Final Assault Research Articles

The final assault on nature: how the environmental crisis reinforces the civilizational crisis in Colombia

Drawing on fieldwork, this article investigates the interplay between the environmental and civilizational crisis at the dawn of the Anthropocene. We explain how in the lower Cauca region in Colombia, possibilities of overcoming the environmental crisis are crushed by power constellations that delegitimize traditional ecological alternatives to extractive systems of governance and production. These alternatives are Indigenous and peasant knowledges and practices, which emerge from ontologies preceding and or later resisting European conquest and exploitation. Ecological alternatives may delineate paths to overcome the mastery of nature and subsequent environmental crisis, but they are under threat. Indeed, by privatizing and destroying ecosystems and violently displacing subsistence communities, extractivism is effectively eradicating entire cultures, valuable ecological knowledge, and perpetuating human suffering on a massive scale. We seek to explain how this process unfolds and also to identify possibilities for intervention and the empowerment of traditional ecological alternatives in the lower Cauca region.

Review: Cold War and Architecture: The Competing Forces That Reshaped Austria after 1945

Review: <i>Cold War and Architecture: The Competing Forces That Reshaped Austria after 1945</i>

Victoria o muerte: Música para los últimos momentos de El Álamo en el cine

La defensa y batalla de El Álamo en 1836 supone uno de los grandes acontecimientos de la Historia americana, hito fundacional sobre el que el cine se interesó desde sus primeros momentos, y que ha conocido diversas interpretaciones a lo largo de un siglo (1911-2004). Los momentos más dramáticos fueron las horas previas a la batalla final, tras trece días de asedio de las tropas del general Santa Anna a los texanos, y la propia batalla. El tratamiento musical que los diferentes compositores de la partitura de cada película han dado a estos momentos ha variado en función de diversos factores. En este artículo analizamos la música de las escenas relativas al día previo a la batalla y al asalto final, abordando especialmente el toque de degüello empleado por cada uno, su importancia en el conjunto de la partitura, sus posibles referentes, su estructura y el carácter del tema. Para ello diseñamos unas tablas de análisis de contenido categorial, que nos permiten comparar las seis películas estudiadas y llegar a las conclusiones. The defense and the battle of The Alamo in 1836 is one of the greatest events of American History. Film writers, directors and producers were interested in it since the early days, so there are several adaptations from 1911 to 2004. The most dramatic moments were the hours before the battle after thirteen days of siege of the Santa Anna’s troops, and the final assault. According to different factors, each film composer has written a personal version of the music for these scenes. In this paper we analyze the musical treatment applied to the scenes of the previous day and of final assault, highlighting the different versions of the deguello, its importance inside the score, its sources, structure and character. For to do this, we use tables of categorical content which let us to compare the six films we studied and to reach the conclusions.

Public Health Approach of Ayurveda and Yoga for COVID-19 Prophylaxis.

Public Health Approach of Ayurveda and Yoga for COVID-19 Prophylaxis.

Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy by Donald L. Miller

Reviewed by: Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy by Donald L. Miller Stephen D. Engle Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy. By Donald L. Miller. (New York and other cities: Simon and Schuster, 2019. Pp. xx, 663. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4516-4137-0.) Approaching the Civil War's centennial, Bruce Catton wrote that as much as the northern people looked anxiously in early July 1863 toward Pennsylvania where the "threads of fate" pulled Robert E. Lee into the titanic three-day battle [End Page 921] at Gettysburg, "the real pull of fate was at Vicksburg. . . . down here by the great river" (Catton, U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition [Boston, 1954], p. 104). More than sixty-five years later, Donald L. Miller reminds us of that truth, even while scholars continue to write Gettysburg onto center stage. Although Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the most important strategic point in the Confederacy, the prosperous river city did not need a civil war to emphasize its importance. One needs only to look at a map to understand why. That scholars continue to chronicle the Union's victorious forty-seven-day siege confirms its centrality to understanding why the North won and why the Confederacy lost the Civil War. In Ulysses S. Grant's own words, "The fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell" (Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Vol. 1 [New York, 1885], p. 567). He was right to affirm that Vicksburg was the Civil War's transformative campaign, in that his army's conquest of the Mississippi River's Gibraltar opened the Father of Waters to Union commerce, split the Confederacy, and isolated the western slave states of Arkansas and Texas and part of Louisiana. More than that, the campaign showcased Grant's mastery of maneuver and adaptation in a hostile environment, while also handling the battles and raids on his way to the final assault. Miller argues that Grant's brilliance was more than just organizing an extraordinary amphibious assault on the Confederate citadel; it also gave evidence of a superior commander determining by thought, action, and deed the politics of war. Handling Abraham Lincoln's, Henry W. Halleck's, and the public's impatience, while managing troublesome political generals such as John A. McClernand, proved to be an equally significant accomplishment. If his unorthodox decisions went against his superior's accepted theories of war, Grant handled the complexities of leadership, strategy, administration, public affairs, logistics, and politics in ways that prepared for what was to come. The commander moved with great skill, and his long-range planning and persistence in a hostile environment not only won the battle of combatants but also transformed that environment by turning slave soil into free soil. His campaign's significance dwarfed anything undertaken in the eastern theater largely because it unleashed a social revolution that culminated in the liberation of nearly 100,000 slaves and brought some 26,000 slaves into the Union army. In the end, Grant's improvisational genius comes alive in this portrait because Miller illuminates the river warrior in ways that humanize the Union commander's strategic ebbs and flows in the heartland's hostile landscape. It is the story of not only the war's great military turning point, but also how America's greatest soldier evolved into an insightful commander and a military emancipator of the quarter million slaves living in the lower Mississippi River Valley. To be sure, several scholars have told this same story, but Miller has found a way to weave both military and emancipation history together that captures the drama and the essence of what it means to wage war while humanizing ordinary men doing extraordinary things. It takes such a book to remind us of why the war is always present. [End Page 922] Stephen D. Engle Florida Atlantic University Copyright © 2020 Southern Historical Association

