Gold Rush Research Articles

Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression by David M. Wrobel

 Reviews REVIEWS GLOBAL WEST, AMERICAN FRONTIER: TRAVEL, EMPIRE, AND EXCEPTIONALISM FROM MANIFEST DESTINY TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION by David M. Wrobel University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2013. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 328 pages. $39.95 cloth. The very best historical monographs ask readers to reconsider what they believe to be true about the past and, in the process, require them to re-examine the source materials on which they formed their interpretations.David Wrobel’s latest book does both.Wrobel offers a careful examination of nineteenth- and twentieth -century travel writing to challenge the idea that writers provided homogeneously “exceptionalist visions”of the American West during that period (p. 4).While Wrobel concedes that Americans consumed a “steady diet of exceptionalist rhetoric and imagery,” he also insists that “there was another cultural diet” that he views as “equally voluminous”(p. 4). Indeed, Wrobel demonstrates that travel literature written by both Europeans and Americans over a roughly one-hundred year period, rather than celebrating notions of American exceptionalism or promoting a mythic West, frequently “offered a countercurrent of thinking about the global West during the nineteenth century, and the considerably more frontier-centric and nation-centric envisioning of the West in the twentieth century” (p. 5). Offering a close re-examination of travel literatures, Wrobel shows that this writing could be both deeply perceptive and globally contextualized. The book is organized chronologically and thematically, allowing Wrobel to explore the changing landscapes that travel writers encountered and the ways in which they differently reflected on the West. Chapter 1 demonstrates that nineteenth-century travel writing challenged “the common notion of the American West as an exceptional place, one without parallel” (p. 22). Wrobel shows that travel writers were likely to “place the West in a broader, comparative global context, viewing it as one developing frontier among many.” Moreover, despite historians’ tendency to view travel writers as“architects of imperial visions” and “agents of empire,” at least some writers offered careful — and sometimes critical —considerationof American’sexpansionist impulses (p.21).In this chapter,as in Chapter 2 (which together constitute Part I of the book), Wrobel persuasively demonstrates the ways in which travel writers described a truly “global West.”German writer Friedrich Gerstäcker,for example, envisioned California as a multicultural “global stage” where actors from around the world met and often struggled.His writing thus “put the world into the West.” For Gerst äcker, Wrobel argues, California’s gold rush was not an exclusively western or American story, but, rather, a world story (p. 40–41). Wrobel similarly demonstrates that many nineteenth-century travel writers brought a global sensibility to their accounts.Where British travel writer Isabella Bird began to consider how her experiences in theWest might provide a “defining frame of reference for encounters all across the globe,” Mark Twain joined a “growing chorus” of writers concerned with imperialism (p. 61, 71). These writers were among the many, as Wrobel’s close readings of their texts suggests, who invited readers to both see the “world in the West and the West in the world” (p. 48). The book’s second section considers the twentieth century and demonstrates what Wrobel takes to be an important shift in travel writing.Where many nineteenth-century writers had offered a view of the West within its “broader and largely deexceptionalized global context, their twentieth-century counterparts  OHQ vol. 116, no. 3 often, in contrast, looked persistently inward while searching for a distinctively American frontier, a place like nowhere else on earth” (p. 85). Wrobel places this shift at the precise momentwhenAmericansbeganto perceive the American frontier as closed.Thus,travelers like John Muir, Jack London, and Theodore Roosevelt sought “new frontiers of adventure well beyond the geographic borders of their newly frontierless nation” (p. 86). Where Wrobel argues that London was a culturally sensitive traveller, one who acted more as a “cultural ambassador than as an agent of empire,” he notes the “imperial tone” characteristic of Roosevelt’s writing (p. 91, 99). Yet Wrobel’s keen analysis links Roosevelt’s accounts of his travels in Africa with his earlier writings about theAmericanWest to show how Roosevelt connected these as like “frontiers.” Wrobel also smartly develops...

