Pb pollution from leaded gasoline in South America in the context of a 2000-year metallurgical history

Exploitation of the extensive polymetallic deposits of the Andean Altiplano in South America since precolonial times has caused substantial emissions of neurotoxic lead (Pb) into the atmosphere; however, its historical significance compared to recent Pb pollution from leaded gasoline is not yet resolved. We present a comprehensive Pb emission history for the last two millennia for South America, based on a continuous, high-resolution, ice core record from Illimani glacier. Illimani is the highest mountain of the eastern Bolivian Andes and is located at the northeastern margin of the Andean Altiplano. The ice core Pb deposition history revealed enhanced Pb enrichment factors (EFs) due to metallurgical processing for silver production during periods of the Tiwanaku/Wari culture (AD 450–950), the Inca empires (AD 1450–1532), colonial times (AD 1532–1900), and tin production at the beginning of the 20th century. After the 1960s, Pb EFs increased by a factor of 3 compared to the emission level from metal production, which we attribute to gasoline-related Pb emissions. Our results show that anthropogenic Pb pollution levels from road traffic in South America exceed those of any historical metallurgy in the last two millennia, even in regions with exceptional high local metallurgical activity.

From Colonial Pride and Hispanic Prejudice

1898 is a crucial moment in Spain’s cultural history: Losing its last Colonies Cuba and the Philippines to the USA caused an unprecedented crisis in Spanish self-understanding that set a complex process of spiritual reconstruction rolling. To rebuild Spanish cultural identity as isolated state nation without losing touch with those parts of the Colonial past that were felt as belonging to its broader cultural environment required sophisticated reflection. Cultural issues had to take over the function to bridge between national borders. Music got is own part in this recycling of the Colonial into the Hispanic.

Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires

Empires as political entities may be a thing of the past, but as a concept, empire is alive and kicking. From heritage tourism and costume dramas to theories of the imperial idea(l): empire sells. Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires presents innovative scholarship on the lives and legacies of empires in diverse media such as literature, film, advertising, and the visual arts. Though rooted in real space and history, the post-empire and its twin, the post-imperial, emerge as ungraspable ideational constructs. The volume convincingly establishes empire as welcoming resistance and affirmation, introducing post-empire imaginaries as figurations that connect the archives and repertoires of colonial nostalgia, postcolonial critique, post-imperial dreaming.

"An attentive Ear, a watchful Eye, and a Calm judicious Pen": William Samuel Johnson, the Colonial Agents, and the Transformation of the British Atlantic World

By looking at Great Britain and the American colonies in conjunction with the larger British Atlantic Empire, historians can better understand the political, social, and cultural transformations that occurred when transatlantic actors met. William Samuel Johnson is an example of an "ordinary" agent who nonetheless had extensive contacts with numerous British and American thinkers. While acting on Connecticut's behalf in London between 1767 and 1771, he sent reports back to Connecticut governors Jonathan Trumbull and William Pitkin on parliamentary proceedings while corresponding with the people who traveled around the Atlantic world during this critical period-merchants, seafarers, emigrants, soldiers, missionaries, radicals and conservatives, reformers, and politicians. He is also representative of the late eighteenth-century empire writ large. Agents, who had once been a source of stability in the far-flung colonies, became a destabilizing force as confusion and conflict grew over conceptual ideas of what constituted "the empire" and who was included in it. Johnson was a sane observer in the midst of the ideological and administrative upheaval of the 1760's and 1770's. His subsequent loyalism and political obscurity during the war years was in many ways a result of his attempts to reconcile various factional interests during his tenure as an agent. Although he did his best to resolve these divisions and provide an accurate account of the powerful nationalistic forces gathering on both sides of the Atlantic on the eve of the American Revolution, the agents' collective failures as transatlantic mediators helped bring about the collapse of an imperial community. This disintegration had dramatic effects on the whole of the Atlantic world.

