Amateurs and the Rise of Astrophysics 1840–1910

This essay examines the role of amateurs in founding the astronomical subdiscipline of astrophysics. During 1840–1870, they initiated many of the observing programs that came to comprise the new specialty. And during 1870–1910, they participated both in the ongoing research of the field and the campaign to provide it with an institutional base. These general trends are illustrated by examples from the lives of ten prominent amateur solar physicists.     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

The Emergence of a Story Space

For centuries, the Club War, a popular uprising on Finnish territory in the 1590s, constituted a minor side story in Swedish royal historiography. After the Napoleonic Wars, it was quickly appropriated as one of the most canonical historical events in the emerging Finnish national history. This article argues that, in order to understand the role of the Club War in early 19th-century Finnish historical culture, it is necessary to trace its interpretive tradition backwards in time, across established borders of national historiographies, in a thematic, transtemporal, and comparative framework. The paper will discuss eight pieces of Swedish and Finnish history writing from 1620 to 1860, focusing on the storylines, attributes attached to the protagonists, and historical agency allocated to different social groups against a backdrop of sources available within each context of writing, in order to pinpoint and analyse moments when the story space of the event altered. The article will demonstrate that textual traditions of regions that formerly belonged to multi-ethnic or conglomerate states provide particularly interesting material for transtemporal historiography. Through this case study, the article also argues that Swedish and Finnish historiography of the early 19th century should be studied as one, entangled, textual culture.     

Studying Immigrant Policy One Law at a Time

This article shows that, in the study of immigrant integration policy in the U.S. states, it is critical to report data and coding decisions for individual laws. This analysis uses an updated and public database of law‐level decisions, which includes 2,703 legislative actions recorded by the National Conference of State Legislatures from 2005 to 2016. These data are used to estimate models of aggregate state policy activity in a variety of ways: as a single continuum of policy balance versus separate models of welcoming and hostile, lumping all policy subareas together versus analyzing a specific subarea, and lumping all years together in one cross section versus panel analysis. The results in these models differ enough to indicate that reporting codes for individual‐level laws is absolutely essential so that each researcher easily can construct the measure that fits his or her theoretical framework best.     

Canadian geopolitical culture: Climate change and sustainability

Considering recent formulations of geopolitical culture in combination with concerns that environmental change be included in contemporary geopolitical analysis, this paper examines the implicit geopolitical formulations in recent Canadian federal political discourse both in Stephen Harper's Conservative government and the subsequent Liberal administration. Contrasting earth system science ideas about global transformations with Canadian nationalist rhetoric concerning petroleum production and notions of unlimited resource extraction as parts of national identity sharply highlights the contours of Canadian identity. If sustainability is to be taken seriously, the official nationalist formulation will have to be drastically changed, but as the widespread rejection of the LEAP manifesto suggests, such ideas of a sustainable mode of globalization have yet to substantially influence Canadian political discourse, despite the rhetorical support offered to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau.     

La rivière Romaine en chantier : Transformations contemporaines des territorialités des Innus d'Ekuanitshit

Since 2009, Innu members of the community of Ekuanitshit have faced a major hydroelectric project on the Romaine River, an integral part of the Nitassinan, their ancestral territory. In this paper, we study the project's impacts on the material and ideational relationship the Innu have with the river. We explore the idea that the project transforms the traditional relationship to territory into a more pragmatic one, marked by economic and political interests. Our analysis reveals that the Innu's territorialities, though partly transformed by increased contact—and sometimes conflict—with hegemonic non‐indigenous society, remain anchored in a strong cultural heritage and a deep identification with territory. We argue that these seemingly differentiated conceptualizations, of traditions on the one hand and development on the other, are not incompatible. These conceptualizations comprise dynamic cultural, social, and political territorialities which are thus internal and external, ancestral and contemporary.     

古典阿拉伯——伊斯兰舆地文献所记欧亚陆路交通

根据阿拉伯——伊斯兰舆地文献,结合汉籍文献记载,考辨了9—10世纪自地中海到中国的陆路交通路线。中亚到中国的道路起于呼罗珊的木鹿,中亚地区的布哈拉、撒马尔罕、扎敏、怛逻斯和碎叶是重要的交通枢纽,而花剌子模是中亚与东南欧及北欧贸易的中心及货物集散地。     

Accessing global value chains? The role of business state relations in the private clothing industry in Vietnam

This article deals with the access to global markets via inclusionin global value chains for private clothing producers in Vietnam.It argues that ‘chain entry barriers’ are not onlyconstructed by global buyers as it is often suggested, but alsoby political–economic processes in Vietnam. The marketorientations of four segments of private enterprise owners isexamined and shown to correspond to their ethnicity, originand location in northern or southern Vietnam. It is argued thatthis is mostly because these factors influence access to thestate system, where export-related resources are found.     

Ancestry Estimation Based on Morphoscopic Traits in a Sample of African Slaves from Lagos,Portugal (15th–17th Centuries)

In 2009, a skeletal collection of 158 individuals was excavated in Valle da Gafaria, Lagos, Portugal. These individuals were buried in an unusual way, having been discarded in an urban dump located outside the medieval city walls, dated from the 15th–17th centuries. Lagos was, at the time, an important slave trade harbour, and during the excavation, the morphological appearance of the skulls and the presence of intentionally modified teeth in some individuals raised suspicion that they were African slaves. Despite the extensive historical information about the Atlantic slave trade, so far, skeletal remains identified as slaves were scarce, especially in Europe. The aim of the present study is to estimate the ancestry of a sample of 33 adult individuals (28 women and 5 men) recovered in the Valle da Gafaria applying eleven morphological characteristics using the naïve Bayes classifier. When comparing the individuals with four groups of classification (European, African, American Indian and Asian), 24 (72.7%) specimens were classified as Africans with a posterior probability greater than 0.90. When only two groups were considered (the African and the European), 31 (93.9%) individuals were classified as Africans with a posterior probability greater than 0.90. These results are in accordance with the historical record and previous genetic studies, suggesting that this sample represents a rare archaeological sample of great interest to the history of the Atlantic slave trade, that is, the Lagos individuals were probably of African ancestry. Although the ancestry is a parameter of the biological profile mainly estimated in forensic Anthropology, this study confirms the importance of its investigation in past populations. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.