Academic literature on the topic 'Amazon River Region – History – 20th century'

The most severe drought in tropical South America during the 20th century occurred in 1926. This extreme El Nino year is further documented anecdotally, in an update of the river stage observations at Manaus, and in annual rainfall records. The annual rainfall anomaly is an east-west dipole over tropical South America, with drought to the west over the Amazon basin whose discharge is documented at Manaus, and with a surplus to the east and including the Nordeste region of Brazil. Speculations about a role for aerosol in aggravating the drought are discussed.

With this work, the authors wish to show some of the alterations in the pattern of relations between society and nature, which have taken place throughout the 20th century in the Parauapebas and Itacaiúnas river valleys, as well as in parts of the Tocantins River valley, in southeastern Pará. This is accomplished through descriptions based on Coudreau's first-hand accounts (1889), transcribed in "Voyage a Itaboca et a L'Itacayuna", published in 1897, which depicts an area almost totally covered by forest. This is followed by a counter view made possible through the LandSat 5 satellite sensors, with images of those valleys in 2001, showing the consequences of society transformations and pressure on natural resources, and above all the dramatic decrease in the size of the forest, reduced to 52 percent of the 63,000 square kilometers analyzed herein.

In terms of scale and devastating consequences, floods are the most dangerous thing among natural disasters. The article is an attempt to assess their impact on the settlements and economic development in the Ob-Irtysh river system within the West Siberian region in the 18th — early 20th centuries. Floods which had high waters were associated with spring floods, but the water could not subside until the fall or even before the ice break. There were also catastrophic ones with a very high level. In addition, some complications such as long high-water cycles accrued at the time when the level and frequency of flooding increased. During severe and catastrophic floods settlements and agricultural land were flooded, livestock died, houses and outbuildings were destroyed or rendered unusable, and communication routes were interrupted for a long time. In the north of the region (Lower Ob region) during catastrophic floods, fishing trade was almost stopped and the opportunities for cattle breeding in the flooded floodplain were sharply reduced. Floodplain agriculture fell into decay during high-water cycles in the southern boreal forest area. The population of coastal areas tried to protect themselves from flooding with storage dams, but they were not built everywhere and often could not withstand the pressure of water. The only effective means of flood defense was relocation to high river banks. Therefore, the floods in 1912 and 1914 years provoked the relocation of the Irtysh River low-cost residents of the Tobolsk province. The authorities facilitated this relocation. Assistance was provided to flood victims, even though not so often. In these conditions, the population often had to rely only on themselves and God’s help. Thus, for example, in the city of Berezov the cult of St. Epiphanius was formed. On his Memorial Day people asked the higher forces for help in eliminating the consequences of the flood. But the most effective tool in combating floods was folk natural science knowledge. Over the long history of life on the river, the Russian population has developed omens, which helped them to judge the level of the upcoming flood. Among the enlightened part of the local population, there were ideas about the cyclical nature of catastrophic floods.

The epic struggles between Mexicans and the Apaches and Comanches in the far northern reaches of the Spanish empire and the conflict between gauchos and Araucanians in the pampas in the far south are the images the mind conjures up when thinking of Latin American frontiers. We must now add for the twentieth century the dense Amazon jungle as one of the last frontiers in popular (and scholarly) minds. However, these images ignore the eastern Andean and Chaco frontier area, one of the most vital and important frontier regions in Latin America since colonial times, today divided up into three different countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay) in the heart of the South American continent. This frontier region has not received sufficient attention from scholars despite its importance in at least three different aspects: First, the indigenous peoples were able to remain independent of the Creole states much longer than elsewhere other than the Amazon. Secondly, indigenous labor proved to be vitally important to the economic development along the fringes, and thirdly, a disastrous war was fought over the region in the 1930s by Bolivia and Paraguay. This essay provides an overview based on primary and secondary sources of the history of the eastern Andean frontier and compares it to other frontiers in Latin America. It thus endeavors to contribute to frontier studies by creating categories of analysis that make possible the comparisons between different frontiers in Latin America and placing within the scholarly discussion the eastern Andean region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Tularemia is a zoonotic disease caused by Francisella tularensis. A large number of recent studies have provided an update on the disease characteristics and the distribution across Europe. In Croatia, most of the clinical cases, as well as the reports of the disease in animals, date from the 20th century. In that period, epidemic and epizootic research had given detailed information about endemic regions and their characteristics, including suspected animal hosts and vectors. The region along the middle course of the Sava River, called Middle Posavina, is described as an endemic region, i.e., a “natural focus” of tularemia, in Croatia. In the 21st century, cases of human tularemia are being reported sporadically, with ulceloglandular, oropharyngeal and typhoid forms of disease. A majority of the described cases are linked with the consumption of contaminated food or water. The disease outbreaks still occur in areas along the course of the river Sava and in northwest Croatia. In this review article, we have summarized epidemiologic and epizootic data of tularemia in the past and in recent Croatian history.

