For more than a decade, Princeton University sociologist Miguel Centeno has taught “The Western Way of War,” a popular undergraduate course that explores the evolution of organized violence from the earliest archaeological record to the present day.
A version of the course he taught online drew tens of thousands of participants. (more…)
Berkeley Lab researchers help scientists determine the radiation risk of exploring an underwater aircraft carrier.
About 42 miles southwest of San Francisco and 2,600 feet underwater sits the U.S.S. Independence, a bombed-out relic from World War II. The aircraft carrier was a target ship in atomic weapon tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands after the war. Then, in 1951, it was loaded up with 55-gallon drums of low-level radioactive waste and scuttled just south of the Farallon National Wildlife Refuge off the California coast. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — It’s football, not soccer! Or is it?
Americans use the word soccer to describe the game that just about everybody else in the world calls football, and this duel over semantics enrages purists of the game. (more…)
Britain’s impending withdrawal from Afghanistan and France’s recent dispatch of troops to the troubled Central African Republic are but the latest indicators of a long-standing pattern.
Since 1945 most British and French overseas security operations have taken place in places with current or past empire connections. Most of these actions occurred in the context of the contested end of imperial rule or decolonisation. Some were extraordinarily violent; others, far less so. (more…)
Ray Callahan discusses his career as historian, author of British military history
A head-on collision with the British Official Secrets Act of 1911 changed the focus of Raymond Callahan’s doctoral dissertation, but also led to a long and distinguished career as a teacher, researcher and author.
Professor emeritus of history at UD, Callahan recounted his personal and professional journey during a “My Intellectual Journey” lecture, sponsored by the UD Association of Retired Faculty on Nov. 7 at the Courtyard Newark-University of Delaware. (more…)
A heroic World War One soldier’s previously unknown semi-autobiographical novel has come to light following the completion of a project to archive and make public the manuscripts, poems and correspondence of Frederick William Harvey.
F W Harvey’s papers are now available to the public thanks to a major collaborative project between the University of Exeter and the Gloucestershire Archives.
The Gloucestershire soldier became well known nationally for his poetry and his acts of courage. Despite having trained as a solicitor, he enlisted in the ranks and was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal before being made an officer. Found among Harvey’s papers was an unpublished novel titled ‘Will Harvey – A Romance’, which is a fictional, but semi-autobiographical, novel which covers the early lives and school-days of two brothers. The story then follows them into the trenches of WWI, where Eric is killed (as was F W Harvey’s brother in real life) and Will is captured (again as in real life). There were several attempts to have it published however it seems that the post-WWI public was no longer interested in reading about the war. (more…)
Countries May Simply Have Less Ability to Fight
COLUMBUS, Ohio – While some researchers have claimed that war between nations is in decline, a new analysis suggests we shouldn’t be too quick to celebrate a more peaceful world. (more…)
Berkeley Lab researchers work on new building standards after discovering previously unknown indoor air pollutants.
For decades, no one worried much about the air quality inside people’s homes unless there was secondhand smoke or radon present. Then scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) made the discovery that the aggregate health consequences of poor indoor air quality are as significant as those from all traffic accidents or infectious diseases in the United States. One major source of indoor pollutants in the home is cooking.
The Berkeley Lab scientists are now working on turning those research findings into science-based solutions, including better standards for residential buildings and easier ways to test for the hazardous pollutants. These efforts are the result of a paper published in Environmental Health Perspectives in 2012 that described a new method for estimating the chronic health impact of indoor air pollutants. That research uncovered two pollutants that previously had not been recognized as a cause for concern—fine particles and a gas called acrolein. (more…)
