Strange Creatures Research Articles

Strange Animals and Creatures in Islamic Miniatures: Focusing on Miniatures of the Conference of the Birds

Strange animals and creatures have always existed in every mythological culture. In Iran's pre-Islamic and post-Islamic miniatures and reliefs, there are many strange animals and creatures such as dragons and phoenix which were associated with the Iranian culture and civilization. Because of presence of these strange creatures, particularly human life, these creatures are first used in mythological life and then symbolically to express human ideas. However, these animals were present in both mythology and epics and, later in the Islamic era, in the mystical stories, educational stories and admonishing anecdotes like Sanai, Attar, and Rumi. This study tends to investigate genealogy of strange animals and creatures in ancient Iranian reliefs and their continued presence in miniatures of Islamic era as well as presence of these creatures in miniatures which are based on Attar’s Conference of the Birds. In fact, this study reviews elements and symbolic concepts of animals, allowing a deeper understanding of function of elements and symbolism in works of Iranian miniaturists. Contemplation of miniatures, icons and the relationship between literature and miniatures will lead to many results in recognition of mystical intellectual foundations. Therefore, this study tends to investigate mysterious and unknown aspects of Iranian miniatures and find their relationship with culture and stories.

Brazilian manatees (re)discovered: Early modern accounts reflecting the overexploitation of aquatic resources and the emergence of conservation concerns

The relationship between indigenous people and manatees in Brazil dates back to prehistoric times. It has been the subject of interdisciplinary research by specialists in marine environmental history, ethnozoology and anthropology. Manatee species, Thrichechus inunguis and Thrichechus manatus, form part of the local culture and traditions of their distribution regions: subtropical and tropical regions, as well as the entire Amazon basin and its Atlantic range. The estimated number of manatees in Brazil when the Europeans first arrived was in the tens of thousands. But the several uses of this exotic, large and strange New World creature not only meant that it featured from early times in literature, folklore and mythology, but also led to hunting and therefore falling populations. We have collected information from documentary sources that referred to manatees. These derived mainly from the early modern era, and included travel books, letters from Portuguese and Spanish missionaries and explorers, chronicles, scientific treatises, illustrated broadsheets, leaflets and images in naturalists’ records, sailors’ reports, folklore sources, poetry and literature. Our main goal was to frame and discuss the first historical accounts of the human exploitation, uses and perceptions of manatees in the Americas. This facilitated analysis of the abundance and uses of manatees from the sixteenth century to this day, as well as discussion of conservation issues, which started to emerge during the mid-eighteenth century, around overexploited resources in colonial Brazil. In focusing on manatees, and other aquatic animals, we offer paradigmatic case studies of past ecosystems and the historical relationships between people and nature.

Disturbing Hospitality with The Young Family

Taking Patricia Piccinini’s 2002 artwork, The Young Family, this article looks to interrogate how the liminal role of the mother within the sculpture can aid in a re-articulation of hospitality as offered to non-human life forms. The artwork depicts a strange creature, part human part pig, surrounded by her children. With her face like a dog, lying on her side with her primate hands and surprisingly human flank, she is rendered in silicon, fibre-glass and human hair, but what is not clear is that The Young Family have been ‘bred’ for the specific purpose of organ donation. Through this work Piccinini asks for the human animal to take up an orientation of care towards these creatures. Following the failures of the ‘father’s of science’ this attitude would be rendered in the name of the mother. I read the role of the mother in this artwork through the lens of hospitality. Rather than being an individuated pregnant body, the mother in The Young Family acts as a metaphor for a care-focused, community-building ethic grounded in the maternal. This shifts the maternal away from pregnancy and birth and towards concepts of renewal, restoration and growth – linking the maternal with environmental and ecological concerns. In representing multiple generations this artwork calls for responsibility to be reconsidered outside of teleological progress. This piece presents a continuum – rather than portraying a singular triumph of the laboratory we are shown a complicated family where responsibility is enduring. In so doing Piccinini’s artwork can offer a new perspective into how we, the human-animal, offer hospitality to the living products of technoscience and beyond. I argue this alter-hospitality, in the mode of mutual thriving, co-evolution and flourishing, could be brought to bear on the collapse of any notion of a sustainable global ecology.