This article intends to approximate the Anthropology and the History through the description of a religious ritual lived by descendents of ancient fugitive slaves of Curuá river, dístrict of Alenquer, Médio-Amazonas paraense, who had lived in that region since middle-eighteen century . Therefore, we try to penetrate into the meanders of one of the most important feasts of Christisnity - Christmas - and in its reorganization in the daily life of an amazon quilombo, arranging several temporalities, recreating biblical passages in the light of black human experience in the community of fugitive slaves

To study the poorly known fire history of Larix-dominated forest in central Siberia, we collected samples from 200 trees in 46 systematically located study plots. Our study area stretches ~90 km from north to south along the River Nizhnyaya Tunguska in northern Irkustk district. Cross-dated tree-ring chronology for all samples combined extended from the year 1360 AD to the present and included 76 fire years and 88 separate fire events. Average fire cycle gradually lengthened from 52 years in the 18th century to 164 years in the 20th century. During the same time, the number of recorded fires decreased even more steeply, i.e. by more than 85%. Fires were more numerous but smaller in the past. Contrary to expectations, climate change in the 20th century has not resulted in increased forest fires in this region. Fire suppression may have contributed to the scarcity of fires since the 1950s. However, a significant decline in fires was evident earlier; therefore an additional explanation is required, a reduction in human-caused ignitions being likely in the light of historical accounts.

The current paper features the peculiarities of colonization of the Kolosovsky district of the Omsk region in the 16th – early 20th centuries. The author integrally approaches the study of this process, analyzing the main ways of settling and economic development of the area. Considerable attention is paid to the factors that conditioned the process of development of the territory. The formation of the rural settlement network of the district, in many ways, was determined by the vectors of state policy, in particular, the policy of resettlement of peasants from the country's low-land regions. Favorable geographical and climatic conditions, the presence of the river artery made the territory of the Kolosovsky district attractive for settlers, who both established their own settlements and settled in old-timer villages. The history of the region is considered in the mainstream of the history of the state, taking territorial features into account. The article outlines the stages of development of the territory, characterizes each of them, by emphasizing the economic activity development. The author gives specific dates for the formation of villages, analyzing the available foundation versions.

