Delmephialmas and Sircorcor: Gasparo Balbi, Dalmâ, Julfâr and a problem of transliteration

Gasparo Balbi, the state jeweller of the Venetian Republic, visited the eastern Arabian coast in c. 1580 and recorded many of the places in the modern United Arab Emirates for the first time, giving them the names by which we know them today, albeit in sixteenth-century Italian transliteration. While some places are readily recognizable, Balbi's terms Delmephialmas and Sircorcor present problems. It is suggested that Delmephialmas is the island of Dalmâ off the coast of Abu Dhabi but with an additional phrase as a suffix, giving a meaning approximating to Dalmâ, fî-hâ mâ' , i.e. 'Dalmâ, there is water there'. The absence of any reference to so major a port as Julfâr in modern Ra's al-Khaima by Balbi is remarkable. It is suggested that Balbi's term Sircorcor is an eliding of al-Sirr as a synonym for Julfâr combined in error with Khawr al-Khuwayr to the north of Julfâr.     

华人社区的冲突、控制与自治——"二战"前美国城市中的中国传统社会组织

在第二次世界大战以前,来到美国的中国移民基本上被华人社区中的中国传统的社会组织所控制。华人社区有四种基本的社会组织,即宗族、会馆、秘密社会和行会,这些组织的扩张是由于社区生活的需要和外部的压力。它们也强烈影响到华人社会的形成和发展,并在延缓中国移民的同化过程中扮演了一个重要角色。排华运动、组织的束缚和内部的争斗使中国移民与主流社会隔离了几十年,宗族的条规、方言的区别、利益的冲突等又破坏了中国移民的内部团结,这也导致了处于相对封闭状态的中国移民的同化过程非常缓慢。     

Archaeological and chemical evidence for the earliest American use of raw coal as a fuel in ironmaking

The archaeological discovery of bituminous coal in the tipple area and the subsequent analyses of specimens of the iron ore, charcoal, limestone, slag, and cast iron from the Eaton (Hopewell) blast furnace built in 1802 indicate that raw coal was used in combination with charcoal as a fuel in American iron smelting at least thirty years before it was used alone. Further, its use in this combinatory manner marks the earliest as yet attested to in the New World.     

Forced migration and legal-spatial violence in the United States and Germany

Asylum laws cannot function without spatial technologies and practices. Refugee camps, detention centers and accommodation facilities, in addition to dispersal and residential obligations, highlight the spatiality of asylum laws and policies. They are not only designed to regulate forced migrants' movement and place them in alternative legal and spatial regimes, but they are also spaces where migrants’ legal rights are violated and access to integrating institutions are restricted. Based on findings from Germany and the United States, this paper argues that current asylum regimes are characterized by a system of legal-spatial violence; a process in which a form of violence is embedded in law, implemented through policies and formal processes, and realized and reproduced spatially. This entanglement between the law, space, and violence involves complex and paradoxical processes: immobility and internal bordering practices (where forced migrants are confined and their movement is limited), as well as forced mobility and situations of unbordering (where movement is forced, and where spatial restrictions are either repealed or replaced). These processes fragment and prolong the trajectories of forced migration. Compulsion, displacement, and the dispossession of rights—which constitute the process of forced migration—do not cease on entering Germany or the United States, but can continue. The rationale for legal-spatial violence goes beyond the securitization of forced migration and the control and deterrence of forced migrants, and also includes economic logic and profit making.     

Anarchists and national identity: The case of German radicals in the United States and Brazil, 1880–1945

How German were German anarchists in the United States and Brazil? Did the experience of exile and immigration preserve or even heighten a national identity among radicals who openly espoused revolutionary internationalism? Anarchists distinguished between nation and nationality on the one hand, and the state and nationalism on the other. This article examines expressions of nationality by a handful of German anarchist editors and writers from the 1880s to the end of World War II. They wanted to be stateless, but not nationless. This article argues that German exile anarchists in the United States and Brazil expressed a militant, countercultural, antistatist and anticlerical nationality. They were ‘rooted cosmopolitans’: They identified with the international revolutionary tradition and at the same time remained attached to Germany's heritage of radical politics, arts and humanities. There was a remarkable consistency in their commentary levelled against Bismarck, the Kaiser, the Weimar government and the Nazis either in Germany or in the host country. Anarchists advocated for a borderless global federation of free communities and, to that end, rejected nationalism and urged people to stop ‘seeing like a state’ by exposing the false promises and crimes of statism.     

加拿大和美国对古巴政策的分歧

由于加拿大与美国的特殊关系 ,使得它在处理战后一些重大的国际事务时不得不与美国保持一致 ,但惟独在古巴问题上与美国相悖。美国一贯视拉美为后院 ,视古巴为共产主义在拉美的桥头堡。加拿大公开反对美国对古巴的封锁政策。古巴问题显示出加美对外政策的纠葛     

试论美国对中国核武器研制的评估与对策(1961-1964)

本文利用美国政府最新解密材料,对1961-1964年间美国对中国进行核试验的时间、地点、核原料及运载能力的侦察情况进行了阐述.并对美国对中国研制核武器的评估和对策进行分析,其评估与对策是建立在过分夸大中国核威胁的基础之上的.中国研制核武器是为了保卫中国人民免受核威胁,而且,中国在任何时候、任何情况下都不会首先使用核武器.     

Defiance to compliance: Visions of the computer in postwar Britain

In a climate of profound uncertainty over Britain’s postwar status, some industrialists and policymakers sought solace in a ‘defiant modernist’ aesthetic, proposing radical technological transformations to circumvent economic constraints. The British computer industry, which briefly challenged that of the USA for technological sophistication, presents a revealing instance of this approach and its limitations. Early promoters, notably Vivian Bowden of Ferranti, shrewdly laid the rhetorical groundwork to position the new machines as the natural outcome of a uniquely British technological trajectory. Into the 1960s, however, their agenda was disrupted not only by economic realities, but also by the increasing importance of software and compatible systems as opposed to individual machines, and by growing public and industrial familiarity with computing in general. Promoters sought new points of differentiation, but had made little headway when a combination of national policy changes, growing market dominance by US-based corporations, and Anglo-French rapprochement rendered the British national exception largely unworkable. Its powerful rhetorical appeal, however, ensured that it never entirely disappeared.     

Hurricane impacts on southeastern United States coastal national park visitation

As a major contributor to local economies, the tourism industry has been greatly impacted by natural disasters. This study demonstrates the association between tourism economies and impacts of hurricanes in the southeastern United States containing coastal national parks, known for attracting a large number of tourists and having experienced hurricanes. In keeping with two longitudinal data methods (i.e. panel logit model and autoregressive integrated moving average), this study focused on the relationship between the (1) duration, intensity, and damage of hurricanes; (2) existing climate conditions; and (3) tourism demand on park visitation during hurricane and tourism seasons. As a whole, the impacts of hurricanes and climate conditions (precipitation, temperature) were found to have a negative effect on tourism demands (park visitation). With regard to the response of tourism economies to natural disaster damage, parks that experienced stronger natural disasters may be closed for a longer period in order to reconstruct facilities or natural/cultural resources damaged by storms. In an attempt to improve tourism-based regional economies, overcome the challenge of natural disasters on tourism economies, and increase opportunities for establishing disaster management, it is necessary to make an effort to allay unexpected damage to tourism-based areas through proactive plans for disaster mitigation activities.