A Hierarchy of Geographies: A Skinnerian Model of Indochina’s Overseas Chinese Congrégations and Their Influence on French Colonialism

In Indochina, overseas Chinese were organized by dialect group into associations called congregations, which shared many of the functions of huiguan in China. The spread of overseas Chinese economic and social networks followed a Skinnerian model in which large urban con?régations wielded more political and economic authority than did smaller, rural con?régations. By examining the impacts of French colonialism upon overseas Chinese networks within Indochina and upon overseas connections with their Chinese native places, this paper proposes that the Skinnerian model of local-system hierarchy fits quite comfortably when applied to the world of French colonial Indochina and its overseas Chinese. Furthermore, it argues that French colonialism actually reinforced the Skinnerian hierarchy of politics and markets in ways that endured long after the collapse of Imperial China.     

Nur „Zweite Wahl”︁ oder Die Berufung Adolf Butenandts zum Direktor des KWI für Biochemie

The remarkable career of the nobel laureate Adolf Butenandt in Germany before 1945 and especially after the second world war is well known. But in recent years several publications have questioned his personal behaviour in the Third Reich. But all these articles interpreted Butenandts career and his attitude from our knowledge today about Nazi Germany. From archival sources this article will view on the situation in the 1930s and will show that Butenandt was originally not the first choice of the government for the position of director at the Kaiser‐Wilhelm‐Institute for Biochemistry. Finally it is shown, that Butenandt did knew what was going on behind the scenes, because through his close connections with officers of the Rockefeller Foundation he got several information on the selection.     

Zur Geschichte des Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituts für physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie. Zur geplanten Veränderung des Instituts in eine Forschungs- und Entwicklungsstätte des Heeres für den Gaskampf und Gasschutz auch in Friedenszeiten 1916 und nach 1933

A Contribution to the History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry: On Projected Changes of the Institute into a Research and Development Center of the Army for Chemical Warfare also in Times of Peace 1916 and after 1933. — The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and Electrochemistry, today named after its first director Fritz-Haber-Institut, was in the first World War a place of research on chemical warfare. Evidences in the Archive for the History of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft show that it was planned during the war to continue research in this area in peacetime. To realize this Fritz Haber proposed to found a special Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. As this could not be accomplished the war ministry founded 6 million marks to establish an extra department in the KWI of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry just before the end of the war. After Germany lost the war these were used for other research areas while work on chemical warfare was carried out elsewhere. When Fritz Haber resigned 1933 because of the race-laws of the nationalsocialists the war ministry in cooperation with the ministery for culture nominated an obliging scientist as director of the institute with the aim to take up again research in the area of chemical warfare despite of the opposition of the president of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft and the ministery of the interior. After that time until the end of the second world war 1945 a good part of the work carried out in the institute was done for the war ministry.     

Isolde Hausser (7. 12. 1889-5. 10. 1951), Technische Physikerin und Wissenschaftlerin am Kaiser-Wilhelm-/Max-Planck-Institut für Medizinische Forschung,Heidelberg

Historical sociobiographic accounts on members of the scientific and technical professions in the years of the Weimar Republic and after, are as yet scarce. This applies notably to women in the scientific community. Having formally been admitted to academic studies at German Universities only in 1908, their claims of wanting to apply their newly gained knowledge and to pursue academic careers were still not unquestioned by society. The social and cognitive integration of “the female” in male dominated science organisation, especially in the natural sciences and their kin fields in industry, remains problematic to-day. Isolde Hausser, daughter of the ambitious but little succesful inventor-entrepreneur Hermann Ganswindt, took her doctoral degree in physics at Berlin University in 1914, then worked as head of a group at a “Telefunken” laboratory for vacuum tubes till 1929, before she became research scientist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg. There she worked on photoerythemaes and the formation of pigment and discovered the specific action of longwave ultraviolet. She contributed important results to our knowledge on the constitution and the behaviour of organic compounds by modern physical methods. She died of cancer on 5th October, 1951.     

An der Schwelle zum Atomzeitalter. Die Vorgeschichte der Entdeckung der Kernspaltung im Dezember 1938

On the Threshold of the Atomic Age: The History of the Discovery of Nuclear Fission in December 1938: - Fifty years ago in mid-December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry discovered nuclear fission by demonstrating, using chemical methods, the presence of barium in the decay products of neutron-irradiated uranium. This essay points out the constellation of conditions and prerequisites (Historischer Erfahrungsraum/“historical field of experience”) which led to the discovery of nuclear fission, and was constituted by specific components (“presentabilia”) both internal and external to science in general and to atomic research in particular. A decisive role was played by the constellation of the three members of the Berlin team and their personal situations under the political conditions of the 1930s. Further “presentabilia” were the institutional, instrumental and disciplinary conditions under which the team worked and the methods available to the individual members of the team. It was very important that some of the “presentabilia” were “not-present” to the members of the team. In particular, after Meitner's departure from Berlin Hahn and Strassmann had no access to methods and tools for proving the presence of alpha rays; nothing was known of the existence of actinides; no cyclotron or other source of neutrons more productive than those already in use in Berlin, Paris and Rome was available; it was very important that Strassmann and Hahn were not convinced of the strong validity of the resonance process induced by thermal neutrons; etc.     

The identification of the medieval church of St Sabas in Jerusalem in the light of new documentary evidence

ABSTRACT

For over a century the church that the Greek monks of Dayr Mar Saba are known to have possessed inside the walls of Jerusalem in the twelfth century has usually been associated with a chapel surviving inside the Disy family house opposite the police barracks south of the Citadel, while the Zāwiyyat al-Shaykh Ya?qūb (Ya?qūbiyya), on the east side of Christ Church, has been identified as having originally been built in the twelfth century, possibly by Monophysites, as a church dedicated to St James the Persian, or the ‘Cut-up’ (Intercisus). New documentary research, however, now makes it appear more likely that Mujīr al-Dīn was correct in attributing the building of the Ya?qūbiyya to the Greeks and that it was also the church referred to by pilgrims in the twelfth century as that of St Sabas. This means that the identity of the church in Dār Disy, if indeed it was a church, remains to be determined.