Stefan Brönnimann
Stefan Brönnimann
Institution: Institute of Geography and Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern,
Email: stefan.broennimann@giub.unibe.ch
Historical reanalyses have become a widely used resource for analyzing weather and climate processes and their changes over time. In this article I explore how further historical observations could support reanalyses and lead to products that reach further back in time or have a better quality. Usin...
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Historical reanalyses have become a widely used resource for analyzing weather and climate processes and their changes over time. In this article I explore how further historical observations could support reanalyses and lead to products that reach further back in time or have a better quality. Using an off-line Ensemble Kalman Filter I estimate improvements arising from assimilating additional observations into the ensemble of the “Twentieth Century Reanalysis” Version 3 (20CRv3). I demonstrate this for three case studies and evaluate them using independent data and a leave-one-out approach. For Europe in 1807, assimilating additional pressure data improves the skill for pressure but slightly decreases it for temperature, while assimilating temperature data, a variable that is not assimilated in 20CRv3, improves the skill for temperature but slightly decreases it for pressure. Assimilating both leads to substantially increased skill in a leave-one-out approach. For Sub-Saharan Africa in 1877/78, assimilating ship-based pressure observations as well as land station data, albeit extremely sparse, leads to a slight improvement over the entire domain. Finally, for Europe in 1926/27, assimilating upper air and total column ozone observations both lead to improvements in geopotential height and wind in the middle troposphere and in total column ozone, but with little or no effect in the lower troposphere. This is because 20CRv3 is already close to perfect over Europe in this period. The article shows how additional observations could improve historical reanalyses. A backward extension to the 1780s seems possible, but further data rescue efforts are necessary. For some applications, improved fields as generated by the offline assimilation presented in this study could be useful.
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Posted 1 year ago
Duaa Mohammed Alashari
Duaa Mohammed Alashari
Institution: Postgraduate student of Islamic Civilization, Faculty of Islamic Civilization, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia,
Email: duaa1983@graduate.utm.my
Art is constantly inspired by what happens in its social and cultural context. The arts cannot be separated from life and the significant events in the world, whether it is a war, a natural disaster, or the spread of a disease an epidemic. Today, the whole world is witnessing the Coronavirus (Covid-...
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Art is constantly inspired by what happens in its social and cultural context. The arts cannot be separated from life and the significant events in the world, whether it is a war, a natural disaster, or the spread of a disease an epidemic. Today, the whole world is witnessing the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, one of the worst in human history. The current scene has taken hold of artwork and the visual arts. The spread of the virus has inspired many artists to produce paintings, posters and artwork. This study aims to reveal the role and importance of Arab artists regarding the message they present regarding the situation at hand. In this study, the qualitative data was amassed as part of the methodology. The qualitative descriptive method and the case study approach are the primary approaches for the data collection. The results section focuses on the answers obtained from Arab artists through their artwork. It is held via a virtual exhibition. The discussion section focuses on a detailed analysis of the paintings. The study results concluded that art is a kind of documentation of all of the events that happen to humans. Art is a record of historical events, so it is a bright spot in times of crisis and darkness. Through these paintings, Arab artists have provided a light to those who feel gloomy in these difficult times, indicating that those in the Arab world focus on the unity of place, language and religion. Therefore, this artistic movement moves between all its countries so that no matter how harsh the situation, people will remain unified.
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Posted 1 year ago
Abstract In the summer of 1894, Claud Cardew, then at British Central Africa, asked his brother in England to send him a violin. In tracing the violin's trajectory from metropole to colony, this article combines two inquiries. It probes, firstly, the emotional vocabulary surrounding Claud's request,...
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Abstract In the summer of 1894, Claud Cardew, then at British Central Africa, asked his brother in England to send him a violin. In tracing the violin's trajectory from metropole to colony, this article combines two inquiries. It probes, firstly, the emotional vocabulary surrounding Claud's request, and secondly, the technology underpinning the British Empire mail. Closely reading the Cardew family letters alongside postal documents, the author argues that for Claud, the violin's delayed arrival triggered a tangled nexus of anxieties, stemming from both the colonial racial hierarchy and the changing expectations surrounding modern technology. Much like the cultural connotations carried by the violin itself, efficient mail delivery denoted racial superiority. Furthermore, the empire mail gained significance in the minds of British users for its racially loaded function as potentially mitigating colonizers’ anxiety in the face of outnumbering locals. Yet the violin's failure to arrive when expected led to mounting anxiety, as claims for colonizers’ dominance cracked in the face of unstable postal communications. The story of Claud Cardew's violin thus offers a framework that may be used to unravel similar emotional entanglements surrounding Western technologies set to work within empire.
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Posted 1 year ago
In the summer of 1780, anti-Catholic riots led by Lord George Gordon in London left hundreds dead and stretches of the city burnt and destroyed. Eighteen months later, during a tense period in the city's history, London was invaded by brown-tail moth caterpillars. The metropolis and surrounding coun...
