scholarly journals The arbitration of nature: state, water, and civil engineering in Northern Ireland directly after partition

Water History ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Reinsborough

AbstractBegun in the summer of 1923, the Silent Valley Reservoir was the first large scale civil engineering project after the division between the North and the South of Ireland. It was the continuation of a previous project. In the late Nineteenth Century a portion of the Kilkeel and Annalong Rivers in the Mourne Mountains had been diverted 35 miles to provide water for the growing industrial city of Belfast in the North of Ireland. A reservoir in the mountains was also planned at a later date but this was delayed by the Great War and then by Irish political instability and the high cost of construction in immediate post war period. Before being completed the project had to overcome several obstacles. Firstly, the Mourne Mountains were claimed by the South of Ireland and thus subject to the Boundary Commission of the Anglo-Irish peace treaty. The Water Commissioners had brought important British political leaders to tour the Silent Valley construction site in an attempt to demonstrate how implausible a situation (in their opinion) that the South should control the major water supply to the capital city of the North. Secondly, shortly after the Boundary Commission was shelved, the combination of fluid subsoil and the failure to locate bedrock at expected depth brought construction to a halt while an engineering, political, and legal solution was sought for the expensive and now publicly controversial project. This article traces the contingent relationship between state (sovereignty) and technology (water reservoir) using a socio legal and socio material description of the crucial arbitration process enabling further time and resources for resolution of the difficulty. Ultimately an air-shaft device for excavating under increased atmospheric pressure had to be designed taking in mind both technical and political difficulties. Today the 3000-million-gallon reservoir, first imagined in the late Nineteenth Century, continues to be a major water source for the city of Belfast.

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Christine McCarthy

Stacpoole and Beaven describe the late nineteenth-century work of New Zealand architects as "exuberant and eclectic, casting aside any earlier notions of simplicity to create strident effects of instant sophistication." It is a decade generally recognised in New Zealand history as an ambitious one and was a time of social and political experimentation and progress including "the entrepreneurial state ... liquor laws ... cheap land for development, [the] management of the effects of capitalism and competition ... an old age pension ... and the exclusion of aliens and undesirables." The 1890s also witnessed the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria (1897), the formation of the Farmers' Union (1899), and wool's establishment as New Zealand's singlemost important export. Sixty-five people were killed in the Brunner Mine disaster (1896), the population of the North Island exceeded that of the South Island for the first time since the 1850s, and the decade's end saw the outbreak of the Boer War (1899).


Author(s):  
Robert Jackson

Chapter 5 examines lynching, a longstanding practice in the United States that became more regionally associated with the South in the late nineteenth century, as a force in film history from the earliest days of the medium through a cycle of anti-lynching films during the years around midcentury. Paradoxically, the Western genre is important here, absorbing many of the common rituals and generating a powerful ideological defense of lynching. During different periods across this half-century, different attitudes about lynching led to a variety of film representations, culminating with a number of films in the late 1930s and beyond questioning both lynching and its cinematic traces.


2005 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wright

In 1876, the National Training School for Music was established by the Society of Arts as a model of advanced music education after the pattern of leading European conservatoires. But, despite having Arthur Sullivan as Principal, the School failed amidst the rumblings of an academic scandal that dogged George Grove's attempt to establish the new Royal College of Music. The article sets this failure against the successful start of the Royal College and explains how conservatoires, after being in all practical senses virtually an irrelevance to professional concert life, managed to reinvent themselves as vital incubators of British musical talent.


2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 435-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey L. Spear ◽  
Avanthi Meduri

The clean and the proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame.—Julia Kristeva,The Powers of HorrorTHE HISTORY WE ARE SKETCHINGis one of boundaries double crossed between India and the West and between periods of the South Asian past. On one level our story is about an historical irony, how late nineteenth-century Orientalism resuscitated the romantic mystique of the eastern dancer in the West just as South Indian dancers were being repressed in their homeland by Indian reformers influenced by western mores. Within that history there is another dynamic that is less about crossing than about shifting boundaries, boundaries between the sacred and the profane and their expression in colonial law. We will be looking at these movements and transformations within the context of current scholarship that is historicizing even those elements of Indian culture conventionally understood to be most ancient and unchanging.