CLAUDIUS’ HOUSEBOAT

In the first months of 44 ce, the Roman emperor Claudius, after spending as few as sixteen days in Britain, returned to Rome to celebrate his triumph. On his journey back to Rome, he stopped near the mouth of the Po river to take a cruise, as Pliny the Elder describes: The Po is carried to Ravenna by the Canal of Augustus; this part of the river is called the Padusa, formerly called the Messanicus. Nearby it forms the large harbour Vatrenus; from here Claudius Caesar, when celebrating his triumph over Britain, sailed out into the Adriatic, in what was more a domus than a ship. Pliny describes a vessel that was less a boat than a floating domus, a somewhat ambiguous word which denotes a structure ranging in size from a modest house to a palace. The cruise, like his time in Britain, was short, and yet this cruise was a part of meticulously planned campaign, a campaign not just for conquest but also for Claudius’ reputation. Aulus Plautius, the experienced commander and suffect consul of 29 ce, had been sent ahead with the army, and Claudius’ freedman Narcissus was also on hand to oversee the invasion. The Roman army achieved initial successes and then halted until the emperor could arrive to command the final assault on the stronghold at Camulodunum (Colchester). While Claudius only spent around two weeks in Britain, his journey to and from the island took six months. Claudius travelled to Britain with a huge entourage, including senators, relatives, and even elephants. This was a mammoth undertaking, and one that seems to have very carefully planned, to ensure military success and a positive reputation for a new emperor of still uncertain legitimacy.

To kill or be killed: the coup de grâce for a warrior after multiple sword wounds

Finding traumatic lesions on ancient skeletal remains offers a unique opportunity to investigate the circumstances surrounding the time of death. Here we present the unique find of a late 17th, early 18th century young male from Southern Italy with eight traumatic skull lesions. A detailed anthropological examination using X-ray and 3D CT scanning techniques was conducted in order to evaluate traumatic extent, direction and degree of severity of each skull injury. The nature, number and timing of repair of the traumata suggest that they were intentional blows inflicted in battle. Gross and radiographic evidence shows that the individual survived long after one of these traumata, most likely suffered in a previous battle. Shape, size and location, as well as different orientation and implied trajectory of the multiple wounds, suggest that they were produced by a heavy, sharp cutting weapon. The perimortem aspect of most of the traumata revealed them to be contemporary injuries, suffered in a final assault by a heavy sword during a face-to-face combat. The largest and deepest fracture penetrating the skull cavity possibly resulting in traumatic brain injury was here suggested as the fatal one, even if the victim may have survived for several days prior to death.

