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Artistic pieces can be studied from several perspectives, one example being their reception among readers over time. In the present work, we approach this interesting topic from the standpoint of literary works, particularly assessing the task of predicting whether a book will become a best seller. Unlike previous approaches, we focused on the full content of books and considered visualization and classification tasks. We employed visualization for the preliminary exploration of the data structure and properties, involving SemAxis and linear discriminant analyses. To obtain quantitative and more objective results, we employed various classifiers. Such approaches were used along with a dataset containing (i) books published from 1895 to 1923 and consecrated as best sellers by the Publishers Weekly Bestseller Lists and (ii) literary works published in the same period but not being mentioned in that list. Our comparison of methods revealed that the best-achieved result—combining a bag-of-words representation with a logistic regression classifier—led to an average accuracy of 0.75 both for the leave-one-out and 10-fold cross-validations. Such an outcome enhances the difficulty in predicting the success of books with high accuracy, even using the full content of the texts. Nevertheless, our findings provide insights into the factors leading to the relative success of a literary work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Upcycling is conceptualised as a digital historical research practice aimed at increasing the scientific value of historical data collections produced in print or in electronic form between the eighteenth and the late twentieth centuries. The concept of upcycling facilitates data rescue and reuse as well as the study of information creation processes deployed by previous generations of researchers. Design/methodology/approach: Based on a selection of two historical reference works and two legacy collections, an upcycling workflow consisting of three parts (input, processing and documentation and output) is developed. The workflow facilitates the study of historical information creation processes based on paradata analysis and targets the cognitive processes that precede and accompany the creation of historical data collections. Findings: The proposed upcycling workflow furthers the understanding of computational methods and their role in historical research. Through its focus on the information creation processes that precede and accompany historical research, the upcycling workflow contributes to historical data criticism and digital hermeneutics. Originality/value: Many historical data collections produced between the eighteenth and the late twentieth century do not comply with the principles of FAIR data. The paper argues that ignoring the work of previous generations of researchers is not an option, because it would make current research practices more vulnerable and would result in losing access to the experiences and knowledge accumulated by previous generations of scientists. The proposed upcycling workflow takes historical data collections seriously and makes them available for future generations of researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur Ramos (1903-1949) was one of the most important Brazilian anthropologists of the 20th century, not only because of his invaluable contribution to the debate about Afro-Brazilian cultures, but also for his role in the process of institutionalizing Anthropology in Brazil, with emphasis on the foundation in 1941 of the Brazilian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology (BSAE). Despite the growing interest in his intellectual legacy, the efforts of revisiting his work have not been devoted to the process of routinizing his anthropological knowledge, mainly from his work at the National Faculty of Philosophy. I propose in this work to analyze the routinization of anthropological knowledge based on the work of Arthur Ramos as a teacher, starting from the examination of his course plans, orientations for students etc., available for consultation in the collection of the National Library (NL). It is an approach on the history of Brazilian anthropology that seeks to understand it from its teaching, and not simply from the results of the researches developed and the resulting publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the inherently divisive legacy of political (anti)heroes, marketing scholars have paid limited attention to the construction of heroic political profiles and institutions. Accordingly, this study seeks to provide an original and thorough analysis on how two 20th century political (anti)heroes have been manufactured and shaped through early and contemporary forms of marketing practice. Adopting a historical perspective and focussing on the political profiles of Joseph Stalin and Margaret Thatcher, the aim of the paper is threefold. Firstly, we show the involvement of propaganda and marketing practice behind the emergence of heroic profiles and we highlight their impact to the construction of hero institutions. Secondly, we critically discuss the role of State propaganda and marketing forces in the shaping, maintenance and communication of collective heroic discourses aiming to strengthen the ideological underpinnings of these heroic institutions. Finally, we provide novel insights on the underexamined role of marketing practice as agent of social-political change behind the rise of political forces that shape government policy, marketplaces and consumer cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postage stamps are designed to convey messages that reverberate symbolically with broad swaths of the public, and their content has been employed as a window