Corporate destruction of Mayan temple in Belize

This video is called Mexico – Chichen Itza (Mayan Pyramids).

From Associated Press:

May 13, 2013, 7:30 PM

Bulldozers destroy Mayan pyramid in Belize

BELIZE CITY – A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize’s largest Mayan pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project, authorities announced on Monday.

The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, Jaime Awe, said the destruction at the Nohmul complex in northern Belize was detected late last week. The ceremonial center dates back at least 2,300 years and is the most important site in northern Belize, near the border with Mexico.

“It’s a feeling of incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity … they were using this for road fill,” Awe said. “It’s like being punched in the stomach, it’s just so horrendous.”

Nohmul sat in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane field, and lacked the even stone sides frequently seen in reconstructed or better-preserved pyramids. But Awe said the builders could not possibly have mistaken the pyramid mound, which is about 100 feet tall, for a natural hill because the ruins were well-known and the landscape there is naturally flat.

“These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It’s just bloody laziness”, Awe said.

Photos from the scene showed backhoes clawing away at the pyramid’s sloping sides, leaving an isolated core of limestone cobbles at the center, with what appears to be a narrow Mayan chamber dangling above one clawed-out section.

“Just to realize that the ancient Maya acquired all this building material to erect these buildings, using nothing more than stone tools and quarried the stone, and carried this material on their heads, using tump lines,” said Awe. “To think that today we have modern equipment, that you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroyed this building. Why can’t these people just go and quarry somewhere that has no cultural significance? It’s mind-boggling.”

Belizean police said they are conducting an investigation and criminal charges are possible. The Nohmul complex sits on private land, but Belizean law says that any pre-Hispanic ruins are under government protection.

The Belize community-action group Citizens Organized for Liberty Through Action called the destruction of the archaeological site “an obscene example of disrespect for the environment and history.”

It is not the first time it’s happened in Belize, a country of about 350,000 people that is largely covered in jungle and dotted with hundreds of Mayan ruin sites, though few as large as Nohmul.

Norman Hammond, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Boston University who worked in Belizean research projects in the 1980s, wrote in an email that “bulldozing Maya mounds for road fill is an endemic problem in Belize (the whole of the San Estevan center has gone, both of the major pyramids at Louisville, other structures at Nohmul, many smaller sites), but this sounds like the biggest yet.”

Arlen Chase, chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida, said, “Archaeologists are disturbed when such things occur, but there is only a very limited infrastructure in Belize that can be applied to cultural heritage management.”

“Unfortunately, they (destruction of sites) are all too common, but not usually in the center of a large Maya site,” Chase wrote.

He said there had probably still been much to learn from the site. “A great deal of archaeology was undertaken at Nohmul in the ’70s and ’80s, but this only sampled a small part of this large center.”

Belize isn’t the only place where the handiwork of the far-flung and enormously prolific Maya builders is being destroyed. The ancient Mayas spread across southeastern Mexico and through Guatemala, Honduras and Belize.

“I don’t think I am exaggerating if I say that every day a Maya mound is being destroyed for construction in one of the countries where the Maya lived,” wrote Francisco Estrada-Belli, a professor at Tulane University’s Anthropology Department.

“Unfortunately, this destruction of our heritage is irreversible but many don’t take it seriously,” he added. “The only way to stop it is by showing that it is a major crime and people can and will go to jail for it.”

Robert Rosenswig, an archaeologist at the State University of New York at Albany, described the difficult and heartbreaking work of trying to salvage information at the nearby site of San Estevan following similar destruction around 2005.

“Bulldozing damage at San Estevan is extensive and the site is littered with Classic period potsherds,” he wrote in an academic paper describing the scene. “We spent a number of days at the beginning of the 2005 season trying to figure out the extent of the damage …. after scratching our heads for many days, a bulldozer showed up and we realized that what appear to be mounds, when overgrown with chest-high vegetation, are actually recently bulldozed garbage piles.”

However small the compensation, bulldozing pyramids is one very brutal way of revealing the inner cores of the structures, which were often built up in periodic stages of construction.

“The one advantage of this massive destruction, to the core site, is that the remains of early domestic activity are now visible on the surface,” Rosenswig wrote.

