Interview with Stephen J. Pyne

Born in California in 1949, reared and educated in Arizona, Pyne earned his bachelor's degree in English at Stanford University and his master's and doctoral degrees in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Pyne has written about fire on earth as none did before him. He has fought fires on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, collected a unique library on how different cultures have used and misused fire in the past, and consulted on fire management for many agencies throughout the world. He has published seven books, three monographs, fourteen reports, and over fifty articles and essays. A MacArthur Fellow from 1988 to 1993, Pyne is a professor of American Studies at Arizona State University West. He and his wife, Sonja Sandberg, were married in 1977 and have two daughters. They live in Glendale, Arizona, where this interview was conducted in September 1994 by Roger Adelson.     

INTERVIEW WITH ROGER ADELSON

Born in 1942 and reared in Kansas, Adelson received his B.A. degree from George Washington University, Washington, D.C.; his B.Litt. degree from Oxford University, Oxford, England; and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington University, St. his, Missouri, where he was a Danforth Fellow. He held a post-doctoral research fellowship at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and taught briefly at Harvard before joining the history faculty at Arizona State University in 1974. Adelson's publications include Mark Sykes: Portrait of an Amateur and London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902–1922. While editing The Historian from 1990 to 1995, Adelson has interviewed numerous historians; many will be republished this fall in Speaking of History. As a consulting editor for The Historian, Adelson will continue doing interviews. This one was conducted by Peter Iverson, associate editor, and edited by Joy Margheim, editorial assistant, in December, 1995.     

The A-Bomb Controversy at the National Air and Space Museum

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1947, Linenthal earned his bachelor's degree in religious studies at Western Michigan University, his master's degree in divinity at the Pacific School of Religion, and his Ph.D. in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is Professor of Religion and American Culture at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. His books include: Symbolic Defense: The Cultural Significance of the Strategic Defense Initiative (1989); Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields (2nd edition, 1993); Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (1995); American Sacred Space (co-editor, 1995). He is writing a history of the A-Bomb controversy that will appear in a book to be published in 1996. Linenthal has often lectured about controversial historic sites for National Park Service staff. At the USS Arizona Memorial, Linenthal delivered a commemorative address on 7 December 1994, on the 53rd anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Linenthal and his wife, with their two sons, reside in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Linenthal was the only historian to testify before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration about the National Air and Space Museum's ill-fated exhibit, “The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II.” What follows is Linenthal's Senate statement and comments he has written for The Historian.     

近代日本文学家的“东力学”——以芥川龙之介为中心

美国著名文学批评家爱德华·W·萨义德在《东方学》一书中提出了在西方实际上一直存在着与“先进的西方”相对的“落后的东方”,也就是所谓的“东方学”式的“二元对立”思维方式。它在西方国家以东方国家为对象大力推进殖民政策的过程中,已成为一种霸权话语。日本是一个东方国家,但是它在比西方国家落后几十年的状态下学习西方,并发展到以中国大陆为主要对象推进殖民政策。从日本近代文学家当时关于中国的言论当中也可以看出有类似于萨义德提出的“东方学”的思维方式。因篇幅的关系,本文试图通过借鉴萨义德在《东方学》里所提出的观点,重点围绕芥川龙之介这位作家,深入探讨他对中国的一些言论。     

《弗吉尼亚人》的史学价值

美国著名作家欧文.威斯特的成名作《弗吉尼亚人—平原骑手》与19世纪末20世纪初美国的社会和文化主题挂钩,表达了镀金时代的美国梦精神,反映了西部牧业开发中东西部矛盾与冲突的走向,展现了怀俄明牧牛业的社会、经济及政治发展状况,不仅是一部影响深远的牛仔小说,而且具有较高的史学价值。同时,受时代和作者阶级立场的局限,《弗吉尼亚人—平原骑手》偏袒大牧场主,带有取悦统治阶级的阶级倾向性,小说中塑造的牛仔形象对西部小说的程式化产生了重要影响。     

