Native Yucatán and Spanish influence: The archaeology and history of chikinchel

Researchers interested in developing long-term social histories are faced with myriad difficulties rising from the biased and fragmentary nature of various available sources of information on the distant past. Understanding the crucial centuries surrounding the Spanish invasion of the northern Maya lowlands is hindered by uncritical mixing of the written and material records. This case study from the Chikinchel region in northeast Yucatán is focused on economic issues. Relevant data from each register first are considered separately in order to preserve the integrity of each source. The resulting synthesis offers a new, well-informed interpretation of late prehispanic economic organization and its alteration under Spanish authority.     

Trade,Politics and the Navy in Latin America: The British in the Paraná, 1845–46

When military conflict and economic disruption in the river Plate region led to a British naval occupation of the river Paraná in 1845–46, traders from many nations followed the warships upstream hoping to conduct business in the Argentine interior and with Paraguay. Since the 1920s historians have uniformly disparaged this Paraná expedition as a commercial failure, insisting that the foreign intruders found neither trade nor welcome among the local populations. In Argentine historiography, the episode is consistently presented as a successful assertion of national identity in the face of European imperial assault. Research here, however, demonstrates not only the expedition's economic success but, again contrary to established opinion, its military and strategic achievements, before the British government abandoned its policy of armed intervention. The Paraná was eventually opened to foreign navigation by international treaties in 1853.     

The notebook and the laboratory – types of knowledge in German piano-making, 1880–1930

ABSTRACT

Between the second half of the nineteenth century and the 1930s, German piano making changed from a craft to an industry. Nevertheless, piano makers still needed specific working knowledge to produce quality instruments. This knowledge was bound to individuals and transmitted informally from one person to another. The piano makers took working knowledge as the core of their practice. But in the shift to industrial methods of production, the key question was how to translate working knowledge into formal knowledge—to articulate what such knowledge meant and how it might be applied. Using the case study of the German piano making factory Grotrian-Steinweg, I show how the piano maker Kurt Grotrian used his notebooks to grapple with the problem of formalizing his working knowledge. At this company, an acoustic laboratory was established, in whose reports formalized knowledge was stored due to the transition of piano making from a craft to an industry.     

The challenge of the spaceship: Arthur C. Clarke and the history of the future, 1930–1970

Arthur C. Clarke’s 1946 essay on ‘The Challenge of the Spaceship’ was one of the founding manifestoes of the Space Age, and helped to establish him as the West’s leading techno-prophet. Restating his ideas in subsequent factual and fictional works, Clarke successfully propagated the belief that man’s destiny lay in space and that the process was already underway. On the surface Clarke’s oeuvre offers a classic astrofuturist model of progress as technology-driven, but on closer examination it also incorporates a more pessimistic, historically based strand of philosophy, British rather than American. This essay traces the genesis of Clarke’s early work and the influence upon him of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee and the moral philosophers Olaf Stapledon and C.S. Lewis. Toynbee was essentially a Christian pessimist who believed that western civilization was on the way out; his long historical perspectives were an important source of inspiration for Clarke, leading him to a cyclical rather than a simply progressive model of history which contemplated both the beginning and the end of civilizations. The concerns of Stapledon and Lewis with grand narratives of decline and redemption were also influences on Clarke. All this needs to be understood in relation to both the European experience of World War I and to the coming of the atomic bomb, the latter a profound influence on Clarke’s generation. Such perspectives gave European astroculture a more modulated vision of the human future in space than the technologically based astrofuturism which dominated in the USA.