Western Sky Research Articles

Religion-Scientific Study of Solar Resting Phase and Solar-Lunar Finality

Religious views on the final state of the Sun, the Moon, the Final Hour, and the astrophysical findings of the solar and lunar fate have been reviewed. Religious views are that the Sun runs its course for a specified time, and it has a resting phase. Also, the advent of the Last Hour will be marked by the Sun’s overhead appearance causing tremendous heat, sunrise in the western sky, engulfing of the Moon, and ultimate vanishing. These religious forecasts were made in the 7th century. Scientists have found that the Sun has lived for 4.5 billion years and make forecast for living another 4.5 billion years. It passes through violent and quiet states every 11 years. The Sun’s red giant state will be large enough to spread beyond the orbit of the Earth by 20% and will be 3,000 times brighter. The Moon recedes away from us, and it will be lost in the Sun. After the red giant phase is over, the Sun will end up as a white dwarf with half of its mass. These astronomical discoveries were made in the early 20th century. Many discoveries could be made if the heavenly bodies’ Qur’anic highlights would be followed.

Thirsty Air: Western skies are craving more water, stoking drought and wildfire.

Thirsty Air: Western skies are craving more water, stoking drought and wildfire.

Midwestern History: Today and Tomorrow

Midwestern HistoryToday and Tomorrow John E. Miller (bio) History moves in mysterious ways. Paraphrasing that great philosopher Yogi Berra, who said, “I just want to thank everyone who made this day necessary,” I would like to note here that I had a role in making this symposium possible. Jon Lauck was a student of mine at South Dakota State University—one of the best I had in three decades as a professor there. When I left teaching in 2003, his return to SDSU to teach my classes, including South Dakota History, led in a roundabout way to his later launching the Midwestern History Association (MHA). It occurred to him that, unlike all of its counterparts in the United States, the Middle West lacked an umbrella organization focusing upon the history of the region as well as having conferences, scholarly periodicals, college classes, textbooks, and other such accoutrements. Numerous scholars and writers were doing midwestern history, but little consensus existed among them regarding identity, subject matter, goals, and methods. Lauck wrote two influential books describing how what once had been a flourishing regional historical and literary consciousness and a network of regional thinkers had gone into decline. In the meantime, he spearheaded the drive to establish the Midwestern History Association, which has borne excellent fruit during its brief history. The questions now facing the organization are: Where are we? and Where are we headed? This is an opportune time to creatively consider those and other issues concerning the direction in which we are going, five years into the development of the MHA. Lest we assume that other regions of the country—New England (or the [End Page 1] Northeast), the South, and the West—got started quickly, assumed a distinct identity, and established a clear set of goals and procedures for themselves, we should consider a statement by Donald Worster, who wrote in 1992 in Under Western Skies, “For a field that has been around so long, western American history can be frustratingly difficult to pin down.” He went on to observe that “as for clarity of purpose, the field is still groping about in adolescence. It doesn’t quite know who it is or what it wants to be when it grows up. What are its boundaries? Where is ‘West’ and where is not? There is no settled, mature answer.” Noting the “wonderful ambiguity” surrounding the field, Worster suggested that “the West is just about anything that anyone has ever wanted it to be.” Participants in this symposium bring their own backgrounds, assumptions, and goals to the table. Doubtless, considerable diversity characterizes their visions, as well as significant overlap. One advantage of organizing a group like this is the variety of viewpoints and diversity of talents that it brings together. At the same time, it reveals some of the common assumptions and purposes that bind us together. In Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (2013), Douglas Rushkoff points out that “pattern recognition is a shared activity.” In the process of collaboration, he observes, “a network of people is better at mapping connections than a lone individual. As author and social critic Steven Johnson would remind us, ideas don’t generally emerge from individuals, but from groups, or what he calls ‘liquid networks.’” However we choose to conceive of it—as “liquid networks,” “collective groupthink,” or “collaborative imagination”—the combined insights of the company assembled here will operate like ripples in a pond, emanating outward from a rock thrown in the water to combine with numerous other ideas percolating in the minds of our participants and readers, who will bring their own thoughts and interests to the subject. Philosophers going back to the ancient Greeks identified space and time as crucial components of the conceptual apparatus that allows us to comprehend the world around us. Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason placed those two ideas at the heart of his critical philosophy. Since then, historians and historical geographers have depended upon them to help direct their inquiries. Regionalism as an approach to knowledge builds upon the insight that “place matters.” In the process of establishing the MHA, the question of boundaries defining the extent of the region has...

