Historical Landmarks Research Articles

Strange Gods in a Great Southern Land

Between 1960 and 2000 Australia witnessed four waves of “cult controversy.” This article provides a historical overview of these controversies. The four historical vignettes presented demonstrate the significance of Australia in the wider global history of the “cult wars” and some of the local societal reactions occasioned by various home grown and international new religious movements that have proved controversial. This article identifies a series of the key episodes and periods that might serve as historical landmarks for the writing of a more fulsome history of new religions in Australia, introduces to a scholarly audience some of the important individuals involved in these Australian controversies, and highlights the key new religions and cult-watching groups whose interactions have collectively shaped the Australian societal response over this period.

ASM News for July and August 2020

Abstract News about ASM members, chapters, events, awards, conferences, affiliates, and other society activities. Topics include: ASM announces 2020 award recipients; Iowa State University Ames Project Site is selected as a 2020 ASM Historical Landmark; ASM appoints Ron Aderhold as Acting Managing Director; Alloy Digest is added to the ASM Digital Library, and Alok Nayar succeeds Dennis Rahoi as Editor; professional profile for Becky Holdford.

Historical landmarks of the management of major urban logistics projects in Imperial Timisoara

This article follows an holistic approach to the management of the major urban logistics projects of Imperial Timisoara. The research conducted so far has been based on unilateral treatments: either exclusively historical or engineering. Research of such projects requires multi-scientific and multidisciplinary treatment angles. Our investigative optics is a managerial-holistic one, which integrates, besides the historical, technical / technological aspects, the architectural aspects, along with the multicultural, socio-human, ethnic, anthropological, urban, structural, processual and functional aspects. In this sense, the strategic references of urban essence are related to the potential of Timisoara city to have been able to carry out such projects, in the contexts specific to the different periods of its logistic development. The multitude of researched data sources, information and documents enables us to innovate the approach of major urban logistics projects, using the logic of public management, in a holistic, integrative vision. We are convinced that such research, in such a way, will contribute substantially to a deeper understanding of Timisoara's contribution to his own Europeanization and the region he was part of, the Imperial Historical Banat.

Initiation and establishment of ecotourism development: Pandin Lake of San Pablo City and Tayak Hill of Rizal, Laguna, Philippines

The Philippines is blessed with an abundance of natural-cultural attractions with an excellent prospect for ecotourism development. Ecotourism has become a key national strategy in promoting local development. Despite this, the country continues to lag behind in ecotourism development as many of its tourism resources in the countryside remain untapped and undeveloped. This situation is exacerbated by the few scholarly discussions on how ecotourism development takes root in a local context. Against this backdrop, the study explores the specifics and dynamics of initiating and establishing ecotourism at the municipal level by looking into the experiences of two localities—Pandin Lake of San Pablo City and Tayak Hill of Rizal Municipality, both in Laguna province of the Philippines. Using a case study design, the article illustrates that in Pandin Lake, the ecotourism development is a locally driven and nongovernmental organisation-inspired initiative, and in Tayak Hill, it is a top-down driven endeavour where the efforts are mainly personal actions of the local executives. In Pandin Lake, the instigating conditions include: the awareness brought about by the save Sampaloc Lake movement; the constraint to aquaculture expansion; the scenic natural beauty of the small lake; and the lack of development-oriented actions by its administrative agencies. In Tayak Hill, the precipitating conditions comprise: the urgent need for instituting a promotional identity for the town and a catalyst for the local socioeconomic development; the advent of a new local government administration that is open to novel development strategies; and the discovery of Tayak Hill as a historical landmark.

Pyoderma gangrenosum: From historical perspectives to emerging investigations.

Pyoderma gangrenosum (PG) is a rare disease of unknown aetiology, first described over a century ago. Initially thought to have an infectious cause, and now primarily considered an autoinflammatory condition, PG continues to be poorly understood, commonly misdiagnosed, and difficult to treat. In this review, we discuss the journey of our understanding of PG to date, including first descriptions, challenges with diagnosis, presumed pathogenesis, and treatments used. We highlight major historical landmarks and their importance, explain the rationale behind current investigations, note outstanding gaps in knowledge, and explore the future directions of PG research. We summarise what we have known, what we are working on knowing, and what we have yet to explore about PG, illustrating overall trends to invigorate future research.

