Great Fire Research Articles

“On the High Seas with no Place to Land”: The Smyrnaean Inferno and Humanitarian Aid to Armenian and Greek Refugees from Turkey (1922-1923)

In September 1922, the great fire of Smyrna drove more than 200,000 Armenian and Greek refugees to the wharves of that port city. They had fled to Smyrna to escape the massacres perpetrated by Turkish nationalist troops and now urgently needed humanitarian aid to relocate them to safety in Greece. In this article we examine the actions and the roles of humanitarian workers of the Near East Relief (NER) and the American Women’s Hospitals (AMH) working in Greece among these refugees deported from Smyrna. We highlight the central role of women doctors and nurses in their humanitarian efforts to save this population. Their actions, and the gratitude of their peers and government authorities, solidified their professional status in the context of profound changes to transnational humanitarianism after 1919.

Logging Amazon forest increased the severity and spread of fires during the 2015–2016 El Niño

Forest fires degrade Amazon forest and its natural functions. Logging, deforestation and the increased frequency of prolonged droughts have contributed to the high recurrence of forest fires in the Amazon. Fires have impacted areas that, until recently, were considered immune to fire, such as the southern portion of the Brazilian state of Roraima, which is characterized by forest types that occur in environments with high natural humidity but that are now strongly impacted by selective logging (SL). The objective of this study was to determine the severity and spread of fire in the forests of southern Roraima, taking as a reference the great forest fire that occurred during the 2015–2016 El Niño. We mapped fire scars and forest biomass from remote sensing and data from forest inventories in a 6657.3 km2 study area, of which 6512.4 km2 (97.8%) had originally been forest and 5412.3 km2 (81.3%) was still forest in 2016. The 2015/2016 fires affected an estimated at 682.2 km2, or 12.6% of the area that was still forest in 2016. Vulnerability maps of the forest were made using the weights-of-evidence method. The biomass impacted by fire totaled 26.4 × 106 Mg, representing 9.5% of the total mapped for the study area (277.4 × 106 Mg). The biomass killed by the fire totaled 5.9 × 106 Mg, representing 22.3% of the biomass affected by the fires. The highest level of fire severity (very strong) proportionally affected 84.6% more forest biomass inside than outside SL areas. Forest vulnerability to fires increased by 265.5% in terms of area and by 400.7% in terms of biomass when exposed to SL. Logging also increased the severity of fires when they occurred: a hectare of burned forest was 85.9% more likely to have a “very strong” fire if it had been previously logged, and burned areas that had been logged lost, on average, 2.9% more of their pre-fire biomass to the fire than those that had not been logged (86.5 Mg ha−1 versus 84.0 Mg ha−1). Considering only the ombrophilous forest, the mean biomass of forest that was logged and burned was 310.7 Mg ha−1, or 30.8% lower than the mean biomass of 448.7 Mg ha−1 in logged but unburned areas, showing a substantial biomass loss to fire (average of 138.0 Mg ha−1). SL more than doubled the impact of fire on biomass loss as compared to the impact of the logging itself. In addition to its contribution to carbon emissions and other impacts, the amplifying effect of SL on forest fires indicates that the assumption that authorized forest management projects in Amazonia are sustainable is unwarranted. The future role of this practice should be rethought, existing projects should be subject to close inspection and control, and unauthorized logging should be identified and repressed. The policy of allowing sale of wood from clearcutting projects should be rethought because it provides a loophole for laundering wood from illegal logging.

FIDDLING WHILE ROME BURNS: THE AETIOLOGY OF A FAMILIAR ENGLISH EXPRESSION

‘Fiddling while Rome burns’ is arguably the most familiar English saying inspired by classical antiquity. The image of Nero actually playing an instrument during the Great Fire is not, in fact, found in ancient sources: the first English reference belongs to Cooper's 1548 revision of Elyot's Latin–English Dictionary, where Nero is said to play a harp during the conflagration. In 1649 the royalist poet George Daniel applied the term ‘fiddle’, and the familiar modern form of the expression, as a byword for a leader's neglect, was apparently coined in a 1680 English parliamentary speech by Silius Titus.

