Sweep Of Time Research Articles

IPUMS Multigenerational Longitudinal Panel

Over the past five years, the IPUMS Multigenerational Longitudinal Panel (MLP) has constructed a massive longitudinal population panel by linking together American censuses, surveys, administrative sources, and vital records spanning the period from 1850 to the present. MLP is designed as a general-purpose resource for studying longitudinal processes and long-run social and economic change. By linking individuals across generations from birth through death using data from multiple sources, MLP enables reproducible research on shifting patterns of life course patterns and intergenerational processes. The large scale of the MLP database allows researchers both to study particular communities and small dispersed populations and to conduct big studies spanning many places and periods. Data that allow investigators to examine simultaneously the broad sweep of time and fine spatial detail will yield new insights into ongoing transformations of demographic behavior. The presentation will describe the creation of the IPUMS MLP database and the current MLP linking strategy. We then detail our plans for expansion and improvement of MLP over the next five years, including the incorporation of additional data sources, the development of a “linkage hub” to connect MLP with other major record linkage efforts, and the refinement of our technology and dissemination efforts. We will conclude by describing a few early examples of MLP-based research.

Influence of dwell time on the hydraulic behaviour utilizing multiple injection strategies and a piezoelectric diesel injector

The electric dwell time is defined as the duration between two electric pulse signals. It is a crucial parameter when multiple injection strategies are employed. The influence of electric dwell time on the hydraulic behaviour utilizing pilot injection strategy, split injection strategy, post injection strategy and a commercial piezoelectric diesel injector has been analysed experimentally. To do so, a sweep of electric dwell time from 1.15 ms up to 3 ms in all multiple injection strategies using rail pressures of 80, 100 and 120 MPa, and a back pressure of 5 MPa was performed. A fuel mass of 110 mg was injected in all cases analysed employing operating conditions defined from the characteristics curves of injected mass. The hydraulic behaviour was characterized through to measure the first and second hydraulic delay at opening and closing injector, the pressure oscillations generated during the first injection event, and injected fuel mass during second injection event in an injection discharge curve indicator, which is based on the Bosch tube method. In summary, the paper concludes that the hydraulic dwell time depends on the injected mass during the first injection event, and the dynamic response of injector. Moreover, a short electric dwell time causes an increase of injected fuel mass during second injection event, which can be attributed to combine two effects provoked by overlapping the first and second mass flow rate signals, namely, a reduction in the hydraulic delay at opening injector, and an increase in the hydraulic delay at closing injector. Finally, the present research provides information which can be employed to optimization the modulation of injection rate in a diesel engine.

