Spaces to play: football as political protest in Kaouther Adimi's Les petits de Décembre

Designed as a companion volume to the author's earlier study The Piano Trio, this book surveys the development of the piano quartet and quintet from their relatively modest beginnings in the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Developments during the first four decades of the nineteenth century resulted not only in Schubert's renowned 'Trout' quintet, but also in works of much brillinace by Dussek, Hummel, weber, and others in which the piano predominates in a concerto-like role. Subsequently, Schubert's epoch-making quintet of 1842 initiated a broadly 'symphonic' style, with large-scale structures and closely integrated textures, which was taken up by many later composers, including Brahms, Dvorak, Cesar Franck, Faure, and Elgar. the author also examinines the numerous changes in the nature of the genres which have occurred in recent times, and gives special consideration to a number of works by leading 20th-century composers, in which 'mixed' media are formed by combining wind instruments with the normal strings-and-piano ensemble. Within his broad historical narrative, Professor Smallman provides descriptive analyses of key works, many with music examples, and also comments perceptively on local trends and developments. his book is likely to be of interest to all those who rae fascinated by this important repertoire - performers, students, and listeners, as well as the general reader.

Abstract. The work presented is the achievement of a master degree project, developed at Politecnico di Torino. The paper aims to provide standards for the formulation and mixing of earth-based mortars, for the rehabilitation of historic buildings of the Roero area, in Piemonte region. Roero presents a large architectural heritage, consisting mainly of fired or earth bricks rural and residential buildings, which was anciently protected using lime or earth-based plasters perfectly integrated with local landscape and environment colours appearance. In recent decades (and still to present days), vernacular plasters are frequently replaced by cement-based products, resulting hardly compatible with local bearing walls materials and landscape aesthetic features. While Roero traditional buildings plasters were produced using local earth and sands coming from streams, today, aggregates extraction in watercourses proximity is not allowed, or strictly regulated by rules and regional regulations. The paper presents a classification of the characteristics of different soils from Roero area, through different types of particle distribution size analysis and diffractometric tests, and propose a method for the production of local earth-based plasters stabilized with lime, making use of earth and rocks from local excavation sites, considered in Italy as secondary raw materials or special waste. Produced plasters compressive and bending strength have been tested, while their suitability for building maintenance and restoration, as their compatibility with Roero architecture and landscape, have been verified through spectrophotometric measures.

One of the most fascinating aspects of irrigation is the close connection between settlement networks and agricultural activities, with water infrastructure serving as the conduit. In particular, irrigation engineering serves as a testament to the evolution and development of local vernacular landscapes, exerting a profound influence on their formation. However, the contribution of irrigation to the development of the vernacular landscape and its internal interactions are poorly understood. This study aims to highlight the relationship between historical hydraulic systems and local landscapes, with a focus on the Chatan Weir Water Conservancy Project, an ancient irrigation engineering system in China. On the basis of archival records, historical materials and observations, this study constructed an analytical framework to analyse how the local landscape changed from 943 to the present. Specifically, this study delved into the evolution of water conservancy, farmland, settlement landscapes and their interactions in the Chatan weir irrigation area. The findings revealed that the local landscape of the Chatan weir irrigation area consists of a collection of landscapes created by residents through a bottom‐up approach. Furthermore, the water conservancy system has provided a stable water supply for both agricultural production and residential livelihoods, which has also shaped the spatial patterns of farmland and settlement landscapes. Finally, clan relations and rural management have played a vital role in the sustainability of the analysed irrigation system. The results of this study can provide insights into the sustainable coexistence of political and local landscapes.

In the first socialist systsem culture was more than a realm of artistry and aesthetics.1 It was often another dimension of a fierce struggle—ideological and political—against the bourgeoisie (Whit...