JONES, Ryan Tucker. Empire of extinction: Russians and the North Pacific's strange beasts of the sea, 1741–1867

JONES, Ryan Tucker. <i>Empire of extinction: Russians and the North Pacific's strange beasts of the sea, 1741–1867</i>

Piękne i szkaradne. Motyw maski na drodze rozwoju i transmisji nowożytnej groteski

In 1555, the serie of masks by Cornelius Floris was edited in Antwerp. This well known and a comprehensive artist, designed Maski fantastyczne (The Fantastic Masks) and then he separated a motive which was the element of ancient and modern grotesque. His style and projects exerted the significant influence on art, especially in the north of Europe. The origin of grotesque ornament can be found in the ancient paintings. In the second half of XVth century, inside Nero’s House in Rome, were discovered some interior decorations – mostly strange and fantastic creatures like the sea monsters, hybrids, girlands of flowers and masks, covering the walls of ancient interior which delighted some the late Reneissance artists. The mask was connected with the theatre, coming from the rituals in honour of Dionisos and it was not only the symbol of vegetation or rebirth but also the oncoming end of life. In medieval times the apotropaic properties were attributed to it. The grotesque ornaments thanks to printing – houses and graphic artists and also – thanks to many XVI th artists’ journeys, expanded quickly and they used by architects, sculptors, carvers, goldsmiths and especially –by graphic artists. The activity of the artists from Raphael’s School in Rome had the main influence on a grotesque ornament expansion in the whole Europe. They transferred the themes from Nero’s House and their work was willingly engraved by well – known Italian, German and Netherlander graphic artists. The important moment for the spread of grotesque ornament was the invitation from Francis the First to Italian artists to the work of Fontainebleau Castle decorations. The monumental wall decorations, joined a picture and relief, figural and abstract composition with the elements of grotesque, two – way exchange of patterns, Italian mannerism connected with ancient , with the French gothic tradition. It involved to a grotesque reduction from strange forms to dominant cartouche, made mainly by Netherlanders. Within the north grotesque the mask achieved an unusual, fantastic shape of mascaron, mostly in Floris’s and Bos’s art. But, most of all, The Floris’s patterns, by graphic artists and his students, got to the north Europe, also to Gdansk and Torun – the main protestant centres in the territory of Royal Prussia.

Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867, by Ryan Tucker Jones

Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867, by Ryan Tucker Jones

Ryan Tucker Jones.Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867.

Ryan Tucker Jones.Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867.

Review: Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867 by Ryan Tucker Jones

Review: Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867 by Ryan Tucker Jones

Ryan Tucker Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867

Ryan Tucker Jones, <i>Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867</i>

