User:Pinkville/Notes 5

Adolfo Farsari (11 February 1841 – 7 February 1898) was an Italian photographer based in Yokohama, Japan. Following a brief military career, including service in the American Civil War, he became a successful entrepreneur and commercial photographer. His photographic work was highly regarded, particularly his hand-coloured portraits and landscapes, often mounted in beautifully bound albums, which he sold mostly to foreign residents and visitors to the country. Farsari's images were widely distributed, presented or mentioned in books and periodicals, and sometimes recreated by artists in other media, and they shaped foreign perceptions of the people and places of Japan and to some degree affected how Japanese saw themselves and their country. His studio – the last notable foreign-owned studio in Japan – was one of the country's largest and most prolific commercial photographic firms and largely due to Farsari's exacting technical standards and his entrepreneurial abilities it had a significant influence on the development of photography in Japan.

due to its prominence in the Yokohama shashin photographic scene

his images were widely distributed, often recreated by other artists in other media, and reproduced or mentioned in books and periodicals, and they shaped foreign perceptions of the people and places of Japan and to some degree affected how Japanese saw themselves and their country.

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Norman Gary Finkelstein (born December 8 1953) is an American political scientist and author, specialising in Jewish-related issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. A graduate of Binghamton University, he received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and most recently, DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007.

Beginning with his doctoral thesis at Princeton, Finkelstein's career has been marked by controversy. A self-described 'forensic scholar,' he has written sharply critical academic reviews of several prominent writers and scholars whom he accuses of misrepresenting the documentary record in order to defend Israel’s policies and practices. His writings, noted for their support of the Palestinian cause have dealt with politically-charged topics such as Zionism, the demographic history of Palestine and his allegations of the existence of a Holocaust Industry. While he has suggested that his goal is to "unite exacting scholarly rigor with scathing moral outrage," both supporters and detractors alike have acknowledged the polemical style of Finkelstein's work. However, its content has been praised by eminent historians such as Raul Hilberg and Avi Shlaim.

Amidst considerable public debate, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul in June 2007, and placed on administrative leave for the 2007-2008 academic year. Among the controversial aspects of this decision were attempts by Alan Dershowitz to derail Finkelstein's tenure bid. On September 5, 2007 Finkelstein announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with the university on generally undisclosed terms. Despite having denied Finkelstein tenure, an official statement from DePaul praised Finkelstein "as a prolific scholar and outstanding teacher."