Historical Terrain Research Articles

Cathy Weis talks with Sílvia Pinto Coelho. Sept-Dec 2022, Weis Acres, Broadway SoHo, US

This interview was carried out in the context of post-doctoral research centred on attention and choreographic thinking.[1] In this research, the work of US postmodern dance choreographers such as Lisa Nelson and Yvonne Rainer are examples of a type of ethics, aesthetics and even politics that is characteristic of the arts in a particular context and that expands to various other fields, both in terms of approach and focus of interest. Following a stay in New York, another choreographer entered the "collection of US dancers with a camera in their hand", and the use of cinema elements on stage. Cathy Weis's work stands out for its originality in this area, which made me want to interview her in 2022 while staying at her loft. The pretext for my stay in New York was to consult and watch films and videos at the public library (NYPL), visit museums, watch performances, and eventually take dance classes. However, because I was living in the historical terrain of postmodern dance in the United States, I began to see research as "fieldwork" rather than just "archive work". [1] "Attention and Choreographic Thinking" is the title of Sílvia Pinto Coelho's post-doctoral project (ICNOVA, FCSH 2019-2025).

Reconstructing Historical Terrain to Elucidate the Causes of Disaster Occurrence and Improve Disaster Prevention Literacy

This research collects and interprets historical information about topography from old maps and pictures, and constructs a method to reconstruct past topography on 3D graphics. Furthermore, from the restored historical topography, we will elucidate how the historical changes in the topography are related to today’s disaster situation, and visualize the disaster risk in the target area. We hope that the results of this research will contribute to the cultivation of disaster prevention awareness and the improvement of disaster prevention literacy.

“Woman” and Diasporic Kurdish Identity in the United States

Abstract There is a growing literature on gender and feminist theory in the Middle East now. However, there has been little work on Kurdish diasporas and gender in the United States. This article examines how US diasporic Kurdish performances of gender and narrations of gender work to create the figure of the “Kurdish woman.” Instead of falling into the trap of Orientalist constructions of womanhood, Kurdish diasporas imagine “Kurdish woman” as a way to challenge nation-state assimilation projects and erasure by practicing identity at the intersections of ethnicity, religion, gender, and race. The category of “woman” becomes an important venue to manage statelessness, create an important archive for Kurds, challenge ongoing colonialism in Kurdistan, and challenge US imperialism. Therefore “Kurdish woman” constitutes an important spatial and historical terrain for Kurdish women and Kurdish men to manage their racialization across national contexts and partake in the racialization of “others.” “Woman” is activated in the service of difference as a means to showcase the heterogeneity within Kurdish communities and expound on the relations Kurds in the US diaspora have with nation, religion, history, and resistance.

Detecting Historical Terrain Anomalies With UAV-LiDAR Data Using Spline-Approximation and Support Vector Machines

The documentation of historical remains and cultural heritage is of great importance to preserve historical knowledge. Many studies use low-resolution airplane-based laser scanning and manual interpretation for this purpose. In this study, a concept to automatically detect terrain anomalies in a historical conflict landscape using high-resolution UAV-LiDAR data was developed. We applied different ground filter algorithms and included a spline-based approximation step in order to improve the removal of low vegetation. Due to the absence of comprehensive labeled training data, a one-class support vector machine algorithm was used in an unsupervised manner in order to automatically detect the terrain anomalies. We applied our approach in a study site with different densities of low vegetation. The morphological ground filter was the most suitable when dense near-ground vegetation is present. However, with the use of the spline-based processing step, all filters used could be significantly improved in terms of the F1-score of the classification results. It increased by up to 42 percentage points in the area with dense low vegetation and by up to 14 percentage points in the area with sparse low vegetation. The completeness (recall) reached maximum values of 0.8 and 1.0, respectively, when taking into account the results leading to the highest F1-score for each filter. Therefore, our concept can support on-site field prospection.