“Everlasting Memorials”: Urban Improvement and the Shadow of Ruin in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London

This essay explores the relationship between plans for the improvement of London and other forms of writing about the city that imagine its inevitable decline and fall. Those lamenting the appearance of London in the eighteenth century frequently looked back to the Great Fire as a missed opportunity to rebuild the city in a grander, more magnificent manner. For these critics, London's built environment did little to stake the nation's claims to polite refinement and cultural prestige. Such concerns became especially pressing in the wake of Britain's victories in the Seven Years’ War, which made London the center of an extensive global empire. Through an examination of proposals for and accounts of urban improvements as well as works that look to a future moment when visitors survey London's faded glories, this essay considers how imagining London in ruins—a trope thus far explored in the context of the loss of the American colonies and Britain's role in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars—served two competing purposes in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. While, on the one hand, improvers acknowledged the transience of imperial power by arguing that now was the time to build grand monuments to mark the achievements of the present, on the other, a range of writers invoked the trope of future ruin to indicate how the seeds of decline had already been sown. The manifold meanings of ruin to which these works gesture would continue to play out in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Adam Smith y los límites a la naturaleza

This article begins by giving a general snapshot of the modern tendency to see regular laws in economic behavior and to displace the social in favor of the individual. In view of that, it searches Adam Smith's thought for some clues to recover an idea of nature that is not absolute and an intermittent appeal to the need to take political measures when necessary, even if they oppose natural designs. For this, three of Smith’s central categories are described, together with some sayings of John Locke about the property and a description of the Great Fire that struck London in 1666 (as well as the genesis of the fire brigades). With all of the above in mind, it will seek to shed light on some less-attended aspects of the intersection between State, market and national life in Smithian work.

Voice in the discussion about the original architecture of the Powder Tower and the 16th century third defensive line in the Lviv Middletown

The Powder Tower was an integral part of the third defensive line, which was laid around the Lviv City Centre since 1522. The active phase of construction of the third line begins after 1527 (the Great Fire of Lviv) and continues until the end of 1540. Construction took place during twenty years when the city was exempt from paying taxes to the state royal treasury and could spend money on the modernization of fortifications.
 In the article, we prove that the date of its construction should be considered 1522−1535 based on the analysis of the defensive parameters of the Powder Tower, its architectural and typological characteristics. Although in the literature most often we can find that construction of the tower was conducted in 1554−1556. In my opinion, at this time there could only be some kind of modernization of the building – the construction of an additional last tier, covering galleries or installing a roof over the entire building. A defence facility of such cubic capacity could not be built in 2 or 3 years. Therefore, given the Great Fire in the city in 1527, the following dating scheme looks very logical: the beginning of work – in 1522, completion – in 1535 and modernization – in 1554−1556.
 The environment around the Powder Tower, in addition to the extraordinary value of architectural space, has preserved archaeological remains of a unique complex of fortifications of the XIV-XVI centuries. Improvement and and architectural and landscape transformations of the territory around the Powder Tower should be considered as a complex regeneration of the eastern side of the fortifications of the Lviv city centre, which consisted of three defensive lines: a High wall (from the port Ruthenica, Mulyarska and Rymarska towers), a Low wall with three small bastei, the Third belt of fortifications. Unlike the Low wall, the third defensive line of artillery bastions surrounds the city centre on all four sides.
 The third belt of fortifications had constant phases of modernization and reconstruction. After its construction in 1522−1540 and modernization in 1554−1556 and further reconstruction of its individual objects took place. For example, in the eastern part of the third line: the north-eastern rondel eventually became the Royal belleward; the empty Powder Tower at the beginning received the upper tier with machicolations, and later the roof; the Carmelite entrance was gradually transformed due to the standards of the defensive gate; the triangular bastei was rebuilt into a “fifth-form” bastion; the Royal Rondel in the south-eastern corner of the defensive belt received a high upper part.