into how members of the public understand the ideas represented therein. In this rhetorical analysis, we analyze Philadelphia's Science History Institute's Witco Stamp Collection, which features 430 stamps from countries around the globe dating from 1910 to 1983, to identify how chemistry is portrayed in this ubiquitous medium. We find the vernacular of science reflected and supported by these images functions to (a) define chemistry in terms of its invisibility and abstraction; (b) uphold chemical operations as instrumental and daedal, or exceptional, in nature; and (c) delineate practitioners of chemistry as—on the whole—privileged and preternatural. Our findings reveal some of the overarching communicative tools made available to twentieth-century non-experts for articulating chemistry as an enterprise and reveal how those tools positioned chemistry in terms of values related to opacity and exclusivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Universitatis Lodziensis: Folia Archaeologica is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Lodzkiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the history of the development a delegate sports federation in France for athletes with physical disabilities during the mid-1900s, and it mentions the French Framework Act Favoring the Disabled, as well as physical rehabilitation, competitive sports, and the creation of the Fédération Sportive des Handicapés Physiques de France in 1963. Founder Philippe Berthe's Amicale Sportive des Mutilés de France club is assessed, along with disability management.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's accent is often used as an illustration of the elite pronunciation heard among the north-eastern US upper classes until roughly the mid 20th century. Known under several names and often considered a mixture of British and American features, this variety is frequently identified with the American Theatre Standard, a norm popularized by acting schools in the early 20th century. Working on the assumption that Roosevelt is an exemplar of the north-eastern standard, the aim of the current study is a preliminary acoustic exploration of his accent with the aim of assessing the plausibility of such comparisons, focusing on the dress, trap, bath, start and lot vowels. Density plots created based on F1 and F2 measured in eight radio speeches were used to examine the relative position of these vowels in the vowel space. Linear mixed-effects regression was then used to model F1 and F2 in selected pairs of vowels to determine whether the differences along the two formant dimensions are significant. The results confirm a conclusion reached in an earlier auditory study (Brandenburg, Braden 1952) according to which Roosevelt's bath was variable between [æ] and a lower and retracted [a], a vowel quality found in Eastern New England and in American Theatre Pronunciation. At the same time, a merged start/lot vowel in Roosevelt's speech makes it unjustified to fully identify his accent with the latter variety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fall of communism in Eastern Europe was one of the most significant and dramatic events in the second half of the 20th century. While it has brought huge improvements in people's lives, it has also led to serious housing shortages, resulting in a severe lack of affordable housing and rapidly rising homelessness. The author discusses the main implications of this and highlights the current situation in two former communist countries. Here he focuses on the approaches taken at a sub-government level, including how communities are working to take control and design and build homes themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are ethnographic photographs from the twentieth century accessed and represented in the twenty-first century? This report from the Tuzin Archive for Melanesian Anthropology at the University of California San Diego Library provides an overview of the photographic materials, arrangements and types of documentation in the archive, followed by summaries of specific digitization projects of the photographs from physician Sylvester Lambert and anthropologists Roger Keesing and Harold Scheffler, among others. Through the process of digitization and online access, ethnographic photographs are transformed and may be discovered and contextualized in new ways. Utilizing new technologies and forming broad collaborations, these digitization projects incorporate both anthropological and archival practices and also raise ethical questions. This is an in-depth look at what is digitized and how it is described to re/create meaning and context and to bring new life to these images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historic photographs are useful for documenting glacier, environmental, and landscape change, and we have digitized a collection of about 1949 images collected during an 1896 expedition to Greenland and trips to Alaska in 1905, 1906, 1909, and 1911, led by Ralph Stockman Tarr and his students at Cornell University. These images are openly available in the public domain through Cornell University Library (http://digital.library.cornell.edu/collections/tarr , last access: 15 March 2020; Tarr and Cornell University Library, 2014, 10.7298/X4M61H5R). The primary research targets of these expeditions were glaciers (there are about 990 photographs of at least 58 named glaciers), but there are also photographs of people, villages, and geomorphological features, including glacial features in the formally glaciated regions of New York state. Some of the glaciers featured in the photographs have retreated significantly in the last century or even completely vanished. The images document terminus positions and ice elevations for many of the glaciers and some glaciers