Untold Riches Research Articles

Cellular and Mitochondrial Pathways Contribute to SGLT2 Inhibitors-mediated Tissue Protection: Experimental and Clinical Data.

In metabolic syndrome and diabetes, compromised mitochondrial function emerges as a critical driver of cardiovascular disease, fueling its development and persistence, culminating in cardiac remodeling and adverse events. In this context, angiotensin II - the main interlocutor of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system - promotes local and systemic oxidative inflammatory processes. To highlight, the low activity/expression of proteins called sirtuins negatively participates in these processes, allowing more significant oxidative imbalance, which impacts cellular and tissue responses, causing tissue damage, inflammation, and cardiac and vascular remodeling. The reduction in energy production of mitochondria has been widely described as a significant element in all types of metabolic disorders. Additionally, high sirtuin levels and AMPK signaling stimulate hypoxia- inducible factor 1 beta and promote ketonemia. Consequently, enhanced autophagy and mitophagy advance through cardiac cells, sweeping away debris and silencing the orchestra of oxidative stress and inflammation, ultimately protecting vulnerable tissue from damage. To highlight and of particular interest, SGLT2 inhibitors (SGLT2i) profoundly influence all these mechanisms. Randomized clinical trials have evidenced a compelling picture of SGLT2i emerging as game-changers, wielding their power to demonstrably improve cardiac function and slash the rates of cardiovascular and renal events. Furthermore, driven by recent evidence, SGLT2i emerge as cellular supermolecules, exerting their beneficial actions to increase mitochondrial efficiency, alleviate oxidative stress, and curb severe inflammation. Its actions strengthen tissues and create a resilient defense against disease. In conclusion, like a treasure chest brimming with untold riches, the influence of SGLT2i on mitochondrial function holds untold potential for cardiovascular health. Unlocking these secrets, like a map guiding adventurers to hidden riches, promises to pave the way for even more potent therapeutic strategies.

Metamodern Spell Casting

Metamodern Spell Casting

Tales from Tang Dynasty China: Selections from the Taiping guangji ed. by Alexei Kamran Ditter, Jessey Choo, and Sarah M. Allen

Reviewed by: Tales from Tang Dynasty China: Selections from the Taiping guangji ed. by Alexei Kamran Ditter, Jessey Choo, and Sarah M. Allen Rebecca Doran Alexei Kamran Ditter, Jessey Choo, and Sarah M. Allen, eds., Tales from Tang Dynasty China: Selections from the Taiping guangji. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2017. xiii, 162 pp. US$16 (PB). ISBN 978-1-62466-6-308 Taiping guangji 太平廣記 has long been recognized as a critical source for scholars and students of Tang and pre-Tang literature and culture. Compiled in the late tenth century, the massive compendium contains 500 volumes of materials culled from a variety of earlier sources, which are identified and preserved in Taiping guangji. However, to date, only a small portion of the chapters and individual entries included therein have received extensive scholarly attention, and even fewer have been translated into English. Tales from Tang Dynasty China offers engaging, erudite new translations of twenty-two tales from Taiping guangji, thus making them accessible to a wider audience. The book is an excellent and essential resource for students, instructors, and other readers interested in Tang China. In addition to the translations, the volume provides a clear and informative introduction that discusses not only the compilation and contents of Taiping guangji, but also important aspects of elite Tang culture and life, such as the civil service examinations, the career path and lifestyle of the government official, the role of poetry in social life, the position of women, beliefs in the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and the supernatural. The translations are grouped into three sections relating to understandings of the relationship between the human realm and other realms: “This World,” “Between Worlds: Otherworldly Encounters in the Human World,” and “Between Worlds: Travel to Other Worlds.” The theme of otherworldly encounters with immortals, ghosts, animal sprites, and other supernatural beings forms an [End Page 199] important strand in Tang tale literature and is especially prominent in Taiping guangji; the editors’ organizational scheme is therefore very well-designed and apt. Each translation is prefaced by a useful introduction and list of relevant scholarly works. The volume concludes with several appendices, which include a chronologically organized list of the translated tales and lists of the sources, Taiping guangji categories, and themes for the tales. These materials are sure to prove highly valuable to student and instructor, specialist and non-specialist alike. The translations themselves are well-written, precise, and engaging. Many of the tales are translated into English for the first time, and the selection of tales has been carefully crafted by the editors and translators so as to provide a range of motifs, styles, and genres. Under the three broad thematic categories outlined above, the tales touch upon themes relating to politics, criminal enterprise, Daoist practice, romantic encounters, family life, and various permutations of human encounters with non-human beings and worlds. The volume includes various stories that deal with tropes that are common in the corpus of Tang tales (for example, the young examination candidate coming to the capital, or the encounter between a human man and a woman who turns out to be a ghost or fox sprite), but with entertaining twists that engage the interest of both students who are new to Tang tales and those who are more familiar with them. For example, “Lu Yong” 陸顒 (pp. 124–131) follows the story of the titular protagonist, a young man who arrives in Chang’an from the provinces as a “tribute student” (gongsheng 貢生) to take part in the civil service examination. However, his life moves in a different, less expected direction when he is approached by a group of mysterious westerners (hu 胡), who visit him at the Imperial Academy for examination students and seek his friendship, offering him gifts of food and drink and, later, gold and silks. It turns out that their goal in so doing is to obtain a wheat-eating parasite residing in Lu Yong’s stomach. The parasite is a “rare treasure” that holds the key to obtaining untold riches. The westerners had been able to locate it by following a green qi 氣 (vapor/essence) emanating from wherever Lu Yong was...

