The martyrdom of Saint Sebastian is one of the most enduring themes in Western religious art. The execution scene so often portrayed - with the Saint transfixed with arrows - is based on the legend about his life and death during the reign of the Roman emperor, Diocletian. However, it is the symbolic association of arrows with the Black Death - during the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance ...

Didier Raoult and Michel Drancourt argue that their recovery of DNAsequences specific to Yersinia pestis from skeletons believed to date from the mid-14th-century Black Death should put a stop to further “speculation” regarding the cause of the epidemic “unless our work is proved to be wrong.” There are several reasons to question the ancient DNA results reported for the Black Death pathogen by...

The early chapters, beginning with the ubiquitous Bishop Ussher, are largely synoptic. In later ones, Grayson resorts to a finer-resolution microscope. He rounds his sights on the crucial 1810-60 period-bounded by Cuvier's announcement of fossil "time markers", and Boucher de Perthes's forging of a common geo-archaeological context for fixing mankind's antediluvial age. The book comes alive wit...

HIV/AIDS and the threat of biological warfare have refueled interest in the Black Death among professional historians, biologists, and the public, not only for assessing the toxic effects of the bacillus but for understanding the psychological and longer-term cultural consequences of mass death. This article makes two arguments. Against the assumptions of historians and scientists for over a ce...

a research study was carried out on the indirect selection efforts amongst small scale holders of west african dwarf (wad) goats based on coat pigmentation and wattle types in ogbomoso, nigeria using personal interviews and structured questionnaires given using simple random on-farm techniques. the questionnaires were focused on the ownership distribution, preferred pigmentation and wattle type...

The Black Death of 1347-1351 was one of the most devastating epidemics in human history, and though it is frequently assumed that the epidemic killed indiscriminately, recent research suggests that the disease was selective, at least with respect to frailty. The purpose of this study is to determine whether the Black Death was similarly selective with respect to biological sex-that is, did eith...

In their article, Umberson et al. (1) demonstrate that African Americans are much more likely than whites to experience deaths in their immediate family circle, and that this elevated exposure to death occurs at virtually all stages of the life cycle. Differential exposure to bereavement by race is likely to contribute to long-standing black−white differentials with respect to health and socioe...

Khaqani is one of the most important poets in Persian literature. His artistic personality is a complex character; he has worked on various branches of art and elegy is one of the main of these branches. Khaqani has composed over sixty elegies that are considered his masterpieces. His personal elegies are the most famous and the most artistically composed Persian elegies. Seven of these elegies...