have photographs from multiple viewpoints that may be suitable for ice volume estimation through photogrammetric methods. While some of these photographs have been used in publications in the early 20th century, most of the images are only now widely available for the first time. The digitized collection also includes about 300 lantern slides made from the expedition photographs and other related images and used in classes and public presentations for decades. The archive is searchable by a variety of terms including title, landform type, glacier name, location, and date. The images are of scientific interest for understanding glacier and ecological change; of public policy interest for documenting climate change; of historic and anthropological interest as local people, settlements, and gold-rush era paraphernalia are featured in the images; and of technological interest as the photographic techniques used were cutting edge for their time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid reception of Gregor Mendel’s paper ‘Experiments on plant hybrids’ (1866) in the early decades of the twentieth century remains poorly understood. We will suggest that this reception should not exclusively be investigated as the spread of a theory, but also as the spread of an experimental and computational protocol. Early geneticists used Mendel’s paper, as well as reviews of Mendelian experiments in a variety of other publications, to acquire a unique combination of experimental and mathematical skills. We will analyse annotations in copies of Mendel’s paper itself, in early editions and translations of this paper, and in early textbooks, such as Reginald Punnett’s Mendelism (1905) or Wilhelm Johannsen’s Elemente der exakten Erblichkeitslehre (1909). We will examine how readers used copies of such works to reproduce the logic behind Mendelian experiments, either by recalculating results, or by retracing the underlying combinatorial reasoning. We will place particular emphasis on the emergent role of diagrams in teaching and learning the practice of Mendelian genetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay shows that comparable notions of humanism emerged independently in two twentieth-century scholars, Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982) and George Sarton (1884–1956). They met as young men at Harvard University and found themselves to be compatible thinkers. They both respected the so-called facts of science, perhaps more than theories in science. They saw their task as assembling these facts for a future synthesis. They recognized the diversity of the world's civilizations, and they actively participated in trying to unite scholars of good will. At the end of their lives, they remained optimistic about the future of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses in detail the content of the collection The Zygmunt Haupt Papers, 1907–1976, held in Special Collections at Stanford University Libraries. In particular, it describes the Voice of America broadcasts prepared by the writer, as well as his life and writings, and provides a summary of the research conducted on Haupt. It briefly discusses The Zdzisław Ruszkowski Papers, the supplemental collection linked recently to Haupt's archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how meditation is inculcated throughout the life of Shan Buddhists using poetic phrasing and texts, culminating in several forms of meditation as part of the practice of temple-sleeping undertaken by lay Buddhist seniors from the age of 40 upwards. I look at how the poetic texts, lik loung, that form the basis of temple-sleeping practice, may have shifted in content in the 19th to 20th centuries to focus on meditation topics, in a move parallel to the development of vipassanā in lowland Burma in reaction to the threat colonialism posed to Buddhism. I then document the rise of separate vipassanā meditation centres in Shan regions from the 1930s and their ambiguous status as either representatives of Burmese hegemony or drivers of Shan revival. I note the influence of Shan lik loung on practice at such centres, as well as a more recent development, the uptake of vipassanā within temple-sleeping contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading has always been part of travel, whether by rail, road or ship. This article focusses on the interrelationship between libraries and sea travel, the dominant form of global transport for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While travel diaries and fictional accounts of sea travel are replete with references to shipboard reading, they reveal little about what texts passengers consumed or how they accessed reading material. Drawing on a number of extant catalogues and records of ships' libraries on passenger steamers operating in the Pacific as well as on travellers' accounts, this article considers the provisions and usage of ships' libraries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The catalogues reveal that these libraries on the move provided predominantly topical, bestselling and entertaining fiction, catering to (perceived) demands for distraction and short-term reading pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happened to peoples who felt colonized in post-colonial states? After the Second World War, the formal international order of the United Nations and Cold War political alignments recognized national self-determination as a right, but only saw claims of self-determination within European empires. However, there are hidden stories of anti-colonial claims within post-colonial states, claims that operated through informal networks because they were invisible to international institutions. These networks produced a layer of international relations that took on the issue of minority