Flexural Behavior of Typical Chinese Traditional Timber Stitching Beams

In Chinese traditional timber buildings, stitching is very common. When the bearing capacity or the rigidity is inadequate, a timber beam is often strengthened with another beam using the stitching method. The timber stitching beams are mainly of two types—the small-top/big-bottom type and the big-top/small-bottom type. To study the bending behavior of these two types of timber stitching beams, including the failure mode, the flexural capacity, the strain distribution at mid-span section, and the maximum deflection, bending tests are carried out on 14 timber stitching beams with Chinese traditional conformation for seven pine beams and seven fir beams. The results show that the failure modes of the small-top/big-bottom type of stitching beams all show brittle fractures at the bottoms of the bottom beams. The failure modes of the big-top/small-bottom type of stitching beams all show brittle fractures at the bottoms of the top beams. The distribution of section strain along the height of each part of the beam basically obeys plane hypothesis. Based on the theoretical and experimental analysis, the calculation formulas of flexural capacity and maximum deflection of these two types of timber stitching beams made of pine and fir are presented.     

Gall's visit to The Netherlands

In March 1805, Franz Joseph Gall left Vienna to start what has become known as his cranioscopic tour. He traveled through Germany, Denmark, and The Netherlands. In this article, we will describe his visit to The Netherlands in greater detail, as it has not yet received due attention. Gall was eager to go to Amsterdam because he was interested in the large collection of skulls of Petrus Camper. Gall presented a series of lectures, reports of which can be found in a local newspaper and in a few books, published at that time. We will summarize this material. We will first outline developments in the area of physiognomy, in particular in The Netherlands, and what the Dutch knew about Gall's doctrine prior to his arrival. We will then present a reconstruction of the contents of the lectures. Finally, we will discuss the reception of his ideas in the scientific community.     

Vox populismus: a populist radical right attitude among the public?

In the last two decades, populist radical right (PRR) parties have been electorally very successful in Western Europe. Various scholars have argued that these parties share an ideological core that consists of a specific form of nationalism (nativism), in combination with two other attitudes (authoritarianism and populism). The aim of this research note is to assess whether this ideological core also exists as a consistent attitude among citizens. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the attitudes of Dutch citizens indicate that we can indeed speak of a consistent PRR attitude among the public. I also show that this attitude is strongly related to the probability of voting for the PRR Freedom Party (Partij voor de Vrijheid) of Geert Wilders.     

Determinants of divorce in nineteenth-century Flanders

In 1830, the year Belgium became independent, there were four divorces in Belgium. From about 1870 to 1910, there were about one hundred divorces per year, and since 1910, there have been about 1,000. The aim of this research is to investigate the factors that played a role in the increase in the number of divorces in Belgium in the course of the nineteenth century. The research relates to information from four Flemish municipalities for the period 1800-1913. Results indicate that an explanation of the rising divorce rate can be sought in the psychological and social consequences of the more pronounced shift in marriage, gender and family expectations. Increasing numbers of women threw themselves more and more into their gender-specific expressive gender role, whereas the objective opportunities and attainability of this role did not increase commensurately. The result was role strain: high marriage and family expectations soon come up against intrinsic limitations. As a result of this, both individual and general frustration increased, and this was an ideal social substratum for facilitating divorce.     

Luxemburg on Tahrir Square: Reading the Arab Revolutions with Rosa Luxemburg's The Mass Strike

The protests on Tahrir Square in Cairo have come to symbolize the Arab uprisings of 2011. They have proven that Arab political life is more complex than the false choice between authoritarian rule or Islamist oppositions. The popular uprisings witnessed the emergence of “the Arab peoples” as political actors, able to topple entrenched authoritarian leaders, challenging repressive regimes and their brutal security apparatuses. In our contribution we want to analyze the political dynamics of these uprisings beyond the salient immediacy of the revolutionary events, by taking, as our guide, Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet The Mass Strike (2005 [1906], London: Bookmarks). An interesting theoretical contribution to the study of revolution, Luxemburg's book provides us with tools to introduce a historical and political reading of the Arab Spring. Based on fieldwork and thorough knowledge of the region, we draw from evidence from the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and the more gradual forms of political change in Morocco. Re‐reading the revolutionary events in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco through the lens of The Mass Strike offers activists on the ground insights into the dialectic between local and national struggles, economic and political demands, strike actions and revolution. The workers protests in Tunisia and Egypt during the last decade can be grasped as anticipations of the mass strike during the revolution; the specific mode in which workers participate as a class in the revolutionary process. This perspective enables an understanding of the current economic conflicts as logical forms of continuity of the revolution. The economic and the political, the local and the national (and one may add the global), are indissoluble yet separate elements of the same process, and the challenge for revolutionary actors in Tunisia and Egypt lies in the connection, organization and fusion of these dispersed moments and spaces of struggle into a politicized whole. Conversely, an understanding of the reciprocity between revolutionary change and the mass strike allows activists in Morocco to recognize the workers' movement as a potentially powerful actor of change, and trade unionists to incorporate the political in their economic mobilizations.     