Mineralogical Fingerprint of Iron Ore Tailings in Paraopeba River Bedload Sediments after the B1 Dam Failure in Brumadinho, MG (Brazil)

The study presents SEM-based automated mineralogy to distinguish between natural sediments and iron ore tailings deposits from the Paraopeba River, after the failure of B1 Dam in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Samples were obtained from borehole cores drilled over channel bars and banks eight months after the failure. After preliminary facies description, sediments from 54 chosen intervals were subjected to density measurement, X-ray diffraction (XRD), SEM-based automated mineralogy (QEMSCAN) analysis and determination of geochemical major components. Hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA) and principal component analysis (PCA) revealed six main mineral associations governed by different contents and ratios of quartz, kaolinite and hematite. Natural sediments are predominantly composed of mineral associations containing kaolinite, quartz and quartz + hematite with density values ranging from 2.5 to 3.3 g/cm3. Tailings deposits have density values higher than 3.5 g/cm3 and are mainly composed of hematite with occasional occurrences of kaolinite + hematite. Because of geological complexity and historical terrain occupation and usage, geochemical anomalies are common in the Paraopeba River sediments. Our data suggests that mineralogical oriented studies should precede detailed geochemical investigations, to enhance the understanding of the source of such anomalies and the environmental jeopardy associated to the occurrence. In this sense, SEM-based mineralogy has an enormous potential in environment studies.

Rethinking resilience: South Africa and self-reliance

ABSTRACT This article, as the introduction to the Rethinking Resilience special issue, lays out the political and historical terrain of thinking with resilience, from South Africa, in 2021. It outlines the urgencies of the current moment, while delving into how the use of “resilience” has been adapted from scientific disciplines into various fields and broader popular culture. We discuss the two primary interlinking and overlapping themes of Rethinking Resilience: resilience as a historical and contemporary governance discourse with consequences and implications; and resilience as a concept tied to the Anthropocene along with the material properties of matter. As colonial and apartheid histories reveal, certain parts of the population have always been assumed to have more resilience than others, demonstrating how, in the present day, it is marginalised communities who are tasked with being resilient in order to survive. It is this assumption that the black gendered body has an innate natural facility to overcome all obstacles that also resonates with anthropocentric thinking. Through discussing these two overlapping themes, this special issue introduction shows how we bring together work that reveals the slippages in resilience, highlighting how the different uses and meanings of resilience can be productive

Grading the College: A History of Evaluating Teaching and Learning

Although Jonathan Zimmerman's The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America and Scott M. Gelber's Grading the College: A History of Evaluating Teaching and Learning cover much of the same historical terrain, the focus of each book proves quite distinct and yet highly complementary. Zimmerman best articulates the stark paradox at the center of both studies. As the United States developed the most elaborate system of higher education and the scholarly endeavors of faculty members evolved into a “highly professionalized enterprise, marked by elaborate codes of credentialing and practice” (p. 10), college teaching in contrast remained a game of chance, conducted by “amateurs, working according to folkloric traditions rather than codified ones” (p. 226). Zimmerman's work attempts a simple and yet daunting task: to supply a history of college teaching in America. Zimmerman excels in discussing the stories of great lecturers and efforts for reform, but often leaves more questions than answers when it comes to the myriad attempts (usually dismissed by faculty) to systematically assess college teaching, exactly where Gelber's work fills in the gaps. As Gelber notes in his conclusion, the evaluation of collegiate teaching and learning “ranks among the greatest unsolved problems of academia—a basic scholarly dilemma” (p. 156). Taken together, these two books may help academicians begin to work toward solutions, simply by finally offering accessible historical overviews of their related areas, though Gelber seems the more optimistic of the two with regard to the possibility (or necessity) of positive change.

Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality

Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality

Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century

Remapping the historical terrain of popular learning in the U.S., Angela G. Ray and Paul Stob’s edited collection Thinking Together guides readers to attend more sensitively to the social complexity and diversity of platform culture during the long nineteenth century. In this volume, platform culture names the then-available modes of public performance and lecture, which supplied a variety of vehicles for “thinking together” – the editors’ term for “people assembling to pursue knowledge and to forge collective understanding” (Ray and Stob 2018, 1). Readers of this text will encounter the “platform” as a protean space for rhetorically (re)configuring identity and community, especially along the axes of religion, race, class, gender, and nationality. In this respect, the collection is notable for convening chapters that recover the narratives of minoritized rhetors, offering a richer historical portrait of “how people living on the margins of society managed to think together despite the many obstacles they faced” (2).Collectively and kaleidoscopically, the chapters of Thinking Together revise the record of how public rhetoric provided for popular learning during the period, both along and against the grain of social difference. For this reason, the collection would make a worthy addition to the bookshelves of specialists in U.S. rhetorical history and culture – but might be an even better addition to introductory syllabi in rhetorical historiography, offering an accessible survey of platform culture’s diverse manifestations. I particularly recommend this collection to readers seeking to place histories of popular learning in closer conversation with histories of social hierarchy and exclusion. Contributions made by Tom F. Wright (chapter 3) and Kirt H. Wilson and Kaitlyn G. Patia (chapter 4), for instance, examine the complex roles platform rhetorics played in resisting or re-inscribing nineteenth-century race science. To be sure, Thinking Together’s account of social diversity and stratification is partial, leaving much underexamined – including where disability and queer cultures are concerned. Yet this partiality doubles as an invitation for future work and can, in the classroom, be leveraged as a teaching device: “Who is missing? What would recovering them mean and require?”Perhaps surprisingly, this collection also has much to offer scholars of (social) media history and rhetoric. With its focus on the nineteenth century, Thinking Together’s explicit engagements with digital rhetorics and environments are understandably infrequent. Yet in excavating past media ecologies that supported “thinking together,” the collection could be considered a sort of rhetorical prehistory for present day social media, positioning readers to ponder continuities between nineteenth-century platform cultures and twenty-first-century social media platforms. Throughout, Thinking Together highlights how oral performances came to be remediated and recirculated in print, serving as sites for public commentary and community-building. Readers seeking to engage in (social) media archeology will be particularly pleased to find the U.S. lyceum reimagined by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray (chapter 2) as a virtual (“portable”) social environment and cultural form, recreated and reenacted in a diversity of spaces, including Civil War prisoner of war camps.Thinking Together does not promise a unified, definitive treatment of the nineteenth-century platform. Instead, it delivers something more important: This polyvocal text stresses the plurality and potency of the long nineteenth century’s popular learning ecologies, and it insists that there remains much to be learned about (and from) the period and its platform cultures. This collection represents one multidisciplinary model for thinking together about this past – and issues a call for future scholars to join this work.

Women in Texas History by Angela Boswell

Reviewed by: Women in Texas History by Angela Boswell Linda English Women in Texas History. By Angela Boswell. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 345. $37.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-707-1.) Angela Boswell’s Women in Texas History is a narrative account of Texas history told through the experiences of women, spanning from the prehistoric period to Senator Wendy Davis’s marathon filibuster for reproductive rights on the floor of the Texas legislature in 2013. Throughout the book, Boswell’s gendered focus intersects with racial, ethnic, and class categories of analysis, providing an ambitious and highly inclusive examination of the state’s history. [End Page 130] On this approach, Boswell notes that “this book pays special attention to the differences in the lived experiences of Native Americans, Tejanas, African Americans, Anglos, Germans, and Asians. Other categories that shape women’s identity, such as class, religion, political ideology, and sexuality are also explored” (pp. xii–xiii). Recasting a state’s narrative history through the lens of sex and gender is not entirely new (see Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California [Albuquerque, 1999]); however, Boswell tackles the entirety of Texas history, shifting the focus away from overly familiar characters and events from the state’s past. Downsizing male-centered topics, like the Texas Revolution, the Texas Rangers, and the oilmen behind the Spindletop oil strike, to mere paragraphs or even sentences allows more room for Boswell to highlight less-covered historical terrain. For example, she details the intricacies of frontier farm life, from soddies to captivity threats, detailing the types of work women conducted inside and outside the household. She contrasts plantation elite women’s responsibilities with those of yeoman farmers’ wives and, further still, with the work of black slave women. In the early chapters, the rigors of the Texas landscape are ubiquitous. As the book progresses, Boswell spends a great deal of time tracing women’s activism in all its forms—from more muted church activities to marches and protests—beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing to the present day. In developing her narrative, Boswell relies on existing scholarship, which, she acknowledges, leads to uneven coverage of some periods and persons. For example, there are ample studies of southern women’s experiences during the Civil War (especially plantation mistresses’), but there is much less scholarship on the frontier perspectives of Native American women, especially regarding life-jarring events like warfare and dislocation. In contrast, Boswell ably draws on the extensive publications on women’s activism during the Progressive era (focusing on clubwomen, suffragists, and heritage preservationists) to provide an in-depth examination of both well-known and unknown female activists. In terms of presentation, the author winnows broader discussions of women’s experiences, both regionally and nationally, to very specific Texas examples, seamlessly weaving her narrative from the macro to the micro level. In addressing family reunification during Reconstruction, for instance, Boswell includes the touching story of Lou Turner, a young black girl “who did not know her mother” and resisted being reunified by authorities with her (p. 100). In another example, Boswell narrows a general discussion of the post–World War II pressures put on women to leave their well-paying factory jobs to Anne L. Baker, a machinist from Waco, who remembered “men implicitly or explicitly asking her what she was doing there: ‘You are taking a man’s job’” (p. 208). The inclusion of these on-point quotations from Texas women transforms Boswell’s survey text into something very special. The last chapter, “Taking Charge: Women to the End of the Twentieth Century,” focuses on the impact of the feminist movement in Texas and its ensuing backlash; Boswell also examines new opportunities for women in the workplace and politics, including the groundbreaking campaigns of Barbara Jordan and Ann Richards. [End Page 131] Ultimately, Angela Boswell’s synthesis of women in Texas history is expansive, rich, and thoroughly refreshing. Linda English University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Topographical Mapping of a Bare Tidal Flat Outside a Mangrove Area based on the Waterline Method and an Iterative Hydrodynamic Model: A Case Study of Yingluo Bay, South China

