In the summer of 1780, anti-Catholic riots led by Lord George Gordon in London left hundreds dead and stretches of the city burnt and destroyed. Eighteen months later, during a tense period in the city's history, London was invaded by brown-tail moth caterpillars. The metropolis and surrounding coun...
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In the summer of 1780, anti-Catholic riots led by Lord George Gordon in London left hundreds dead and stretches of the city burnt and destroyed. Eighteen months later, during a tense period in the city's history, London was invaded by brown-tail moth caterpillars. The metropolis and surrounding countryside disappeared behind the tents and nests of the insects, prompting widespread fear of famine and plague. With the memory of the riots still fresh, philanthropists such as Jonas Hanway and entomologists like William Curtis sought to assuage the public's fear, insisting that the brown-tail moth outbreak was part of the normal operations of nature, that the infestation bore no danger to the public, and that efforts to alarm the public or describe them as dangerous were contemptuous. At the same time, the conjurer and philosopher Gustavus Katterfelto, performing in the city, sought to profit from the public agitation, developing spectacles and performances that promised the insects would soon deliver famine, plague, and ruin on the city. This article examines the intersection of scientific authority, public fear, and performance, showing that the outbreak placed tremendous stress on the relationship between scientific authority and security in the metropolis.
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Posted 2 years ago
Jonathan Baldo
Jonathan Baldo
Institution: Department of Humanities, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, 26 Gibbs Street,
Email: jbaldo@esm.rochester.edu
Indirectly addressing the authorship question in the anonymous The Reign of King Edward III, this paper focuses on a signature of Shakespeare’s treatment of English history, a concern with the political implications of remembering and forgetting. Multiple ironies attend the unstable relation of re...
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Indirectly addressing the authorship question in the anonymous The Reign of King Edward III, this paper focuses on a signature of Shakespeare’s treatment of English history, a concern with the political implications of remembering and forgetting. Multiple ironies attend the unstable relation of remembering and forgetting in the play. The opening of Edward III gives the impression that England’s forgetful enemies, Scotland and France, require schooling by a nation that appears to own memory. However, initial appearances prove to be deceiving, as three early Shakespearean scenes prominently feature lapses of English memory, causing the early alignment of England with faithful memory to slip away. There are traces of a distinctly Shakespearean approach to history—one that interrogates the mixed effects of historical memory itself and the values commonly assigned to remembering and forgetting—in The Reign of King Edward III. A consideration of the scenes that share the practice of Shakespeare’s histories—of not simply reviving the past but also reflecting on the motivations and conflicts associated with recollection—accords well with previous attributions of those scenes to Shakespeare on stylistic grounds.
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Posted 2 years ago
Timothy J. Minchin
Timothy J. Minchin
Institution: La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Email: t.minchin@latrobe.edu.au
On 15 September 1970, over 400,000 workers struck General Motors (GM), the biggest corporation in the world. It was a massive walkout, lasting sixty-seven days and affecting 145 GM plants in the US and Canada. GM lost more than $1 billion in profits, and the impact on the US economy was considerable...
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On 15 September 1970, over 400,000 workers struck General Motors (GM), the biggest corporation in the world. It was a massive walkout, lasting sixty-seven days and affecting 145 GM plants in the US and Canada. GM lost more than $1 billion in profits, and the impact on the US economy was considerable. Despite the strike's size, it has been understudied. Fifty years later, this article provides a re-assessment of this landmark dispute, the first to use detailed archival records of the strike. Refuting claims that the strike lacked drama, I argue that this was a multifaceted – and compelling – story. Primary sources show that workers and union leaders were heavily invested in the battle, which reflected deep-seated local, national, and global issues. The United Automobile Workers (UAW) mobilized significant levels of national and international support, and won a range of concessions, including substantial wage and benefit increases and the ability for workers to retire after thirty years’ service. The strike was deeply infused by local issues and should not just be viewed through the lens of the national GM–UAW relationship. In a broader context, the strike is also important because it occurred at a time of rising global labour militancy, which scholars are increasingly recognizing. Its story contributes to a growing body of literature on the 1970s, a decade that witnessed important activism in many areas.
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Posted 2 years ago
Riedno Graal Taliawo
Riedno Graal Taliawo
Institution: n Political Science, University of Indonesia
Email: riednograal@gmail.com
The Indonesianization of Papua project, which has been going on since 1963, has not yet reached the ideal stage. The rise of the post-2000s separatist movement indicates a need to re-read the relationship between Indonesia and West Papua, an examination of past and current events. This study aims to...