1999 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 627-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Bendroth

On the morning of Wednesday, May 20,1885, Boston police arrested three Protestant clergymen for preaching on the Common. News of the outrage traveled quickly, and within hours the city's evangelical Protestants were in an uproar. When the preachers—A. J. Gordon, pastor of the Clarendon Street Baptist church; H. L. Hastings, editor of a locally popular evangelical periodical, the Christian; and W. H. Davis, superintendent of a mission in the North End—appeared at the Municipal Criminal Courthouse on Thursday morning, a crowd reported to be between four thousand and five thousand, “principally of the middle-class, well-dressed and well behaved,” thronged the steps of the building. “[I]t was clearly evident,” Hastings later wrote, “that something unusual was going on in the police court of the city of Boston.”


1952 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 314-322
Author(s):  
C. Howard Hopkins

Among the significantly great historical achievements of the American Young Men's Christian Associations has been the planting of Associations in foreign countries. Paralleling the notable missionary outburst of the late nineteenth century among the North American churches, this distinctive program of the YMCA was inaugurated in the last years of the 1880's with the sending of Association secretaries to Japan and to India.1 Nourished in the student Y.M.C.A.'s and particularly evangelized at the pioneer student conferences held under the auspices of Dwight L. Moody in Northfield, Massachusetts, beginning in 1886,2 the missionary fervor aroused significant interest in many Associations. By 1916 there were 157 North American secretaries in 55 foreign countries, 140 of them in Asia.


1999 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 408-418
Author(s):  
Frances Knight

In 1910, the Royal Commission on the Church of England and the Other Religious Bodies in Wales and Monmouth revealed that the Church of England was the largest religious body in Wales, and attracted over a quarter of all worshippers. This indicated a significant improvement in the Church’s fortunes in the previous half century, and a different picture from that which had emerged from the 1851 Census of Religious Worship, which had suggested that the established Church had the support of only twenty per cent of Welsh worshippers. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light upon the Church’s improving fortunes between 1851 and 1910 by exploring the liturgical patterns which were evolving in a particular Welsh county, Montgomeryshire, in the late nineteenth century. Montgomeryshire is part of the large rural heart of mid-Wales, bordered by Radnor to the south, Cardigan and Merioneth to the west, Denbigh to the north, and Shropshire to the east. The paper considers the annual, monthly, and weekly liturgical cycles which were developing in the county, and how the co-existence of the Welsh and English languages was expressed in different styles of church music and worship.


2018 ◽  
pp. 14-53
Author(s):  
Muhammad Qasim Zaman

This chapter introduces many of the groups that will form the subject of this book and charts their emergence and development in conditions of British colonial rule. It shows that the traditionalist orientations that enjoy great prominence in the South Asian landscape began to take a recognizable shape only in the late nineteenth century, although they drew on older styles of thought and practice. The early modernists, for their part, were rooted in a culture that was not significantly different from the `ulama's. Among the concerns of this chapter is to trace their gradual distancing from each other. The processes involved in it would never be so complete, in either British India or in Pakistan, as to preclude the cooperation of the modernists and their conservative critics at critical moments. Nor, however, were the results of this distancing so superficial as to ever be transcended for good.


1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Coombs

This essay examines ethnicity, nuptuality, and fertility in four central Wisconsin counties which typified newly opened areas in the North Central Region during the late nineteenth century. Frontier settlement was largely a family affair involving far more immigrants than native-born migrants. Central Wisconsin settlers had higher child-woman ratios than their national counterparts because they were more likely to be married, and their children were more apt to survive infancy. Interrelated factors involving marriage patterns, religious beliefs, residence, and husbands occupation were responsible for the fertility differentials among the ethnic groups within the region.


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