Written on the heavens: Recent studies in archaeoastronomy

Aveni, Anthony F., ed. The Lines of Nazca. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1990. xii + 343 pp. including references, appendices, and index. $60.00 cloth.

Aveni, Anthony F., ed. World Archaeoastronomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. xiii + 504 pp. including chapter references and index. $125.00 cloth.     

Charles the bold and the crusade: politics and propaganda

The pressures on Charles the Bold (duke of Burgundy from 1467 to his death in 1477) to lead, or lend his support to, a crusade were many. His Italian allies and the papacy all pleaded for his help and participation; and these appeals were augmented by the exhortation contained in much of the literature popular at the Burgundian court and by the presence there of refugees from the East.Charles's response was mixed. Political and moral pressures made it impossible for him to ignore the question of the crusade, but, even if his attitude should be characterized as cautious rather than as indifferent, he never did go on crusade. Equally, however, he repeatedly justified his comparative inaction and, at the same time, made propaganda against his enemies by suggesting that their hostility alone prevented him from embarking on an expedition to drive back the infidel.This response, since it was not untypical of the princes of his generation, helps explain the West's failure to unite against the Turks. From the point of view of Burgundian history, Charles's cautious attitude towards the crusade tends to support the revisionists who argue that he was far less ‘rash’ than the traditional historical view allows.     

Charles the bold and the crusade: politics and propaganda

The pressures on Charles the Bold (duke of Burgundy from 1467 to his death in 1477) to lead, or lend his support to, a crusade were many. His Italian allies and the papacy all pleaded for his help and participation; and these appeals were augmented by the exhortation contained in much of the literature popular at the Burgundian court and by the presence there of refugees from the East.Charles's response was mixed. Political and moral pressures made it impossible for him to ignore the question of the crusade, but, even if his attitude should be characterized as cautious rather than as indifferent, he never did go on crusade. Equally, however, he repeatedly justified his comparative inaction and, at the same time, made propaganda against his enemies by suggesting that their hostility alone prevented him from embarking on an expedition to drive back the infidel.This response, since it was not untypical of the princes of his generation, helps explain the West's failure to unite against the Turks. From the point of view of Burgundian history, Charles's cautious attitude towards the crusade tends to support the revisionists who argue that he was far less ‘rash’ than the traditional historical view allows.     

Governmentality and comic propaganda: Mighty Man,the black superhero of apartheid

Recent years have seen growing academic interest in the proliferation of a distinct genre of African superheroes. There is, however, a much longer – and at times, problematic – history of superheroes in and from Africa, a history often heavily infused with colonial and imperial ideology. Using the 1970s South African Mighty Man comic book series, this article highlights how popular culture and media can be used as covert and mundane tool of governmentality. Mighty Man can be understood as a technique of power deployed in service of the apartheid regime's philosophy of separate development, illustrating the use of popular culture as a technology of (colonial) governmentality. The landscapes, narratives and additional content of Mighty Man were used in efforts to instil and frame a conduct of conduct amongst Black subjects – both in accepting separate development and the apartheid government, and in framing the everyday practices and dispositions that would allow for governing at a distance by the white minority regime. Mighty Man provides a powerful example of state-commissioned, covert comic propaganda which was indelibly framed by government policy and an ambition to create and impose a set of values and ideals around the dispositions, behaviour and actions of Black subjects. Ultimately, Mighty Man embodied a segregationist fantasy in which the absence of non-Black characters both denied the possibility of inter-racial contact and normalised social and spatial segregation – as well as class-based aspirations – while simultaneously promoting the conduct of conduct amongst subjects that would maintain these divisions. Through the construction of moral township landscapes, the Mighty Man series not only sought to regulate the conduct of the colonised subject through the condemning of ‘immoral’ behaviours but also attempted to offer illusory hopes of aspiration and freedom.     

