Hasil untuk "Modern history, 1453-"

Raúl Ruiz Álvarez

En la Edad Moderna, el transporte terrestre se ve inexorablemente influenciado por las condiciones de las infraestructuras y los servicios del camino, que determinan su tipología y desarrollo; pero también por la economía y las políticas. En una sociedad donde la pluriactividad y la organización del trabajo en el seno del hogar desempeñan un papel fundamental, el transporte terrestre ha quedado marcado por una clara división sexual del trabajo que no puede, ni debe, ocultar la participación de las mujeres en la empresa arriera. El objetivo de este estudio es reflexionar sobre cómo las categorías de género y pluriactividad, y la dicotomía entre lo rural y lo urbano influyen en el entramado de la economía y los modelos de trabajo de los hogares del transporte.  

María Gajate Bajo

Elizabeth Amann

Book review

Ulrich Päßler

Zusammenfassung Alexander von Humboldt beschäftigte sich seit den frühen 1790er Jahren mit der Pfl anzengeographie. In seinen „Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pfl anzen“ (1807) stellte er ein Forschungsfeld vor, das Mensch und Natur, Ästhetik und quantitative Wissenschaften umfasst. Die vorliegende Arbeit schlägt einen neuen Zugang zu diesem komplexen Forschungsprogramm vor. Eine genaue Lektüre der pflanzengeographischen Aufzeichnungen, die er während seiner Amerikareise anfertigte, gibt Einblick in den situativen und zuweilen zufälligen Charakter von Humboldts Wissenschaft. Humboldt glich seine Erfahrungen in den Tropen mit vorgefassten europäischen Vorstellungen von Naturgeschichte ab. Die Reiseroute selbst und die persönlichen Begegnungen spielten eine wichtige Rolle bei der Ausgestaltung von Humboldts pfl anzengeographischen Überlegungen. Abstract Alexander von Humboldt studied plant geography from the early 1790s onwards. In the “Essay on the Geography of Plants” (1807) he presents a field of science that encompasses man and nature, aesthetics and quantitative sciences. This paper suggests a novel approach to this complex research program. A close reading of the notes on plant geography taken during his American voyage gives insight into the situational and at times contingent nature of Humboldt’s science. Humboldt aligned his experience of the Tropics with preconceived European notions of natural history. The travel route itself and personal encounters played a significant part in reshaping Humboldt’s plantgeographical ideas. Résumé Alexander von Humboldt étudia la géographie des plantes dès le début des années 1790. Dans son « Essai sur la géographie des plantes » (1807), il présente un domaine scientifi que qui englobe l’homme et la nature, l’esthétique et les sciences quantitatives. Cet article propose une nouvelle approche de ce programme de recherche complexe. Une lecture approfondie des notes sur la géographie des plantes prises au cours de son voyage en Amérique donne un aperçu de la nature situationnelle et parfois casuelle de la science de Humboldt. Humboldt a aligné son expérience des Tropiques sur les notions européennes d’histoire naturelle préconçues. L’itinéraire du voyage luimême et les rencontres personnelles ont joué un rôle important dans le remodelage des idées phytogéographiques de Humboldt.

Alícia Duhá Lose

En 1798 aparecieron en la capital bahiana manuscritos que llamaban a la población a una «revolución» que implantaría la «República Bahiense». El gobernador ordenó iniciar un proceso durante el cual dos hombres fueron arrestados y sus bienes incautados por sospecharse que eran autores de «papeles sediciosos». Papeles, plumas, tintas y documentos de los investigados fueron analizados y comparados por expertos, para cursar una acusación contra Luís Gonzaga das Virgens. Este estudio se propone arrojar luz sobre las dificultades a las que enfrentan los investigadores de fuentes primarias: la falta de conocimientos básicos sobre el material documental y sobre Diplomática y Paleografía por parte de los que trabajan o investigan en los archivos es una de las razones de los errores. A partir del caso de los pasquines sediciosos de la Revolución de los Sastres, buscamos mostrar cómo el sistema de clasificación de documentos y la falta de acceso físico a los originales pueden inducir la interpretación del investigador.