Professor Carly Adams of the University of Lethbridge is the editor of an interesting and highly relevant textbook on the history of sport in what is now Canada. This textbook is intended primarily for undergraduate students and, as such, can be handily used as a basis for structuring a course on sports and sports practice in Canada. However, it should not be assumed that only undergraduate students will benefit from this textbook. The various chapters offer a decolonial perspective, and both sport researchers and graduate students will benefit from consulting the work of the contributors. In addition, in the preface, Adams emphasizes that sport and recreation practices are contextualized and, therefore, act as a locus of socialization that either reproduces or challenges systems of oppression based on gender, race, or class. In other words, sports, as well as the historical narratives that recount their evolution and transformation, are shaped by broad sociopolitical issues.The first two of the fifteen chapters of the book are methodological in nature. The first one, by Adams, reaffirms the importance of sport as a tool to understand societies better, as well as an agent of sociopolitical, cultural, and economic change. The next chapter, “Method and Theories in Historical Research,” introduces students to the ABCs of historical research and the importance of taking into account the context in which historical sources are produced, as well as the narratives that have been made from these sources. Chapters 3 to 14 are essentially case studies dealing with the place and representation of Indigenous peoples in the development of sport in Canada (Chapters 3 to 5), the impact of industrialization and environmental concerns (Chapter 6); the influence of colonial, nationalist, and imperialist ideologies in the evolution of sport (Chapters 7 to 9 and 13), and the “Sports-Media Complex” as a means of producing and disseminating a Canadian culture of “settler colonialism” (Chapter 12).Chapters 10 and 11 offer a more inclusive reading of history with respect to race issues, while Chapter 14 looks at Canadian nongovernmental organizations involved in the promotion of sport both at home and abroad. Finally, Adams takes up the pen again, this time accompanied by Braden Te Hiwi, to offer a fifteenth and final chapter by way of conclusion. This chapter offers a general reflection on the need to set aside the colonial perspective of historical narratives to bring all the necessary nuances to a complex history.While the approach taken by Adams and the seasoned contributors assembled here is not new in itself, one of the hallmarks of this book is a strong interest in all sports and recreational practices, not just hockey, which remains the subject of much work by Canadian sport historians. In addition, there is a strong focus on Aboriginal activities, practices, and athletes, who are still the most neglected in Canadian history despite significant efforts over the past two decades to include their past in the historical narrative. Sport and Recreation in Canadian History, thus, tries to establish a historical dialogue among the various ethnocultural communities that populate the Canadian territory around the issue of sport, which continues to create a very powerful social and community link. To do so, Adams and her collaborators undertake a rereading of the dominant narrative and propose a history of sport that is emancipatory and inclusive while being attentive to the mechanisms of power and exclusion inherited from a Canadian culture that has—and sometimes still does—defined itself, in large part, on the basis of colonial relationships.

Putting Up with “Putting Up”: A Cultural Analysis of Making Homemade Jam in the Twenty-First Century

Cued by Hegel’s description of his philosophy of history as a “theodicy” and Marx and Engels’ recycling of the term in The German Ideology, this paper examines the role of theodicy in modern thought through an analysis of Marx’s work. I consult Hans Blumenberg, Odo Marquard, and Anthony Paul Smith to develop a definition of modern theodicy as the attempt to reconcile thought with evil by subsuming instances of suffering into a rational, singular, and often periodized historical narrative of progress that represents the world as a reliable and meaningful ground for human self-assertion. I then argue Marx’s philosophy of history retains theodical elements in The German Ideology and his correspondence with Vera Zasulich. Finally, I turn to Lee Edelman and Eckhart von Hochheim to illustrate how thought and life might normatively challenge portraying the world as reliable and framing suffering within a broader historical narrative.

