In 1771 Joseph Banks and other wealthy collectors sent a talented, self-taught naturalist to Sierra Leone to collect all things rare and curious, from moths to monkeys. Henry Smeathman’s expedition ...to the West African coast, which coincided with a steep rise in British slave trading in this area, lasted four years during which time he built a house on the Banana Islands, married into the coast’s ruling dynasties, and managed to negotiate the tricky life of a ‘stranger’ bound to his landlord and local customs. In this book, which draws on a rich and little-known archive of journals and letters, Coleman retraces Smeathman’s life as he shuttled between his home on the Bananas and two key Liverpool trading forts—Bunce Island and the Isles de Los. In the logistical challenges of tropical collecting and the dispatch of specimens across the middle passage we see the close connection between science and slavery. We also see the hardening of Smeathman’s attitude towards the slaves, a change of sentiment which was later reversed by four years in the West Indies. The book concludes with the 'Flycatcher' back in London - a celebrated termite specialist, eager to return to West Africa to establish a free, antislavery settlement.
By using the multifiber spectrograph FLAMES mounted at the ESO-VLT, we have obtained high-resolution spectra for 18 giant stars, belonging to three old globular clusters of the Large Magellanic Cloud ...(namely NGC 1786, 2210, and 2257). While stars in each cluster showed quite homogeneous iron content, within a few cents of dex (the mean values being Fe/H= -1.75 ± 0.01 dex, -1.65 ± 0.02 dex and -1.95 ± 0.02 dex for NGC 1786, 2210, and 2257, respectively), we have detected significant inhomogeneities for the Na/Fe, Al/Fe, O/Fe, and Mg/Fe abundance ratios, with evidence of O/Fe versus Na/Fe and Mg/Fe versus Al/Fe anticorrelations. The trends detected nicely agree with those observed in Galactic Globular Clusters, suggesting that such abundance anomalies are ubiquitous features of old stellar systems and they do not depend on the parent galaxy environment. In NGC 1786 we also detected two extreme O-poor, Na-rich stars. This is the first time that a firm signature of extreme chemical abundance anomalies has been found in an extragalactic stellar cluster.
ABSTRACT
Even after decades of research, the origin of multiple stellar populations in globular clusters (GCs) remains enigmatic. The question as to whether the galaxy environment plays a role in ...their formation remains unanswered. To that extent, we analysed two classical (>10 Gyr old) Large Magellanic Cloud GCs, NGC 1786 and NGC 1898, using imaging data from Hubble Space Telescope to compare and contrast them with ancient Galactic GCs to assess systematic differences that might exist between their abundance variations. We calculated their red giant branch width, subtracted the effect of metallicity, and compared it with the available data on Galactic GCs by plotting them against initial and current cluster mass. We see that the two clusters follow the same general trend as that of the Galactic GCs, and Galactic GCs from different progenitors follow the same general trend as one another, indicating that the galaxy environment may only play a minor role in the formation of multiple stellar populations within GCs.
The 2022 Luding
Ms
6.8 earthquake has drawn attention to the Xianshuihe fault zone. Historically, there was an
M
7
3
/
4
earthquake in this region in 1786. Because the surface rupture of this ...historic earthquake was not obvious, there is still much debate over the extent of the surface rupture, which is critical for comprehending tectonic activity and assessing seismic risk for the Xianshuihe fault (XSHF). In particular, the seismogenic structure of this earthquake was connected by three active left-lateral strike-slip faults—the Anninghe fault (ANHF), Daliangshan fault (DLSF), and XSHF—where a large earthquake could cause multi-fault rupture.
Given
these criteria, we report the results of a series of trenches excavated in the vicinity of the epicenter at the northern section of the DLSF, the northern section of the ANHF, the Zheduotang section, and the Selaha section of the XSHF. We find that 1) three palaeoseismic events have been revealed on the northern section of the ANHF: BE1, ∼1003 AD; BE2, 1000–1182 AD; and BE3, 1536 AD as
M
7 earthquakes, and 2) two palaeoseismic events have occurred on the Selaha fault during the last 500 years. The first event corresponds to the AD 1725 Kangding
M
7 earthquake, and the latest event may be the AD 1786
M
7
3
/
4
earthquake. 3) Three palaeoseismic events occurred on Zheduotang: ZD1, 1215 BC∼315 AD; ZD2, 830 BC∼705 AD; and ZD3, the 1955 AD Kangding
M
7
1
/
2
earthquake. 4) The 1786 Kangding
M
7
3
/
4
earthquake was probably a multi-fault rupture event, as evidenced by the trenching profile evidence, nearby offset geomorphic features, and historical earthquake data. Not only the Moxi fault, a seismogenic structure, but also the southern end of the Selaha fault to the north and the Shimian fault (DLSF) to the south simultaneously broke during this earthquake.