Under the Western Sky: Essays on the Fiction and Music of Willy Vlautin ed. by Neil Campbell

Under the Western Sky: Essays on the Fiction and Music of Willy Vlautin ed. by Neil Campbell

Uma sequência didática para discutir as relações étnico-raciais (Leis 10.639/03 e 11.645/08) na educação científica

Um dos grandes desafios da Educação Básica do Brasil do século XXI é a implementação das Leis 10.639/03 e 11.645/08, as quais tornam obrigatória a inclusão do ensino da História da África, da Cultura Afro-Brasileira e Indígena, nos currículos dos estabelecimentos de ensino do País, na luta por uma sociedade mais igualitária. No entanto, do ponto de vista prático, o debate atual em torno dessas Leis bem como das práticas pedagógicas e didáticas desenvolvidas nas escolas estão quase que exclusivamente restritas às iniciativas feitas no contexto de disciplinas das Ciências Humanas e Sociais. Ancorado em referenciais teóricos da Astronomia Cultural e da Pedagogia Dialógica de Paulo Freire, o presente trabalho apresenta uma Sequência Didática diversificada com o objetivo de permitir, nas aulas de Ciências/Física da Educação Básica, embora ela possa também ser aplicada no Ensino Superior, uma ampla discussão acerca dos pressupostos históricos, culturais e científicos do céu Africano, Indígena e do assim denominado céu Ocidental. Tomando as constelações em variadas culturas como ponto de partida, o presente trabalho soma-se às iniciativas que buscam articular a garantia de direitos humanos e sociais e o respeito à diversidade étnico-racial. Trata-se, assim, de um exemplo simples, por meio de um objeto virtual de aprendizagem e de um material didático construído em sala, de como aulas de Ciências/Física podem contribuir nos Ensinos Fundamental e Médio, com uma educação mais crítica, antidiscriminatória, antirracista, emancipatória e diversa, levando em conta as diferentes alteridades, ou seja, o “outro”.

Jackie Robinson, the Anatomical Record, and the Gift of Building Bridges

Jackie Robinson, the Anatomical Record, and the Gift of Building Bridges

Тувинская музыка и World Music

В эссе представлены авторские наблюдения о процессе вхождения тувинской музыки в World Music — нишу мировой музыкальной культуры, в которой представлены этнические музыкальные традиции. Автор был свидетелем пробуждения интереса к традиционной музыкальной культуре в Туве и России, а также процесса глобализации тувинской музыки. Он ставит цель осмыслить эти перемены и выяснить, как они повлияли на саму традиционную музыку, на хоомей.В конце советского времени традиционная музыка в Туве, как и во многих республиках страны, была как бы законсервирована. В период перестройки и процесса национального возрождения традиционность стала восстребованной. В Туве стали проводиться симпозиумы, фестивали, на которых самодеятельные исполнители выступали наравне с профессиональными. Особым почетом пользовались старые мастера хоомея. Ученые активно обсуждали происхождение, роль хоомея и его жанры.Рыночный интерес к хоомею пришел извне. В конце 1980-х гг. американским ученым и продюсером Т. Левиным впервые были проведены полевые записи хоомейжи для выпуска диска. Был создан этнографический aнсамбль «Тыва». Его участники впоследствии образовали свои музыкальные группы. Музыкальные программы составлялись по принципу этнографического дивертисмента, в тот период востребованная форма проведения концертов в самой Туве и за ее пределами. Начались выпуски дисков, гастроли тувинских исполнителей за границей. Резкий рост интереса к феномену World Music ознаменовался знаковым интересом к феномену горлового пения и обертоновой музыки и развитие тувинской музыки с этого времени стало тесно связано с западным музыкальным рынком. Автор прослеживает особенности таких групп, как «Хун-Хурту», «Ят-ха» и др., и отмечает, что ценность тувинской музыки не столько в звездах, покоривших небосклон западного рынка, сколько в образовании стабильного сообщества людей, вдохновленных этой музыкой и культурой, ищущих новые пути эстетического и духовного мировосприятия.Сегодня Тува имеет свои рок-группы, авангардные, женские и т. д. Горловое пение стало востребованным видом вокального искусства. Тувинская музыка привлекла сотни тысяч поклонников по всему миру. Распространение звуконосителей, в особенности тувинской музыки, позволило музыкантам Саяно-Алтая и Центральной Азии заново открыть многие жанры собственной традиции.C начала 1990-х годов тувинская музыка ворвалась в мировое сознание наподобие монгольского нашествия. Очевиден глобальный успех тувинской музыки на мировом музыкальном рынке. Но неизбежен процесс нормализации восприятия тувинской музыки внешним миром. К статье прилагаются аудиофайлы (см. «Дополнительные файлы» во вкладке «Инструменты для статьи»).

