Hasil untuk "History of Great Britain"

Freya Johnston

When Benjamin Disraeli met Thomas Love Peacock in 1848, he greeted him—to Peacock’s apparent surprise—as his ‘master’. Why should Disraeli have considered the prose satirist who was Shelley’s contemporary to be the leading influence on his early literary career? In seeking to answer this question my article draws on Isaac D’Israeli’s Flim-Flams! Or the Life and Errors of My Uncle, and the Amours of My Aunt (1805), a work never mentioned by his son, as well as on other points of historical, biographical, and stylistic connection between Peacock’s novels and the so-called ‘Silver Fork’ or ‘Dandy’ School to which Vivian Grey (1826‒27) belongs.

Kathryn E. Powell, Tom H. Oliver, Manuela González‐Suárez et al.

Abstract Asynchrony in population abundance can buffer the effects of environmental change leading to greater community and ecosystem stability. Both environmental (abiotic) drivers and species functional (biotic) traits can influence population dynamics leading to asynchrony. However, empirical evidence linking dissimilarity in species traits to abundance asynchrony is limited, especially for understudied taxa such as insects. To fill this knowledge gap, we explored the relationship between pairwise species trait dissimilarity and asynchrony in interannual abundance change between pairs of species for 422 moth, butterfly, and bumblebee species in Great Britain. We also explored patterns differentiating traits that we assumed to capture ‘sensitivity to environmental variables’ (such as body mass), and traits that may reflect ‘diversity in exposure’ to environmental conditions and lead to niche partitioning (for example, habitat uses, and intra‐annual emergence periods). As expected, species trait dissimilarity calculated overall and for many individual traits representing response and exposure was positively correlated with asynchrony in all three insect groups. We found that ‘exposure’ traits, especially those relating to the phenology of species, had the strongest relationship with abundance asynchrony from all tested traits. Positive relationships were not simply due to shared evolutionary history leading to similar life‐history strategies: detected effects remained significant for most traits after accounting for phylogenetic relationships within models. Our results provide empirical support that dissimilarity in traits linked to species exposure and sensitivity to the environment could be important for temporal dissimilarity in insect abundance. Hence, we suggest that general trait diversity, but especially diversity in ‘exposure’ traits, could play a significant role in the resilience of insect communities to short‐term environmental perturbations through driving asynchrony between species abundances.

Irem Islek, Sule Gunduz Oguducu

Recommendation systems can provide accurate recommendations by analyzing user shopping history. A richer user history results in more accurate recommendations. However, in real applications, users prefer e-commerce platforms where the item they seek is at the lowest price. In other words, most users shop from multiple e-commerce platforms simultaneously; different parts of the user's shopping history are shared between different e-commerce platforms. Consequently, we assume in this study that any e-commerce platform has a complete record of the user's history but can only access some parts of it. If a recommendation system is able to predict the missing parts first and enrich the user's shopping history properly, it will be possible to recommend the next item more accurately. Our recommendation system leverages user shopping history to improve prediction accuracy. The proposed approach shows significant improvements in both NDCG@10 and HR@10.

Kristīne Beķere

During the beautifully snowy days of December 2023, we are preparing the second issue of this year’s journal for publication. This issue is almost entirely devoted to the historical problems of the first half of the 20th century: developments in society and the armed forces during the Latvian War of Independence, the ideas gaining momentum amongst the ethnic minorities in Latvia in interwar period, and also international trade. We present four scholarly articles and several reviews of recent research. In his article, Professor of the University of Latvia Ēriks Jēkabsons discusses at length the  activities of Herbert Adolphus Watson, an unofficial representative of the British Foreign Office in Latvia during the first half of the War of Independence, from November 1918 to the summer of 1919  – a  time when hostilities were active and conditions in Latvia particularly difficult. The author traces the circumstances of Grant-Watson’s arrival and endeavours in Latvia, providing a  broad insight into his perception of the events in Latvia at the time. Grant-Watson’s reports on the situation in Latvia provide a wealth of information on the domestic political situation, public sentiment, political and military developments in Latvia, as well as Latvia’s international relations, particularly with Great Britain. The  same period, 1918–1920, is also addressed in the  next article, a  study by Estonian researcher Toivo Kikkas on the  surveillance reports compiled by the political departments of the Red Army’s national units, also called political summaries – politsvodki. The author analyses the instructions for drafting surveillance reports, the  implementation of these instructions and the content of the reports, i.e. what was actually reported by the political departments of the Estonian and Latvian national units of the Red Army. In this issue of the  journal, we continue our tradition of publishing one article based on a recently defended master’s thesis. In this issue, it is an article by Milana Drugoveiko on the political thought of the Belarusian intelligentsia in Latvia in the period 1920–1934. Based on the example of the Belarusian activist Konstantin Jezovitov, the author describes the main political ideas of the Belarusian minority in Latvia in the interwar period, the attitude of Belarusians towards the Latvian state and its minority policy. The study by Romanian scholar Andreea Dahlquist, on the other hand, focuses on international trade during the  Second World War, analysing the  trade relations linking two seemingly very distant and unrelated countries, namely, Romania and Sweden, between 1939 and 1944. Tracing the  development of economic relations connecting Sweden and Romania, and the  obstacles thereof, the  author concludes that it was the  war that prompted the  two countries to establish closer economic cooperation. Although trade between the two countries was relatively restricted in volume, its significance lay precisely in the types of merchandise exchanged, with both sides gaining access to the goods and raw materials that were of key importance to each of them. The  journal concludes with reviews of several books: a  collection of documents on the  final phase of the  War of Independence by Professor Ē.  Jēkabsons; a  monograph on political activities in exile written by the  author of these lines, as well as a study dedicated to the history of Eastern Christianity in the region, published in Poland.

