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Historical markers offer important insights into the portrayal of place, social dynamics, and untold narratives within various landscapes. The vast collection of over 195,000 historical markers scattered throughout the United States provide a wealth of data that can shed light on distinctive representation patterns and narratives associated with different individuals and events. Yet, only a few studies examined historical markers as a valuable data source. The goal of this study is to investigate how Texas women are commemorated through historical markers and to uncover the spatial and temporal patterns and contexts associated with these commemorations. We utilize qualitative GIS method and a suite of corpus linguistics techniques to analyze the spatial, temporal, and thematic patterns of the historical markers in Texas that are dedicated to women. Our findings address the existing gender imbalance and shed light on the underrepresentation of women in Texas' historical narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines patterns of disaster commemoration in Texas as witnessed in 1,590 markers erected by the state between 1936 and 2019. In the first half of the analysis, we highlight spatiotemporal trends of commemoration, which focus on a few well-known historic disasters that occurred between 1875 and 1916. From a spatial perspective, markers concentrate in the coastal cities of Galveston, Houston, and Corpus Christi, but no discernible temporal patterns emerge concerning the timing of commemoration—that is, when a marker is erected. After looking at the when and where of commemoration, in the second part of the analysis we look at how each disaster term is described in the text of the markers. Here, the narrative is one of initial destruction quickly followed by recovery and the reestablishment of communities. We also note how the selective nature of commemoration extends to disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban spatial segregation in Santiago de Chile, a prevalent feature of Latin American cities, underscores socioeconomic disparities and shapes the city's socio-spatial dynamics. This segregation, driven by land prices and private ownership, has pushed disadvantaged groups to the periphery and limited their access to desirable areas reserved for wealthier segments of society. Quebrada Macul Park, situated within this segregated urban landscape, serves as an emblematic case that challenges and expands the classical definition of urban segregation. It exemplifies the complex negotiations over space utilization among social groups, defined by socioeconomic, generational, and interest-based differences. This study employs micro-segregation studies in a broad sense, both as a conceptual framework and as a methodological tool to analyze these dynamics. Through qualitative methodologies, including six in-depth interviews with diverse stakeholders (social and ecological activists, longtime residents, and park employees) and five participant observations, the research investigates the varied uses and meanings attributed to the park. The findings reveal that the park's evolution from a space frequented by low-income dwellers to a diverse metropolitan park has sparked debates over its public versus private character, mirroring the power struggles among distinct social factions. The park serves as a profound identity marker for its historical inhabitants, who initially fought for the right to use it and today experience nostalgia due to its widespread popularity. Meanwhile, the struggle to establish the park as a public space challenges the city's segregation dynamics and might promote social cohesion within urban natural environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the centuries, the depths of the most severe storm surges that have flooded Venice have been measured using different reference frames, i.e., related to the algae belt (CM), mean sea level (MSL), local land (ZMPS), large-scale leveling (IGM), and satellite altimetry (SA). Some reference frames, i.e., IGM and SA, are absolute, while the others are relative and represent two different physical points of view, i.e., CM and MSL refer to the sea that is rising and ZMPS refers to the land that is subsiding. The perceptions derived from the different systems are contradictory. This paper discusses and compares surges from 1821 to 2021 measured with these frames, also including the commemorative plaques that report the flood depths on walls in Venice. The paper explains the consequences of a change in frame and zero reference, and it transforms the flooding depths from the original systems to make them homogeneous. The severity of flooding changes in terms of rating with the choice of frame. In the 19th century, five storm surges exceeded the famous level of 1966 and, if they were to recur today or in the future, the sea level rise and the local land subsidence that have occurred in the meantime would greatly exacerbate the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just like an army of ants caught in an ant mill, individuals, groups and even whole societies are sometimes caught up in a Death Spiral, a vicious cycle of self-reinforcing dysfunctional behavior characterized by continuous flawed decision making, myopic single-minded focus on one (set of) solution(s), denial, distrust, micromanagement, dogmatic thinking and learned helplessness. We propose the term Death Spiral Effect to describe this difficult-to-break downward spiral of societal decline. Specifically, in the current theory-building review we aim to: (a) more clearly define and describe the Death Spiral Effect; (b) model the downward spiral of societal decline as well as an upward spiral; (c) describe how and why individuals, groups and even society at large might be caught up in a Death Spiral; and (d) offer a positive way forward in terms of evidence-based solutions to escape the Death Spiral Effect. Management theory hints on the occurrence of this phenomenon and offers turn-around leadership as solution. On a societal level strengthening of democracy may be important. Prior research indicates that historically, two key factors trigger this type of societal decline: rising inequalities creating an upper layer of elites and a lower layer of masses; and dwindling (access to) resources. Historical key markers of societal decline are a steep increase in