French Flag Research Articles

Major League Baseball and Myth Making: Roland Barthes's Semiology and the Maintenance of Image

INTRODUCTION It was found in a dusty trunk in a farmhouse attic in Fly Creek, New York, three miles from Cooperstown. It was undersized, misshapen and obviously homemade and unlike any other of its kind. (1) It became known as the and was used by a historic commission to cement the game into the national psyche. The object became a symbol of an adventurous and independent United States, a country that, despite its regional differences, used baseball to forge and sustain an identity in the chaotic years surrounding the Civil War. The supposedly served as evidence that Abner Doubleday converted the multiversioned game of town ball into a contest that would eventually be called baseball. By itself the Doubleday Baseball was a of cloth, whose stitched cover had been torn open. But when Cooperstown resident and philanthropist Stephen C. Clark purchased the in 1934, he vested it with a meaning that would tie into the findings of the Mills Commission almost twenty-five years earlier. The became more than a historical object. The came to embody the belief that the United States owned baseball inasmuch as the sport was rooted in American ideals and was the product of American enlightenment. The Doubelday Baseball, supposedly one of the sport's earliest artifacts, serves as a case study for an object endowed with sincere meaning that can be taken for granted as part of U.S. history, much as its namesake was. This vestment is a process--one that fascinated French philosopher Roland Barthes, and he called the outcome of the process myth or speech. If one looks at the history of baseball, and later Major League Baseball, using Barthes's concept of mythic speech, the Doubleday Baseball serves to anchor an ethnocentric message, maintained in various forms by the administration of professional baseball leagues, most notably the Major Leagues. ROLAND BARTHES AND SEMIOLOGY According to Barthes, images and visual representations--along with other objects--are symbols that provide underlying and socially based meanings and messages. Barthes states that objects are signifiers and embody or represent some idea or ideology. He calls that meaning the Together the signifier and signified constitute a third entity, called the sign, in which the object and meaning are fused together and cannot be stripped from each other. But the sign can also represent or be part of an overarching ideology or set of sociocultural beliefs and thus serve as a signifier in a second order of meaning. Barthes calls this overarching set of ideas (or the signified in the second order of meaning) the concept. Together the second-order signifier (which Barthes calls form) and signified (or the concept) comprise the signification. (2) In other words, the form, or language, acts as a vessel carrying a message. As such, the two cannot be separated and form the third entity of signification, which may be transformed into myth. Barthes uses as an example a French magazine cover that depicts a black soldier saluting a French flag. (3) The cover, as the signifier, uses the image to convey the message, or the signified. The message on the surface (at the level of the first order) is simply one of the black soldier saluting a flag. In the context of French culture and society, this sign conveys a larger, second-order meaning. That meaning becomes the concept, conveying the glorification of French imperialism and the suggestion that all of France's subjects, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. (4) The magazine cover then becomes a form that carries a concept, and the signification is one that bolsters French imperialism. Together the form, concept, and signification comprise myth. …

Katherine E. Browne, Creole Economics: Caribbean Cunning under the French Flag (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), pp. xvi+271, $22.95, pb.

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Creole economics: Caribbean cunning under the French flag – Katherine E. Browne

Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituteVolume 12, Issue 4 p. 980-981 Creole economics: Caribbean cunning under the French flag – Katherine E. Browne James G. Carrier, James G. Carrier Indiana and Oxford Brookes UniversitiesSearch for more papers by this author James G. Carrier, James G. Carrier Indiana and Oxford Brookes UniversitiesSearch for more papers by this author First published: 31 October 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2006.00372_22.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume12, Issue4December 2006Pages 980-981 RelatedInformation

Creole economics: Caribbean cunning under the French flag – Kathleen E. Browne

Creole economics: Caribbean cunning under the French flag – Kathleen E. Browne

The presence of right whales in summer on the west coast of South Africa: the evidence from historical records

Conventionally, southern right whales Eubalaena australis are portrayed as spending the summer on feeding grounds in the Antarctic and the winter on breeding grounds in coastal waters of the southern continents. Historical whaling records challenge this perception in the case of the Cape of Good Hope whaling ground, where substantial catches were made earlier and later in the year as well as in winter. The hypothesis that these might in part represent whales on migration to and from Namibia is examined in this paper through the use of historical evidence, including the journals of two vessels operating in the region under the French flag in the 1788/89 and 1791/92 seasons. An episode of catching in the St Helena Bay/Saldanha Bay area between 1787/88 and 1791/92 that may have accounted for as many as 1 780 whales was followed by a shift of effort to the Walvis Bay ground in Namibia. If this represented local depletion, it would suggest that whales off the Western Cape were from a different population component to those off Namibia.