The Story of Oil

When I was a child, I had a book-a book that was already old, a relic- The Story Of Oil. In the book was a drawing-it must have been a drawing, although in my memory it is as vivid as a photograph: the landscape is rendered in the soothing, alien palette of Pleistocene dioramas-ocher skies and yellow grasses. In the center is a vast lake of tar in which Strange Beasts of the Past (another book-another story) are trapped, struggling against an inescapable destiny-which is to become the engine and essence of this inevitable present. A gentle giant of some sort (a mastodon? a giant sloth?) whose only crime was mistaking death for drinking water, struggles to lift her feet, her eyes filling with a deep pooling sadness as relentless as the tar itself. Riding her back is a tigerbeast, as opportunistic as pickpocket, angry and snarling, trapped by her own greed. The image is a parable, a gazing ball through which the entirety of evolution is revealed, not only pointing to but to the combustion engine. Decoded correctly, any child can see that the reason these prehistoric beings lived and died (and suffered) was to lubricate and propel the future perfect present in which live.I am stuck in this image, as surely as the animals depicted in it. I think of it often, as it is a vision of horror, like a lake in hell. This image is a Trojan horse, carrying many agents and messengers. Through this image I am initiated into many truths; encoded in the DNA of this image is evidence of the cruel suffering caused by the processes of the natural world. This idea of the Cruel Natural World preempts any discomfort one might feel at the evidence of cruel suffering caused by human intervention in the Natural Order . . . All beings live, starve, suffer, and die-we are not a disruption but simply a flavor. In fact, look at this image long enough, and swallow it deeply enough, and it is clear that our appropriation of their animal bodies is a form of redemption. These wooly mammoths, like Christ, died so that might live.But symbolic orders are unreliable and have a tendency to shift, leaving us stranded and floating. Now I am an adult, and I know do not get our oil from wooly mammoths but from phytoplankton (so much more difficult to depict microorganisms struggling in lakes of tar-I get that). I also know the bottom is really the top: Perhaps are the ones who live, whose combustible engines fire, so that the phytoplankton (who, let's face it, had dominion orders of magnitude longer than it has taken us to evolve from shrew-like peons) can purge the earth? Perhaps are only the mechanism to bring to fruition the version of the universe that became locked and trapped in these cells, slumbering like a genie in a lamp until our catalytic converters set it free?The thing about immortality is that you have to take the long view: to give up your attachment to notions of stasis/normality and accept the eternal constant of change that eternity means . . . Perhaps these ancient animals are simply time bombs, correcting for a planet that has become overrun with mammals-particular mammals: pants-wearing, gun-toting, phanstasmaphilic bipeds full of sentiment and overly sensitive to change.Seen from far enough away, one has to ask: W hy all this sentimental attachment to a blue planet? Thought of as a process of corruption, the translation of molecules in the atmosphere disturbs . . . but if you think of it as liberation, from the tyranny of chlorophyll and sunlight, what then? Is it possible to imagine an illustration in which (and by we I don't just mean humans, but polar bears, hippos, frogs, and bees) are suffering/ surrendering so that an unimaginable future can struggle into being?Immortality means there is always time for another roll of the dice- perhaps there are many ways to be consumed by the inevitable, and being stuck in a lake of tar is only one. …

Across the Seven Seas: Is Russian Maritime History More Than Regional History?

Ryan Tucker Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and North Pacific's Strange Beasts of Sea, 1741-1867. 320 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-0199343416. $58.00. Igor' Vladimirovich Kurukin, PersidskiipokhodPetra Velikogo: Nizovoi korpus na beregakh Kaspiia, 1722-1735 (Peter Great's Persian Campaign: The Nizovoi Regiment on Shores of Caspian, 1722-35). 381 pp. Moscow: Kvadriga, 2010. ISBN-13 978-5917910468. Irina Mikhailovna Smilianskaia, Elena Borisovna Smilianskaia, and Mikhail Bronislavovich Velizhev, Rossiia v Sredizemnomor 'e: Arkhipelagskaia ekspeditsiia Ekateriny Velikoi (Russia in Mediterranean Region: The Archipelago Expedition of Catherine Great). 840 pp. Moscow: Indrik, 2011. ISBN-13 978-5916741292. The Russian Empire is haunted by many stereotypes, one of which is that it does not have a maritime tradition. At same time, Imperial Russian Navy is put forth as quintessential example of Russia's Westernization. (1) Given resources invested in developing navy and naval iconography in imperial capital, it is odd that few studies exist that examine Russian naval practices and maritime interests outside of an immediate strategic context. (2) Over past decade, essayists have observed an increase in maritime scholarship, proclaiming that the sea is swinging into view while offering new directions for research. (3) Meanwhile, maritime history has been put forth as a way to understand global history, (4) and scholarly monographs have given way to synthetic histories of many of world's seas, with chronological frameworks spanning centuries or even millennia. (5) The large academic publishers Routledge and Brill have recently launched series specializing in maritime history. (6) But while there has been an increase in study of watery subjects, little of that scholarship has included Russia. Could it be that geography truly is destiny? Or are Russian historians simply tired of trope that Russian expansion was driven by search for a warm-water port and thus reluctant to approach subject? The latter would certainly be a mistake, as imperial Russia bordered at least 13 seas (14, if you include Caspian Sea, which geographers now classify as a lake, but ancients considered an ocean) and a couple of oceans. For over two decades, Atlantic history has shown that oceans are not barriers between nations but rather interactive spaces that have facilitated networks of commerce and exchange, transportation of people, and dissemination of institutions and ideas. (7) Atlantic history is but one geographic subfield that was inspired by Ferdinand Braudel's assemblage of sea and surrounding lands into a single unit of historical analysis. (8) In Atlanticists' stead, scholars have argued that Indian and Pacific oceans were similarly sites of circulation of trade, migration, and cultural exchange. (9) Maritime historians have meditated on divisions and diverse experiences of populations living around a single oceanic basin, (10) and on similar experiences that historical actors encounter across different bodies of water. (11) Still other scholars have called for oceans themselves to be focus of maritime histories, for history to be retold from perspective of sea. (12) In short, perspectives developed by maritime historians are broad and not always in agreement with one another; they range from emphasizing similarities to inviting comparisons to mapping transnational currents. As Alexei Kraikovski recently noted, Russian history has its own tradition of scholarship on relationship of Russians and sea, although tradition could be reinvigorated with new perspectives that focus on different groups involved in this relationship and less passive constructions of environment. (13) The three books under discussion may well begin conversation on whether approaches and perspectives developed by maritime historians are useful for understanding Russian history. …