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The Indonesianization of Papua project, which has been going on since 1963, has not yet reached the ideal stage. The rise of the post-2000s separatist movement indicates a need to re-read the relationship between Indonesia and West Papua, an examination of past and current events. This study aims to examine the dynamics of Indonesia's attitude and policy towards West Papua, the discourse, and the tension between Indonesia and the Papua freedom movement. This study uses a historical approach by diachronically reviewing how the Indonesian occupation and the Indonesianization project began and its relation to resistance from the Papuan community with the manifestation of the existence of the Papua Freedom Organization. In addition, to capture the synchronic dimension of the current situation, the writer also interviewed several key figures in the integration-and-disintegration of Papua as the primary data source. Indonesia has had a very monochromatic perspective of Papua throughout history, and they tend to ignore Papua as an entity with a will. The military approach and inappropriate development carried out by the Indonesian Government caused the strengthening of the Papuan independence movement. At this point, the Indonesian Government needs a new approach to negotiate its position with the West Papuan community and change the militaristic approach still being used in West Papua. The development approach taken by the current President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, towards West Papua does not seem to be reflected when we see how the stigmatization of Papua continues in the Government's political communication practices related to Papua.
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Posted 2 years ago
Grand hotels had been a metropolitan phenomenon before they emerged in remote regions of the Alps between the 1880s and the 1930s. This essay explores how these semi-public spaces and early places of modernity engaged with alpine scenery and shaped the very industry of mountain tourism. It analyzes ...
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Grand hotels had been a metropolitan phenomenon before they emerged in remote regions of the Alps between the 1880s and the 1930s. This essay explores how these semi-public spaces and early places of modernity engaged with alpine scenery and shaped the very industry of mountain tourism. It analyzes the relationship between elite tourism and the natural and social environment of the Alps. The success of mountain grand hotels was tied to increasing industrialization and a new understanding of travel. Their thoughtful detachment from space, time, and society was an expression of a business as much as of social philosophy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, mountains served as a backdrop for the narrative of the period's scientific and technical progress and became subject to rational interpretation and economic exploitation. Mountain grand hotels were not only a key component of tourism infrastructure but also the bold expression of a presumptuous occupation of spaces set away for tourism. Natural space had widely been turned into social space for visual and leisurely consumption, raising questions of authority, priority, appropriation, and imposition. By mapping the perception of mountains along the history of mountain grand hotels, this essay studies the sites, gazes, and environments of mountain tourism at the fin de siècle. It examines how the history of the mountain grand hotel conflates with the forces of nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism and showcases how these spaces reflect the socio-economic transformations that ultimately paved the way for mountain mass tourism.
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Posted 2 years ago
Heinz Tschachler
Heinz Tschachler
Institution: English and American Studies at the Heinz Tschachler University of Klagenfurt
Email: heinz.tschachler@aau.at
When in the early summer of 1805 Meriwether Lewis for the first time sights the great mountains of the American West, he merely reports "an august spectacle." The word "august" was not then an aesthetic category, nor did it usually describe visual contact with landscape. Categories used for these pu...
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When in the early summer of 1805 Meriwether Lewis for the first time sights the great mountains of the American West, he merely reports "an august spectacle." The word "august" was not then an aesthetic category, nor did it usually describe visual contact with landscape. Categories used for these purposes were the picturesque and the sublime. Whereas there are numerous examples of the picturesque in the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the sublime draws a blank. In my contribution, I will be offering several reasons for the absence of description in the sublime mode: (1) Like their contemporaries, Lewis and Clark held nature up to the yardstick of utility, calculating the agricultural potential of the land or the navigability of a river. (2) The Lewis and Clark expedition was a military expedition, sent out by President Jefferson not to stand in awe at sublime grandeur but to document a useful landscape. (3) Seeing mountains as sublime was essentially a matter of an individual imagination. The Corps of Discovery was a group, whose success depended on cooperation. Hence, the individual imagination must take a back seat. (4) The actual experience of hardship and adversity during the crossing of the Rockies would have obviated any description in the "grand style." (5) Finally, the Corps of Discovery was not even prepared to encounter the great mountains of the West, expecting instead gentle rolling hills that would enable an easy portage to the Columbia River and, if anything, call for picturesque description.
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Posted 2 years ago
Birgit Capelle
Birgit Capelle
Institution: University of Bonn; North American Studies Program; Department of English, American, and Celtic Studies;
Email: bcapell1@uni-bonn.de
This article explores the epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) by Gary Snyder and a Song/Chin dynasty Chinese landscape painting. I illustrate how the poem and the painting, together with Henry David Thoreau’s autobiographical narrative A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849...