Changing patterns of familial sociability: family members as witnesses to (re)marriage in nineteenth-century Flanders

Based on research in three Flemish communities, the author concluded that during the course of the second part of the nineteenth century, there was an increasing trend toward choosing family members as witnesses to the marriage ceremony (of first marriages). This was interpreted as an aspect of the "familiarization" of marriage. It might also, however refer to changing family contexts and social networks, to switching roles of parents and youth, to shifting intergenerational power, and to new family situations of solidarity and conflict. In this follow-up study, the author demonstrates that the former conclusions also hold true for other Flemish regions, for all social groups, and for remarriages. It also appears that marrying people increasingly selected brothers and brothers-in-law as witnesses, rather than descending or ascending kin. These observations support the thesis of the increasing familiarization of family relations during the course of the nineteenth century.     

The Problem of Slums: Shifting Methods of Neoliberal Urban Government in Morocco

This article puts forward two main arguments. First, it highlights the relationship between different phases of neoliberalism in Morocco together with the specific methods and techniques of urban government that were deployed in an effort to govern the slums and their populations. A period of ‘roll back neoliberalism’ during the 1980s generated reforms that tried to increase government control over the urban territory to compensate for the negative social outcomes of structural adjustment. The subsequent period of ‘roll out neoliberalism’ coincided with the attempt to manage and regulate the slum population through new modalities of state intervention. Second, while evolutions in neoliberal government reflected a gradual process, this transition in Morocco was accelerated by security concerns following two moments of serious urban violence: the 1981 riots and the 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca. Therefore, Morocco's recent political transformations cannot be understood in terms provided by the mainstream narrative linking economic liberalization to democratization. Rather, they reflect a profound shift towards intrinsically authoritarian modalities of neoliberal government which are clearly revealed at the urban scale.     

Marrying in the city in times of rapid urbanization

Economic, social, political, and demographic processes changed Western European cities strongly during the nineteenth century. Especially during this time, the northern part of Belgium (Flanders) became highly urbanized. Investigating the long-term development of the marriage pattern in the cities of Antwerp, Aalst, and Ghent gives a detailed picture of the evolution of the urban marriage pattern. In this article, specific emphasis is on gender, social, and migration distinctions. The results confirm that there is a male-female difference and variation among various social and migrant groups in the age at first marriage during the period 1800-1906. Moreover, regional differences are also visible. In the port city of Antwerp, massive immigration caused a unique evolution in the age at first marriage during the last decades of the nineteenth century, which did not appear in the textile cities of Aalst and Ghent during this time.     

Botta Adorno,Empress Maria Theresa and Brussels Tapestry in the Mid-Eighteenth Century. Part I

Relying on newly excavated archival sources, this two-part study seeks to map the genesis and development of the plan conceived by Antoniotto di Botta Adorno (1688–1774), Minister Plenipotentiary of the Austrian Netherlands from 1749 to 1753, to support the Brussels tapestry industry by promoting Brussels tapestries as diplomatic gifts. The first part sheds fresh light on the lives and mutual relations between the tapestry producers (tapissiers) who populated the landscape in the 1750s — Peter van den Hecke (1680–1752), Daniel IV Leyniers (1705–1770) and the half-brothers Jan Frans (1697–1774) and Peter II van der Borcht (1712–1760) — and analyses the slow maturation of Adorno’s plan in the summer of 1749. The second article will describe the way in which Botta Adorno made the project a reality and will also examine the strategies devised by the Minister and the Brussels tapissiers and the context in which they sought to apply them.