Maite Escudero-Alías

Drawing upon theoretical frameworks, such as Sara Ahmed’s “strange encounters” (2000), “willful subjects” (2014), and Judith Butler’s vulnerability (2004), the present article aims to explore female agency and action in The Wonder as fundamental steps to achieve transformation and change. For this purpose, I first offer a brief introduction to the vulnerability of the female body in Irish history, as it counts on a significant tradition firmly rooted in religious and class politics. Significantly, the novel foregrounds a reformulation of religious superstitions into new patterns of existence. Lib’s watchfulness and vigil astutely enact a self-displaying activity that offers the promise of a more communicative and empathic interaction with Anna. In addition, attention will be also paid to the narrative techniques that depict Lib’s failure to read Anna’s body fully as a wounded individual, thus revealing an encounter with alterity that can only work when there is will, love and affection. The story, then, challenges an aesthetics of grief and guilt and enacts, in turn, a new pattern of existence for both Anna and Lib. Such a pattern demands an ethics of attention and communication aimed to restore the self and display a more affective stance, which is necessary in order to encounter the limits of intelligibility and find out the perverse truth behind Anna’s “wonderful anomaly” (Donoghue 2016: 97).

Joern Ploennigs, Markus Berger

Recent generative AI platforms are able to create texts or impressive images from simple text prompts. This makes them powerful tools for summarizing knowledge about architectural history or deriving new creative work in early design tasks like ideation, sketching and modelling. But, how good is the understanding of the generative AI models of the history of architecture? Has it learned to properly distinguish styles, or is it hallucinating information? In this chapter, we investigate this question for generative AI platforms for text and image generation for different architectural styles, to understand the capabilities and boundaries of knowledge of those tools. We also analyze how they are already being used by analyzing a data set of 101 million Midjourney queries to see if and how practitioners are already querying for specific architectural concepts.

Alexandra Walsham

This essay surveys the relationship between puritanism and religious pluralism between 1559 and 1642. It examines the contradictory instincts towards inclusion and exclusion that were central to its dynamic throughout this period, as well as the tension between its commitment to reforming the Church of England from within and the emphasis on social separatism that pulled it in the direction of congregationalism. It also explores puritan attitudes to popery, heresy, and unbelief and puritanism’s contribution towards critiques of persecution and calls for toleration and liberty of conscience in the mid seventeenth century. Its aim is to tease out some of the intriguing paradoxes of this religious movement and outlook.

Hailey Aronson, Thomas W. Baumgarte, Stuart L. Shapiro

We assess whether gravity darkening, induced by a tidal interaction during a stellar fly-by, might be sufficient to explain the Great Dimming of Betelgeuse. Adopting several simple approximations, we calculate the tidal deformation and associated gravity darkening in a close tidal encounter, as well as the reduction in the radiation flux as seen by a distant observer. We show that, in principle, the duration and degree of the resulting stellar dimming can be used to estimate the minimum pericenter separation and mass of a fly-by object, which, even if it remains undetected otherwise, might be a black hole, neutron star, or white dwarf. Our estimates show that, while such fly-by events may occur in other astrophysical scenarios, where our analysis should be applicable, they likely are not large enough to explain the Great Dimming of Betelgeuse by themselves.

Zhuo Xu, Masayoshi Tomizuka

In this extended abstract, we investigate the design of learning representation for human intention inference. In our designed human intention prediction task, we propose a history encoding representation that is both interpretable and effective for prediction. Through extensive experiments, we show our prediction framework with a history encoding representation design is successful on the human intention prediction problem.