Rome is Burning: Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty

Barrett’s new book, aimed at both an academic and general readership, is an object lesson in how ancient historians work. Every major disaster raises basic questions about its date, extent, causes, and consequences. Modern historians offer answers from archival material—state and private (media) eyewitness statements, statistics, reports, etc. Ancient historians, lacking such resources, have to look elsewhere. Hence, they must be fully interdisciplinary. Formal histories are usually insufficient to consult exclusively because of the lateness of their composition, authorial bias, incomplete survival, etc. Hence, ancient historians must also turn to a wider literature, such as poetry and plays, and to inscriptions, coins, archaeological finds, and comparisons with experiences of the same sort of disaster at other times. To bind all of this evidence together, they often resort to reasoned speculation: The line between the ancient historian and the historical novelist is distinct, but fine!Barrett, an authority on the early Roman Empire, deploys all these approaches to conclude that the Great Fire of Rome lasted from 19 to 28 July, a.d. 64. Starting in the Circus Maximus, it swept around and up the Palatine hill and then devastated much of the city. The fire began accidentally, and strong winds spread it: Neither Nero nor local Christians, both of whom were popular scapegoats, were responsible for setting it. Nero’s subsequent re-development of Rome, including his building of a grand Golden House, stimulated major advances in architecture and art, though it led directly to his fall and long-term fiscal disaster.Barrett’s knowledge about the subject and his passionate desire to impart it is particularly evident in his enthusiastic summary of the most recent archaeological discoveries about both the severity of the initial fire damage and the ambition of Nero’s rebuilding program. He is, however, always careful to point out the difficulties involved in using all types of source; in this respect, he gives much space to evidence from the historian Tacitus. His lengthy treatment of Tacitus’ description of Nero’s savage punishment of Christian scapegoats may, indeed, smack of self-indulgence; it certainly comes close to academic heresy in its revival of the view that it may be a late Roman interpolation. Yet his frankness is forgiveable: Lay readers should be aware of the range of problems that have to be explained away by special pleading if the passage is to be accepted as authentic.Overall, Barrett’s book is a mine of information that scholars will cite copiously. However, apart from its treatment of the Christians, it propounds two questionable hypotheses. (1) Barrett argues throughout that the Roman elite turned against Nero because of financial losses incurred by the fire, resulting first in failed conspiracies and finally Nero’s deposition and suicide in a.d. 68. (2) He also argues that the fiscal burden of the fire forced Nero into a major debasement of the coinage, thereby starting a downward spiral that ended in the collapse of the Roman monetary system in the third century.The first argument is debatable. The upper-class rejection of Nero that caused his downfall may well have occurred much later than a.d. 64, totally unrelated to the fire.1 This notion is, however, part of the cut and thrust of speculative ancient history; neither case has definitive proof. More substantive is the recent metallurgical research that rules against Barrett's second argument about a major financial crisis under Nero that required him to enact an emergency debasement of the coinage. The debasement of the coinage was actually part of a deliberate and deft way of breaking the direct correlation in value between the gold aureus and the silver denarius, which was badly disrupting the whole monetary system.2 Another positive result was that it brought the denarius, the dollar of the western Empire, into line with the drachma, the dollar of the eastern empire. Barrett’s own statements about the debasement confirm the efficacy of the reform, which kept the system stable until the early third century.

A brief history of natural history museums in the Ottoman Empire

Natural history collections and museums made their appearance in the Ottoman in late 19th century through various attempts to build collections through field excursions, donations and exchanges among researchers, individuals and institutions around the world. Among them, the Imperial Medical School of the Ottoman Empire, schools of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and other American educational groups and French colleges stand out with their vast collections from various parts of the Ottoman Empire and beyond. While these museums were created and built by eminent curators and researchers, a considerable amount of work was carried out by uncredited staff and the students. The history of these museums was often obscured by catastrophic events such as the great fires in Istanbul, the passing of the curators and other administrators and, particularly, the devastating effects of the First World War. However, long-lasting commercial science objects networks and the establishment of global natural history collections and museums are still operational today, supported by scientific exchange between other countries and the Ottoman Empire during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing an outline of the history of the natural history collections of the Ottoman Empire can shed light on the evolution of both the naturalistic movement within the Ottoman society and an embryonic scientific network around the Middle East and the rest of the world.