Archie the Daredevil Penguin by Andy Rash (review)

Reviewed by: Archie the Daredevil Penguin by Andy Rash Jeannette Hulick Rash, Andy Archie the Daredevil Penguin; written and illus. by Andy Rash. Viking, 2015 [40p] ISBN 978-0-451-47123-9 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R 5-7 yrs Archie is the risk-taker of his penguin colony, whether climbing Mount Nosebleed, tobogganing through Craggy Pass, or, in his latest venture, attempting to fly via mechanical means to Iceberg Nine to partake in a fish fry. His flight attempts (a giant slingshot, Flap-O-Matic™ wings, and a rocket) are valiant efforts but each ultimately fails, and another penguin guesses what Archie is trying to hide: he is “afraid of the water and the strange creatures who lurk in the briny deep.” When his last flight trial lands him directly in the sea, Archie must confront his fears head on, but fortunately, the creatures he dreaded quickly and kindly surround him with helpful advice and encouragement to help him swim. While the ease with which Archie conquers his fears is more convenient than realistic, the consolation and support offered by the ocean dwellers is still satisfying. The text, presented entirely in speech bubbles, is snappy and straightforward with entertaining vocabulary (“Zounds!”) interspersed into the narrative. The humor is underscored by Rash’s high-contrast, slightly cartoonish digital illustrations in which big-beaked Archie, amusingly differentiated from the other penguins by his red safety helmet, intrepidly hurtles through the air and barrel-rolls under the sea. Kids who get a kick out of the penguins from Madagascar movies will find Archie’s stunts particularly diverting. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Jones, Ryan Tucker. Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific's Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867 (review)