“Subject to Invent”: Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets into other Media

Abstract Adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays has been part of his legacy from the beginning, as works by artists such as Nahum Tate, Henry Purcell, and John Dryden can attest. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, too, have been put to many uses over the years. They have been set to music, they have been quoted by politicians, they have been used as wedding vows, and they have appeared on greeting cards. For many, they represent the ultimate statement on love. In the four hundred years since Shakespeare’s death, they have found their way into a variety of media, including music, drama, books, television, and film. Whereas the plays have long been acknowledged as a rich source of inspiration—both serious and parodic—by artists and auteurs, ranging in kind from novelist James Joyce to dramatist Tom Stoppard to comedian Ben Elton, the poems have received less scrutiny in this regard. However, they represent a gold mine of untold riches, especially in terms of biography, which has yet to be sufficiently tapped. In this paper I take a look at the various uses the sonnets have been put to, primarily in books, television, and film, and come to some conclusions regarding their success in remediation.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist (review)

Reviewed by: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist Richard Follett (bio) The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. By Edward E. Baptist. (New York: Basic Books, 2014. Pp. 528. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $18.99.) Slavery is “the tough stuff of American memory.” As Saidiya Hartman memorably writes, African American bondage “established a measure of man and a ranking of life . . . that has yet to be undone.” Whether in the 1830s, 1960s, or today, slavery remains a touchstone in the “search for social justice on the critical issue of race.”1 Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told is the latest attempt to come to terms with slavery and its enduring legacies. As Baptist makes clear, his book is about “how slavery constantly grew, changed, and reshaped the modern world” (xxii); it reveals the violence, theft, and modernity of American slavery and what it meant for those who survived the rapid expansion of racial slavery during the first half of the nineteenth century. Baptist tells “the other half of [slavery’s] story,” a half that has been “left out of history” by southern whites who “convinced a majority of white Americans, including most historians, that slavery had been benign and that ‘states’ rights’ had been the cause of the Civil War” (xxii, 409). Baptist argues otherwise; slavery propelled the American economy forward while on “new slave labor camp[s]” (115) in the Mississippi valley, entrepreneurial slave masters upped productivity by deploying “systematized torture” as a “central technology” (141–42). Violent exploitation reduced humans into “hands,” interchangeable commodities “rendered effectively identical for white entrepreneurs’ direct manipulation” (101). Theft, speculation, piracy, and risky behavior defined life in the sprawling Cotton South, as aggressive, expansionist, and consumeristic planters generated untold riches for manufacturing and trade businesses throughout the Atlantic world. As Baptist declares, “The northern economy’s industrial sector was built on the backs of enslaved people,” while Britain’s economic ascendance began with cotton textiles (322). Slavery’s profits emboldened its politicians to press the continued geographic expansion of slaveholding terrain, to amplify slavery’s leverage in Congress, and ultimately to wage war for an independent proslavery state. Slavery—Baptist concludes—lay at the axis of American capitalism; it was the definitive driver of economic growth and a source of unparalleled political power. In a “world greedy for . . . the whipping-machine’s super-profits,” American slaveholders built an empire [End Page 578] and a world economic power on the backs of cotton and slavery (413). That story—an account of a capitalist “world in motion . . . [of] the sweat and blood of [a] growing system”—Baptist claims, is “the half [that] has never been told” (xxiv, xxi). Perhaps every good historian of American slavery courts controversy. Stanley Elkins, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, and Eugene Genovese all triggered intense debate among generations of scholars. Baptist too has drawn fire. In an intemperate—and subsequently withdrawn—review, the Economist pronounced Baptist’s latest work to be “advocacy.” In another bruising encounter, one reviewer declared it “a poor book . . . overblown.”2 It is neither—historians should be writing exactly the kind of capacious, challenging history that Baptist intends to tell. The Half Has Never Been Told, furthermore, forces its readers to confront the moral basis of history. “We tell slavery’s story by heaping praise on those who escaped . . . leaving the listener to wonder if those who didn’t flee or die somehow ‘accepted’ slavery” (xix). They didn’t, of course, but the rights-centered discourse of American history has isolated enslaved African Americans from the national story with enduring consequences for modern society. “Understanding something of what it felt like to suffer . . . [and] to endure” is accordingly crucial to Baptist’s writing style (xxv). Readers are submerged in richly evocative personal stories that evoke empathy, horror, and revulsion in equal measure. Enslaved people survived their “zombie days”; they were a “living-dead person,” a chained machine (146). By contrast, slavery’s entrepreneurs “fucked” the soils, the fields, and the enslaved: “He takes their product, keeps it for himself. He breaks open the skin on their...

Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives by Charlotte Rogers (review)

Reviewed by: Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives by Charlotte Rogers Hans Pols Charlotte Rogers. Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012. ix + 234 pp. $55.00 (978-0-8265-1831-6). Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness narrates how Kurtz, an intrepid explorer who entered the jungle in search of untold riches, succumbed to debilitating diseases before descending into madness. Throughout the nineteenth century, concerns about the deleterious effect of tropical environments on the health and sanity of Europeans were commonplace in both medicine and popular culture. During the era of exploration, colonization, and empire building, physicians observed [End Page 358] high mortality rates from what we now know were nutritional deficiencies. Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, they had witnessed how disease regularly decimated colonial settlements and noted that most new arrivals would be dead within a few years. At the time, physicians ascribed these high mortality rates to the incompatibility of the tropical environment and white, European bodies, which originated in temperate zones. After a number of breakthroughs in tropical medicine around the turn of the twentieth century, these concerns were replaced by fears about pathogens that caused malaria, dysentery, yellow fever, and other debilitating illnesses. Even though physicians in the twentieth century were no longer concerned about the climate per se, they continued to ascribe mental illness, in particular tropical neurasthenia, to climactic factors. Popular concerns about the dangers of tropical living continued unabated. Medical apprehensions about life in the tropics had been present in medical writings for over a century when Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was published in 1899. Following Conrad’s example, novelists frequently elaborated on the intricate relationship between the tropical environment, disease, and madness. In Jungle Fever, Charlotte Rogers explores how medical understandings of health, disease, and mental illness in the tropics were reflected in literary works. Nineteenth-century romantic novels valorized the powers of nature and bucolic environments to restore disordered minds; these narratives of tropical madness emphasized the sinister powers of pristine nature on the European mind and included elaborate references to medical and psychiatric theories. In her innovative study, Rogers analyzes how medical theories have informed novels from a variety of national contexts. She details how the bountiful nature of tropical forests represented the opposite of civilized society, how inhabitants of these forests were imagined as humans in their most primitive form. These novels portrayed the tropics as sites of disease, decay, degeneration, and madness that overwhelmed and ravaged European explorers. After an extensive analysis of Conrad’s novel, Rogers explores these themes in four additional novels from four different national contexts: France, Colombia, Venezuela, and Cuba. To supplement her literary analysis, she explores the interests the authors of these novels had in medical matters, their exposure to medical theories, their experiences with illness, and their interactions with physicians. The strength of her work lies in her detailed attention to both medical and literary works by tracing the influence of the former on the latter. Progressive Latin American intellectuals generally sought to domesticate the landscape and its peoples, leading to tentatively positive appraisals of both. South American physicians were more optimistic about the viability of civilization in the tropics. Instead of narrating an irreversible descent into madness and death, the Latin American novels analyzed by Rogers detail the transformative experiences of explorers in tropical forests who all return to tell the tale. Rogers’s analysis of common literary tropes of intrepid explorers descending into madness in the jungle provides a welcome addition to the psychiatric thought in non-Western contexts and furthers recent work on the history of tropical neurasthenia. Rogers adroitly analyzes how medical and broader concerns about the [End Page 359] dangers of living in the tropics—epitomized by the experiences of white bodies in tropical forests—were common among physicians and the wider public but were articulated in different ways in different national contexts. By focusing her attention on South American novels, she successfully expands her analysis beyond Europe and North America. Hans Pols University of Sydney Copyright © 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press