GENERATIVE CREATING OF SACRAL SPACE:LATVIAN ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY PLACES OF WORSHIP

The Balts received God’s counsel and energy and regained health in energetically strong places but the Latvian worldview formed on the thousands of years was encoded in the Lielvārde belt, which is Latvian womenfolk costume’s element. Bishop (1199–1229) Albert founded the town of Riga for the Riga Bishopric centre on the right bank of the Daugava.It was the four-part Riga Old Town semicircledivided by two main streets as the cross.Soon after the Great Fire in 1214, the construction ofthe Riga Cathedralbegan tocreate sacral urban space in areasof the Old Town and the New Town of Riga (in nova civitate Rige).Now, eastwards of Lielvārde, landscape artist Shunmyō Masuno from Japan has visualized the Garden of Destiny, where people obtainsolace to the past, strength to the present and inspiration to follow dreams in the future. Through this set of relationships, architecture maintains the cosmological connection and dialogue with all the scales of the World. Research object: Latvian places for the worship of God.Research goal: analysis of Latvian urban sacral space. Research problem: common and different features of the sacral space of the Latvians and other nations have been little studied. Research novelty: detailed studies of generative design of sacral spaces and contemporary places of worship in Latvia. Research methods: analysis of archive documents, cartographic and urban planning materials, a study of published literature and inspection of sacral places in nature.

Combining sociocultural discourse analysis and multimodal analysis to explore teachers' and pupils' meaning making

This paper explores a common educational dilemma, namely that of how to resource meaningful teaching and learning experiences, and the research challenge of how to represent the multimodal complexity of pedagogic intentions and instantiations. We share the sociocultural view of talk as a central tool in meaning making, aligned with attention to how teaching and learning conversations are mediated by communicative cues and interactions orchestrated across modes. We present extracts to exemplify the benefits of combining sociocultural discourse analysis (SCDA) and multimodal analysis, to explore classroom data at different levels of detail and temporal range. The context for the data collection was a series of lessons on the Great Fire of London with a Year 2 class (6–7 years). Lessons were part of a project using dance and interactive technologies to support understanding. We highlight the purposeful use of different analytic foci, enabled by SCDA and multimodal analysis, and explore what this can add to researchers' understanding of the contextualised nature of meaning making, building and weaving over time, in often unexpected ways. The original contribution of this paper is in offering an innovative mixed-methods approach to explore the complex detail, development and multimodal array of educational interaction. • Innovative mixed-methods approach to researching educational interactions • Combining sociocultural discourse analysis and multimodal analysis • Acknowledging the use of classroom talk and multimodality in meaning making • Exploring breadth and depth of classroom interactions toward meaningful learning

Identifying sex differences in neuromuscular fatigue: the challenge of normalizing exercise intensity and interpreting the results between populations.

Identifying sex differences in neuromuscular fatigue: the challenge of normalizing exercise intensity and interpreting the results between populations.

Morality Meters and Their Impacts on Moral Choices in Videogames: A Qualitative Study

Morality meters are a commonly used mechanic in many ethically notable video games. However, there have been several theoretical critiques of such meters, including that people can find them alienating, they can instrumentalise morality, and they reduce morality to a binary of good and evil with no room for complexity. While there has been much theoretical discussion of these issues, there has been far less empirical investigation. We address this gap through a qualitative study that involved participants playing a custom-built visual novel game ( The Great Fire) with different intuitive and counter-intuitive morality meter settings. Overall, we found that players’ attitudes towards the morality meter in this game was complex, context sensitive and variable throughout gameplay and that the intuitiveness of the meter encouraged participants to treat the meter more ‘as a moral guide’ that prompts reflection and less ‘as a score’ to be engaged with reactively.

Fire Performance of Self-Tapping Screws in Tall Mass-Timber Buildings

Building elements are required to provide sufficient fire resistance based on requirements set forth in the National Building Code of Canada (NBCC). Annex B of the Canadian standard for wood engineering design (CSA O86-19) provides a design methodology to calculate the structural fire-resistance of large cross-section timber elements. However, it lacks at providing design provisions for connections. The objectives of this study are to understand the fire performance of modern mass timber fasteners such as self-tapping screws, namely to evaluate their thermo-mechanical behavior and to predict their structural fire-resistance for standard fire exposure up to two hours, as would be required for tall buildings in Canada. The results present the great fire performance of using self-tapping screws under a long time exposure on connections in mass timber construction. The smaller heated area of the exposed surface has limited thermal conduction along the fastener’s shanks and maintained their temperature profiles relatively low for two hours of exposure. Based on the heat-affected area, the study presents new design principles to determine the residual length of penetration that would provide adequate load-capacity of the fastener under fire conditions. It also allows determining safe fire-resistance values for unprotected fasteners in mass timber construction exposed up to two hours of standard fire exposure.

