"That Admirable Italian Gentleman": The View from America (and from Italy)

Review in this Article
David F. Schmitz. The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922–1940 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. x + 273 pp     

Early postwar Sydney: a comparison of its portrayal in fiction and in official documents

Literature is a valid source for geographers. In particular, it can offer the humanistic geographer a source of information about the experience of living in certain environments and about the way people thought about their lives. When writers are dealing with their firsthand experience, literature can also be a source of factual data Two novels by Ruth Park and one by Dorothy Hewett, set in early postwar inner Sydney, are analysed on the basis of Ley's (1983) humanistic parameters of security and stress, stimulus and ennui, and stigma and status. The fictional picture is then compared with an official planning document published in 1948. It is concluded that not only literature, but also non-fiction should be approached sceptically.     

ELECTRON SPIN RESONANCE THERMOMETRY APPLIED TO QUARTZITE COBBLES FROM VERGELEGEN SLAVE LODGE,SOMERSET WEST,SOUTH AFRICA

This paper describes the use of electron spin resonance spectroscopy to estimate the degree of heating of quartzite cobbles from hearths on the floor of the archaeological remains of an eighteenth-century Dutch colonial slave lodge. A novel technique based on the comparison of line intensities for the E’and O^-₂ centres in quartz distinguished successfully between cobbles which had been heated to estimated temperatures ranging from 300 °C to 450° C and controls from an adjacent stream bed. This inexpensive and simple technique could be applied to a wide range of archaeological problems involving the thermal history of objects consisting of or containing quartz.