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In the summer of 1780, anti-Catholic riots led by Lord George Gordon in London left hundreds dead and stretches of the city burnt and destroyed. Eighteen months later, during a tense period in the city's history, London was invaded by brown-tail moth caterpillars. The metropolis and surrounding countryside disappeared behind the tents and nests of the insects, prompting widespread fear of famine and plague. With the memory of the riots still fresh, philanthropists such as Jonas Hanway and entomologists like William Curtis sought to assuage the public's fear, insisting that the brown-tail moth outbreak was part of the normal operations of nature, that the infestation bore no danger to the public, and that efforts to alarm the public or describe them as dangerous were contemptuous. At the same time, the conjurer and philosopher Gustavus Katterfelto, performing in the city, sought to profit from the public agitation, developing spectacles and performances that promised the insects would soon deliver famine, plague, and ruin on the city. This article examines the intersection of scientific authority, public fear, and performance, showing that the outbreak placed tremendous stress on the relationship between scientific authority and security in the metropolis.
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Posted 1 year ago
Jonathan Baldo
Jonathan Baldo
Institution: Department of Humanities, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, 26 Gibbs Street,
Email: jbaldo@esm.rochester.edu
Indirectly addressing the authorship question in the anonymous The Reign of King Edward III, this paper focuses on a signature of Shakespeare’s treatment of English history, a concern with the political implications of remembering and forgetting. Multiple ironies attend the unstable relation of re...
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Indirectly addressing the authorship question in the anonymous The Reign of King Edward III, this paper focuses on a signature of Shakespeare’s treatment of English history, a concern with the political implications of remembering and forgetting. Multiple ironies attend the unstable relation of remembering and forgetting in the play. The opening of Edward III gives the impression that England’s forgetful enemies, Scotland and France, require schooling by a nation that appears to own memory. However, initial appearances prove to be deceiving, as three early Shakespearean scenes prominently feature lapses of English memory, causing the early alignment of England with faithful memory to slip away. There are traces of a distinctly Shakespearean approach to history—one that interrogates the mixed effects of historical memory itself and the values commonly assigned to remembering and forgetting—in The Reign of King Edward III. A consideration of the scenes that share the practice of Shakespeare’s histories—of not simply reviving the past but also reflecting on the motivations and conflicts associated with recollection—accords well with previous attributions of those scenes to Shakespeare on stylistic grounds.
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Posted 1 year ago
Timothy J. Minchin
Timothy J. Minchin
Institution: La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Email: t.minchin@latrobe.edu.au
On 15 September 1970, over 400,000 workers struck General Motors (GM), the biggest corporation in the world. It was a massive walkout, lasting sixty-seven days and affecting 145 GM plants in the US and Canada. GM lost more than $1 billion in profits, and the impact on the US economy was considerable...
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On 15 September 1970, over 400,000 workers struck General Motors (GM), the biggest corporation in the world. It was a massive walkout, lasting sixty-seven days and affecting 145 GM plants in the US and Canada. GM lost more than $1 billion in profits, and the impact on the US economy was considerable. Despite the strike's size, it has been understudied. Fifty years later, this article provides a re-assessment of this landmark dispute, the first to use detailed archival records of the strike. Refuting claims that the strike lacked drama, I argue that this was a multifaceted – and compelling – story. Primary sources show that workers and union leaders were heavily invested in the battle, which reflected deep-seated local, national, and global issues. The United Automobile Workers (UAW) mobilized significant levels of national and international support, and won a range of concessions, including substantial wage and benefit increases and the ability for workers to retire after thirty years’ service. The strike was deeply infused by local issues and should not just be viewed through the lens of the national GM–UAW relationship. In a broader context, the strike is also important because it occurred at a time of rising global labour militancy, which scholars are increasingly recognizing. Its story contributes to a growing body of literature on the 1970s, a decade that witnessed important activism in many areas.
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Posted 1 year ago
Riedno Graal Taliawo
Riedno Graal Taliawo
Institution: n Political Science, University of Indonesia
Email: riednograal@gmail.com
The Indonesianization of Papua project, which has been going on since 1963, has not yet reached the ideal stage. The rise of the post-2000s separatist movement indicates a need to re-read the relationship between Indonesia and West Papua, an examination of past and current events. This study aims to...
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The Indonesianization of Papua project, which has been going on since 1963, has not yet reached the ideal stage. The rise of the post-2000s separatist movement indicates a need to re-read the relationship between Indonesia and West Papua, an examination of past and current events. This study aims to examine the dynamics of Indonesia's attitude and policy towards West Papua, the discourse, and the tension between Indonesia and the Papua freedom movement. This study uses a historical approach by diachronically reviewing how the Indonesian occupation and the Indonesianization project began and its relation to resistance from the Papuan community with the manifestation of the existence of the Papua Freedom Organization. In addition, to capture the synchronic dimension of the current situation, the writer also interviewed several key figures in the integration-and-disintegration of Papua as the primary data source. Indonesia has had a very monochromatic perspective of Papua throughout history, and they tend to ignore Papua as an entity with a will. The military approach and inappropriate development carried out by the Indonesian Government caused the strengthening of the Papuan independence movement. At this point, the Indonesian Government needs a new approach to negotiate its position with the West Papuan community and change the militaristic approach still being used in West Papua. The development approach taken by the current President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, towards West Papua does not seem to be reflected when we see how the stigmatization of Papua continues in the Government's political communication practices related to Papua.