Expressive Currencies: Artistic Transactions and Transformations of Warrior-Inspired Masquerades in Calabar

Reviewed by: The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930 by Natalie J. Ring Erin Clune (bio) The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930. By Natalie J. Ring. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Pp. 349. Cloth, $69.96; paper, $24.95.) One of the enduring debates in postbellum scholarship concerns the question of southern distinctiveness: the extent to which the “New South” [End Page 431] was different and separate, both from the society that preceded it and the one that shared its northern border. As Howard Rabinowitz once observed, scholars have approached these questions with a variety of conceptual frameworks and “categories in which to help package the past.”1 Given their different frames of reference, it’s not surprising that historians have also reached widely divergent conclusions about the nature of southern change and the meaning of national reconciliation. In The Problem South, Natalie Ring sheds creative new light on this long-standing debate. Her primary frame of reference is not really the South, in the sense that she doesn’t assess the vitality of the southern economy, the fairness of the political landscape, or everyday struggles over developing laws of segregation. Yet she does weigh in. Alongside the trend toward sectional reunification around the turn of the century, Ring says, there was a “broader historical narrative about the South’s differentness from the nation. An equally powerful and opposing set of representations of the South as a backward region played counterpoint to the nostalgic image of the reconciled New South” (5–6). The architects of that narrative, she says, were a collection of mostly northern reformers, philanthropists, and social scientists who drew attention to what was commonly known as the “southern problem.” Ring’s book is a study of these reformers and their aspiration to “readjust” the South. And in that sense, her main frame of reference is the growth of the Progressive Era state. The notion that northern liberals wanted to reform the South isn’t a new finding. What makes Ring’s study unique is that she considers that reformist impulse in more cohesive terms and puts their southern story in conversation with scholarship about the growth of the modern state. Looking at southern distinctiveness primarily in discursive and representational terms—rather than tangible, historical ones—the author avers that the South was a paradox of progress and poverty. But it was a paradox that northern reformers also constructed—at least in part—as they worked to entrench their corporate liberal values. As Ring notes, “The consolidation of early twentieth-century liberalism entailed the creation of a persuasive image of regional backwardness that could then be resolved through economic and social reform” (6). As Ring’s chapters demonstrate, the reformist ambition to fix the South expressed itself through various organizational initiatives and cultural discussions—around public health and disease, agriculture, education, and race. Broadly speaking, many of these topics have been standard yardsticks in the change/continuity debate. Yet Ring is mainly interested in the ways they served the reformist agenda of “reshaping the South in the likeness of the North” (131). In her chapter on King Cotton, for example, [End Page 432] she explores the career of Seaman A. Knapp, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s special agent for the promotion of agriculture in the South, who traveled through the South to promote his farm demonstration program and to teach farmers the techniques of “scientific” agriculture. In a larger sense, Ring writes, “the rural uplift of the South inevitably made for better national democratic citizens as well as contributed to the economic welfare of the nation” (130). In her chapter on education, the author identifies a similarly nationalist agenda behind familiar efforts like the General Education Board and the Ogden movement. Such reforms, Ring argues, “underscored the imperative need to educate white children in preparation for assuming their roles as white citizens in the American nation-state” (173). While The Problem South repackages southern distinctiveness as a political tool of national elites, it also argues that this Progressive impulse had an important global dimension. Northern reformers reinforced their narrative of distinctiveness through reference to...

Between 1912 and 1947, when it sank, the icebreaker the RMS Nascopie, a British-made vessel commissioned by the HBC to be used as a supply ship, serviced the eastern Canadian Arctic. For an eight-year period during this time it also counted tourists among its passengers, alongside HBC personnel, missionaries, medical practitioners, scientists, and government officials. Life aboard the ship, wildlife, sea ice, inclement weather, and Inuit were all documented in the reports, written diaries, and visual records that emanated from the Nascopie as it operated under the many, often contradictory, guises of icebreaker, supply vessel, cruise ship, and sovereign symbol. Looking across photography, painting, and printmaking during the 1930s through to the present day, I consider the Nascopie as an anchor between the visual arts and the coastal landscape. Here, I position Inuit and non-Inuit perceptions of cultural and environmental change and continuity along Canada’s coastline within the transformative effect of colonial modernity. Image-making, notably photography and painting, aboard the Nascopie sought to reproduce the Canadian Arctic as an object of collective history and national identity. Confronting the often-anonymous Inuit and Arctic environments throughout the photography and painting of Lorene Squire and F.H. Varley, I identify how the Nascopie, as a colonial actor in the local landscape, persists in contemporary Inuit visual and cultural memory, most notably in the work of Shuvinai Ashoona. By untangling the inter-media and multi-temporal role of the Nascopie across past and present image cultures, I explore the intertwined narratives of coastal history, visual culture, and colonial modernity in the eastern Canadian Arctic.