K. A. Sozinova

The author of the article assumes that the interstate relations between Russia and Great Britain in the late 18th — early 19th centuries largely determined the area of private contacts between Russians and the British. English-Russian marriages have a special place in the history of English-Russian relations. Attention is paid to one of such unions — the marriage of the outstanding statesman M. M. Speransky with an Englishwoman Elizabeth Stephens. It is claimed that a significant role in Speransky’s fate was played by A. A. Samborsky, also married to an Englishwoman, in whose house Speransky’s fateful meeting with his future wife took place. It is reported that the Speransky Fund of the Russian national library preserved letters of Elizabeth Stephens to Speransky, previously not widely attracted by researchers, but not all of these letters actually belong to Elizabeth, some of them belong to her sister — Marianne. This study provides the first translation of these letters for the analysis of Speransky’s private life. The author concludes that the preserved correspondence meets the standards and methods of expression of feelings in the era of “sentimentalism.” The problem of how much Speransky was immersed in the cultural context of British reality due to this marriage is also considered. Despite the fact that the marriage was quite short, Speransky’s relations with the Stephens family were quite strong.

Zakhar Kabluchko, Christoph Thäle

The concept of typical and weighted typical spherical faces for tessellations of the $d$-dimensional unit sphere, generated by $n$ independent random great hyperspheres distributed according to a non-degenerate directional distribution, is introduced and studied. Probabilistic interpretations for such spherical faces are given and their directional distributions are determined. Explicit formulas for the expected $f$-vector, the expected spherical Quermaßintegrals and the expected spherical intrinsic volumes are found in the isotropic case. Their limiting behaviour as $n\to\infty$ is discussed and compared to the corresponding notions and results in the Euclidean case. The expected statistical dimension and a problem related to intersection probabilities of spherical random polytopes is investigated.

Kirill Stankov

This article deals with one of the most controversial problems in the history of Britain in the Early Modern Time. Hardly any personality of this period provoked such heated debates among historians and contradictory assessments of contemporaries as King James II Stuart. He was the last Catholic on the British throne. The main aim of this article is to identify the main direction of church reforms of this monarch, show the confessional groups that benefi ted from this direction and who considered themselves aggrieved. The article also attempts to identify the reasons for the “black legend” of James II as a blood-covered representative of Counter-Reformation. Based on a large evidence of sources, the article proves that James II strived after a broad religious tolerance rather than elimination of Protestantism in his reign. One of the conclusions is that in the 17th century the Catholic community in England and Scotland was so small that did not pose any threat to the confessional system dominating in each of these countries (Anglicanism in England, Presbyterian Church in Scotland). Persecution of Catholics was a remnant of Reformation, which should have been overcome for the sake of overcoming political tension in Britain’s society. The article identifi es the main stages in church reforms of James II, his strategy in the religious question, and sheds light on the attempts to fi nd at least temporary allies. The main conclusion of the article is that the vision of James II was broader than that of his contemporaries and that he was ahead of his time (the emancipation of the Catholics only took place in Great Britain in the late 18th — early 19th centuries), which was the reason why his contemporaries did not understand him. Besides, the social basis of the king was very limited. All these factors led to the overthrow of James II during the Glorious Revolution of 1688‒1689.

Jean-Didier Hache

Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz

This article explores the difficulties of representing motherhood from a contemporary – and, allegedly, feminist – perspective in the collection of short stories Mother America (2012) by Irish author Nuala Ní Chonchúir. The stories in the volume include a whole typology of mothers: surrogate mothers, exiled mothers, mothers who see their child abducted and others who tattoo them for protection, all of whom need to deal with particular crises which usually change them in profound ways. Although the writer proves very brave in challenging and revising some of the myths and dominant discourses about motherhood in earlier historical periods, she also sometimes resorts to a number of clichés concerning mothers and children that may somehow endanger their qualification as conventional feminist texts. Like some of the literature on the subject, Ní Chonchúir seems rather hesitant and ambivalent about whether motherhood should be primarily conceived as a social construct – or institution – or rather as something natural and innate to the female condition. In any case, Mother America offers penetrating insights into the dilemmas that frequently accompany motherhood and very rarely passes moral judgments on the (rather habitual) failures and the (much less common) triumphs of the characters.

