scholarly journals ‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

Geopolitics of Comparison: World Literature Avant la Lettre

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.

Out of Defenderism: Ribbonism in the Early Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 31-63
Author(s):  
Kyle Hughes ◽  
Donald M. MacRaild
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Social Literacy ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Negative Factors

This chapter assesses the earliest history of Ribbonism within the context of its origins in the aftermath of the 1798 Rising. The chapter shows that the spread of new forms of political protest from the late eighteenth century was not exclusively the result of negative factors like population pressures but is also be attributed to positive ones including greater prosperity and developing social literacy. It demonstrates that the act of Union fundamentally altered Ireland’s constitutional status. yet the union of itself did little to alter the dramatic political, cultural, economic, and social forces—some parochial, others universal—that generated popular political protest in modern Ireland.

Orientalism, Medievalism, Colonialism, and Militarized Mercantilism

2020 ◽  
pp. 415-429
Author(s):  
Kathleen Davis ◽  
Nadia R. Altschul
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

This chapter investigates the intersections of British medievalism and colonialism in two very different places in the world: early nineteenth-century Chile, as Britain exercised economic domination over parts of the former Spanish Empire (thus it will be termed neocolonial); and late eighteenth-century India, as British officials devised strategies for extracting revenue from Bengal. Despite their many differences, in both cases an area beyond Europe is defined as Moorish and its present is associated with Europe’s past, specifically with the centuries now termed ‘medieval’. In both cases, too, medievalization forwards the economic interests at the basis of this temporal discourse, which is also fully enmeshed in the history of Orientalism. These similarities demonstrate the value of studying the under-examined effects of British medievalism beyond the familiar national frameworks, and, more broadly, underscore the importance of investigating the global dimensions of temporalizing phenomena.

Anthology of Goethe Songs

10.31022/n023 ◽  
1994 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Ferruccio Busoni ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
German Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Voice And Piano

Few poets have had so profound an influence on the history of German art music as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Since the late eighteenth century, over seven hundred of his poems have been set by nearly six hundred composers as lieder for voice and piano. This anthology gathers twenty-two such settings, in a wide variety of styles, by composers ranging from Goethe's friend Carl Zelter to Hans von Bülow, Ferruccio Busoni, and Othmar Schoeck.

TWO HUNTERS, A MILKMAID AND THE FRENCH ‘REVOLUTIONARY’ CANON

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA DOE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Stage I ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Printed Music

ABSTRACTLarge-scale programming studies of French Revolutionary theatre confirm that the most frequently staged opera of the 1790s was not one of the politically charged, compositionally progressive works that have come to define the era for posterity, but rather a pastoral comedy from mid-century:Les deux chasseurs et la laitière(1763), with a score by Egidio Duni to a libretto by Louis Anseaume. This article draws upon both musical and archival evidence to establish an extended performance history ofLes deux chasseurs, and a more nuanced explanation for its enduring hold on the French lyric stage. I consider the pragmatic, legal and aesthetic factors contributing to the comedy's widespread adaptability, including its cosmopolitan musical idiom, scenographic simplicity and ready familiarity amongst consumers of printed music. More broadly, I address the advantages and limitations of corpus-based analysis with respect to delineating the operatic canon. In late eighteenth-century Paris, observers were already beginning to identify a chasm between their theatre-going experiences and the reactions of critics: Was a true piece of ‘Revolutionary’ theatre one that was heralded as emblematic of its time, or one, likeLes deux chasseurs, that was so frequently seen that it hardly elicited a mention in the printed record?

The Opium Wars

Jazz in China ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 14-20
Author(s):  
Eugene Marlow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Coast ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Unrestricted Access ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Many ◽  
Opium Wars

In the late 1910s, 1920s, and even into the 1930s, “jazz” was the music of the age in the Republic of China, especially and primarily in Shanghai on China's east coast. It was enjoyed equally by sophisticated Chinese gentry and upper-class people in the many dance halls dotting various parts of Shanghai, and by the many Europeans, Russians, and Americans living and working in the so-called “Paris of the East.” These same foreigners also owned pieces of Shanghai, literally. This chapter asks how several foreign nations came to own sections of Shanghai, and have unrestricted access to numerous key ports throughout China's eastern coast? The answer to these questions can be found in a conflict initially between the British (and ultimately the French, Russians, and Americans) and the Chinese in the mid-nineteenth century: the Opium Wars, two wars that had roots in late eighteenth-century China.

Dangerous Parents

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-39
Author(s):  
Peter Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

While we know much about the cult of childhood, historians have spent less time analysing the ways in which certain parents became demonized from the late eighteenth century. This chapter traces growing criticisms across nations of parents who were felt to have endangered their offspring and to have deprived the nation of a future robust population. Industrialization and urbanization lent a growing shrillness to the debate. Doctors, opponents of child labour and slavery, and criminologists all began to denounce parents and especially those from the left who they identified as a threat to their offspring and society. As the nineteenth century progressed and competition between nations increased, the growth of eugenic thought gave extra virulence to these denunciations. This set the stage for demands for ‘dangerous’ parents to be stripped of their guardianship.

Wanostrocht’s Practical Grammar and the grammar-translation model

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Coffey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Translation Model ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intended Purpose ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Background Detail

Wanostrochts’s Practical Grammar was first published in London in 1780, then in the US from 1805.1 It was one of the most successful pedagogical grammars of its time, appearing in revised forms for almost a century. It was probably the first grammar to include ‘exercises’ in the same volume and represents a prototype of what would become known as the ‘grammar-translation’ manual that provided a template for most language schoolbooks throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. The analysis in this chapter considers the content of Wanostrocht’s primer as an example of late eighteenth-century language epistemology, and provides broader background detail to help better understand the context of the publication, its intended purpose, and the reasons for its enduring popularity.

Reading Henry Maundrell’s Sacred Geography in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany

2019 ◽  
pp. 210-226
Author(s):  
Simon Mills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Sacred Geography ◽  
History Of

This chapter explains the remarkable popularity of Henry Maundrell’s A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter AD 1697 (1703). It argues that Maundrell’s eye-witness reportage of his travels in the Holy Land provided the book’s readers with a storehouse of geographical observations and descriptions of eastern customs with which they could recreate imaginatively the world of the Scriptures. Tracing the book’s use by editors, commentators, translators, and paraphrasts, it argues that Maundrell was most often put to work in defence of the Bible against attacks on its claims to truth. Yet in the hands of Maundrell’s late eighteenth-century German translator, the naturalist and historicist tendencies inherent in his account were brought into sharper focus; ‘sacred geography’ was transformed into a history of biblical culture.

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