Séculaires par Olivier Barbarant

Reviewed by: Séculaires par Olivier Barbarant Khadija Khalifé and Deborah Gaensbauer Barbarant, Olivier. Séculaires. Gallimard, 2022. ISBN 978-2-07-298386-3. Pp. 128. In his latest autobiographical collection, composed in Barbarant's characteristic supple blend of diverse forms of poetry and sonorous prose pieces, the poet, born in 1966, meditates at a mid-point in his life on both intimate and broadly historical memories and experiences spanning forty years. Crucially for Barbarant, they bridge a change of centuries and altered personal perspectives, hence the title conjuring a significant sweep of time. "Jadis j'étais l'été/À présent je le vois" (38). The first section, essentially an affective balance sheet, continues in the lyrical and sensual vein of his Un grand instant (prix Apollinaire 2019). Barbarant probes in "ma mémoire grenier en désordre" childhood vignettes blended by time into dream-memory hybrids, conjurations of intimate moments with lovers, and confrontations with aging (20). Engagingly, too, he chronicles the relationship to words, sounds and rhythms that has impelled him to "faire entendre quelque chose de sa perception de son émotion, dans le corps respiratoire du langage" (49). His melancholic meditations become more searingly political in the second section, which he opens by declaring: "[i]l n'y a plus de paille dans l'étable espérance" (55). An extensive segment entitled "Complainte à la charnière des temps" limns consequential events for each year from 1981 through 2020. The strongest pieces, corroborating his conviction that "[c]'est à l'intérieur que la vérité creuse son sillon," capture his acute sense of light and color in evocations of intimate experiences that bear historical weight (95). The prose elegy on the fire-ravaged Notre-Dame Cathedral, for example, conjures student memories of emerging from the train "directement sous son soleil/Elle était maternelle volumineuse et couleur de blé tendre," to render the momentous reverberations of the cultural loss with poignant simplicity (18). "C'était comme si chaque pierre était un sable cristallisé/un morceau du pays mêlé à l'intime mémoire" (95). As the calendar moves toward the millennium, the poetic reflections increasingly focus on social injustice: "[d]es violences du temps naissent celles des êtres/Brillent dans les regards l'éclat d'affreux couteaux" (99). Séculaires advances toward a grim finale with "Fils de feu," ten poems concerning a global rash of self-immolations. Barbarant concludes, nonetheless, by juxtaposing darkness with a positive entreaty. "Que vaut un siècle dont les fils/souffrent tant qu'ils se font bûcher?" (125). This despairing query in the final poem, "Envoi," is followed by a plea that alters the strictly personal context of his earlier paeans to corporeal intimacy: "[e]nfants, brûlez/de colère/et [End Page 217] de désir, mais laissez/l'ardeur à l'âme, à la langue,/et que d'étreinte seule/flambent vos paumes nues" (125). "Envoi" connects to previous affirmations of life in the collection but responds to concrete socio-political violence by tempering the ferocity of an earlier exhortation: "cri ou couteau mais que/ la vie/ déborde" (20). A disciple of Louis Aragon, Barbarant fears neither emotions nor the mundane: "[i]l sut que frémir ne serait jamais ridicule" (45). Although a few poems in Séculaires come across as palely sentimental and nostalgic, his intertwining of personal intimacy, public history, and combat against the "grésil des écrans" creates overall a compelling work (105). [End Page 218] Deborah Gaensbauer Regis University (CO), emerita Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Hydraulic Interactions between Injection Events Using Multiple Injection Strategies and a Solenoid Diesel Injector

An experimental study was performed to explore the influence of dwell time on the hydraulic interactions between injection events using pilot injection strategy, split injection strategy, post injection strategy and a solenoid diesel injector. To do so, a sweep of dwell time from 0.55 up to 2 ms using all multiple injection strategies and levels of rail pressure, of 80, 100 and 120 MPa, and single level of back pressure, of 5 MPa, was performed. The hydraulic interactions between injection events were characterized through the second injection hydraulic delay and second injection mass in an injection discharge curve indicator equipped with all the components required for its operation and control. In order to define the operating conditions of the multiple injection strategies, to ensure the same injected fuel mass in all cases, the characteristic curves of injection rate for the solenoid diesel injector studied were obtained. The second injection hydraulic delay increases with dwell time values in the range of 0.55–0.9 ms for all multiple injection strategies and levels of rail pressure tested. Conversely, the second injection hydraulic delay decreases with dwell time values higher than 0.9 ms. Moreover, the second hydraulic delay depends mainly on the dwell time and not on the injected fuel mass during the first injection event. The second injection mass increases with dwell values less than 0.6 ms. By contrast, the second injection mass is not significantly affected by that of the first injection at a dwell time higher than 0.6 ms.

Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory by Odai Johnson

Reviewed by: Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory by Odai Johnson Erika L. Weiberg Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory. By Odai Johnson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018; pp. 358. In this ambitious book, Odai Johnson brings questions and methods familiar from his earlier work on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American theatre to bear on the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. In a series of ten case studies that stretch from the origins of ancient Greek theatre to late antiquity, a period of over a thousand years, Johnson probes the scars in the historical and material record that tell us that something significant once existed but does no longer. Ruins argues that even in antiquity, the theatre created a notion of the "classical" past not by conserving tradition, but by marking absences imbued with "an excess of memory" (3). The endurance of the Greco-Roman theatre over this thousand-year span occurs through and despite these absences, which keep people going to the theatre in droves even when their pastors, in the fifth-century ce, demand that they go to church instead. Johnson's method is like that of a forensic scientist. Arriving at the crime scene of antiquity, he looks for evidence of what is not there—the flecks of blood that suggest a past struggle—in order to extract clues about how the Greeks and Romans constructed their own past, and indeed, committed crimes that they remembered to forget, through the textual and material remains of the theatre. To this task he brings to bear a toolkit of scholarship by classicists, theatre historians, and cultural theorists. Of the latter, most important are the fields of trauma theory and memory studies. To my knowledge, this combination of approaches has never before been applied to the classical theatre, especially not to its development over such a long period of time. The astonishing sweep of time canvassed in this study is both its strength and its weakness. As a specialist in Greek theatre of the fifth and fourth centuries bce, I learned a great deal from Johnson's startling juxtapositions of material from my period of study with material from the fifth century ce. Yet, as will emerge from discussions of specific case studies, I also found myself wanting more nuanced engagement with both primary and secondary materials for each period. Chapter 4 is emblematic of the perils of Johnson's approach. This chapter aims to explain why Menander's comedies do not engage in the personal barbs against politicians that were typical of Aristophanes' genre of comedy a hundred years earlier. Johnson suspects a link with the concept of amnesty that developed in Athens after the bloody period of civil war that marked the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. While this explanation is reasonable, [End Page 522] Johnson overplays the differences between Old and New Comedy when he repeatedly represents Menander's comedies as frivolous, apolitical, benign, and even low-IQ (89). Johnson is correct to point out that comedy's approach to social commentary changed, but I find very difficult to digest the suggestion that Menander's drama is "harmless," that "nothing offended" (89)—this of comedies that obsessively replay a rape plot in which citizen-girls are raped and, in the end, forced to marry their rapist. Harmless to whom? Johnson does not ask what social or political forces Menander was responding to when he replayed this plot line so incessantly, although Susan Lape, among others, has illuminated the relevance of these rape plots to Athenian civic ideology. Instead, he suggests that "New Comedy is itself a monument of cultural dementia" (103), marked primarily by its disappointing difference from Old Comedy. By contrast, the merits of Johnson's diachronic approach are evident in chapter 2, on Phrynichus's Sack of Miletus and the genre of tragedy, and in chapters 6–8, a suite of chapters on the theatre's evolution from an alien institution, antithetical to Roman values, to weaponized imperial architecture, symbol of Roman dominance. Chapter 2 productively reads the censoring of Phrynichus as a defining moment in the development of the tragic genre. Johnson argues that the trauma that the representation of recent historical...

Origin of the Universe, Dark Energy, and Dark Matter

This explanation of the origin of the universe, dark energy, and dark matter is based on quantum mechanics, general relativity, thermodynamics, and Shannon information theory. It envisions our universe beginning with a quantum fluctuation from nothing into an unstable closed space with our familiar three space dimensions accompanied by seven extra space dimensions, the four basic forces unified, and initial radius of the order of the proton wavelength. The compact extra dimensions collapsed to their ground state with radius of the order of today’s Planck length, injecting most of the entropy (information) in the extra dimensions into our three space dimensions and inflating them by a factor of about e58≈1025. The constant ground state energy of the compact extra dimensions is related to the dark energy (vacuum energy) driving today’s accelerating expansion of our three-dimensional universe. With the usual values of G, , c, and Hubble constant h0=0.65, the dark energy fraction is ≈0.7. Immediately after inflation, the strong force acting only on matter was an effective “strong gravity” (about 1038 times stronger than gravity today) causing 83% of matter to coalesce into small impenetrable closed systems interacting only by gravity and constituting most of the dark matter. Other universes may have formed similarly in the infinite sweep of cosmic time, but are of no practical significance because they are profoundly elsewhere. The holographic principle (a consequence of quantum mechanics, general relativity, thermodynamics, and Shannon information theory) indicates only a finite number (about 10122) of bits of information encoded on the event horizon will ever be available to describe all physics within our universe. There are no sources or sinks of information outside the universe, so the universe must be described as a closed system. Matter dominance over anti-matter relates to the finite number of bits of information in the universe, as does the fact that theories involving continuum mathematics only approximate an underlying theory involving discrete mathematics. Ordinary matter constitutes only about 5% of the energy density of the universe. Holographic analysis of large scale structures composed of stars accounts for: minimum stellar mass as a function of time; the hierarchy of star clusters, galaxies, and galaxy clusters; and supermassive black holes. It identifies configurations of spiral and elliptical galaxies consistent with conservation of mass and angular momentum accounting for the 15% of bulgeless disks found in the survey of 15,000 spiral galaxies in the sixth SDSS data release. The smallest scale structures are usually described by the Standard Model of elementary particles, based on local quantum field theory. The Standard Model cannot be the final theory of elementary particles because: it incorrectly assumes neutrinos are massless; it cannot account for the bizarre mass spectrum of three generations of four Standard Model fermions; and does not provide the necessary non-local discrete theory of elementary particles. A holographic (and therefore non-local) preon theory involving strands with finite energy density instead of point particles can be outlined, but calculation in such a framework is difficult and gives no insight into the fermion mass spectrum.