A systems approach to morphogenesis in Arabidopsis thaliana: II. Modeling the regulation of shoot apical meristem structure

Two models of the mechanism maintaining a zonal structure in the shoot apical meristem (SAM) were built based on the analysis of experimental data on the interactions between CLV1, CLV2, CLV3, and WUS genes and the concepts of their role in this mechanism. The first model, a simple one-dimensional model with two morphogens, which is a variant of Wolpert’s French flag model [1], describes the regulation of zone distribution along the SAM vertical axis. Despite a number of simplifications, this model has stationary solutions with biologically meaningful interpretation. The simplifying assumptions were successively abandoned in constructing a two-dimensional model of the mechanism underlying the regulation of SAM structure. This model provides a better understanding of the distributed system that regulates the SAM structure, and allows more detailed formalization of the modern concepts and experimental data concerning this mechanism.

On the dynamic nature of positional information

Morphogenetic fields are among the most fundamental concepts of embryology. However, they are also among the most ill-defined, since they consist of dynamic regulatory processes whose exact nature remains elusive. In order to achieve a more rigorous definition of a developmental field, Lewis Wolpert introduced the concept of positional information illustrated by his French Flag model. Here we argue that Wolpert's positional information - a static coordinate system defining a field - lacks essential properties of the original field concept. We show how data-driven mathematical modeling approaches now enable us to study regulatory processes in a way that is qualitatively different from our previous level of understanding. As an example, we review our recent analysis of segmentation gene expression in the blastoderm embryo of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Based on this analysis, we propose a revised French Flag, which incorporates the dynamic, feedback-driven nature of pattern formation in the Drosophila blastoderm.

Haiti I'm Sorry

Haiti is not a place for the squeamish or the unseasoned traveler. Attendez derriere la ligne jaune - Wait behind the yellow the sign says when you manage to find your way through the chaotic two and three headed snaky lines and get up to the glass fronted airport cubicles of the Haitian immigration officers. Surprisingly, the immigration officials waited patiently, for the incoming visitor or returning Haitian. But no one stayed behind the line. The line was not even yellow. It was more of a jaundiced ochre, trampled over by hundreds of feet of laden travelers. Waiting for the luggage is yet another Haitian experience - the conveyor belt resembles a chaotic Dambala (African snake god) going round and round, a humped back snake misshapen by cello taped and stringed up broken cardboard boxes, oversize and travel weary suitcases, even large bottles of potable water clothed in soiled linen. Sorry to greet you in this condition, a sign apologizes above the hot, crowded steamy baggage area with one ineffectual fan swirling the heat around unevenly, we are in the process of rectifying it. Signs of rectification were hard to identify in the arrival lounge. Armed with one state of the art laptop computer, three cameras and two smallish suitcases, our response of vacance to the customs' officer conventional question What eez the purpose of your vizeet to 'Ayti was understandably greeted skeptically. He looked over our heads to the search officer, pleez opaan ze baggaages. She rustled through the spare packaging of clothes and essentials and helped politely to close the suitcase as he waved us royally on. I remembered my sister's comment from her visit a few years ago. Despite their depressed living conditions, she had found Haitians to be a polite and extremely kind people. So far so good. You manage to find a path through customs into another set of indeterminate lines, pass the exit door held open by a large rock stone on one side. A yellow hot midday sun against a sea of black faces, most of them self employed porters vying and trying your attention, struggling to get a hand on your baggage. Others shouting taxee taxee, others waiting for relatives or friends and obscuring an escape route. Yet there was some method in this madness, the Montana had come to Mohammed. The hotel driver had turned up to meet us. I had come to Haiti, accompanied by my husband, to carry out research for my book on Caribbean iconography. Minus one or two islands here and there, over the last two decades I had traveled throughout most of the Caribbean, including to the Dominican Republic which adjoins Haiti. Haiti was still unknownterritory within the Region. Columbus had claimed the entire island for the Spanish crown back in 1492, calling it Hispaniola or little Spain. The island was later called Santo Domingo by the Spanish, who began introducing African slaves into the colony from 1503. By 1635 the French had settled the western side and of course translated the name into their tongue, Ste Domingue. A campaign of terror through poisoning against white colonials led by maroon Francois Makandal began in 1750. The real war however, was fought consistently from 1791 to 1803, with indescribable bloodshed and intrigue, plots and counterplots, between white colonials and white planters, between small planters and big planters, between white planters and mulattos, and against the mulatto and black population. The events in Ste Domingue were spurred on by the revolution in France in 1789 for liberte, equalite and fraternite. The French and the British became strange bedfellows in the attempt to suppress the uprisings in Ste Domingue. Despite the odds the black slaves and some of their half brothers, the mulattos, had fought and won the first successful slave revolution. In 1803, in a gesture of defiance and vision, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of the black generals, ripped out the white from the French flag, symbolically tearing out the white control, and with independence in 1804 returned the name given to the land by the Tainos, Hayti - the land of mountains, to itself. …

