The iron age in Mediterranean France: Colonial encounters, entanglements, and transformations

During the last seven centuries of the first millennium BC, the indigenous societies of Mediterranean France underwent a series of gradual social and cultural transformations that are linked in complex ways to their encounter and increasing entanglement with the broader Mediterranean world. This article presents a synthesis of current knowledge of this issue and explores some of the main themes guiding research. New evidence concerning the alien colonial agents (Etruscan, Greek, Punic/Iberian, and Roman), and the contrasting nature of their presence and power in the region, is discussed, as is evidence concerning forms of indigenous engagement with colonial states and paths of social and cultural change. The consumption of alien goods (wine, ceramics) and the adoption of foreign techniques and practices (ceramic production methods, coinage, writing) are examined in terms of the locally situated logic of demand and the ramifications for entanglement and change. Transformations in settlements, ritual spaces, funerary practices, and the agrarian landscape are discussed.     

Metals,microanalysis and meaning: a study of metal objects excavated from the indigenous cemetery of El Chorro de Maíta,Cuba

This is the first publication reporting systematic analytical research conducted on archaeological metals from Cuba. The main focus of the study consists of beads and small metal objects excavated at the cemetery of El Chorro de Maíta, which comprises some of the richest funerary deposits so far recovered on the island. Some comparative samples from the nearby site of Alcalá were also investigated, with an emphasis made on the manufacture, composition and origins of the different alloys. The resulting picture is that members of the social elite of the indigenous Taíno peoples were buried with beads made of placer gold exploited locally, gold–copper–silver pendants brought from continental South America and, above all, brass lacetags from European clothing that were perceived as sacred metals. The archaeometallurgical approach offers fresh insight into the relationships between Europeans and Taínos, and the impact of colonization on the indigenous customs, values and social structures.     

The Status of Geography in Cuba

A review of current Cuban research in geography and associated fields and of the institutions established for that purpose.     

The meaning of politics and the mechanics of meaning

Anthony Milner, The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya: Contesting Nationalism and the Expansion of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) pp.328 $75.00 ISBN 0 52145665 6.     

Making room for rubbers: Gender,technology, and birth control before the pill

Before the Food and Drug Administration approved in 1960 the distribution of oral contraceptives, the most popular form of birth control in the United States was the condom. Scholars have often downplayed men's involvement in the history of birth control, relegating knowledge and use of contraceptive technology to a separate "female domain." This article explores the role of condoms in the evolution of the American birth control business, attitudes toward public health, and everyday sexual behavior, and suggests why the full complexities of the history of birth control are best captured by an approach that is attentive to broad gender dynamics as well as to the diversity of technological change.     

Kids,raccoons, and roos: awkward encounters and mixed affects

Within the Western cultural imaginary, child–animal relations are characteristically invoked with fond nostalgia and sentimentality. They are often represented as natural and innocent relations, thick with infantilizing and anthropomorphizing ‘cute’ emotions. Our multispecies ethnographic research – which is conducted in the everyday, lived common worlds of Australian and Canadian children and animals – reveals a very different political and emotional landscape. We find these embodied child–animal relations to be non-innocently entangled, fraught, and messy. In this article, we focus on some awkward encounters of mixed affect when kids and raccoons co-inhabit an urban forest setting in Vancouver, and when kids and kangaroos bodily encounter each other in a bush setting in Canberra. We trace the imbroglio of child–animal curiosities, warinesses, risks, inconveniences, revulsions, attachments, and confrontations at these sites as generative of new ethical logics.     

Natural encounters: climate,weather and the Italian Renaissance

This paper examines a key issue in the history of the climate in the pre-instrumental period, that is, how to use narrative sources which make frequent references to weather events, but which need contextualised interpretation. The paper follows an argument that climatological techniques for deriving temperature indices from chronicles, though they have become increasingly elaborate and refined, nevertheless leave out much that is of interest to the social historian. This paper explores the area of the what-is-left-behind when chronicle narratives are reduced to numerical indices. Investigating a broad range of Latin and Italian chronicles from fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italy, the paper draws three main conclusions: that sensitivity to weather events not only varied greatly among writers (as one might expect) but so too did their use of severe weather to serve the purposes of narrative (through sequencing, metaphor and analogy); that sensitivity to meteorological anomaly changed during the period, especially in the fifteenth century with the spread of prognosticating verses; and that the broadening of chroniclers' interests in weather, both ordinary and extraordinary, and in its effects on everyday, material life may allow a connection to and re-evaluation of the Burckhartian idea of the Renaissance ‘discovery of the world’.     

Clinton,Congress, and Cuba Policy Between Two Codifications: The Changing Executive-Legislative Relationship in Foreign Policy Making

We examine the changing dynamics of institutional control over U.S. policy toward Cuba that have played out during the time between two codifications of Cuba policy: The 1996 Helms-Burton legislation that codified the long-standing embargo policy as law, and the 2000 bill that wrote travel restrictions into law. The study of who makes U.S. foreign policy has long been characterized by a debate over the respective roles of the president and Congress in this area, but-in theory, at least-Helms-Burton should have put an end to the scholarly debate about who makes Cuba policy: With codification, Congress does. But the practice of making Cuba policy has been more complicated than it might have first appeared in March 1996. We track the politics of Cuba policy between these two codifications and try to understand what they mean for who makes Cuba policy now, and speculate about what these dynamics may more generally mean.     

纵贯历史：辛亥前后的铁路国有

1911年,由铁路国有引发的保路运动,正是辛亥革命爆发的导火线,辛亥革命则导致了清朝的灭亡。不过,铁路国有的政策却并未成为清帝国倒台的殉葬品。民国建立以后,铁路国有化的整体趋势却是不可逆转的。铁路国有在清朝和民国的不同命运,揭示了辛亥前后政治格局的变动。