Veterans of the high-definition TV wars of the 1980s, the authors, social scientists as well as technologists, came to see themselves as "chroniclers and students of an intriguing and serious techno-economic conflict." Why, they asked, did so few understand the rules of the game? In a broad account accessible to generalist and specialist alike, they address the current national debate about the development of a national information infrastructure, locating the debate in a broad historical narrative that illuminates how we got here and where we may be going, and outlining a bold vision of an open communications infrastructure that will cut through the political gridlock that threatens this "information highway."Technical change the authors argue is creating a new paradigm that fits neither the free market nor regulatory control models currently in play. They detail what is wrong with the political process of the national information infrastructure policy-making and assess how different media systems (telecommunications, radio, television broadcasting,) were originally established, spelling out the technological assumptions and organizational interests on which they were based and showing why the old policy models are now breaking down. The new digital networks are not analogous to railways and highways or their electronic forebears in telephony and broadcasting; they are inherently unfriendly to centralized control of any sort, so the old traditions of common carriage and public trustee regulation and regulatory gamesmanship no longer apply. The authors' technological and historical analysis leads logically toward a policy proposal for a reformed regulatory structure that builds and protects meaningful competition, but that abandons its role as arbiter of tariffs and definer of public service and public interest.

Deep-Seated Barriers to End-of-Life Care Improvement in the Twenty-first Century David Clark (bio) Emily K. Abel. The Inevitable Hour: A History of Caring for Dying Patients in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. viii + 226 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $32.95. By the late nineteenth century, the people of Europe and North America were living longer and had rising expectations of health and well-being, but with the benefits of longevity and the diminished threat of early death came other consequences. The predominant causes of death started to shift ground—from the sudden demise brought on by infection, disaster, and plague to protracted dying associated with the emerging chronic diseases of the modern era—not least cancer and tuberculosis. Whereas in the Middle Ages in Europe, the death that came too swiftly was something to be feared and defended against, now concerns began to grow about lengthy dying and the suffering it might entail. Mid–nineteenth-century popular culture presented idealized images of a slow and controlled farewell to the world, with family members gathered around and confidence in a passage to another and better world. But, by the close of the century, preoccupations were emerging about the manner of dying—now coming to be seen not only as a social and cultural event but also as potentially a medical process. This brought growing unease in the disposition towards dying. Changing personnel around the deathbed, secrecy about the imminence of death, as well as the desire to quell the threat of pain and suffering—all reveal a new anxiety that opened up a space for medical intervention. The nineteenth century, for the French historian Phillipe Ariès, was associated with the emergence of new sentimental orientations to death that reflected, in particular, major changes within the culture and structure of family life. As the meaning of family relationships deepened and became more nuanced, parting with a dying relative and subsequent grief for that loss became increasingly emotional and expressive. A growing emphasis fell on the emotional pain of separation and on keeping the dead alive in memory. This was enhanced by new developments in photography that enabled carefully staged postmortem images to be captured and preserved for posterity. It also meant elaborate rituals of mourning and funeral observance as well [End Page 751] as the emergence of the cult of the grave as a family resting-place. Undoubtedly, it led to new representations of the deathbed itself. The wider Romantic movement contributed to notions of the “beautiful death,” to la mort de toi (“thy death”) personified in the death of a loved one. Ariès also showed that, in the nineteenth century, the rise of modern science brought challenges to religious authority and, specifically, in this context, to the necessity of dying in the presence of the official representatives of formal religion. For Ariès, medical men began to replace priests, clergy, and ministers at the bedsides of the dying. But this created a moral vacuum. For if the role of medicine was to focus on the technical preoccupations of attending to the relief of pain and the easing of physical distress, who was to address the fears of the dying, the distress of the bereaved, and the achievement of the “good death”? There has been a tendency to see this as the period in which dying was drained of meaning by science and medicine—forcing life’s end to retreat from its public and family dimensions into the sequestered spaces of hospitals and other institutions. This was also strengthened by the growing tendency to shield the dying person from the reality of their fate. For Ariès, the mid-nineteenth century was therefore the origin of “the lie” wherein the gravity of the dying person’s situation was kept from them—and death was on the way to becoming “shameful and forbidden.” Emily Abel’s thoroughly researched book steps into this broad historical narrative and gives context, detail, and definition. Focused on the American experience, and with some stretching of the period at either end, she takes us from the close of the nineteenth century to the mid-1960s, explaining how the movement...