Thomas W. Laqueur. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.

Thomas W. Laqueur’s The Work of the Dead contains 711 very full pages, including 119 pages of notes, 30 of index, numerous black-and-white and color illustrations that I would call iconographic documents, and hundreds of interesting archival sources consisting of texts from the sixteenth century to the present and others going back to antiquity. Laqueur furthermore draws from the disciplines of philosophy, literature, anthropology, political science, art, sociology, and archaeology—all of this wrapped in a book of cultural history. First, we look at the masterpiece with awe: How is it possible to do so much, to say so much about the dead in so many societies over such a broad sweep of time, even in a book as capacious as this? The title is an oxymoron: the dead do not work—it is the individuals who bury them (or not),who tend their graves or forget, who mourn (or not), who work through their grief (or not) in philosophical, material, ritual, and spiritual ways. Moreover, corpses are nothing, all is in the “soul”—whatever that term means—and yet to take care of the dead is the epitome of humanity; caring for the dead while one is still living ensures that one’s own humanity will not be lost in death.

Book review of Capital in the Twenty-first Century

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century is a landmark work. Together with its technical appendix and website it presents the results of many years of research on the role of personal wealth and inheritance in economic inequality. The book has had a large impact and readership, reflecting the fact that wealth has been rising both in quantitative importance and in its salience in the public mind for some time, and that this is a highly readable and scholarly volume.1 There has been much past work on personal wealth and its distribution (see Davies and Shorrocks, [3], and Waldenstrom and Roine, forthcoming, for overviews). What makes Piketty’s contribution different is its historical breadth – a more accurate title would be Capital Since the Eighteenth Century, attention to data, identification of long-term trends and regularities, and emphasis on the role of capital in determining the extent of economic inequality. While labour income is admitted to be important and interesting comments are offered on it, that is not a key focus of the book. And while the author has done important theoretical work elsewhere that informs the argument, its technical details are not dwelt on. Finally, there is more stress on the functional distribution of income than is common in most current research. A central observation of the book is that over the broad sweep of time the average rate of return on capital, r , has considerably exceeded the rate of economic growth, g. Another is that, in normal times, r is relatively steady, falling in a band from about 4 % to 5 %.2 Piketty finds that r tends to fall when the capital-output ratio, β , rises, but much less than

Aesthetics and Time: Sustained and Distracted Modes of Engagement

This article considers the relation between aesthetic engagement and time. It puts forward a sociologically-based approach that considers social time and its stratifications, and it draws attention to two intersecting temporal dimensions of aesthetic engagement: the sweep of time that leads to the moment of engagement and the particular moment of engagement itself. The sweep of time needs to be explored because individuals, in common with the cultural objects with which they engage, have histories and trajectories which when plotted over time take stable but sometimes relatively unpredictable courses. Zooming in on the particular moment of aesthetic engagement in its sustained and distracted modes will enable us to better understand the extent of engagement as other objects and tasks compete for our attention. The article also draws attention to the stratification of social time and the fact that some are more able than others to possess time and find time for sustained aesthetic engagement.

Genealogy: A Tale of Two Families and a Cat

In this essay, I juxtapose mundane moments in life with two other time experiences. One is the larger sweep of time expressed in a genealogy or a family history, and the other is the time-out-of-time experience of trauma. Family histories work to contain experience, to offer explanations. And, in sharp contrast, often simultaneous to such stories, trauma happens, bursting though other experience, refusing containment.