Oliver Cromwell and the Cambridge Elections of 1640

Oliver Cromwell's many biographers have been puzzled by his elections as MP for Cambridge in 1640. His connections with the town at this time were slight. Historians have, therefore, fallen back on his supposed opposition to the draining of the fens or, more recently, on possible aristocratic patronage. This article proposes a new theory, based on a rehabilitation of a very old source, James Heath's Flagellum, one of the earliest Cromwell biographies. Heath claimed that Cromwell had been elected with the support of a group of minor members of the corporation. Although very garbled, the Flagellum account probably records genuine details about the election and the men it identified as Cromwell's key supporters can be shown to have opposed the religious policies of the local bishop, Matthew Wren of Ely. Cromwell was probably elected as a critic of Wren.     

Consequences of Designating the Recent Past: Korreweg-district,Groningen, The Netherlands

The article focuses on the meaning of heritage, especially on its connection to time, space and people, and is concerned with signification, representation and identity at a national scale. Key questions are how the image of Estonianness creates national heritage out of diverse legacies and how these messages fit the local circumstances. This is examined in the case of Paldiski, a small town on the Pakri Peninsula west of the Estonian capital Tallinn. The area encompasses all that is considered non‐Estonian, but nevertheless reflects the history and geography of the country and thus is used for critical examination of current heritage creation and preservation.     

Beyond the German Model of Capitalism: Unorthodox Local Business Development in the Cologne Media Industry

On the basis of a media firm-survey and the measurement of in-town enterprise concentration, this paper explains the extraordinary sub-sectoral specialization and the spatial concentration towards radio and television in a German city: Cologne. A peculiar mix of institutional support, typical of German capitalism and unorthodox deviance from such arrangements is discovered in all matters of collective goods provision, including vocational training, enterprise financing, etc. Using a case study-approach, this article shows how the German model of capitalism can be rearranged for new markets on the local level, successfully overcoming institutional constraints by informal cooperation and institutional entrepreneurship.     

活跃在太行山上的文艺轻骑兵——八路军太行纪念馆宣讲小分队掠影

在驰名中外的太行老区，活跃着一支高扬爱国主义教育旗帜，以文艺为武器，大力宣传八路精神，奏响“发扬革命传统，争取更大光荣”主旋律的宣讲小分队。机关部队留下了她们飒爽英姿的身影；厂矿学校回响着她们催人泪下的演讲。她们以惊人的毅力战胜严寒酷暑，全然不顾旅途劳顿，心中只有一个闪光的信念：以八路精神宣传八路精神，这就是闻名遐迩的八路军太行纪念馆“八路精神”宣讲小分队的座右铭。 这支家喻户晓的宣讲小分队，始创于２０００年金秋十月，当时正值全国人民深入开展“三讲”教育和“三个代表”学习的关键时期，馆领导便抓住…     

Reenactment, Fantasy, and the Paranoia of History: Oliver Stone's Docudramas

In the late 1980s and 1990s, American popular culture has been increasingly rife with conspiracy narratives of recent historical events. Among cultural producers, filmmaker Oliver Stone has had a significant impact on popular understanding of American culture in the late twentieth century through a series of docudramas which reread American history through the lens of conspiracy theory and paranoia. This paper examines the films of Oliver Stone—in particular Platoon , Born on the Fourth of July , JFK , and Nixon —asking why they have achieved popularity and brought about catharsis, why they are the subject of attack, and why it is useful to look beyond the debate about truth and falsehood that has surrounded them. It analyzes the ways in which Stone's status as a Vietnam veteran allowed Platoon to be accorded the authenticity of survivor discourse, whereas JFK and Nixon were subject to almost hysterical attack, not only because of Stone's assertions of conspiracy, but also because of his cinematic style of tampering with famous images. Taking these films as its point of departure, this paper examines the role of images in the construction of history, the form of the docudrama, the reenactment of historical images, fantasies of history, and ways in which paranoia part of the practice of citizenship.     

Justinian's Novella 11: memory and political propaganda in the build up to the Gothic War

This paper will examine memories of a fourth‐ to fifth‐century western Balkan past in Justinian's Novella 11. Announcing the appointment of a new northern Illyrian archbishop at the city of Justiniana Prima, this decree refers nostalgically to an earlier period of late antiquity, prior to the invasions of Attila, when Sirmium, rather than Justiniana Prima, had been the administrative and ecclesiastical capital of Illyricum. Published in April 535, on the eve of the Gothic War, it thus suggested that Gothic‐held Sirmium belonged to the eastern Roman state. In this way it contradicted rival political propaganda emanating from the Gothic kingdom of Italy, according to which it was the rightful Roman heir to the western Balkans.     

