Von Richthofen Research Articles

Empires of coal: fueling China's entry into the modern world order, 1860-1920

From 1868-1872, German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen went on an expedition to China. His reports on what he found there would transform Western interest in China from the land of porcelain and tea to a repository of immense coal reserves. By the 1890s, European and American powers and the Qing state and local elites battled for control over the rights to these valuable mineral deposits. As coal went from a useful commodity to the essential fuel of industrialization, this vast natural resource would prove integral to the struggle for political control of China. Geology served both as the handmaiden to European imperialism and the rallying point of Chinese resistance to Western encroachment. In the late nineteenth century both foreign powers and the Chinese viewed control over mineral resources as the key to modernization and industrialization. When the first China Geological Survey began work in the 1910s, conceptions of natural resources had already shifted, and the Qing state expanded its control over mining rights, setting the precedent for the subsequent Republican and People's Republic of China regimes. In Empires of Coal, Shellen Xiao Wu argues that the changes specific to the late Qing were part of global trends in the nineteenth century, when the rise of science and industrialization destabilized global systems and caused widespread unrest and the toppling of ruling regimes around the world.

Famous head injuries of the first aerial war: deaths of the "Knights of the Air".

World War I advanced the development of aviation from the concept of flight to the use of aircraft on the battlefield. Fighter planes advanced technologically as the war progressed. Fighter pilot aces Francesco Baracca and Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron) were two of the most famous pilots of this time period. These courageous fighter aces skillfully maneuvered their SPAD and Albatros planes, respectively, while battling enemies and scoring aerial victories that contributed to the course of the war. The media thrilled the public with their depictions of the heroic feats of fighter pilots such as Baracca and the Red Baron. Despite their aerial prowess, both pilots would eventually be shot down in combat. Although the accounts of their deaths are debated, it is undeniable that both were victims of traumatic head injury.

The Place of Kazakhstan in the Study of Central Asia

The Place of Kazakhstan in the Study of Central Asia Gulmira Sultangalieva (bio) Translated by Paul W. Werth Among the republics of Central Asia, Kazakhstan represents a distinct geographical, geopolitical, cultural, and historical entity.1 In the west and north, Kazakhstan constitutes a borderland belt (poias prigranich´ia) with Russia and its territories of the lower Volga, southern Urals, and Siberia. In the east, the region borders on China, while the southern and southeastern portions can be considered part of Central Asia. As a territory inhabited historically by nomads, Kazakhstan has seen its historical and cultural significance rise and fall, periodically becoming either the center or the periphery of ethno-political and ethno-cultural processes in the region. This history raises a series of questions: What place does Kazakhstan occupy in Central Asia? Has Central Asia existed as a single and coherent region? What role has the study of Central Asia and Kazakhstan played in attempts to understand the state organization, history, and culture of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union? In my view, exploration of these questions should broaden academic interest in the history of Central Asia—a history that occupies a critical place in any effort to make sense of historical processes in neighboring countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and Afghanistan. A Complex Nomenclature Any attempt to answer these questions must begin with nomenclature, which proves to be especially complicated in the case of Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Indeed, considering the history of the term “Central Asia” allows us not only to see that there have been various names for the region and disagreement concerning the definition of its borders and to understand the significance [End Page 345] of Kazakhstan within a broader regional system.2 Such a consideration also shows that the meaning of “Central Asia” has changed over time, depending on such factors as the political context, the attitude of authors to particular geographical and historical phenomena, and so on. The term “Central Asia” first became a part of geographical and historical scholarship in the 19th century, thanks to the German natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt.3 Although his travels in the Russian Empire included only the middle and southern Urals, the Altai, the Volga delta around Astrakhan, and the nearby Kazakh steppe, Humboldt nonetheless defined the boundaries of the entire region, characterizing it as an internal space of the Asian continent extending from the Caspian Sea in the west to an indefinite border in the east. The German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen offered a more exact definition of “Central Asia” while dividing the region into two parts. “Central Asia” proper, according to Richthofen, encompassed the space from Tibet in the south to the Altai in the north, and from the Pamir Mountains in the west to the Khingan range in the east.4 Richthofen described the lowlands between the Aral and Caspian Seas—which in the 18th and 19th centuries were dominated economically and culturally by Kazakhs of the tribal confederation of the Alimuli of the Little Horde—as a transitional zone.5 The intermediate space of the Kazakh steppe that Richthofen identified reveals a distinct geopolitical feature of Kazakhstan, which linked different parts of Central Asia into a regional system. For similar reasons, one may suppose, Russian researchers of the first half of the 19th century characterized the territories of the Little and Middle Hordes (the northern, western, and central parts of Kazakhstan) as the “Kirgiz-Kazak hordes and steppes” (kirgiz-kaisatskie ordy i stepi) but regarded the southern portions of the Kazakh steppe, controlled by the khanates of Kokand and Khiva and the emirate of Bukhara, as part of “Middle Asia.”6 It is significant that [End Page 346] whereas in the first half of the 19th century the term “Kirgiz steppe” was used with the qualifiers “of western Siberia” or “under the jurisdiction of Orenburg,” from 1882 on, Russian authorities used the more encompassing toponym the “Steppe,” once they had created the Steppe General-Governorship (Stepnoe general-gubernatorstvo) and decisively separated the northern, western, and eastern parts of the steppe zone of Kazakhstan from the southern portions. This kind of territorial division reflected the fact that the steppe transcended the...