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This article explores the epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) by Gary Snyder and a Song/Chin dynasty Chinese landscape painting. I illustrate how the poem and the painting, together with Henry David Thoreau’s autobiographical narrative A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958), form a complex web of intertextual and intermedial references. All four works, I argue, tell similar narratives of spiritual journey and paths through mountain and river landscapes; all four speak of moments of heightened awareness in the sense of Buddhist “no-mind” (Chinese: wu-shin; Japanese: mushin). I show how they converge in exhibiting ontologies of non-substantiality, emptiness, and becoming. Taking the philosophies of Zen Buddhism and Taoism as a theoretical frame, I argue that the American transcendentalist and Beat works poetically and narratively convey relational rather than substantialist views of Being and life. They depict the world as a dynamic and open field of tension between two non-oppositional forces from which we as subjects are not essentially separate in a dualistic way. I substantiate my argument by drawing on the French sinologist and philosopher François Jullien, who refers to the Chinese understanding of landscape (“mountains and waters”) in his critical treatment of (European) philosophy’s centuries-long subject-centered epistemology and substantialist “ontology of Being.”
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Posted 2 years ago
Andrés Teira-Brión
Andrés Teira-Brión
Institution: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Departamento de Historia, Praza da Universidade 1, 15782, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Email: andres.teira.brion@usc.es
The Roman economy of the Iberian Peninsula has habitually been characterised in terms of prestige goods and economic activities such as trade, mining and metallurgy. The analysis of plant-based foods –less prestigious but more essential in everyday life– has commonly been marginalised in state-o...
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The Roman economy of the Iberian Peninsula has habitually been characterised in terms of prestige goods and economic activities such as trade, mining and metallurgy. The analysis of plant-based foods –less prestigious but more essential in everyday life– has commonly been marginalised in state-of-the-art reviews. The O Areal saltworks is exceptional in terms of the large number of organic materials it preserves, and the excellent state of that preservation. After its abandonment (end of the 3rd/4th century AD), the saltworks was briefly used as a dumping ground for the surrounding area. The site's archaeobotanical remains, preserved under anoxic, waterlogged conditions, consist of the building materials used at the saltworks, tools and other artefacts, organic objects employed in activities such as fishing, and refuse. The assemblage suggests a wide diversity of species to have been introduced into northwestern Iberia during the Roman Period, including the mulberry, peach, fig, plum, grapevine, and melon. The notable presence of other edible fruit species that normally grew wild during this period, such as chestnut, walnut, stone pine, and cherry trees, might be related to the start of their cultivation.
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Posted 2 years ago
This paper aims to show how local civic communities, nominally subject to the Seleucid dynasts, integrated Roman magistrates into an existing framework of authority during the late second and early first centuries BCE. I argue that as Roman magistrates played
an increasingly significant role in th...
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This paper aims to show how local civic communities, nominally subject to the Seleucid dynasts, integrated Roman magistrates into an existing framework of authority during the late second and early first centuries BCE. I argue that as Roman magistrates played
an increasingly significant role in the region, cities initially framed them in quasi-regal terms, which their interlocutors consciously accepted. Through a close reading of two Roman letters to the Cilician city of Mopsuestia, dated to 87 BCE (SEG 44.1227), and analysis of literary, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence for the final collapse of Seleucid authority in the early 60s BCE, I reveal that this was a locally driven process. Consequently, local agents played a critical role in both legitimising Roman hegemony in local contexts and encouraging Roman intervention within the region
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Posted 2 years ago
Augustine Owusu-Addo
Augustine Owusu-Addo
Institution: Dean, Faculty of Education, Catholic University College of Ghana,
Email: info@res00.com
The main aim of this paper is to visualize the historical development and the belief system of Confucianism. Confucianism is a term used in Western literature as the name for the philosophy and religion based on the teachings of its founder Confucius.). Confucius believed that political order can be...
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The main aim of this paper is to visualize the historical development and the belief system of Confucianism. Confucianism is a term used in Western literature as the name for the philosophy and religion based on the teachings of its founder Confucius.). Confucius believed that political order can be restored if the ideals, standards, and rites found in the ancient classics were put into practice. This practice developed from an ethico-political system of a paternal government based on the doctrine of humaneness. Confucianism has also spread well beyond China, and its principles and values are highly honoured in East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam (Morgan 2001). The adoption of Confucianism as the official state ideology made Confucian learning the only legitimate content of state education during the Han dynasty. Confucianism has sometimes been purely humanistic, void of any religious elements. While it is true that Confucius did not dwell much into the religious dimension, there is sufficient inferences in his writings that points to this dimension. The basic tenets of Confucianism are captured in the teachings of Confucius which deal with social and moral values. The texts of Confucianism are traditionally known as the “Four Books and Five Classics”. One common practice derived from of this religion is ancestral worship. This is probably the most recognisable influence of Confucius on Chinese culture. The last section of this review takes a comparative look at Confucianism and Christianity. It points out gaps and the bridges that’s between Christians and Confucianism and how interreligious dialogues and the preaching of the gospel relates to Confucian teachings.
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Posted 2 years ago
