Biedermeier desk in Seattle: the Veit Simon children,class and the transnational in Holocaust history

This study offers a transnational history of the Holocaust based on a study of a well-known Berlin Jewish family, the Veit Simons. The authors use this tangled family history as a point of departure for a transnational history of the Holocaust. In particular, they show how to read the links connecting the protagonists to the wider world as a means of writing transnational history. Their history also shows the interconnectedness of perpetrators and victims. Moreover, they demonstrate the importance of the category of class for our understanding of the experience of Holocaust history. While the Veit Simons could hold off some of the persecution, eventually the Holocaust brought them to the ground, resulting in a story of illness, death and loss. Finally, the authors read the story from a feminist angle, offering an examination of the interplay of gender, class and persecution, examining how gender played out in coping while losing one’s former class.     

Rethinking activism: tourism,mobilities and emotion

Abstract

This article seeks to trouble distinctions between activism and tourism, and activism and regionality. It does this by exploring the role of tourism, mobilities and emotion for a regional Australian queer collective, and their 1400 km return journey to the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade. In illustrating the ways this touristic journey represents alternative ways of performing queer activism, I argue that the existence of regional activism deconstructs notions that non-normative sexualities and queer politics do not exist beyond urban centres. Granting attention to the alternative ways the queer collective utilises tourism mobilities as part of their activism strengthens characterisations of leisure as always more than a space of hedonism and escape. Understanding the broader significance of events enables scholars to rethink festivals as spatially and temporally bounded, one off events but rather crucial to the ongoing sustainability of regional queer collectives and performances of queer activism in peripheral areas.     

For Science,Salvage, and State: Papua New Guinea’s Earliest Colonial Museums

In recent years, growing attention has been paid to the complex relationship between museums, collecting and colonialism in the Southwest Pacific. This paper contributes to this wider body of research by presenting a baseline study of Papua New Guinea’s two earliest museums: an Economic Museum built in 1907 and an Anthropology Museum initiated in 1907, but not built until 1914. Both museums were financed and run by government departments within the newly established Australian Territory of Papua. Both were imbricated in contemporary colonial agendas aimed at mapping, classifying and, ultimately, exploiting the natural and human resources of the colony. However, their histories also reveal significant differences in the personal and political agendas of their respective founders, Miles ‘Staniforth’ Smith and Hubert Murray, who in 1907 were in direct competition for the position of inaugural lieutenant-governor of the Territory. In the internecine rivalries of the day their respective museums provided each of them with a platform to publically demonstrate his aptitude and vision for governing the new colony.     

Working with images and texts: Elio Vittorini’s Il Politecnico

Il Politecnico (1945–47) is the most relevant Italian cultural journal in the immediate aftermath of WWII. It is also the most anomalous; the systematic integration in its graphic layout of textual and visual elements made it more similar to the illustrated magazines of the time than to other cultural journals. The choice to present highbrow contents in a graphic layout associated with popular mass media served to complicate the already tricky relationship between the editor – the writer Elio Vittorini – and the intellectuals working in the cultural agencies planning the journal: the Italian Communist Party and the publishing house Einaudi. A reconstruction of the intellectual network surrounding Il Politecnico and of how it began shrinking during the months of its lifespan shows how this conflict developed and finally led to its closure.     

“History had taken such a large piece out of my life” — Neuroscientist refugees from Hamburg during National Socialism

ABSTRACT

Approximately 9,000 physicians were uprooted for so-called “racial” or “political” reasons by the Nazi regime and 6,000 fled Germany. These refugees are often seen as survivors who contributed to a “brain drain” from Germany. About 432 doctors (all specialties, private and academic) were dismissed from the major German city of Hamburg. Of these, 16 were Hamburg University faculty members dismissed from their government-supported positions for “racial” reasons, and, of these, five were neuroscientists. In a critical analysis, not comprehensively done previously, we will demonstrate that the brain drain did not equal a “brain gain.” The annihilation of these five neuroscientists’ careers under different but similar auspices, their shameful harassment and incarceration, financial expropriation by Nazi ransom techniques, forced migration, and roadblocks once reaching destination countries stalled and set back any hopes of research and quickly continuing once-promising careers. A major continuing challenge is finding ways to repair an open wound and obvious vacuum in the German neuroscience community created by the largely collective persecution of colleagues 80 years ago.     