ASM News for April 2020

Abstract News about ASM members, chapters, events, awards, conferences, affiliates, and other society activities. Topics include: Sunniva Collins to chair 2020 ASM Nominating Committee; ASM President Zi-Kui Liu discusses ASM's role in partnering with Granta Design in light of Granta's recent acquisition by Ansys; a dedication ceremony celebrated the FerrerÍa Mirandaola Ironworks in Spain being recognzied as a 2019 ASM International Historical Landmark; ASM develops a virtual tour of its laboratory facilities; professional profile for Tuesday Kuykendall.

Synthetic Methods Driven by the Photoactivity of Electron Donor-Acceptor Complexes.

The association of an electron-rich substrate with an electron-accepting molecule can generate a new molecular aggregate in the ground state, called an electron donor–acceptor (EDA) complex. Even when the two precursors do not absorb visible light, the resulting EDA complex often does. In 1952, Mulliken proposed a quantum-mechanical theory to rationalize the formation of such colored EDA complexes. However, and besides a few pioneering studies in the 20th century, it is only in the past few years that the EDA complex photochemistry has been recognized as a powerful strategy for expanding the potential of visible-light-driven radical synthetic chemistry. Here, we explain why this photochemical synthetic approach was overlooked for so long. We critically discuss the historical context, scientific reasons, serendipitous observations, and landmark discoveries that were essential for progress in the field. We also outline future directions and identify the key advances that are needed to fully exploit the potential of the EDA complex photochemistry.

MIGRATION AND NARRATION: HOW EUROPEAN HISTORIANS IN THE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES TOLD THE HISTORY OF HUMAN MASS MIGRATIONS OR VÖLKERWANDERUNGEN

ABSTRACTHistorians’ interest in the history of human migrations is not limited to recent years. Migrations had already figured as explanatory factors in connection with cultural and historical change in the work of classical and ancient studies scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the writings of these scholars, migrations acted as historical landmarks or epochal thresholds and played a key role in the construction of geo‐historical areas. This model has been called “migrationism” and cannot be explained simply on the basis of the history of individual disciplines, but must be seen in its complex interaction with scientific and historical contexts. However, “migrationism” does not relate to fixed political and scientific positions or movements. For this reason, it cannot be explained adequately by using a historically or ideologically based approach. Relying on narratological approaches, this article examines migration narratives that historians of this period used to explain the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. Referring to contemporary historiographical representations of the ancient Near East, it distinguishes three main narratives that are still common today: narratives of foundation, narratives of destruction, and narratives of mixtures. In this sense, analyzing older migration narratives helps us to sharpen the critical view on the genealogy of our own views on the history—and present—of human migrations.

Seafront villas “Mechta” and “Kseniya” in Simeiz on the Southern Bank of Crimea: fate of the buildings and their creators on the background of the “age of extremes” (1900 – 1990s)

The subject of this research is the history of two recognized landmarks of the Southern Bank of Crimea – villas Seafront villas “Mechta” and “Kseniya” in the rural locality Simeiz near Yalta. The were erected in the early XX century, and since then are the center of attention for admirers of the relics, residents and guests of this resort town, and its urban development dominant. For the first time in historiography, based on the newly introduced archival sources form museum collections, as well as the sources of historical memory, is reconstructed the sequence of transfer of ownership of land parcels, on which both buildings are erected. The author also discovers the names of the people who commissioned construction of both villas, as well as their architects. The work describes the fate of buildings, their owners and descendants after arrival of the Soviet government and nationalization of private property on the Southern Bank of Crimea. The scientific novelty consists not only in the conducted documental reconstruction of the fate of two historical and cultural landmarks of the late XIX – early XX century, which description hat lots of gaps in the historical, art and local lore literature, but also in placing this reconstruction into the context of examination of Russia’s sociocultural modernization in the beginning of the XX century, formation of new social strata with characteristic to them new culture of leisure and aesthetization of life. The revealed by the author sources and information contribute to preservation of Russian cultural heritage, as well as can be applied by the historians in the area of social history, history of culture, history of leisure, and history of mentality.

Celebrating the 70 years of pyridostigmine on therapy of Myasthenia Gravis: historical aspects of the preliminary trials.

Currently, pyridostigmine bromide is an indispensable anticholinesterase agent used worldwide to treat patients with Myasthenia Gravis (MG). However, pyridostigmine bromide was unsuccessful in its "pioneering trials" to treat a series of MG patients. There are important historical landmarks before pyridostigmine bromide becomes useful, safe and indispensable for MG therapy. After 70 years of these "pioneering trials", this article reviews some historical aspects related to them, as well as other preliminary trials using pyridostigmine bromide as therapy for MG patients.