Mariateresa Crosta

This essay demonstrates the key role of Astronomy in Botticelli's "Venus and Mars-NG915" painting, to date only very partially understood. Worthwhile coincidences among the principles of the Ficinian philosophy, the historical characters involved and the compositional elements of the painting, show how the astronomical knowledge of that time strongly influenced this masterpiece. First, Astronomy provides its precise dating since the artist used the astronomical ephemerides of his time, albeit preserving a mythological meaning, and a clue for Botticelli's signature. Second, it allows the correlation among Botticelli's creative intention, the historical facts and the astronomical phenomena such as the heliacal rising of the planet Venus in conjunction with the Aquarius constellation dating back to the earliest representations of Venus in Mesopotamian culture. This work not only bears a significant value for the history of science and art, but, in the current era of three-dimensional mapping of billion stars about to be delivered by Gaia, states the role of astronomical heritage in Western culture. Finally, following the same method, a precise astronomical dating for the famous Primavera painting is suggested.

Wei-Ming Dai, Yin-Zhe Ma, Zong-Kuan Guo et al.

We investigate the constraints on the reionization history of the Universe from a joint analysis of the cosmic microwave background and neutral hydrogen fraction data. The $\tanh$ parametrization and principal component analysis methods are applied to the reionization history respectively. The commonly used $\tanh$ parametrization is oversimplistic when the neutral hydrogen fraction data are taken into account. Using the principal component analysis method, the reconstructed reionization history is consistent with the neutral hydrogen fraction data. With the principal component analysis method, we reconstruct the neutral hydrogen fraction at $z=9.75$ as $x_{\text{HI}}=0.69^{+0.30}_{-0.32}$ for $6<z<20$ range reconstruction, and $x_{\text{HI}}=0.76^{+0.22}_{-0.27}$ for $6<z<30$ range reconstruction. These results suggest that the Universe began to reionize at redshift no later than $z=10$ at a $95\%$ confidence level.

Pauline Schnapper

This article analyses the reasons why the Remain campaign, led by David Cameron, failed to convince a majority of the British voters to stay in the European Union on the 23 June 2016. It first analyses the structural reasons underestimated by the Prime Minister, in particular the general eurosceptic climate in his country, strengthened by the multiple crises confronted by the EU since 2008. It then analyses the political factors which constrained the Remain campaign and finally the tactical mistakes made during the campaign, in particular the failure to articulate a clear message on immigration, which left the floor open to the Leave campaign.

J. Brian Pitts

In 1835 Lobachevski entertained the possibility of multiple (rival) geometries. This idea has reappeared on occasion (e.g., Poincaré) but didn't become key in space-time foundations prior to Brown's \emph{Physical Relativity} (at the end, the interpretive key to the book). A crucial difference between his constructivism and orthodox "space-time realism" is modal scope. Constructivism applies to all local classical field theories, including those with multiple geometries. But the orthodox view provincially assumes a unique geometry, as familiar theories (Newton, Special Relativity, Nordström, and GR) have. They serve as the orthodox "canon." Their historical roles suggest a story of inevitable progress. Physics literature after c. 1920 is relevant to orthodoxy mostly as commentary on the canon, which closed in the 1910s. The orthodox view explains the behavior of matter as the manifestation of the real space-time geometry, which works within the canon. The orthodox view, Whiggish history, and the canon relate symbiotically. If one considers a theory outside the canon, space-time realism sheds little light on matter's behavior. Worse, it gives the wrong answer when applied to an example arguably in the canon, massive scalar gravity with universal coupling. Which is the true geometry---the flat metric from the Poincaré symmetry, the conformally flat metric exhibited by material rods and clocks, or both---or is the question bad? How does space-time realism explain that all matter fields see the same curved geometry, given so many ways to mix and match? Constructivist attention to dynamical details is vindicated; geometrical shortcuts disappoint. The more exhaustive exploration of relativistic field theories (especially massive) in particle physics is an underused resource for foundations.

Luc Borot

In 17th-century England, the notion of citizenship can only be understood by contradistinction with the definition of the subject. Englishmen of the time were aware that they were both subjects of the monarch and members of the common weal, defined as the web of relationships, privileges and obligations that got society and its institutions working, down to the most local levels of the parish or the manor.Thus, some descriptions of English society and institutions in the late 16th century revealed a point that was confirmed by the crises in collective identification that raged in the 1640s. The soldiers of the New Model Army disagreed together, as they also disagreed with their generals, such as Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton, on the definition of the people who was to be represented in Parliament. The Putney debates of the Autumn of 1647 reveal such mutual misunderstandings, as well as the underlying fears.From 1653, the constitutions of the Cromwellian regime paint an increasingly detailed portrait of the active citizen, as they exclude some persons from the franchise for motives of personal morality or religious conformity, as well as economic reasons. As it raised the property qualifications and piling up conformity criteria, the regime keeps isolating itself from society.By the end of the 1650s, the struggle of the secular or religious republican theorists focuses on admission to citizenship, and on the size of the citizen body. Though they all agreed on the need for property qualifications, the polemic raged on the relevance of ideological and confessional criteria.