EVALUATING THE WELFARE EFFECTS OF SCHOOL QUALITY IMPROVEMENTS: A RESIDENTIAL SORTING APPROACH

Las Vegas experienced improvements in math and reading performance between 2006 and 2011. This study evaluates the benefits of these nonmarginal improvements to Las Vegas area homeowners, using a residential sorting model. We estimate households’ preferences for multiple characteristics including the proportion of proficient students in their assigned elementary school. The estimation accounts for the endogeneity of school quality using school boundary fixed effects. The welfare estimates suggest that the school quality improvements provided substantial benefits to the area's households. We find that benefit measures derived from a hedonic price model are substantially larger than our sorting model benefit measures.     

James Mill's treatment of religion and the History of British India

James Mill's History of British India’ (1817) played a major role in re-shaping the English policy and attitudes in India throughout the nineteenth century. This article questions the widely held view that the ‘HBI’ heralded the utilitarian justification of colonisation found for instance in John Stuart Mill's writings. It suggests that James Mill's role as a proponent of ‘utilitarian imperialism’ has been overstated, and argues that much of Mill's criticism of Indian society arose from the continuing influence of his religious education as well as from his links with a network of Presbyterian and Evangelical thinkers. It is only after his death that the colonialist views put forward in the History of British India were re-interpreted in light of his later attachment to utilitarianism.     

Irrigated taro (Colocasia esculenta) farming in North Kohala,Hawai‘i: sedimentology and soil nutrient analyses

How did traditional farming transform the natural environment in the Hawaiian Islands? This question is one that has largely been addressed for rainfed farming of crops like sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), but evidence is lacking for irrigated farming of the critical staple crop taro (Colocasia esculenta). We describe the results of soil nutrient and sedimentological analyses of deeply-stratified pondfield deposits representing a 600-year-long record of irrigated taro farming in the North Kohala District, Hawai‘i Island. Soil is categorized by particle size to determine modes of transport and deposition, and concurrent soil nutrient analyses were conducted to infer shifts in the source of sediments and changes associated with taro harvesting. The advent of farming is clearly detectable in sedimentology, the presence of charcoal found within sediments, and soil chemistry. However, diminished nutrient concentrations can be attributed largely to deposition of a mixture of upstream sediments. Overall, there is no clear evidence for nutrient draw-down by taro harvesting, but we cannot yet rule it out as a factor. This study demonstrates the inherent difficulty of correlating changes in soil nutrients evident in irrigated pondfields with the long term history of soil nutrient cycling.     

The role of canids in ritual and domestic contexts: new ancient DNA insights from complex hunter–gatherer sites in prehistoric Central California

This study explores the interrelationship between the genus Canis and hunter–gatherers through a case study of prehistoric Native Americans in the San Francisco Bay-Sacramento Delta area. A distinctive aspect of the region's prehistoric record is the interment of canids, variously classified as coyotes, dogs, and wolves. Since these species are difficult to distinguish based solely on morphology, ancient DNA analysis was employed to distinguish species. The DNA study results, the first on canids from archaeological sites in California, are entirely represented by domesticated dogs (including both interments and disarticulated samples from midden deposits). These results, buttressed by stable isotope analyses, provide new insight into the complex interrelationship between humans and canids in both ritual and prosaic contexts, and reveal a more prominent role for dogs than previously envisioned.     

Signs of sinusitis in times of urbanization in Viking Age-Early Medieval Sweden

The influence and possible negative impact on sinus health of living conditions in rural and urban environments in Viking Age (AD 800–1050) and Early Medieval Sweden (AD 1050–1200) is investigated. Skeletal samples from 32 rural settlements in the Mälaren Valley (AD 750–1200) and burials in the nearby proto-urban port of trade Birka (AD 750–960) are examined. Based on the diagnostic criteria for maxillary sinusitis used in earlier studies, the results show that there is no significant difference in the prevalence of signs of sinusitis between the two materials (i.e. the Mälaren Valley versus Birka). Consequently, this provides no evidence that living in a proto-urban environment had a negative impact on sinus health. However, when compared with previously studied samples from the early medieval town Sigtuna, dated to AD 970–1100, the populations of the Mälaren Valley and Birka show significantly lower frequencies of bone changes interpreted as chronic maxillary sinusitis (95%, 70% and 82% respectively). This implies that the urban environment of Sigtuna could have led to impaired sinus health. There is also a significant difference between males and females in the Birka material, in which more females (100%) than males (68%) were affected. A gender based differentiation in work tasks is suggested by this, or exposure to environmental risk factors that affect sinus health. No difference between males and females could be detected in the samples from the Mälaren Valley and Sigtuna.