Saving the City: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 by Richard Roberts

Reviewed by: Saving the City: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 by Richard Roberts Nicola Tynan Richard Roberts. Saving the City: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013. 320 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-964654-8, $29.45 (cloth). Since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, much attention has been given to comparisons between the Great Recession and Great Depression, but the financial crisis of 1914 has received little attention. Richard Roberts, financial historian at King’s College, London, has filled the gap. Saving the City: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 provides such a rich, detailed, history that it is likely to become the authoritative source for this previously ignored part of the events of 1914. In his foreword, Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England, accurately describes Saving the City as a mix of “detective story and compelling political and social history.” Drawing on an impressive quantity of archival material from a large range of sources, Richard Roberts has carefully woven it into a gripping story covering all dimensions of London’s financial crisis, from Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia on July 23, 1914 to the reopening of the Stock Exchange on January 4, 1915. Austria’s announcement shocked financial markets and perception of the risk of war changed overnight, triggering a rush for gold or cash in other forms. Liquidation of assets threatened London’s major financial institutions: banks, brokers, jobbers, and discount houses. Market participants feared contagion as panic spread from one market to another. The Bank of England, Treasury, and Chancellor all became involved in a rush of policies to contain the crisis. From the perspective of most of the key players, the challenge throughout was maintaining confidence in the financial system. On these terms, the policies implemented may be considered an overall success. Individually, however, the role played by each policy and its contribution to containing the crisis is a far messier picture. We are introduced to all the main characters involved in the crisis, including John Maynard Keynes, whose influence on policy was clear [End Page 724] but indirect (p. 128), and Lloyd George, whose bold scheme to indemnify the Bank of England against loss from accepting low-class bills paid off. Throughout the book, arguments made by different people—or by the same person at different times—are skillfully connected into a narrative that takes us back, almost as eavesdroppers, to learn of policies that were considered before being dropped or enacted. In at least one case, of a prescient argument made by Robert Brandt in 1912 (pp. 81–82), Roberts achieves this even when Brandt himself failed to make the connection. The careful writing means that it is always clear whether we are eavesdropping on conversations that remained private in 1914 or are revisiting information made public at the time. Roberts highlights tensions between the Bank of England (then still a joint-stock bank), the other joint-stock banks, and the Treasury as a result of both shared and conflicting interests. The bankers’ scheme, a proposal that the joint-stock banks would deposit £13 million of gold at the Bank of England in exchange for Bank of England notes, though presented as a solution to the financial crisis after Germany’s declaration of war, involved many aspects similar to a scheme the banks had been proposing prior to the war. Despite seeking a way to pay out notes rather than gold, the Treasury was reluctant to give the impression that it was endorsing the bankers’ scheme more permanently. A version of the bankers’ scheme seemed to remain under consideration until August 5; when the final crisis containment package was announced, however, it was not included, having been made unnecessary by the Treasury’s commitment to provide currency notes in small denominations (p. 132). The initial focus on banks’ loss of gold externally, as other countries liquidated assets, and internally, as depositors withdrew their savings, were soon superseded by concerns about the demand for small-denomination bills to meet payments. The interdependence of real and financial markets took the crisis out of London. Traders unable to make loan payments or pay wages as a result...

