Mooring the global archive: a Japanese ship and its migrant histories

Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan's engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth century. His compelling in-depth analysis reconstructs the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai'i, Southeast Asia and Australia. These stories bring together transpacific historiographies of settler colonialism, labour history and resource extraction in new ways. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, Dusinberre addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. This engaging investigation into archival practice asks, what is the global archive, where is it cited, and who are 'we' as we cite it? This title is also available as Open Access

Attitudes to women in Jacobean drama

The prominence of women in Jacobean drama is immediately evident. Jacobean dramatists excel in their depiction of courtship and marriage, in their evocation of London life and city women, and in their analysis of female character. This concern with women is new to the drama, and is most marked, and most fruitful in the plays written between 1590 and 1625. The major dramatists of the Jacobean period - Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, Middleton, Marston, Heywood, Dekker, Chapman, and Beaumont and Fletcher - share attitudes to women, but their sensitivity to conflicting ideas, and eagerness to spell out their own assumptions, suggests that the similarity is not merely conventional. Their treatment of women implies confidence in their audience's involvement in the issues on which they focus. The Puritans, preaching to the same audience as the dramatists write for, promote liberal attitudes to women by following through the implications in the Protestant and Humanist ideal of chaste marriage. The dramatists echo them in disapproving of virginity as an end in itself, and in exalting sexual passion in marriage, in opposing inhumane practices such as forced marriage, and in pointing out that a wife's obedience to her husband is conditional on his treatment of her. The dramatists hark back to Humanists such as More, Erasmus and Vives in their distrust of romantic excess, both in adulterous situations, and in courtship. They portray individual women who fulfil Humanist convictions about women's rational and intellectual equality with men. The drama reflects contemporary uneasiness at women's liberty in a society where economic change alters a wife's relation to her husband's work, and where an impoverished gentry seeking middle-class wealth creates a booming marriage market. The dramatists expose both female presumption and male alarmism. They recognize the bid for independence of women who join Puritan sects (ridiculed as disreputable in the drama), or who ape masculine dress; their defence of masculine-feminines is in part a defence of theatrical practice against Puritan extremists. The abundance of stock medieval satire on women in Jacobean drama seems at first misleadingly at variance with liberal attitudes to women. The dramatists give it a coherent dramatic function by attributing it to groups of characters whose way of life, or associations for the audience, neutralise its venom. Convinced that women are as capable of virtue as men, the dramatists concentrate on the causes of adultery and whoredom, whether they lie in witchcraft, or in special pressures - the temptations of money and social status, the corruption of Court life, the condition of womanhood - which operate against women. They attack the double standard by dividing moral responsibility equally between seducer and seduced, and by implicating the husband in the adulteress's guilt. Shakespeare shares his contemporaries' attitudes to women, but integrates them into his realisation of individual character. He shows how preconceptions about women in general damage individuals, and limit the experience of love. The dramatists’ close contact with conflicting ideals and prejudices relating to women outside the theatre contributes to the richness and vitality of Jacobean drama

The Mother Of All Decisions: How Women Make Career Decisions Around Motherhood

This capstone seeks to discover how women make career decisions around motherhood. Specifically, what types of factors are involved when a woman chooses to become a mother and how workplaces can support their workforce around motherhood. With no government mandated paid maternity leave, organizations are required to meet the call of supporting the female workforce around motherhood, which inevitably can cause some friction and opportunities for bias. Through interviews of eight women who recently became mothers or are looking to start a family in three years, this research provides findings on how women are influenced in their decision making. The research dives into the history of women’s rights in the United States and the current state of government involvement, with trends and experiences in the workplace. The interviews determine how external and internal factors impact how women make decisions and provides suggestions to mothers, coworkers, and organizations on how to make the transition easier for women

Commissioning of the CMS High Level Trigger

The CMS experiment will collect data from the proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at a centre-of-mass energy up to 14 TeV. The CMS trigger system is designed to cope with unprecedented luminosities and LHC bunch-crossing rates up to 40 MHz. The unique CMS trigger architecture only employs two trigger levels. The Level-1 trigger is implemented using custom electronics, while the High Level Trigger (HLT) is based on software algorithms running on a large cluster of commercial processors, the Event Filter Farm. We present the major functionalities of the CMS High Level Trigger system as of the starting of LHC beams operations in September 2008. The validation of the HLT system in the online environment with Monte Carlo simulated data and its commissioning during cosmic rays data taking campaigns are discussed in detail. We conclude with the description of the HLT operations with the first circulating LHC beams before the incident occurred the 19th September 2008

Performance of the CMS Cathode Strip Chambers with Cosmic Rays

The Cathode Strip Chambers (CSCs) constitute the primary muon tracking device in the CMS endcaps. Their performance has been evaluated using data taken during a cosmic ray run in fall 2008. Measured noise levels are low, with the number of noisy channels well below 1%. Coordinate resolution was measured for all types of chambers, and fall in the range 47 microns to 243 microns. The efficiencies for local charged track triggers, for hit and for segments reconstruction were measured, and are above 99%. The timing resolution per layer is approximately 5 ns