Rita Dove and the Art of History

Rita Dove and the Art of History Pat Righelato (bio) Rita Dove’s expression of history is the most diverse in form and range of subject in contemporary American poetry. Her poem entitled “Lady Freedom Among Us” is a witty reminder that the statue representing freedom atop the Capitol building in Washington is, for all its classical signifying, closest to African American historical experience. Freedom is resonant not only with escape from the bondage of slavery, but also, in the “Lady” allusion to Billie Holiday, with the struggle for artistic expression in a racist society. This sassy colloquial poem is not, however, dragged down by the past. It was written to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the Capitol and the restoration and return of the statue to the Capitol dome in 1993 while Dove was Poet Laureate. Freedom, among “Us,” punning on the United States, must be acknowledged and safeguarded: “don’t lower your eyes” (1); “she’s not going to budge.” (28) The prefix “Lady” reaffirms African-American history as fundamental to the history of the American nation. Dove’s artistic enterprise in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah (1986) is historical recovery. The poem focuses large-scale cultural change through the familial and intimate. It captures the lives of her grandparents who, in the early years of the twentieth from the poverty of the rural South to the industrialized cities of the North, an economic movement given pictorial expression in Jacob Lawrence’s paintings, The Migration Series, first displayed collectively in 1940 41. Dove said of the migration, “It’s the first time that blacks in this country had any chance, however stifled, of pursuing ‘the American dream.’”1 The poem, formally innovative in its “two sides of the story,” “Mandolin” from Thomas’s perspective and “Canary in Bloom” from Beulah’s, exhibits Dove’s ability, in her own words, to weave lyrics as “discrete moments” like “beads on a necklace” that taken together create the “sweep of time.”2 The symbolic motifs are musical: the cheap popular instrument and the canary in its cage are threaded into a structure of repetition and enhancement that evokes formal classical structures as well as the looser laying down of phrases in African-American patterns. The motifs link lyrics in diverse modes including blues, jazz, and soul idioms. Music, the mandolin, embodies Thomas’s life: it is expressive first of his friend, Lem, and their carefree moments as a musical duo in the South. In high spirits, on a Mississippi riverboat, they travel towards their new life in the North. There is a lurch of fortune: Lem, responding to Thomas’s dare, is accidentally drowned; the shape of the mandolin now signifies Thomas as a “half-shell” survivor. In Akron, Ohio, Thomas becomes the folksy charmer, a caricature of Southern minstrelsy: [End Page 760] The young ladies saying He sure plays that tater bug like the devil! sighing their sighs and dimpling (“Jiving” 17–22) As a married man, Thomas becomes “a sweet tenor /in the gospel choir.” (‘Compendium” 2–3) The mandolin, negl–ected, is nevertheless part of the domestic scene: In the parlor, with streamers, a bug on a nail. (“Compendium” 9–10) Such brief references cannot do justice to the compositional subtlety of the poem, but are a reminder of how much cultural history is compressed in the sequence. The poem reconstructs the struggles of Dove’s grandparents, concerned with the “essence”3 rather than the factual precision of their lives (the poet makes up the details relating to Lem, the key symbolic figure). In foregrounding “these nobodies in the course of history,”4 the poet gives the story of the major cultural upheavals of migration, the Depression and war years, the civil rights movement, through the fate of individuals. In the poem “Variation on Pain” the “ridged sound” of the mandolin recalls the “Tennessee ridge” of the first poem, “The Event” where Thomas and Lem were raised: geography and history become integrated; the mandolin is like the portable emblem of the South, both as scar tissue and as internalised strength. Dove’s belief in the power of the quotidian detail to deliver the history of...

An ultrasonic time-delay spectrometry system employing digital processing

Time-delay spectrometry (TDS) is a swept-frequency technique that has proven useful in several ultrasonic applications. Commercial TDS systems are available, but only in the audio frequency range. Several ultrasonic research TDS systems have been constructed, and they have been used effectively for substitution calibration of hydrophones and for measurement of attenuation and sound velocity in materials. Unfortunately these systems depend on features of commercial equipment no longer manufactured, so a new system has been designed using modern equipment and straightforward signal processing. This system requires a frequency source with a reasonably linear sweep of frequency versus time, audio frequency filters, a standard double-balanced mixer, a power splitter, a waveform digitizer capable of handling audio frequency signals, and a personal computer. An optional implementation that shifts the signal to a lower frequency for more convenient digitization and easier velocity measurements additionally requires an audio frequency oscillator and an audio-range analog multiplier. The processing steps are performed with standard signal processing software. To demonstrate the operation of the system, substitution calibration measurements of hydrophones as well as attenuation measurements on a tissue mimicking material were obtained and compared to a custom TDS system previously described by the authors. The data from these two TDS systems agree to within +/- 0.5 dB in the 1-10 MHz frequency range used. Higher frequency source transducers could be used to extend this range.