nationalisms. Through the travelogues and visa difficulties of nationalist claimants from Nagaland in Northeast India and Namibia in Southern Africa, this article makes visible this layer of politics. It considers the peoples for whom 1960s global decolonization did not mean national liberation, the unofficial individuals who spoke for them that were empowered by the UN's inability to do so, and the symbiotic relationship between these two sets of actors. By showing the mutual, yet unequal dependence of nationalists and their advocates, this article argues that certain nationalist claimants achieved forms of pre-independence recognition from advocacy, but that this support came with strings–strings that constrained nationalist claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a first-hand report of a participant and leader of a number of underground initiatives within the “refuseniks’” community which aimed to encourage Jewish studies. These underground initiatives involved seminars (scholarly as well as public), excursions through Jewish historical sites, and the publication of a samizdat journal. In short, these initiatives sought to recover and disseminate knowledge of Jewish history and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Propaganda from the BBC directed at Italy during the Second World War played a dual role. The 'Radio Londra' programmes, on the one hand a propaganda tool of the British government and on the other moral support to many Italians, are part of the cultural heritage of the war. This article explores what topics and types of programme were broadcast during the period of the Allied occupation of Italy (1943-1945) in order to engage the support of different social categories, including ordinary men and women, soldiers, factory workers, former Fascists, and intellectuals. The first part analyses some of the programmes in order to determine their propaganda strategies, while the second part focuses on the letters sent by listeners in Italy to the BBC broadcaster Colonel Stevens. It will be seen how both the use of cultural stereotypes and the attention to the detail of daily life for Italian civilians contributed to the success of the programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, which emphasizes the importance of transnational history, tracks the influence of E. Stanley Jones, a missionary to India in the early twentieth century, on evangelicals in the United States. It contends that global encounters pushed Jones to hold integrated ashrams, conduct evangelistic crusades, and participate in the Congress on Racial Equality. During his time abroad, he discovered that racial segregation at home hurt the causes of missions and democracy abroad. Using this Cold War logic, Jones in turn provoked American evangelicals to consider more fully questions of racial inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the Nanjing Massacre, American figures who remained in Nanjing, or who took an interest in Nanjing's plight despite not being present in the city, produced copious reports, observations, records, and analyses with respect to the events that unfolded, forming highly unique third-party sources on the history of the Nanjing Massacre, and disseminated them across China, Europe, and the United States. The American sources recorded the facts of the massacres, rape, looting, arson, narcotics trafficking, implementation of a "comfort women" system, and other atrocities committed by the Japanese Army, and revealed the actions taken by Japan to conceal its war crimes; their evidentiary value was demonstrated during the war crimes trials in Tokyo and Nanjing. The documents were produced during the course of the Americans' efforts to provide humanitarian aid to Chinese soldiers and civilians, but at the same time, they also reflect these figures' consideration for American interests in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many art practitioners across cultures and over generations, I work in my room. A room serves the function of essential studio space, a space where I can paint, write, read, chant, meditate or do nothing. The notion of “a room of one’s own” brought forth by the writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) in the 1920s is a c­ommon goal among many practitioners in the arts, women in particular. This continues to the present day. In this article, I aim to illustr­ate how my practice is akin to that of women in the West, Paris in particular, at the turn of the twentieth century in the longing for one's private space. The article explores the notion of private space in other, less obvious ways. I also discuss how women in a remote part of China in their own rooms, through the exclusive practice ofnüshu, a set of near-extinct and “secret” writing script, echoed the significance of having their own platform, a creative space in which they could excel. I demonstrate how, through appropriating some characters from the Chinese language with a “female” ideograph andnüshuscript, my drawing acts as a strategy, suggesting that the “edge” of culture could speak. In addition, it attempts to “practice that difference” advocated by the philosopher Luce Irigaray (b. 1930). Working and exhibiting in various spaces, I realize that a room for executing and displaying is a transitional tool. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the role and capabilities of major weapon system transferred between 1950 and 2010 in Great Britain. Topics discussed include empirical examinations of an arms transfer data set that provide exporters an avenue to provide security to other states while gaining economic benefits; economic motivations for arm transfers such as foreign military sales for cash, and the arms are free ; and effect of human rights on U.S. transfers.

