Order of the Madras High Court dated 07/06/2021 in the matter of Suo Motu Vs Archaeological Survey of India & Others regarding safeguarding of archaeological monuments in Tamil Nadu. The Madras High Court, June 7, 2021 in a slew of measures directed the concerned authorities to establish Mamallapuram World Heritage …
In February 1544, an Hungarian court charged a Flemish cartographer for heresy. Gerard Mercator, the cartographer in question, was sent to a poky prison cell in the outskirts of Budapest. He had powerful friends though and was out of prison in seven months. But the Catholic orthodoxy remained close on …
Climate change seems a factor in the rise and fall of the Roman empire, according to a study of ancient tree growth that urges greater awareness of the risks of global warming in the 21st century. Good growth by oak and pine trees in central Europe in the past 2,500 …
Through a case study on the Tata Iron and Steel Company, this article aims to clarify how a large-scale Indian industrial enterprise developed its business strategy in order to expand suitable sales networks in the 1920s, when the consumption pattern of steel changed drastically. In correspondence with the change, the …
In an 1895 lecture at England’s Royal Society, historian John Dalberg Dalton lauded the democratic impact of the printing press. According to Dalton, print “gave assurance that what was written would be accessible to all, suppression of knowledge and ideas would never recur”. Most historians concur with Dalton: print has …
During the Great Depression, US Works Progress Administration hit upon a novel way to find employment for out-ofwork scribes and writers. It asked them to document what people in different regions of the US were eating. At the end of the Depression, the agency gave up the project. The material …
Physicist Richard Feynman once said, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you probably don’t.” Einstein struggled with the quantum demon and his famous sentence, “God does not play dice” is related to these struggles. Quantum mechanics does have this slippery characteristic. And yet quantum mechanics is an incredibly fruitful …
Food history has become a bit of an exotica of late. We have Nicola Fletcher’s Charlemagne’s Table, Fellipe Fernandes Armesto’s Food A World History and Liz Collingham’s Curry. Tom Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity is an oddity in this smorgasbord. There is hardly any mention of restaurants, chocolate, oysters …
An 18th century library in Aurangabad that shut down in 1970 has thrown its doors open to the public. Once reputed to be one of the biggest libraries in Asia, it had more than 100,000 books and manuscripts in the 1950s. It is situated adjacent to another historic monument, a …
1500 AD The Spanish explorer Joao de Barros wrote about Chinese merchants stamping children’s palm prints and footprints on paper with ink to distinguish one youngster from another.JULY 1858 William Herschel, a British civil servant in Hooghly district, obtained the palm impression of one Rajyadhar Konai as part of a …
Although texts and wall paintings suggest that bees were kept in the Ancient Near East for the production of precious wax and honey, archaeological evidence for beekeeping has never been found. The Biblical term
In this paper, an attempt is made to understand various dimensions of the relationship between the electricity system and politics in colonial Madras presidency between 1900 and 1947. The colonial government, which introduced new technological systems such as electricity, had its own economic and political priorities. These interests came in …
In 1860, two young women held a long discussion on their career prospects in the small southern English town of Hitchens. “I must devote myself to securing the higher education while you open the medical profession to women,” Emily Davies told Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. Five years later Anderson started practising …
Almost after a century of experimenting, Kaziranga National Park is now a well-known example of the success of wildlife conservation. Conservationists have no hesitation in ascribing the success of this story to the careful application of the science of wildlife conservation. A large section of the Assamese middle class would …
Insect pests affect plants, animals and humans. Chemical pesticides are often used indiscriminately to control these pests. But most of these pesticides are toxic and non biodegradable and have adverse effects on the environment by polluting soil and water and affecting health. Therefore, there is a need to develop suitable …
It is a common signboard on Indian roads: Caution, men at work. It connotes everything from a nuisance for the motorist to profit for the contractors, from infrastructure addition to government reports to seasonal employment for migrant labourers. It is a space where societies clash, build and destroy. In the …
During 1859-61, a large portion of colonial Bengal became a site of contest between the indigo peasants and English planters, with the Bengali bhadralok and British officialdom as important stakeholders. On the face of it, the Indigo movement was against the oppressive and unremunerative system of indigo cultivation. It was …
Mid 16th century The Spaniards’ expectations of plentiful and easily accessible gold reserves proves unfounded, but the island still becomes important as a seat of colonial administration, a starting point for conquests of other lands, and a laboratory to develop policies for governing new possessions. At Española the Spanish crown …
As a child, I would look forward to the vacations. Not just because they usually meant a visit to a relative in the southern or the eastern part of the country. But also because the visits involved a train journey, taking turns for the window seat to look at the …
A brief survey of views thus far expressed in regard to the identification of the Rg-vedic Soma plant is given. In the present study, the problem has been approached from the point of view of the effects produced by Soma drinking rather than from the morphological aspects of the plant. …