Related articles

• Ancient Mayan pyramid destroyed by construction company in Belize (rt.com)

Anne Frank censorship attempt fails

From the New York Daily News in the USA:

May 13, 2013 11:24 AM

School officials in Northville, Mich., refuse to ban unedited version of Anne Frank’s diary

BY Taylor Malmsheimer

Last month, a mother in Northville, Mich., filed a formal complaint against her daughter’s school district, stating that the unedited version of “The Diary of a Young Girl: Anne Frank” contained “pornographic” passages that were inappropriate for her seventh grade daughter and her classmates.

The Northville Patch reports that following a deliberation by a review committee, Northville Public School officials have decided not to remove the definitive edition of Anne Frank’s diary from its middle school’s reading options.

Assistant superintendent for instructional services Robert Behnke wrote a letter to the community regarding the school’s decision, stating that the committee worried that removing the book would constitute as censorship.

“The committee felt strongly that a decision to remove the use of ‘Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl — The Definitive Edition’ as a choice within this larger unit of study would effectively impose situational censorship by eliminating the opportunity for the deeper study afforded by this edition,” Behnke wrote.

The committee, which consisted of elementary, middle school and district administrators as well as two middle school English teachers and two parents in the district, also suggested the district should better communicate information about the units of study in middle school literature classes, Behnke said. It suggested that when possible, middle school English classes should provide parents with booklists that can be reviewed by parents before students make a selection.

The school’s decision is a welcome hiatus from a recent troubling trend, in which parents and teachers request that various books be banned from school libraries and reading lists in communities across the country.

Related articles

• Anne Frank’s Diary in US schools censorship battle (guardian.co.uk)
• Michigan Woman Believes Anne Frank’s Diary is Indecent, Wants It Pulled From Middle School Reading Lists (complex.com)
• Michigan mom deems Anne Frank’s unedited diary too naughty for junior high (redalertpolitics.com)
• Is the unabridged ‘Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl’ too much of a good thing? (csmonitor.com)

British suffragettes, 1913-2013

By Louise Raw in Britain:

Deeds, not words

Friday 10 May 2013

“Tall and slender, with red hair. Her illusive, whimsical green eyes and thin, half-smiling mouth bore often the mocking expression of the Mona Lisa.”

This is Emily Wilding Davison as described by Sylvia Pankhurst, the “socialist one” in the Pankhurst line-up.

She and Davison, who died under the king’s horse a century ago next month, were sisters-in-arms during the fight for votes for women. They shared a common understanding of the need to tackle class as well as gender-based oppression.

Both women worked for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded in 1903 at the Pankhursts’ Manchester home. Sylvia’s mother and sister, Emmeline and Christabel, would become its de facto leaders.

Even as it adopted more militant tactics the WSPU became increasingly middle class. Its leadership would eventually support the first world war. The paper Suffragette was renamed Britannia, and suffragettes even handed out white feathers symbolising cowardice to men not in service.

By this point Sylvia, a lifelong pacifist, had left and set up the delightfully initialed Elfs – the East London Federation of Suffragettes, which attracted considerable working-class support.

And Davison had carried out her final, shocking act of resistance.

Sylvia’s integrity and tremendous efforts for women and the working class have made her the Pankhurst it’s OK to like for leftie feminists like me – fefties? leminists? – and ensured she is not forgotten.

But in Davison’s case the manner of her death has too long eclipsed her life.

I recently visited a hidden memorial to Davison at Westminister and talked to Katherine Connelly, the young woman behind her memorial campaign.

Davison broke into the House of Commons on three separate occasions. On census night 1911 she hid in a broom cupboard in the Crypt chapel so the official record would have to record Parliament as her address.

The crypt is closed to the public but I managed to get inside recently courtesy of parliamentary researcher Kevin Morton, another Davison fan.

“Emily’s closet” is big as cupboards go, but way too small for a comfy night. On the inside of the door is a brass commemorative plaque placed by Tony Benn in 1999.

Dennis Skinner told me it was put there in appropriately illicit style: “Tony wanted to put the plaque up but he didn’t think he’d ever get permission. So I said just do it regardless – and he did.”

Davison was arrested and imprisoned numerous times and adopted the WSPU tactic of hunger strike. She was first force-fed at Strangeways.

The scale and brutality of state violence against suffragettes, both in and outside prison, should not be forgotten. The women were targeted and treated as criminals and terrorists.

Force-feeding was torture and intended to be so. Entries in Davison’s prison diary record the horrific details.

“They forcibly undressed me and left me sitting in a prison chemise. Then I was dressed in prison clothes and taken into one of the worst cells, very dark.

