Cobalt was Ontario's first mining-boom town and at its height was the world's fourth-largest producer of silver. The initial discovery of silver in 1903 led to a rush that saw the town grow to several thousand inhabitants within a decade. In this period, land values rose to astronomical heights, thousands of claims were laid, and the town was hemmed in by mining operations. Initially the mines were relatively small-scale and used simple technology, but soon major mining interests impinged on the town geographically and severely affected it politically and economically. The mining-boom story of Cobalt takes the form of a conflict between the town council on the one hand and powerful mining concerns on the other. The former struggled to provide a reasonable standard of living for Cobalt's inhabitants, while the latter attempted to extract as much silver as quickly as possible from the surrounding land, from beneath neighbouring lakes, and even from within the townsite itself. In this struggle both the urban and natural environments suffered: financial constraints and near-unrestricted mining production resulted in a thoroughly inadequate urban infrastructure, especially in the provision of water for the town's inhabitants, while unhindered mining systematically deforested and denuded the land around the town and even drained the town's original main source of water, Cobalt Lake. Today, almost a century after the silver industry began to decline, the Cobalt region still displays the environmental impact of the mining activities of those early, rush years.
The Crimean question developed as one of the major crises of the post-Soviet period among the two largest Slavic states of the former Soviet Union. It is an issue with several dimensions: the historical background; the case of the Crimean Tatars as an ipso facto aboriginal population deported en masse toward the end of the Second World War; the military-strategic question, with Crimea as the base for the Black Sea Fleet; economic and social developments; and the legality of the 1954 transfer of the peninsula from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to Ukraine in 1954.
Cet article examine l'immigration écossaise en Nouvelle-Écosse dans une perspective environnementale. Big Island, qui est absente depuis longtemps des annales historiques, est un microcosme qui illustre la thèse d'Alfred Crosby au sujet de la nouvelle Europe. La théorie fondatrice de l'historien de l'environnement n'a jamais été appliquée à l'histoire de l'immigration écossaise, au Canada ou ailleurs, et son application à Big Island révèle une forte enclave culturelle et géographique qui témoigne de la puissance durable du lieu.This article examines Scottish immigration to Nova Scotia from an environmental perspective. Big Island, which has been long absent from the historical record, is a microcosm of Alfred Crosby's New Europe thesis. The environmental historian's seminal theory has never been applied to the Scottish immigration story, in Canada or abroad, and applying it to Big Island reveals a strong cultural and geographic enclave that serves as a testament to the enduring power of place.
The works of Edward Hallett Carr represent an important contribution to thehistoriography ofSaviet Russiaand to die studyofinternational relations in general. Yet his work is often dismissed, primarily because Carr was considered 'ideologically unsound,' that is, a Stalinist. This essay examines the validity ofthat charge and concludes instead diat Carr was in fact firmly realistic in his writings on the Soviet Union and on international relations. In the case of the Soviet Union, this paper argues that Carr's realism produced works of balance and judgement in a period -the Cold War-when such characteristics were anathema to the historiography of the subject. In at least one of his works on international relations, The Twenty Years' Crisis, this realism represented a novel and revolutionary approach to the the subject.A significant characteristic of the British educational and social system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the remarkable number of polymaths it spawned. Individuals such as Bertrand Russell, Robert Graves, and J.B. Priestley acknowledged the benefits that the liberal atmosphere ofBritish education afforded them. Interested individuals were free to study -and more impor tantly, to question -any subject that attracted them, and this questioning produced an environment of freedom which greatly enriched the British intellectual climate in the early twentiedi century. As die increasing complexity of the twentieth century resulted in a reaction against unrestrained free thinking, however, this freedom was soon revealed to be a double-edged sword. Both Russell and Priestley, in later life, were not only criticized but even placed under surveillance as they became more active in the peace and antinuclear movements of the 1950s and 1960s.These are extreme examples of an undercurrent of conservatism which gradually encroached upon the sphere of British scholastics and which became particularly marked after World War Two. As the Cold War mercury fell, writing about communism, and particularly die Soviet brand, became increasingly less and less popular -or acceptable-without resorting to ideological invective and suspicion. At this time, however, a British historian published the first volumes of a truly magisterial history of the Soviet Union. Unlike other
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