Emerging Identities in Colonial Tunisia: "Alliancist" and Zionist Representations in Tunis prior to World War I

By 1900 the Jewish community of Tunisia witnessed the emergence of new competing identities: “assimilationist” of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, termed “Alliancist,” and Zionist. Strikingly, two members of the same family in Tunis, Raymond Valensi, President of the AIU Regional Committee, and Alfred Valensi, President of the Zionist Federation, led the struggle for their separate causes. In his discussion of identity in the modern world, Homi Bhabha asks, "How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities…where, despite shared histories of …discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities…may be profoundly antagonistic…?" It is in this context that the claims of the Alliance and Zionism will be examined prior to World War I, based on the Archives of the AIU and on such secondary sources as the indispensable work of Paul Sebag. The tensions between the Alliancists and Zionists continued until the outbreak of World War II, as the French-speaking Jews of Tunisia sought to define their individual and collective identities.

East Africa (British) : its history, people, commerce, industries and resources

compiled by Somerset Playne ; edited by F. Holderness Gale

Enrique Barba y el orbe colonial rioplatense. Balances y proyecciones

La Universidad Nacional de La Plata y los estudios históricos en la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación se construyeron con la impronta de Ricardo Levene, la cual dejó su estela por años en muchos de sus discípulos. Dentro de esa escuela histórica se desarrolló y consolidó la figura de Enrique Barba en la ciudad de La Plata y en su Universidad. Sus libros, folletos y colaboraciones suman más de 50 trabajos a lo largo de 55 años de labor, sin embargo en estas líneas que siguen a continuación nos referiremos a su veta menos divulgada y es ella el aporte historiográfico que realizó Enrique Barba para la construcción del pasado colonial rioplatense como también quiénes fueron los que continuaron por el camino que Barba trazó en el campo de los estudios coloniales.

La historiografía colonial y los fundamentos de la tesis independentista clásica en Uruguay

Los autores canónicos de la historiografía uruguaya identificaron en la época colonial un conjunto de factores -económicos, sociales, políticos y geográficos- que, en su opinión, condicionaron en los pobladores del territorio de la Banda Oriental, sentimientos de carácter autonomista que se transformarían en independentistas. Esta interpretación, conocida como tesis independentista clásica, tuvo entre sus más destacados representantes a Francisco Bauzá, Pablo Blanco Acevedo y Juan Pivel Devoto. En este artículo pretendemos analizar las principales obras de estos historiadores a efectos de identificar en las mismas los caracteres originales de la historia oficial uruguaya

Enrique Barba y el orbe colonial rioplatense. Balances y proyecciones

La Universidad Nacional de La Plata y los estudios históricos en la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación se construyeron con la impronta de Ricardo Levene, la cual dejó su estela por años en muchos de sus discípulos. Dentro de esa escuela histórica se desarrolló y consolidó la figura de Enrique Barba en la ciudad de La Plata y en su Universidad. Sus libros, folletos y colaboraciones suman más de 50 trabajos a lo largo de 55 años de labor, sin embargo en estas líneas que siguen a continuación nos referiremos a su veta menos divulgada y es ella el aporte historiográfico que realizó Enrique Barba para la construcción del pasado colonial rioplatense como también quiénes fueron los que continuaron por el camino que Barba trazó en el campo de los estudios coloniales.

La historiografía colonial y los fundamentos de la tesis independentista clásica en Uruguay

Los autores canónicos de la historiografía uruguaya identificaron en la época colonial un conjunto de factores -económicos, sociales, políticos y geográficos- que, en su opinión, condicionaron en los pobladores del territorio de la Banda Oriental, sentimientos de carácter autonomista que se transformarían en independentistas. Esta interpretación, conocida como tesis independentista clásica, tuvo entre sus más destacados representantes a Francisco Bauzá, Pablo Blanco Acevedo y Juan Pivel Devoto. En este artículo pretendemos analizar las principales obras de estos historiadores a efectos de identificar en las mismas los caracteres originales de la historia oficial uruguaya