Research Infinity - All Articles

‘A Gallant Fight’: The UAW and the 1970 General Motors Strike

On 15 September 1970, over 400,000 workers struck General Motors (GM), the biggest corporation in the world. It was a massive walkout, lasting sixty-seven days and affecting 145 GM plants in the US and Canada. GM lost more than $1 billion in profits, and the impact on the US economy was considerable. Despite the strike's size, it has been understudied. Fifty years later, this article provides a re...
Posted 2 years ago

The Indonesianization of West Papua: Development of Indonesia's Attitudes and Policies towards West Papua and the Dynamics of the Papua Freedom Movement

The Indonesianization of Papua project, which has been going on since 1963, has not yet reached the ideal stage. The rise of the post-2000s separatist movement indicates a need to re-read the relationship between Indonesia and West Papua, an examination of past and current events. This study aims to examine the dynamics of Indonesia's attitude and policy towards West Papua, the discourse, and the ...
Posted 2 years ago

Mountain Grand Hotels at the Fin de Siècle Sites, Gazes, and Environments

Grand hotels had been a metropolitan phenomenon before they emerged in remote regions of the Alps between the 1880s and the 1930s. This essay explores how these semi-public spaces and early places of modernity engaged with alpine scenery and shaped the very industry of mountain tourism. It analyzes the relationship between elite tourism and the natural and social environment of the Alps. The succe...
Posted 2 years ago

More than a Feeling Why the Lewis and Clark Expedition Did not Experience “the Sublime” at the Great Divide when Crossing the American Continent

When in the early summer of 1805 Meriwether Lewis for the first time sights the great mountains of the American West, he merely reports "an august spectacle." The word "august" was not then an aesthetic category, nor did it usually describe visual contact with landscape. Categories used for these purposes were the picturesque and the sublime. Whereas there are numerous examples of the picturesque ...
Posted 2 years ago

Mountains and Waters of No-Mind A Transcultural Approach to Moments of Heightened Awareness and Non-Substantialist Ontology in Henry David Thoreau, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder

This article explores the epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) by Gary Snyder and a Song/Chin dynasty Chinese landscape painting. I illustrate how the poem and the painting, together with Henry David Thoreau’s autobiographical narrative A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958), form a complex web of intertextual and intermedial re...
Posted 2 years ago

Plant economy in the westernmost territory of the Roman state through waste: the wet site of O Areal (Vigo, Spain)

The Roman economy of the Iberian Peninsula has habitually been characterised in terms of prestige goods and economic activities such as trade, mining and metallurgy. The analysis of plant-based foods –less prestigious but more essential in everyday life– has commonly been marginalised in state-of-the-art reviews. The O Areal saltworks is exceptional in terms of the large number of organic mate...
Posted 2 years ago

Political Authority and Local Agency: Cilicia Pedias and Syria between the Seleucid Empire and the Roman Republic

This paper aims to show how local civic communities, nominally subject to the Seleucid dynasts, integrated Roman magistrates into an existing framework of authority during the late second and early first centuries BCE. I argue that as Roman magistrates played an increasingly significant role in the region, cities initially framed them in quasi-regal terms, which their interlocutors consciously a...
Posted 2 years ago

Visualising the historical development and belief system of confucianism

The main aim of this paper is to visualize the historical development and the belief system of Confucianism. Confucianism is a term used in Western literature as the name for the philosophy and religion based on the teachings of its founder Confucius.). Confucius believed that political order can be restored if the ideals, standards, and rites found in the ancient classics were put into practice. ...
Posted 2 years ago

Mining, Waste and Environmental Thought on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950-2000

Since the early twentieth century, the copper-mining industry on the Zambian and Congolese Copperbelt has moved millions of tonnes of earth and dramatically reshaped the landscape. Nonetheless, mining companies, governments and even residents largely overlooked the adverse environmental aspects of mining until the early 1990s. By scrutinising environmental knowledge production on the Central Afric...
Posted 2 years ago

From Garrisoned District to Chinese Town: Land and Boundaries at the Kowloon Walled City, 1898–1912

The Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong became a named entity around 1810 and was demolished in 1994, but its architecture had long been unclassified. Not until the years just prior to its demolition did this dense slum of informal multi-story buildings receive sustained attention from architects and architectural historians. However, the architectural nature of the six-acre area predated its late-20...
Posted 2 years ago