In recent years I have done researches in the Palóc dialect area. In this region the diphthongs were used by the speakers of a larger area in earlier eras of Hungarian language history. In some dialect groups and local dialects of this region even in the 19th century also reported diphthong pronunciation. At the end of the 20th century and now most of the Palóc speakers do not pronounce diphthongs, this data is demonstrated in language tests. It can be detected divergent linguistic movements. We can perceive those different phenomena on both sides of the Trianon border in the earlier Nógrád county (the borderline between Hungary and Slovakia is here at the present). The geographical boundary line marking the area in which a distinctive linguistic feature commonly occurs. The isogloss means a geographical dialect continuum. In my study, I try to draw the temporal and spatial boundaries of diphthong use and disappearance. Sometimes these differences will be larger, sometimes smaller, but they will be cumulative. My corpus shows linguistic changes from the Middle Age to the present. My analysis was done by the following written and oral data: 1. The Code of Gömöry from the 16th century – the nun who copied it (her name: soror Katherina, Legéndy Kató), comes from the Palóc dialect region from the village Legénd. My resources contain the descriptions of the speech and customs of the Palóc speakers from the 18th and the 19th century (Matthias Bel 1735, from the northern Palóc region; Fábián Szeder 1819, the first and the following researches in the area along the river Ipoly; Imre Hollók 1836, from the region of Gömör; István Szabó 1837, in the valley of Karancs; Antal Reguly 1857, notes on her trip in the land of Palóc ethnicity; Gyula Pap 1865, from the region of Salgó; Sándor Pintér 1880, her collections in the western central region of the Palóc; Gyula Istvánffy 1890–1900, her collection of the folk poetries in the area of Mátra); 3. Atlas of the Hungarian Dialects from the middle of the 20th century; 4. the data from the atlases of dialect islands from Slavonien (at the present: Croatia); 5. Dialect Atlas of Medvesalja; 6. and language databases from the 20th and 21th century, my own research from a village Karancslapujtő in the Palóc area. Based on the data, I try to present the isogloss of the spread of diphthongs in space and time in the Palóc dialect area groups.

In the article the endeavors of the Russian empire to make use of the waterways of the region upon its conquest of the Turkistan region, the start of the usage of Amudarya river for military-strategic, economic purposes, its scientific expeditions to achieve these goals, the bringing of steamboats, barges which were able to navigate in the local conditions, their load capacity and speed, the warehouses of the Russian industrial plants on the Amudarya, their exterritorial legal issues, steamboats in the disposal of the

Defence date: 9 October 2014
Examining Board: Professor Kiran Klaus Patel, Maastricht University (EUI Supervisor); Professor Claudia Damasceno Fonseca, EHESS; Professor Christof Mauch, LMU/RCC; Professor Dirk Moses, EUI
This thesis explores the rise and decline of the farming project Vale do Rio Cristalino, run by Volkswagen in the Amazon from 1973 to 1986. This large-scale development project was built within the framework of a colonization program launched by the Brazilian military regime to promote the territorial occupation of the region. Celebrated as a technological revolution in tropical farming, the ‘VW ranch’ was supposed to be a model of civilization in the jungle, to pave the way for the conversion of the Amazon into a modern export economy and to elaborate solutions to overcome hunger in the ‘Third World’. However, this consensual image was tarnished after Cristalino became the subject of various socio-environmental scandals, leading to the mobilization of transnational networks against the project. This thesis analyzes the transformation of Cristalino from a scientifically and politically legitimized project to a space of conflict. It is a multi-layered case study of how a development project was negotiated between different groups of actors and in dialogue with environmental factors. It argues that there were three main reasons for the demise of Cristalino: the conflicting interests behind an apparent consensus of development, a growing awareness of the scarcity of resources, and disappointing results in the area of labor conditions. This historical example leads one to question the loss of authority of the politics of development in Brazil and at the international level from the second half of the 1970s. By showing how a deterministic view of development—which fixed the intensive exploitation of nature as the Amazon’s unique historical outcome—was progressively unravelled, this thesis reveals the process of politicization of a place. With the dismantling of the ‘developmentalist’ consensus, the future of the rain forest became an open issue, negotiated through the prism of multiple projections, viewpoints and scales of intervention.