“In the evening the matron, two doctors and five or six wardresses entered the cell. A doctor said: ‘I am going to feed you by force.’

“The scene which followed will haunt me with horror all my life. While they held me flat the elder doctor tried all round my mouth with a steel gag to find an opening. On the right side of my mouth two teeth are missing. This gap he found, pushed in the horrid instrument and prised open my mouth to its widest extent.

“Then a wardress poured liquid down my throat out of a tin enamelled cup. What it was I cannot say but there was some medicament which was foul to the last degree. As I would not swallow the stuff and jerked it out with my tongue, the doctor pinched my nose and somehow gripped my tongue with the gag.

“In my mind was the thought that some desperate protest must be made to put a stop to the hideous torture which was now our lot.

“When a good moment came I walked upstairs and threw myself from the top, onto the iron staircase. If I had been successful I should have been killed, as it was a clear drop of 30 to 40 feet. But I caught on the edge of the netting. I threw myself forward on my head with all my might. I knew nothing more except a fearful thud on my head. When I recovered consciousness, it was to an acute sense of agony…”

Davison was force-fed a total of 49 times.

In 1913, the Asquith government rushed the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act through Parliament.

It became known as the cat-and-mouse act because of its drawn-out cruelty. Under the Act suffragettes who went on hunger strike were released from prison when they became weak or ill. As soon as they recuperated they were reimprisoned.

I’ve always felt this Act gave us an early warning: Never trust a Liberal.

And this was passed in the year of Davison’s death.

In June 1913 she attended the most important horse race of the year, the Epsom Derby.

The royals were there. They traditionally entered a horse.

The racecourse bent sharply at Tattenham Corner, where the horses slowed before entering the home straight and finishing in front of the royal box.

The king’s horse in 1913 was called Anmer and was ridden by Herbert Jones. As the horses rounded Tattenham Corner Anmer was third from last. Davison ducked beneath the barrier.

Reports conflict on what happened next. Did she try to grab the bridle? Throw herself in front of the horse? Or was she simply trying to cross the track?

The Pankhursts, as so often, disagreed – Emmeline saw Davison’s act as a deliberate self-sacrifice, while Sylvia believed she had not intended anything so dramatic.

Mary Richardson, who was with her, remembered that “I was watching her hand. It did not shake. Even when I heard the pounding of the horses’ hooves moving closer I saw she was still smiling. And suddenly she slipped under the rail and ran out. It was all over so quickly.”

Davison was knocked into the air by the force of the collision. Her skull was fractured and she sustained massive internal injuries.

She was taken to a nearby cottage where she survived for four days, but she never recovered consciousness. She died on June 8 1913.

The suffragette flag she took onto the racecourse was carried by her friend and fellow suffragette Mary Leigh – once arrested with her for throwing stones at David Lloyd George’s car – on the Aldermaston anti-nuclear marches of the 1950s.

The tattered WSPU scarf she wore at Epsom can be seen in a display case in the House of Commons.

Crowds lined the streets for Davison’s funeral procession. Sylvia Pankhurst recorded: “The call to women to come garbed in black carrying purple irises, in purple with crimson peonies, in white bearing laurel wreaths, received a response from thousands who gathered from all parts of the country.

“Graduates and clergy marched in their robes, suffrage societies, trade unionists from the East End. The streets were densely lined by silent, respectful crowds. The great public responded to a life deliberately given for an impersonal end.”

Contingents of mourners came from the Dockers Union, Gas Workers Union and General Labourers Union, among others.

The trade union turnout was no coincidence. As well as working full time for the WSPU Davison had been heavily involved in the Workers Educational Association.

She had visited striking women workers in Bermondsey in 1911 and writer Rebecca West saw her on the streets of London in 1912, collecting money for the wives and children of striking dockers.

Davison would doubtless have been proud of Kate Connelly – the founder of her memorial campaign.

Connelly’s teachers’ feelings may have been more ambiguous – she organised her first protest at primary school, for girls’ right to wear trousers.

As a sixth-former in 2003 she was a leading organiser of student walkouts against the Iraq war – and was arrested during one.

Connelly has always been inspired by Davison’s indefatigable spirit and decided that the centenary of her death could not go unmarked.

She began work in 2012 on a campaign for a minute’s silence on Derby Day 2013. Speakers at the launch included Sylvia Pankhurst’s granddaughter Dr Helen Pankhurst.