inequalities, government overreach, over-integration (interdependencies in networks) and a rapidly decreasing trust in institutions and resulting collapse of legitimacy. Important issues that we aim to shed light on are the behavioral underpinnings of decline, as well as the question if and how societal decline can be reversed. We explore the extension of these theories from the company/organization level to the society level, and make use of insights from both micro-, meso-, and macro-level theories (e.g., Complex Adaptive Systems and collapsology, the study of the risks of collapse of industrial civilization) to explain this process of societal demise. Our review furthermore draws on theories such as Social Safety Theory, Conservation of Resources Theory, and management theories that describe the decline and fall of groups, companies and societies, as well as offer ways to reverse this trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complejo Conejo is a Chilean design and performance collective that creates projects in public spaces, exploring concepts such as absurdity and masking. Their performances involve multiple performers wearing costumes that embody simple and absurd concepts, creating a walking idea that can be interpreted in multiple ways. The collective redefines spaces and daily traffic actions, providing an ephemeral spectacle to passers-by. Their recent performances involve performers imitating the movements of passers-by and exploring human creations in public spaces. The costumes are designed to subtract identity and create a crew, with the performers' skin completely covered until the end of the show. The collective's approach to costume design and performance comes from their participation in a walking exhibition in 2015, allowing them to explore the performativity of costumes in public spaces. The document discusses the costume design process of Complejo Conejo, emphasizing the importance of diversity in the costumes and the communication between the costumes and the diverse bodies in public spaces. [Extracted from the article]

In this article we explore the text of the over 16,000 historical markers erected in the state since 1936, using GIS and corpus linguistics to determine the where, how, what, and when of how Texas memorializes its racial and ethnic groups. Unsurprisingly, our results indicate that the story of Texas is implicitly a narrative of white people. More interestingly, the term “African (Americans)” begins to be commemorated especially after the 1990s, but only in stories of community, religion, school, and children, as Texas historical markers do not to dwell on narratives of slavery, the civil rights movement, and lynchings. “Indians” and “Mexicans” in the 1930s and 1960s exemplify the most egregious case of derogatory semantics we found in the markers. As concerns racial and ethnic groups, in general they tend to be memorialized where they were historically present, whether or not such groups are still there. The analysis also reveals the increasing concentration of the markers in urban areas.

In this article we explore the text of the over 16,000 historical markers erected in the state since 1936, using GIS and corpus linguistics to determine the where, how, what, and when of how Texas memorializes its racial and ethnic groups. Unsurprisingly, our results indicate that the story of Texas is implicitly a narrative of white people. More interestingly, the term "African (Americans)" begins to be commemorated especially after the 1990s, but only in stories of community, religion, school, and children, as Texas historical markers do not to dwell on narratives of slavery, the civil rights movement, and lynchings. "Indians" and "Mexicans" in the 1930s and 1960s exemplify the most egregious case of derogatory semantics we found in the markers. As concerns racial and ethnic groups, in general they tend to be memorialized where they were historically present, whether or not such groups are still there. The analysis also reveals the increasing concentration of the markers in urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa has a colonial and apartheid past of social injustice, epistemological oppression, and exclusion. These mechanisms are historically inscribed in the designs, practices, and content of higher education—including in occupational therapy curriculum. If these historical markers are not consciously interrogated, patterns of reproduction are reified along the fault lines that already exist in society. The focus of this article is to demonstrate how an archaeological Foucauldian method was crafted from foundational Foucauldian archaeology analytics and existing approaches of Foucauldian discourse analysis to unearth the rules of the formation of the occupational therapy profession. These rules pertain to the formation of (a) the 'ideal occupational therapist'; (b) who had a say about the profession; (c) the ways of preferred reasoning; and (d) underlying theoretical themes and perspectives about the future. Data sources for this archaeology analytics included commemorative documents of universities on the origin of their programmes; historical regulatory documents; and the South African Journal of Occupational Therapy archive from the period 1953–1994. The analysis rendered two subthemes for each of the rules of formation including 'white exceptionalism', white male national, and international, regulatory bodies, the profession's know-how practical knowledge, and its need for recognition within a bio-medical paradigm. Unearthing the historical markers of a curriculum and viewing it as discourse may enable a conscious reconfiguration thereof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lussari is a Marian sanctuary located at the eastern end of the Alpine arc, attracting Italian, Austrian, and predominantly Slovenian pilgrims for the past six centuries. Hiking, religious tourism, and pilgrimage expose local residents and foreign visitors to a direct experience of the symbolic dimension of the Alpine mountain. This research was based on participant observation during the Pilgrim's Path, the ascent to the Hunter's Peaks, and the visit to the sanctuary on the heights of Lussari. It included interviews with visitors, pilgrims, and locals; photographic documentation of ritual settings -summit crosses, chapels, Stations of the Cross, etc.