Vincent Kiernan examines the fraught career of
New York Times science
journalist, William L. Laurence and shows his professional and
personal lives to be a cautionary tale of ...dangerous proximity to
power. Laurence was fascinated with atomic science and its
militarization. When the Manhattan Project drew near to perfecting
the atomic bomb, he was recruited to write much of the government's
press materials that were distributed on the day that Hiroshima was
obliterated. That instantly crowned Laurence as one of the leading
journalistic experts on the atomic bomb. As the Cold War dawned,
some assessed Laurence as a propagandist defending the
militarization of atomic energy. For others, he was a skilled
science communicator who provided the public with a deep
understanding of the atomic bomb. Laurence leveraged his perch at
the Times to engage in paid speechmaking, book writing,
filmmaking, and radio broadcasting. His work for the Times declined
in quality even as his relationships with people in power grew
closer and more lucrative. Atomic Bill reveals
extraordinary ethical lapses by Laurence such as a cheating scandal
at Harvard University and plagiarizing from press releases about
atomic bomb tests in the Pacific. In 1963 a conflict of interest
related to the 1964 World's Fair in New York City led to his forced
retirement from the Times . Kiernan shows Laurence to have
set the trend, common among today's journalists of science and
technology, to prioritize gee-whiz coverage of discoveries. That
approach, in which Laurence served the interests of governmental
official and scientists, recommends a full revision of our
understanding of the dawn of the atomic era.
This article examines the prominent Japanese postwar thinker Maruyama Masao's critical engagement with his contemporary German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Maruyama engaged with Schmitt's ...decisionistic notion of "the political" and sovereignty since he found it useful in addressing the pathological elements of Japanese political culture, namely, the widespread political passivity and fatalistic ethos of the Japanese public. In his view, such a "decision-avoiding" political culture, which had contributed to the rise of fascism in interwar and wartime Japan, posed a fundamental threat to the viability of Japan's postwar democracy. Although Maruyama objected to Schmitt's authoritarian theory of political leadership, he nevertheless believed Schmitt provided important insights into the key concepts of modern politics, such as political agency and the constituent power of the people. In his efforts to foster political subjectivity and liberal individuality in postwar Japan, Maruyama attempted to strike a balance between two extremes: Schmittian normless decisionism, on the one hand, and a politically naïve liberal constitutionalism, on the other. I conclude by suggesting that the hitherto overlooked intellectual affinity between Maruyama and one of the leading Weimar-era constitutional theorists-Hermann Heller-can enrich our understanding of Maruyama's unceasing effort to formulate and insist on the imperative role of political subjectivity and liberal individuality in consolidating liberal democracy in postwar Japan.
"The burden of the past" invoked by any discussion of eclecticism
is a familiar aspect of modernity, particularly in the history of
literature. The Age of Eclecticism: Literature and Culture in
...Britain, 1815-1885 by Christine Bolus-Reichert aims to reframe
that dynamic and to place it in a much broader context by examining
the rise of a manifold eclecticism in the nineteenth century.
Bolus-Reichert focuses on two broad understandings of eclecticism
in the period-one understood as an unreflective embrace of either
conflicting beliefs or divergent historical styles, the other a
mode of critical engagement that ultimately could lead to a
rethinking of the contrast between creation and criticism and of
the very idea of the original. She also contributes to the emerging
field of transnational Victorian studies and, in doing so, finds a
way to talk about a broader, post-Romantic nineteenth-century
culture. By reviving eclecticism as a critical term,
Bolus-Reichert historicizes the theoretical language available to
us for describing how Victorian culture functioned-in order to make
the terrain of Victorian scholarship international and comparative
and create a place for the Victorians in the genealogy of
postmodernism. The Age of Eclecticism gives
Victorianists-and other students of nineteenth-century literature
and culture-a new perspective on familiar debates that intersect in
crucial ways with issues still relevant to literature in an age of
multiculturalism and postmodernism.
Nietzsche has repeatedly commented on his already published works, and thus continuously reinterpreted them, in order to shape their public reception and to foreground the communication of specific ...aspects of his works. As such, he followed a specific “work politics,” or
. The resulting retractions are not only revealing for the reconstruction of Nietzsche’s self-understanding, but also demonstrate both the development and the dynamic character of his thinking. In the present article, this is shown through a so-called “contrasting reading,” which contrasts a posthumous note about
, the
from 1886, with the book itself and with the chapter in
that is dedicated to BT. Starting from a close reading of note Nachlass 1888, 173, which also takes into account the genesis of BT, I argue that Nietzsche’s self-commentaries combine his current philosophical reflections with work-political objectives. The subsequent comparison reconstructs the philosophical differences between the note and the texts mentioned above, thus demonstrating the dynamic character of Nietzsche’s philosophizing, which is often stated but seldom reconstructed on the basis of the actual texts.
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