The Men in the Middle

There is a vast underground network of tens of thousands of recruitment agents, brokers, and sub-agents peddling the fantasy of the Gulf as the destination of choice. They operate in the shadows of the law, unregulated but visible everywhere: on street corners, inside the ubiquitous pawnshops, behind the enticing facades of travel agencies that promise untold riches in faraway lands, and in the suddenly lavish homes of the relative who just returned from the Gulf. They concentrate their efforts in the small towns and villages across South Asia—places that have been ravaged by the effects of neoliberal economic policies and declining public investment in agriculture. There, among the most desperate and daring, they find an eager audience for their stories of easy money and promises of a future dipped in gold.

Environmental science: Dryland epiphany

Andrew Robinson finds that a study of arid places and their peoples reveals untold riches.

Viruses: unlocking the greatest biodiversity on Earth

Viruses: unlocking the greatest biodiversity on Earth

Qantas the Limping Kangaroo

Akio Morita, SONY's ex-CEO once quipped that the CEO and executive, not the workers, should be the ones losing their jobs when a company under-performs, because it is they that drive all major decisions, like when the Qantas CEO, Alan Joyce with the board support, opted for closing down the airline in November 2011. It was his decision because he believed that it was the 'ideologically' right decision. Naturally, one cannot blame him and his board, for doing exactly what other CEOs and boards are doing elsewhere: believing, blindly I might add, in the idea of the free-market and attempting, with the support of like-minded politicians, to free it from all constraints, especially the costly labor regulations. To them, markets are thought to be correcting government malfunctions rather than vice versa. No matter, that, in so many instances of infrastructure privatization, such as: electricity and water, the most convoluted socio-economic re-engineering can only produce 'a market which is artificial, rigged, imperfect and imperfectable'. Qantas like any other 'brand owning' business operating in the 21st century has been, and continue to be, seduced by the promise of untold riches if it would follow the 'magical' mix of efficiency prescriptions extrapolated from the Tillinghast efficiency maxim: automation of the demand and supply chains, decapitalization of the capital resources, and the offshoring of the operations. Charles C. Tillinghast Jr., TWA Chairman (1961-1976) may have defined the future of airline business, when he was reportedly to have said, 'We're gonna' shrink this airline 'til it's profitable', but his efficiency maxim had unwittingly brought on TWA’s demise, when it starved the airline of capital needed to respond to the rapid growth in domestic demand and airline deregulation years later. Not surprisingly, U.S. airlines which showcase the power and glory of 'American Capitalism', exemplify the Tillinghast efficiency maxim in being on pretty much a similar course and probably a similar fate to TWA, given that all top five US airlines had already filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection over the past decade, and continue to experience financial difficulties. The paradox of the Tillinghast efficiency maxim is that it continues to live on as some absolute truth, where everyone in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors are not only attempting to surpass themselves, by being incessantly ultra-efficient in their performance to meet the predatory nature of market expectations. However, the financial markets reward those value creation prescriptions in the short-term, but not necessarily so in the long term, especially, when companies are unable to attain the same level of efficiency gains year in and year out. For the uncritical mind that dwells with fervor for intelligent design, the market is seen as a ‘pseudo-natural’ phenomenon, which substitutes for the exercise of collectively rational choice. The elevation of the market to almost divine, omnipotent, omniscient status has been at the expense of the downgrading of rational choice based on analysis. It comes as no surprise, then, that Qantas increased levels of efficiency did not deliver the untold riches as expected. This may help us understand why Qantas lost 80% of its