The story of Comanche: horsepower,heroism and the conquest of the American West

Marked by the Census Bureau’s closure of the frontier; the symbolic end of American Indian resistance at Wounded Knee and powerful articulations on the ‘winning of the West’ from Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill Cody, the early 1890s was a critical moment in the history of the American West. It also saw the death of one of the region’s most famous cavalry horses, Comanche, who succumbed to colic in 1891 aged twenty-nine. Famously billed as ‘the only living thing to survive the Battle of the Little Bighorn’, this article uses Comanche as a locus around which to examine the history of warhorses in the military culture of the American West, and, more broadly, to point towards a growing scholarship on war and the environment that emphasises the usefulness of such themes as spatiality and inter-species exchange in embellishing our understanding of the experience, impact and cultural memory of war. Not only does Comanche’s lifespan (c.1862–1891) usefully coincide with the federal government’s final conquest of the West but his equine biography serves as valuable testament to the use of horses in the US military as both practical and symbolic agents of American expansionism.     

Military Curfew, Race-Based Internment, and Mr. Justice Rutledge

The story is well known. A few months after Pearl Harbor, a curfew was imposed on West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens. Then they were confined at internment camps around the country. This tragic episode continues to generate scrutiny, including three new books last year. ¹ But there is at least one story, as yet untold, that will be of particular interest to students of the Supreme Court. Why did Justice Wiley Rutledge, the Court's newest member, who was known for his unyielding allegiance to civil liberties, join the majority in allowing internment?     

Virtual Forum: Archaeology and Decolonization

In this forum, patiently achieved through months of cyber-work, participants Nayanjot Lahiri (India), Nick Shepherd (South Africa), Joe Watkins (USA) and Larry Zimmerman (USA), plus the two editors of Arqueología Suramericana, Alejandro Haber (Argentina) and Cristóbal Gnecco (Colombia), discuss the topic of archaeology and decolonization. Nayanjot Lahiri teaches archaeology in her capacity as Professor at the Department of History, University of Delhi. Her books include Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered (2005) and The Archaeology of Indian Trade Routes (1992). She has edited The Decline and Fall of the Indus Civilization (2000) and an issue of World Archaeology entitled The Archaeology of Hinduism (2004). Nick Shepherd is a senior lecturer in the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, where he convenes the program in public culture in Africa. He sits on the executive committee of the World Archaeological Congress, and is co-editor of the journal Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress. In 2004 he was based at Harvard University as a Mandela Fellow. He has published widely on issues of archaeology and society in Africa, and on issues of public history and heritage. Joe Watkins is Choctaw Indian and archaeologist Joe Watkins is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. He is 1/2 Choctaw Indian by blood, and has been involved in archaeology for more than thirty-five years. He received his Bachelor’s of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Oklahoma and his Master’s of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Anthropology from Southern Methodist University, where his doctorate examined archaeologists’ responses to questionnaire scenarios concerning their perceptions of American Indian issues. His current study interests include the ethical practice of anthropology and the study of anthropology’s relationships with descendant communities and Aboriginal populations, and he has published numerous articles on these topics. His first book Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice (AltaMira Press, 2000) examined the relationships between American Indians and archaeologists and is in its second printing His latest book, Reclaiming Physical Heritage: Repatriation and Sacred Sites (Chelsea House Publishers 2005) is aimed toward creating an awareness of Native American issues among high school students. Larry J. Zimmerman is Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies and Public Scholar of Native American Representation at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. He is Vice President of the World Archaeological Congress. He also has served WAC as its Executive Secretary and as the organizer of the first WAC Inter-Congress on Archaeological Ethics and the Treatment of the Dead. His research interests include the archaeology of the North American Plains, contemporary American Indian issues, and his current project examining the archaeology of homelessness. Originally published in Spanish in Arqueología Suramericana 3(1), 2007     

Yusuf Islam (aka Cat Stevens) and his anti-war and pro-peace protest songs: from hippy peace to Islamic peace