Francisco Cebreiro Ares

Reseña de: Francisco Andújar Castillo, El Atila de Madrid: La forja de un banquero en la crisis de la monarquía (1685-1715), Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2021, 344 pp. ISBN:978-84-17945-48-0.

Marina Barba

The War of Independence led to the appearance of a new musical genre, the patriotic anthem, which served to ignite popular resistance against the French occupation. This patriotic musical literature adopted a new functionality during the regency of María Cristina de Borbón favoring the renewal of the national identity, in accordance with the new model of parliamentary monarchy, through the celebration of progress in the Cortes. This study will reconstruct the political story of the regency of María Cristina de Borbón through the hymns composed by Ramón Carnicer, master and director of the theaters of Madrid, making known and analyzing, within this corpus of works, the hymn Grito santo de paz y contento, in order to appreciate how the composer puts music to some verses that place his hopes in the new parliamentary model and that are a plea for peace and freedom.

Francisco Bethencourt

Rosalind O’Hanlon

Abstract British observers of the nineteenth-century panchayat were convinced that it represented a judicial forum of great antiquity, in which petitioners were able to gain local and direct access to justice. They contrasted the panchayat favourably with the delays and frustrations that beset the eighteenth-century East India Company's attempts to channel all petitions through its own courts. This article examines the history of the pre-colonial panchayat in western India and its early modern predecessors. During the early modern centuries, a diverse array of state-level and local corporate bodies made up the landscape for the submission of petitions and the hearing of suits. Although many suits were local in nature, the process of hearing and adjudication itself gave these judicial spaces a significant ‘public’ dimension, and their forms of argumentation frequently invoked general principles of justice and moral order. From the early eighteenth century, the new form of the panchayat came to supersede these older corporate bodies and to reshape the forms of public that gathered around them. The Maratha state, based in Pune, sought firmer control over revenue and justice. State officials promoted the panchayat as a new type of judicial arena, weakening the local corporate institutions and tying them more closely to the Pune court.

Maysaa Barakat

ABSTRACT Many educational reform initiatives worldwide do not result in deep and sustainable change. Limited studies have looked at reform initiatives in countries like Egypt. The purpose of this mixed methods study is to examine educational reform initiatives in Egypt throughout modern history using a transformative leadership lens, and to explore the perceptions of educational leaders regarding the more contemporary reform initiatives. The findings show that historically, large-scale reform initiatives in Egypt, which had transformative and sustainable results, were typically associated with a more comprehensive ideological inclination. More contemporary educational reform attempts were not transformative because these were perceived to be top-down reforms that were driven by foreign-aid agencies, and had no support from stakeholders.

Émilie Morin

Abstract:Many of Samuel Beckett's texts are infused with the political knowledge and experiences of their author and remain tied to forms of war memory that resonate with conflicts past and present. Yet the type of political situation that Beckett pondered most consistently over the course of his career remains connected not to states of war, but to states of exception. The state of chronic suspension that has come to characterize his postwar texts has particularly powerful historical and transnational underpinnings and owes much to the cultural memory and political legacies of states of siege and emergency that have made so much of modern history.

R. Pergher

Over the last four years, the Journal of Modern History has published a series of historiographical reviews about the First World War. Each piece has centered on one of the main belligerents: Austria, Germany, Russia, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Great Britain. It makes eminent sense to review the historiography of the war, and indeed its history, within such national frameworks; after all, the war was fought by nations (albeit many of these protagonists were in fact empires, a point I will return to below), and almost all of the principal belligerents still exist as independent states today. The Great War had lasting effects on all of them, be it because of its length, the masses of people and resources involved, the enormously high death rates, or the implications of victory and defeat for regimes, peoples, and borders. Indeed, the war was a turning point in the histories

Claire Colebrook, Peter Adkins, Wendy Parkins

In this interview, Claire Colebrook discusses the implications of the Anthropocene for Victorian literature — and, by extension, for the field of Victorian studies — as well as literary history and critical theory more broadly. A literary scholar by training, with a focus on Romanticism, Colebrook is now a leading figure in Anthropocene studies, and her work in this field examines how climate change forces us to reassess the modes of thinking upon which we have come to rely in the humanities. In this provocative discussion, Colebrook addresses the ways in which the Anthropocene might be traced back through Romantic and Victorian poetry, the emergence of post-apocalyptic narratives in the nineteenth century, the challenges posed to feminism by planetary destruction, and the humanities’ complicity with ecological degradation.