Organ Transplantation in Ecuador.

Organ Transplantation in Ecuador.

Editorial Comment: Minor Asias

Editorial Comment: Minor Asias Sean Metzger September 2017, dusk: a black woman, hair sculpted into a high coronet on her head with an eye mask of caked white powder and a shimmery navy blue, floor-length dress with a high stand collar, entered the inner courtyard of the Pico House, a historical landmark and once the most lavish nineteenth-century hotel in what is now downtown Los Angeles.1 Constructed at the behest of Pío de Jesús Pico, a businessman who was also the last Mexican governor of Alta California, the Pico House is now a historic monument that reminds visitors of the complicated colonial dynamics that shaped the history of the state. It also stands near the site where a group of Chinese migrants had been lynched in 1871 during one of the city’s periods of civil disorder. The building thus marks a crossroads, an intersection where racial politics have eventuated across time. On this particular evening, the woman in question, visual artist and performer María Magdalena Campos-Pons, activated this location as a site of memory.2 However, the historian Pierre Nora, who coined the term lieux de mémoire, tends to privilege the national in his writings, and Campos-Pons shifted consideration away from that rubric. She evoked instead the legacies of the coolie network that once linked California, China, and Cuba. Using a stalk of sugar cane to untangle strips of cobalt-colored cloth bundled together (see the back cover of this issue), she incanted several phrases while engaging in slow, seemingly ritualistic movements. Eventually, Campos-Pons offered several gifts to the audience standing before her. A Cuban woman of Chinese and Nigerian descent, Campos-Pons used cane to evoke the plantation system that brought different sets of her ancestors across the Atlantic or the Pacific respectively to the Americas. Many people in the audience could also point to such conjunctions among their kin, as several of us could trace genealogies to the labor attendant to and surrounding the cultivation of sugar.3 As anthropologist Anna Tsing has written, globalization is a history of social projects that might be traced through the “sticky materiality of practical encounters” that might “give grip to universal aspirations.”4 In this case, the performance referenced the harvesting and shipping of sugary substances [End Page xiii] now and in the past: the manufacture of a global sweet tooth on the backs of African and Asian laborers.5 Campos-Pons complicated the site in which she moved, suggesting how it might have been transected by flows of people and goods that the official narratives of Pico House did not highlight in the colonial archive they detailed. By conducting this performative opening for the “Circles and Circuits II: Contemporary Chinese Caribbean Art” exhibition with an embodied repertoire that supplemented dominant histories, Campos-Pons identified and helped to construct a community that included a number of scholars, artists, patrons, and spectators invested in the residue of cultural contact across and beyond the Antillean archipelago. Indeed, the artwork and those who produced and/or commented on it addressed questions about Chinese flows in and through the Caribbean from a number of different perspectives: insular (analyzing an individual island or a comparison of islands); archipelagic (following Édouard Glissant’s theorization of rélation and its reverberations in his contemporaries as well as more recent turns); diasporic; and hemispheric.6 All of these ways of seeing Campos-Pons’s performance would highlight specific aesthetic, familial, racial, and regional connections that it rendered legible. Nevertheless, despite the utility of all these methodological approaches, something else seemed to emerge from those moments that none of these analytical tools quite captured for me. For example, Campos-Pons’s multiple minoritarian subject positions as Asian and black and Latinx within the context of the places she has lived (Canada, Cuba, and the United States) opened a different mode of conceptualizing cultural contact, one that evokes both nation-states and regions (like the Caribbean or the Western hemisphere) but also exceeds them. Individuals like Campos-Pons might further identify with multiple diasporas that become meaningful in relation to particular conditions. As one illustration, the Chinese elements integrated into...

Visible light photocatalysis - from racemic to asymmetric activation strategies.

In the last years, an increasing interest towards the development of novel enantioselective strategies in photocatalysis has been observed within the research community. The high challenge associated with the intrinsic nature of photochemical reactions has obstructed the rapid development of this research field in comparison with asymmetric thermal processes. However, recently, many outstanding enantioselective transformations have been achieved through mechanistically different approaches. Here, we disclose the most significant contributions, with a special emphasis on the various activation strategies. An introduction to photocatalysis and to the different activation modes is provided, followed by an historical perspective and landmark examples of their application in asymmetric reactions.

