Taiwanese aborigines are the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. Although each group holds a variety of creation stories, contemporary research suggests their ancestors may have been living on the islands for approximately 8,000 years before major Han Chinese immigration began in the 1600s. The Taiwanese Aborigines are Austronesian peoples, with linguistic and genetic ties to other Austronesian ethnic groups, such as peoples of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Oceania. For centuries Taiwan's Aboriginal peoples experienced economic competition and military conflict with a series of conquering peoples. Centralized government policies designed to foster language shift and cultural assimilation, as well as continued contact with the colonizers through trade, intermarriage and other dispassionate intercultural processes, have resulted in varying degrees of language death and loss of original cultural identity. The bulk of contemporary Taiwanese Aborigines reside in the mountains and the cities. Many Aboriginal groups are actively seeking a higher degree of political self-determination and economic development since the early 1980s.

More selected articles

More...

A recruitment poster for the United States Navy from 1918. Prior to the outbreak of World War I, military recruitment in the US was conducted primarily by individual states. Upon entering the war, however, the federal government took on an increased role, using five basic appeals to these campaigns: patriotism (the most prevalent theme), job/career/education, adventure/challenge, social status, and travel.

More selected pictures

Read more

• ... that among long-term prisoners held at Akershus Fortress (pictured) in the 19th century were Norwegian career criminals Gjest Baardsen and Ole Høiland, and Sami rebel Lars Hætta?
• ... that the 1981 general strike in Bielsko-Biała in Poland forced several officials to lose their jobs?
• ... that members of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors include United Kingdom's most experienced and successful songwriters like Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and Elton John?

More did you know facts

• 2 August 2009 - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society reached The New York Times Best Seller list
• 17 August 2011 - Organization of the Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society
• 24 August 1963 - Malaysian Red Crescent Society admitted as a member of the League of Red Cross Societies

“ A person who cannot live in society, or does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is either a beast or a god. ” — Aristotle, Politics

More selected quotes

More at Wikiquote

David Émile Durkheim (French: [emil dyʁkɛm] or [dyʁkajm]; April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology. Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labor in Society (1893). In 1895, he published his Rules of the Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology. In 1898, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies. Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as "collective consciousness" have since entered the popular lexicon. (Full article...)

More selected audio

Read more