But when campaigners met with Derby Day organisers their proposal received a “wholly negative, dismissive response.”

Connelly isn’t easily thwarted. She had soon secured an intervention from BBC sports presenter Clare Balding, who “persuaded the organisers to commission us to produce a short photo montage of Emily Davison and the struggle for the vote, which will be shown on all the big screens at the Derby on June 1.”

There will also be a rally next week at the church where her funeral was held. Join us if you can to pay your respects to Davison and the women like her who fought not just for their sex, but in the cause of justice and equality for all.

—-
Rally for Emily Davison

Thursday May 16, 6.30pm

St George’s Church, 6-7 Little Russell Street, London WC1

Speakers include:

Katherine Tupper, Davison’s great great niece

Katherine Connelly, author of forthcoming biography Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, socialist and scourge of empire

Louise Raw, director of the forthcoming Matchwomen’s Festival

—-

Louise Raw is the author of Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen (Continuum Press) and director of the forthcoming Matchwomen’s Festival on Saturday July 6. Go to www.matchwomensfestival.com for more details.

Related articles

• Centenary of Emily Wilding Davison’s death marked with plaque at Epsom (telegraph.co.uk)
• Suffragettes on hunger strike: from the archive blog (guardian.co.uk)
• Jeanette Winterson: 100 years after the suffragettes (guardian.co.uk)
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17th century British revolutionary gets monument

Thomas Rainsborough (1610-1648) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By John Rees in Britain:

Resurrecting Rainsborough

Friday 10 May 2013

History isn’t meant to happen this way in Gove‘s Britain. A young Muslim woman local councillor and the left getting together, to raise a memorial to a Leveller leader in a revolution the Tory right would rather forget, certainly isn’t on his agenda.

But that is how it’s happening in the London borough of Tower Hamlets on Sunday when Tony Benn, Councillor Rania Khan, Jeremy Corbyn MP and I unveil a plaque to Leveller leader Colonel Thomas Rainsborough of the New Model Army, a long-time hero of mine.

Researching his funeral procession for the book The People’s History Of London, I discovered that it turned into a huge Leveller demonstration which came from Tottenham via the City and ended in St John’s Church, Wapping.

The original church is long gone, as is its replacement, but the churchyard where Rainsborough was buried remains.

Rania Khan and I had met in Stop the War Coalition and I’d been part of the campaign that got her elected as a Tower Hamlets councillor. We met again at one of the meetings to launch the People’s History Of London and we talked about how great it would be if there were a plaque to Rainsborough in St John’s churchyard.

She said she would see what she could do and was as good as her word.

A few months later, a Tower Hamlets council officer from the parks department got in touch and we chose the location for the plaque and agreed the wording, based on a Leveller leaflet that was issued on the day of the funeral in November 1648. The new National Civil War Centre at Newark, due to open next year, lent its support.

The Rainsborough Regiment of the Sealed Knot re-enactors are sending a file of musketeers to fire the salute on Sunday. Their ensign will be there with the regiment’s flag, wholly appropriate since some accounts say that the sea-green ribbons that the mourners wore that day and which were to become the Leveller movement’s badge were torn from the regimental banner of the same colour.

On the day of the original funeral the royalist press complained that the crowd contained a ragtag of “Tom the tapster” and “Dick the doorsweeper.” On Sunday at 1pm we hope that some of their 21st-century counterparts will return the Levelling spirit to St John’s churchyard to honour the man who, at the Putney debates a year or so before his death, spoke these never to be forgotten words: “The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he … I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.”

The memorial ceremony commemorating the life of Thomas Rainsborough takes place at 1pm on Sunday May 12 in St John’s churchyard, Scandrett Street, London E1.

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Ernest Hemingway in Cuba and the USA

This video from the USA is the film For Whom The Bell Tolls (1943) – Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.

From Prensa Latina news agency:

Hemingway Writings Preserved in Cuba Sent to US

Havana, May 10 – A total of 2,000 unpublished documents written by US author Ernest Hemingway were preserved by Cuban and US specialists as part of a bilateral agreement signed in 2002.

The lot of documents by Hemingway was sent to the US and will be exhibited soon at the Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts, being the second sending from Cuba to the US cultural institution.

Ada Rosa Alfonso, director of the museum, told Prensa Latina that it is an extension of the working agreement for more than 10 years, with the objective that both nations possess a digital copy of the documents.