share price value over the past 5 years ($5.70 in June 2007), and its share price was not even marginally better recently ($1.12 on 23 June 2012 losing 41% of its nominal value since 1995, notwithstanding the cumulative loss to investors, due to share price swinging movements over that period) than the time when it was sold in July 1995 at $1.9 to individual investors and at $2 to institutional investors. Alan Joyce and his board are prisoners of their own predilections, with their preference to systematically making decisions to break down the 'high-cost' airline, so as to 'reorganize' it, which often means major staff cuts, then rehiring the staff that were made redundant on far inferior working conditions and employment contracts. His recent warnings (threats) about the possible failure of the airline to Members of Parliament on June 22, 2012, were only the prelude to restructuring. This may explain why there is nothing extraordinary, or novel for that matter, with the Qantas CEO Alan Joyce and his board in running the company to the ground, by comparison to most 'non-government-supported' airlines.

Boom and bust in the Alaska goldfields: a multicultural adventure

In this lively narrative with its numerous illustrations and photographs, Steven C. Levi captures the color and the riches of the Alaska Gold Rush and tells the stories of the larger-than-life characters who lived the adventure. The Alaska Gold Rush at the end of the 19th century was the last great fit of gold fever in North America. Men and women-including African Americans, Portuguese, Japanese, Italians, and Chinese-all rushed north. Many of these adventurers died in the harsh Arctic winters or drowned in the leaky, rotting ships that ferried them to the gold fields. The Gold Rush created the geography of modern Alaska and brought its rich natural resources and large Native population under the eye of the American government. This book, says Levi, is not intended to be an overview of the Alaska Gold Rush. Rather, it is meant to provide a myriad of glimpses into the lives of people and events of the age. This is a book of popular history. If you find it interesting, don't thank the writer; credit the 100,000 men and women who rushed north in search of the precious yellow metal a century ago. Far to the north of the 48 contiguous states, writes Steven C. Levi, is a land shrouded with the miasma of adventure. It is a land of glaciers the size of some states and fish the size of some cities. Its history is steeped in intrigue, scoundrels abound, and things that could never occur anywhere else on earth happened here. It has everything one has come to expect of an exotic port-and more. This land is Alaska. The Alaska Gold Rush at the end of the 19th century was the last great fit of gold fever in North America. It promised untold riches to anyone who could get there, and created a last-ditch, wild-west culture of greed and sin-a perfect haven for dreamers and scoundrels alike. Men and women-including African Americans, Portuguese, Japanese, Italians, and Chinese-all rushed north. Many of these adventurers died in the harsh Arctic winters or drowned in the leaky, rotting ships that ferried the dreamers to the gold fields. The Gold Rush created the geography of modern Alaska. Strikes in Nome (where the gold lay on the beach and anyone could reach down and pick it up), Juneau, Fairbanks, Valdez, and Kotzebue helped put Alaska on the map and brought its rich natural resources and large Native population under the eye of the American government. In this lively narrative with its numerous illustrations and photographs, Steven C. Levi captures the color and the riches of the Alaska Gold Rush and tells the stories of the larger-than-life characters who lived the adventure. E. T. Barnette, for example, founded his own city (Fairbanks), established his own bank (Washington Alaska), and then absconded with every dime in the vault. George Hinton Henry, the father of Alaska journalism, was run out of every town where he tried to establish a newspaper. This book, says Levi, is not intended to be an overview of the Alaska Gold Rush. Rather, it is meant to provide a myriad of glimpses into the lives of people and events of the age. This is a book of popular history. If you find it interesting, don't thank the writer; credit the 100,000 men and women who rushed north in search of the precious yellow metal a century ago.