The oldest illustration of Chinese crinoid calyx: Annotated translation of “Cupressocrinus abbreviatus” reported by Fritz Frech in 1911

The early history on the discovery of the first Chinese crinoid calyx of “Cupressocrinus abbreviatus” (now Halocrinites schlotheimiiSteininger, 1831) remains unclear. The first record of “C. abbreviatus” was reported by Fritz Frech in 1911. It was included in the fifth and the last volume of the series titled China by the German traveler and explorer Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen. The cover page, title page, and prologue are informative; thus, they are explained and translated in detail. Richthofen's specimen is still the oldest documented cupressocrinitid calyx known in China today. Discovery of a second cupressocrinitid specimen confirms the existence of this family in China. Current taxonomic positions of the Chinese specimens are discussed.

Max Weber in Munich (1919/20): Science and politics in the last year of his life

Max Weber spent only a short period of his life in Munich, but this last year of his life was full of dramatic events: an abortive experiment as a politician, his comeback at university, the overwhelming but unfinished work on his magnum opus, Economy and Society, a liaison with Else von Richthofen–and conflicts with protofascist groups of students at university.

A Life in Troubled Times—Cut Short, Fulfilled: Review essay of "Max Weber Briefe 1918-1920"

[MVS 13.1 (2013) 111-125] ISSN 1470-8078 A Life in Troubled Times—Cut Short, Fulfilled: Review essay of Max Weber Briefe 1918-1920 Uta Gerhardt Max Weber-Briefe 1918-1920, edited by Gerd Krumeich and M. Rainer Lepsius together with Uta Hinz, Sybille Qßwald-Bargende and Man fred Schön, 2 Halbbände (two volumes), Max Weber Gesamtausgabe— im Auftrag der Kommission für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Section II, Correspon dence, vol. 10; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012, pp. xxxiii +1218. ISBN 978-3-16-150895-0. €508.00. The two volumes of Max Weber's correspondence between Janu ary 1918 and May 1920, the last two and a half years of his life, are an impressive collection of over four hundred letters, crowning the series in section II of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe. This collection is the most welcome Fundgrube for scholars who feel that the picture previously drawn from the correspondence is in need of urgent revi sion, and that this is a matter that concerns not Weber alone but also the connection between his oeuvre and personal life, even psyche. The full material presented here puts the record straight, document ing as it does from the (original) letters written by Weber himself, that his sociology was neither a spill-over from his concern for the future of Germany nor was it a fallout of his personal and love life. Indeed, Weber7 s last two years of life were an era of crisis in Ger many, when he first engaged in and later withdrew from active pol itics, whereas his personal life provided some kind of cantus firmus undergirding his thoughts and feelings as he moved in and out of— or, out from and into again—the worlds of academia, politics, and sociology. In the troubled times of Germany's dramatic transition from Monarchy to Republic, in the wake of defeat in the War, he fell in love with the woman whom he was to worship ever after, Else Jaffé, née von Richthofen, whom he had known for some twenty© Max Weber Studies 2013, Clifton House, 17 Malvern Road, London, E8 3LP. 112 Max Weber Studies years but made his 'golden angel' only at this point. Their corre spondence witnesses how passionate the relationship was that gave him strength, perseverance, and courage, as he became politically influential, returned to an academic post, and produced some works unparalleled as classics to