Salt Moon by Noel Crook

Reviewed by: Salt Moon by Noel Crook Carol Niederlander (bio) Noel Crook. Salt Moon. Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. A stunning brutality runs through Texas-born Noel Crook’s Salt Moon, winner of Crab Orchard Series in Poetry’s First Book Award. The world depicted is beautiful but merciless, the line between human and wild realms blurred. In the ekphrastic “Turner’s Suns,” the painter’s hot, blinding “God’s-eye” sun falls like “a mushroom cloud of saffron / vapor under which not one thing is spared.” Nothing is spared in these poems either. In riveting, often exquisite language, the poems acknowledge cruelty, need, and desire in both animal and human domains, though animals see more clearly and house dogs may bark warnings to clueless owners. Readers should perhaps be given their own heads-up: danger ahead; proceed at your own risk—but the risk is worth the reading. The opening poem, “Big Sky,” lets readers know what they are in for. Its narrator describes the Carolina [End Page 67] woods where she resides as green with trees and “ten kinds of birds all hollering / at once.” This is not to her liking. “I want the western sky / of my girl-hood,” she declares, “purple as lupines / and longing”: Give me sun-stunted scrub oaks rooted in rock and shaped like bad hearts; the summer a mountain lion ambushed an appaloosa colt by the barn and two bottle-fed backyard deer, their bones dragged to the dump to be picked clean and sun-whitened. We understand that “bottle-fed” deer don’t stand a chance in the wild but may assume human beings would show more mercy. The ensuing lines argue otherwise: Give me flint arrowhead the color of lost rivers, the barbed-wire fact that Comanche girls liked burning the captured fawn slowly to death before breakfast; scorched earth, nights rampant with stars, the Pleiades fleeing, an orange skiff of moon going down fast into black swells of hills. Sunrise the colors of cataclysm, the singular solace of the canyon wrens, their strafed ululations, and, in a cartwheel of azure, the lone buzzard wheeling and waiting. Crook’s description of the stark, violent beauty of the natural world provides a context for human cruelty she depicts—and perhaps an explanation. Nature is inherently scorched, rampant, straffed, a cataclysm—and perhaps so are we. Looking at it all dead-on is what the poet prefers. Stark reality can be bracing even when tragic. In “Owl,” the speaker finds the raptor’s sad leavings: “dry orbs of bone and fur laced / with tiny xylophones of vertebra, // little femurs, sharp-chinned skulls.” She nevertheless admires the owl, would like to tell him how she once “heard the cry of something small/from the woods behind the barn—a low pain-whistle that spiked my blood. . . . And he would tell how he knows death as swoop / and smack of beak, the crush of small bones, the kick of the whole mouse in the craw.” In “Skull,” a mother watches her children sleep, seeing “one who throws the covers off, his arms / and legs flung wide like a sea star; one with a dog at her feet and three dolls / tucked in neatly, their bristled heads / on the pillow beside her; one who murmurs in his sleep for pancakes.” The language is tender, unlike that in most poems in this volume, but parents, even animal ones, want to protect their offspring. The ominous “Crows” ends with a cawed warning: “Watch, watch, watch. . . . Count the children again.” It seems fair to ask if these poems depict valid perceptions of danger or the projections of depression. “Melancholia,” suggests that the poet/speaker has asked that question herself: Who is this knocking at my door? I should not but will let him in since he is sad mouthed and solemn and pretends to know me best. Love, he says, come here to me, put out your lip so I can bite it. The admission is brave but belied by the preponderance of poems in this volume. They argue for the actuality of danger, the excitement danger can engender (especially that associated with sexual desire), and even an...