Internet in Sierra Leone: Way forward (originally published in February 1997)

The Internet which contains untold riches of information and access to people world-wide has been launched in Sierra Leone. This article discusses the potential benefits the country stands to derive from this relatively new technology.

Book and Multimedia Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:Blind Watchers of the Sky: The People and Ideas that Shaped Our View of the Universe by Rocky KolbMining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets by John S. LewisThe Sun as a Star by Roger J. TaylerShadow of a Star: The Neutrino Story of Supernova 1987A by Alfred K. Mann. W. H. FreemanWorlds Unnumbered: The Search for Extrasolar Planets by Donald Goldsmith

Mining the sky: untold riches from the asteroids, comets, and planets

* Introduction: The End is Near? * Humanity Awakening to Space * A Pocket Guide to the Moon * Castles Build of Moondust * Asteroids and Comets in Our Backyard * The Best Things Come in Small Packages * Catching a Ride in Space * Power from the Sun, the Moon, and Asteroids * Mars in Imagination and Reality * Homesteading Mars * Phobos and Deimos * The Asteroid Belt: Treasure Beyond Count * The Outer Planets: Power Beyond Measure * Environmental Solutions for Earth * Civilization in Space * Afterword

Internet in Sierra Leone: Way forward

The Internet which contains untold riches of information and access to people world-wide has been launched in Sierra Leone. This article discusses the potential benefits the country stands to derive from this relatively new technology.

Diamonds are forever?

Humankind has long been fascinated by the alchemists' dream to change simple metals into gold and thereby reap untold riches. Despite centuries of effort in this direction, our ancestors were never able to achieve this goal. However, many of today's scientists are actively striving to create diamond from such simple substances as methane, hydrogen and ordinary carbon.

The Hidden Himalayas.

Two young Americans take us to Humla, an ancient territory at the edge of Nepal where no Westemer has ever lived before. In breathtaking photographs and evocative prose, Thomas Kelly and Carroll Dunham capture Humla's limitless vistas and disclose intimate details of the lives of its extraordinary people: yak herders, caravan drivers, shamans, and brides who are shared among brothers.Here is a land of eternally snow-capped mountains and sweeping valleys, eerie, forbidding as the landscape of some distant moon, its people all but forgotten by the rest of the world. Their lives are a struggle -- the alpine soil metes out sustenance grudgingly, and long winters threaten to banish the warmth of life forever. Yet these lives yield untold riches. As if the splendid isolation and sheer altitude of the hidden Himalayas bring them closer to the gods, the people of this land are possessed of a spirituality few Westerners will ever know.Kelly's extraordinary photographs are accompanied by Dunham's evocative and lyrical account of life through four seasons of life in Humla: fall, winter, spring, and summer. In a world made easy, accessible, and all too familiar by supersonic travel, television, and communication at the click of a mouse, here is an intimate, moving adventure in one of the last truly exotic places on earth.