this day. Weber's letters from the period of 1918-1920, place him in his times when his opus major took shape, a torso that made him world famous as sociologist. In a matter of months, he re-wrote previous work, the chapters on sociology of authority in Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte that now became Chap ter 3 of the new work, whose chapter 1 tackled the methodologi cal groundwork and chapter 2 the theory of economic action. The emergent book carried the working title, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. To make a long story short, the newly added chapters became the opening section of Economy and Society, the posthumous work rec onciling the earlier writings and the unfinished textbook, under the editorship of Marianne Weber and Johannes Winckelmann. At the time, he revised and finalized also the Sociology of Religion published earlier in long articles in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, the journal whose editor he had been since 1904. The correspondence highlights also Weber's role in the planning of the Constitution of the Weimar Republic as well as his sojourn at Ver sailles as a member of the delegation at the Peace Conference where he hoped he could influence the unfortunate conditions that Ger many was made to accept subsequently. All this happened while he resumed his professorship, after nearly fifteen years outside aca demia. First in Vienna in the summer of 1918, and from the summer of 1919 onward in Munich, he returned to the lectern—an achieve ment that he himself commented on, as somewhat unbelievable, to his Heidelberg confidante Mina Tobler: 'A strange "adventure", in a way, the thing here has become nearly unreal and ghostly, espe cially against...

The red mist? Red shirts, success and team sports

Baron von Richthofen (the Red Baron) arguably the most famous fighter pilot of all time painted his plane the vividest of red hues, making it visible and identifiable at great distance, showing an aggressive pronouncement of dominance to other pilots. Can colour affect aggression and performance and if so is it observable within team sports? This study explores the effect of red on sporting performances within a team sports arena, through empirical analysis of match results from the Australian Rugby League spanning a period of 30 years. Both the descriptive analysis and the multivariate analysis report a positive relationship. Nevertheless, more evidence is required to better understand whether teams in red do enjoy greater success controlling explicitly in a multivariate analysis for many factors that simultaneously affect performance.

Old Frisian

For a century, Old Frisian has largely remained in the shadows of its Germanic sister languages. While dictionaries, concordances, and grammars have been readily and widely available for learning and researching other Germanic languages such as Middle High German, Middle Low German and Middle English, whose timelines roughly correspond to that of Old Frisian, or their earlier counterparts, e.g., Old High German, Old Saxon and Old English, few materials have been available to scholars of Old Frisian. Moreover, as Siebunga (Boutkan & Siebunga 2005: vii) notes, “not even all Old Frisian manuscripts are available as text editions”1 making the production of comprehensive core research materials more difficult. Consequently, what materials there have been, e.g., von Richthofen (1840), Heuser (1903), Holthausen (1925), and Sjölin (1969), have typically not taken into consideration the full range of extant Old Frisian texts, or have focused on specific major dialects, e.g. Boutkan (1996), Buma (1954, 1961). This has left a gap in the materials available providing an opportunity for Old Frisian scholars to make substantial contributions to the field by filling these gaps.