Global demand for gold is another threat for tropical forests

The current global gold rush, driven by increasing consumption in developing countries and uncertainty in financial markets, is an increasing threat for tropical ecosystems. Gold mining causes significant alteration to the environment, yet mining is often overlooked in deforestation analyses because it occupies relatively small areas. As a result, we lack a comprehensive assessment of the spatial extent of gold mining impacts on tropical forests. In this study, we provide a regional assessment of gold mining deforestation in the tropical moist forest biome of South America. Specifically, we analyzed the patterns of forest change in gold mining sites between 2001 and 2013, and evaluated the proximity of gold mining deforestation to protected areas (PAs). The forest cover maps were produced using the Land Mapper web application and images from the MODIS satellite MOD13Q1 vegetation indices 250 m product. Annual maps of forest cover were used to model the incremental change in forest in ∼1600 potential gold mining sites between 2001–2006 and 2007–2013. Approximately 1680 km2 of tropical moist forest was lost in these mining sites between 2001 and 2013. Deforestation was significantly higher during the 2007–2013 period, and this was associated with the increase in global demand for gold after the international financial crisis. More than 90% of the deforestation occurred in four major hotspots: Guianan moist forest ecoregion (41%), Southwest Amazon moist forest ecoregion (28%), Tapajós–Xingú moist forest ecoregion (11%), and Magdalena Valley montane forest and Magdalena–Urabá moist forest ecoregions (9%). In addition, some of the more active zones of gold mining deforestation occurred inside or within 10 km of ∼32 PAs. There is an urgent need to understand the ecological and social impacts of gold mining because it is an important cause of deforestation in the most remote forests in South America, and the impacts, particularly in aquatic systems, spread well beyond the actual mining sites.

First Impressions: Anglo Travelers and the Origins of El Paso, Texas, 1846-1852

El Paso del Norte was a thriving agricultural region on the Santa Fe-Chihuahua trail when the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848) and the 1849 gold rush turned it into a border town on the southern route to California. The diaries and letters of the Anglo-American soldiers, engineers, and gold seekers who passed through the area in the 1840s and 1850s document the emergence of a new political and economic landscape that helped define the pattern of Anglo-Mexican relations in the new town of El Paso, Texas (across the Rio Grande from El Paso del Norte), well into the next century.

<em>Orientalia, Bibliophilia, Fetish</em>: A Play in Three Acts

192 John Whittier Treat Orientalia, Bibliophilia, Fetish: A Play in Three Acts Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not a tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvre china every day?” —Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting” I begin with the intuition that the Western penchant for collecting things, and occasionally people, from Asia is related to the erotics of acquisition and especially the potential of those erotics to encode and even embody illicit sexualities hardly expressible without recourse to a particular geohistorical imaginary (e.g., the “Orient”). I hope to prove this intuition via a tour of our modern libraries, our simultaneous celebration and medicalization of bibliophilia, and the international wanderings of first a German Jew (e.g., an “Oriental”) and last a collection of miniature, often risqué, Japanese figurines. My aim is to open the notion of collecting, the theme of this issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, to further considerations of the Orientalism and queer insights already implicit in the heightened critical attention we now pay bibliophilia , all the way from an appreciation of the elite connoisseurship of classic editions at one end to the latest fashionably psychosexual malady of “hoarding disorder” at the other. The workings of the fetish that unites both these ends maps an “Asia” equally material and immaterial, its ultimate borders decided only by libidinal desires equally frustrated and fulfilled. Orientalia, Bibliophilia, Fetish 193 Peter X. Zhou’s (2010) edited volume of essays on North American East Asian libraries, Collecting Asia: East Asian Libraries in North America , 1868–2008, tells readers that many East Asia library collections in North American universities began through the efforts of a single person gifted with exceptional drive and dedication, and, occasionally, a fortune. In Yale’s case, for instance, that man was Yung Wing, Yale class of 1854 and the first Chinese to graduate from an American college. In 1874, he donated his personal collection of 1,280 Chinese volumes to his alma mater, where they formed the early nucleus of today’s collection. Yale historian Asakawa Kan’ichi, the first Japanese to teach at an American college or university, augmented the collection in the early decades of the twentieth century many times over with funds from his university and the Library of Congress. In some cases, though, the early benefactors of East Asia collections were not expatriate Asians but instead evident Caucasians who, through a variety of personal or professional encounters with the East, brokered contributions of East Asian materials to schools in the New World. For example, James A. Thomas’s gift in the late 1920s founded the East Asia collection at Duke University. Thomas was the managing director of the British-American Tobacco Company in China from 1905 to 1922 and a friend, fortuitously for the university that now bears their patronym, of James and Benjamin Duke. Another of the best-known patrons of East Asia collections in North America was Horace Walpole Carpentier, a man born in New York State in 1824, the son of a cobbler (the family name was “Carpenter”—Horace would add the i in adulthood to appear less common) who, after graduating from Columbia, struck it rich in the California gold rush, not by prospecting but by provisioning those who did. He eventually established the Bank of California in San Francisco and became the first mayor of Oakland when he persuaded the new state legislature to incorporate the settlement as a municipality in 1852, though he was quickly ousted from his post after the electorate discovered he had reserved all development rights to the city’s waterfront for himself. In time he endowed East Asian studies at both the University of California, Berkeley and, even more generously, Columbia. He acquired the moniker “General” when he was appointed to the rank of major general in the California State Militia in 1854. Carpentier returned to New York, by 1888, a wealthy man, with homes in both the city and his upstate birthplace of Galway. He...

Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction by Stacey L. Smith

 Reviews reviews Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction by Stacey L. Smith The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2013. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 344 pages. $39.95 cloth. This book centers California, and more broadly the American West, in a story historians used to tell as the southern history of African American slavery, freedom, national reconstruction, and racial segregation. Stacey L. Smith joins a throng of recent historians pulling apart the exceptionalist story of the West as a region removed from, antithetical to, and an antidote for the racial struggle that led to the American Civil War. She relocates the West in the middle of antebellum race relations and in the failed promise of racial equality and civil rights that followed. Smith focuses on California because of its history as a free state with a complicated history of human bondage, both before and after the Civil War. And while the story she tells could be (and probably should be) explored in every western territory and state, California’s large and multiracial society — the product of generations of exchange and the tsunami of gold rush immigration — makes this a particularly satisfying analysis of the multiple forms of bound labor that existed in the West and the fluidity of racial categories across time. Smith argues that California — a transnational crossroads of imported social and economic systems — exploded the dichotomous concepts of race (black and white) and labor (free and slave) in the United States. Across seven chapters, Smith explores the different kinds of imported bound-labor practices that coexisted in California with the arrival of peoples from Chile, Mexico, Hawaii and the South Pacific, China, Japan, Europe, and the United States — white, black, and Native. As those peoples converged in the mines, their methods of “managing, binding, and disciplining labor” converged as well (p. 17). When Californians organized themselves as a free state in 1850,they had to navigate (socially as well as legally) those distinctive versions of wage and contract labor, debt bondage, peonage, indentured servitude, wardship, prostitution, and slavery. Californians did so through a shifting lens of racial classifications and valuations. Smith documents the ways slave-owning Southerners bound blacks under contracts different from hereditary slavery as a means of perpetuating state-sanctioned bondage on free soil.Asian“coolie”and Latino “peon” labor, defined as threats to free white labor, elicited legal expulsion or exclusion, yet the use of Indian or black children — bound through legal guardianship as domestic servants — gained protection. Smith also evaluates the ways in which sexual commerce and the labor of prostitutes was both normalized and criminalized, depending on race. With the onset of the Civil War, California’s Union Party embraced political emancipation,freeing African Americans while ignoring the virtual slavery of unfree Indians and Asians. In her most significant interpretive argument,Smith then connects the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to California’s experiments with racially discriminatory immigration laws in the 1870s that evaded the “equal protection” intent of the Fourteenth Amendment and other civil rights laws by masquerading as antislavery measures. Those laws emerged as a means to prevent Asian immigration by defining their bound labor as imported slavery, a threat to free white labor, and therefore excludible. In this way, Smith traces how an era of emanci-  OHQ vol. 115, no. 2 pation in the West morphed along racial lines into a national era of exclusion. Smith excels at illustrating her arguments with the stories of real people struggling to make a living and find their place in California ’s society and polity. Rather than abstract nameless victims of bound labor and a legal system dominated by faceless white men of power and greed, she reconstructs individuals with agency, motive, and history. Smith mines information from newspapers, memoirs, letters , and legal cases, introducing readers to a parade of characters who illustrate the ambiguity and historical contingency of unfree labor.Readers meet indentured Indian servant Augustín, a New Mexican genízaro, who along with Mexican debt peons Benito Pérez and his wife, travelled from Sonora to California to dig gold and wash laundry for their patrone Antonio Francisco Coronel. There is James...

