This thesis examines the motives behind the Dutch East India Company’s decision to enter a relationship with Buton sultanate, a small sultanate in the eastern Archipelago of Indonesia. The analysis...Show moreThis thesis examines the motives behind the Dutch East India Company’s decision to enter a relationship with Buton sultanate, a small sultanate in the eastern Archipelago of Indonesia. The analysis focuses on the seventeenth-century East Indonesia as this period was considered crucial for the Company’s objectives in reinforcing their power and influence in the spice-producing region. To achieve the objectives, the Company needed more than just a military excellence because at the time they also dealt with strong opponent such as Makassar. As a result, the Company designed a strategy to overcome the challenge in which Buton, together with Ternate and Bone, became a part of it although the VOC’s sources identified Buton as not profitable. To answer the research question, this thesis investigated the Butonese materials and the VOC’s materials those were found in the Netherlands. The effort to bring together these sources is an attempt to understand the Butonese and the Company’s perspectives and to see whether their perspectives aligned or distinct with one another. Regarding this issue, this study shows that the Butonese materials and the VOC materials were never in harmony. As the Butonese considered the Company as their “dear friends” throughout the seventeenth century, the Company did not seem to share the same idea.Show less
Fossil fuel industry giants in the United States like ExxonMobil sponsor contrarian science to distort the public image of the (virtually non-existing) debate on whether anthropogenic global...Show moreFossil fuel industry giants in the United States like ExxonMobil sponsor contrarian science to distort the public image of the (virtually non-existing) debate on whether anthropogenic global warming exists. The efforts of this so-called ―Denial Machine‖ seem to bear fruit: despite scientific consensus, Americans remain divided on the issue of anthropogenic climate change. Liberal Democrats are more likely to follow the consensus view (79% believes the planet is warming mostly due to human activity), whereas only 15% of the Conservative Republicans supposes this to be the case. Dunlap and McCright argue that conservative media outlets function as an echo chamber for the contrarian voices of this Denial Machine. Liisa Antilla argues that the conservative media is not the only side responsible for this echoing—in their quest for ―journalistic balance,‖ mainstream and progressive news outlets (including the New York Times) have also presented contrarian voices as ―experts‖ in the past. With these insights in mind, this study maps the climate change discourses and source-use of two opposing poles in the U.S. media landscape in the months prior to Trump‘s election: the New York Times on the Liberal Democrat side; news weblog Breitbart on the Conservative Republican side. The results show that these opposing poles conduct their climate change reporting on completely different levels: while the conservative Breitbart seems stuck in denial, hence condemned to the debate-level, the liberal Times has passed this level by accepting consensus and focusing its reporting on the consequences of climate change. In addition, this study also concludes that the Times no longer functions as an echo chamber for contrarian voices for the sake of journalistic balance, while Breitbart, by giving pseudo scientists space to directly publish on their platform regularly, not only functions as echo chamber, but also as the vocal cords of contrarian voices.Show less
‘The Lorelei: “Verfasser unbekannt” – Fact or Fiction’ explores the earliest sources of a rumour, saying that the Nationalist Socialists changed the attribution of the famous German folk song from...Show more‘The Lorelei: “Verfasser unbekannt” – Fact or Fiction’ explores the earliest sources of a rumour, saying that the Nationalist Socialists changed the attribution of the famous German folk song from Heinrich Heine, its actual author, to ‘author unknown’. Research shows that the rumour has its roots in the German emigrant press, being repeated so often that it even persists today. The rumour appeared late 1934, i.e. earlier than the source that is usually named as the earliest source: the preface of Walter Behrendson’s book ‘Der lebendige Heine im germanischen Norden’. The conflict between the song as a symbol of genuine German culture and the author’s Jewish origin was even mentioned before 1934, namely in a satire dated early 1932.Show less