abstractA change in the elevation of bare tidal flats outside a mangrove area is an indispensable factor for the sustainable development of mangroves. Waterline extraction, as an effective and economical tool used in reconstructing the terrain of an intertidal zone, has been widely applied to open-coast tidal flats by constructing a digital elevation model (DEM). However, mangrove wetlands are usually located in wave-sheltered sites, such as estuaries and bays that have narrow tidal channels flanked by tidal flats. Changes in water level are affected by the dry-wet processes of complex landforms caused by tides. This article takes as a study case the area of Yingluo Bay, which covers the core region of the Zhanjiang and Shankou National Mangrove National Nature Reserve in southwestern China. Waterline extraction based on seventeen multisource and multispectral satellite images obtained from December 2014 to April 2015, combining the finite-volume coastal ocean model (FVCOM) hydrodynamic model in an iterative process, was used to generate a topographical map of the bare tidal flat outside the mangrove area in Yingluo Bay. The quality of the iterative DEMs was evaluated via six transects of a ground-based survey using Real - time kinematic (RKT) GPS in May 2015. The mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) of the DEM decreased with an increase in the number of iterations. In this study, the DEM in the third iteration was used as the final output because the difference from the previous iterative DEM satisfied an inversion-stopping criterion. The MAE and RMSE of the final DEM with the measured data were 0.072 and 0.09 m, respectively, without considering small tidal creeks. The method used in this study can be an effective and highly precise approach for detecting and reconstructing the historical terrain of a bare tidal flat outside a mangrove area. This work also has great importance regarding intertidal resource management and the sustainable development of mangroves facing the vulnerable coastal ecological environment.

Neo Frontier Cinema: Rewriting the Frontier Narrative from the Margins in Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010

This article discusses Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Chloe Zhao’s Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017) as contemporary rewritings of the Western genre and frontier mythology. I argue that the three films play the mythologies of the American West against the realities and consequences of settler colonialism, provide alternative perspectives on the politics of empire, construct the Western frontier as a contact zone, and challenge the original epic story of linear conquest by redefining what it means to travel or live in the Great American desert. I also underline how these films differ in their preferred focus for cultural and political rewriting: Meek’s Cutoff mainly centers on its alternative feminine perspective and on a deflation of the myth in its original historical terrain, while Zhao’s films are more about producing a postcolonial perspective on the contemporary West as a marginalized yet fascinating frontera.

Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami by Andrew K. Frank

Reviewed by: Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami by Andrew K. Frank Jessica Chopin Roney, Whitney Martinko, and Samantha Seeley (bio) KEY WORDS Miami, Florida, Tequestas, Seminoles, Seminole Wars, Spain, Henry Flagler, Julia Tuttle Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami. By Andrew K. Frank. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017. Pp. 161. Paper, $16.95.) Andrew K. Frank’s Before the Pioneers is a deep history that explores 4,000 years of human settlement on the north bank of the Miami River, the location of present-day downtown Miami, Florida. Frank’s volume examines a site that is only a few square acres, but the book ranges through thousands of years of history. He begins with Florida’s geologic formation and the migration of people to the Florida peninsula some 12,000–14,000 years ago. The book ends where, as he notes, many histories of Miami open—with booster Julia Tuttle, industrialist Henry Flagler, and the incorporation of the city in 1896. In between, Frank explores the many people who shaped the north bank site to suit their own purposes—Tequestas and Seminoles, Bahamian mariners and shipwrecked sailors, fugitive slaves, deserters, Spanish missionaries, and American plantation owners. Throughout the book, Frank traces the physical tools, structures, and landscape modifications the inhabitants of the north bank left behind. The Tequestas were the first to form a sedentary community at the site, which they occupied as early as 3,500–4,000 years ago. Frank calls the Tequestas the north bank’s first urban planners. They built a complex of round buildings and burial mounds that was home to up to 1,000 people, as well as a ceremonial site across the river. In the sixteenth century, the Tequestas allowed Spanish missionaries to build a palisaded fort and a mission at the site. The Spanish and the Tequestas abandoned the [End Page 327] north bank only in the early eighteenth century when slave raiders threatened the region. After they left, a series of deserters, runaway slaves, and shipwrecked sailors created autonomous communities in the abandoned structures, where they remained despite the changing imperial winds that passed the Florida peninsula from Spanish to British and back to Spanish rule. When enslaved people and two slaveholders bearing Spanish and then United States land grants arrived at the north bank in the early nineteenth century, they found fruit trees that had been planted by Bahamian sailors decades before. The north bank plantation was short-lived, however. During the Second and Third Seminole Wars, the plantation buildings were abandoned, and the United States army repurposed them to create Fort Dallas, a launching point for raids against the Seminoles. By linking these physical remainders of human habitation over thousands of years, Frank argues that “the Tequesta Indians and other earlier inhabitants of the Miami River built the foundations for the city of Miami long before Julia Tuttle, Henry Flagler, or any of the other city ‘founders’ or so-called pioneers were born” (3). Frank’s concern for physical remnants stems from a contemporary debate over archaeology and the future of downtown Miami. In 2013, archaeologists discovered the remains of the Tequesta north bank town during a historical analysis of the site for a major residential and retail complex. Frank suggests that Miami has long destroyed the old to make way for the new. “Through little or no fault of their own, Miamians lack a sense of the deep historical terrain that they occupy,” he writes (5). This was by design. In the 1890s, developers demolished much of the evidence of earlier north bank settlements to lay out the new city. African American workers leveled Tequesta mounds to build Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel and the city grid, and the remains of Fort Dallas were eventually destroyed or removed beyond the city center. Flagler’s hotel was anointed “the birthplace of Miami,” a moniker that rooted the founding of the city in a venture that boosters believed symbolized “progress and modernity” rather than the past (106–107). Frank shows how communities create the past they need, highlighting narratives that will best serve the interests of tourism or...

Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique by Ramah McKay

Reviewed by: Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique by Ramah McKay Rebecca L. Upton Ramah McKay, Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 256 pp. Ramah McKay’s Medicine in the Meantime is a provocative and timely addition to the literature on global health and the multiple meanings of medical pluralism in the complex historical terrain of Mozambican health care. In this book, McKay explores how global health projects build upon long standing development projects by NGOs and transnational others. Mozambique, like many contexts in southern Africa, is one where foreign aid undergirds infrastructure in ways that have expanded medical services and created new forms of dependence. McKay examines the effects of two medical projects on the lives of patients and providers, demonstrating the possibilities for care in the midst of socio-political and economic constraints. Using ethnographic methods, Medicine in the Meantime offers an interesting comparison between two organizations: the International Center for Health Care (ICHC) that supported health care at Clínica 2 and other public sites in Maputo (the capital of Mozambique) and the Global Children’s Fund (GCF) that managed projects in the Morrumbala District of Zambézia Province. The fundamental question that drives the research in the book is how “care is made when medical knowledge and practices are shaped by a range of interventions motivated by diverse actors, aims, and temporalities” (8). McKay focuses not on the production of care, but rather on what happens as medical aid and “care” itself are manipulated by human interaction. These interactions are at the very core of the ethnography, and in a world created and shaped by colonial desires and contemporary NGOs, McKay has put people back in the center of the analysis. In addition, McKay offers a unique perspective on how colonial pasts continue to shape a conflicted present. This book reminds us of the myriad ways in which colonization, warfare, and cultures of care resonate [End Page 597] beyond the bodies upon which they are enacted. Specifically, the story of Mozambique is a transnational one, driven by international financial policies and agencies (20). She tackles what she describes as the dynamics of improvement—the seemingly non-reflexive anthropological writing that focuses much of its attention on critiques of global health endeavors in Africa. Arguably the “idea” of Africa itself has long been central to the anthropological work on the continent—stories of our work there are often key to the generation and regeneration of interventionist projects that are geared toward “better health.” But as McKay reminds us, such projects have only served to recreate and reinforce an idea of “racialized misery” (196) and colonial era systems of command. A particular strength of this book, and a methodological necessity given the emphasis on multiplicity at all levels, is how McKay looks not just at individual actors (which she does do) but at the organizations themselves. These organizations have come to represent the whole of the global health machinery that makes and unmakes health for all in particular places. McKay brings us to Mozambique with anthropological skill to focus on individuals whose lives are caught up in the relationships of care fostered by the global health processes and practices. That focus illuminates the privileged position of transnational agencies and actors and how the management of medical information helps to ensure a seemingly neo-colonial system. But the organizational management of such information is not without its obstacles. An interesting thread throughout the book focuses on documentary processes and problems, literally the paperwork that is generated in these sites. McKay’s is not just a study of bureaucracy in that sense, but rather, of the bureaucratic processes that are actors and have agency in and of themselves. By tracing the ways in which medical documentation (processos) is manifest in everyday life and at all levels of health care (at the local clinic, between caregiver and patient, at national and transnational levels, etc.), we come to see just how documents (real or imagined) contribute to what “agency” and “multiplicity” mean today. Hence, in these two different parts of Mozambique, individual lives are caught between local needs...

Vegetation as the Bioindicator of Human-induced Degradation in Karst Landscape: Case Study of Waste-filled Dolines

Mismanagement practices, such as unsustainable waste disposal, created many degraded sites. In karst landscapes, old uncontrolled landfills are often located in dolines (sinkholes). Buried waste material in dolines represents degradation of landform, habitats and a potential danger of groundwater pollution. Buried waste provides heterogeneous ecological conditions on the surface, thus plant communities or individual plant species that developed on the surface of landfills can be used as a bioindicators of waste-filled doline sites and therefore indicators of land degradation. We aimed to discover the potential of vegetation to detect unknown locations of old dump-sites in suffusion dolines in Logasko polje (Dinaric Karst, Slovenia), either by plant communities or by plant species. We aimed to ascertain whether vegetation can indicate the dumping period by estimation of community succession stage. Locations and the age of waste-filled dolines (doline-dumps) were preliminary identified by a historical landscape study. Thus, we used time series of aerial photographs and digital photogrammetry tools for 3D modelling of historical terrain. Ecological evaluation was based on sampling the floristic composition of plots (5x5 m). We analysed ecological conditions by Ellenberg bioindicator values, structure by life history traits and naturalness by hemerobic levels of plants. We studied in detail 30 up to 50-years-old waste-filled dolines that are interspersed by dry and mesic grasslands. Ecological evaluation demonstrated that the main driver of ecological diversity at doline-dumps is the time at which the doline was backfilled and succession started. Annual and eutrophic communities dominate the youngest doline-dumps, middle aged doline-dumps are covered by nitrophilous perennial forbs and, finally, communities developed towards mesic grassland. We conclude that plant communities in combination with diagnostic plant species can be used as a bioindicators of doline-dumps in agricultural landscape of Logasko polje and can therefore indicate the sites of potential groundwater pollution sources but not the type of long-time buried waste. Key words: suffusion dolines, plant communities, waste dumping, Ellenberg indicator values, polje.

