As the founder of Islam, a religion with over one billion followers, Muhammad is beyond all doubt one of the most influential figures in world history. But learning about his life and understanding his importance has always proven difficult, as our only source of knowledge comes from the biography of him written by his followers, the reliability of which has been questioned by Western scholars.…
The impacts of natural hazards on human societies can be acute, far reaching and attimes surprising. As much as the products of hazards arising entirely by natural means,however, the disastrous circumstances created by such events are socially-createdphenomena. Not only are natural hazards themselves the product of a complex web ofEarth-system processes, their effect on human society is the res…
The space age dawned in 1957 with the successful orbiting of Sputnik by the Soviet Union, and it surged forward with the Apollo moon land-ings, ushering in the era of satellites and deep space probes. This situation in which space business relied on space science probes, space shuttle flights, and satellite launches largely persisted until the…
The Temple of Dendur stands grandly in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 1). Reflecting pools and cool tan-marble floors stylishly evoke the Nile and its surroundings; an enormous semi-translucent ceiling remains a relic of 1970s mod-ernism; a vast wall of glass looks out to Central Park and E. Eighty-Fourth Street. All frame the Egyptian temple’s relocation to the former Sackler …
In many countries, policies regarding reduction of unwanted catch anddiscards are crafted in response to concerns regarding accountability, conservation,and waste as well as scientific needs to fully account for all sources offishingmortality. It is important to note, however, that unwanted catch is minimal andmost, or all, of the catch has value in somefisheries. Utilisation rates are very hig…
Drylands encompass land areas characterized by a mean annual precipitation to mean annual potential evapotranspiration ratio (known as the aridity index) below 0.65. The aridity index defines four distinct dryland subtypes: hyper-arid (aridity index < 0.05), arid (0.05 ?aridity index < 0.20), semi-arid (0.20 ?aridity index < 0.50) and dry sub-humid …
Over the past two decades, Canadian international history has slipped its traditional North Atlantic moorings. Studies of Canada’s postwar relation-ships with a waning United Kingdom or an ascendant United States have faded in popularity, replaced with a stream of publications on relations with the decolonized states of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, countries whose citizens increasingly co…
In her treatise on aesthetics, Feeling and Form, the twentieth-century philosopher Susanne K. Langer wrote that Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ conveys above all the joyous experience of having such a great idea as that which informs the poem—the ‘excitement of it’ (Langer 1963, p. 219). Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ …
A few years ago, Shauna found herself exhausted and isolated, her soul and body sick. She was tired of being tired and burned out on busy. It seemed like almost everyone she talked to was in the same boat: longing for connection, meaning, and depth, but settling for busy. But then something changed. She decided to trade the hustle and bustle for grace, love, stillness, and play, and it chang…
The creation of—or even the existence of—a “Pacific World” is a question that has preoccupied scholars to a much greater degree than existential doubts have bothered historians of other oceanic basins. Economic historian Eric Jones and colleagues have written that “there can be no meaningful history ofthe whole Rim or Basin [ofthe Pacific] since there…