ABSTRACT

In the 1970s Yusuf Islam (aka Cat Stevens) inspired a generation with his songs on anti-materialism, finding self and peace in such classic albums as Tea for the Tillerman (1970, US 3x platinum) and Teaser and the Firecat (1971, US 3x platinum). In December 1977 he converted to Islam, gave up popular music and focussed on humanitarian and educational work, until he returned to popular music in 2006. Meanwhile, Muslims became associated in the West as intolerant and violent. Yusuf has emerged in the last decade as a voice for progressive Muslims. This article explores the continuities in his music from his Cat Stevens days to his comeback and how he has reconciled popular music and his Cat Stevens past with his understanding of Islam. The focus is on his anti-war and pro-peace songs. It argues that his earlier songs are similar in their messages of world peace through love and unity, though less dark than his post-2006 songs. Additionally, his recent songs have a new message that the world must be more inclusive to achieve world peace. This is connected to him being a Muslim in the West and his feeling of exclusion, in an age when many in the West portray all Muslims as extremists. Consequently, in his recent music he reflects his experience as a Muslim, in the same way as his earlier music reflected the counter-culture of that period. Thus he has gone back to his earlier self after adopting a progressive understanding of Islam. Not Started Completed Rejected.     

Discovering Wang Yangming

The Ming dynasty Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming (1472–1529) has been the subject of a European and North American literature since at least the 18th century. But the rich history of writing about him in the West has been largely obscured by an English-language scholarship published in the 1960s and 1970s. This earlier literature nevertheless provides one window into the broader history of intellectual encounter between China and the West, shedding light on it from the angle of the discovery of one of late imperial China’s most influential scholar-officials. This article’s goal is to provide a history of writing about Wang Yangming in Europe and North America from the 17th century to 1950, demonstrating both how historical circumstances shaped his reception and interpretation, and that these earlier accounts shared valuable insights yet worthy of our attention today.     

We are never alone: a conversation on bio art with Eduardo Kac

Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kac’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) work has raised eyebrows especially for his ‘transgenic art’ projects, among others: Genesis, 1999; GFP Bunny, 2000; The Eight Day, 2001; Natural History of the Enigma, 2003/08. In all of these, Kac and his scientific collaborators realize genetic interventions into living organisms at the same time as they trigger audience reactions to these from playful kinds of interaction that is integrated into the works’ open and dynamic creative process. Yet whereas the ethical and political challenges Kac’s work poses have sparked lively debates within and beyond the realm of the arts – can and must art engage with the ‘creative’ potentials of biotechnology and genetics? Do these not in fact (as Vilém Flusser and others have suggested) hold the key to realizing the vanguardist dream of merging art and life? Or should the artist, from the vantage point of his own creative practice, not rather warn us against the ethical and political risks involved in genetic engineering? – much less attention has been paid to the way Kac’s art also continues and transforms a particular legacy of post-concretist, ambient and performance art in Latin America.

Kac himself has referred to Brazilian artists Flávio de Carvalho, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark as informing his interest in open, participative forms, which characterize both his transgenic and his earlier ‘tele-presence’ art projects. Other Latin American artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have been producing intriguing engagements with living materials, multispecies habitats and organic remains, including such diverse names as Luis Fernando Benedit, Nicola Constantino, Nuno Ramos, or Teresa Margolles. In a conversation with Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi at the University of Zurich’s Center of Latin American Studies on March 12, 2015, Kac addressed the way in which his work might be seen as continuing or challenging long-standing representations of the New World as a repository of ‘nature’, from colonial chronicles of discovery to contemporary discourses of biodiversity and conservation. To what extent is bio art – and the questions it raises about the Anthropocene as a threshold of radical biopolitical convergence between ‘history’ and ‘nature’ – necessarily ‘transcultural’ and planetary in its extension?     

The nuclear nation and the German question: an American reactor in West Berlin

This essay analyses the relationship between nuclear technology and ideas about the nation in the late 1950s by looking at the US–West German bilateral agreement and at American proposals to develop reactors in West Berlin, both of which emerged from Eisenhower's 1953 Atoms for Peace programme. American efforts to maintain tight control over the German nuclear sphere contradicted the claim that reactors were solely instruments of peace. At the same time, plans to build a reactor in West Berlin underscored that city's status as an occupied city with an uncertain future and with ill-defined relationships to East and West Germany.     

William Alexander Hammond: The Centenary of His Death

In the United States, the field of clinical neurology began within the medical practice of a single physician, William Alexander Hammond. In the 1870s, this New York medical practitioner became the first American physician who limited his practice to patients who suffered from symptoms potentially due to dysfunction of the nervous system. From the experience of his huge practice, Hammond wrote the first American textbook of neurology. With Silas Weir Mitchell, he founded the American Neurological Association. The year 2000 marked the 100th anniversary of Hammond's death and stimulates this brief survey of his life.     