Dr. Leopold Takes French

Dr. Leopold Takes French Joann Kobin (bio) Edgar practically sprints from the classroom. Outside night has blotted out all but a luminous strip of fiery pink in the western sky. In the dimness of the high school parking lot, all the cars look alike. He finds his Camry, is glad he ended up driving. He needs a fast getaway. “It was excruciating,” he tells Lisa when he gets home. Excruciating, he quickly remembers, is the kind of hyperbole that Lisa is beginning to find objectionable. He takes a deep breath. “Not easy,” he qualifies, in his reasonable psychiatrist voice. She’s settled on the living room couch, making a bead necklace for his daughter Gabriela’s forty-sixth birthday. Glancing up, she reassures him it was only the first class and probably everyone else was squirming. She offers a cup of tea or a thimble of cognac. “Nobody else looked like they were squirming.” He declines the tea, considers the cognac, more than a thimbleful. A couple of logs in the fireplace smolder comfortably. Of course he knows it was only the first class but he hasn’t had a chance to tell her the extent of his classmates’ superior performance, how everyone had to read from a novel Madame Guiet passed around so that she could evaluate their accent and pronunciation. “She wasn’t testing for comprehension,” he explains. “The novel was too difficult for a beginning class — she told us that upfront. But everyone read with fluency and had a superlative accent except me, and they chuckled because the passage was apparently quite funny — some contemporary satire about the seamy side of French political life. Their comprehension was apparently fine. I didn’t get a word.” “Hard to believe,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “My accent, as they say, sucks. When it was my turn Madame Guiet didn’t smile. She looked offended.” “It was just an evening class at the local high school,” Lisa insists. “So who cares if you weren’t the best and the brightest!” Her eyes are focused on the beads she’s arranging. “It’s no fun being the dumbest,” he mumbles, prodding logs in the fireplace. “Just try saying ‘psychiatrist’ in French. You have to pronounce the P first. You don’t start with the ‘Sy’ sound. I froze.” [End Page 512] “There are synonyms, Edgar. You could’ve said you’re a therapist or a doctor.” “Why didn’t I think of that?” he says with a glaze of sarcasm, and with a shrug drops into the armchair. It’s almost nine; the class ended at eight and his vanity and confidence are still shaken. Learning to speak French was a dream he’d postponed since his first year of college, when all the pre-med courses had hours of lab work trailing them. Before he and Lisa married, his second marriage almost twenty-five years ago, he was in Paris for a professional conference, and his high school French utterly failed him. He met an attractive, smart Parisian psychiatrist, Yvonne Piquette, and he couldn’t come up with one complete sentence. His strong suit was menu-ese. Very strong on legumes and meat, he knew his cassoulet from his côtelettes. In the intervening years other languages had taken on far more cachet but somehow he still wanted to speak French, even though Paris itself was no longer the city of light. It was the city of unwarranted snobbery and chilly “hauteur,” of religious tension, of lecherous public officials. And yet this class still drew ten people intent on improving their French. Ten people under sixty-five or even under sixty. He was almost seventy-five, and his anxiety unnerved him. It had been almost traumatic — a word that’s lately become trivialized in the field of psychiatry, now everything is considered a trauma. Let’s face it, the class was difficult but it wasn’t traumatic. He’d be the last to make a case for that. He can’t stop ruminating about it. The very air of the classroom — the lingering recycled breath of perhaps three hundred adolescents with all their struggles and hormones — had made him...

Review of Lighting the Western Sky: The Hearst Pilgrimage and the Establishment of the Bahá’í Faith in the West by Kathryn Jewett-Hogenson

Review of Kathryn Jewett Hogenson's Lighting the Western Sky: The HearstPilgrimage and the Establishment of the Bahá’í Faith in the West by Janet Ruhe-Schoen

NUMBER, PLEASE

2 4 Y N U M B E R , P L E A S E W I L L I A M L O G A N The brrr, brrrr, brrr of the pinetop warbler, like an old-fashioned desk phone, rasps like a Robert Musil. The trees in terminal blossom flake flesh-colored petals onto dried da√s. Under the overgrown hedge lies an abandoned nest, shreds of tinsel woven into recycled tweed. These bespoke days, the whip-stripes at sunset fire the western sky with some symphony of old grievance. This morning I peered into the whitewashed courtyard. Two robins sat the gate, ignoring each other. At the top of the telephone pole, what seemed a song was an alarm call. ...

In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau (review)