‘The defences of culture’

The General Conference of Unesco at its twenty-second session (October-November 1983) adopted a resolution which recognized that 1985 ‘marks the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the most devastating and bloody of all wars, that cost the lives of over fifty million human beings and annihilated untold riches brought into being by the labour of many generations’. The resolution called upon Member States to commemorate this anniversary and recommended that Unesco take part in the commemoration as well. Museum is happy to be associated with this initiative, thanks to the contributions of two distinguished Soviet colleagues, Irina Antonova and Boris Piotrovsky. These two articles take us back graphically to those years of reconstruction and hope, when profound shock at the damage suffered by the cultural heritage moved whole nations to rebuild their shattered cities and the international community to define Unesco's first international normative instrument in the cultural field. Adopted at The Hague on 14 May 1954, the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict marked the culmination of twentieth-century efforts to safeguard unique historic or artistic treasures from the ravages of war. The Convention sets out in great detail the specific problems raised by the protection of the cultural heritage and lays down practical measures to solve them. Yet it has been acceded to or accepted by only seventy-three states. Wars and acts of military aggression continue to impoverish the collective memory of humanity, destroying masterpieces of its creative genius and laying waste to the ancient fabric of its cities, as the destructive power of military technology daily assumes more awesome proportions. So this year's commemoration must also serve as a sobering reminder of the very considerable efforts still needed to be made, an uphill struggle to ‘build in the minds of men the defences of culture’ as Dr Manfred Lachs, Judge at the International Court of Justice, The Hague, has paraphrased the famous sentence in the Preamble to Unesco's Constitution (‘That since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’). He was delivering an address at Unesco Headquarters on 14 May 1984, at a ceremony held on the thirtieth anniversary of the Hague Convention. An extract from his address is reproduced below.

‘The defences of culture’

The General Conference of Unesco at its twenty‐second session (October‐November 1983) adopted a resolution which recognized that 1985 ‘marks the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the most devastating and bloody of all wars, that cost the lives of over fifty million human beings and annihilated untold riches brought into being by the labour of many generations’. The resolution called upon Member States to commemorate this anniversary and recommended that Unesco take part in the commemoration as well. Museum is happy to be associated with this initiative, thanks to the contributions of two distinguished Soviet colleagues, Irina Antonova and Boris Piotrovsky.These two articles take us back graphically to those years of reconstruction and hope, when profound shock at the damage suffered by the cultural heritage moved whole nations to rebuild their shattered cities and the international community to define Unesco's first international normative instrument in the cultural field. Adopted at The Hague on 14 May 1954, the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict marked the culmination of twentieth‐century efforts to safeguard unique historic or artistic treasures from the ravages of war.The Convention sets out in great detail the specific problems raised by the protection of the cultural heritage and lays down practical measures to solve them. Yet it has been acceded to or accepted by only seventy‐three states. Wars and acts of military aggression continue to impoverish the collective memory of humanity, destroying masterpieces of its creative genius and laying waste to the ancient fabric of its cities, as the destructive power of military technology daily assumes more awesome proportions.So this year's commemoration must also serve as a sobering reminder of the very considerable efforts still needed to be made, an uphill struggle to ‘build in the minds of men the defences of culture’ as Dr Manfred Lachs, Judge at the International Court of Justice, The Hague, has paraphrased the famous sentence in the Preamble to Unesco's Constitution (‘That since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’). He was delivering an address at Unesco Headquarters on 14 May 1984, at a ceremony held on the thirtieth anniversary of the Hague Convention. An extract from his address is reproduced below.

“Tantsn Is Lebn”: Dancing in Eastern European Jewish Culture

The study of Jewish wedding dances, as represented in this volume, is a new and exciting endeavor. There are untold riches of dance customs and wedding celebrations to be found among the Jewish peoples of the world. A better understanding of these customs will help illuminate the complex nature of Jewish dance traditions and the importance of dancing in Jewish social life.This paper will discuss the wedding dances performed by the Jews of Eastern Europe. It is ironic that although the majority of Jews in North America are of East European heritage, this dance tradition is probably the one about which we know the least. The reasons for this are complicated, but one of the most important factors is that the dance tradition did not adapt very well to Jewish life in the New World, unlike, for example, food traditions. The foodways of East European Jewish culture have persisted voraciously in New World communities. In fact, in many parts of the country, Jewish foodways have had a profound influence on the culinary repertoire of non-Jewish America. In contrast, the dancing that was part of traditional Jewish social life in Eastern Europe has dwindled, surviving primarily in the Jewish wedding and other rites of passage.