The Interaction of Elements in the System “Ocean—Atmosphere—Continents”

A Soviet geophysicist, who has been specializing in physics of the sea, reviews his own recent work on the Atlantic sources of heat that reach the Soviet Union, particularly its European part. One-fourth of the total amount of heat is found to originate in an area of the northeast Atlantic, off Scandinavia, where temperature isanomals are at a maximum. Three-fourths are said to originate in an area of cyclic currents coinciding roughly with the North American Basin of the West Atlantic. The author also uses simple algebraic equations to calculate the parameters of a tropical hurricane, and finds a relationship between the surface-water temperature and the power of the hurricane.     

British Women Travellers and Constructions of Racial Difference Across the Nineteenth-Century American West

At a time coinciding historically with the height of the British Empire, the immigrants' rush to occupy American West lands and the wholesale removal of Native Americans onto reservations, encounters between Native peoples and British women travellers became emblematic of a whole range of socio-spatial relationships of domination, subordination and resistance. In this paper, I examine representations of western Native Americans in the travelogues of ten British women travellers to the late nineteenth-century American West, produced primarily during encounters at sites along the western rail lines. Constructions of racial and gender differences in the texts can be tied to British colonial discourses, as well as to the social relations inherent in the multiple contact zones within which the encounters took place.     

A Feminine Atlas? Sacagewea,the Suffragettes and the Commemorative Landscape in the American West, 1904-1910

This article examines how American suffragettes sought to reinscribe women's lives and experiences into the canon of American historical narratives about the 'conquest' of the West as part of their wider campaign for an enhanced female role in public life in the early years of the twentieth century. The analysis focuses on the centenary of Lewis and Clark's early nineteenth-century explorations into the Pacific North-west. The renewed interest in the exploration of the West during this centenary gave women activists an opportunity to develop a modified, and more explicitly female, version of events in which the previously obscure figure of Sacagewea, the young Native American women who had guided Lewis and Clark, assumed a more central position. The idea of Sacagewea as a historical role model for modern American womanhood was assiduously cultivated in several historical and literary texts that have been explored in detail elsewhere. This article is primarily concerned with the hitherto unexamined, but closely related, campaign to commemorate Sacagewea's achievements by physically reinserting her image into the emerging cultural landscape of the West in a series of statues erected to her memory at various points on her epic journey. The article concludes by considering some of the ironies associated with this new emphasis on the female contribution to the Lewis and Clark narrative. Though a necessary corrective to earlier masculine accounts, the cultivation of Sacagewea by white, educated and well-to-do American women served only to underscore the persistence of other divisions within early twentieth-century American society, particularly surrounding the vexed question of 'race'.     

D. W. Meinig and The Shaping of America

Published over eighteen years, between 1986 and 2004, in four volumes and well over 2000 pages, Donald Meinig's The Shaping of America quartet is one of modern geography's most substantial achievements. It warrants and repays careful attention. This essay seeks first to situate or contextualize The Shaping project by attending to the development of Meinig's ideas and scholarship before 1986. It argues that the approaches and emphases of Meinig's magnum opus were substantially but not entirely adumbrated by his earlier work and that the four volumes reflect something of the intellectual contexts in which Meinig developed his ideas about historical geography and the discipline more generally, as well as of Meinig's own particular interests and circumstances. The second section of this essay turns attention to the four volumes and offers some assessment of their contribution to, and significance for, geography, historical geography, and the study of American and Atlantic history.     

论柯文的"中国中心观"

柯文《在中国发现历史》一书所提倡的“中国中心观”,不仅仅是一个史学方法论问题,更是一个深层次的史学理论问题;尽管它仍存在着明显的缺陷,但对于克服美国中国史研究领域中的“西方中心主义”弊端,具有重要的意义。     

Russia's Several Seats at the Table

In his reply to Jonathan Haslam's article published in the January 1998 issue of International Affairs , William Odom outlines his vision of NATO and its origins and purpose, and discusses the American strategic view of the post-Cold War world against which the decision to expand NATO should be seen. Russia will, he maintains, remain a problem for the West, but its importance and power should not be overemphasized. The danger facing the Western security order is not one of Russia's exclusion but of US power ebbing out of Europe—a distinct probability unless NATO expands.