And its neighboring countries once formed most of the old soviet union, or u. S. S. R. Many of these old soviet republics differ from one another on the basis of ethnicity and religion. But within the Russian Federation itself, there are republics that could still fragment along cultural and political lines. One of these is dagestan. Dagestans historical and economic geographies help explain opposing centripetal and centrifugal forces within russia. As a largely Islamic Republic adjacent to warring chechnya dagestan now receives new scrutiny in the war on terrorism. To help explain the differences between chechnya and dagestan, we explore the relationship between diverse cultures d the physical geography of the Caucasus Mountains. Dagestan the name means land of mountains. Part of the Russian Federation dagestan lies in the Caucasus Mountains on russias southern border. Most people here live in small villages that are often very isolated. In the 19th century, when science still believe
Iudad juarez, mexico is a squatters settlement called anapra. In 1980, this was empty desert. By the 1990s tens of thousands of residents have staked out small plots and constructed makeshift homes. Most tie into the power lines illegally and run lamp wires over the sand to light their homes. 1994 we visit Concha Martinez for the first time living in this tarpaper shack. Like thousands of her neighbors, she has no Running Water or sewers, no title to her land. A single mother, concha built this oneroom home for herself and her four children abel, 12, adrian, ten, wendy five, and the youngest, alexi. Their incredible struggle, and a tenar story of this place will illuminate some key geography themes, including scale has several meanings in geography. One is very specific having to do with ratios of distance on a map to actual distance on the ground. But it also has a more intuitive meaning related to the size of the area in question. Lets call this view of anapra a neighborhood scale. A
Eileen Collins was the first woman to pilot a space shuttle, flying the shuttle Discovery with a crew that included Russian cosmonauts on NASA's 1995 STS-63 mission.