Deep Time and the Texas High Plains: History and Geology (review)

Reviewed by: Deep Time and the Texas High Plains: History and Geology Brian Frehner Deep Time and the Texas High Plains: History and Geology. By Paul H. Carlson. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2005. Pp. 160. Preface, illustrations, charts, tables, maps, notes, select bibliography, index. ISBN 0896725529. $34.95, cloth. ISBN 0896725537. $19.95, paper.) Paul H. Carlson tackles an admirable but daunting task—explaining in only 117 pages how geological forces shaped history over the course of more than ten thousand years at an archaeological site and its surrounding region on the Texas High Plains. Drawing upon John McPhee's concept of "deep time," the author proposes to capture the "long geological past" of the Lubbock Lake archaeological site located in northwest Texas's Llano Estacado region (p. xv). At times, the vast scale and scope of change Carlson describes overwhelms the narrative and prevents him from focusing sufficiently on the Lubbock Lake site or even the Llano Estacado. Carlson sets a context of "deep time" by starting with the Big Bang approximately ten to fifteen billion years ago. He briefly surveys the evolution of stars, the Earth's internal structure, and the geologic time scale. "Then, over deep time, the great Pangaea separated" (p. 6). As geological processes formed different rocks, dinosaurs appeared and became extinct and mammals evolved. By the end of chapter one, the author has surveyed the prehistoric past up to approximately ten thousand years ago. The scope and impact of the change Carlson covers is so all-encompassing and global in its reach that the reader is left to wonder whether the author has provided too much context. Paleoindian cultures provide the subject matter for the next chapter, and here too the author struggles to strike a balance between generalizations about pre-Clovis, Clovis, and Folsom cultures and more specific assertions about choices people made accommodating their lives to the Lubbock Lake and Llano Estacado environments. Although archaeologists have uncovered extensive evidence of these cultures throughout North America, it is never entirely clear what lessons Paleoindians' lives illuminate for the modern reader about this particular environment which, after all, purports to serve as the book's focal point. Carlson does a better job of characterizing the impacts of long-term climate and environmental change on the Llano Estacado's people and land in chapter three, [End Page 417] which focuses on the Archaic period (8,500 to 2,000 years ago). Due to a semi-arid interval of time, animals dependent on the region's water supplies departed as vegetative cover gradually decreased at the Lubbock Lake site. People continued to use the site, though, to camp and gather plants. Carlson is on shakier ground when he characterizes social organization during the Archaic period. For example, he states that sharing, egalitarianism, and flexible social institutions "must have been present" and acknowledges that he can only "speculate" about mobility patterns (p. 65). The next two chapters cover the period from two thousand years ago to the present. Carlson discusses rather informatively and adroitly the process by which Indian people branched off into separate cultural groupings, contested one another for access to the area, and felt the impact of Europeans entering the area. He then narrates Americans' attempts to hunt bison and ranch the area, their impacts on the local environment, and archaeological activity that has uncovered much of the information that makes up this study. Historians should produce more studies of the kind Carlson has tackled. Geology significantly shapes history by defining the limits of the stage upon which environmental, biological, and human events unfold. The relationships between geology and history are manifold and complex, and Carlson unflinchingly sets out to articulate how the two intersect. This approach presents the Herculean task of identifying how the grand sweep of geological time unfolded in smaller regions and local environments in ways readers can comprehend. Brian Frehner Oklahoma State University Copyright © 2007 The Texas State Historical Association

