Variation in Venues of Slavery and Freedom: Interpreting the Late Eighteenth-Century Cultural Landscape of St. John, Danish West Indies Using an Archaeological GIS

An archaeological GIS is used to examine the late eighteenth-century cultural landscape of St. John, US Virgin Islands. Land use patterns are reconstructed using a combination of historic maps, tax records, and survey reconnaissance. The study demonstrates significant, heretofore undocumented, transitions taking place that reflect dynamic cultural and economic change within Danish West Indian plantation society that includes a significant trend towards land ownership by free-colored St. Johnians more than a half a century before emancipation. These venues of freedom are discussed in relation to broader patterns of estate consolidation and economic shifts.     

Multi-Component Seismic Response Analysis – A Critical Review

Issues related to multi-components seismic response analysis are critically reviewed and their implications with respect to the current codified approaches are studied. The issues specifically addressed are: (1) the directions of earthquake forces to excite a structure when the direction of the potential epicenter is known; (2) different commonly used combination rules to obtain the critical response when responses are available in different directions; and (3) the applicability of the combination rules for elastic and inelastic analyses. Based on an extensive parametric study consisting of three-dimensional 1-, 3-, 8-, and 15- story buildings made of moment-resisting steel frames and 20 recorded earthquakes, it is observed that the principal components produce larger responses than the normal components. The 30% and SSRS rules generally underestimate the axial loads in columns. The 30% combination rule is slightly better than the SSRS rule. For both rules, the uncertainty in the estimation of the axial loads in terms of COV is very large (about 25%). The statistics obtained for axial loads and total base shear indicate that the combination rules are applicable for both elastic and inelastic cases. The critical response could be obtained for an orientation different from that of the principal components. The differences are found to be slightly greater for the scaled earthquakes producing a considerable inelastic behavior. Considering the enormous amount of efforts needed to address the directionality effect, it is believed that the responses obtained by the principal components will be acceptable in most cases; however, for critical structures the components should be rotated to obtain the critical responses.     

The idea of freedom in the writings of non-Chalcedonian Christians in the fifth and sixth centuries

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Christians who had been deprived of the direct sponsorship of the state articulated their claims for political and religious freedom. I examine four cases from the fifth and sixth century in the Eastern Roman Empire and Sasanian Iran. Here I argue that Scriptural models provided an important reservoir of political ideas that could be used by clerics to undermine state authority, whether to underscore the conditional nature of Roman claims to authority or to deny an equality of religious freedom to non-Christian co-citizens.     

‘We are the new Jews!’ and ‘The Jewish Lobby’ – antisemitism and the construction of a national identity by the Austrian Freedom Party

In this article I will analyse the role of antisemitism for the construction of a national identity and an exclusive national in‐group in the discourse of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). The analysis will show that this discourse of the FPÖ, one of the most successful extreme right‐wing parties in Europe, utilises various forms of Holocaust inversion and victim perpetrator reversal in order to delegitimise political opponents. The analysis of these incidents and of the legitimising strategies used by the FPÖ when criticised involves discussing the increasing abstraction of the codes characteristic of latent antisemitism and forms of post‐Nazi antisemitism. I will focus on how the FPÖ's use of the term Holocaust and other terms referring to Nazi atrocities against the Jews corresponds to a universalisation of the term Holocaust in social constellations that are permeated by the culture industry.     

Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi in Correspondence

Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi corresponded with each other for the best part of thirty years. They had shared interests that included science, social science, economics, epistemology, history of ideas and political philosophy. Studying their correspondence and related writings, this article shows that Hayek and Polanyi were committed Liberals but with different understandings of liberty, the forces that endanger liberty, and the policies required to rescue it.