Digital Management of Rock Art: the African Archaeology Archive Cologne (AAArC)

Archaeology is a costly and object-affine practice requiring sophisticated technical equipment, and therefore is largely initiated and run from industrialised countries. Accordingly, also data and objects are largely lodged in these countries. In rock art, this leads to the paradoxical situation that many motifs and sites with outstanding prehistoric art are better known and more often shown in northern hemisphere urban centres than in the global south rural areas where the art in fact is found. This paper will focus on the possibilities and benefits of a digital archive in making pictures, data and other archaeological source material accessible anytime from everywhere. An open online archive will in the long run flatten the hierarchical order of access to the results of archaeological research and heritage archiving. Today, this is still concentrated in the western metropoles and rarest in African hinterlands. The open access to thousands of pictures will facilitate dissemination of motifs in particular since the distribution of smartphones and network coverage are ever growing particularly in Africa’s rural areas. The African Archaeology Archive Cologne (AAArC), being licenced under Creative Commons, provides open access to tens of thousands of rock art photos and to the enormous Brandberg-Daureb Data Base that contains 39,000+ rock art figures. Additionally AAArC stores all kinds of digital archaeological products from across Africa (mainly Sudan, Algeria, Chad and Namibia), including audio and film documentary.     

Sputniks,explorers and propaganda: The discovery of the earth's radiation belts 1

Abstract

The most important scientific discovery of the early space era ‐ the 1958 discovery of the radiation belts of the Earth ‐ was made in the context of Cold War rivalry between the USSR and the USA. The paper uses previously unavailable archival records to reconstruct the relative contributions of American and Soviet researchers and their interations during the process of discovery. The former discovered what is now known as the inner radiation belt, while the latter observed the outer radiation belt and gradually came to realize the existence of two distinctively different zones of radiation. The uses of science for the purposes of Cold War political propaganda affected the behavior of scientists and led to the misrepresentation of the events in mass media.     

Legends of the Beauchamps' ancestors: the use of baronial propaganda in medieval England

From the early part of the eleventh century, legendary propaganda was generated by the Tosny family. The Warwickshire branch of the Beaumonts did likewise from the late twelfth century, their efforts culminating in the popular romance Guy of Warwick. Such material was designed to romanticize those activities of the families which had led to their acquiring landed power, and to reinforce a widespread acceptance of the status which they endeavoured to retain in face both of the growing powers of the monarchy, and of economic pressures. By contrast, the families of Beauchamp and Mauduit relied on growing royal power to enhance their position. Beauchamp dominance of Worcestershire through the hereditary enjoyment of the post of sheriff, and Manduit enjoyment of court influence through exercise of the hereditary office of chamberlain, obviated the need to generate a popular image, although both families attracted unfavourable notice in contemporary literature, generated by territorial or professional rivals. When the estates of all four families merged, at the end of the thirteenth century, to form the late medieval earldom of Warwick, the Guy image was consciously revived. John Rous, composing the Rous Roll in 1483, in order to glorify the lords of Warwick, suppressed unfavourable elements, both in this literature and in modern political history, while elaborating on others, reworking the material with the help of current literary themes.     

Mobility in seventh-century Byzantium: analysing Emperor Heraclius’ political ideology and propaganda

This paper aims to shed light on the mobility of people and relics in the seventh century. It will show that Emperor Heraclius strategically designed his movements and those of his household, citizens, and officials, as well as those of relics within and beyond the borders of Byzantium, in order to consolidate the empire and his position in it. These movements also allowed Heraclius to associate himself effectively with Old Testament, antique, and Byzantine exemplary models of leadership. Overall, this look at mobility in terms of political ideology and propaganda provides a more nuanced understanding of imperial leadership in seventh-century Byzantium.