REVIEWS 561 Apart from its size and weather, Siberia is best known for its exile system, described powerfully by some of those who experienced it such as Dostoevskii, while helping to form the outlook of V. I. Ulianov who allegedly drew his revolutionarypseudonymfromtheRiverLena.Eventoday,alibrarianinIrkutsk defines Siberians as ‘the children of the Decembrists’ (p. 130). Willy-nilly, they are also the children of the Leninist and Stalinist revolutions, however much some of them would like to deny a key part of their past. Hartley does not hold back from the horrors of the Civil War, if treating Reds and Whites in an evenhanded manner, and the miseries of the ‘Gulags’, although also acknowledging that genuine idealism helped to construct the Soviet Union. On the new, post-Soviet Russia, she also strives for balance, concluding with a long quotation from Valentin Rasputin. Siberia is exceptional, he declares, in retaining wilderness until recent times, but also experiencing ‘the immense unprecedented influence of our economic activity’ in its exploitation of natural resources. This coincidence tests the human race and attracts people ‘to feel in themselves the boundary between the temporal and the eternal, the inconstant and the true, the ruined and the preserved’ (p. 251). Thebookcouldnotbethelastwordonitschallengingsubject,norindeeddoes it claim to be so, falling into the ‘scientific-popular’ genre that characterizes the Yale imprint. But, building on the achievements of its predecessors, it certainly adds to them. Most of all, the enthusiasm which pervades the work will be infectious, spreading the understanding of an important part not only of Russia, but also of the world, and encouraging others to join the growing number of ‘Sibiroveds’. The fact that these have for many years included contributors to a Siberian Seminar and a journal entitled Sibirica deserved mention, perhaps. Certainly, in a fairly full bibliography for this kind of book, Practical Dictionary of Siberia and the North edited by V. D. Golubchikova and Z. I. Khvtisiashvili (Moscow, 2005) should have been included. History Department Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen Jones, Ryan Tucker. Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2014. xi + 296 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Figures. Appendices. Notes. Index. £35.99. Empire of Extinction is a cautionary tale that provides grim proof of the moral to the fable of the man who killed the goose that laid the golden egg. The epic story of Russia’s early conquest of Siberia, lured by the commercial SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 562 riches derived from the hunting and slaughter of the taiga’s fur-bearing mammals — most famously and lucratively the sable — has been well told, as, for example, in Raymond H. Fisher’s pioneering The Russian Fur Trade (Berkeley, CA, 1943) as well as other more recent works on Siberian history. As the terrestrial killing fields on the mainland became increasingly exhausted, Russian explorers, hunters, merchants and mariners in the mid eighteenth century turned their attention to the pursuit of the abundant aquatic animal life of the North Pacific Ocean, in particular the vast multi-islanded region stretching from the Kamchatka peninsula, through the Aleutian archipelago to the north American littoral. This is the remote, perilous, icy seascape which Ryan Tucker Jones dubs ‘the empire of extinction’, and the hunters’ prey the ‘strange beasts of the sea’, which give his book its title. The relentless, reckless hunt of the sea otter (Enhydra lutris) in particular also led to the establishment of Russia’s first overseas colony in present-day Alaska. Jones’s meticulously researched narrative not only describes the exploits of Russia’s Arctic adventurers and animal executioners, but also provides an analysis and object lesson in the close three-way relationship between the near extermination of the region’s marine species (in the case of Steller’s see-cow [Rhytina borealis] the total extinction), the pursuit of scientific knowledge (zoological, botanical, oceanographic, ethnological and cartographical) and the process of colonial imperialism. It is also somewhat ironic that a leading role in the Russian Empire’s expansion across the Pacific was played not so much by Russians as by foreign scholars and sailors. Vitus Bering (Danish), Daniel Messerschmidt, Georg Steller and...

Hallucigenia's head

The finding of pharyngeal teeth and circumoral mouthparts in fossils of the Cambrian lobopodian animal Hallucigenia sparsa improves our understanding of the deep evolutionary links between moulting animals. See Letter p.75 Of all the strange creatures from the mid-Cambrian Burgess Shale of Canada, Hallucigenia is one of the strangest. In particular it has proved difficult to reconstruct the head area from the available fossils and its relationship to other creatures has therefore been enigmatic. Now Martin Smith and Jean-Bernard Caron present data on newly examined 508-million-year-old fossils of Hallucigenia sparsa that at last reveal the head in some detail. Hallucigenia's strangeness is given shape in the form of a mouth surrounded by a ring of toughened plates and its throat lined with needle-like teeth. Although a member of the group that includes modern velvet worms (onychophores), at the base of the arthropod radiation, the head and anterior gut of Hallicigenia indicate evolutionary links with more disparate phyla such as nematodes and kinorhynchs. Hallucigenia now provides concrete evidence of structures (that were previously just a matter of conjecture) that might have existed in the last common ancestor of the Ecdysozoa.