The Cremation of Sam McGee: A Brief History and Analysis

The Cremation of Sam McGee was first published in 1907 through Service's Songs of A Sourdough. The work was not intended for a large audience and its publication actually sprouted from a Christmas bonus Service received. In this brief analysis, the Klondike gold rush, the life of Robert W. Service, and perhaps his greatest work, The Cremation of Sam McGee, are analysed for their significance to Canadian literary themes.

Environmental applications of three-dimensional graphene-based macrostructures: adsorption, transformation, and detection.

Just as graphene triggered a new gold rush, three-dimensional graphene-based macrostructures (3D GBM) have been recognized as one of the most promising strategies for bottom-up nanotechnology and become one of the most active research fields during the last four years. In general, the basic structural features of 3D GBM, including its large surface area, which enhances the opportunity to contact pollutants, and its well-defined porous structure, which facilitates the diffusion of pollutant molecules into the 3D structure, enable 3D GBM to be an ideal material for pollutant management due to its excellent capabilities and easy recyclability. This review aims to describe the environmental applications and mechanisms of 3D GBM and provide perspective. Thus, the excellent performance of 3D GBM in environmental pollutant adsorption, transformation and detection are reviewed. Based on the structures and properties of 3D GBM, the removal mechanisms for dyes, oils, organic solvents, heavy metals, and gas pollutants are highlighted. We attempt to establish "structure-property-application" relationships for environmental pollution management using 3D GBM. Approaches involving tunable synthesis and decoration to regulate the micro-, meso-, and macro-structure and the active sites are also reviewed. The high selectivity, fast rate, convenient management, device applications and recycling utilization of 3D GBM are also emphasized.

Rush to Gold: The French and the California Gold Rush, 1848-1854 Malcolm J.Rohrbough. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.

Rush to Gold: The French and California Gold Rush, 1848-1854 Malcolm J. Rohrbough. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.The Californian gold rush of 1849 brought an international deluge of miners and entrepreneurs hoping to strike it rich in American West. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, no stranger to history of gold rush, explores this frenzied phenomenon through unique lens of a particular group of forty-niners: 30,000 French who immigrated to California to seek their fortune. By examining gold rush from perspective of French miners, entrepreneurs, and writers captivated by dreams of wealth, Rush to Gold contributes a compelling, if somewhat incomplete, study to a growing literature that regards nineteenth century West as a site of transnational convergence and competition.Rohrbough's book juxtaposes heady optimism of Californian gold rush with social and political upheavals in France that followed 1848 Revolution and resulting Second Republic. For many working class French in cities and provinces, revolution failed to bring about meaningful social transformation or lasting economic opportunity; short-lived government experiments, such as establishment of national workshops to provide employment for poor, merely exacerbated public discontent with increase in public expenses and commensurate imposition of new taxes. Into this environment of uncertainty and disappointment came reports that vast reserves of gold had been discovered in California, and this news quickly took on a mythical quality in French media as untold wealth seemed to beckon for anyone who could make journey. One part poor relief and another part individual opportunism, sudden outpouring of capital to fund la ruee vers l'or, or the rush to gold, spirited away thousands of French citizens to American West. While some French Argonauts were able to make a fortune in gold fields, others, discouraged from diminishing returns, logistical failures by French companies, and increasing friction with competing American miners, either returned to France or stayed to become part of San Francisco's burgeoning urban community.Rohrbough roots his dual narrative solely within French perceptions of gold rush, alternating between optimistic accounts of gold fever in France and more mixed experiences of miners themselves in California. To accomplish this, book draws heavily upon French newspapers and periodicals and to a lesser extent previously unpublished or long-neglected personal letters of French men and women who immigrated across Atlantic. …