Buildings in the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666

This paper describes features of secular buildings, mostly houses, shops, and warehouses, standing in the City of London in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; buildings in some cases constructed after the Great Fire of September 1666, and in other cases buildings from before the fire which stood in the zone outside it until the nineteenth century. Some prevalent types of smaller house in the rebuilt city are described; and, to compare with them, some houses in the area outside the fire which are known from historic plans and antiquarian drawings. Briefly some archaeological aspects are outlined: prospects for reconstructing the interiors of houses, London’s incipient involvement in slavery, and the houses of some prominent seventeenth-century citizens who financed slavery. Other matters raised are criticism of scholars who have habitually described the city after the fire as totally rebuilt in brick, which it was not; and the statement, also often made, that after the fire London became a modern city. This is questioned.

Lessons not learned: How did we arrive at the need for the Hackitt Review?

The term ‘unprecedented’ is often wrongly used in respect of catastrophic events, and while the Grenfell disaster has highlighted significant shortcomings in both our regulation and construction regimes, sadly history tells us that far from being unprecedented, this was a disaster not only waiting to happen, but which has been repeated at intervals throughout history. From the Great Fire of London to the Woolworths Manchester fire, the drivers behind Grenfell are well-known — cost pressures, lack of expertise and ineffective legislation all playing their part, as stated in the Hackitt Review. What is perhaps unprecedented is the extent to which Grenfell has highlighted what can only be described as endemic failings in our modern construction practises that show we have not simply forgotten the lessons history should have taught us, but have knowingly disregarded them. Before looking at the recommendations of the Hackitt enquiry and the proposed changes to the construction industry, this paper will look at the history of fire safety and the lessons that we were already taught, asking ourselves: ‘How did we end up at Grenfell?’

City Profile: Cape Town, South Africa

city profile Cape Town, South Africa by SarahBelle Selig THE WIND KEEPS THE CITYinmotion. The pine trees grow sideways away from the peaks, bowed seaward by the southeasterly. It snaps you to attention, pushes you onward, opens your mind. If it’s not the wind, it’s the brandy or good Shiraz. Perched on barstools, the people seem to vibrate. The clouds pour over the mountains thick as cream and then shyly roll into themselves, the city a stovetop too hot to touch. The whole place has a sense of sway. On pleasant afternoons, the twentysomethings run trails; in the evening they drink sundowners on Clifton Beach or in Church Street’s art galleries; by midnight they flock to Long Street bars and smoke in alleyways with dilated pupils. The port is restless, too, boats ushered in and departing like visiting bees. It’s not uncommon to have three friends emigrate in a month, and three others return. The European swallows and vaalie tourists from Johannesburg gather in summer, gone again before the end of lychee season. Protest , queer, and coffee cultures keep the city buzzed, change its aesthetics overnight. The literary world is solid ground, a way to orient oneself in the din. After less than eighteen months, I know most publishers, writers, and critics by name and count many of them as friends. I can tell you how they prefer their tea, the marathons they’ve run, the names of their ex-husbands and children. They greet me barefoot at the door. Many of us mourned Elsa Joubert and Achmat Dangor as fans, yes, but as family, too. Clarke’s Bookshop is a testament to that intimacy, an indie that exclusively sells local authors—and yet, somehow, thrives. My bookish colleagues have always lived here and always will, because this country is a fruitful milieu for storytellers. Each day spent out is a series of inimitable episodes. Sitting downtown, one could hear isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English, or German while eating a miscellany of “Tex-Mex,” ramen, focaccia, schnitzel, bobotie, boerewors. Cape Town is nonbinary, microcosmic. Eachneighborhoodisaplanetinorbitaround Table Mountain, our sun. Sea Point is white: the apartments, the restaurant chairs, the cappuccino froth, the wave caps, the people. In Woodstock, the streets bleed with color. The landscape looks different from Blouberg or Camps Bay; we each see a different city. And if one considers its surrounds—the bohemia of Scarborough and wealth of Llandudno, the horses of Constantia and fish of Kalk Bay, the cinderblock of Mitchell’s Plain and vineyards of Stellenbosch, the corrugated iron of Khayelitsha and dunes of Muizenberg, the Afrikaaner suburbs to the north—the solar system expands still. These orbits do not intersect but watch each other from behind Vibracrete walls, moving in parallel through space and time but separate. Proteas, the country’s national flower, rely on wildfires to propagate. As the soft green of fresh growth begins, the petrified proteas remain, otherworldly, like spray-painted metal. They are scars on the hill of the country ’s past, proof of a former life and the great fire that engulfed it. Same too, in South Africa, a country born of sun and soil and salt and rebirthed of fire and endurance and time. The saplings are still young and vulnerable to those who would prey on them with greedy hands, yet they persist, lay down roots, demand sunlight. South Africa is a young country with old country blues. Here, poverty and privilege dance an eternal sokkie; one knocks on the gate of the other. Apartheid and democracy remain at twenty paces. Muggings, corruption , and racial partitions are as indigenous as its spekboom bushes, hadeda birds, and the Southern Cross constellation on the horizon. As an expat, I am as alien to this place as the eucalyptus trees, but like them—despite two wrong hemispheres and 7,901 miles between myself and my childhood bed—I am blood in its veins. SarahBelle Selig is a freelance writer living in Cape Town and a first-year in the MFA in creative writing program at University of Cape Town. She freelances for Catalyst Press, an independent publisher out of California, and is the publicity writer for the South...

