The Alchemy of Modernity. Alonso Barba's Copper Cauldrons and the Independence of Bolivian Metallurgy (1790–1890)

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
TRISTAN PLATT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Linear Mode ◽  
The Andes ◽  
Elective Affinities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
European Method ◽  
The 19Th Century

Those natures which, when they meet, quickly lay hold on and mutually affect one another we call affined. This affinity is sufficiently striking in the case of alkalis and acids which, although they are mutually antithetical … most decidedly seek and embrace one another, modify one another, and together form a new substance … It is in just this way that truly meaningful friendships can arise among human beings: for antithetical qualities make possible a closer and more intimate union.Goethe, Elective affinities (1809)A linear mode of historical understanding relegated alchemy to a ‘pre-scientific’ era, with the enlightenment's New Chemistry creating a break between ‘empirical’ and ‘scientific’ metallurgies. Similarly, Bolivia's early Republican silver-production has been regarded as ‘stagnant’ and ‘colonial’ from the ‘modern’ perspective of late nineteenth century liberalism. This article questions both periodisations by documenting an ‘alchemical renaissance’ in Bolivian silver-refining methods during the first part of the 19th century. The relaunch of Alonso Barba's ‘hot method’ of amalgamation in copper cauldrons (1609), and its associated technical discourses, expressed a creole desire for an independent ‘modernity’. This rediscovery of a seventeenth century technology, carried out shortly before the Independence War in the Potosí provinces (Chichas), and slightly later in Oruro and Carangas, is distinguished from the version reinvented in Central Europe by Ignaz von Born (1786), as well as from two pre-Bornian experiments in Potosí and New Spain. Its nineteenth century consolidation was, in part, a little-known reaction to Nordenflicht's failure to introduce the new European method of rotating barrels to the Andes during the 1790s. The article shows that this ‘alchemy of modernity’ held its ground for several decades, suggesting a fresh approach to America's postcolonial ambiguities from the perspective of a comparative history of technology.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Editorial Introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Editors of the JIOWS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Shed Light

The editors are proud to present the first issue of the fourth volume of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. This issue contains three articles, by James Francis Warren (Murdoch University), Kelsey McFaul (University of California, Santa Cruz), and Marek Pawelczak (University of Warsaw), respectively. Warren’s and McFaul’s articles take different approaches to the growing body of work that discusses pirates in the Indian Ocean World, past and present. Warren’s article is historical, exploring the life and times of Julano Taupan in the nineteenth-century Philippines. He invites us to question the meaning of the word ‘pirate’ and the several ways in which Taupan’s life has been interpreted by different European colonists and by anti-colonial movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. McFaul’s article, meanwhile, takes a literary approach to discuss the much more recent phenomenon of Somali Piracy, which reached its apex in the last decade. Its contribution is to analyse the works of authors based in the region, challenging paradigms that have mostly been developed from analysis of works written in the West. Finally, Pawelczak’s article is a legal history of British jurisdiction in mid-late nineteenth-century Zanzibar. It examines one of the facets that underpinned European influence in the western Indian Ocean World before the establishment of colonial rule. In sum, this issue uses two key threads to shed light on the complex relationships between European and other Western powers and the Indian Ocean World.

Theodore H. Friedgut, Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (ed. and annotated Theodore H. Friedgut). Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014. 199 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foster Mother ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Identity Transitions ◽  
Israeli Kibbutz

This chapter reviews the book Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 (2014), by Theodore H. Friedgut, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (edited and annotated by Theodore H. Friedgut). Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America is a two-in-one volume that explores an obscure episode in the history of the Jews in the late nineteenth century while at the same time connecting much of its content to the author’s own life experience as a son of western Canada’s Jewish farming colonies and, later, as an ideologically driven halutz on an Israeli kibbutz. Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America retells one branch of the mostly forgotten history of the Am Olam agricultural movement and brings a new layer into the discussion of global Jewish agrarianism, while Recollections of a Communist offers an edited and annotated version of a memoir written by Mandelkern.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Future State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
State Of Israel

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.

Schopenhauer’s Pessimism in Context

2020 ◽  
pp. 283-298
Author(s):  
Mark Migotti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.

The National and the Universal

2020 ◽  
pp. 368-386
Author(s):  
Sarah Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Respective Treatment ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.