LATE CAMBRIAN Au-Pd MINERALIZATION AND Fe ENRICHMENT IN THE ITABIRA DISTRICT, MINAS GERAIS, BRAZIL, AT 496 Ma: CONSTRAINTS FROM U-Pb MONAZITE DATING OF A JACUTINGA LODE

Bonanza-style mineralization of palladiferous gold in specular hematite-rich lodes engendered the most important gold rush in Brazilian history, which took place at the end of the seventeenth century in the province that became known as Minas Gerais. The timing of this itabirite-hosted vein mineralization, locally referred to as jacutinga, is controversial; different views have ascribed jacutinga to one of the two orogenic events recorded in the Quadrilatero Ferrifero of Minas Gerais, the ~2.0 Ga Transamazonian event and the ~0.6 Ga Brasiliano event. This controversy is due mainly to the absence of reliable age data for hydrothermal minerals. Here we report the first U-Pb age for a jacutinga lode, obtained by laser ablation-sector field-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-SF-ICP-MS) on monazite grains recovered from the Conceicao Fe-ore deposit within the Itabira district. The monazite analyses yield a precise Late Cambrian age of 495.6 ± 2.2 Ma, which is well within the time period between ca. 524 and 444 Ma, suggested by recently published geochronologic data on regionally distributed similar hydrothermal systems. The age of 496 Ma for the jacutinga monazite corroborates an orogen-scale hydrothermal overprint at later stages of the Brasiliano event. This hydrothermal overprint also affected surrounding Neoarchean rocks of the Minas Supergroup, as well as younger rocks of the southern Serra do Espinhaco, along the platiniferous Au-Pd belt of Minas Gerais.

Atlantic World mining, child labor, and the transnational construction of childhood in Imperial Britain in the mid-nineteenth century

This article argues that information about child laborers in mining industries outside of Britain greatly informed ideas about British childhood in the mid-nineteenth century, the period of much legislation and activation against child labor in mining in the UK. The Atlantic World, and particularly Brazil, was a major crucible for cultural formation in global mining industries and therefore ideas about “British childhood,” especially with reference to mining, inhered racialized notions of white privilege. In addition, the article shows how the contexts of mid-century gold rushes and East India Company (EIC) activity in the Punjab also factored into notions of British childhood. “Childhood” was one category through which British imperial culture developed and worked to assert imperial authority at home and abroad within a global and ever-more-globalizing context. The article is based on English travel-writing on Brazil, surveys of the British press, and the records of the EIC.

Potentials and Perils of E-Business in China

The E-business market in China is growing at an exponential rate. In 2013, the business volume is expected to reach $285 billion which surpasses the level in the U.S. As a result, there is a gold rush to China to participate in the market. This article discusses the potential but also points out the perils. This paper also focuses on the competition in the Chinese E-business market, and reveals that the Chinese online business is almost completely monopolized by only one seller, Taobao, which accounts for 81.2% of the whole E-business market. This article further considers the tax burden of the Internet commerce transaction which found that the Chinese government imposes a value-added tax at a rate of 17%. This rate is much higher than the sales tax rate at 7% in the U.S. Additionally, this article investigates the problem of counterfeited products and infringement of intellectual property rights. It discovered that this problem is rampant in China. The losses in international trade amount to $360 billion a year. Eighty percent of the counterfeited products were originated in China. The problem is extremely serious. Moreover, this article offers many planning strategies for operating an E-business in China. Despite the perils, this article concludes that the benefits of running an E-business in China outweigh the risks.

Ultra-stable RF-over-fiber transport enables NASA ground-based deep space tracking antenna arrays and space-borne earth mapping radar

The Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles in Southern California is a place of rolling hills, shallow valleys, and jagged outcrop-pings of rock, which are the remains of ancient mountains. It is a land inhabited by rattlesnakes, tarantulas, giant scorpions, and poisonous hunting spiders (called vinegaroons by the locals) because their bite leaves the taste of vinegar in your mouth. The plants are mostly sagebrush, cactus, and Joshua trees. The temperature can rise above 100 deg F during daytime and drop below freezing at night. In the middle of this desert, 50 km northwest of Barstow, is Goldstone, a ghost town abandoned at the end of the gold rush era.

