Pink truck ads: second-wave feminism and gendered marketing

Second-wave feminist media had a contentious relationship with corporate advertisers. This article uses automotive advertisements to explore the role of gender, class, and race in the construction of consumer markets from the 1970s through the 1980s. It analyzes the struggle of Gloria Steinem and other liberal feminists to navigate the terrain between the women's movement and corporate advertisers. The increased economic power of women, stemming from the Equal Credit Opportunity Act as well as broader social and political shifts, facilitated their efforts. In the 1980s, automobiles continued to be marketed to women, albeit through "feminine" imagery conforming to the era's dominant trends.     

Producing Ottomans: Internal Colonization and Social Engineering in Ottoman Immigrant Settlement

In the past decade, historians of the Armenian Genocide have productively explored broader trends in Ottoman population politics to situate the genocide within the totality of Ottoman social engineering techniques and to highlight continuities between the Second Constitutional Period (1908–1918) and the Kemalist era (1919–1950). This article contributes to the effort to understand state building, internal colonization, and state-enacted violence across regimes by examining Ottoman archival documents related to immigrant settlement. Rather than focusing exclusively on the Young Turk period, this article traces Ottoman conceptions of its territory and population from the 1850s forward. In 1857, concerns about population density and population productivity inspired the Tanzimat High Council to issue a new set of migration regulations, which encouraged immigration by promising free land, tax exemption, and religious freedom for colonists from Europe and the United States. The issuing of the 1857 regulations occurred almost simultaneously with the initiation of a decades-long mass Muslim migration from the Crimean Peninsula, Caucasus, and Balkans into the shrinking territory of the Ottoman state. In 1860, the Empire established a centralized Immigrant Commission (Muhacirin Komisyonu) for receiving, categorizing, and settling the Muslim immigrants. Most immigrants did not meet the selection criteria established in the 1857 regulations. Nevertheless, immigrant settlement became a key component in nineteenth-century Ottoman internal colonization and social engineering. Ultimately, settlement policies and data generated about the population and territory allowed officials to enact assimilative and expulsive policies based not only on ethnic or religious characteristics but also on tropes of productivity and civilization. Examining immigrant settlement as internal colonization situates the Ottoman Empire within global patterns of state building and imperialism and reveals continuity in how officials conceived of population productivity and population removal, allowing historians to understand better political, infrastructural, and ideological precursors to the Armenian genocide.     

The Development Authority and the formative years of the Israeli land regime

The history of Israel’s land allocation regime is traced from its inception in the formative years (1948–60), focusing on distribution of urban land to private and business entities. Rich archival materials provide documentation regarding the Development Authority (DA), established in 1950, and its practices. The prohibition on selling “national lands,” zealously observed in Israel’s rural regions, was never closely adhered to in urban areas. The DA’s double role, as a major actor in land allocation as well as the institution representing the “rules of the game,” serves as a platform for a preliminary examination into institutional path dependency theories.     

A Visceral Politics of Sound

Questions of bodies and embodiment are a critical focus for geographers. In this paper we advance discussion of the mobilisation of bodies that investigates the interconnections between the visceral and discursive, through paying attention to the affordances of sound. We draw on our ethnographic research of the Climate Camp parade held during October 2009 in Helensburgh, New South Wales, Australia. Using feminist theory and visceral understandings of socio‐political life, we explore sounds to illustrate how people's beliefs about climate change are mobilised at this parade. We argue that visceral experiences of the rhythmic affordances of sounds—flow, pulse and beat—provide us insights as to how people are mobilised into action. Our results explore bodily judgements of sounds to illustrate how a visceral approach can help to mobilise bodies in ways that can both upset, and reproduce, particular beliefs, subjects and places.     

Starch analysis reveals prehistoric plant translocations and shell tool use,Marquesas Islands,Polynesia

Starch analysis is proving particularly useful in tropical regions like the central Pacific where crop inventories are often dominated by starchy fruits and tubers and recovery of macrobotanical remains is rare. Analysis of 23 shell tools from the Marquesas Islands provides direct evidence for translocation of five traditional crop plants. Four taxa derive from the western Pacific, including Artocarpus altilis (breadfruit), Piper methysticum (kava), Colocasia esculenta (taro), and one or more species of Dioscorea (yam). The fifth taxon, the South American Ipomoea batatas (sweet potato), dates from the 14th century AD onward and constitutes the earliest record of this cultigen in the archipelago. The occurrence of sweet potato starch suggests that this crop plant may have been more important than usually is assumed, while the limited recovery of breadfruit starch, the main Marquesan food plant at western contact, requires further investigation. The starch residues also inform on tool use, demonstrating that shell tools ethnographically associated with specific crops (e.g., “breadfruit peelers”) had more generalised functions. This study is a further demonstration of the potential of starch analysis to provide important information on the history of crop introductions, on-site activities, and artefact use.     

Mammalian erythrocyte preservation in a 3500-year-old Egyptian pot

A ca. 3500-year-old Egyptian pot from the Fayoum site of Gurob contains ethmoid bones characteristic of the sinuses and morphological remains of erythrocytes. The pot contents are interpreted as the remnants of an embalmers studio, and substantiate records of mummification.