According to Paul Otlet, in order to face the worldwide interdependence which was evidenced in the First World War, we need an international center for the storage and dissemination of knowledge: The Mundaneum (1928). To study this utopian project is to study how positivism, centralism, and monumentalism have determined Otlet’s international perspective. His project of a colossal Bibliopolis co...

Recently completed excavations at the site of El Palenque in Mexico's Valley of Oaxaca have recovered the well-preserved remains of a palace complex dated by associated radiocarbon samples and ceramics to the Late Formative period or Late Monte Albán I phase (300-100 BC), the period of archaic state emergence in the region. The El Palenque palace exhibits certain architectural and organizationa...

It is probable that the sanitarians of the future will declare that we, the sanitary pioneers of the nineteenth century, were little more than unclean barbarians, unable to master the first principles of scavenging, when they read that, despite all our affectation of learned dogmatism, and our pretence that our rude art is an exact science, a preventable fever took from our midst the best-belov...