EDGAR JAFFÉ E ELSE VON RICHTHOFEN À LUZ DE CARTAS RECÉM-DESCOBERTAS

Resumo: O artigo conta a história de Edgar Jaffé e Else von Richthofen em seus círculos sociais e intelectuais, dos quais participaram, entre outros, Max e Marianne Weber. O relato se baseia na correspondência do casal Jaffé/von Richthofen, durante os anos de 1902 e 1918, descoberta pelo autor, em Nova York, com o neto Christopher Jeffrey, que doou mais de mil cartas para o Leo Baeck Institute, em 2009. A narrativa permite ao leitor entender os dramas de uma vertente da intelectualidade alemã, ao revelar a sua intimidade, os casamentos, as amizades, o erotismo, as escolhas de carreira e as lealdades políticas, antes e depois da Primeira Guerra Mundial. Na história da sociologia, Edgar Jaffé é conhecido como um dos editores do Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, ao lado de Werner Sombart e Max Weber; Else Von Richthofen, como musa dos intelectuais e aluna dileta de Max Weber - com quem ele manteve vínculo amoroso no final da vida. No artigo, porém, penetrando na intensidade epistolar do casal, o autor pretende que Edgar Jaffé e Else von Richthofen falem por si próprios.

In the Shadow of Max Weber: Bärbel Meurer's Portrait of Marianne Weber

[iMWS 11.1 (2011) 141-146] ISSN 1470-8078 Review Essay In the Shadow of Max Weber: Bärbel Meurer's Portrait of Marianne Weber Bärbel Meurer, Marianne Weber. Leben und Werk (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), pp. xix + 688,20 photos. ISBN 978-3-16-150452-5. Hbk. €89.00. On 17 June 1920 an impressive number of mourners from academia, politics and society gathered at Munich's East Cemetery. It was the funeral ceremony for Max Weber who in the midst of a new burst of creative energy had died at the age of 56. After the funeral speeches the widow, Marianne Weber, stepped forward 'to the richly decorated bier in order to speak of his inner being and his generosity of spirit'.1 This was reported in the newspapers as well as in private correspondence as unusual and unbecoming. Marianne Weber should be regarded as a brave and, for her time, a modern woman. She is known today, also in England, as the biographer of Max Weber. Her 'Lebensbild' has been translated into many languages and stands as the richest biography of the great sociologist and universal scholar. But who was she really? The sociologist Bärbel Meurer has laboured in a comprehensive biography of almost 700 pages to retrieve Marianne Weber from the large shadow of her husband. The book is published by Mohr Siebeck of Tübingen and its cover is very similar to the 'Lebensbild' from the same publishing house. Immediately it feels like a parallel biography, and indeed Meurer uses the same methods as Marianne Weber: she cites where available from a selection of the surviving correspondence of Marianne Weber to Helene Weber and allows Marianne's voice to speak for herself. Alongside this large collection of letters, the letters to Sophie Rickert and to Else von Richthofen are used. The life of Marianne Weber (1870-1954) is laid out before us in eight chapters with all its highs and lows, not only the personal story but also German history. She was born in the Kaiserreich, lived through the first and second world wars, and the breakdown of political and social order of 1918 and 1933 as well as the new start of 1945. The foundations of her life were always precarious, both personally and materially. As the only child of a country doctor Eduard Schnitger and his wife Arma Weber, who came from a family linen business, she grew up, after the early death of her mother and the worsening psychological illness of her father, as more or less an orphan looked after in the small town of Lemgo by her grandmother and aunt. After leaving school, she went to Berlin in 1892 taking drawing lessons and came in closer contact with the family of Max Weber. Marianne Weber, and here Meurer7s descriptions are wonderful, stood 1. Anonymous newspaper article: 'Max Webers Feuerbestattung', Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, Nr. 244,18 June 1920:3.© Max Weber Studies 2011, Clifton House, 17 Malvern Road, London, E8 3LP. 142 Max Weber Studies out in her garish clothes and lower middle class be and upper middle class atmosphere. She quickly fe reserved eldest son of the Weber family. Meurer ske the engagement and marriage in 1893 with her cousi At Max Weber's side the young ambitious wom education. She attended, as a guest, the lectures colleagues. She wanted to gain a doctoral degree Rickert with a study of Fichte, but lacking the f not be admitted as a student. Her book on Ficht 'Volkwirtschaftliche Abhandlungen der Badischen by Max Weber. At the same time her private life achiever among the young professors of economic after the summer semester of 1898 he could no long in clinics followed one after another, those neares and helplessness and this was accompanied by a sion of Max Weber's apparent weakness of will. In the household in Heidelberg and started a months with her husband, always dependent on the finan life did not accord with Marianne's outlook, sinc wished to be part of the intellectual and social s ingly overwhelmed and suffered from nervous tens with the middle class women's movement and ab she attempted to...