City Profile: Cape Town, South Africa

city profile Cape Town, South Africa by SarahBelle Selig THE WIND KEEPS THE CITYinmotion. The pine trees grow sideways away from the peaks, bowed seaward by the southeasterly. It snaps you to attention, pushes you onward, opens your mind. If it’s not the wind, it’s the brandy or good Shiraz. Perched on barstools, the people seem to vibrate. The clouds pour over the mountains thick as cream and then shyly roll into themselves, the city a stovetop too hot to touch. The whole place has a sense of sway. On pleasant afternoons, the twentysomethings run trails; in the evening they drink sundowners on Clifton Beach or in Church Street’s art galleries; by midnight they flock to Long Street bars and smoke in alleyways with dilated pupils. The port is restless, too, boats ushered in and departing like visiting bees. It’s not uncommon to have three friends emigrate in a month, and three others return. The European swallows and vaalie tourists from Johannesburg gather in summer, gone again before the end of lychee season. Protest , queer, and coffee cultures keep the city buzzed, change its aesthetics overnight. The literary world is solid ground, a way to orient oneself in the din. After less than eighteen months, I know most publishers, writers, and critics by name and count many of them as friends. I can tell you how they prefer their tea, the marathons they’ve run, the names of their ex-husbands and children. They greet me barefoot at the door. Many of us mourned Elsa Joubert and Achmat Dangor as fans, yes, but as family, too. Clarke’s Bookshop is a testament to that intimacy, an indie that exclusively sells local authors—and yet, somehow, thrives. My bookish colleagues have always lived here and always will, because this country is a fruitful milieu for storytellers. Each day spent out is a series of inimitable episodes. Sitting downtown, one could hear isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English, or German while eating a miscellany of “Tex-Mex,” ramen, focaccia, schnitzel, bobotie, boerewors. Cape Town is nonbinary, microcosmic. Eachneighborhoodisaplanetinorbitaround Table Mountain, our sun. Sea Point is white: the apartments, the restaurant chairs, the cappuccino froth, the wave caps, the people. In Woodstock, the streets bleed with color. The landscape looks different from Blouberg or Camps Bay; we each see a different city. And if one considers its surrounds—the bohemia of Scarborough and wealth of Llandudno, the horses of Constantia and fish of Kalk Bay, the cinderblock of Mitchell’s Plain and vineyards of Stellenbosch, the corrugated iron of Khayelitsha and dunes of Muizenberg, the Afrikaaner suburbs to the north—the solar system expands still. These orbits do not intersect but watch each other from behind Vibracrete walls, moving in parallel through space and time but separate. Proteas, the country’s national flower, rely on wildfires to propagate. As the soft green of fresh growth begins, the petrified proteas remain, otherworldly, like spray-painted metal. They are scars on the hill of the country ’s past, proof of a former life and the great fire that engulfed it. Same too, in South Africa, a country born of sun and soil and salt and rebirthed of fire and endurance and time. The saplings are still young and vulnerable to those who would prey on them with greedy hands, yet they persist, lay down roots, demand sunlight. South Africa is a young country with old country blues. Here, poverty and privilege dance an eternal sokkie; one knocks on the gate of the other. Apartheid and democracy remain at twenty paces. Muggings, corruption , and racial partitions are as indigenous as its spekboom bushes, hadeda birds, and the Southern Cross constellation on the horizon. As an expat, I am as alien to this place as the eucalyptus trees, but like them—despite two wrong hemispheres and 7,901 miles between myself and my childhood bed—I am blood in its veins. SarahBelle Selig is a freelance writer living in Cape Town and a first-year in the MFA in creative writing program at University of Cape Town. She freelances for Catalyst Press, an independent publisher out of California, and is the publicity writer for the South...