This essay summarizes the thesis of a much longer article, Advocacy for Marriage Equality: The Power of a Broad Historical Narrative During a Transitional Period in Civil Rights, 2015 Mich. St. L. Rev 1249 (2015). Previous civil rights movements in the United States define broad historical patterns that form a narrative helpful to a proper understanding of new controversies. As a society we often could benefit from a reminder that our actions today will form the history for future generations, who will judge us with benefit of hindsight and a broader perspective. With each new civil rights controversy, we owe it to ourselves and to the victims of discrimination to ask whether we are once again in a period of transition, where conventional mores will soon sound as jarring as Justice Bradley’s concurrence in Bradwell v. Illinois sounds to us now.

Russian and Soviet nurse refugees faced myriad challenges attempting to become registered nurses in North America and elsewhere after the World War II. By drawing primarily on International Council of Nurses refugee files, a picture can be pieced together of the fate that befell many of those women who left Russia and later the Soviet Union because of revolution and war in the years after 1917. The history of first (after World War I) and second (after World War II) wave émigré nurses, integrated into the broader historical narrative, reveals that professional identity was just as important to these women as national identity. This became especially so after World War II, when Russian and Soviet refugee nurses resettled in the West. Individual accounts become interwoven on an international canvas that brings together a wide range of personal experiences from women based in Russia, the Soviet Union, China, Yugoslavia, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere. The commonality of experience among Russian nurses as they attempted to establish their professional identities highlights, through the prism of Russia, the importance of the history of the displaced nurse experience in the wider context of international migration history.

Despite the progress made toward generating and utilizing population-scale family trees to study historical population dynamics, little is known about their representativeness for the entire population. In this article, we confront the inherent complexities and biases in historical data collection and shed light on the extensive areas of history that remain unknown, unrecorded, or inaccurately portrayed. Although we do not provide definitive solutions for these data gaps, we aim to initiate a dialogue on these critical issues, contributing to the discourse on ethical data collection and representation in historical research. We first report on the preliminary results of a record linkage experiment between family tree records and a historical census, emphasizing the need for methods that integrate historical data from multiple sources to systematically evaluate representativeness. The experiment reveals significant underrepresentation of certain groups in the United States, notably Native American, Black, and Mexican persons, as well as those from eastern Europe, southern Europe, and Ireland. These findings underscore the ethical responsibilities that should guide historical research, including the need to address underrepresentation and improve methodologies to better reflect the diversity of population dynamics and migration patterns. To complement these efforts, we advocate for the use of interactive story maps to amplify the qualitative narratives of underrepresented populations and integrate them into the broader historical narrative. Our endeavor to map migration and demographic changes is not just about tracing the past; it’s about shaping a more equitable and comprehensive understanding of history that honors the diversity of all its participants.