Ranching on the Right Side of History

Ike Blasingame had a good horse, a blood-bay gelding he called C Heart, under him that warm spring day of 1905 as he approached the east bank of the Missouri River. He considered the proposition of crossing the ice to get back to Matador headquarters on the west side, in the grazing lease on the Cheyenne River Reservation. The horse was shy of the honeycombed ice with pools of water on the surface, but Ike had liquored up in the cattle-shipping town of Evarts, and he spurred his mount across. He had stayed too long in town; he should have been back on the job. As things turned out, he was lucky he made it at all. The hardy horse clambered out of trouble again and again, at one point pulling himself out from a hip-deep immersion. “Both of us were thankful to get off that river,” recalled Ike, no stranger to dangerous scrapes. “By sundown, the ice burst apart, booming like a cannon as it split in a thousand directions.” Range memoirs, such as Ike Blasingame’s Dakota Cowboy,1 are fi lled with hair’s-breadth escapes from deadly peril and with second-guessing of decisions made at the time. Reading the broader history of the range cattle industry during its heyday on the northern plains likewise offers opportunity for second-guessing with benefi t of hindsight— always a dubious undertaking. Nevertheless, the chronicle fairly shouts a catalog of lessons for riders of the northern range in any generation of the livestock industry. The biggest lesson is this: do not let yourself get situated on the wrong side of things, like Ike did that day in 1905. The record of the livestock industry as to staying on the right side of history is checkered at best. Too often stockmen have been swamped by developments they ought to have foreseen and navigated. The fi rst problem in learning from the early experience of ranching on the northern plains is to overcome collective memory. Over time we, professional historians and the public together, have fashioned a grand narrative, a certain way of telling the story of the range, that does not necessarily refl ect what happened on the ground. Our grand narrative goes like this. The North American range cattle industry began in south Texas, being Hispanic in origin—its methods of handling cattle, its genetics both bovine and equine, and its very extensive nature. The Hispanic system of ranching, once co-opted by Anglos, became the Texas system. Following the Civil War the Texas system dispersed north with the long drive, whereby southern cattle were delivered to shipping points in Kansas and Nebraska. Longhorns not shipped east to packers or feeders were wintered or, once Indian confl icts had wound down, driven on north to mature and fatten as well as to establish breeding herds. These rangers, as the Texas longhorns were called, were the stock and trade of the Cattle Kingdom of the 1870s and 1880s. The Cattle Kingdom of Wyoming, Montana, and Dakota reached its pinnacle in the early 1880s. Prompted by such enthusiastic tracts as Cattle-Raising on the Plains of North America (1885)2 by Walter Baron von Richthofen (uncle and godfather to the Red Baron, World War I fl ying ace), eastern and foreign investors poured capital into the cattle industry. The northern range became seriously overstocked. Then came the hard winter of 1886–1887. Following a droughty summer, cattle entered the winter in poor shape and with forage depleted. Winter arrived early, the blizzards came one after another, and temperatures were 40 below

ESTHER VON RICHTHOFEN. Bringing Culture to the Masses: Control, Compromise and Participation in the GDR. (Monographs in German History, number 24.) New York: Berghahn Books. 2009. Pp. ix, 239. $90.00