Synagogue Decorations in Present-Day Ukraine: Practice in Preservation of Cultural and Artistic Heritage

There are approximately ten historical synagogue buildings left in Ukraine today which continue, to varying extents, to preserve their original wall paintings and decoration. A number of these were only recently discovered. The attempts underway, beginning in the early 2000s, to preserve as well as uncover old paintings often produce the opposite effect, destroying authentic works. The cultural significance of these historical landmarks requires that they be included in a single international register, along with supervision and an agreed upon preservation program designed individually for each. Synagogue wall paintings will inevitably perish unless ways of transferring this heritage are sought that will move these works to a different and more reliable “medium of cultural memory”. Different, innovative approaches to museum preservation and ways of presenting these works to public view are called for. Among the tried and tested options are: reconstructing old synagogue interiors which contain wall or ceiling paintings; using motifs taken from the original paintings in new works being produced for the Jewish community; and work on exhibition projects, catalogues and two-dimensional reconstruction models.

Ayad AkhtarHomeland Elegies

on to tell the story of “Two people, one tree, not enough land or light or love.” For that story to be told and for it to have any chance at a resolution, some things have to be put aside, glossed over, and reimagined so that the two people have the same claim to the one tree and the same right to light and love in that land. With my family divided on both sides of Lebanon’s southern border, I leave Shrapnel Maps disappointed, feeling that it is a story and a journey for someone else’s benefit, not mine. Nevertheless, I am certain that these poems will bring much enlightenment to an uninformed reader, an easy initiation into the Palestinian tragedy. When confronted with a neighbor who keeps high fences and whose children grow up “only around their own kind,” the Arab American in Metres’s collection thinks: “The Arab in me still wants to invite him in for tea. The American in me wants the Arab to turn and disappear in the falling snow.” Like this persona, we as Arab Americans are expected to contort the Arabs (and especially the Palestinian in us) into difficult spaces, package our trauma in palatable ways, translate our pain into the pain of others who are perceived as more valid or relatable. Shrapnel Maps left me with burning questions Metres himself poses in his afterword : “What do we say to those who remain in the thickets of suffering? What do we do in this brief space of our breathing?” And for a people gagged and erased, oppressed and dehumanized for three generations now, a poem is sometimes “the only space for breathing.” It is a space that does not tolerate diplomacy or compromise. For it then risks two things: relinquishing itself as poetry and muffling the voices it sets out to champion. Huda Fakhreddine University of Pennsylvania Ayad Akhtar Homeland Elegies New York. Little, Brown. 2020. 368 pages. HOMELAND ELEGIES is Ayad Akhtar’s second novel following American Dervish, published in 2012. In the interim, Akhtar has been a prolific playwright, with Disgraced winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2013. Akhtar continues to reinvent himself as a writer, this time in the genre of autofiction. He forewarns readers in the preface that he has fictionalized many parts of his life, drawing inspiration from Alison Bechdel’s quotation in the epigraph: “I can only make things up about things that have already happened.” This experimental novel is simultaneously a poignant reflection of the complexities of being a Muslim writer in post-9/11 America as well as a tender and funny tribute to his parents, particularly his father, whom Akhtar recently lost. Historical events like 9/11, the truck bomber in New York, and the rise of Donald Trump form the historical landmarks against which intense dramas of his personal and familial history are played out. In lieu of a plot, this novel follows an episodic structure, woven with many metafictional commentaries, dreams, diatribes, and debates about the critical reception of his works. In some ways, this is a reworking of the genre of the künstlerroman , a novel about the development of an artist. Homeland Elegies memorializes Akhtar’s father, a brilliant interventional cardiologist whose innovations had once brought him dizzying fame and patients like Donald Trump. The novel encapsulates Akhtar’s love-hate relationship with his father, beginning with their opposed politics in the 2016 elections. By the end of the novel, we see an exhausted Sikander, fighting grief over the loss of his wife, a gambling addiction, and an undeserved malpractice lawsuit, admit that he had been wrong about Trump. Interspersed between these episodes, we see the visceral antipathy for Muslims unleashed on Akhtar and his father after 9/11, which returns with greater fury after the rise of Donald Trump. There are several harrowing moments in the novel, when Akhtar and his family are deeply unsettled by verbal and near-physical Islamophobic abuse. Akhtar connects the rise of anti-immigrant and racist ideology to the failure of American capitalism to advance the hopes of working-class people in rural America. He reflects on the decimation of American manufacturing, the...