Proverbs are concise formulations of folk wisdom and as such, when seen in masses, they may well express the spirit of their time and place. In Hungarian proverbial lore Jews figure prominently in nineteenth-century proverb collections but fade out of such collections as of the mid-twentieth century. In the nineteenth-century proverb collections Jews are invariably portrayed as faithless, dishonest, greedy, physically weak and unattractive. Largely, this portrayal as well as the dynamics of the earlier presence of Jews versus their later disappearance from Hungarian proverb collections match the shared history of Hungarians and Hungarian Jews since the 1867 Emancipation of the country's Jews and possibly even earlier, through their growing integration in significant arenas of their host society, up to their persecution and annihilation in the Holocaust, and later their decade long forced merging into the general Hungarian society under communism. This article traces the occurrence and disappearance of Jews in Hungarian proverb collections throughout the last two centuries and analyzes the language, content and messages of the proverbs about Jews in these collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues for the importance of Kodachrome in stimulating direct 16mm professional film production in the late prewar and early postwar periods. Introduced for amateurs in 1935, Kodachrome became viable for professional work in 1938, when Kodak developed a successful means of duplicating 16mm Kodachrome film for release prints. Despite the traditional preference for 35mm in professional production-even for films destined primarily for 16mm nontheatrical screening-16mm Kodachrome emerged as an attractive and economical alternative for color at a time when fully successful 35mm color derived only from the very costly and cumbersome three-strip Technicolor process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, part of a larger work in progress, uses archives, key secondary sources, and oral histories from participants in the 1970 United States postal wildcat strike for better pay and working conditions to argue that this was a monumental event both unique and representative of the times. It was a rank-and-file effort that began in New York City - with a history of labor militancy - and rapidly spread across the country. The strike defied federal statute outlawing federal employee strikes, and also union leaders who opposed striking. A spike in 1960s hiring of blacks, veterans, women, and young people, combined with established labor unity tradition, a nationwide workplace and long-simmering frustrations produced the strike. But its dual character (both spontaneous and organized by local union officials and activists) allowed it to grow and maintain for eight days with no central coordination. Besides winning a living wage, the strike triggered the transformation of the US Post Office Department into the US Postal Service (USPS) with full collective bargaining rights for postal unions representing its employees. Moreover, it brought rankand- file politics into postal unions while contributing to the increased strength of postal unions, public union organizing, and the labor movement in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how Switzerland maintained its stance of neutrality during the World War II and Cold War. It discusses how its postwar foreign policy did not involve the membership of military alliance like North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and international organization like United Nations (UN). It also points towards other countries specifically Allies criticizing Swiss neutrality and the U.S. criticizing its decision to trade with Nazi Germany.

The best part of a century separates photography's public unveiling in 1839 and its predominance in architectural representation in the first decades of the 1900s. In the intervening decades, as photography laboured to find its place within architecture's representational economy, photographs frequently made their way into print as engravings. Often bearing the caption ‘after a photograph’, such remediated images challenged the ontological distinction between drawings and photographs. Whilst photographs were understood—at least to a certain extent—to be unmediated objects, they required multiple remediations not only to become reproducible in print but also in order to live up to their promise. Engravings from photographs transmitted photography’s supposed guarantee of facticity whilst correcting its perceived flaws; in so doing, they contributed to the discursive construction of photographic objectivity—in another medium. Drawing on a wide range of examples from British and French publications, including popular magazines such as theIllustrated London Newsand professional journals such as theBuilderand theRevue générale,this article argues that by studying engravings made from photographs—with their numerous additions and omissions in the mediatory process—we are better able to understand photography's appeal to architects as a medium than we would be by merely studying photographs. These constructions of idealised photographic images in another medium challenge myths of technological progress, myths that mask the persistent continuity of existing economies of image making. Whilst photography changed the expectation of what a truthful, accurate and useful image should be, extant means were crucial to meeting this new standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the Birth Home that was launched in Southeast Portland in September 1962. Topics discussed include the home being envisioned as a birth center staffed by doctors, midwives and registered nurses as an option for families wishing for hospital birth alternatives, comments on the home's goal from one of its founders, and the closure of the home in 1986 as it was unable to maintain professional liability insurance.