Reviewed by: In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau Hal Crimmel In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau. By Paul Lindholdt. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. 146 pages, $19.00. Paul Lindholdt’s latest book is an engaging collection of first-person, literary nonfiction essays focused on the rural Pacific Northwest, primarily the Columbia Plateau bioregion, which includes slices of northern Idaho and much of Washington state east of the Cascades. The author’s deep knowledge of the Plateau and its surrounding regions is reflected in his fluency with local flora and fauna, landforms, and waterways. The essays describe the satisfaction of living a life where the non-built environment plays a significant role, but these celebratory place-based accounts are often weighed against the region’s history of environmental abuse. From the demise of wild salmon due to the damming of the Columbia River watershed, including the “tourniquet” of Grand Coulee Dam, which is like most other dams that act “as tombstones to the largest rivers in the American West,” to tragic stories of people “leaded” by smelter fallout from an Idaho silver mine to the severe air pollution resulting from wheat field stubble burning, Lindholdt condemns corporations and government entities that sacrificed the health of individuals, communities, and ecosystems for the sake of short-term profit (86, 84, 110). [End Page 310] Perhaps the most memorable essay in this regard is “In the Shadow of the Government’s Blind Eye,” an account of environmental apocalypse at the former Western Processing Company site, which is now one of the largest Superfund sites in the Pacific Northwest. As a young, blue-collar worker in 1974, the author risked his health disposing of industrial wastes from clients such as Boeing. He describes emptying—by hand—55-gallon drums of “heavy metals suspended in acids” and other toxic liquids into storage ponds (28). Clad in little more than rainslickers and boots, he and coworkers pump “chemical slurries straight to the dirt”; later he watches flames flicker out of the contaminated ground (31). Reading this, one wonders how frequently a similar story has played out across the West. In addition to the single-source water pollution from this site, the pall cast by other toxic by-products of industrial civilization spread far across the region—and across the nation—as such hazardous wastes were “recycled” as fertilizer, sold, and used in agriculture (33). Many Washington farm communities, for instance, fell victim to this practice when they unwittingly spread these contaminants onto their fields, resulting in sickly animals and poor crop yields. Readers hoping to find the romantic landscapes of an unspoiled West or idealized traditional Western culture are going to be disappointed. This collection offers instead a clear-eyed view of the region’s people and places, including critiques of such sacred cows as the rodeo circuit, which the author and his son see as a dubious form of entertainment, based as it is on the exertions of animals who have been “ridden, roped, panting, jerked, and spurred” for the benefit of audiences eating barbequed meat under hot western skies (134). For those who relish such honesty, the author’s keen ear for local speech contributes to the emerging portrait of place, with its prevailing conservative orthodoxy. One feels the tight cinch of convention when neighbors spread rumors that a local woman who left her husband took “‘her feminism down a recreational path’ by falling ‘in love with another woman. She had gone lesbian’—as if to say she had gone feral” (72). Sometimes personal matters become fodder for community gossip; other times they affect one’s sense of place as profoundly as the landscape and the culture. One example is “The Way to Open,” a chapter on rafting the Main Salmon River in Idaho. As part of a Forest Service–sponsored working trip to reduce the spread of spotted knapweed, an invasive species that poisons the soil around it, killing off native vegetation and preventing the growth of new plants, the author shares painful memories about his son’s drowning on Puget Sound, a reminder that the world has its own inexplicable agenda, an agenda that...

The investigation and design for a unique architectural space – The Chillida Cavern, Mount Tindaya, Fuerteventura

The late Spanish artist, Eduardo Chillida, proposed the creation of a large subterranean sculpture within Tindaya Mountain, on the island of Fuerteventura, Canary Islands. The sculpture consists of a 15m span entrance tunnel to a cavern (65m long, 49m wide and 45m high) and two rectangular light shafts (20m×20m and 21m×30m). The two light shafts are orientated to capture the rotation of the sun and moon as they cross the mountain and provide the only light in the cavern. The entrance tunnel would provide a view to the sea and western sky from within the cavern.The sculpture would have a flat roof and slightly inclined walls. The excavated surfaces are to be formed with flat, high quality finishes, with no visible support. This results in a unique engineering challenge, whose construction would push the limits of cavern design and construction.In order to realise the artist’s concept, the design comprises the formation of a series of reinforced rock arches within the rock mass above the cavern roof and pre-support of the cavern roof with rock anchors fixed to the arches. The arches would be created with rock anchors radiating around the tunnels which would also provide access for long term maintenance, monitoring instrumentation and drainage. The reinforced rock arch tunnels would be formed from the light shafts prior to the main cavern excavation. The rock anchors supporting the cavern roof would be installed in predrilled holes as they are exposed during cavern excavation.The cavern would be constructed within the trachyte rock mass making up the majority of the mountain and would also encounter highly persistent master joints and basalt dykes. Specific local treatment and support is expected to be required to stabilise these features. There are also durability issues associated with the particular micro-structure and porosity characteristics of the predominant trachyte rock itself that have been addressed to meet the long-term design requirements.This paper describes the phased investigation and development of the design concept. The project is currently under consideration by the Canary Islands Government.