-; readings from the summit book and the book of intentions in the temple; interpretation of ex-votos, offerings, and commemorative plaques; and documentation such as photographic records and field notes. The analysis focused on the symbolic dimension of the high-altitude landscape, considering the conceptual framework provided by Edwin Bernbaum for the study of sacred mountains, as well as that of classical authors in religious anthropology, including Victor Turner and Mircea Eliade, among others. As a result of the investigative work, it is interpreted that the high-altitude sanctuary of Monte Lussari gathers devotees concerned with human fertility, health, and family and social ties traditionally cultivated in this scenic corner of the Julian Alps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On August 21, 2022, more than 100 individuals from at least nine different states gathered at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia. Each of the three major eye care professions in the United States was amply represented. The occasion was to celebrate the contributions of John McAllister, Sr. and his descendants, whose early efforts led to the advancement of scientific knowledge, and to the evolution of eye care in the United States. John McAllister is widely regarded as the father (or grandfather) of optometry, since his work and the work of his progeny led to the beginning of optometry as an independent profession. The highlight of the event was the dedication of a historical marker honoring the ophthalmic legacy of the McAllister Family. The marker is situated in Old Town Philadelphia, very near where John’s original optical shoppe was located. The three eye care professions— opticianry, ophthalmology, and optometry—worked hand in hand to make this remarkable achievement possible. This paper tells the story of how and why it all came about. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the textual politics of how Indigenous peoples and Indigenous/settler relations are portrayed by the state-sponsored historic marker program in Kansas. Before statehood, the land that became Kansas was home to several Indigenous nations, including Pawnee, Kansa, Osage, and Cheyenne. It then became part of Indian Territory in 1834 and received additional peoples dispossessed from their eastern homelands. Only two decades later, the newly organized Kansas Territory hosted a series of treaties that forcibly removed these groups into what is now Oklahoma. The Kansas Historical Markers program commemorates this history through several of its 120 textual markers along the state’s highways. Using a methodology focused on textual politics as memory work, this paper uses these markers to analyze how public forms of historical memory commemorate Indigenous peoples and their dispossession by the settler colonial state. While some markers include Indigenous struggles with the state, others utilize texts that reinforce settler colonial attitudes by excluding Indigenous heritage in exchange for those that focus on colonial narratives of Manifest Destiny and economic development. A significant edit of 34 markers in 2010 shows if an anti-colonial process of public engagement in memory work can uncover previously obfuscated and excluded historical geographies and produce a more socially just memorial landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the music which is an extremely immaterial medium as it is only possible to directly communicate with music and through music at the moment of performance. Topics include considered the indirect communication happens through symbols, and the most obvious example of this is musical notation suggest how music sounds.

Human‐assisted movement has allowed the Asian longhorned beetle (ALB, Anoplophora glabripennis (Motschulsky)) to spread beyond its native range and become a globally regulated invasive pest. Within its native range of China and the Korean peninsula, human‐mediated dispersal has also caused cryptic translocation of insects, resulting in population structure complexity. Previous studies used genetic methods to detangle this complexity but were unable to clearly delimit native populations which is needed to develop downstream biosurveillance tools. We used genome‐wide markers to define historical population structure in native ALB populations and contemporary movement between regions. We used genotyping‐by‐sequencing to generate 6102 single‐nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and amplicon sequencing to genotype 53 microsatellites. In total, we genotyped 712 individuals from ALB's native distribution. We observed six distinct population clusters among native ALB populations, with a clear delineation between northern and southern groups. Most of the individuals from South Korea were distinct from populations in China. Our results also indicate historical divergence among populations and suggest limited large‐scale admixture, but we did identify a restricted number of cases of contemporary movement between regions. We identified SNPs under selection and describe a clinal allele frequency pattern in a missense variant associated with glycerol kinase, an important enzyme in the utilization of an insect cryoprotectant. We further demonstrate that small numbers of SNPs can assign individuals to geographic regions with high probability, paving the way for novel ALB biosurveillance tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the French Revolution (1789) and the outbreak of the Springtime of the Peoples (1848), European economic thought debated between the defense of protected markets and the proper opening of capitalist markets. In this paper, we address this process specifically in the framework of the German intellectual scene, from the bibliographic debates of the time, as a historical marker for a more complete understanding of the Hegelian conceptualization of political economy, its scope, limitations, and projections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines the aesthetic features of Sabry Musa's Lord of the Spinach Field (1987) through Karl-Heinz Bohrer's "Utopia of the Subject" to foreground Homo's quest for a wished-for yet unattainable reality. Post-Colonial Utopianism depicts man's inner turmoil to force an act of willful rethinking to enhance the "anticipatory consciousness" of a better life, a point interrogated within Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope to propose the concept of the "Not-Yet-Become": the not realized futuristic reality. Therefore, the