ESTHER VON RICHTHOFEN. Bringing Culture to the Masses: Control, Compromise and Participation in the GDR. (Monographs in German History, number 24.) New York: Berghahn Books. 2009. Pp. ix, 239. $90.00

Edgar Jaffé and Else von Richthofen in the Mirror of Newly Found Letters

Political historians have dealt mostly and critically with Edgar Jaffé's participation in the Bavarian Revolution of 1918/19, and only peripherally with his achievements as economist, publisher and editor. Among social scientists Edgar Jaffé (1866-1921), is still known, if mainly as a name, as editor, linked with the names of Max Weber and Werner Sombart, of the leading social science journal of its time, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. Among cultural historians and students of literature, in particular, he became known through his marriage to Else von Richthofen (1874-1973) in 1902. The couple were seen as figures of fact and fiction in the antinomic world inhabited by Max and Marianne Weber, Otto and Frieda Gross, and D.H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen. Else v. Richthofen was mythologized as 'a muse of the critical intelligence of our century', in contrast to her sister Frieda Lawrence as 'a muse of the erotic imagination'. Newly discovered letters and documents let Else and Edgar speak with their own voices more clearly than could be heard previously. I aim to present a more coherent and balanced account than has been feasible up until now.

Bringing Culture to the Masses: Control, Compromise and Participation in the GDR – By Esther von Richthofen

Bringing Culture to the Masses: Control, Compromise and Participation in the GDR – By Esther von Richthofen

Creating Genocidal Space: Geographers and the Discourse of Annihilation, 1880–1933

The connection between geography, geographers and the events of genocide needs to be explored further. This article provides an intellectual overview of the most prominent German geographical intellectual traditions in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, focusing on the work of Friedrich Ratzel and Ferdinand von Richthofen. It argues that this particular strand of geographical thought, including the invention of concepts such as lebensraum, provided powerful arguments for wholesale extermination and annihilation. The article points out that the close connection between imperial governments, their policies and geographers enabled the latter to play an important role influencing imperial actions. Although there is evidence to suggest the connection between these geographical theories and the events of Nazi-occupied Europe, the more immediate connection is the genocide in German Southwest Africa in 1904–1905. The article concludes that this geographical discourse provided arguments that, under circumstances of a ‘struggle’ for geographical space, whole populations must be eradicated – i.e. in contrast to the euphemistic term lebensraum (living space), the geographic thinkers were in reality talking about a ‘genocidal space’.

O caso Richthofen na Revista Veja Uma análise semiótica de um texto sincrético

O presente artigo tem por objetivo analisar, semioticamente, as duas primeiras páginas da Reportagem Especial da Revista Veja sobre Suzane Von Richthofen, publicada no dia 12 de abril de 2006 e que tem na fotografia um dos principais chamarizes do leitor. Este artigo vai ocupar-se apenas de alguns aspectos do plano de expressão e do plano de conteúdo e suas possíveis relações.
 
 Palavras-chave: Suzane Richthofen; análise semiótica; texto sincrético.

A Queensland Reader: Discovering the Queensland Writer

An old friend, Jim Cleary, working on the monumentalBibliography of Australian Literatureat the University of Queensland, recently rang to tell me about the elusive modernist poet Anna Wickham. ‘Wickham’ is the pen-name of Edith Alice Mary Harper, ‘one of the most significant feminist poets of modernism’, who published between the 1910s and the 1930s. The author of over one thousand poems, covering a remarkable diversity of forms, Wickham was described in the memoir of American publisher Louis Untermeyer as ‘a remarkable gypsy of a woman’. During her tempestuous life, she mixed with members of the London Chelsea and Bloomsbury sets, plunged into the literary and artistic circles of the Parisiandemi-monde, had a brief sexual relationship with pioneer American modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Dolittle), was sexually spurned by lesbian heiress and literary patron Natalie Clifford Barney, and became closely aligned with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen, as well as Dylan Thomas and Caitlin MacNamara, falling out with the latter couple after throwing a drunken ‘Thomas and fellow writer Lawrence Durrell out of the house’. She was also close friends with the erratic novelist Malcolm Lowry, whetted the appetites of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, and helped to mentor the young Stephen Spender. Somewhat like T.S. Eliot's wife Vivien Haigh-Wood, she was incarcerated at one point in a mental institution by her husband, solicitor Patrick Hepburn, And, like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. she died by her own hand, hanging herself in her decaying home on Parliament Hill, London, following the freezing winter of 1947.