SHAW'S LONDON THEN AND NOW

SHAW'S LONDON THEN AND NOW

AT THE SHORE, CORPUS CHRISTI

1 0 1 R A T T H E S H O R E , C O R P U S C H R I S T I S C O T T H I G H T O W E R Oleander blossoms hold their corals and fuchsias. Roses and oranges spill across the western sky. You, considering the matinee, lean into me and – in a playful voice – murmur into my ear, that they should have cast Danny Kaye as Antonius. For years they resisted theater here; questionable of virtue. I guess in these times, there’s something less invasive about cinemas. The one today was nowhere near as grand as Ziegfeld’s in Manhattan, where we watched the New York premiere of this restored version. ‘‘A veritable cinematographic abundance in the land.’’ ‘‘I thought you said they once had acoustically perfect, even opulent opera houses scattered throughout the state.’’ You pause. I nod. ‘‘Getting hungry?’’ 1 0 2 Y (I’ve come to understand your reflexive hunger in the question.) ‘‘Chicken-fried steak, gravy, okra, hush puppies?’’ ‘‘How about oysters, toast tips swimming in olive oil and garlic butter? If you get my drift. . . . . . . I do. You grin, roll your eyes, and deadpan. ‘‘Sí, tengo hambre. Cariño, my appetite, too, includes both oysters and snails.’’ Next, we await the restored ‘‘Alexander’’ before the pared down version even goes into initial release. We accept ‘‘sworn virgins’’ and ‘‘white marriages’’ and wonder why others, who do not even have a dog in the fight, are so certain that the centurion in Capernaum could not have loved or been loved by his slave. ...

Where There Is No Frontier

When, after fifty-one years, Abdur got down apprehensively from the second-class compartment of the train at Azimabad station, the winter sun was starting to decline in the western sky. The sunlight had lost its shine and was the colour of faded turmeric, and the north wind gusted like a mad, unbridled horse. His full name was Abdur Hussein. He was sixty, of medium height and slender build. There were heavy shadows under his eyes, and he had prominent jawbones. His eyesight was no longer strong, and he wore heavyframed glasses. His whole body bore the marks of age: his skin was rough and wrinkled, and his hair and beard mostly grey. Abdur was wearing a very crumpled pajama and a sherwani, over which he had a long-sleeved woollen pullover. Even that was not enough to stop the indomitable cold of north India, so over the pullover he had a thick woollen shawl wrapped around himself. On his feet he wore heavy sandals. He carried a large leather suitcase in his right hand and, in the other, a holdall containing his pillow, a thin mattress, a pair of blankets, a bedcover, and sundry odds and ends. Two years after Partition, when he was nine, Abdur and his family left Azimabad for West Pakistan and settled in Karachi, where they lived in the very crowded part of the old city, a locality that became a colony for Mohajirs, the Urdu-speaking Muslim refugees from India. He had two reasons for coming back to India after fifty-one years. One was to go to Ajmer Sharif; the other was to come to Azimabad and visit his elder sister, Fatima, who had remained behind when the family went to Pakistan after Partition. Many people had told them that they would have no security in India and that their future would be bleak, so it did not make sense for them to risk staying. However, Fatima's father-in-law, Sheik Badruddin, was a dogged character who said simply that he and his family would not be leaving his country, the land of his birth, for anywhere. Let happen what may. Before Partition and for some time after, there had been clashes between Hindus and Muslims that had culminated in arson, bloodshed, and

The sodium tail of Mercury

Abstract— Mercury is difficult to observe because it is so close to the Sun. However, when the angle of the ecliptic is near maximum in the northern hemisphere, and Mercury is near its greatest eastern elongation, it can be seen against the western sky for about a half hour after sunset. During these times, we were able to map sodium D2 emission streaming from the planet, forming a long comet‐like tail. On 2001 May 26 (U.T.) we mapped the tail downstream to a distance of ˜40 000 km. Sodium velocities in the tail increased to ˜11 km s−1 at 40 000 km as the result of radiation pressure acceleration. On 2000 June 5 (U.T.) we mapped the cross‐sectional extent of the tail at a distance of ˜17 500 km downstream. At this distance, the half‐power full‐width of the emission was ˜20 000 km. We estimated the transverse velocity of sodium in the tail to range from 2 to 4 km s−1. The velocities we observed imply source velocities from the planet surface of the order of 5 km s−1, or 4 eV. Particle sputtering is a likely candidate for production of sodium atoms at these velocities. The total flux of sodium in the tail was ˜1 times 1023 atoms s−1, which corresponds to 1 to 10% of the estimated total production rate of sodium on the planet.

