Slave naming patterns : onomastics and the taxonomy of race in eighteenth-century Jamaica

Every year, slave owners responsible for managing estates were required by Jamaican law to submit to the local vestry an account of the whites, slaves, and livestock on their properties. Whites were listed by first name and surname; slaves were denoted by first name, sometimes accompanied by a modifier referring to age, occupation, or ethnicity; and stock were merely enumerated. Thus, on July 3, 1782, Thomas Thistlewood, penkeeper and proprietor of Breadnut Island Pen, rode to Savanna La Mar and handed to his fellow vestrymen the names of his thirty-two slaves. The list began with the first slave that he owned—an Ibo slave called Lincoln—and ended with his most recent addition— Nancy, the one-year-old daughter of Phoebe, a Coromantee slave purchased in 1765. He also noted that he owned thirty unnamed head of cattle

Caribbean slavery, British abolition and the cultural politics of venereal disease in the Atlantic world

Venereal disease was commonplace among free and enslaved populations in colonial Caribbean societies. This article considers how contemporaries (both in the empire and metropole) viewed venereal infection and how they associated it with gendered notions of empire and masculinity. It further explores how creole medical practices evolved as planters, slaves, and tropical physicians treated sexually transmitted infections. Yet what began as a familiar and customary affliction was seen, by the late eighteenth century, as a problematic disease in the colonies. As medical theory evolved, placing greater attention on behaviour, British abolitionists focused on the sexual excesses and moral failings of Caribbean slaveholders, evidenced by their venereal complaints. The medicalization of venereal infection and its transition from urbane affliction to stigmatized disease helps explain a key problem in imperial history: how and why West Indian planters became demonized as debauched invalids whose sexual excesses rendered them fundamentally un-British. The changing cultural meanings given to venereal disease played an important role in giving moral weight to abolitionist attacks upon the West Indian slave system in the late eighteenth century. This article, therefore, indicates how changing models of scientific explanation had significant cultural implications for abolitionists, slaveholders, and enslaved people alik

Calibration of pressure-dependent sensitivity and discrimination in Nier-type noble gas ion sources

The efficiency of many noble gas mass spectrometers to ionize gas species is known to be a function of the pressure of gas in the spectrometer. This work shows how the half plate voltage for maximum He or Ar signal depends on the spectrometer pressure and shows that the half plate voltage for maximum 4He sensitivity does not coincide with the half plate voltage for maximum 3He sensitivity. In addition, half plate voltage has a greater control on sensitivity at higher spectrometer pressures. Variations in He and Ar sensitivity and isotopic discrimination as a function of pressure are due, at least in part, to these variations in the position of maximum sensitivity with respect to half plate voltage. The maximum sensitivity settings shift to lower half plate voltage at high spectrometer pressures, irrespective of if the pressure increase is due to the gas being investigated or a different species. Therefore noble gas mass spectrometers should always be tuned at the maximum possible pressure; measurements at higher pressures should be avoided. Significant errors in the spectrometer sensitivity and discrimination can result from improper tuning and calibration of noble gas mass spectrometers

Developing creative learning through possibility thinking with children aged 3-7

Abstract not available

Teaching in Europe and researching in the United States

No abstract available

XAIRA : software for language analysis

This paper describes a software architectiure developed at Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) over the last decade for the analysis of large or small text corpora, in any language, using rich or only minimal XML markup