The Restoration (1814-1830) was a golden age for liberal philosophy in France, especially in the field of politics. The political thought of Benjamin Constant and François Guizot, two of the most ...well-known theorists of the representative regime, is today regarded as particularly useful for understanding the meaning of many of the institutions which post-revolutionary democracies inherited. However, this paper reveals the existence of another great theory of the representative regime in circulation during the French Restoration: that popularized in the pages of Le Censeur (1814-1815), a major liberal newspaper of the time. Its editors, Charles Comte (1782-1837) and Charles Dunoyer (1786-1862), are today known for their important contribution to the rise of liberal political economy in France. Their earliest journalistic writings contrast with the rest of their work and predate their discovery of the Treatise on Political Economy by Jean-Baptiste Say. During the first Bourbon Restoration (1814), Comte and Dunoyer were concerned almost exclusively with political philosophy. Before adopting the doctrine of 'industrialism', they attempted to make a synthesis of the political thought of Rousseau and Montesquieu, in order to give a liberal form to the idea of popular sovereignty compatible with monarchical government.
A good understanding of seismic giant landslides could provide favourable guidance for seismic stability evaluation of nearby slopes. Here, an excellent example of a catastrophic seismic landslide ...named the Mogangling giant landslide (MGL), located upstream along the Dadu River and triggered by the 1786 Moxi M 7.75 earthquake, is analysed for its deposit characteristics, failure mechanism and dammed lake. The MGL, with a volume of approximately 4500 × 10
4
m
3
, 450 m long and 1000 m wide, blocked the Dadu River completely and caused over 100 000 deaths when the landslide dam broke. The MGL occurred on the upper part of a narrow granite ridge; a potentially unstable wedge-shaped rock mass was separated from the remaining massif by unloading fissures and an active fault (Detuo fault) that just crossed the slope foot. The Moxi earthquake coupled with strong site amplification triggered the MGL, which blocked the Dadu River; the elevation of the dam crest was approximately 130 m higher than the present river level. The dammed lake had a volume of approximately 9.504 × 10
8
m
3
, an area of 19.91 km
2
and a length of approximately 31 km; the peak flow of the outburst flood was larger than 7100 m
3
/s. After hundreds of years of concave bank erosion, the deposit is divided into the right bank deposit (main deposit) and left bank deposit (residual deposit).
This article explores the significance of orientalism as a cultural phenomenon in Polish literature and culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Intervening in a long-standing debate about ...whether orientalism in Poland was an original phenomenon or a 'derivative and imitative' discourse, the article offers close readings of two cultural phenomena that show that the application of such binaries is overly reductive. Rather, orientalist inspirations in Poland were multi-layered: inspiration from western European orientalism mixed with Poland's own historical 'easternness', especially in the heterogeneous contact zone of what is now Ukraine. Analysis of Edward Raczyński's (1786-1845) 1821 account of his journey to Turkey, and of the life and cultural legend of Wacław Seweryn Rzewuski (1784-1831), shows that Ukraine was a site of overlapping orientalist projections in the Polish cultural imagination in the decades following the Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
This book takes its title from the catchphrase of the eponymous hero of the 1825 play Paul Pry, which was an immense success on the London stage and subsequently around the English-speaking world. It ...tackles the complex, multifaceted subject of privacy in nineteenth-century Britain by examining the debates that the trope of Paul Pry illuminated. The book presents a history of privacy conducted through a biography of a polymorphous fictional character embodied in myriad forms. The book uses a new kind of social history, using dense archival research to trace a cultural artefact through every aspect of its consumer context, and deploying its meanings to interrogate the largely hidden history of privacy in a period of major transformations in the role of the home, mass communication, and the state. The book presents an account of a recreational event in an era which saw a decisive shift from an articulated to a segmented market. In the examination of the discourses of privacy which Paul Pry brought into focus, the book casts light on the tensions between curiosity and intrusion which are captured by the play’s catchphrase.
PDF