Defence date: 13 January 2014
Examining Board: Professor Stephen Anthony Smith, University of Oxford /EUI (Supervisor); Professor Alexander Etkind, EUI Professor; Alexei Miller, CEU Budapest; Professor Boris Kolonitskii, European University in St. Petersburg.
First made available online on 26 February 2015.
The dissertation investigates the Russification policy of the late-imperial Russian state, as it related to educational policy in the Middle Volga region. It seeks to understand how the tsarist authorities sought to define Russianness and how they sought to craft relations with pagan minorities and Muslims in a region where the Slavic-Orthodox, the Turkic-Islamic and the Finno-pagan worlds interacted. It asks how far the educational projects of the Orthodox missions and the secular authorities brought about Russification. The analysis of the changes in imperial policy in the period between the 1860s to 1914 allows for the conclusion that the methods, instruments and aims of Russification policy continually changed and that policy was applied quite differently vis-à-vis the Muslim and pagan, or in most cases only superficially Orthodox , population of the region. When dealing with the educational project for the non-Muslim population in the region, also known as the project of N.Ilminskii, the dissertation aims to understand how the russifying and missionary components related to each other. Furthermore, it studies the alternative educational projects aiming at Russification of the non-Russian population of the region that the Ilminskii system had to compete with. A considerable amount of the dissertation is devoted the discussion of the Muslim reform movement and emergence of Jadidism. By analyzing and comparing the curricula of old-method madrasahs and the new-methods ones, the dissertation demonstrates the evolution that the Middle Volga Muslims underwent under the influence of both inner reforms and the actions of the authorities.

Critical examination of gendered and racialized encounters between people and landscapes highlights the varied ways in which individuals respond to complex and multifaceted discourses. By analyzing an archive of letters and photographs generated by a single individual (David Inglis McDowell) I reveal the relationship between experience and discourse in the Skeena region of northwestern British Columbia at the turn of the twentieth century. I examine McDowell's representations of people of various origins and class backgrounds and his portrayal of both the natural and created environments through which he travelled and how these shaped the way he saw himself and others. This work contributes to the growing scholarship which views everyday lives as key sources of knowledge concerning broader social processes. I uncover the process of mythmaking and reveal that the story told by Skeena region settlers was one of conquering the wilderness and promoting progress-a frontier myth that still endures.