Specialists from the Andover, Massachusetts North Eastern Center for Document Preservation are working together with Cuban colleagues, she said.

Among the documents there is a letter written to Swedish-born actress Ingrid Bergman talking about Hemingway’s wish she were the starring actress in the famous film “For Whom the Bell Tolls” inspired by the novel with the same name written by Hemingway.

Another significant document is the group of letters addressed to his wife Mary Welsh, shopping lists, travelling itineraries and several of his weather considerations about the hurricanes going through the island between 1939 and 1960.

In the first part of the project, among the preserved documents there were manuscripts on his novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and a sample of the script for the film “The Old Man and the Sea”, also based on a novel written by the famous US writer.

Recently restored and with more than 9.88 acres, the house and farm in which Hemingway lived in Cuba, called Finca Vigia, in San Francisco de Paula, near the Cuban capital, was bought by Hemingway in December 1940.

His yacht, called “Pilar”, was restored with its original colors, registration information and other elements, to recreate the environment that surrounded Hemingway in Cuba.

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• Ernest Hemingway’s Cuba Home Items Go To JFK Library (huffingtonpost.com)
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Drowned medieval English town Dunwich, new research

From the University of Southampton, in Britain:

-Secret streets of Britain’s Atlantis are revealed

09 May 2013

A University of Southampton professor has carried out the most detailed analysis ever of the archaeological remains of the lost medieval town of Dunwich, dubbed ‘Britain’s Atlantis’.

Funded and supported by English Heritage, and using advanced underwater imaging techniques, the project led by Professor David Sear of Geography and Environment has produced the most accurate map to date of the town’s streets, boundaries and major buildings, and revealed new ruins on the seabed. Professor Sear worked with a team from the University’s GeoData Institute; the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton; Wessex Archaeology; and local divers from North Sea Recovery and Learn Scuba.

He comments, “Visibility under the water at Dunwich is very poor due to the muddy water. This has limited the exploration of the site.

“We have now dived on the site using high resolution DIDSON ™ acoustic imaging to examine the ruins on the seabed – a first use of this technology for non-wreck marine archaeology.

“DIDSON technology is rather like shining a torch onto the seabed, only using sound instead of light. The data produced helps us to not only see the ruins, but also understand more about how they interact with the tidal currents and sea bed.”

Peter Murphy, English Heritage’s coastal survey expert who is currently completing a national assessment of coastal heritage assets in England, says: “The loss of most of the medieval town of Dunwich over the last few hundred years – one of the most important English ports in the Middle Ages – is part of a long process that is likely to result in more losses in the future. Everyone was surprised, though, by how much of the eroded town still survives under the sea and is identifiable.

“Whilst we cannot stop the forces of nature, we can ensure what is significant is recorded and our knowledge and memory of a place doesn’t get lost forever. Professor Sear and his team have developed techniques that will be valuable to understanding submerged and eroded terrestrial sites elsewhere.”

Present day Dunwich is a village 14 miles south of Lowestoft in Suffolk, but it was once a thriving port – similar in size to 14th Century London. Extreme storms forced coastal erosion and flooding that have almost completely wiped out this once prosperous town over the past seven centuries. This process began in 1286 when a huge storm swept much of the settlement into the sea and silted up the Dunwich River. This storm was followed by a succession of others that silted up the harbour and squeezed the economic life out of the town, leading to its eventual demise as a major international port in the 15th Century. It now lies collapsed and in ruins in a watery grave, three to 10 metres below the surface of the sea, just off the present coastline.

The project to survey the underwater ruins of Dunwich, the world’s largest medieval underwater town site, began in 2008. Six additional ruins on the seabed and 74 potential archaeological sites on the seafloor have since been found. Combining all known archaeological data from the site, together with old charts and navigation guides to the coast, it has also led to the production of the most accurate and detailed map of the street layout and position of buildings, including the town’s eight churches. Findings highlights are:

* Identification of the limits of the town, which reveal it was a substantial urban centre occupying approximately 1.8 km2 – almost as large as the City of London
* Confirmation the town had a central area enclosed by a defensive, possibly Saxon earthwork, about 1km2
* The documentation of ten buildings of medieval Dunwich, within this enclosed area, including the location and probable ruins of Blackfriars Friary, St Peter’s, All Saint’s and St Nicholas Churches, and the Chapel of St Katherine
* Additional ruins which initial interpretation suggests are part of a large house, possibly the town hall
* Further evidence that suggests the northern area of the town was largely commercial, with wooden structures associated with the port
* The use of shoreline change analysis to predict where the coastline was located at the height of the town’s prosperity