READING WALTER BENJAMIN'S CONCEPT OF THE RUIN IN VICTOR HUGO'S NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS

Walter Benjamin's readings of modernity are repeatedly strained by the tension he identifies between demystification and the drive towards the mythic. How are we to awaken from 'ideological dream-states' and engage with an indeterminate reality without positing the unity of an integrated whole to begin with? I suggest that Hugo's de Paris yields a compelling perspective on this dilemma. Hugo never denies the lure of myths in his novel, simply their possibility, recognising that they remain as irresistible as they are incredible. He energises the opposition between artifice and actuality, proposing that man can only oscillate between both the ideal and the real, even though he cannot overcome their incompatibility. This dynamic is observed upon Notre-Dame herself. Her hybrid edifice bears the mark of bygone values, yet as such stands as a monument to the transformative sweep of time. In turn, Hugo teases yet simultaneously refuses any absolute narrative viewpoint, stressing both the limitations of language and his own subjectivity. What makes this reading less an exercise of intellectual indulgence than a matter of critical urgency is Benjamin's widely overlooked attraction towards Hugo as a modernist writer. Indeed, the novel deploys two key tools of Benjamin's thinking: allegory, to expose meaning as arbitrary, and the ruin, which preserves the image of a history that is no more. I explore Hugo's representation of both novel and cathedral as realms of contrast, not integration, so as to make a productive return to the dilemmas Benjamin encounters.

The State at War in South Asia (review)

Reviewed by: The State at War in South Asia Douglas M. Peers The State at War in South Asia. By Pradeep P. Barua. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8032-1344-1. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xvi, 437. $65.00. The State at War in South Asia offers a timely, ambitious, and occasionally provocative account of the interplay between political and military developments in the Indian subcontinent over the past four millennia. In just over three hundred pages of text, Barua, at times breathlessly, goes from speculating about whether the walls that archaeologists have uncovered at Mohenjadaro and Harappa served a defensive purpose to itemizing recent purchases by the Indian Army, Navy, and Air Force at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In between, he makes brief forays into the nature of military power in medieval India, deploys the Anglo-Maratha, Anglo-Mysore, and Anglo-Sikh campaigns as examples of colonial warfare in India, jumps to [End Page 566] India's participation in World War II and its legacies for developments in post-independence India and Pakistan, and ends with capsule histories of recent clashes between India and Pakistan. This somewhat idiosyncratic approach is matched by an eclectic selection of sources, ranging from well-worn classical histories, a smattering of colonial records, published memoirs, to journalistic exposés and published assessments of recent developments in the Indian armed forces, all of which are intended to provide an assessment of how well South Asian states have managed their military affairs over a huge sweep of time. In his own words, he has written a study "not on warfare's role in state building but on how the state from prehistory to modern times has managed to wage war" (p. xi). Moreover, his intention, a wholly laudable one, is to unshackle South Asian military history from the constraints imposed by deeply-ingrained Eurocentric traditions of reading and assessing military history. In tackling four thousand years in three hundred pages, it comes as no surprise that Barua has had to be selective, and for the most part he has chosen his case studies well. Experts in particular epochs will no doubt quibble over why he chose to look at some states and their armies and not others, but readers will nevertheless be treated to many fascinating observations and vignettes. But there is little here on the Afghan Wars and Frontier Wars of the nineteenth century which were so instrumental in determining the tactical orientation not to mention the culture of the Indian Army, and which have been so ably dissected by Tim Moreman and others. I was also surprised that a number of other key studies were missing from the bibliography. Books and articles by Jos Gommans on warfare in the Mughal era were apparently not consulted, nor was Apurba Kundu on civil-military relations, which can shed further light on the command and control issues that Barua highlights in his chapter on the Indo-China and Indo-Pakistan wars. More curiously, given his scrutiny of the military history of the Marathas, there is no discussion of or engagement with the debate between John Pemble and Randolf Cooper over possible explanations for the deterioration in the military efficiency of the Marathas. And in his discussions of the apparent combat superiority of the East India Company and British armies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his reliance upon contemporary chronicles written by the likes of G. B. Malleson and others leads him into using their estimates of the numbers of combatants as well as assuming some of their prejudices, both of which are fraught with peril as James Belich and others have shown. Of more significance, however, is that Barua is confronted with a paradox that has and will continue to bedevil writing the military history of South Asia, and that is once you have identified military effectiveness as the chief criteria, some kind of metric is required to perform the analysis, and that often leads back into the assumption that European military history is the norm against which others are assessed. Consequently, in places the differences between European and Indian ways of warfare are overdrawn as for example when...