The Price Was Right

The second time around, the French flag flew over New Orleans for only three weeks. Louis XV had, of course, been the first European monarch permanently to settle subjects on the banks of the Mississippi River (at New Orleans in 1718), but the French had ceded Louisiana to their Spanish allies at the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1762. As every attentive schoolchild knows, however, First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte obtained a retrocession of Louisiana in 1801, promising never to alienate it. But by November 1803, when Pierre Clement Laussat officially took possession in name of France, Napoleon had already sold the territory to the United States. The brief French re-possession of Louisiana and its momentous sequelthe more-than-doubling of the land area claimed by the United States-are the subjects of the three bicentennial volumes under review here. None of these authors seeks to overturn any of our most cherished notions about the Louisiana Purchase, and indeed most of the information in Wilderness So Immense, Louisiana Purchase, and Jefferson's America and Napoleon's France may also be found in Encarta®. But all three books have their virtues. Thomas Fleming's Louisiana Purchase can expect a long run as the best short summary of the context and course of the negotiations that resulted in the Louisiana Purchase. The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) has honored its 2003 bicentennial Louisiana Purchase exhibition (its largest ever) by publishing not only luscious photographs of the artifacts but also ten scholarly essays that

La Nouvelle Orleans: Etat Sommaire des Espaces Urbains et Sociaux a l'Epoque de Pierre Clement des Laussat (Mars 1803-Avril 1804)

Pierre Cl�ment de Laussat arrived in New Orleans in 1803 as Napoleon's colonial prefect, directed to receive Louisiana from Spain and govern it, unaware until four months later that it had been sold to the United States. In the process of working through the preliminaries to the retrocession, Laussat encountered problems endemic to the racist ideology, slave economy, and paternalist organization of the colony, only exacerbated by the disorder of the end of the Spanish regime. He addressed these issues through official acts carried out during the three weeks that the French flag finally flew over the city. This paper reviews the political and social background for some of Laussat's final acts on behalf of France, all aimed at securing the goodwill of powerful inhabitants: the restoration of the Code Noir, establishment of the city's first fire brigade, and reactivation of the institutions of French government.

A Remarkable Heritage: The ‘Daily Round’ of the Children of the Harkis, between Merger and Vilification

Strictly speaking, the word ‘harkis’ originally denoted one of the categories of former Muslim auxiliaries in the French army who had served on a voluntary basis under the French flag during the War of Algerian Independence (1954–62). When Algeria achieved independence in 1962, those former auxiliaries of the French army who were able to escape the National Liberation Front's bloody reprisals (conservative estimates suggest some 65,000 perished) were forced to seek exile in mainland France. In spite of the restrictive measures enacted by the highest state authorities with a view to preventing the migration to France of people generally considered undesirable, and in spite of rudimentary reception arrangements, some 95,000 to 100,000 former auxiliaries and family members established themselves in France after choosing French nationality. But in a society increasingly restructured by strong migratory flows from the Maghreb (particularly from Algeria) and characterized by strong prejudice against Arabs (in part linked to the transfer of the memory of ‘French Algeria’), today in France the sons and daughters of the harkis find themselves in a situation where their identity is very insecure and one which forces them to cope with a burdensome legacy at both the socio-cultural and symbolic levels.

