The Bimillennium

2000 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Michael Grant
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Turn Over ◽  
Do So ◽  
Mathematical Error

Everyone is now celebrating the Bimillennium, and very many are writing about it. Bimillennium of what? Of our era, of course: A.D. 2000. Our era is supposed to have begun with the birth of Jesus Christ. But Jesus Christ was not, unfortunately, born in A.D. 1: he was born in 11 or 7 or 6 or 5 or 4 B.C. We do not know exactly when, and our sources have made no particular effort to tell us. Our era was only established by a Russian monk Dionysius Exiguus, in the sixth century A.D. – he had been asked to attack the problem by Pope John I. The theory of Dionysius (which appears, incidentally, to be based on a mathematical error) was taken up by the West, and has held the field ever since. That is why, quite illogically, we commemorate the Bimillennium today: and why governments are spending a great deal of their peoples' money to do so. But let us not, all the same, belittle this misconceived Bimillennium. For it gives a great many people the opportunity to think a lot about their lives – to turn over a new leaf, hoping confidently that their new era and behaviour will be an improvement on the past. So for that reason let us welcome the Bimillennium. But not because it is the Bimillennium of the birth of Jesus Christ, because it is not. Not that the public, as a whole, minds. Any more than it minds about the religious basis of Christmas. It is, however, in my opinion, worth recording that this religious basis exists, and that on these grounds the whole foundation of the Bimillennium is fallacious, although no doubt it will receive the most massive celebrations, and these are justified in so far as they persuade people to change and improve their lives and the life of the community to which they belong. This was certainly the case in A.D. 1000, and I hope and believe it will be the case in 2000 as well.

scholarly journals CHINESE SCULPTURE IN THE NEW ERA

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 125-135
Author(s):  
Wei Xiao
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
The West ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
National Spirit ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Cultural Content

With the advent of a new era, universal social changes pose new challenges for the art of sculpture. In terms of cultural content and practice, sculpture needs to keep pace with time. Chinese sculpture should participate in the global processes of modern sculptural development, guided by the literary and artistic concept «do not forget the past, absorb the foreign, look into the future». Not only should it receive inspiration and stimuli for development from the West but find its voice, preserving Chinese cultural tradition and Chinese national spirit.

Climbing the Capitoline Hill

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Moralee
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Traditional Uses ◽  
The Hill ◽  
Do So ◽  
High Politics ◽  
Late Roman

Chapter 1 introduces the transformations of the traditional uses of the hill from the third to the sixth century, in particular when emperors climbed the Capitoline Hill, when they chose not to do so, and the dynamics that eventually led to the abandonment of the Capitoline Hill. By the end of the fourth century, Christian rulers and administrators began to treat Rome as pilgrims did, thus terminating processions not at the Capitoline Hill, as they had in the past, but instead at St. Peter’s, the Lateran Palace, or the Forum of Trajan. Far from signaling the end of the hill’s history, the absence from the hill of emperors and their ritual power lifts the hill from the shadow of late Roman high politics and allows us to see how the hill functioned in other ways.

China’s Rule of Law Dilemma

2016 ◽  
Vol 08 (04) ◽  
pp. 38-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongnian ZHENG ◽  
Wen Xin LIM
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Legal Reform ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Do So

China’s rule of law took an ugly turn in less than a year after the legal reform was announced. The country detained lawyers on 9 July 2015. The Chinese Communist Party seems to have inherited the "Rule of Man" from the past and acts like an "organisational emperor". While it took the West a few centuries to build its system of rule of law, it will take China even longer to do so.

scholarly journals COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine hesitancy: Role of the allergist/immunologist in promotion of vaccine acceptance

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph A. Bellanti
Keyword(s):  
Adverse Reactions ◽  
Present Report ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Vaccine Acceptance ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Many ◽  
Do So

Background: Vaccine hesitancy has been defined as a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines, despite the availability ofvaccine services. In the past, despite an impressive record of vaccine effectiveness in the United States, several factors havecontributed to a decreased acceptance of vaccines that has resulted in outbreaks of infectious diseases, e.g., measles. More recently, vaccine hesitancy has spread to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines. There are many causes of vaccine hesitancy, such as misinformation, fallacies, and myths, that have contributed to vaccine hesitancy.Objective: The purpose of the present report is to address the many causes of vaccine hesitancy and to suggest ways that the allergist/immunologist can be involved in the promotion of vaccine acceptance.Methods: The current COVID-19 vaccines were reviewed, together with their mechanisms(s) of action and adverse reactions to them.Results: The many causes of vaccine hesitancy include many doubts and concerns related to COVID-19 vaccines as well asa diminished level of confidence and trust by segments of the public in the nation's leaders in government, medical, and business communities, that those groups once enjoyed.Conclusion: Vaccination with COVID-19 vaccines is the only way that COVID-19 will be eliminated or at least controlled today, and vaccine hesitancy is the potential nemesis. The present report describes how the allergist/immunologist not only plays a major role in the delivery of specialized therapy of COVID-19 but also in educating the public with regard to the importance of COVID-19 vaccines, in dispelling misinformation, and in promoting trust for vaccine acceptance but must be informed with the most accurate and current information to do so.