The Last Crusade in the West: Castile and the Conquest of Granada

The Last Crusade in the West: Castile and the Conquest of Granada

Toward Representational Sovereignty: Rewards and Challenges of Indigenous Media in the A’uwẽ-Xavante Communities of Eténhiritipa-Pimentel Barbosa

Focusing on the communities of Eténhiritipa-Pimentel Barbosa of eastern Mato Grosso, Brazil, this article considers the tremendous shift that has taken place over the last twenty-five years in &lt;em&gt;A’uw&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;ẽ-&lt;/em&gt;Xavante peoples’ use of audio-visual media to achieve greater representational sovereignty. It discusses the adoption of video in the context of A’uwẽ&lt;em&gt;-&lt;/em&gt;Xavante ideologies and gendered patterns of dealing with the outside and their prior use of cassette technology. This case demonstrates that, while the adoption of new media has not proven to be the final assault in a Faustian bargain with modernity, media makers face a number of significant challenges and dilemmas, specifically curating, archiving, and also securing and sustaining financial and technological support. Partnerships and collaborations are essential but their often-precarious nature presents difficulties. Dedication, persistence, creativity and adaptability are assets community members draw upon in responding to challenges. Media makers are increasingly gaining more control and are now training the next generation of youths; young people are using new social media, as well as video and film, to achieve greater representational sovereignty.

Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend by Jr. Ron J. Jackson and Lee Spencer White

Reviewed by: Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legendby Jr. Ron J. Jackson and Lee Spencer White Carina Hoffpauir Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend. By Ron J. Jackson Jr.and Lee Spencer White. Foreword by Phil Collins. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Pp. xxiv, 325. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-4703-1.) Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legendrecounts the story of Joe, an enslaved man who was one of the few Texian survivors of the Alamo siege. Joe provided “the clearest and most complete account of the final assault on the Alamo,” one that solidified his name in Texas history (p. xvii). Despite his acclaim, little has been known about Joe other than what could be found in scant primary source fragments. Authors Ron J. Jackson Jr. and Lee Spencer White intervene in this deficient history with an impressive examination of Joe’s experiences before and after the Alamo. The result of a seventeen-year investigation, their book takes into account legal documents, newspapers, slave narratives, travel logs, census records, journals, and letters. “We opened and closed county courthouses, state archives, and university collections,” the authors write, “often skipping lunch to read old documents until they were blurry from our exhaustion” (p. xvi). Jackson and White posit that this labor of love was necessary to overcome the particular difficulties in researching enslaved people. Their approach has resulted in hard-won breakthroughs in Joe’s story, which simultaneously fills important gaps in the scholarship on the Alamo and on slavery in the state of Texas. The text begins with a tense imagining of Joe’s actions and mood on March 5, 1836, the night preceding the final assault on the Alamo. From there, Jackson and White backtrack to consider the events that led to Joe’s presence at the battle. The second half of the book is devoted to the incidents that took place once Joe’s owner, William Barret Travis, was drawn into the Texas Revolution along with his slave. Scholars of Texas military history will appreciate the detailed tracing of the pair’s route along the Texas frontier from Joe’s perspective, which brings new life to a likely familiar narrative of the revolution. Along the way, Jackson and White provide a comprehensive view of the debates over slavery that raged in Texas in order to portray Joe’s legal status as a bondman and his complex relationships with his owners. Linking Joe’s story with the story of Texas implicitly suggests that slavery is central to what W. Fitzhugh Brundage refers to as “Texas’ mythic past” (Gregg Cantrell and Elizabeth Hayes Turner, eds., Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas[College Station, Tex., 2007], xiii). The rendering of this past in earlier accounts has too often silenced enslaved voices and minimized slavery in favor of mythologizing and glorifying Texas as part of what Randolph B. Campbell calls the “romantic West” ( An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865[Baton Rouge, 1989], 1). [End Page 925]Jackson and White’s text provides an important counternarrative for these partial narratives that have overlooked the perspectives of people of color on the Texas frontier. Jackson and White, however, overreach in their somewhat novelistic renderings of Joe’s interactions and innermost thoughts. Indeed, the text occasionally provides intimate details that would be difficult for a researcher to obtain without resorting to imagination. For example, Jackson and White write with descriptive emotion about Joe’s possible responses to seeing his mother whipped and his family divided; elsewhere, there is the problematic claim that “given their perilous position,” Travis and Joe “likely spoke as equals, as two souls standing on the doorstep of eternity” (p. 5). Flowery and romanticizing inferences aside, these moments of fictive liberty function not as detraction but ultimately as invitation to understand the story of Joe as central to the drama of the Texas Revolution. By approaching Joe’s life in this manner, the authors also open the text to audiences both scholarly and popular. Though Joe’s story is engaging, equally entertaining is the story of the authors’ own research and obsession with their subject...

SRI LANKA: HOW DID THE TIGERS LOSE?

