Sur les traces de Cortés: L'expédition du Mexique d'après Le Monde illustré

Unlike L'Illustration, with which it competed under the Second Empire, the weekly Le Monde illustré, which first appeared in 1857 and which was protected by the imperial government, did not count among the political newspapers overtaxed under Napoléon the Third's repressive regime. For this reason, it made great strides thanks to its blind allegiance to a French imperialism that had asserted its authority during the Crimean war, but which spent itself during the war against Juárez and his republican partisans in Mexico. While the French liberal press criticized the Second Empire foreign policy, Le Monde illustré persisted in turning the Mexican war into an antijuarist pacification favorable to a new Latin colonial empire, as well as to an application of the Saint-Simonian doctrine on Mexican industry and economy. In order to achieve this, the illustrated reports on the expeditionary force, military operations, and French victories were a warmongering that aimed to place this campaign in the afterglow of the conquistadors' era, as well as to idealize the imperial army as a symbol of the French nation.     

Hunter-gatherer tobacco smoking: earliest evidence from the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America

Chemical analysis of residue extracted from stone pipes and pipe fragments excavated at sites in the southern Pacific Northwest Coast of North America demonstrate that hunter-gatherers smoked the psychostimulant tobacco (Nicotiana sp.) by at least AD 860. Non-farming ethno-historic Native Americans throughout the west gathered and sometimes cultivated tobacco for ritual and religious purposes, but until now the antiquity of the practice on this part of the continent was unknown. Method validation includes chemical characterization of a suite of smoke plants and experimental reproduction of “smoked” pipe chemistry; results indicate biomarkers are traceable for several species commonly smoked by ethnographic native peoples, including tobacco (nicotine, cotinine), tree tobacco (anabasine), and kinnikinnick (arbutin). Developed methods—where residue is extracted directly from the stone or clay matrix of whole and fragmentary archaeological pipes—may be applied in similar studies investigating the spread and use of ritual smoke plants in the ancient Americas and elsewhere.