Tsang Yuk-ha, Eileen.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-256).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Acknowledgment --- p.i
Abstract --- p.ii-iii
"PROLOGUE Applying a Cultural Perspective for Analyzing New Class Formation, Living Styles and Consumerism in Post-Reform China" --- p.1
"Bringing the ""New Class"" Back in: The Story of Uncle Wong Class Formation, Living Styles and Consumerism in Post-Reform China"
Chapter Chapter ONE --- Conceptualization and Theoretical Framework--- Formation and Culture of the New Class Fraction --- p.5
Chapter 1.1 --- "Dynamic Economy, Declining Party-State"
Chapter 1.2 --- Empirical Puzzles and Theoretical Questions
Chapter 1.3 --- "Methodological Design: Cultural Sociology, Qualitative Method and Documentary Studies"
Chapter 1.4 --- "Theoretical Frameworks and Conceptualization of ""New Class Fraction"""
Chapter 1.5 --- The Importance of Cultural Perspective in Analyzing New Class in Post Reform China
Chapter 1.6 --- The Manifestations of Living Styles and Consumption Patterns
Chapter 1.7 --- Overall Summaries of the Thesis
Chapter Chapter TWO --- The Theoretical Conceptualizations and Understandings for the New Class Fraction in Post-Reform China --- p.20
Chapter 2.1 --- Posing the Problem - The Agenda of Class Analysis
Chapter 2.2 --- "Conceptualizations of Poulantzas's ""Class Fraction"" Theory"
Chapter 2.3 --- Bourdieu's Conceptualizations for the Manifestation of New Class Fractions
Chapter 2.4 --- Class Culture as in the Economic Perspective
Chapter 2.5 --- "New Class Theories in Socialist, Capitalist and Transitional Societies"
Chapter 2.6 --- New Class Theories in Transitional China
Chapter 2.7 --- "The Prospering Groups as ""New Class Fraction"" in Post-Reform China"
Chapter Chapter THREE --- The Fieldsite of the Case Study: Humen Town in the Pearl River Delta --- p.45
Chapter 3.1 --- The Methodological Designs
Chapter 3.2 --- Cultural Studies - The Meaning of Meaning
Chapter 3.3 --- Semiotics as a Theoretical Basis
Chapter 3.4 --- Qualitative Research Method
Chapter 3.5 --- Documentary Studies - Supplementary Data in the Fieldsite
Chapter 3.6 --- The Distinctive Profiles for the New Class Fraction
Chapter 3.7 --- "Economic Hardships, Unforgettable Past"
Chapter 3.8 --- Physical Layout of Humen Town
Chapter 3.9 --- Structures and Infrastructures of Commercial Opportunities in Humen
Chapter Chapter FOUR --- Living Styles and Consumption Patterns among the New Class Fraction --- New Class Boundary and Admission --- p.78
Chapter 4.1 --- Class as no Longer Primarily an Economic Term in Post-Reform China
Chapter 4.2 --- Economic Hardship and the Rise of Consumerism in Post-Reform China
Chapter 4.3 --- Lifestyles and Consumerism for the New Class Fraction in Humen
Chapter a. --- Entertainment Activities
Chapter b. --- Foods
Chapter c. --- Fashions
Chapter d. --- Traveling
Chapter e. --- Cultural Activities
Chapter f. --- Cigarettes and Liquors
Chapter 4.4 --- Living Styles and Consumption Patterns for the Non-New Class Fraction
Chapter Chapter FIVE --- Cultural Capital and Collective Memories for the Formation of New Class Fraction --- p.112
Chapter 5.1 --- Cultural Capital in Bourdieuian Conceptual Framework
Chapter 5.2 --- The Operationalization of Cultural Capital
Chapter 5.3 --- Cultural Capital in Terms of Educational Credentialism
Chapter 5.4 --- Adapting to the Investment Environment in Humen
Chapter 5.5 --- Ambiguities and Incompleteness of Humen's Policies
Chapter 5.6 --- Social Networks and Flexibility for the Formation of New Class Fraction
Chapter 5.7 --- Collective Memories and the Formation of New Class Fraction
Chapter 5.8 --- Collective Memories and Past History of the New Class Fraction
Chapter 5.9 --- Collective Memories as a Lubricant for the Shared Lifestyles
Chapter Chapter SIX --- Collaborative Relationship and Power Struggles of the New Class Fraction --- p.155
Chapter 6.1 --- Autonomous Discourses of the New Class Fraction
Chapter 6.2 --- Institutional Commodiflcation in Humen Town
Chapter 6.3 --- The Rise of the Cadre Entrepreneurial Paths
Chapter 6.4 --- "Collaborative Strategies, Cooperation and Economic Interests"
Chapter 6.5 --- "Power Struggles, Conflicts and Harmonies"
Chapter 6.6 --- Enhancing Expectations: A New Form of Guanxi Network
Epilogue: Rethinking New Class Formation ´ؤ from Economic Exploitation to Cultural Consumerismin Post-Reform China --- p.191
Chapter 7.1 --- Sociological Significance of the Research on New Class Fraction
Chapter 7.2 --- Final Insight: A New Form of New Class Fraction in Post-Reform China
Endnotes --- p.195
Appendix --- p.209
Appendix 1: Tables
Appendix 2: Map of Humen
Appendix 3: Glossary
Appendix 4: Photo Description
Bibliography --- p.246

This chapter establishes that western Kentucky is relatively ignored, particularly in the twentieth century, in the state’s historiography, but that it deserves more attention given its role in the state’s political history, as well as the region’s economic and social importance. This chapter presents a number of previous efforts to identify the extent of western Kentucky before offering one that stretches from the Mississippi River to the eastern borders of Simpson, Warren, Butler, Ohio and Hancock counties. Readers will gain an appreciation for the region’s isolation at the beginning of the 20th century, reinforced by the numerous large rivers, which lacked bridges until the New Deal, the importance of tobacco and coal, and the conservative, Southern-leanings of its people. This chapter above all stresses the dominance of the Democratic Party which gave the region its reputation as the Gibraltar of Kentucky Democracy.