The Madrasas of Oxford: Iranian Interactions with the English Universities in the Early Nineteenth Century

Against the background of the Russo-Persian wars of the early 1800s, the Iranian government sponsored a series of Iranian students to travel to the homeland of its erstwhile British allies in search of the new scientific and technological learning. Along with members of the Iranian embassies to London in the same period, the students were the first Iranians to acquire extensive and direct knowledge of British society as it entered the industrial era and the earliest to gain access (albeit short-lived) to the English universities. Yet in spite of the practical agenda of the students and their sponsors, on reaching Britain the students found it necessary to engage extensively with the evangelical and more generally religious agendas of their British co-operators. In reconstructing in detail the intellectual circles in which the Iranian students moved in England between 1815 and 1818, the article uncovers the series of religious negotiations that were a necessary part of Iran's early path to modernization.

In Oxford there are twenty big madrasas and five small madrasas they call “halls.”

Mirza Saleh Shirazi, 1818

     

Natural preservation mechanisms at play in a Bronze Age wooden shovel found in the copper mines of Alderley Edge

A wooden shovel, dating from the Early Bronze Age, has survived in a remarkable state of preservation in the copper mines of Alderley Edge, Cheshire UK. Other historic timbers recovered from the mines, whilst still intact, have fared less well. An X-ray investigation into the distribution of minerals through the shovel using portable X-ray Fluorescence (PXRF) along with the use of synchrotron-based X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) measurements of the copper and arsenic chemical speciations has provided clues to the methods by which metals from the mining environment have entered the wood of the shovel and ensured its survival. The distribution and nature of the minerals so determined suggest that the copper and arsenic, along with a significant lead content, entered the shovel during its original use in working mineral-rich deposits, rather than through the burial environment. The insights gained are expected to be applicable to other wooden artefacts recovered from ancient copper mines in other places.     

Good guys or bad? Middle class blacks and the black community

William Alan Muraskin. Middle Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. 318 pp. $14.95.     

From chronological to spatio‐temporal histories: mapping heritage in arukwa, área indígena do uaçá, Brazil

This article explores some of the reasons the 1910 Republican revolution in Portugal failed to bring about the long-term changes in national life envisioned by Party Leaders. Specifically, I argue that the Portuguese Republican Party's anti-clerical and anti-monarchical disposition ensured the continued existence of religious and political schemas it sought to eradicate, setting the stage for counter-revolution.