Does the nano-patent ‘Gold rush’ lead to entrepreneurial-driven growth? Some policy lessons from China and Japan

In this study we compare the nano-patent landscapes of China and Japan in order to assess how their structures (type, fragmentation and concentration of patent ownership) affect the organization of the nanotechnology industry. We also analyze technology policy in order to assess how these interventions support technology transfer and nano-exploitation through university–industry collaboration and technology entrepreneurship. Drawing upon 20,365 patent families related to carbon nanotubes from 1994 to present, we found that two dissimilar technology policies boosting national innovation system emerged: China is more focused on forging an anchor-tenant model, while Japan exhibits a more industry-oriented model through demand-side policy intervention. Implications for firms׳ strategies and policy makers are discussed.

After the gold rush: Corporate Warriors and The Market for Force revisited

In the mid-1990s, unprecedented interventions by private companies specializing in the delivery of military muscle and know-how began altering the dynamics of local conflicts. Since then, private military and security companies have transformed the dynamics of local security delivery around the world, most prominently in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the process, the private military industry has generated plenty of profit and attention, both alarmist and analytical. Two totems of research into the burgeoning industry and its implications are Corporate Warriors by P.W. Singer and The Market for Force by Deborah Avant. Nearly a decade after their publication, these books remain among the most in-depth and sustained treatments of the industry. This essay looks back at the arguments presented in each book and their influence on subsequent research on military privatization.

Time-series analysis of Landsat-MSS/TM/OLI images over Amazonian waters impacted by gold mining activities

Water siltation caused by artisanal gold mining has impacted the Tapajós River Basin in Brazil for the past 40years, however spatial-temporal information about changes in water quality and consequences to the aquatic environment is lacking. To address this, the Landsat satellite family sensors were used to retrieve total suspended solids (TSS) of the water of the Tapajós River from 1973 to 2013. An image processing approach that includes atmospheric correction, based on the 6S model, and glint removing, based on shortwave infrared correction, was applied and validated with in situ radiometric data. An optimization of the atmospheric correction having dark dense forest spectra as reference was applied and allowed a robust correction of MSS, TM and OLI signal to surface reflectance values. Sediment concentration was estimated based on a non-linear empirical regression between measured TSS and satellite surface reflectance at red band. The multi-temporal analysis of TSS showed that the sediment load in the Tapajós aquatic system is in synchrony with mining activities, and a constant seasonal variation of water siltation is observed throughout the time frame of this study. At the end of the rainy season, mining activities intensify and, coupled with low water flow, TSS increases. During the high water level, TSS concentrations were consistently lower because of high water dilution and low mining activity. In a decadal analysis, a peak of sediment concentration coincides with a peak of gold production in all sites analyzed during early 1990s. More recently, due to the currently gold rush, an increase in suspended solids has been observed mainly in the Novo and Tocantins rivers where industrial mining has been installed.

Dirty Words in Deadwood: Literature and the Postwestern MelodyGraulich and Nicolas S.Witschi, Editors. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.