Industrialisering av alvar: Studier kring svensk vattenkraftutbyggnad 1900-1918 (review)

Reviewed by: Industrialisering av älvar: Studier kring svensk vattenkraftutbyggnad 1900–1918* Arne KaiJser (bio) Industrialisering av älvar: Studier kring svensk vattenkraftutbyggnad 1900–1918. By Eva Jakobsson. Gothenburg, Sweden: Avhandlingar från historiska institutionen i Göteborg, 1996. Pp. 302; illustrations, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, English summary. The English translation of the title of Eva Jakobsson’s book is “The industrialization of rivers.” The author argues that when the emerging power companies in the beginning of this century built power stations and dams to harness hydropower, they fundamentally transformed the character of the Swedish rivers. The dams made it possible to control the water flow to adjust to variations in the electricity demand in distant industries and towns. This management of water flows to regulate available water resources is the essence of an “industrialized river.” Jakobsson’s aim is to analyze the preconditions for, and the conflicts over, this fundamental transformation of Swedish rivers. Her approach has been inspired both by environmental historians such as Theodor Steinberg and Donald Worster and by historians of technology such as Thomas P. Hughes. Worster has pointed out that “it is not ‘man’ who has achieved mastery of western American rivers, but some men, while the rest of us have looked on in passive wonder” (Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992], p. 73). More or less the same holds for Sweden, even if some of the rest actively resisted the development taking place. Jakobsson’s starting point is to analyze the actions of a small group of men, whom she calls the hydropower developers. [End Page 569] Among these she identifies seven key actors: five were civil engineers, and the others were lawyers specializing in water legislation. These magnificent seven were active in different domains—commercial, technical, and political. In particular, they played leading roles in the establishment of the Swedish power industry, which came to be dominated by one state-owned company (the first of its kind in the world) and a handful of private companies in which municipalities had substantial shares. One of Jakobsson’s assertions is that the organizational structure of the Swedish power industry is an expression of what has been called “organized capitalism.” The basic reason for public involvement in the power sector was to promote industrial development by providing cheap electricity to industry. This contrasted with Norway, for example, where public power companies were established for supplying the general public, while industries had to build their own power plants. Using Hughes’s terminology, Jakobsson argues that the prevailing water legislation, designed for the needs of an agrarian society, was the major reverse salient for the emerging hydro-based electricity system in the beginning of this century. This legislation was based on riparianism and the principle of “natural flow,” which prevented disturbances of the natural flow of rivers. According to a special rights institute, the kungsådran (“king’s vein”), a third of the water in a river should always be allowed to flow freely, and dams across water courses were therefore forbidden. The hydropower developers realized at an early stage the necessity of changing this legislation, and several of them became members of parliament and experts in governmental commissions on water legislation. After two decades of investigations and political debates, a new water law was passed in 1918, which corresponded to the power industry’s wishes. The new law included the principle of “reasonable use,” which implied that a hydropower project should be allowed if the benefit could be shown to be three times greater than the damage to agricultural lands. Jakobsson focuses on more than the few men playing key roles in the transformation of Swedish rivers. By looking at a local conflict, she also studies some who opposed it. From 1899 onward, a provisional water act allowed the building of dams across rivers in special cases. In 1906 the Gullspšang power company applied to the government for permission to build a dam and to regulate the water level in Lake Skagern. The application, however, was vigorously opposed by most of the 475 riparians around the lake, and what followed was a ten-year battle, which primarily took...

