Beyond Frontiers

Describes and provides illustrations of the kinds of space exploration that may be done in the near future, and discusses the economic and political implications for the people of the earth

Rome and the Worlds Beyond Its Frontiers examines interactions between those within and those beyond the boundaries of Rome, with an eye to the question of contested identities and identity formations.

This account describes the author's adventures during an 18-month journey beyond forbidden frontiers in Asia. With minimal equipment and disguised as an itinerant Muslim, he hitch-hiked and walked through southern Turkey, and the Iran of the Ayatollahs, entering Afghanistan illegally in the wake of a convoy of Chinese weapons and then spent months dodging Russian helicopter gunships with the rebel guerillas. He was the first foreigner to cross from Pakistan into the closed western province of China since the revolution on 1949.

Owing to their unique magnetic, phosphorescent, and catalytic properties, rare earths are the elements that make possible teverything from the miniaturization of electronics, to the enabling of green energy and medical technologies, to supporting essential telecommunications and defense systems. An iPhone uses eight rare earths for everything from its colored screen, to its speakers, to the miniaturization of the phone?s circuitry. On the periodic table rare earth elements comprise a set of seventeen chemical elements (the fifteen lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium). There would be no Pokémon Go without rare earths. Rare Earth Frontiers is a work of human geography. Klinger looks historically and geographically at the ways rare earth elements in three discrete but representative and contested sites are given meaning.

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Why is it that we so readily accept the boundary lines drawn around nations or around regions like ‘Asia’ as though they were natural and self-evident, when in fact they are so mutable and often so very arbitrary? What happens to people not only when the borders they seek to cross become heavily guarded, but also when new borders are drawn straight through the middle of their lives? The essays in this book address these questions by starting from small places on the borderlands of East Asia and looking outwards from the small towards the large, asking what these ‘minor pasts’ tell us about the grand narratives of history. In the process, it takes the reader on a journey from Renaissance European visions of ‘Tartary’, through nineteenth-century racial theorising, imperial cartography and indigenous experiences of modernity, to contemporary debates about Big History in an age of environmental crisis.

This book deals with an important facet of late Roman history which has not received systematic treatment.