WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE?*

This article examines the potential future of the U.S. environmental justice movement in a time of economic uncertainty, increasing inequality, and an ascendant white right. It traces the origins of “whiteness” as a historically contingent concept within American history and its relationship to current politics in general and the politics of the environment in particular. It reviews the emergence of research, public concern, and action over the linkage between environmental pollution, race, and class. After offering a critique of the contrary empirical findings of academic researchers, the article identifies two roads for future work in the field, and their potential pitfalls.     

RECONSTRUCTING THE ROYAL FAMILY OF RAMESSES Ⅱ AND ITS HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE

A systematic examination of Ramesses Ⅱ's large family of over 100 children and at least a dozen wives reveals that the Great Royal Wives Nefertari and Isetnofret, along with their children, enjoyed a privileged status within the hierarchical structure of the royal family. Nefertari owed her supreme status to being mother of Ramessse Ⅱ's first born son Amunhirkhopeshef, while Ramesses Ⅱ was still crown prince under Sety I. Isetnofret's sons and daughters were also favored because she gave birth to the second born son Prince Ramesses Jr. Isetnofret herself did not enjoy prominence on the monuments until after the death of Nefertari, nor was she buried in the Valley of the Queens. The remaining offspring of these wives also benefited from the prestige of their mothers and eldest brothers. Other early wives gave birth to the majority of Ramesses Ⅱ's children, but these women are now completely anonymous. Other attested wives of the king include his five daughter-wives and two Hittite Princess-brides. No other Egyptian wives are known for Ramesses Ⅱ. Monumental sources that privilege Queen Nefertari, and the children of both Nefertari and Isetnofret, reveal a hierarchical structure of the royal family.     

IS THE GENDER DIVISION OF LABOUR CHANGING IN JAPAN?

The paper examines potential changes in housework and employment among married couples in Japan. The data are from national surveys in 1994 and 2000 of persons aged 20–49. Wives’ housework hours decreased and the proportion of husbands doing any housework increased. A majority of wives are employed, many work full-time and husbands work long hours and many return home late in the evening. While wives do less housework if they are employed, husbands’ housework does not respond to their wives’ employment. Large gender differences persist, with wives’ employment associated with family constraints. In general, changes were the same across categories of the population, though three of five significant interactions with time involved wives’ education. A positive relationship between wives’ education and any housework by husbands becomes stronger over time. The results suggest gender inequality in housework may decrease in the future, with potential relevance to future marriage and fertility.     

THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER?

Alon Confino has issued a desideratum to other historians that they should bring questions and insights from cultural history to bear on the study of the Holocaust. Taking the work of Saul Friedländer as his point of departure, Confino nonetheless sets out on a path different from Friedländer's. He turns away from the goal of “integrated history” and instead seeks to investigate the realm of German culture, understood as encompassing much more than just Nazi ideology. By analyzing how the Holocaust has come to be perceived as unprecedented, as a rupture in human history, and furthermore by treating Jewish victims' sense of disbelief as an artifact of the past, one that has continued to inform unduly the historical understanding of the Holocaust up to the present day, historians will be able to account anew for what made the persecution and extermination of Jews imaginable and thus possible. With Confino's approach, a major historiographical question resurfaces, however: namely, what place an analysis of non‐Germans should occupy in the history of the Holocaust, and in particular what place should be accorded to Jewish voices? This essay argues that we cannot make sense of why Germans supported and carried out the Holocaust without also considering Jewish contemporaneous perspectives and imaginings.     

“MY PUTREFACTION IS MYRRH:”THE LEXICOGRAPHY OF DECAY,GILDED COFFINS,AND THE GREEN SKIN OF OSIRIS

While the ancient Egyptian practice of mummification inhibited physical decomposition, the Egyptians believed that there was a liminal state during decomposition where the dead were vulnerable to spiritual attack. Spells and incantations were used as a measure to preserve the deceased by ritually converting and transforming the products of decomposition. This paper explores the lexicography of rot and decay in order to study idiomatic expressions that anticipate outcomes that preserve the dead, reverse decomposition, and transfigure the deceased. The paper relates the ritual conversion presumed through some of the Coffin Texts to religious beliefs and practices that include apotheosis, gilded coffins, and the green skin of Osiris.     

THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS? GENOMIC HISTORY AND THE RETURN OF RACE IN THE STUDY OF THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN

This article discusses the impact of genomic history, a subdiscipline that emerged in the study of the ancient Mediterranean in the 2010s. In 2014, scientists first published a method for extracting genetic material, which they christened aDNA (ancient DNA), from ancient human remains in hot climates. After a decade of research, genomic history is now poised to transform our understanding of Mediterranean premodernity, centering migration and conflict as the key mechanisms for cultural change. Despite years of critique, aDNA researchers have failed to seriously examine the bioessentialist assumptions implicit in their work—a failure that has led many to deploy language that is strikingly evocative of pre-World War II racialism. Even worse, some genomic historians continue to make troubling overtures toward the ethnonationalist Right, which has been ascendant across Europe and North America since the 2010s. This article traces the intellectual genealogy of genomic history from World War II to the present, examines recent attempts to answer criticism from the humanities and social sciences, and suggests paths for responsible use of aDNA in historical and prehistorical scholarship.     