The Problem of the "Popular" in the New Western History

STEPHEN TATUM The Problem of the "Popular" in the New Western History To see this commercialized vision of the Old Frontier in concrete, threedimensional form, the best place to go is Disneyland in Anaheim, California . When they enter Frontierland, visitors might ask Disneyland employees for directions, but they do not have to ask for a definition of the frontier. The frontier, every tourist knows, was the edge of Anglo-American settlement, the place where white Americans struggled to master the continent. This frontier, as everything in Frontierland confirms, was populated by a colorful and romantic cast of characters—mountain men, cowboys, prospectors, pioneer wives, saloon girls, sheriffs, and outlaws. . . . These images are very well understood. Tourists do not need any assistance in defining Frontierland. Patricia Nelson Limerick, "The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century" (1994) My West is the American West: that fabled land where the restless pioneer moves ever forward, settling one frontier after another; where the American charactet becomes self-reliant, democratic, and endlessly eager for the new; where we strip offthe garments ofcivilization and don a rude buckskin shirt; where millions ofdejected immigrants gadier from around the world to be rejuvenated as Americans, sounding together a manly, wild, barbaric yawp offreedom. That is my West: precisely that and nothing more. "Oh," my colleague [in Chinese studies] ventures, more perplexed now than cantankerous, "you mean 'the West'—the frontier, Indians , Clint Eastwood?" I nod vaguely and sidle off. It is all so hard to convey over a single, polite glass of academic sherry. Donald Worster, Under Western Skies (1992) IN one of the early chapters in his We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher, E. C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott describes Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-16 10 154Stephen Tatum his adventures in 1880 while he worked for the cy Ranch out of Wyoming. Teddy Blue was born in England and grew up in the Lincoln, Nebraska, area where, as a young man being pressured to take up the life of a farmer, he routinely saw Texas cowpunchers and Texas cattle moving north to Wyoming and Montana, following the open range. Unlike his fathers and brothers before him, who did become farmers, and unlike one brother who in Teddy's words "ended up the worst of the lot—a sheepman and a Republican" (29), Teddy Blue left home at the age of eighteen to learn the cowboy way. In the summer of 1880, the then twenty-year-old Teddy Blue was supposed to rendezvous in Cheyenne with a few other cowpunchers and travel to Oregon so as to bring cattle back to stock the cy Ranch. But while waiting for the others to arrive, Teddy Blue met a man who had just come back from Oregon and who complained mightily about the rainy weather that plagued everyday work and travel on the trail. Hearing this news, Teddy Blue and one comrade "quit the layout and went south" (41), heading for New Mexico to work on ranches there after a brief stop in Denver to see the sights. The "sights" for Teddy Blue invariably means saloons and brothels, and on this particular occasion he recalls getting "well lit up" and attending a "hot show" on Blake Street with some other cowpunchers (46). The show they saw was entitled "Poor Nell," a melodrama which featured a scene of a burglar beating his wife to death. One of the drunk cowpunchers, Teddy Blue recalls, had passed out during the performance, but was awakened by noise made by the actor playing the burglar, who would stamp his foot on the floor as he shook his co-star's head, so that it sounded like her head was hitting the floor. Upon being awakened by the noise and seeing the scene before him, this drunk, chivalrous cowpuncher jumped "onto the stage and busted the fellow on the head with his six-gun before he remembered where he was. The woman got up and began to cuss him, all hell broke loose, somebody pulled Bill off the stage, they called for the police, the boys shot out the lights, and...

John Wesley Powell and the Unmaking of the West

Environmental historians have a fondness for the American West, for it is there that the squandering of America's wealth of natural resources is so conspicuous and, by modem standards, so shameful. It is there that the causes of overgrazed ranges, clear-cut forests, wildlife losses, regimented rivers, and mountains of tailings and lakes of toxic sludge are as crystal clear as the azure western sky. There, the sages of the West, from their easy chairs, from their lofty perches above the one-hundredth meridian, and from the besieged gates of the lords of yesterday, decry the sins of private greed, waste, and abuse that was and is, they claim, the unmaking of the West. Who can deny the environmental record of unbridled individualism or question the gallantry of a federal few to save the West from capitalist exploitation? Make no mistake-there was exploitation. Grass was extracted from arid prairies at rates that exceeded the historic harvests of tens of millions of migrating bison. Forests were cut at rates that exceeded the natural periodicity of fire and regeneration. Rivers, wild and choked with salmon, were blocked, stair-stepped, and channeled to make way for a new breed: cultivators and stockmen. Mountains that had taken ages to thrust upward, and then ages more to be sculpted by wind, water, and ice, were deconstructed to their basic elements of rubble. In fact, much of the West has been deconstructed. A generation of insightful and daring historians have dismantled the edifice of myth, the cultural belief that this home on the range of the winsome cowboy somehow steered clear of the ills endemic to the rest of America and stayed true, instead, to its ethos of individualism and its birthright of frontier democracy. But there is a problem, or more accurately a hesitancy. Slash and burn as they might, western historians have shown a stubborn reluctance to dismantle the one icon that is most responsible for the West's environmental undoing: the western hero. By western hero, I do not mean the fictional agents that pass down to us from the ages or the manufactured legends that occasionally grace the cinematic screen, though their ethos shares much in common with what I have in mind. Rather, the heroes I see, the ones who deconstructed the West to stubble, stumps, and stagnant pools, were flesh and blood, mostly male, living but much larger than life. They are the ones who won the West of wise use, the scribes who, in an