Calling Forth History's Mocking Doubles

Hortense Spillers ends “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe” with a provocative suggestion: “Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to ‘name’) … ‘Sapphire’ might rewrite after all a radically different text for female empowerment.” In this article, I knead the material, representational, and performative powers operating through conceptually separate and yet deeply entangled contested terrains: (1) the “real,” or the scene of “actual mutilation,” whose high crimes against the flesh coincide with (2) the construction of the “symbolic.” Through Baradian performativity, I read Spillers's theorization on the name as an event wherein proprietary relationships, which necessarily oscillate between material/signification binaries, are called forth in historical terrain in the moment of racial address. Paying close attention to her grammar, the first half of this article tracks Spillers's movement through an undercurrent of American historical mythology that, as she demonstrates, misnames the black mother. The rest of this article then takes up to what extent certain “mocking doubles”—minstrel and/or monstrous tropes resuscitated but not redeemed or even necessarily renamed—might agitate their way toward new texts for female empowerment and the cultivation of the black mother's power to “name.”

Why Do Only Some Places Have History?: Japan, the West, and the Geography of the Past

This essay analyzes why historians in Japan as in the West concentrate on only a few places, primarily their home countries and Europe. It responds to the challenge laid down by Luke Clossey and Nicolas Guyatt in their 2013 study, “It’s a Small World After All,” which revealed the parochialism of British, Canadian, and U.S. historians. By examining the geographical focus of the historical profession in Japan, I show that history confronts the problem not just of one “small world” but of many, alternative “small worlds.” History, in short, is beset by contending parochialisms. Moreover, as the data reveals, the distorted geographical emphasis of contemporary historians bears surprisingly strong traces of late nineteenth-century Western European imperialism. My findings raise three questions: (1) why does the practice of history everywhere create distorted maps, (2) should our ideal as historians be proportional representation in terms of geography and population or should it be greater clarity as to why some places are chosen over others, and (3) can world history transcend these small incongruous worlds and supply a single over-arching perspective? As I will argue, distorted geography is not in itself a problem for historians, nor is it our mandate to represent the past in accord with current population figures. The problem, rather, is our reluctance to remap the historical terrain formed in the 1890s in response to urgent new questions about human experience, in particular our environmental challenges.

Review: Tanz auf dem Vulkan: Das Berlin der Zwanziger Jahre im Spiegel der Künste and 1A-Duft: Schwarzlose & Das Berliner Parfüm

Tanz auf dem Vulkan: Das Berlin der Zwanziger Jahre im Spiegel der Kunste Ephraim-Palais, Stadtmuseum Berlin 4 September 2015–31 January 2016 1A-Duft: Schwarzlose & Das Berliner Parfum Ephraim-Palais, Stadtmuseum Berlin, 4 September 2015–31 January 2016 With these two exhibitions, the larger Tanz auf dem Vulkan , or Dancing on the Volcano (involving more than five hundred exhibits), and the accompanying smaller show devoted to the Berlin perfume industry, the Stadtmuseum Berlin realized an ambitious project to present viewers with a multimedia account of the city's “golden twenties.” The historical terrain covered by Dancing on the Volcano —the Weimar Republic years from 1919 until 1933, when Hitler was named chancellor—is largely familiar territory (and not only in terms of the past: issues such as the divide between rich and poor, housing shortages, immigration, and growing nationalist sentiment undoubtedly resonated with today's visitors). Although the exhibition's subtitle heralded a history lesson as “mirrored” in the arts, the displays took a more dynamic and thought-provoking form than this might imply. Thematically organized over two floors, exhibits included work by well-known artists of the period (Kathe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz) as well as photographs, posters, architectural models, and recorded music. Sections devoted to Berlin's theater and entertainment industries, nighttime illumination, and women's fashion invoked …