Three Quaker Meeting Houses in Pasadena, California: An Architectural Study

Three Quaker Meeting Houses in Pasadena, CaliforniaAn Architectural Study Judson Emerick (bio) Between 1882 and 1909 Quakers established three meetings in the American frontier town of Pasadena, California, incorporated in 1886—two quite progressive, and one very conservative. During that quarter century each of the three groups in question built radically different places of worship in the city, each drawing upon and/or resisting the long Quaker architectural tradition they inherited. This study thus starts by tracing that inheritance from its beginning in George Fox's England to colonial North America. It savors an American Quaker architectural invention, the "ideal Quaker plan" that emerged in the mid eighteenth century (and dominated Quaker building for more than a century thereafter). The paper then goes to Pasadena to examine, in chronological order, meeting houses built by the evangelical Quakers at First Friends Church, then to that erected by conservative Friends at the Pasadena Monthly Meeting, and finally to the meeting house of the Orange Grove Monthly Meeting, the setting for liberal Quakers in the city. Each of these speaks (or spoke) clearly of its builder's intentions and commitments. Only two of the original three meetings still survive today (the Pasadena Monthly Meeting was laid down in 1988). First Friends Church, moreover, moved in 1949 to a new property in the city, then slowly evolved thereafter to become the Foothills Community Church in the late 1990s. Among the three meeting houses in Pasadena, that belonging to the Orange Grove Monthly stands out for its novelty and originality. This study aims to reveal and celebrate that special achievement. [End Page 66] Early Friends Meeting Houses in Britain From the start Quakers gathered in their houses to worship, pray, and seek the light within.1 But as followers of George Fox (1624–1691) grew in number, household dwellings could no longer have sufficed. Although Quakers did meet outdoors for worship on occasion, even ideally, shelter for meetings was needed. As with so much else of established religion in seventeenth-century England, Fox scorned the religious architecture of his own time, growling about its excessive pretention. He found nothing to admire in the Anglican churches of his day—not even those that the celebrated architect Sir Christopher Wren built all over London after the Great Fire in 1666 (fig.1). "Steeple houses" (Fox's words) could not serve the Religious Society of Friends. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. St. James, Piccadilly (1672–84), designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Photo: Tony Hisgett, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. [End Page 67] But more to the point, architectural pretention aside, no ordinary church could ever have met Quaker needs.2 Like other early dissidents who had long objected to the remaining aspects of Catholicism in the Anglican church, like Puritans and Presbyterians who thought the Anglican Protestant church not Protestant enough, Quakers too rejected any notion that a place of worship might itself count as holy. The Anglican church, like Roman Catholic churches throughout medieval and modern times, housed altars in impressive settings presented as the venerable tombs and memorials of the saints where believers gathered on special feast days dependent upon priests to mediate their joining with God in the eucharist. Zealous English and Scottish protestants during the last half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth rejected the altars, the saints' relics, and the sanctoral liturgy that spun around them.3 (By Fox's day, during the second and third quarters of the century, Quakers had dispensed with the temporal liturgy as well.4) The seventeenth-century dissidents pushed instead to focus worship upon personal transformation, to provide each member of a congregation the fullest opportunity to take responsibility for their own salvation—by their own light or knowledge. Among the dissidents it was the community of believers itself that comprised the "church," properly speaking, and not any kind of building. They saw places of worship as mere "meeting houses." This Pauline dogma that all believers, past, present, and future, constituted members of Christ's body and were all thereby equal in holiness, all thus "sanctified," underpinned Christian doxa from the beginning, and in the seventeenth...

An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic by Kate Luce Mulry (review).