Commenting on the significance of Dunwich, Professor Sear says: “It is a sobering example of the relentless force of nature on our island coastline. It starkly demonstrates how rapidly the coast can change, even when protected by its inhabitants.
“Global climate change has made coastal erosion a topical issue in the 21st Century, but Dunwich demonstrates that it has happened before. The severe storms of the 13th and 14th Centuries coincided with a period of climate change, turning the warmer medieval climatic optimum into what we call the Little Ice Age.

“Our coastlines have always been changing, and communities have struggled to live with this change. Dunwich reminds us that it is not only the big storms and their frequency – coming one after another, that drives erosion and flooding, but also the social and economic decisions communities make at the coast. In the end, with the harbour silting up, the town partly destroyed, and falling market incomes, many people simply gave up on Dunwich.”

Professor Sear’s full report can be found here.

A new breed of archaeologists is using satellite imagery to unearth clues about past civilisations: here.

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Murdered Surinamese workers remembered musically

This is a music video from Suriname, with historic photos of Mariënburg plantation workers and their families.

Translated from Starnieuws in Suriname:

07 May, 19:00

The artist Ruben Jitan has a new CD, Bahadoerôn of Marienburg. It contains four songs about the life of the Hindustani immigrants. 24 of the workers were murdered in cold blood on the former plantation in Marienburg, district Commewijne. …

Bahadoerôn stands for heroes and is dedicated to the 24 people who were murdered on the former plantation Mariënburg on July 30, 1902 by Dutch colonial forces.

As I wrote earlier on this blog:

“Well”, said an ex Marienburg worker, “24 is only the number of the mortal victims whose name is known. So, probably more. After the massacre, the dead bodies of the victims were buried in a mass grave. Then, quicklime was thrown over the dead bodies to erase the evidence of the army’s violence. The bodies have never been found again.”

The name Bahadoerôn was chosen because these 24 immigrants fought against the bad treatment which they received from the colonialists then.

…

Jitan sings the four songs. Three of the songs were written by Wilhelmina Ganga and one by Shabie Hussain. He says that in these four songs he sings about love, the difficult living conditions of the ancestors, their struggle for their existence, their identity and about the treatment they received.

Aryan Soewarto

See also here.

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Women in British science, new research

This video from Ireland says about itself:

Reflections on women in science; diversity and discomfort: Jocelyn Bell Burnell at TEDxStormont

Apr 4, 2013

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell inadvertently discovered pulsars as a graduate student in radio astronomy in Cambridge, opening up a new branch of astrophysics — work recognised by the award of a Nobel Prize to her supervisor. She is now a Visiting Professor in Oxford.

From Kingston University in London, England:

Unearthing the hidden women of science and inspiring the next generation

08 May 2013

A group of historians and scientists is about to embark on a major project to scrutinise the role of British women in science. It will focus on finding and assessing the careers of scientific women who may not have received credit or recognition for their work. The £33k project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and run jointly by Kingston University, University of Liverpool, the Royal Society and the Rothschild Archive London, aims to examine how women were involved in scientific societies between the years 1830 to 2012 and look at how that can inform policy today.

It will involve the establishment of a network of academics to gain a better understanding of how historical perspectives might impact future education policy making. Recent statistics show that only a third of science, technology, engineering and maths students in Britain are female and just 11 per cent of senior positions in science are held by women.

“Women’s unequal participation in science subjects at all levels, both in education, academia and in industry, is currently receiving close attention from policy makers, educationalists and social commentators,” project leader Dr Susan Hawkins, a senior history lecturer from Kingston University, said. “Part of the purpose of our work will be to closely examine data on women in science in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The hope is that by looking at women’s relationship with science in the past, we can pinpoint ways to encourage young women to participate more fully in the subject.”

There was a wealth of historical information which could open a window into the past but it was often dispersed across different archives, Dr Hawkins, who originally trained as a scientist, explained. “Through the network we hope to identify where these archives are and what revelatory material they may contain.” Part of the project will involve a shadowing scheme which will allow researchers studying the history of science to spend time alongside a female scientist in the laboratory, gaining an understanding of how science works today and the challenges faced by women in the field.