Quasi‐markets in British Health Policy: A Longue Durée Perspective

Abstract Quasi‐markets in health care are generally associated with the period 1991–7 in the later years of office of the British Conservative Party. This paper aims to place such claims in a wider framework by exploring definitions of and conditions of success for quasi‐markets over a longer timescale, beginning in the 1930s and ending with the current New Labour government. It suggests a typology of quasi‐markets based on hard versus soft, direct versus indirect and internal versus external forms. It applies these categories and the conditions for success for quasi‐markets to seven historical periods. Both the typologies and the conditions for success of quasi‐markets varied over time, defying a simple linear development, suggesting a more nuanced historical narrative than simple continuity or discontinuity accounts of recent developments provide. Covering such a large topic over a long sweep of time, with the absence of clear evidence for much of the period, necessarily means that verdicts tend to be impressionistic. However, even at this level, the tentative conclusions provide important contextual elements in the debate on quasi‐markets.

Mammoths, Sabertooths, and Hominids: 65 Million Years of Mammalian Evolution in Europe

J. Agusti, M. Anton. 2002. Mammoths, Sabertooths, and Hominids: 65 Million Years of Mammalian Evolution in Europe. Columbia University Press, New York, 313 pp. ISBN 0-231-11640-3, price (hardcover), $39.50. Mammoths, sabertooths, and hominids is intended for a wide range of readers who are interested in the last 65 million years of mammalian evolution in Europe, with Europe defined broadly to include the area from Iberia to the Urals and Georgia. The book is divided into 7 chapters, 1 each on the Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene, and 2 on the Miocene, 1 covering the early to middle Miocene and the other the late Miocene. To cover this broad sweep of time, the authors limit their coverage of systematics and phylogeny (focusing the discussion primarily at the generic level and limiting their coverage of generic origins to those instances that shed light on matters of biogeography or paleoenvironmental conditions) and take a relatively broad chronological focus. Rather than describing the numerous climatic trends, glaciations, immigrations, emigrations, and extinctions that are known to have occurred in each period, the authors cover broader trends, emphasizing the climatic and ecological state of affairs at the beginning, middle, and end of each period. The study gives balanced attention to herbivores, carnivores, insectivores, and omnivores as well as to large and small species. Primates, including humans, receive coverage, but not at the expense of other groups. On those few occasions when it is relevant …

Time before history: the archaeology of North Carolina

North Carolina's written history begins in the sixteenth century with the voyages of Sir Walter Raleigh and the founding of the ill-fated Lost Colony on Roanoke Island. But there is a deeper, unwritten past that predates the state's recorded history. The region we now know as North Carolina was settled more than 10,000 years ago, but because early inhabitants left no written record, their story must be painstakingly reconstructed from the fragmentary and fragile archaeological record they left behind. Time before History is the first comprehensive account of the archaeology of North Carolina. Weaving together a wealth of information gleaned from archaeological excavations and surveys carried out across the state--from the mountains to the coast--it presents a fascinating, readable narrative of the state's native past across a vast sweep of time, from the Paleo-Indian period, when the first immigrants to North America crossed a land bridge that spanned the Bering Strait, through the arrival of European traders and settlers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. |The first comprehensive account of the archaeology of North Carolina. Weaving together information gleaned from excavations and surveys, it presents a readable narrative of the state's native past from the Paleo-indian period through the arrival of European traders and settlers in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Cosmos in a Computer

Capturing the full sweep of observable space and time, the largest cosmological simulation to date shows how gravity could have gathered ripples left by the big bang into the colossal structures--walls, clumps, and filaments of galaxies--that fill the visible universe. The result is a coarse-grained look at cosmic history within a cube 10 billion light-years on a side, a volume so big that if Earth sat in one corner, the far corner would hold some of the most distant galaxies and quasars ever seen. Other cosmologists expect this model universe to be a powerful tool for interpreting data from large surveys of the real sky.

Past imperfect, future tense: Archaeology and development

Archaeological sites are valuable nonrenewable resources and they are being destroyed rapidly by modern development projects of all kinds, worldwide. The contextual information in these sites could tell surprising and valuable stories of human behavior over an enormous sweep of time and might contribute to a better future. Archaeologists’ experience of site destruction and their recent efforts to work with local communities toward alternatives to site destruction may offer examples for others concerned with the treatment of nonrenewable resources