CHAPTER FOUR: UNDER THE FRENCH FLAG: From Canada to Louisiana

Center for Migration Studies special issuesVolume 16, Issue 4 p. 83-94 Free Access CHAPTER FOUR: UNDER THE FRENCH FLAG: From Canada to Louisiana First published: 18 July 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2050-411X.2000.tb00275.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume16, Issue4Special Issue: Four Centuries of Italian American HistoryJuly 2000Pages 83-94 RelatedInformation

1 Lateral Inhibition and Pattern Formation in Dictyostelium

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses lateral inhibition and pattern formation in Dictyostelium amoebas that start to differentiate into either prespore cells or prestalk cells about 8 hrs after the initiation of development. The pattern of differentiation in Dictyostelium discoideum presents direct evidence that the initial proportioning of cell types occurs in a spatially independent manner. Localization of prespore cells to the posterior of slugs is a subsequent event that results from the prespore-specific differentiations themselves. The initial differentiation of the amoebas into prespore cells appears to depend only on temporal progression along the developmental pathway to the proper stage. It is the laggards that are kept from prespore differentiations and induced to follow the prestalk pathway. Pattern formation has often been analyzed in terms of long-range positional information, provided by the gradients of morphogens. The “French flag” model suggests that cells respond to different thresholds of a morphogen, by following different developmental pathways. Despite the considerable efforts to define molecular mechanisms that might mediate responses to graded positional information, convincing support for the model has been found only during the early development of Drosophila, in which a gradient of bicoid protein sets the polarity of the embryo. Short-range interactions, rather than field-wide positional signals, appear to regulate divergent patterns of differentiation in many developing systems, including Dictyostelium.

French penal policy and the origins of the french presence in new caledonia

IN 1852 THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT ENDED CONVICT TRANSPORTATION TO THE eastern colonies of Australia. In the same year French transportation began: the first common convicts left their prisons for camps in French Guiana. One year later the French flag was raised in New Caledonia and the act was officially justified solely on penal grounds. The government had long wished to possess overseas some places which could, if needed, receive its penal settlements. New Caledonia met all the desired conditions.1

Setting the Story Straight: Louis Hunkanrin and Un forfait colonial

In Paris 1931, the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme published the pamphlet, Un forfait colonial: l'esclavage en Mauritanie. Its author was a man best known in the context of radical Dahomean politics, Louis Hunkanrin, who had cause to know Mauritania better than he would have liked during ten years spent there in political exile. This exposé of slavery in Mauritania is a curious concoction -- general information damning the morals, values and work ethic of Moorish society; selected cases of injustice drawn from his personal experience; a lengthy report by a medical official despairing of Mauritania's poor food production and its relation to the slave situation; an eloquent letter to the Governor of Mauritania presenting a defense of his own actions; brutal attacks on particular French administrators; all with a large dose of French patriotism liberally sprinkled throughout. As stated in his preface, Hunkanrin's aim in exposing the crimes committed against the blacks in Mauritania was none other than “to illuminate the true face of France in this territory where the French flag flies—emblem of peace, liberty, and justice: the France of the Rights of Man, maternal France, good, generous and just,… It is well understood that I am only concerned to serve the interests of France and humanity.”

Australian/Cairns Group Perspective: Southern Agriculture and the World Economy: The Multilateral Trade Negotiations

Last week was Australia's 200th birthday. When the rebels in America won what they called their war of independence, Britain lost her penal colonies in the Carolinas and looked around for replacements. The first colonial fleet arrived in Australia on January 26,1788, and included, along with 700 convicts, 44 sheep and 6 cattle. If Britain had defeated her American colonists, then the history of both Australia and Louisiana would likely have been very different. The French flag might be flying today over both Sydney and New Orleans.

