Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia

Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between ad 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period ad 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

"Fascinating Voids: Alexander von Humboldt and the Myth of Chimborazo"

When Alexander von Humboldt reached the village of Calpi in the Andes on 22 June 1802, he was greeted with reverence and enthusiasm. Triumphal arches adorned with cotton, cloth, and silver decorated his path. The natives performed a dance in festive dress. A singer praised the explorer's expedition, which had departed three years earlier from the Spanish port of La Coruña. Like Odysseus on the isle of the Phaeacians, the traveler listened to a local rhapsodist singing about his heroic deeds. Before his adventure ended, it had already spun a popular myth. This episode, which Humboldt recorded in his diary, occurred at a significant moment. One day later, the “Second Discoverer of America” rose to even greater fame on an excursion marking in more ways than one the climax of his enterprise. Humboldt set out to climb Chimborazo (6,310 m/20,702 ft.), the mountain then thought to be the highest in the world. He was accompanied by the French botanist Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858) and the Creole nobleman and future activist Carlos Montúfar (1780–1816), as well as native guides and assistants. They climbed to heights never reached before, setting a new record and catapulting Humboldt to fame on both continents.

Pulmonary fat embolism - a prospective study within the forensic autopsy collective of th eRepublic of Iceland

In the last century, studies established the origin of pulmonary fat embolism (PFE) and identified mechanical trauma as main source for PFE. This prospective study focused on determining a possible influence of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), in the context of an aging population, on the occurrence of PFE. Lung tissue samples from 256 bodies were examined using the twin-edged knife technique without preliminary fixation but after staining with Sudan III. PFE grading was determined according to Falzi and performed at a 10× magnification. For statistical analysis, bodies were grouped by age, gender, and putrefaction and categorized following whether they had experienced trauma, CPR, the combination of both, or no mechanical impact. There was a significant correlation of trauma, CPR, and the combination of both to PFE but no noticeable influence of gender or putrefaction. An age over 70 years promotes a PFE due to resuscitation.

Melodrama and Narrative Fiction: Towards a Typology

Recent research on melodrama has stressed its versatility and ubiquity by approaching it as a mode of expression rather than a theatrical genre. A variety of contexts in which melodrama is at work have been explored, but only little scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between melodrama and novels, short stories and novellas. This article proposes a typology of melodrama in narrative prose fiction, examining four different categories: Melodrama and Sentimentalism, Depiction of Melodramatic Performances in Narrative Prose Fiction, Theatrical Antics and Aesthetics in Narrative Prose Fiction and Meta-Melodrama. Its aim is to clarify the ways in which melodrama, ever since its early days on the stages of late eighteenth-century Europe, has interacted with fictional prose narratives, thereby shaping the literary imagination in the Anglophone world.

Imperialismustheorien und Geschichte: Eine empirische Annäherung

For decades, if not centuries, the term imperialism has been used in manifold and ambivalent ways. Some historians, such as William Hancock, therefore shied away from using it in their texts, while others set up theories to explain as much as possible with regard to the European expansion into the non-European world – and in some cases even beyond. Taking the three cases of German colonial policy before 1890, the granting of “responsible government” to the so-called British dominions and the expansion of British power in South Asia from the mid-eighteenth century to 1914, this article seeks to show to what extent a knowledge of both older and more recent theories of imperialism can still be useful for empirical research in the humanities and the social sciences.

The invention of democratic parliamentary practices in the Helvetic Republic

In this book, leading historians of the French, Batavian, Helvetic, Cisalpine, and Neapolitan revolutions bridge the gap between the historiographies of the so-called Sister Republics and explore political culture as a set of discourses or political practices. Parliamentary practices, the comparability of "universal" political concepts, late-eighteenth-century Republicanism, the relationship between press and politics, and the interaction between the Sister Republics and France are all examined from a comparative, transnational perspective.