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this issueLiterature and Fine ArtsYoungblood, Denise. Bondarchuk's War and Peace: Literary Classic to Soviet Cinematic Epic.Losev, Alexei Fyodorovich. The Dialectic of Artistic Form.Kelimbetov, Nemat. Drevnie literaturnye pamiatniki Turkskikh narodov.Andreyev, Alexandre. The Myth of the Masters Revived: The Occult Lives of Nikolai and Elena Roerich.Bulgakov, Mikhail. Don Quixote.Burry, Alexander. Multi‐Mediated Dostoevsky: Transposing Novels into Opera, Film, and Drama.Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment.Gandlevsky, Sergey. Trepanation of the Skull.Móricz, Klára, and Simon Morrison, eds. Funeral Games: In Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié.White, Frederick H. Degeneration, Decadence and Disease in the Russian Fin de Siècle: Neurasthenia in the Life and Work of Leonid Andreev.Kleespies, Ingrid. A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature.Zorin, Andrei. By Fables Alone: Literature and State Ideology in Late‐Eighteenth–Early‐Nineteenth Century Russia.Lossev, Alexeï and Valentina. “La joie pour l'éternité”: Correspondance du Gulag (1931–1933).Peterson, Nadya L., ed. The Witching Hour and Other Plays by Nina Sadur.Popkin, Cathy, ed. Anton Chekhov's Selected Stories: Texts of the Stories, Comparisons of Translations, Life and Letters, Criticism.Swartz, Anne. Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century.Mahoney, Daniel J. The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker.Schuman, Samuel. Nabokov's Shakespeare.Shrayer, Maxim D. Bunin i Nabokov: Istoriia sopernichestva.HistoryJones, Stephen F., ed. The Making of Modern Georgia, 1918–2012: The First Georgian Republic and Its Successors.Narangoa, Li, and Robert Cribb. Historical Atlas of Northeast Asia 1590–2010: Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, Eastern Siberia.Birchall, Christopher. Embassy, Emigrants, and Englishmen: The Three Hundred Year History of a Russian Orthodox Church in London.Jones, Ryan Tucker. Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific's Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867.Schmidt, Christoph. Pilger, Popen und Propheten: Eine Religionsgeschichte Osteuropas.Sunderland, Willard. The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution.Wolff, Frank. Neue Welten in der Neuen Welt: Die transnationale Geschichte des Allgemeinen Jüdischen Arbeiterbundes 1897–1947.Twiss, Thomas M. Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy.Campbell, Craig. Agitating Images: Photography against History in Indigenous Siberia.Barenberg, Alan. Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta.Goscilo, Helena, and Yana Hashamova, eds. Embracing Arms: Cultural Representation of Slavic and Balkan Women in War.Golubev, Alexey, and Irina Takala. The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s.Robinson, Paul. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich: Supreme Commander of the Russian Army.Tikhomirov, Aleksei. Luchshii drug nemetskogo naroda: Kul't Stalina v Vostochnoi Germanii (1945–1961 gg.).Herspring, Dale R. Civil‐Military Relations and Shared Responsibility: A Four‐Nation Study.Chakars, Melissa. The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia.Rittersporn, Gábor T. Anguish, Anger, and Folkways in Soviet Russia.Kuznitz, Cecile Esther. YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation.McDaniel, Cadra Peterson. American‐Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet's American Premiere.Davies, Sarah, and James Harris. Stalin's World: Dictating the Soviet Order.Petrova, N. K., ed. Samyi pamiatnyi den’ voiny: Pis'ma‐ispovedi.Petrova, N. K., ed. Voina glazami detei: Svidetel'stva ochevidtsev.Petrova, N. K., ed. Znat’ i pomnit': Prestupleniia fashizma v gody Velikoi otechestvennoi voiny.Petrova, N. K., ed. Zhenshchiny Velikoi otechestvennoi voiny.Markwick, Roger D., and Euridice Charon Cardona. Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War.McClellan, Dorothy S., ed. Witnessing the Soviet Twilight: Accounts of Americans in the USSR on the Eve of Its Collapse.Smith, Michael G. Rockets and Revolution: A Cultural History of Early Soviet Spaceflight.Smilovitsky, Leonid. Jewish Life in Belarus: The Final Decade of the Stalin Regime (1944–53).Vakhter, Tarmo. Estoniia: Zharkoe leto 91‐go: Avgustovskii putch i vozrozhdenie nezavisimosti.Peacock, Margaret. Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War.Michelson, Patrick Lally, and Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, eds. Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia: Culture, History, Context.Social Sciences, Contemporary Russia, and OtherTsygankov, Andrei P. The Strong State in Russia: Development and Crisis.Makarychev, Andrey. Russia and the EU in a Multipolar World: Discourses, Identities, Norms.Butler, William E. Russian Law and Legal Institutions.Butler, William E., Philip T. Grier, and Vladimir A. Tomsinov, eds and trans. On the Essence of Legal Consciousness by Ivan Aleksandrovich Il'in.Anderson, Richard D. Discourse, Dictators and Democrats: Russia's Place in a Global Process.Gel'man, Vladimir, Otar Marganiya, and Dmitry Travin. Reexamining Economic and Political Reforms in Russia, 1985–2000: Generations, Ideas, and Changes.Rozman, Gilbert. The Sino‐Russian Challenge to the World Order: National Identities, Bilateral Relations, and East versus West in the 2010s.Le Huérou, Anne, et al., eds. Chechnya at War and Beyond.Dunlop, John. The Moscow Bombings of September 1999: Examinations of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin's Rule.Mickiewicz, Ellen. No Illusions: The Voices of Russia's Future Leaders.