The Europeanized Algerians and the emancipation of Algeria

The term 'Young Algerian' was used in the French press as early as 1911 to describe a group of politically active young Muslims of French culture. They were a small group in a small social class, the upper bourgeoisie, whose influence in the rural and proletarian masses was minimal.I This group made its first important demands for change within the framework of a French colonial system and under the sovereignty of the French government. When in 1910 the French government passed a law imposing obligatory military service on Muslims, they cheered. They saw this legislation as a sign of trust, and they wanted to be trusted by the rulers of France. They thought this would lead the French to grant Muslims political rights and equality with the Europeans. But to their disappointment, as Ageron indicates the French colonial administration in Algeria showed no interest in them.2 The most assimilationist Young Algerians were led by Dr. Benthami. They were willing to give up their religious obligations as Muslims as a prelude to gaining French political citizenship. In this context Ageron indicates that the Young Algerian movement was characterized by its assimilationist programme during the period of its first president, Dr Benthami. He represented, according to Ageron, the most assimilationist faction within the movement, and opposed Amir Khalid, who was the grandson of the nineteenth-century hero, Abd Al Kader, in the municipal elections of Algiers in November 1919.3 However, the majority of the 'Young Algerians' were led by Amir Khalid. His ideas were spread by means of a French language journal, Ikdam. In his political views, he placed himself squarely in a tradition of the 'Young Algerians'. He dared to criticize an administration that was oppressive to his fellow Muslims; but the solutions he proposed all tended towards assimilation. He wanted equality in all things between the natives and the colons. He demanded French citizenship and political equality without renouncing Al Shari'a Al Islamiya. At the same time he proclaimed that he and his associates did not refuse the duties assigned them as French subjects. They simply emphasized that the service, if imposed, should carry with it recompense. Algerians would serve under the French flag, but France must give Muslims political rights more nearly equal to those of other French citizens. The indigenat should be revoked. Natives should be taxed on the same scale as Europeans and the so called 'Arab tax' should be abandoned. Also, Muslims should have more representatives in the elected assemblies, and should be permitted to become citizens, not forced to remain subjects. Khalid's demands for justice went largely

Regulation of the pattern of basal bodies within the oral apparatus of Tetrahymena thermophila

The number and arrangement of basal bodies included in the four compound ciliary organelles making up the mature oral apparatus of Tetrahymena thermophila ordinarily vary only slightly. Severe starvation brings about formation of oral structures with a reduced number of basal bodies within these organelles, and sometimes with a complete loss of one of the component organelles. Such reductions are stringently specified in spatial terms, but they do not represent simple and proportional shrinkage of the organelle complex. Instead, certain spatial features remain essentially unaltered, while others undergo major quantitative reductions, resulting in large changes in the internal proportions of the structures. This selective regulation can be explained in terms of the different parallel and sequential processes taking place during the development of this organelle complex. There is also no strict proportionality between the size of the oral apparatus and that of the cell; instead, oral apparatuses become relatively larger as cells become smaller. This is due in part to the inherent temporal discontinuity of oral development, but there is probably also a real change in the oral/body size relation at the time of oral development. The 'French flag' rule fails when applied to the relative sizes and internal proportions of organelle systems in this and in other ciliates.

Scale-invariance in reaction-diffusion models of spatial pattern formation.

We propose a reaction-diffusion model of spatial pattern formation whose solutions can exhibit scale-invariance over any desired range for suitable choices of parameters in the model. The model does not invoke preset polarity or any other ad hoc distinction between cells and provides a solution to the French flag problem without sources at the boundary. Furthermore, patterns other than the polar pattern that usually arises first in a growing one-dimensional system described by Turing's model can be obtained. Evidence is given that suggests that the model may apply in the slug stage of Dictyostelium discoideum.

Fractions on Grid Paper

A lesson on fractions, using colored pencils and grid paper, can be both enjoyable and a good mind-stretcher for students' conceptualization of fractions. You can introduce the lesson with a discussion of checkerboards, flags that have rectangular subdivisions, or tiled floors or walls, asking such questions as What fraction of the checkerboard is red? What fraction of all the tiles are green? or What fraction of the French flag is white?