High modernism in the Arctic: planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik

This paper considers Frobisher Bay and Inuvik, two Canadian Arctic towns, as examples of the high-modernist planning that swept the globe during the middle decades of the twentieth century, but also Cold War projects reflecting a sudden interest in the Arctic as a region of military significance. Building on the framework provided by James Scott in Seeing like a State (1998), the paper details the connections between modernization theory and Cold War militarism before turning to the strikingly parallel case studies. In each instance, federal officials proposed ambitious urban models designed to simultaneously overcome the hostility of a northern environment and catapult native northerners into conditions of modern living. While the limits and failings of such schemes varied by location, both sites were also laboratories for social scientists employed by the federal government to document and analyze the modernization of the Arctic. The work of these scholars represents a particularly rich and complex record of governmental interventions, tied variously to Cold War imperatives, in northern lives and landscapes at a time of great faith in the transformative power of modern engineering.     

李四光与辛亥革命

在近代中国仁人志士探索国家出路的大背景下,李四光作为一位新式知识分子,在时代的号召下亦曾投入到革命洪流之中,参与辛亥革命。这充分体现了时代与个人的互动关系。在时代的号召下,他接触革命党人,接触革命思想,实现思想转变,走上革命救国道路,而革命党人的思想也对李四光的一生产生了深远影响：在辛亥革命后,面对辛亥革命的失败,他积极参与实业建设,力图实业救国,走上了科学救国之路。     

Modeling and testing polity boundaries in the Classic Tuxtla Mountains,Southern Veracruz,Mexico

Combined application of GIS modeling of polity boundaries and qualitative characterization of those boundaries in the Tuxtla Mountains, southern Veracruz, Mexico generated interesting questions and some answers regarding the regional political landscape. Not only did this process elucidate possible boundary locations, the process of evaluating these different hypotheses proved to be a useful exercise in characterizing the boundary and the nature of interaction between the polities controlled by Matacapan and Totocapan during the Classic period. I develop a seven variable classification for political boundaries to be used with coarse-grained settlement data.     

Crafting the future: envisioning space exploration in post-war Britain

Prior to the launch of Sputnik, knowledge about human space travel was widely circulated by spaceflight proponents, scientists and news producers in mainstream culture through print, film and broadcast media and displayed in public sites such as museums and public exhibition spaces. Focusing on the timeframe 1947–1953, this article examines how key members of the British Interplanetary Society used a combination of craft skills, graphical technologies, and communication media to create pictures and models to support rhetorical claims that spaceflight and astronautics are legitimate fields of scientific research and space travel could and should be achieved in the near future. Production and circulation of factual knowledge about space travel was not confined to material and discursive practices in established fields such as astronomy and aeronautical engineering. Actors from other professional, non-professional, and social groups contributed to the realization of future spaceflight as an heterogeneous cultural endeavor or astroculture encompassing an array of technical processes, artifacts, craft skills, and scientific knowledge.     

The Universe will be televised: space,science, satellites and British television production, 1946–1969

This essay uses material from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) archives to show how space-related technoscientific activities played a key role in the development of BBC television. The essay focuses on a crucial period when this influential cultural institution transitioned away from radio as their primary broadcast medium in the 1930s and 1940s to reluctantly embrace television in the 1950s and 1960s. Space-related activities, including astronomy, cosmology, rocketry, aerospace engineering, astrophysics and interplanetary research, played a key role in the modernization of BBC television broadcasting in two intersecting ways. Space-related material provided informative, yet popular, programmatic material that helped BBC television compete in an increasingly commercialized media market, and, later, space projects supplied technologies that impacted on the mechanics of broadcast production and transmission. The profile and prestige of space as a topic, in particular, its visuality, the drama of exploration it presented, and its association with celebrity scientists like Bernard Lovell and Fred Hoyle, meant that such programming became a crucial business asset for the BBC and a professional asset for ambitious producers who saw its commercial potential. Following the launch of Sputnik in 1957, space technology became further intertwined with the development of British broadcasting as the fields of satellite communications and broadcasting transmissions infrastructure converged. In particular, BBC producers promoted the potential development of communication satellites within their television programming by portraying such satellites as plausible and necessary for the advancement of civilization, and most crucially, as a prospective British Space Race achievement.     

Forensics and fortification in South African self-captivity

ABSTRACT

This essay considers how residential security and forensic genetics in South Africa open ways to think about captivity as something that the relatively privileged embrace to delineate a safe inside from a threatening outside. Captivity functions here as a means to entrench privilege and guarantee its protection.     

Doing Independent Overseas Fieldwork 1: Practicalities and pitfalls

This article explores issues of scalability and sustainability in distance learning. The authors kept detailed records of time they spent teaching a course in geographic information science via the World Wide Web over a six-month period, during which class sizes averaged 49 students. The authors also surveyed students' satisfaction with the distance learning course through ratings and open-ended questions. Findings are compared with similar data collected a year earlier, when class sizes associated with the same distance learning course averaged 18 students. In response to the increase in average class size by a factor of 2.7, the authors' course-related workloads increased by a factor of about 2.5 (from 47.5 hours to 116.7 hours total). Analyses of student feedback suggest that student satisfaction with the course was high overall and suffered no significant decline as a result of increased instructional efficiency.     

Science as propaganda: Swedish scientists and the co-production of American hegemony in Sweden during the cold war, 1953–68

This article takes a close look at how the United States used the funding of scientific research in Sweden as a hegemonic and propaganda tool in the 1950s and 1960s. It shows that non-aligned Sweden functioned just as much as a node in the international science network set up by the Americans after the Second World War as did the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. These funds were awarded mainly to an elite network of prominent Swedish scientists. The article sheds interesting light on the controversies of such funding in Sweden during the cold war and adds important knowledge about Swedish–American relations during the cold war. The article argues that this Swedish scientific elite co-produced US hegemony in Sweden by actively seeking out American military funding and by making use of it. It also argues that US funding was intended to portray the United States as an altruistic patron of science in the world and thus serve American propagandistic purposes as well.     

苏联专家与新疆综合科学考察

1956～1960年,在自然资源综合考察委员会领导下,中国开展了第一次新疆综合科学考察。这次考察以查明新疆自然条件与资源情况,提出新疆生产力发展与布局方案为目的。这项考察不仅是《十二年科学技术远景规划》的重要任务之一,而且也是中苏科学技术合作的项目。从1957年开始,苏联陆续派遣专家组参与了考察工作。苏联专家在新疆考察中承担了重要任务,也做了大量工作,不仅指导了考察工作的顺利进行,还举办了一系列学术讲座,帮助中国培养了一批科研人才,并将他们的野外考察经验无私地传授给中国同行。在考察中,苏联专家们还有针对性地提出意见和建议,与中国同志开展学术交流活动。总之,虽然因中苏关系的破裂,使苏联专家未能参加最后的总结工作,但苏联专家仍为考察工作做出了重大贡献。     

论徐天麟《两汉会要》的编纂特点

作为补撰前代会要的代表作,徐天麟《两汉会要》首开补撰前代会要的新途径,并通过设置总类,开创二级分类体系,丰富注释体例的形式与内容,以及采用多种史论形式相结合的方式,完善了自中唐以来所产生的会要体史籍的编撰体例,奠定了补撰前代会要史籍的史学地位。