Proportionality and Judicial Review: A UK Historical Perspective

Academic legal study is perforce temporally grounded. We most naturally consider the here and now. We may take a fleeting backward glimpse, most commonly to confirm our desired impression of the status quo, and add substance to our prognostications, hesitant or not as they may be, about the future. Legal history is commonly left to legal historians in this age of increased specialization. Their expertise is invaluable, but the historical terrain is vast, the numbers of specialist legal historians are limited and the subject matter coverage uneven. There are perforce large gaps, as exemplified by the historical landscape of administrative law. Relatively little is known about legal development in this area, and the regulatory environment from which it grew, as attested to by the nostrum that the UK had no regime of administrative law until the mid-twentieth century, which is as erroneous as it is oft-repeated. We are of course not formally bound by anything that historical legal inquiry reveals. The academic has tools that bear analogy to the judicial. We can distinguish, praying in aid changed social circumstance, altered normative values and shifting policy preferences. Yet this academic ‘power’, like all other forms thereof, comes with responsibility. The argument must withstand scrutiny in the academic market place, and must also be grounded in some knowledge of what preceded the here and now. Insofar as this knowledge is exiguous it thereby diminishes the value of the academic judgment.This chapter is designed to cast historical light on the role played by the concept of proportionality in UK law. This very sentence may provoke skepticism, given the dominant view that it was an import from continental Europe, the integration of which into UK law has been driven by membership of the ECHR and EU. There is no doubt that the classic three or four part proportionality inquiry has continental foundations, particularly Germanic, although it is noteworthy that the German eighteenth century formulation of the principle was embryonic, with the fully-fledged test developing later. Integration of proportionality into UK law has been furthered by ECHR and EU jurisprudence. There is, however, also no doubt that the UK had a concept akin to that of proportionality, from the late sixteenth century onwards. The precise appellation varied, with terms such as proportionability, proportionable, and disproportionate found in the legislation and case law. It was not a formal three-part test of the modern kind, but the older UK concept shared a common theme with its more modern offspring, which is the proscription of excessive regulatory burdens and the need to ensure that the burden was objectively justified. The story begins with four general misconceptions about UK Administrative law, which sets the backdrop for the ensuing discussion. This is followed by four historical manifestations of proportionability. It will be seen that the concept was very commonly used as a criterion in regulatory legislation from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, with the expectation that the courts would interpret and apply it to the particular regulatory regime, which is exactly what occurred. It was also used in the absence of express statutory mention, as a principle of legal interpretation, such that the courts would interpret regulatory legislation whenever possible so as not to impose excessive burdens on individuals. Proportionability was in addition deployed as a free-standing principle of judicial review, and also on some occasions as a condition for the legality of regulatory intervention. The magic number four frames the discourse in the final section of the chapter, where the focus shifts to the normative. There is discussion of the relationship between proportionality and proportionability, followed by reflections on the connection between the judicial and legislative use of proportionability. The final parts of this section consider the relevance of this material for modern doctrine, the determination of which is predicated on understanding that proportionability was judicially applied with sensitivity to regulatory purpose and appreciation of the limits to judicial oversight of the administration.

Historical Terrain Changes Mapping Due to the Wind Erosion Degradation Processes

Abstract In this paper we compare the Digital terrain model (DTM) created from contours extracted from the Base Map of Slovakia with the scale of 1 : 10000 from year 1970 and DTM derived from the points measured with the Trimble® R8 GPS receiver with TSC2 data loggers from 2013. The purpose of the provision of these DMTs is to create baseline information that we used in quantifying physical changes due to wind erosion processes in the terrain of selected field in 43 years, since 1970 to present 2013. The comparison of the DTMs was validated by the volumetric method during wind erosion event. The results achieved from the volumetric method show that in one erosion event, about 480 m3 of soil has been eroded and transported to another location. In DTM comparison (43 years) volume amount which was calculated by “3D analyst tool - terrain and TIN surface - Surface difference”, 31,228 m3 of eroded soil was accumulated in the area and 16,236 m3 was lost from the area. Totally 14,922 m3 (5.5 cm height across the whole field) was transported from outlying eroded fields.