The network will be organised around a series of events, including three workshops, a two-day international conference to be held at the Royal Society in May 2014 and an exhibition open to the public. The first workshop will aim to identify archives that may contain information on women in science. It will concentrate on two groups of women – those whose work was recognised by the scientific community of their time and those who, despite producing work of high standard, were not. “The intention is to look at the characteristics that link the two groups of women and also to find out what set them apart,” Dr Hawkins added. Another workshop will focus on identifying possible oral history projects.

“The final workshop will pull together the findings from the first two events and allow us to make recommendations to government on future projects to help increase female participation in science,” Dr Hawkins said.

The issue of the representation of women in science has dominated headlines in the media in recent months. According to a report in last month’s Independent newspaper, female professors account for 5.5 per cent in physics, 6 per cent in chemistry and maths and just 2 per cent in engineering. This has prompted growing calls for better representation of women in science both in universities and in industry – a sentiment also echoed by Kingston University’s new Chancellor American playwright and author Bonnie Greer. “It is crucial that women continue to take up the study of science and maths as historically women have been kept out of these professions, so who knows what genius has been lost?” she said recently. “When you think of all the big problems that are out there waiting to be solved, every ounce of human intelligence is needed.”

Things were extremely tough for women in science in the past and they often did not receive proper recognition, according to Dr Hawkins. “It was a real struggle. For instance, the Royal Society didn’t accept female fellows until as late as 1945,” she said. “There were women in the scientific field but they really had to fight to be recognised, independent of any men they might have been working with.”

Guests from around the world will attend a launch event for the project at the International Congress for the History of Science Technology and Medicine to be held in Manchester in July.

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American Indians, George Catlin paintings in London

This video is called George Catlin: American Indian Portraits (Trailer).

From The Art Newspaper:

Painter of a vanishing and vanished world

“George Catlin: American Indian Portraits”, National Portrait Gallery, London, until 23 June

By John Chu

In the summer of 1830, the American painter George Catlin (1796-1872) embarked upon the first of five journeys deep into the Indian territories that stretched west of the Mississippi River. Having abandoned a burgeoning law career and failed to establish himself as a society portraitist, this Pennsylvanian was busily reinventing himself as an artist-ethnographer possessed of an urgent mission to document the “looks and modes” of the Native American peoples before they were overtaken by the geographic encroachments of the United States. The result was a large body of oil paintings documenting the terrain and rituals of their ways of life, and an even more substantial collection of portraits detailing the continent’s wondrous variety of facial characteristics and tribal apparel— Mandan, Pawnee, Omaha; beads, plumage and face-paint were never arrayed in such dazzling variations as here.

“George Catlin: American Indian Portraits” presents a small but representative sample of this prolific output which now resides principally in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. By way of a centrepiece, its organisers have recreated a miniature version of the vast “Indian Gallery” that Catlin toured around Europe in the 1840s, including an initial spell up the road in a cavernous showroom on Piccadilly. Only around 5% of the original 500 exhibits have made it back to London, although many of the returning pictures have been arranged to approximate the dense, grid-like scheme of the Catlin’s travelling show. Stirring and poignant, the “Indian Gallery” was designed to capture the imagination of a wide, ticket-buying audience, and it still packs an impressive punch. A multitude of faces, one after another, attests to the astonishing diversity of “First Nation” culture and the enormity of its destruction.

As well as re-acquainting the British audience with this exotic, yet once-famous, body of works, Stephanie Pratt, a Dakotan and associate professor of the University of Plymouth, Joan Carpenter Troccoli, founding director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art, Denver, co-curators of the how, and Peter Funnell, the gallery’s 19th-century portraits curator, have succeeded in advancing its claim to more than purely ethnographic attention. By placing the charismatic figure of Catlin squarely at centre stage, a story of artistic and commercial opportunism emerges as surely as his vision of a noble, doomed world.

The manifest struggle to transcend an extremely limited technique is itself a point of considerable fascination (Catlin was a virtual stranger to chiaroscuro, glaze-work, and convincing figure drawing). Indeed it appears to have been thanks to a mixture of chance and sheer, bloody-minded persistence that moments of pictorial grace did occasionally shine through in his profuse outpouring. Catlin’s approach is most successful when, paradoxically, a composition remains incomplete. In the masterpiece of the show, La-dóo-ke-a, Buffalo Bill,

sic; Buffalo Bull

a Grand Pawnee Warrior, 1832, a virtually unworked background allows the explosion of the sitter’s hairstyle to pop off the canvas, along with the starkly outlined buffalo heads that stain various parts of his body. In Hee-oh’ks-te-kin, Rabbit Skin Leggings, a Brave, 1832, the inscrutable, hieratic mask of a painted face dissolves into vague, fly-away wisps of hair and fringing, as if the whole confection might at any moment be carried off on a breeze.

