The Israeli West Bank wall: iconographic storytelling

2After the Arab Spring, in the early 2010s, street art burst onto the urban scene filling meters and meters of walls in the major cities of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria and many other Arab countries. Specifically, our focus is on a very particular case: the Israeli West Bank wall (better known as the Israelian Security Fence/Palestinian Apartheid Wall). This study aims to examine how a wall that was born as an element of separation, closure and marginalization, over time has become a means of openness and communication, but above all the manifesto of a condition and a social malaise visible to the eyes of the whole world. All thanks to the messages traced or engraved on the wall that ordinary people, local artists and international street artists wanted to leave to express their thought and communicate them in a context that is certainly not trivial. The messages that follow one another, mostly iconographic, are often intertwined with slogans purposely written in English that refer to international events or personalities. Graffiti techniques merges Western influences with a distinct national heritage, recognising local history and shaping a future open to new influences.openopennetti, rossana; mansour, osamaNetti, Rossana; Mansour, Osam

Patient Experiences of Terminal Illness Toward the End of Life: A Reflective Narrative Report

The care of patients, towards their end of life, in the community is complex and challenging. We prefer to see them in their home environment, with their spouse or next of kin present, often accompanied by a junior colleague for help and support

Up to Their Elbows in Blood: The Crimean War and the Professionalization of Medicine

Dr. Heather McCreaFought in the mid-1850s, many scholars regard the Crimean War as largely insignificant. However in reality, the historical contributions of the war are important – particularly those contributions pertaining to medicine. This seemingly “unnecessary” war facilitated the modernization of Western medicine; methods used during and directly after the Crimean War were standard until World War Two. A brief history of the war reveals medical data that constitutes the bulk of my interpretation. The war’s specific medical achievements are highlighted throughout the essay. The findings in this paper are by no means conclusive, but they exhibit that it is important to look beyond Florence Nightingale, the war’s most famous and studied individual, and gaze upon the larger trends of medicine. Her story is covered in some detail in this paper, but she is not the sole source of innovation from this rather disastrous war. The professionalization of Western medicine stands out as one of the great accomplishments of this war, despite scholars viewing the war as useless

Horse-Racing in Nineteenth-Century Russia

Whereas previous historians have traced the eighteenth-century origins of Russian horse-racing and discussed the growth of a national sport financed by mass betting from 1876, this article instead focuses on the period 1825–75, when racing was used primarily to trial breeds in a quest for the perfect combination of speed, strength and endurance. The crucial dynamic was a tension between proponents of the English thoroughbred and advocates of less temperamental native horses, allegedly better suited to military and agricultural needs. Rival equine values stimulated contrasting equestrian cultures. The turning point was the 1840s, when the English model introduced under Catherine II came under attack, and when harness-racing and peasant cart-racing, more popular than flat-racing or steeplechasing, flourished under the umbrella of the Ministry of State Domains. State support for private studs amounted to incentives rather than subsidies, and their withdrawal in the 1860s affected racing less than broader changes in the economy of the nobility. Even in the era of mass entertainment, aristocratic equestrianism persisted in the cavalry, in Russia as elsewhere in Europe

L'istituzione del matrimonio in Tolstoj

The Institution of Marriage in Tolstoy Family Happiness, Anna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata Maria Zalambani Tolstoy\u2019s works are not just literary masterpieces. They are also mirrors of the cultural, historical and social transformations that were taking place in Czarist Russia. This study examines three of his novels from this perspective, as reflecting the evolution of the marriage institution in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Family Happiness anticipates the transition from the marriage of convenience, intrinsic to the economic and social structure deriving from large landed property, to the bourgeois marriage, mirroring the social changes which were taking place after the Great Reforms. Anna Karenina is the novel which best illustrates the nature of the marriage of convenience, depicting its definitive crisis in Anna\u2019s attempts to flaunt and justify her adultery. In this she challenges her contemporaries, and decrees the end of the marriage of convenience, which tolerated adultery provided it was committed privately. Anna\u2019s fearless decision to make her relationship public leads to her death. But her choice also illustrates a new alternative for women who, towards the end of the century, were acquiring greater awareness of the \u201cwoman problem\u201d. If Family happiness shows the first cracks in the institution of aristocratic marriage by questioning a mechanism which, being a mere contract of alliance between families, does not contemplate personal feelings and allows no expectation of happiness for the spouses (in particular for women), Anna Karenina shows an institution in deep crisis. An attempt at solution can be glimpsed in the complex sequences of events in The Kreutzer Sonata. Beyond Pozdny\u161ev\u2019s murderous insanity, we can see a transition to a new type of marriage based on sentiments. Between the lines of his confession, we can see the birth of a bourgeois marriage relationship, with a nuclear family based on love and the education of children (previously delegated to nurses and tutors). The time of the Great Reforms, with the birth of a new social class and the demise of the aristocracy, requires a family structure to match these changed conditions. The bourgeois family is now the focus for feelings, for love, as well as for sexuality, for which it is the only focus permitted by state and church. Nonetheless, the family remains a place in which relations of power on the axes of husband-wife and parents-children continue to exist, albeit with new modalities. The transition to a modern model does not mean the end of the family as a microcosm with disciplinary powers among its members, but its affirmation in different terms and manners. Considering these issues also raises the question of the relationship between society and literature. As well as mirroring social and cultural change, literature contributes to produce such change. This study aims to read historical reality from between the lines of literature and at the same time to show how, in a literature-centred society like Russia\u2019s, Tolstoy\u2019s works may have helped generate new models for life. Thus Anna\u2019s suicide is a shout of denunciation which appears to have penetrated the unconscious of Tolstoy\u2019s readers, influencing their mentalities and their behaviour

L’istituzione del matrimonio in Tolstoj

Leo Tolstoy's works are not only masterpieces of world literature, but also mirrors of their time, of the socio-cultural transformations which took place in Tsarist Russia; it is from this perspective that, in this work, this great writer’s production is analysed. In particular, the author examines the evolution of the institution of marriage in the second half of the 19th century in Russia, starting from the reading of Family Happiness , Anna Karenina and The Kreutzer Sonata. If Family happiness preludes to the crisis of the arranged marriage, its implosion is beautifully described in Anna Karenina . Anna announces the definitive death of this institution when she defies the society of her time by not hiding her adultery and, on the contrary, by exhibiting it and trying to legitimize it.The Kreutzer Sonata, lastly, demonstrates the successful overcoming of the aristocratic marriage model, replaced by the bourgeois one