Restitution and the Politics of Repair

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Zolkos
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
The West ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Politics And Law

This book develops a political philosophic approach to restitution and repatriation of objects, by arguing that the development of restitutive norms in the West has been auxiliary to the emergence of modern state sovereignty. It draws on critiques of international law of cultural heritage return, and of its Western humanistic underpinnings, including the ontological binary distinction between things and persons. Rather than accept the restitutive goals of politics and law seeking to do justice for the past and to ‘undo’ the expropriations and dispossessions that have occurred, and are still occurring (be it in contexts of coloniality or war), this book looks at the limits and aporias of restitution in texts of philosophy, literature and social theory. As such, it identifies figures and objects situated beyond the possibility of restitution and repair. This includes analysis of the social fantasies and imaginaries that ‘prop’ our contemporary reparative politics—making the past ‘unhappen’, or cancelling out the occurrence of wrongs. What the analysed texts have in common is that they articulate restitution through the motifs of undoing and making-unhappen, as a reparative and curative procedure, and a prelapsarian return to a place, time or condition prior to the event of violence. Insofar as this reading uncovers the mythical-religious ‘substrate’ of the restitutive tradition, and illuminates the political and affective allures of prelapsarianism, this book also offers insights into Western secularism, not as disappearance of religious thought in the public domain, but as its ‘repression’ (in a psychoanalytic sense).

Imagining Opportunity: The 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act and the Promise of the Public Domain

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-279
Author(s):  
Sara M Gregg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Land Policy ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The West ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Public ◽  
Federal Land ◽  
Elected Representatives ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Western Landscape

Abstract The turn of the twentieth century brought a significant expansion of the nation-state, as the U.S. Congress passed new homestead laws that experimented with adapting land policy to regional conditions. That focus on creating opportunity on challenging, non-irrigable terrain presents a striking contradiction to the firsthand experiences of the western legislators who argued in support of the bill. Elected representatives from these districts justified larger acreages by candidly acknowledging the geophysical realities of the western landscape—those climatic and topographic conditions that were the most frequently cited challenges to settlers in the West—even as they argued that land law should be made more flexible to support new farms and ranches. Adapting to the limits of the western landscape became a paramount goal of legislators who drafted federal land policy, ultimately contributing to expanding the reach of the expert and interventionist state and signaling a new era in regional development.

The Partially Opened Door: Limitations on Economic Change in China in the 1860s

1978 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon R. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Time Perspective ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Limited Time ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Historical Coverage ◽  
Do So

The economic impact of the West on China has long been a subject of debate among students of Chinese history. Despite numerous books and articles, however, a consensus has yet to emerge. Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that the more analytical contributions to the debate have been too sweeping in their historical coverage, while those with a more limited time perspective have been insufficiently rigorous in their analysis. The aim of this paper is to renew this debate, but to do so by a method that will, hopefully, avoid the pitfalls of the past. Specifically, I intend to employ an explicitly theoretical framework to examine the facts of a particular period—the 1860s. This decade is especially important since it immediately followed the expanded opening of China by the Treaty of Tientsin in 1860. The analytical framework employed—economic theory—is applicable to any period in modern Chinese history, but as the data examined are drawn mostly from the 1860s, my conclusions, strictly speaking, are applicable only to that decade. For reasons discussed below, however, I strongly believe these conclusions to be applicable to the entire period from 1860 to 1895.

The Specie Circular and Sales of Public Lands: A Comment

1965 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 414-416
Author(s):  
Richard H. Timberlake
Keyword(s):  
Banking System ◽  
Public Lands ◽  
The West ◽  
The Public ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
Public Money ◽  
Do So

The chronology of events in 1836 surrounding Jackson's Specie Circular and the Act to Regulate the Deposits of Public Money, under which the Federal fiscal surplus was distributed to the states, has never been much in dispute. The orthodox analysis of these events likewise has been almost universally accepted. The Specie Circular has been seen as a device that provoked an increase in the demand for hand-to-hand specie in the West where the public lands were being sold, at the same time that specie was needed in the East to effect the distribution of the surplus. The monetary system could not have its specie in two places at once, the argument has been, and the attempt to do so led to the disastrous breakdown of the banking system and to the ensuing business recession of 1837.

scholarly journals After Life: Engaging Museum Visitors with the Theme of Death and Remembrance

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
Ben Paites ◽  
Emma Reeve
Keyword(s):  
Public Engagement ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Public Event ◽  
Hindu Temple ◽  
Mortuary Archaeology ◽  
Museum Visitors ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Do So

In August 2015, three pottery vessels were discovered in the River Colne in Colchester’s Castle Park. After discussion with the local Hindu temple, these objects were identified as Hindu vessels used during death rites, and subsequently they were entered into the collection of Colchester + Ipswich Museums. These finds acted as a catalyst for an exhibition called After Life, which deployed the wider museum collections, including its archaeological artefacts, to explore through the themes of Body, Soul and Mourning, how people engaged with death in the past and how they continue to do so. This article outlines the public engagement activities conducted during the development of the exhibition, an overview of the exhibition itself, and a discussion of the ‘Death Café’ public event, which took place in the museum during the run of the show. As such, the article offers a case study in public mortuary archaeology in the museum environment.

China’s new blacklist is a threat to foreign firms

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Firms ◽  
Export Control ◽  
Export Controls ◽  
The West ◽  
Chinese Enterprises ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Past ◽  
Do So

Subject China's plan to blacklist foreign firms for denying supplies to Chinese customers. Significance China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) is responding to US export controls by creating a new tool to punish foreign businesses that curtail supplies to Chinese enterprises for non-commercial reasons: the Unreliable Entity List (UEL). China has not shied away from targeting foreign businesses for political reasons in the past. The UEL gives it a much more powerful tool to do so. Impacts The United States is the target for now, but once in place the UEL can easily be used against other countries. An export control bill now in the works will hasten the decoupling of China and the West. Foreign firms in sensitive sectors may opt to curtail their presence in China preventatively, or curry greater favour with Beijing.

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