Two separate trips to Sri Lanka provided the material for this brief examination of the reasons for the unexpectedly swift final defeat of the Tamil Tigers, whose ruthless methods had enabled them to resist for so long. But external fundraising was so successful that over time the priorities of the external contributors came to weigh over those of the Tamils in the North on whom the Tigers relied for their support and recruitment. The state they set up to sustain their campaign was none-too gentle. After 9/11, external funding was dramatically curtailed and this, combined with Chinese support and a crisis of recruitment set the stage for the final assault by the Sri Lankan army.

What Harvest: Poems on the Siege &amp; Battle of the Alamo (review)

Reviewed by: What Harvest: Poems on the Siege & Battle of the Alamo Bob Cavendish What Harvest: Poems on the Siege & Battle of the Alamo. By Floyd Collins. (Shepherdstown, W.Va.: Somondoco Press, 2011. Pp. 66. ISBN 9780978961787, $15.00, paper.) Alfred Lord Tennyson’s muse whispered of King Arthur and his knights in Idylls of the King and Stephen Vincent Benét’s of the American Civil War in John Brown’s Body. Now Clio and Calliope beckon readers toward Texas’s Thermopylae in a collection by Floyd Collins entitled What Harvest, not a history but a collection of blank verse where fact and fable mingle emotions, history, people, and weaponry: it is 1836 and the battle of the Alamo. Throughout, it is apparent that Collins knows the era and its trappings. Aside from the familiar characters—Bowie, Crockett, Santa Anna, and Bonham—Collins has delved into those who answer the roll call less frequently, whose fates become vague parts of the legend: John McGregor, skirmishing from the high wall near the main gate; John Hays, reminiscing as night falls before the final assault; Daniel Bourne, cigar-punk in hand, igniting fuse-detonated grenades flung into the ranks of the oncoming cazadores. Santa Anna’s rarely mentioned Congreve rockets “hiss and explode/in the predawn haze” as the assault opens (48). From an anonymous American gunsmith emerges the Alamo defenders’ stereotyped weapon of choice, the Kentucky long rifle, in a rendition bolstered by Collins’s impressive familiarity with the forge. No Excalibur, no sinister knights, but Sheffield blades and Green River knives, Baker rifles, elite zapadores, Matamoros soldados—and Santa Anna’s spurs. Even notable artwork of the battle inspires twenty-nine lines but, rather than Henry McArdle’s 1905 romanticized Dawn At the Alamo, Collins draws from Eric Von Schmidt’s realistic 1986 image in which “the elite Zapadores climb up/The patched redoubt, its chinks and uneven/Beam ends, spilling over onto the parapet” (50). What Harvest is not conventional history but a “well-versed” saga, an adornment enhancing the scholar’s account. Lon Tinkle’s 13 Days To Glory (1958) opens as Daniel Cloud, a sentry in the San Fernando church bell tower, yanks the bell rope in disbelief, startled by the appearance of Santa Anna’s lancers. By contrast, Collins’s defender, “A tatterdemalion/Sentry squints back from his post aloft/The San Fernando belfry” while “the motley garrison lies snoring/After last night’s fandango” (38). Sighting the advancing Mexican horsemen, “Temples pounding with his first hangover/Robert Brown seizes the bell rope/And pulls to rouse the slumbering men” (38). Hostile artillery “dug in across the river/Lob hissing grenades bursting orange/Against the west-wall footings; cannon/Hurling solid shot threaten to pulverize/A timber-shored section of the Alamo’s/North bastion” (39) Conventional history’s Crockett is a blustering adventurer and legend but Collins’s Crockett is less self-assured: “‘I’m good for a few years yet.’ Others roared/But he swallowed like it was a hard medicine” (27). People and places emerge through twenty-seven episodes, opening with Bowie’s last moments and Travis’s [End Page 224] demise. Suddenly Collins has us before the Alamo pyre where “the heretic’s fire steepled, forking/Here and there among the branches/Of hacked and splintered chaparral” (23). But this is a mosaic of Alamo lore and we drift forward and backward through a cavalcade of reflections, impressions, and descriptions, until the last poem, at the west façade of the Alamo chapel in 1756, eighty years before the fateful Sunday morning when a Texas legend was born. So that his grandchildren might study poetry, John Adams once mused, Adams himself must study politics and war. If poetry were the prize for study, then What Harvest has been worth the odyssey through dispatches, newspapers, and books devoted to the last stand on that tragic Sunday morning. Enabled by scholarship, inspired by legend, Collins takes the Alamo story to the next point along John Adams’s progression from politics to poetry. What Harvest is compelling and has earned a place in the Alamo chronicles. [End Page 225] Bob Cavendish Austin Community College...

