‘A Very Hell of Horrors’? The Haitian Revolution and the Early Transatlantic Haitian Gothic

This article explores the Gothicisation of the Haitian Revolution in the transatlantic discourse during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As it argues, the Gothic mode has to be understood as a reaction to the profound challenges that the Haitian Revolution posed to a transatlantic world built on the slave economy. Pro-slavery and pro-colonialist authors demonised this successful slave revolution and one of the first anti-colonial revolutions in modern history by resorting frequently to the ‘hegemonic Haitian Gothic.’ By contrast, early Haitian leaders and some British radicals appropriated this mode, turning it into the ideologically contrary ‘radical Haitian Gothic.

Wave breaking of periodic solutions to the Fornberg-Whitham equation

Based on recent well-posedness results in Sobolev (or Besov spaces) for periodic solutions to the Fornberg-Whitham equations we investigate here the questions of wave breaking and blow-up for these solutions. We show first that finite maximal life time of a solution necessarily leads to wave breaking. Second, we prove that for a certain class of initial wave profiles the corresponding solutions do indeed blow-up in finite time

Distributional solution concepts for the Euler-Bernoulli beam equation with discontinuous coefficients

We study existence and uniqueness of distributional solutions to the differential equation of the Euler-Bernoulli rod with discontinuous coefficients and right-hand side. Upon checking the validity of a solution the occurring products of singular coefficients with the distributional solution have no obvious meaning. When interpreted on the most general level of the so-called hierarchy of distributional products, it turns out that existence of a solution forces a minimum regularity to hold. Curiously, the choice of the distributional product concept is thus incompatible with the possibility of having a discontinuous displacement function as a solution. We also give conditions for unique solvability.Comment: 3 figure