Andrew Dury's map of the present seat of war,between the Russians,Poles, and Turks (1769)

Abstract

The chance assembling of a number of different impressions of Andrew Dury's Map of the present Seat of War between the Russians, Poles, and Turks (1769) in the British Library led the authors to examine the map's carto‐bibliographical history. Nine states of the map, two of which were sometimes sold with printed paste‐ons, have been identified to date. The two earliest states of the map are now in the State Historical Museum, Moscow. Although both are best described as proof, or pre‐publication, impressions, each bears evidence of intensive use at the highest levels of the Russian army command. Indeed, the circumstances leading to the creation of the map by Andrew Dury and Peter Bell and to a succession of different versions over the three decades or so of intermittent Russian‐Turkish hostilities highlight the interplay of international politics, individual initiative and commercial factors in late eighteenth‐century map production in London.     

Analyzing Fertility and Attraction in the Paleolithic: The Venus Figurines

Countless hypotheses have focused on the enigmatic “Venuses”, but most are not testable. The current authors investigate a hypothesis suggested by R.D. Guthrie involving the waist-to-hip ratio. This measurement determines fertility, beauty, and health in modern females; a 0.7 indicates cross-cultural beauty and fertility. Guthrie argued that the statuettes share an average waist-to-hip ratio of 0.655, indicating that Paleolithic males preferred curvier women. We sought to test this and analyze regional data. Our mean was significantly different than Guthrie's and we found evidence for regional differences. While some statuettes may have served as Paleo-erotica, it seems unlikely that they all did.     

Denmark,Scandinavia and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in the early Cold War

This article analyses the role of the Danish and Scandinavian labour movements in the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in 1950–1955. First, it is demonstrated that although the Scandinavians were critical towards the communist regimes in eastern Europe and supported the Marshall Plan, they only joined the ICFTU as a result of the British break-up of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). Next, the Scandinavians, on the one hand, allied with the British and other west Europeans and rejected the ‘negative’ anticommunism of the Americans, while, on the other hand, they supported the establishment of an intelligence network behind the Iron Curtain, gave financial aid to the campaign against communists in west European unions, and supported victims of the East German uprising in 1953. In short, the Scandinavians closely followed the British, remained critical towards the Americans, and challenged the Soviets.     

From Dionysus to the Anti-Christ

Abstract

This essay is a reconstruction of Rene Girard's Christian apology in “I saw the Devil fall like Lightening.” It develops Nietzsche's antithesis between Christ and Dionysius which Girard identifies as the antithesis of modernity as such. Against Girard's own alliance with Carl Schmitt the essay adopts the Trinitarian point of view suggested by the author, in order to show that it is Erik Peterson's “Trinitarian” critique of Carl Schmitt's political theology of sovereignty which could fulfill the “true” aim of the author in fact much better.     

Mapping pedagogic frailty in geography education: a framed autoethnographic case study

Pedagogic frailty has been proposed as a unifying concept that may help to integrate institutional efforts to enhance teaching within universities by helping to maintain a simultaneous focus on key areas that are thought to impede the development of pedagogy. These areas and the links that have been proposed to connect them are interrogated here through the analysis of an autoethnographic narrative produced by a community “insider” who has considerable experience of teaching and researching geography. This person-centred methodology acknowledges the subjective nature of teaching, gives voice to important stories that might not otherwise be heard formally and provides a case study that can been used as an exemplar to promote institutional dialogue about quality enhancement and the student experience. The findings from this case study suggest that colleagues may be able to repurpose disciplinary concepts to help make sense of the learning and teaching discourse.     

Post-socialist Sprawl: A Cross-Country Comparison

This paper presents a land-use change analysis of five Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. We utilize CORINE (Coordination of Information on the Environment) Land-Cover and Urban Audit data for two distinct time periods: 1990–2000 and 2000–2006 aggregated at urban, suburban and non-metropolitan geographies. The literature on post-socialist cities suggests that urbanization rates and patterns in the post-socialist period are quite variable and divergent, both “inter”nationally and “intra”-nationally, and we expect to find both spatial and temporal differences. We compare and contrast urbanization patterns at the national scale, using cities and their functional urban regions as the unit of comparative analysis. Our results show that unlike other eastern European countries, metropolitan areas in the former German Democratic Republic began sprawling (defined as a decline in urban density) in the 1990s. Similar changes only became visible in other CEE countries later during the 2000s. We also demonstrate that larger cities which were better connected to the political elite and more economically integrated with global investment patterns experienced more extensive urban sprawl than their smaller and mid-sized counterparts.     

Secular decline in cranioskeletal size over two millennia of interior central California prehistory: Relation to calcium deficit in the reconstructed diet and demographic stress

An osteometric study of residual rickets (RR) skeletal plasticity has been made of a time-ordered sequence of fifteen series of adult skeleton sets (n=359) from the Great Valley of central California (GV), spanning the three archaeological horizons of California Indian prehistory in this region: Early (EH), Middle (MH) and Late (LH). By least-squares linear regression analysis, a clear and continuous downward trend obtained in cranioskeletal size in both sexes, proceeding from EH to LH in the GV sequence, pari passu with a steady upward trend in the RR-15 score. To ascertain if dietary calcium deficit (CADEF), a known cause of active rickets, can explain the observed secular increase in RR, the aboriginal diet was reconstructed by the diet grid method: CADEF was found to rise from borderline in the EH, to moderate in the MH, to severe in the LH, as the subsistence base shifted gradually away from hunted prey, and storable seed foods—mainly leached acorn meal—became the dominant source of energy. Further regression analysis has shown that the secular upward trend in CADEF is highly correlated with the temporal clines of the GV sequence, directly with the RR-15 score, and inversely with cranioskeletal size: in round numbers, one grade of CADEF brings about a loss of 120 cm³ or 4 per cent in partial skeleton volume. Two biocultural influences—demographic stress (DS) in females, and the less common ‘male nutritional advantage interaction co-factor’ (MNAIC)—modulate the primary bone antitrophic CADEF effect: DS enhancing, MNAIC ameliorating.