A. Eriksen

The idea of history as magistra vitae – a collection of good and bad examples – was a central topos of historical writing in the West from antiquity till the late eighteenth century. The idea has served a number of different ends, motivating advanced political theory as well as functioning as a mere saying. The article investigates two books of historical examples, written for pedagogical purposes addressing young boys, both explicitly produced with this aim in mind: Johannes Schefferus’ Memorabilium Sueticae gentis exemplorum liber singularis (1671) and Ove Malling’s Store og gode Handlinger af Danske, Norske og Holstenere (1777). They differ considerably from modern history books in not being structured chronologically but according to the virtues the histories are meant to illustrate. The article compares the books’ structure, tables of content, choice of virtues and introductory texts. The aim is to explore the tension between exemplarity and temporality in the two collections.

Rosario de la Torre del Río

Estudio la respuesta política que los gobiernos de Fernando VII dieron, entre 1814 y 1817, a la decisión de las grandes potencias vencedoras de Napoleón de no compartir las decisiones importantes con las potencias que pasaron a considerar “menores”, entre las que destaca una España que había colaborado en la derrota de Napoleón y que, formalmente, conservaba todavía un amplio imperio ultramarino.

Julian Drews

Zusammenfassung Der Bezug auf Kolumbus ist ein Gemeinplatz der Humboldtbiographik. Humboldt selbst betont ihn besonders in seinem Examen critique, wo er eine autobiographische Dimension gewinnt. Der Beitrag geht aus literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive dem Material und den Formen der Inszenierung nach, mit denen ein Leben über ein anderes dargestellt wird.  Résumé La référence à Colomb est un lieu commun de la biographie humboldtienne. Humboldt lui-même le souligne particulièrement dans son Examen critique, en y ajoutant une dimension autobiographique. La contribution analyse, dans une perspective philologique, le matériel et les formes de mise en scène avec lesquelles une vie est représentée au travers d'une autre.  Summary The reference to Columbus is a commonplace in Humboldt-biography. Humboldt himself is using it in his Examen critique which subjoins a auto-biographical dimension. This articel examines from a philological point of view the materials and literary strategies by which one life comes to represent another.