The Barren Mediterranean: Rural Imaginary in Italian Colonial Libya

Author(s): Monserrati, Michele | Abstract: The article considers the development of Italy’s Mediterranean identity from the country’s Unification to the Turco-Italian War (1911-1912). I show how Italy’s political ambition to restore Roman control over the Mediterranean Sea (Mare Nostrum) generated two alternative representations of the Roman myth: a sea-based and a land-based one. After the initial success of the maritime version of this myth, I argue that the years leading up to the war in Libya represented a shifting moment toward a reconsideration of the Romans’ agrarian legacy. Therefore, I maintain that an analysis of the Italian aesthetic of “Mediterraneism” should include representations of the natural environment. I show how Italians considered the idea of a uniform Mediterranean landscape as a natural historical landmark to testify the historical presence of the ancient Romans in North Africa and to legitimize the link between the Italian colonies and their supposedly glorious ancestors. Ultimately, by insisting on the botanical similarities between Italy and the North African shore, I demonstrate how the Libyan territory came to be represented as a landscape of the ‘self,’ while manifesting the presence of the Muslim’ other’ in the form of its most arid regions.

A despatologização das identidades TRANS e a psicologia brasileira frente a luta pelos direitos LBGTQI+

Devido ao avanço da direita e do conservadorismo no cenário político nacional, o país enfrenta revisões sistemáticas de suas políticas sexuais (VELASCO E CRUZ; CODAS, 2015). Desde 2011, os ataques aos direitos e à cidadania LGBTQI+ vem se intensificando no campo social, especialmente, por meio de campanhas contra a chamada “ideologia de gênero”, termo de que se servem os movimentos contrários a legitimidade das identidades sexuais e de gênero. O presente estudo tem como objetivo evidenciar alguns dos marcos históricos que contribuíram para a institucionalização da transexualidade como patologia; discutir as perspectivas de implementação do processo transexualizador em um país refratário à diversidade sexual e debater, no âmbito das Teorias de Gênero, qual o lugar que a Psicologia ocupa no processo de despatologização da transexualidade. Como método de pesquisa, foi adotado a revisão crítica da literatura que busca analisar o estado atual das pesquisas em relação às identidades trans publicados em documentos, bem como identificar de que modo as Teorias de Gênero têm contribuído para o processo de despatologização dessas identidades. A pesquisa visou, sobretudo, debater as identidades trans e a importância dos profissionais de Psicologia na luta pela despatologização das identidades trans no Brasil. Considerando Gênero como uma ferramenta teórico-metodológica útil para os que trabalham com os objetos teóricos e analíticos relacionados ao campo das Ciências Sociais e Humanas, esta pesquisa articulou três categorias analíticas: Gênero, Identidade, Transexualidade.
 (Imagem Hypescience)

The Romania-US Strategic Partnership and the Security of the Wider Black Sea Region: Historical Landmarks

The Romania-US Strategic Partnership and the Security of the Wider Black Sea Region: Historical Landmarks

Historical landmarks of the use of Nelaton’s probe in the surgical diagnosis of gunshot wounds and two famous applications: Garibaldi’s and Lincoln’s cases

Historical landmarks of the use of Nelaton’s probe in the surgical diagnosis of gunshot wounds and two famous applications: Garibaldi’s and Lincoln’s cases

BYZANTINE HESYCHASM IN THE LIFE OF THE ORTHODOX CHURCH

In spite of the historical vicissitudes through which the Orthodox Church passed, monasticism represented for the Church a pillar of stability and fidelity to the Gospel teachings and Christian living. Practicing the prayer of the heart, of contemplation in complete silence, of a severe ascension give the possibility to the hesychast monks to see the uncreated light that the Holy Apostles saw on Mount Tabor, at the Transfiguration of Our Lord. The one who strongly supported the hesychast doctrine was Saint Gregory Palamas. The present study attempts to make a short presentation of how the prayer of the heart (the hesychast prayer) has evolved over the centuries, but also a comparative analysis of the rationalist way of thinking, inspired by Catholic schooling, with the hesychast tradition, specific to the Orthodox Church. Also, the study presents some historical landmarks regarding the practice of the hesychast life in the Romanian lands.