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Posted 1 year ago
Grand hotels had been a metropolitan phenomenon before they emerged in remote regions of the Alps between the 1880s and the 1930s. This essay explores how these semi-public spaces and early places of modernity engaged with alpine scenery and shaped the very industry of mountain tourism. It analyzes ...
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Grand hotels had been a metropolitan phenomenon before they emerged in remote regions of the Alps between the 1880s and the 1930s. This essay explores how these semi-public spaces and early places of modernity engaged with alpine scenery and shaped the very industry of mountain tourism. It analyzes the relationship between elite tourism and the natural and social environment of the Alps. The success of mountain grand hotels was tied to increasing industrialization and a new understanding of travel. Their thoughtful detachment from space, time, and society was an expression of a business as much as of social philosophy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, mountains served as a backdrop for the narrative of the period's scientific and technical progress and became subject to rational interpretation and economic exploitation. Mountain grand hotels were not only a key component of tourism infrastructure but also the bold expression of a presumptuous occupation of spaces set away for tourism. Natural space had widely been turned into social space for visual and leisurely consumption, raising questions of authority, priority, appropriation, and imposition. By mapping the perception of mountains along the history of mountain grand hotels, this essay studies the sites, gazes, and environments of mountain tourism at the fin de siècle. It examines how the history of the mountain grand hotel conflates with the forces of nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism and showcases how these spaces reflect the socio-economic transformations that ultimately paved the way for mountain mass tourism.
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Posted 1 year ago
Heinz Tschachler
Heinz Tschachler
Institution: English and American Studies at the Heinz Tschachler University of Klagenfurt
Email: heinz.tschachler@aau.at
When in the early summer of 1805 Meriwether Lewis for the first time sights the great mountains of the American West, he merely reports "an august spectacle." The word "august" was not then an aesthetic category, nor did it usually describe visual contact with landscape. Categories used for these pu...
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When in the early summer of 1805 Meriwether Lewis for the first time sights the great mountains of the American West, he merely reports "an august spectacle." The word "august" was not then an aesthetic category, nor did it usually describe visual contact with landscape. Categories used for these purposes were the picturesque and the sublime. Whereas there are numerous examples of the picturesque in the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the sublime draws a blank. In my contribution, I will be offering several reasons for the absence of description in the sublime mode: (1) Like their contemporaries, Lewis and Clark held nature up to the yardstick of utility, calculating the agricultural potential of the land or the navigability of a river. (2) The Lewis and Clark expedition was a military expedition, sent out by President Jefferson not to stand in awe at sublime grandeur but to document a useful landscape. (3) Seeing mountains as sublime was essentially a matter of an individual imagination. The Corps of Discovery was a group, whose success depended on cooperation. Hence, the individual imagination must take a back seat. (4) The actual experience of hardship and adversity during the crossing of the Rockies would have obviated any description in the "grand style." (5) Finally, the Corps of Discovery was not even prepared to encounter the great mountains of the West, expecting instead gentle rolling hills that would enable an easy portage to the Columbia River and, if anything, call for picturesque description.
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Posted 1 year ago
Birgit Capelle
Birgit Capelle
Institution: University of Bonn; North American Studies Program; Department of English, American, and Celtic Studies;
Email: bcapell1@uni-bonn.de
This article explores the epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) by Gary Snyder and a Song/Chin dynasty Chinese landscape painting. I illustrate how the poem and the painting, together with Henry David Thoreau’s autobiographical narrative A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849...
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This article explores the epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) by Gary Snyder and a Song/Chin dynasty Chinese landscape painting. I illustrate how the poem and the painting, together with Henry David Thoreau’s autobiographical narrative A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958), form a complex web of intertextual and intermedial references. All four works, I argue, tell similar narratives of spiritual journey and paths through mountain and river landscapes; all four speak of moments of heightened awareness in the sense of Buddhist “no-mind” (Chinese: wu-shin; Japanese: mushin). I show how they converge in exhibiting ontologies of non-substantiality, emptiness, and becoming. Taking the philosophies of Zen Buddhism and Taoism as a theoretical frame, I argue that the American transcendentalist and Beat works poetically and narratively convey relational rather than substantialist views of Being and life. They depict the world as a dynamic and open field of tension between two non-oppositional forces from which we as subjects are not essentially separate in a dualistic way. I substantiate my argument by drawing on the French sinologist and philosopher François Jullien, who refers to the Chinese understanding of landscape (“mountains and waters”) in his critical treatment of (European) philosophy’s centuries-long subject-centered epistemology and substantialist “ontology of Being.”
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Posted 1 year ago