Fatal child abuse: a study of 13 cases of continuous abuse.

A parent who continuously physically abuses her/his child doesn’t aim to kill the child but commits an accidental filicide in a more violent outburst of anger. Fatal abuse deaths are prevented by recognition of signs of battering in time. Out of 200 examined intra-familial filicides, 23 (12%) were caused by child battering and 13 (7%) by continuous battering. The medical and court records of the victim and the perpetrator were examined. The perpetrator was the biological mother and the victim was male in 69 per cent of the cases. The abused children were either younger than one year or from two-and-a-half to four years old. Risk factors of the victim (being unwanted, premature birth, separation from the parent caused by hospitalization or custodial care, being ill and crying a lot) and the perpetrator (personality disorder, low socioeconomic status, chaotic family conditions, domestic violence, isolation, alcohol abuse) were common. The injuries caused by previous battering were mostly soft tissue injuries in head and limbs and head traumas and the battering lasted for days or even an year. The final assault was more violent and occurred when the parent was more anxious, frustrated or left alone with the child. The perpetrating parent was diagnosed as having a personality disorder (borderline, narcissistic or dependent) and often substance dependence (31%). None of them were psychotic. Authorities and community members should pay attention to the change in child’s behavior and inexplicable injuries or absence from daycare. Furthermore if the parent is immature, alcohol dependent, have a personality disorder and is unable to cope with the demands the small child entails in the parent’s life, the child may be in danger.

Elimination of leprosy &amp; possibility of eradication - the Indian scenario

Elimination of leprosy &amp; possibility of eradication - the Indian scenario

“By force or fraud / Weening to prosper”: Milton's Satanic and Messianic Modes of Heroism

“By force or fraud / Weening to prosper”: Milton's Satanic and Messianic Modes of Heroism

Sri Lanka’s “Bloodbath on the Beach” Made the UN’s Ban Ki-mute Moot: Now What?

In the first part of 2009, the Sri Lankan military began its final assault on a beachfront ‘no fire’ zone to root out the remnants of a long-standing insurgency within its territory. The counterinsurgency campaign was especially brutal, and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 20,000 civilians. Yet in the midst of this, members of the UN Security Council stymied all attempts to even formally discuss the conflict, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon remained utterly silent throughout (some worry due to a conflict of interest that had him aligned with some of the political imperatives of the Sri Lankan government). In the end, the Responsibility to Protect was shown to be an empty promise, with the UN rendered mute and moot.

Nuclear Proliferation and the Geocultural Divide: The March of Folly1

When US President Harry Truman dispatched the Enola Gay from the Pacific island of Eniwetok on August 6, 1945 with “Little Boy” in its bomb bay, little did he and his advisors realize that it was far from the opening shot in what came to be known as the “North–South” divide: the cleavage between the geographically “North” or culturally Western and those who exist outside that sphere. Their energies were focused on the more immediate challenge of bringing World War II to a rapid and victorious conclusion. Not that the decision to target Hiroshima with the first available—and barely tested—atomic bomb was a simple and obvious one. Aside from the uncertainty of the weapon's reliability and effectiveness, there was the internal debate as to whether its use was militarily necessary. The allied consensus was that Japan was far from defeated and that a long and bloody campaign would be needed to take the Pacific islands surrounding Honshu before the final assault. Equally salient to many of the principals was, of course, the desirability of an atomic “message to Moscow.” The prospect of an accelerated Soviet-American rivalry was never far below the surface during the war and there were those who relished a monopoly of quite a few years to develop and put into place the strategies for addressing the Russian challenge. In any event, the momentum of battle and the investment in the Manhattan Project were more than sufficient to carry the day. In terms of our discussion here, one of the arguments against the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was all too prescient: would this be seen as a racially motivated decision? Although the Allies by no means went easier on the Germans than the Japanese—casualties from the attacks on Cologne, Dresden, and other cities were comparable to the …

Observations of wild hunting behaviour and bioluminescence of a large deep-sea, eight-armed squid, Taningia danae

Our newly developed underwater high definition video camera system took the first live images of adults of the mesopelagic large squid, Taningia danae, between 240 and 940 m deep off Ogasawara Islands, western North Pacific. The resulting footage includes attacking and bioluminescence behaviours, and reveals that T. danae is far from the sluggish neutrally buoyant deep-sea squid previously suspected. It can actively swim both forward and backward freely by flapping its large muscular triangular fins and changes direction quickly through bending its flexible body. It can attain speeds of 2-2.5 ms(-1) (7.2-9 km h(-1)) when attacking bait rigs. They emitted short bright light flashes from their large arm-tip photophores before final assault, which might act as a blinding flash for prey as well as a means of measuring target distance in a dark deep-sea environment. They also emitted long and short glows separated by intervals while wandering around the double torch lights attached to the bait rig, suggestive of potential courtship behaviours during mating.