Dirty Words in Deadwood: Literature and the Postwestern Melody Graulich and Nicolas S. Witschi, Editors. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.Deadwood, South Dakota, occupies a space both real and imagined in the history of the American West. It was founded illegally as a mining camp during the 1876 gold rush in the Black Hills, which had been granted to the Lakota in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Present-day Deadwood, with its well-maintained historical district and prestigious place on the National Register of Historic Places, is far removed from the rough-and-tumble frontier camp of the 1870s. Yet, it is precisely the haunting presence of the Old West and the notoriety of some of its illustrious inhabitants, in particular Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, that make Deadwood's mythical reality overwhelm it as historical metaphor.The 2004-2006 HBO television series, Deadwood, feeds off the frontier mythology and history surrounding Deadwood but steers clear of the romanticism and patriotic fervor of the classic western. Deadwood is a prime example of a postwestern in the sense that it reassesses and in some ways parodies the generic conventions and restrictions of conventional cinematic and literary western narratives. From the beginning of the series, Deadwood raised eyebrows with graphic depiction of sex and violence. It quickly gained a strong following of viewers attracted to its complex characters, heavy dialogue brimming with profanity and philosophy, and its revision of the conventional frontier narrative.The latest installment in the University of Nebraska Press's Literature and the Postwestern series, Dirty Words in Deadwood, explores the television series not only as cinematic and literary narrative but also offers a well-rounded contextualization of its genesis and colorful creator David Milch. Milch has worked as a teacher, assisted Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren in writing college textbooks on literature, and published poetry and fiction. But he is best known for his contributions to television and has received several Emmy Awards for his work on Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue. Dirty Words in Deadwood opens with an interview with Milch by Nathaniel Lewis, the son of R.W. B. Lewis. In response to Lewis's prompts, Milch elaborates on his vision of collective identity-we're all members of one body (15)-and the spectral presence of the past in American literature. …

Resource Rents and Economic Growth. Economic and Institutional Development in Countries with a High Share of Income from the Sale of Natural Resources. Analysis and Recommendations Based on International Experience.

“Resource curse”, “Dutch disease”, “gold rush”, “blood diamonds” – those are just some of the epithets used to characterise the role of natural resources in economic development. They certainly do not set a positive tone for a constructive discussion. The purpose of this report is to change that attitude and lay a foundation for a policy roadmap based on success stories of economic development among resource abundant countries. This report presents the argument that resource economies with better economic and political institutions are more capable of managing their resource revenues, and can achieve superior results in economic growth and social development. To support that argument, we have used empirical evidence and analysed the relevant research that has been conducted on the subject to date. We compare performances of resource economies in different parts of the world depending on their institutional rankings, property structure of their extractive industries and other key parameters.

The Right to Asylum: Britain's 1905 Aliens Act and the Evolution of Refugee Law

From the 1880s, states and self-governing colonies in North and South America, across Australasia, and in southern Africa began introducing laws to regulate the entry of newly defined “undesirable immigrants.” This was a trend that intensified exclusionary powers originally passed in the 1850s to regulate Chinese migration, initially in the context of the gold rushes in California and the self-governing colony of Victoria in Australia. The entry and movement of other populations also began to be regulated toward the end of the century, in particular the increasing number of certain Europeans migrating to the United States. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Britain followed this legal trend with the introduction of the 1905 Aliens Act, although it was a latecomer when situated in the global context, and certainly within the context of its own Empire. The Aliens Act was passed in response to the persecution of Eastern European Jews and their forced migration, mainly from the Russian Empire into Britain. It defined for the first time in British law the notion of the “undesirable immigrant,” criteria to exclude would-be immigrants, and exemptions from those exclusions. The Aliens Act has been analyzed by historians and legal scholars as an aspect of the history of British immigration law on the one hand, and of British Jewry and British anti-Semitism on the other. Exclusion based on ethnic and religious grounds has dominated both analyses. Thus, the Act has been framed as the major antecedent to Britain's more substantial and enduring legislative moves in the 1960s to restrict entry, regulate borders, and nominate and identify “undesirable” entrants effectively (if not explicitly) on racial grounds.

Luxury goes digital: how to tackle the digital luxury brand–consumer touchpoints

Today, many of the big brands are diverting substantial amounts of resources away from classical communication channels toward the digital domain. However, despite the digital gold rush, major sections of luxury brands still have not fully arrived in the digital world. Their sentiment increasingly shifts from “Do we need to be online?” to a more complicated question: “How do we actually do it right?” Therefore, this paper has two major objectives. First of all, we want to provide luxury marketers with an overview of the major digital luxury brand–consumer touchpoints and corresponding digital working areas. The first step to digital excellence is to know the available digital opportunities. Based on that, we want to derive some recommendations regarding how to tackle the digital channels successfully, based on an expert survey and a discussion of case studies for each major digital touchpoint. The paper concludes with some major lessons learned.