Theory of Aces: High Score by Skill or Luck?

We studied the distribution of World War I fighter pilots by the number of victories they were credited with, along with casualty reports. Using the maximum entropy method we obtained the underlying distribution of pilots by their skill. We find that the variance of this skill distribution is not very large, and that the top aces achieved their victory scores mostly by luck. For example, the ace of aces, Manfred von Richthofen, most likely had a skill in the top quarter of the active WWI German fighter pilots and was no more special than that. When combined with our recent study (Simkin and Roychowdhury, 2006), showing that fame grows exponentially with victory scores, these results (derived from real data) show that both outstanding achievement records and resulting fame are mostly due to chance.

A Natural Order of Volcanic Succession: Midnineteenth-Century Field-based Models of Von Richthofen, King, and Dutton

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, pioneering studies of volcanic rocks were undertaken by Ferdinand von Richthofen, Clarence King, and Clarence Dutton in the Great Basin and California Cascades. They developed hypotheses on the petrogenesis of magmas in order to explain what they deemed to be a regular progression of volcanic rock types through time during the Cenozoic Era. There was general agreement that effusive volcanism resulted in an orderly sequence of magmas: propylitic, andesitic, trachytic, rhyolitic, and basaltic. Von Richthofen related this phenomenon to the tapping of magma sources at ever-greater depths during orogenic activity, the basic magmas being denser and occupying a lower level within the Earth. King felt that so-called ‘lakes of fusion’ developed within the Earth as a result of erosional unloading of its crust; and that within such lakes gravity separation resulted in silicic magmas floating upon basic. In the secular refrigeration of the globe these temporary lakes would necessarily occur successively at greater and greater depths and the secular changes that recorded themselves in the subtle petrographical distinctions by which the various acidic and basic members could be distinguished were in each case an expression of depth. Dutton, by contrast, saw no connection between unloading and volcanism and established a modified model for the genesis of magma, emphasizing the importance of magma provenance being controlled by the fusion of variable source rocks. All felt that such temporal changes in magma type were universal and provided a basis for a natural classification of volcanic rocks.

Living at the Edge: A Biography of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen

Dashingly told and meticulously researched, this double biography of D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen is the first to draw fully on Frieda s unpublished letters and on interviews with people who knew her well. It explores their collision with an industrial world they hated and chronicles the stormy relationship between husband and wife. strong sexual vitality that inspired Lawrence s art brought both joy and anguish to his marriage. Here, the Lawrences emerge as proud but not conceited in their unconventional lives, staunch in the face of fierce opposition from a conformist society. Living at the Edge follows the separate lives of Lawrence and Frieda up to their first meeting in 1912. Tracing their new life together, it depicts their grateful escape from the English Midlands; their discovery of exotic places where they made temporary homes Italy, Cornwall, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico; Lawrence s courageous battle against illness; and, after his death in 1930, Frieda s success in recreating the simple life on ranches near Taos, New Mexico, where she died in 1956. At the center of their story is Lawrence s literary career. Biographers Squires and Talbot see Lawrence s major novels The Rainbow, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley s Lover as a fresh way to understand his turbulent and conflicted life. They reveal the extreme care with which he rewrote his personal experience to satisfy his deepest needs, and they introduce the many influential people who entered the Lawrences lives and work. rich materials from Frieda s letters reveal a different Lawrence more difficult as a man but more interesting as an artist; they also reveal a different Frieda more vibrant as a woman, more substantial as a companion. This superb biography gives both Lawrence and Frieda striking new dimensions.