I. Charmantier, S. Müller-Wille

The development of paper-based information technologies in the early modern period is a field of enquiry that has lately benefited from extensive studies by intellectual historians and historians of science. 1 How scholars coped with ever-increasing amounts of empirical knowledge presented in print and manuscript – leading to the so-called early modern “information overload” – is now being increasingly analysed and understood. 2 In this paper we will turn to an example at the close of the early modern period. Towards the very end of his academic career, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) – best known today for his “sexual” system of plant classification and his binomial nomenclature – used little paper slips of a standard size to process information on plants and animals that reached him on a daily basis. From today's perspective, these paper slips look surprisingly like modern index cards. This is surprising, because throughout the early modern period, the medium of choice to cope with information overload was a different one: the commonplace book, promoted by humanists and philosophers such as Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and John Locke (1632–1704). Commonplace books usually took the form of bound manuscripts that were subdivided by headings indicating the particular topics under which information was to be subsumed. The collected information was thus brought into a fixed and permanent order, and an index was usually added at the end of the volume to provide access to this information. 3 One of the areas where information overload made itself felt in particular, and for which the commonplace book was adopted quickly, was natural history. As new worlds were discovered, and more species described, the circulation of information grew rapidly, in print and manuscript. Naturalists like Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) and Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) collected observations from specimens, annotated and excerpted new publications, and engaged in far-flung correspondence networks, all along developing their own common-placing techniques to process the information thus gained. 4 In the process, some scholars and naturalists occasionally strove to find more flexible ways of accessing, storing, and retrieving information than the bound and structured commonplace book. One such way was processing and communicating information in the form of simple, open-ended lists of key words or short factual statements. 5 Another, even more flexible way was to keep notes on loose pieces of papers, which enabled information to be shuffled around, collated, and rearranged readily. Thus Robert Boyle (1627–1691) kept his notes in a haphazard way on loose sheets and paper slips, apparently to prevent others from making sense of them, while Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) preferred to order his loose notes according to a contraption invented by Thomas Harrison: an “ark of studies” where pieces of paper were attached onto hooks arranged according to a pre-established system of heads, or commonplaces. 6 As the example of Harrison's “ark of studies” shows, there remained a distinct tendency to literally “file” – the term derives from the practice to use a string (Latin filum) to bundle loose papers – notes in the early modern period, and thus to retain a fixed, topical order in their material arrangement. This is what distinguishes Linnaeus's paper slips from earlier instances, and also from the range of filing systems that he himself had been experimenting with in earlier stages of his career. 7 The paper slips which Linnaeus produced in the last years of his working life, from 1767 to 1773, were strictly of a standard size, used a uniform format for the information contained, and show no sign of ever having been fixed or “filed” in a particular order. It is these features that make them strikingly similar to modern index cards. In this article, however, we do not want to establish whether “Linnaeus invented the index card.” 8 As our analysis will show, there is much that speaks for this claim, but there are equally arguments against it. First of all, Linnaeus seems to have turned to the use of loose paper slips for purely idiosyncratic reasons, and there is no sign that he ever tried to rationalise or advertise the new practice. Moreover, it was only towards the very end of his working life that he began to use the new technology to note the names, geographical origin, and morphological features of newly discovered plant genera and species. And finally, there are many indications that he himself never envisioned his stack of paper slips as a system that would permanently store information for collective use, which is perhaps the feature that is most characteristic of the modern index card. Ironically, as we will show, it was only shortly before and after Linnaeus's death in 1778 that his slips were used in this way. Rather than documenting the history of a momentous invention, our case study will throw light on the eighteenth century as a period of transition – be it in scholarly, literary, medical, administrative, or commercial contexts – towards increasingly flexible media of information processing, such as tables, files, and card catalogues. 9 Studying Linnaeus's paper slips will not only provide insight into the use eighteenth-century naturalists made of such media, but also reveal something about the dynamics of paper tools as research technologies in general. 10 We propose that it was the sheer amount of new information that fed back to Linnaeus as a result of the success of tried and tested information processing technologies which led to their eventual breakdown and adoption of a new working method. Linnaeus's “invention,” that is, was entirely inadvertent, and it is therefore hardly surprising that he himself did not realize its full potential. We will make this point in three steps. In the first two sections of our paper, we will look at the contexts in which loose paper slips and cards were used for information processing during Linnaeus's time, explore the reasons why contemporaries – and in all likelihood Linnaeus himself – hesitated to use them for storing knowledge, and finally discuss what motivated Linnaeus to adopt this paper technology late in his career. In the third and fourth section, we will describe Linnaeus's paper slips in detail, and reconstruct the way in which he used them. The two final sections will focus on their legacy, partly in the hands of Linnaeus's son and successor Carl Linnaeus the Younger (1741–1783), but mainly through the successful and independent use that his student Daniel Solander (1733–1782) made of a similar paper technology in the early years of the British Museum.

Anna Krylova

Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti

There has recently been increasing scholarly interest in early modern correspondence and specifically also in women’s letter writing and reading. Starting from the late Middle Ages familiar responsibilities and domestic obligations led many women to write to their absent husbands or other relatives to exchange health news and inform them about family affairs. It is however in the early modern period that corresponding with relatives and friends became a widespread social practice ranging from official to familiar and personal correspondence; in this period female literacy increased thus allowing growing numbers of women to write and read their own letters. A growing number of female voices can thus be heard depicting early modern social life. The article focuses on a neglected aspect of women’s correspondence: it investigates not the sender’s epistolary identity, but that of the recipient through the analysis of the personal correspondence of Lady Cornwallis Bacon. The main theme of the article is to show how the epistolary identity of an early modern gentlewoman was constructed by her correspondents. It is assumed that modes of communicating information and achieving a specific goal through letters varied not only according to the relationship connecting the correspondents but also the purpose and content of letters.

Angela Loxham

Interdisciplinarity has been the focus of much attention across the social sciences and humanities in recent years. In this spirit, the article shows how sociology might be applied to sensory history and how to choose and apply suitable theories to this field. This is supported by a short discussion of the author's own research.