The “Works of the Old Men” in Arabia: remote sensing in interior Arabia

In the 1920s pilots overflying the Transjordan panhandle discovered thousands of enigmatic stone-built structures which the beduin called ‘’The Works of the Old Men’. We now know these works are several thousand years old, extend from Syria to Yemen and probably number a million or more, making them far older and significantly more extensive than Peru’s Nazca Lines. Like the latter they are often unseen and seldom intelligible at ground level. Now an aerial reconnaissance programme in Jordan and high-resolution satellite imagery from Google Earth for large areas of Arabia is vastly expanding the database bringing transformation and opportunity. Despite regional and diachronic variations, these works are plainly parts of an immense prehistoric cultural continuum surviving as hunting traps, funerary/religious sites and seasonal camps. Extensive sampling and test-mapping show patterns and associations which suggest methodologies for developing a remote sensing programme to record, map and begin analysis for interior Arabia as a whole. On such foundations may be built interdisciplinary collaboration to interpret and explain this little-known human landscape on the fringes of the Fertile Crescent.     

Resurrection in slow motion: the delayed restoration of the cinema exhibition industry in post-war Rotterdam (1940–65)

Abstract

Investigating a cultural industry such as the cinema exhibition sector allows insights in the dynamic intersections between economic, social and cultural history. One of the central questions in the debates about the history of movie-going in the Netherlands centres on why the size and number of cinemas and cinema visits per capita has been significantly lower than the average in Western Europe throughout most of the twentieth century. This article monitors the restoration and repositioning of the Rotterdam cinema exhibition sector in the new city centre arising after the devastation of the bombardment of 1940. An analysis of the trade press and the archives of the influential business association ‘NBB’ suggests how effective local exhibitors were in fending off outsider entrepreneurs and regulating internal competition. Alternative networks of socio-cultural or religious or organizations were successfully prevented from setting up a viable operation exhibiting films.     

One Region,Many Regionalisms: The Multiple Identities of a Neo-Gothic Circle in the Low Countries (1863–1900)

Summary

Historical scholars have recently turned their attention to local communities, resulting in a lively debate about the role of regions and provinces in Western Europe. This has quite predictably led many to question this resurgence of local identities in order to discover the cultural roots and the geographical boundaries of these identities and their interaction with the formation of nation-states in the literary, artistic and political practices of the past two centuries. This article provides an introduction to one specific transnational intellectual network, the Guild of Saint Thomas and Saint Luke, which in the latter half of the nineteenth century served as a forum for the different local identities which were influential in the Gothic (and Catholic) Revival of the Low Countries. The interaction among the most influential members during the annual excursions of the Guild and the choice for the locations of these meetings resulted in different ideological discourses about the position and the borders of ‘Christian art’ in the Low Countries. Due to both internal and external influences these discourses very soon integrated into the national frame, making the definition of a potentially common style for the whole area impossible. The analysis is based on existing literature on regionalism and the Neo-Gothic Revival, and on archive material concerning the first meetings of the Guild. The above-mentioned observations offer the opportunity to underline the peculiarity of transnational permanent networks composed by a fluctuating number of participants and to stimulate debate about the applicability of this example to other geo-cultural contexts.     

The haircutting movement in modern China (1903–1927): Analysis from the view of “body”

Modern China was an intense period of “body rebuilding.” Within the field of body history in China, the modern Chinese history has been rediscovered and reinterpreted from the view of “body.” In this paper, the author attempts to explore the movement of women’s haircutting in modern China and analyzes its social and political meaning from the view of body organ, gender, politics and culture. The conclusion is that the women’s haircutting movement in modern China was involved in the pursuit of state power, women’s rights, and political power in different levels.     

The role of charity in public relief, 1708–1871: Copenhagen as case

This article explores when and why charity vanished from public relief in Copenhagen and thereby differentiates itself from the traditional research field on welfare that focuses on studying the growth of taxation and social spending in the 19th century. This article reveals that charity was not solely a transfer of financial resources, but that charitable donations also entailed a cultural symbolism, which implied that charity was meant to support the local worthy poor. When the function of public relief underwent a transformation, especially at the beginning of the 19th century, the cultural symbolism of charity became incompatible with public relief. After the 1830s, the inhabitants of Copenhagen ceased to donate to public relief and instead donated charity to private philanthropy, which usually targeted the worthy poor for its help.     

“The Men of the North” Redux: Nanook and Canadian National Unity

This article explores the operation of nordicity as a discursive resource in Canadian national identity. Drawing on the late nineteenth-century idea of Canadians as “the men of the north” and therefore having a particular national character, this article examines the way that the Inuit have been drawn into this discursive frame since the 1950s. The key argument advanced in this article is that idealized images of the Inuit as exemplars of “northern people” operate in various ways to affirm a “northern” identity for all Canadians. This claim is explored with reference to the images of Nanook of the North and of the Inuit as “a quintessential Canadian Folk.” Continuities between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century versions of the “northmen” thesis are examined in this article.     

Fascist Colonialism: The Archaeology of Italian Outposts in Western Ethiopia (1936–41)

Despite the relevance of material culture in the politics and culture of Italian Fascism (1922–45), this phenomenon has rarely been approached from an archaeological point of view. In this article, I argue that archaeology can provide new insights into the study of this particular version of totalitarianism. I will show the connections that an archaeological study of fascism has with some concerns of historical archaeology, such as colonialism, power, conflict, and race. For this, three Italian military sites in Ethiopia will be examined.     

“The Pull of Love”: Mutual Love as Democratic Virtue in Niebuhrian Political Theology

Although Reinhold Niebuhr's account of democracy aims to protect marginalized communities by restraining sin through the diffusion of power, the conceptions of sin and love that inform his political theology have anti-democratic consequences for members of these communities. I address this inconsistency by revisiting his under-developed idea of mutual love and clarifying his account of sin. Mutual love occupies crucial terrain between agape and justice for Niebuhr, and therefore enables moral agents to achieve democratic goals. Given the nature and importance of mutual love, I clarify Niebuhr's account of sin by making his position on “self-love” more moderate than it often appears.