In the early twentieth century, British architects increasingly turned away from the Gothic Revival towards new forms of architectural expression. However, in many key contexts and projects this style continued to evolve. Two architects, John Ninian Comper (1864–1960) and Temple Lushington Moore (1856–1920), were especially invested in medievalism and, more broadly, in the richness of architectural revivalism. Both worked in different ways within this set of practices in order to demonstrate revivalism's wide appeal for modern culture, and for sacred spaces in particular. This article compares two Church of England chapels that have received very little art historical attention, but which are linked in a series of ways. Moore's chapel for Pusey House in Oxford was completed in 1914, with additions by Comper in the 1930s. The chapel for the Anglican convent at London Colney in Hertfordshire, established by All Saints Sisters of the Poor, was designed by Comper in the 1920s and extended by his son Sebastian Comper in the 1960s. In both cases, historicism and revivalism in architecture and design heralded not a conservative return to previous generations' experiences of religion and of Anglicanism in particular, but a new way forward in liturgical ritual, social cohesion, and multisensory experiences of the sacred. In both cases, I argue, the connection between the visual cultural legacies of High Anglicanism following the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century, and the unique characteristics of small-scale intimate worship in the all-male context of Pusey House and all-female context of London Colney, created new and intensive zones for revivalist monasticism that were as medievalist as they were modern. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is the second in a two-part series exploring the development of the early history of information technologies, from the 1940s to the present. This article describes the evolving information infrastructure used by historians in support of their research on the history of computing and of the role of IT practitioners, computer executives, scientists, and universities in creating that support since the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses a historical controversy over the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's standard of identity for peanut butter as a site for investigating three topics of high importance for historians of technology, consumption, and food activism: how new industrial food-processing technologies have become regulatory problems; how government, industry, and consumer actors negotiate standards development; and how laypeople try to shape technological artifacts in spaces dominated by experts. It examines the trajectory of consumer activist Ruth Desmond, co-founder of the organization the Federation of Homemakers. By following Desmond's evolving strategies, the article shows how the broader currents of the 1960s-70s consumer movement played out in a particular case. Initially Desmond used a traditional style that heavily emphasized her gendered identity, working within a grassroots organization to promote legislative and regulatory reforms. Later, she moved to a more modern advocacy approach, using adversarial legal methods to fight for consumer protections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses research involving the docket books that are associated with then-U.S. Supreme Court (USSC) Chief Justice William Howard Taft's tenure as the leader of the nation's highest court during the twentieth century, and it mentions how each docket book contains the votes that each U.S. Supreme Court Justice cast when the American judges met to discuss legal cases in conference. USSC litigation involving issues such as American civil rights and criminal procedure is examined.

The article evaluates the architectural designs of the skyscrapers from the Edwardian period in Toronto, Ontario including city court, temple building and a historical landmark building, called as Rookery Building.

An essay is presented which discusses the African American itinerant bookseller and editor Kathryn Magnolia Johnson's activism from the 1910s through the 1950s, including her efforts to increase membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). An overview of Johnson's efforts to promote reading among African Americans, including to increase their racial pride and to have knowledge of their history, is provided.

Felix Candela’s hyperbolic paraboloid reinforced concrete structures - also known as hypars - were not only masterly used in his well-known religious buildings but they were also ingeniously and profusely employed to roof a vast number of industrial buildings during the Mexican industrialisation era. Candela’s inverted hypar shells prototype for industrial buildings became a trademark for a systematic and standardised construction method which crossed the Mexican borders to reach and influence the work of other architects and engineers further afield. In the United Kingdom this is exemplified by the John Lewis Warehouse (JLW) at Stevenage in which Candela worked as co-designer and consultant of the post-War architectural firm Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall (YRM) and the engineers Clarke Nicholls and Marcel.The JLW represents a unique structure in the repertoire of Candela’s work outside Mexico for two main reasons. Firstly, it stands as Candela’s first European project and secondly it represents a structure in which ‘automatic beauty’ was achieved through economic efficiency and the use of more sophisticated construction methods than those conventionally used in Mexico. Moreover, and beyond its structural and constructional merits the JLW yields a spatial richness which transformed the ephemeral of the working day to forge spaces of mnemonic identification. Built in 1963, the JLW is an epitome of structural art amongst the industrial buildings of Britain's post-Austerity period. Candela’s first European project is analysed not only in terms of its structural and constructional merits but also in relation to its spatial poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the