Reviewed by: An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic by Kate Luce Mulry Eric H. Ash (bio) An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic By Kate Luce Mulry. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 361. The Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, after years of civil war and various experiments in ruling England without a king under Oliver Cromwell, was both a hopeful and a nervous time. The return of King Charles II inaugurated a period of rebuilding and renewed stability, but memories of political unrest, religious strife, violence, and bloodshed were still very fresh. To reunite his fractious nation and reestablish English rule in its various overseas colonies, Charles and his advisors promoted a number of projects intended to improve the physical environment, both in England and across the empire. Kate Luce Mulry's book makes an important contribution to the understanding of those projects—and the many intertwined purposes they were intended to serve. Mulry succeeds in weaving together threads of political history, the history of medicine and public health, and environmental history to tell a compelling story: the Restoration drive to restore the English monarchical state and empire by improving the health, character, and productivity of its restive and far-flung subjects through enhancements to their environment. This is a very ambitious project with a lot of moving parts. It explores a series of case studies, including the many proposals for rebuilding a safer and healthier London in the aftermath of the 1665 plague epidemic and the Great Fire of 1666; land drainage projects in the English Fens, Ireland, and the Delaware River valley in North America; numerous projects to improve lands and increase food production throughout England and its empire; and the desire to transform the newly-acquired colony of Jamaica into an imperial garden of sorts, not only to grow valuable plants "naturalized" from the East Indies but also to create a paradise of order, harmony, and sweet aromas that would soothe a wild and unruly colonial populace. The great success of the book lies in Mulry's skillful linking of public health, agricultural productivity, natural philosophy, and political priorities of the restored monarchy. Draining wetlands perceived by most as "waste" land and planting food crops there would provide wholesome sustenance for English subjects, a vital concern for any king who hoped to foster political stability and establish his own legitimacy. It would also impose a sense of order on a chaotic landscape and improve the perceived character of its inhabitants, transforming them from so-called rude and lazy pastoralists into good, honest, hard-working English farmers and subjects. This was true whether the land and people in question were in the riot-prone Fens, in rebellious Ireland, or in the wilds of England's North American colonies. Likewise, planting an orderly and profitable garden of sweet-smelling [End Page 1243] plants in Jamaica would assert English authority and ownership over land that the English myopically perceived to be wild and unclaimed. But this plan was developed in conjunction with a plan to create a similar garden in London, where sweet smells might also be used to calm a potentially rebellious urban population. Moreover, the successful transplantation of foreign plants to Jamaican soil would demonstrate that it was possible for English colonizers to transplant themselves as well, to become "naturalized" to Jamaica without necessarily losing their English identities in the process. Many of the projects that Mulry explores in the book did not come to fruition; some were only partially realized, and some never made it past the proposal stage. She makes a convincing argument, however, that unrealized projects can provide important clues regarding the goals, priorities, and sense of possibilities shared by the king and his advisors, the Council of Foreign Plantation, the nascent Royal Society, and entrepreneurial landowners and colonizers, among others. Complicating the common historical view that Charles II had little real interest in the scientific investigations of the Royal Society, Mulry shows how that body served the king as a "Parliament of Nature," promoting a number of improvement projects that had the crown's attention and favor. Her commitment to...

From Birth to Death. The Silk-Flower Industry in Mexico

For centuries silk flowers have been used by different societies as personal and spatial adornments. Flowers, both natural and man-made, have diverse meanings in daily life and rites of passage, accompanying individuals from birth to death. During the nineteenth century, the use of silk flowers gained in popularity and, thanks to the industrialization of textile weaving and the discovery of chemical dyes, silk flowers became available not only to elites but to the growing bourgeoisie, and later, even low-income classes. During this boom, Judith Deschamps and Etiesenne Pucheu met and were married, both of them florists. After the 1851 great fires in San Francisco, California, they decided to settle down in Mexico, where a friend of theirs had established, a couple decades before, the first silk-flower factory in Mexico. Being entrepreneurs, Judith and her husband took the business in their hands and made it stronger, inventing patented machines for different processes and products of their trade. Judith lead the silk-flower production and, as in factories around Europe and the United States, they hired women as workers, making this industry a pioneer in gender equality and women’s empowerment. At least in Mexico, silk-flower making gathered women from all ages, cultural backgrounds, and social classes. This paper delves into the history of the Pucheu silk-flower factory through the stories of the Pucheu-Deschamps family and their workers from the nineteenth century to date, also exploring the way in which these complex artifacts were created, used, and valued.