Empire of extinction: Russians and the North Pacific's strange beasts of the sea, 1741-1867

Empire of extinction: Russians and the North Pacific's strange beasts of the sea, 1741-1867

Strange Creatures and Mechanical Marvels from Canada

Strange Creatures and Mechanical Marvels from Canada

Authoritative Images. The Kiwi and the Transactions of the Zoological Society of London.

The first exemplar of a kiwi, the wingless bird of New Zealand, arrived in the form of a lifeless specimen in Europe in 1812. A debate was sparked over the appearance and nature of this strange creature and indeed whether it actually existed. In 1833 the Transactions of the Zoological Society of London entered the debate and the illustrations published in this journal contributed greatly to the acceptance and further study of the kiwi. Some of the most eminent British zoologists and anatomists of the time were involved, from William Yarrell to Richard Owen, and from John Gould to Abraham Dee Bartlett. This crucial period in the discussion, which would extend over two decades and would only be brought to a close with the arrival of the first living specimen in the London Zoological Garden in 1851, will be analyzed based on a detailed examination of the reports published in the Transactions and other journals. This essay will show how images of the bird were produced and used by zoologists during different stages in the early research on the bird and how these figures circulated inside and outside the zoologists' community.

Politics of Postmodern Multiculturalism in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival: Reconfiguring the Subject as a Nomad

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; In Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006), an intriguing 128-page wordless sequence of sepia-toned images marketed to audiences ranging from middle school-age children to adults,1 readers become visually engaged in the main character’s struggle to navigate a nameless constructed geographic space—an imaginary New World. Fleeing his serpent-infested Old World homeland and leaving behind two females usually interpreted as his wife and daughter,2 the migrant protagonist settles in a New World multi-ethnic community that seamlessly meshes elements of the real with the fantastic. Strange creatures jump out of familiar domestic objects, invented alphabets adorn the walls of a typical cityscape, and peculiar foods are served on the dining tables of an everyday household. As Tan suggests on his website in ‘Comments on The Arrival,’ such blending of the ordinary and the imaginary, together with the book’s genre merging, ‘plants the readers...in the shoes of an immigrant character’ (Tan 2009). Something like migrants, readers are positioned to leave behind common understandings in attempts to decipher the new society. I argue that the narrative strategies of defamiliarisation and genre blurring, in juxtaposition with the text’s deployment of further postmodern techniques (such as conflicting or mutually-exclusive symbolic referents), challenge constructions of the subject as a stable, coherent entity with a clear cultural and geographic affiliation, representing the empowerment of the ex-centric. Specifically, I show that The Arrival, as an example of a postmodern text engaged in the ontological enterprise of decentralisation, promotes the nomadic subject as defined by Rosi Braidotti —a fractured, polyvalent form of self not tied to a specific nation, place or ideology (Braidotti 1994). As such, the narrative encourages its readers to celebrate a consciousness that resists discriminatory normative practices, thus opening a space for traditionally disadvantaged subjects, such as immigrants.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

A Field-Based Biomimicry Exercise Helps Students Discover Connections Among Biodiversity, Form and Function, and Species Conservation During Earth's Sixth Extinction

ABSTRACT In a first-year seminar on mass extinctions, a field-based, paleontology-focused exercise promotes active learning about Earth's biodiversity, form and function, and the biomimicry potential of ancient and modern life. Students study Devonian fossils at a local quarry and gain foundational experience in describing anatomy and relating form to biological function. Another goal is to give students a firsthand opportunity to evaluate the fossil record and what it reveals about past mass extinction episodes on our planet. Students who complete this exercise acquire the basic tools for developing and testing hypotheses. They become more skilled at making observations and inferences about familiar species that live in modern environments and about the strange and marvelous creatures that inhabited Earth's lost worlds. Finally, students gain valuable insights into how bioinspired designs can solve human problems in a sustainable way, elevating their appreciation for the value of species conservation as the Sixth Extinction gains traction.