early 1970s, as New York City was in an economic and social downfall, a vibrant downtown arts scene emerged in downtown Manhattan south of 14th Street. The scene's development is often attributed to the neighbourhood's at-the-time inexpensive rent, which permitted artists to live, work, and exhibit with low overhead. This article maintains that the scene's development was also contingent on the growing availability of a new medium: the copy machine. While xerographic copiers had been staples in office culture for 15 years, they were newly available to the general public in the early 1970s. This article examines how copy machines were used by artists and writers to produce and distribute works, to promote upcoming gigs of all kinds from drag shows to punk shows, and, eventually, to facilitate the downtown scene's migration into the suburbs and beyond through the production of mobile texts, including zines and mail art. Finally, this article asserts that as a media technology that is at once capable of intensifying the local and developing and sustaining non-local networks, copy machines were and remain uniquely situated to accommodate the inherent tensions and contradictions that define scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 100th Anniversary of the Second Battle of Ypres was marked with Royal Attendance of a remembrance ceremony and, perhaps more importantly to most Canadians, a "shout-out" to the battle given by Don Cherry on Coach's Corner. The ways in which this battle has been remembered and written about have shifted significantly in the last 100 years, and this paper attempts to chart some of the ways in which it has been understood by scholars and soldiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the efforts of the Alabama newspapers to promote the development of roads throughout Alabama by the Alabama Good Roads Association (AGRA) and the Alabama Highway Commission in 1911 and 1912. Other topics include the history of the Good Roads movement and its opposition since 1880, the efforts of newspaper promotion to secure funding for road building, and the efforts to include proposed roads on the 1913 Alabama road map.

Copyright of International Journal of Canadian Studies is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Transnational insurgents are a common feature of contemporary wars, but research on how to address this problem is still scarce. This article examines the South African Defence Force's (SADF) counterinsurgency against Namibian transnational insurgents. It concludes that the South African forces focused a large amount of their efforts outside the borders of Namibia. Highly coercive operations in Angola and Zambia created the space for hearts and minds activities in Namibia, as well as forcing neighboring states to end their support for the insurgents. Although the war in Namibia is somewhat different from contemporary wars, SADF's cross-border strategy gives us some important insights into the regional dynamics of civil wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1918, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) partnered with libraries to develop International Mind Alcove collections in the United States and abroad. These collections aimed to help put an end to war by encouraging international understanding and developing cosmopolitan perspectives across the globe. During the programme's forty-year history, the alcoves grew from a group of small informal collections to a well-funded and highly organized operation. As the programme evolved, it utilized libraries, books, and the media to advocate for internationalism, educate the public about other nations, and instil cross-cultural understanding in children before they became embroiled in political controversy. The Mind Alcove programme and the work of librarians in its creation represents a significant episode in library history, placing the library profession within the early twentieth-century development of international organizations and global information networks that are the forerunners of contemporary international non-governmental organizations and global social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the dance performance piece "Adelante!" by Helen Tamiris. According to the author, the dance's aesthetics, dramaturgy, and historiographical characteristics were influenced by artist Francisco de Goya's series of etchings "Disasters of War". It is suggested that Tamiris used Iberian Jewish history to call for U.S. action against fascist anti-semitism. Other topics include democracy, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, and nationalism.

Language is one of the central metaphors around which the discipline of computer science has been built. The language metaphor entered modern computing as part of a cybernetic discourse, but during the second half of the 1950s acquired a more abstract meaning, closely related to the formal languages of logic and linguistics. The article argues that this transformation was related to the appearance of the commercial computer in the mid- 1950s. Managers of computing installations and specialists on computer programming in academic computer centers, confronted with an increasing variety of machines, called for the creation of "common" or "universal languages" to enable the migration of computer code from machine to machine. Finally, the article shows how the idea of a universal language was a decisive step in the emergence of programming languages, in the recognition of computer programming as a proper field of knowledge, and eventually in the way we think of the computer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented that discusses the significance of former U.S. vice president Spiro T. Agnew during the administration of former U.S. president Richard Nixon, in addition to the political strength of what the author calls the conservative New Right in the U.S. It examines Agnew's impact on the appeal of the Republican Party to suburban Americans, his impact on U.S. political discourse, and his political reputation. It also examines Agnew's governorship of Maryland, stances on civil rights, and rhetoric.