Police Records

2019 ◽  
pp. 797-819
Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

Sufis and the Sufi Lodges in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Socio-Spatial Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422110252
Author(s):  
Ahmet Yusuf Yüksek
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
Spatial History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Profiles

This study investigates the socio-spatial history of Sufism in Istanbul during 1880s. Drawing on a unique population registry, it reconstructs the locations of Sufi lodges and the social profiles of Sufis to question how visible Sufism was in the Ottoman capital, and what this visibility demonstrates the historical realities of Sufism. It claims that Sufism was an integral part of the Ottoman life since Sufi lodges were space of religion and spirituality, art, housing, and health. Despite their large presence in Istanbul, Sufi lodges were extensively missing in two main areas: the districts of Unkapanı-Bayezid and Galata-Pera. While the lack of lodgess in the latter area can be explained by the Western encroachment in the Ottoman capital, the explanation for the absence of Sufis in Unkapanı-Bayezid is more complex: natural disasters, two opposing views about Sufi sociability, and the locations of the central lodges.

scholarly journals A família (en)contra a escola: pobreza, conflitos e obrigatoriedade escolar nas Minas Gerais do século XIX

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Fabiana Da Silva Viana
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Education ◽  
State Government ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Minas Gerais ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Compulsory School ◽  
School Poverty ◽  
The 19Th Century

Neste artigo dedico-me ao estudo das relações estabelecidas entre pais de família, professores primários e autoridades locais em Minas Gerais, nas primeiras décadas do século XIX. Para tanto, recorri a um grande número de documentos produzidos por presidentes de província, bem como pela Assembleia Legislativa e pelas autoridades responsáveis pela fiscalização das escolas primárias mineiras. Já no alvorecer do século XIX, o desejo de civilizar e formar o cidadão trabalhador motivara a elaboração de dispositivos legais voltados à organização e ampliação do serviço de instrução pública. Foi neste contexto que intelectuais e políticos defenderam a educação das crianças e a generalização da instrução pública primária, considerando-as como as medidas mais adequadas à formação da nação brasileira. Em Minas Gerais, o que se observa a partir daí é a intensificação, nos discursos de intelectuais e dirigentes, de uma preocupação com a infância e sua preparação para a vida adulta. Preocupação, contudo, alicerçada em uma percepção um tanto preconceituosa e negativa em relação à moralidade das famílias mineiras e na compreensão de que elas eram incapazes de zelar pelo futuro de suas crianças. O que tais intelectuais e políticos não esperavam, contudo, é que os pais de família resistissem a essas representações, demonstrando a fragilidade das críticas que lhes eram dirigidas e o caráter ainda incipiente das ações do governo do Estado.Family encounter school: poverty, conflicts and compulsory school in Minas Gerais of the 19th century. In this paper I study the relations established among parents, primary teachers and local authorities in the first decades of the nineteenth century in Minas Gerais. To do so, I relied on a large number of documents produced by provincial presidents, by the Legislative Assembly and by the authorities responsible for supervising primary schools in Minas Gerais. In the late nineteenth century, the desire to civilize and to form the working citizens motivated the elaboration of legal devices whose aim was to organize and to expand the public education service. It was in this context that intellectuals and politicians defended the children’s education for all and the generalization of primary public education as the most appropriate measures for the formation of Brazilian nation. In Minas Gerais, what is observed from there is the intensification in the discourses of intellectuals and leaders of a concern with childhood and its preparation for adult life. This concern was based on a prejudiced and negative perception of the morality of Minas families and on the understanding that they were unable to take care of the future of their children. What such intellectuals and politicians did not expect, however, was the resistance of the parents to these representations. They demonstrate the fragility of the criticisms directed against them and the incipience of the state government policies. Keywords: Public education; Compulsory school; Family-school relationship.

scholarly journals ‘He came to her bed pretending courtship’: sex, courtship and the making of marriage in Ulster, 1750–1844

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (162) ◽  
pp. 244-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leanne Calvert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Activity ◽  
Sexual Intercourse ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Sex And Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Formed Part

AbstractThe history of sex and sexuality is underdeveloped in Irish historical studies, particularly for the period before the late-nineteenth century. While much has been written on rates of illegitimacy in Ireland, and its regional diversity, little research has been conducted on how ordinary women and men viewed sex and sexuality. Moreover, we still know little about the roles that sex played in the rituals of courtship and marriage. Drawing on a sample of Presbyterian church records, this article offers some new insights into these areas. It argues that sexual intercourse and other forms of sexual activity formed part of the normal courtship rituals for many young Presbyterian couples in Ulster. Courting couples participated in non-penetrative sexual practices, such as petting, groping and bundling. Furthermore, while sexual intercourse did not have a place in the formal route to marriage, many couples engaged in it regardless.

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