IS THE MACROSCOPIC CLASSIFICATION OF FLINT USEFUL? A PETROARCHAEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS AND CHARACTERIZATION OF FLINT RAW MATERIALS FROM THE IBERIAN NEOLITHIC MINE OF CASA MONTERO*

Casa Montero is a mining complex located outside Madrid (Spain), dated from the Early Neolithic (c. 5400–5000 cal bc ). An area of some 4 ha has been investigated and some 4000 shafts recorded, of which 324 have been excavated. The characterization of its raw flint materials and the establishment of its diagnostic features are indispensable in the reconstruction of the distribution of the mine's products beyond the immediate site. This work reports the geological study of the mine's Miocene flint layers and their petrological characterization. Archaeological samples from the mine's shafts were classified according to macroscopic features and petrological characteristics.     

IS THE GHOSH MODEL INTERESTING?*

ABSTRACT The overall value of the Ghosh model is appraised. Its treatment of quantities and prices is scrutinized by examining the variant with data in quantities and prices, and the variant with data in value and price indexes. The methodology involves returning to the accounting equations and shows that: (i) the Ghosh model offers solutions of limited interest, being incapable of providing prices or price indexes separately from quantities; (ii) what is taken to be the equation of Ghosh's value model is actually that of Ghosh's physical model; (iii) the Ghosh model may serve for cost‐push exercises, but the dual of the Leontief model performs the same task in a much simpler and more natural way; and (iv) Cronin's mixed models do not actually mix Leontief and Ghosh hypotheses.     

THE “RUSSIAN LAND” AND THE FORMATION OF THE TERRITORY OF THE ANCIENT RUSSIAN STATE

The author retraces, on the basis of extensive written sources, the formation of the territory of the ancient Russian “independent semi-states” on the vast expanse of the Eastern European Plain. His conclusions, which show that the problem of the study of the formation of state territory is not at all the same as the study of ethnic territory, particularly colonization, confirm that the territory of the ancient Russian state was formed not with the appearance in Kiev of Oleg and Igor but as a result of a long internal process that commenced long before that event and continued for centuries after. (The translation was prepared by James R. Gibson of York University, Toronto.)     

NOTES ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE INCANTATION OF MAQL SERIES

There has recently been a marked revival of interest in what many generations of Assyriologists called 憁agic?and 憌itchcraft literature?a revival in which the names of T. Abush1 (1974, 1986), G. Cunningham2 (1998), M. Geller3 (1985), A. Livingstone4 (1…     

THE PUBLICATION OF--＂BANQUETS OF WISES-THE TRANSLATION OF THE HISTORY OF TUBO＂

<正>Bawo Tsukla Chengwa(1504-1566) is the author of Banquets of Wises (in Tibetan,it is Lho-brag-chos-vbyung for short).The book has five volumes of which the mo...     

EASTER ISLAND： THE EVOLUTION OF ITS CULTURE UNTIL THE DESTRUCTIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

1. Introduction
Since the first time Easter Island was explored, scholars have been arguing and speculating about the date of the natives＇ arrival, the nature and purpose of the larger statues, its actual number of inhabitants, the reasons for the progressive deforestation of the island, etc.     

‘THE BEAUTY OF A SICK ROOM’: FAMILY CARE FOR THE DYING IN THE ENGLISH UPPER AND MIDDLE CLASS HOME c. 1840–c. 1890

Abstract

With the standard of care provided by hospitals and nursing homes to those nearing the end of their lives in Britain the subject of much concern and when increasing numbers of people would like to die at home, it is a timely moment to consider end of life care in the 19th century, when death at home was the norm and families had a leading role in providing care. This was also a period of change that laid the foundations for the 20th century model of hospital-centred palliative care. The article examines the experiences of middle and upper class carers, the objectives of care, including the importance of spiritual care, and the practicalities of providing care in the home. It also considers the support available to through informal networks of extended family, friends and neighbours and suggests aspects of care that may still have relevance to palliative care practice today.     

‘BEST FOR THE FAMILY’: RESEARCHING FAMILIES AND BUSINESS

Abstract

For most of us, the term ‘family firm’ summons images of an old-established and perhaps rather conservative business that has been passed down through the generations. This article starts by using a study of one firm to argue that the stereotype conceals significant questions about firms, families and the relations between them. It goes on to outline some recent historical work on family firms by looking, in turn, at research on the incidence and character of family business, on the strategies and performance of companies, and on the family dimension in enterprise. It stresses the importance of the small-scale and the local in this research and notes that historians are now using a range of sources familiar to local and community historians to develop this field.