Sacrificed at the Alamo: Tragedy and Triumph in the Texas Revolution

Fans of Bruce Winders now have another book to place on their shelves, one that certainly matches, in quality and clarity, other works by the noted historian and curator of the Alamo. Unlike most studies of the famous siege and capture of the Alamo in 1836, Winders spends little time or effort in detailing who exactly was in the fort, where they were when the final assault took place, what their last words must have been, and whether they fell fighting or fleeing. Not that these are not interesting and worthy issues to many, but this author attempts a macro history to explain what brought a small Mexican army and a still smaller Texas one fatefully to San Antonio in February and March of 1836. In doing so, Winders enriches our understanding of the Alamo in dozens of ways.The author first looks at the meaning of republicanism as an ideology, in order to explain how the Anglo-Texans thought war was to be fought. If ever Jacksonian democracy ran amok, it was among these Anglo-Texans attempting to organize a government, pick civilian and military leaders, craft the war’s objectives, and raise an army of military equals. It did not work, which explains much about the strange indecisiveness of those who defended the Alamo. At the same time, the conduct of the Mexican army under Santa Anna sprang from a different historical environment—one that allowed it to move much faster and more decisively than its northern opponents.No nineteenth-century war among those of European descent was complete with-out homage to Napoleon’s shade. Winders finds the Corsican’s influence everywhere in the Texas revolt, with deference to the unique Gulf Coast environment of flat, hot land sloping toward the ocean. Line and column, volley and bayonet, infantry versus cavalry, and traditional tactics for assaulting a fortified stronghold were common subjects in the training of all military officers, and Texas events followed standard military practices hammered out and honed in the long European wars of the first decades of the century.Winders’s macro approach considers many other topics; among the most interesting is that of the Mexican civil war between centralists and federalists. Regardless of what some Texans might have thought, they were very much a part of this. Sacrificed at the Alamo demonstrates that what happened in San Antonio was merely a smaller version of what had happened to defeated federalists in the north a year earlier, in the so-called Rape of Zacatecas. If Mexican military leadership was consistent about anything, it was in its consensus on proper treatment toward defeated rebels. Giving quarter to traitors never seemed to produce the right results.No historical work on the Alamo will escape criticism, and Winders’s book will certainly receive some. His treatment of Santa Anna, for example, still has elements of an older view of the Mexican leader as a bombastic, inept Latin American caudillo. While acknowledging grave and tragic flaws in his character, modern scholarship has moved toward a more charitable view of the Mexican general, one that finds consistency in his political actions, patriotism in his approach to national problems, and decisiveness in pressing a military campaign. For a good and provocative read about the most famous event in Texas War of the 1830s, scholars on both side of the Rio will find Winders’s book well worth the time.

Glimpses of an Eclipsed Heritage: Photography of Afghanistan in the Collections of the Fine Arts Library at Harvard

The photographic collections of Harvard's Fine Arts Library have benefited from a recurring interest in augmenting its holdings of the art and architecture, and, latterly, the ethnography of Afghanistan. Approximately 9,000 images reflect nearly 90 years of photography and nearly 70 years of collecting. Starting with Benjamin Rowland and his expedition to Afghanistan in 1936, a series of Harvard scholars have contributed to these collections, directly or indirectly. While the earlier contributions primarily related to pre-Islamic art and architecture, the library began actively acquiring photographs and slides of Islamic architecture from Islamic art historians and professional photographers in the 1970s after the arrival of Oleg Grabar as Harvard's Professor of Islamic Art. These have been further augmented since the founding of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture in 1979 and its Documentation Center in the Library, especially by a variety of archival collections. Most notable among these is the very large gift of photography documenting art, architecture and ethnography created by Josephine Powell. These impressive collections have never been as important as now. The devastation to Afghanistan's cultures, art and architecture caused by Soviet invasion, a prolonged war of national liberation, the subsequent civil war that devastated Kabul, and the final assault on representational art by the Taliban iconoclasts have altered these images from useful to critical documents of a past that has largely passed from view.