Thought and action? Perspectives on Mazzini and Garibaldi on the bicentenaries of their births

Abstract

The introduction provides a context for the six papers that were presented at two different symposia marking the birth bicentenaries of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. The papers, revised for publication, address specific contributions made by these two founding figures of the modern Italian nation to the history of the Risorgimento, the ideologies of republicanism, democracy and nationality. The papers also make room for a discussion of their contrasting political modes, and look at their politics before and after Italy's political unification in 1860–61. The comparative approach highlights differences and similarities between Mazzini's and Garibaldi's political strategies and illuminates the choices available to those who wanted to unify the peninsula. The broad themes around which these papers are organized restore to these two figures the broad cosmopolitan dimensions that made the Risorgimento a movement of global impact.     

Historical context and chronology of Bronze Age land enclosure on Dartmoor,UK

The upland of Dartmoor, southwest England, is one of the flagship prehistoric landscapes within Britain owing to the excellent survival of extensive prehistoric coaxial field systems. Archaeological surveys and rescue excavations during the 1970s and 1980s did much to further the understanding of this landscape; however, much remains to be explored, in particular the chronology of enclosure, the nature of the pre-enclosure landscape and the relationship between Bronze Age communities and their environment. Reconsideration of this landscape is important, given the place it holds in our understanding of subdivision of the landscape across northwest Europe during prehistory. This paper presents new palaeoecological data recovered as part of an integrated archaeological and palaeoecological project on northeast Dartmoor. The sequences detailed here include the first dated Neolithic period palaeoenvironmental data from within the prehistoric enclosed land on the moor, providing a longer-term context for enclosure. Neolithic groups are implicated in the first establishment of heathland in the study area at around 3630–3370 cal BC. During the early Bronze Age, reestablishment of hazel scrub in the study area implies reduced use of the upland, although it is not clear whether this is local or indicative of the wider landscape. A combination of pollen and fungal spore data indicates a substantial shift to species-rich grassland with grazing animals at c.1480 cal BC in a phase that lasted 400 years. The later Bronze Age and early Iron Age are characterised by low intensity use of the upland. These data provide new chronological data for land cover change on Dartmoor and whilst they broadly confirm existing models of upland land use in later prehistory, their proximity to the standing archaeology affords a more nuanced interpretation of local change.     

The Politics and Ethics of Relocated Art

At the end of Word War II, Soviet occupation forces removed countless art objects from German soil. Some of them were returned during the 1950s, but most either disappeared for good or were stored away secretly in cellars of Soviet museums. The Cold War then covered the issue with silence. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, museums in St Petersburg and Moscow started to exhibit some of the relocated art for the first time in half a century. The unusual quality of the paintings-mostly impressionist masterpieces-not only attracted the attention of the international art community, but also triggered a diplomatic row between Russia and Germany. Both governments advanced moral and legal claims to ownership. To make things even more complicated, many of the paintings once belonged to private collectors, some of whom were Jews. Their descendants also entered the dispute. The basic premise of this article is that the political and ethical dimensions of relocated art can be understood most adequately by eschewing a single authorial standpoint. Various positions, sometimes incommensurable ones, are thus explored in an attempt to outline possibilities for an ethics of representation and a dialogical solution to the international problem that relocated art has become.     

‘How Time Flies’: Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1960s

Recent histories of human rights have identified the 1970s as the most decisive epoch in the birth of the modern rights era. These works have tended toward a parenthetic dismissal of the period 1948–70 as years of interregnum, of marginal impact to the ‘breakthrough’ moment which followed. This article argues for a more complex periodisation, and reclaims the importance of the 1960s. Far from an undifferentiated abyss, the two decades between the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1968 International Human Rights Year held their own shifts, integral to the evolution of modern human rights. A crucial transition in the status of the UDHR occurred across the mid-1960s, roughly aligned with the terminal years of liberal post-colonialism. Through a comparison of two hitherto neglected events in the history of human rights, the fifteenth and twentieth anniversary commemorations of the UDHR, in December 1963 and 1968, this article traces the trajectory of that transition. These commemorations, concentrated moments of explicit reflection on the meaning of human rights, encapsulated the gulf between the early and the late 1960s. In the space of five years, any vestigial consensus on the vision enunciated in 1948 was obliterated.     

Identifying Stakeholders' Views on Sustainable Urban Transition: Desirability,Utility and Probability Assessments of Scenarios

The assessment of different urban planning scenarios by stakeholders can yield important insights which, in turn, inform sustainable urban transition. Yet to gain in-depth insight, this assessment needs to be multi-faceted and should go beyond a unidimensional “most/least desired” approach. Accordingly, we use indicators that distinguish between desirability, utility and probability assessments. We compare these assessments within and between various stakeholder groups based on a set of literature-based hypotheses. We constructed six planning scenarios, systematically varied with respect to sustainability for the case study, “Erlenmatt”, a major urban redevelopment area in Switzerland. Three stakeholder groups (housing suppliers, the non-profit & public sector and housing target groups, n?=?80) were investigated. The results of the statistical analyses suggest that more sustainable scenarios are preferred with respect to both their desirability and utility and that their probability is not lower than that of the other scenarios. The non-profit & public sector is the most pessimistic about the probability of a sustainable district while housing suppliers desire it less. We conclude that such detailed subjective scenario assessments can provide informative and detailed guidance for sustainable urban transition.     

Palaeochannels of the Balkh river (northern Afghanistan) and human occupation since the Bronze Age period

In 2002, the unexpected discovery of Hellenistic architectural blocks, buried in 8 m of alluvium, found displaced in a former bed of the river of Balkh, brought about a programme of surveys and excavations under the aegis of the French Archaeological Mission in Bactria. The geoarchaeological side of the programme focused on the drawing of a regional geomorphological map then on the identification, mapping and dating of the palaeochannels of the river of Balkh. We established the chronology of several fluvial channel generations by association with archaeological settlements of different eras (Bronze Age, Bactro-Achaemenid period, Kushan period, Islamic period) and with optically stimulated luminescence dating carried out on alluvium deposits. The present riverbed leading up to Aqcha was formed during the Islamic period. We suspect the primary agent of this change in the river channel to, be tectonic activity and the activation of a blind fault crossing the floodplain. We identified a northern Bactro-Achaemenid aqueduct, currently located in the desert area separating the plain of Balkh from the Amu Darya.