interest is in utopia/dystopia historicities as analytical markers of historical inquiry to analyze specific space/time coordinates; post-colonial pitfalls of a technoscience dystopia. As such, the remarkable characteristic of Post-Colonial Utopianism is critique, and "Subjective Utopia" strives to achieve a breach in the teleological ideology of historical structures; thereby, transformation is the central aesthetic strategy of post-colonial critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban transformation of the Mediterranean coast constitutes a critical historical phenomenon. Especially representative is the process that took place in Spain in the latter years of Francisco Franco's regime (1959–1975). Tourism, alongside foreign investment and emigration, were the drivers behind Spain's economic miracle, paving the way towards a successful democratic transition. Although a topic of primary interest, this latter period has generally been overlooked by academics. The article presents a spatial history that explores the characteristics of Franco's economic and development policies, and their impact on Spain's geography. It demonstrates how the coastline developed into a discontinuous landscape, made up of a collection of self-sufficient complexes. New tourist centers, historical markers structuring the coastal corridor, altered the character of the landscape. The research provides a missing dimension to Spanish historiographies of this period, lending perspective to broader debates on historical geography, and, more generally, to the dynamics of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ghetto bench (1937) is emblematic of the process by which antisemitism was legalized and institutionalized in the interwar Republic of Poland (1918-1939). This text focuses on the failure to include this knowledge in the mainstream narrative, a problem which continues to this day. The lack of an integrated history results from a lack of condemnation, and from the fact that the dominant majority has not broken away from the framework of assumptions of concealed processes and events. After 1989, these assumptions have been additionally celebrated in the cult of interwar Polish statehood. The collision of the Polish dominant culture with the liberal-democratic formal-legal framework produced the collapse of liberal democracy in Poland (2015). This text thus questions the location of the ghetto bench and its cultural representations in the field of memory studies. By pointing to the current stakes of the discourse on Polish antisemitism, the author calls for a revision of socio-cultural norms which means socio-cultural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore the historical markers in the novel The portrait painter, by the writer Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil, and their significance. We examine how such markers are organized in such a manner as to reveal the characteristics of the new historical novel. They do so by representing various expressions of historical transition from the Old to the New World and from the 19th to the 20th century, specifically the changes brought on by the Second Industrial Revolution. Overlapping this context, we move alongside protagonist Sandro Lanari in his personal transition as he journeys chronologically, geographically and psychologically towards maturity. Finally, we appreciate how the historical commentary also mirrors, in metafictional fashion, the transition of the novel as genre and of the author's literary body of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economists have used historical heights as markers of health, living standards, and long-run development. Although possible selection bias has been debated, height measurement error is less studied. I analyze novel administrative data of male Indian indentured laborers with repeated measurements of adult height to answer an important underlying question of precision. Laborers were measured by British colonial officials on departure in India and again several years later when opting to return to India. I find no height differences for men who had attained full height in India. Younger men continued to grow even into their twenties. A caste subgroup analysis finds mostly similar results. This paper provides some of the first evidence showing height consistency in repeated measurements of adult heights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To mark history, governments authorize the erecting of markers, signs on the landscape meant to inform. While historical markers have a long tradition for identifying places with significant events and people, there has been an expansion on what and how to mark places and their heritage. Signs capture the attention and provide information for those interested in learning about where they are at the moment. They are in-situ teaching tools, open to anyone able to interpret the heritage for broad audiences, and can encourage places for cosmopolitanism, canopies for people to learn about the past and each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Egyptian presence in the Southern Levant during the Late Bronze Age is to be considered as rooted and capillary on the territory. Nevertheless, by excluding some written sources as the Letters of el-Amarna, it is practically impossible to evaluate local perceptions and representations of who populated the region during this period. In fact, Southern Levant presents an extreme lack of human depictions and iconographies, thus Egyptian direct witnesses become very useful to provide a vivid picture of society and its prominent historical protagonists. "Asiatics" depictions on reliefs, paintings and Egyptian artifacts, give us a quite punctual idea of who the Levantines were and what they wore during this period. The paper means to focus on the analysis of the personal ornaments by which "Asians" are identified and represented, as well as on the function of ethnic, cultural and identity markers these items represent in the depictions. An iconographic and stylistic analysis will try to show the association between images and objects through material culture findings in and extra context, though bearing in mind the asymmetric vision the Egyptians had in perceiving themselves and representing other people, sometimes far more distant than it appeared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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