The subject of this exhibition raises a host of cultural and political questions that easily exceed the capacity of a three-room gallery. Perhaps wisely therefore, the organisers have opted to broach the complex politics involved in the Western representation of indigenous cultures in a substantial catalogue and in an associated programme of events.

In the particular context of the National Portrait Gallery, it seems, however, a little perverse not to address this oeuvre’s peculiar contribution to the history of the painted likeness as part of the main presentation. I wanted to know, for example, what Catlin’s subjects might have made of this entirely foreign yet peculiarly intimate act of representation. In Europe, could a phenomenon so comprehensively removed from the early 19th-century business of commission and polite self-presentation have been unquestioningly understood as portraiture? Or was something more generically ambiguous in play? And what can portraiture’s dominant role in this episode of proto-anthropology tell us about its documentary authority at the dawn of the photographic age? With different outcomes and at vastly contrasting stakes, Catlin’s art bears witness not to one, but to two visual cultures on the brink of transformation.

John Chu is studying for a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, writing his dissertation of 18th-century genre painting.

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Remember British Chartism

This video from Britain says about itself:

A short animation telling the story of Chartism and the struggle for working men to receive the vote. The story is set to the Kaiser Chiefs – I predict a riot.

By Hywel Francis in Britain:

Our democratic debt to the Chartists

Tuesday 07 May 2013

We take for granted now that any democracy would embrace such basics as secret ballots and universal suffrage. But these had been denied in the 1832 Electoral Reform Act and so the Chartist movement emerged.

Seventy-seven MPs from a wide range of political parties recently signed the Parliamentary early day motion saluting the men and women of the Chartist movement who sacrificed so much to create what Karl Marx called the first political organisation of the working class in the world and what Eric Hobsbawm called “the greatest of all mass movements of British labour.”

Many Chartists died for this noble cause as in the Newport Rising of November 1839. Others risked victimisation as in the great 1842 Chartist General Strike.

Others, many of the leaders, were arrested, imprisoned and transported to Australia.

Two of these outstanding men, leading Welsh Chartist John Frost and the black Chartist William Cuffay, along with many others, would undoubtedly have been elected MPs had there been a democratic Parliament in their day.

Instead, for their role in campaigning for democratic change, they were transported to Australia. Frost eventually returned to Britain, but Cuffay died in poverty in an Australian workhouse.

The all-party group on archives and history will commemorate the Chartists this year.

First, Chartist historian Professor Malcolm Chase of Leeds University will give a lecture on the People’s Charter in the Speaker’s House in October.

And second, we will arrange for a digitised photograph of Frost to be lodged in the parliamentary archives.

The original photograph was donated to the South Wales Miners’ Library 40 years ago by Edgar Evans of Bedlinog who had himself been imprisoned for his role in the struggle against the scab union in south Wales in 1935.

We will also add to the parliamentary archives a digitised version of Lord Byron‘s collected works, which had been given to Cuffay by the Westminster branch of the National Charter Association prior to his transportation.

One hundred and seventy-five years after they and so many others launched the Chartist movement we will at last welcome Cuffay and Frost to the Palace of Westminster as fellow democrats and fellow citizens.

Hywel Francis is Labour MP for Aberavon.

—-
EDM 1088, tabled by Hywel Francis, signed by 77 MPs

This house celebrates the 175th anniversary of the launch of the People’s Charter on May 8 1838 which was a blueprint for our parliamentary democracy
Salutes the men and women of the Chartist movement across the UK who sacrificed so much to achieve universal adult suffrage; acknowledges the black Chartist leader William Cuffay and others who were transported to Australia for striving for political justice
Recognises that it was left to the Suffragist and Suffragette movements to win universal female suffrage
Notes the subsequent roles of political parties in legislating for many of the Chartist demands including the secret ballot
And welcomes the work of the all-party parliamentary group on archives and history to commemorate in appropriate ways the debt that all parliaments owe to the selfless campaigning of the Chartists in achieving democracies in many countries.

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