C. H. B. Quennell (1872–1935): Architecture, History and the Quest for the Modern

2007 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 211-246
Author(s):  
Elizabeth McKellar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Strong Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Architecture ◽  
Building Conservation ◽  
Architecture History

Charles Quennell embodied many of the possibilities and contradictions of British architecture in the first decades of the twentieth century. He is a little-known figure today, but one who deserves further consideration, not only for his own remarkably interesting and varied career but also because of the light he sheds on some of the less explored aspects of architecture in the 1895–1935 period. Throughout his life he combined a strong interest in history with a search for efficiency and design appropriate for the modern world. Both of these preoccupations were widespread among his generation although, apart from a few notable exceptions, rarely can they be found combined to as great a degree as in Quennell. For example, in 1914 he was a keen exponent of standardization and at work on large romantic houses in Hampstead Garden Suburb. By 1918 he had designed what have been called the first modern houses in the country and had just published the first of the bestselling books in the series co-authored with his wife, A History of Everyday Things in England. In 1930 he was writing a contemporary tract The Good New Days and he built a neo-Palladian villa. He has been little studied to date, the main accounts being Alastair Service’s of his work in Hampstead, a Masters thesis by Nick Collins focused on issues of building conservation, and Graham Thurgood’s article on his 1920s work in Essex.

The limits of comparison: institutional mortality rates, long-term confinement and causes of death during the early twentieth century

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Waltraud Ernst
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Causes Of Death ◽  
Modern World ◽  
British India ◽  
Psychiatric Institution ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material

This article presents a case study of institutional trends in a psychiatric institution in British India during the early twentieth century. It focuses on mortality statistics and long-term confinement rates as well as causes of death. The intention is two-fold: first, to provide new material that potentially lends itself to comparison with the few existing institutional case studies that have explored this particular period; second, to highlight some of the problems inherent in the status of the statistics and the conceptual categories used, and to consider the challenges these pose for any intended comparative and transnational assessment. Furthermore, it is suggested that historians working on the history of western institutions ought to look beyond the confining rim of Eurocentric self-containment and relate their research to other institutions around the world. It is important for social historians to abstain from uncritically reproducing hegemonic histories of the modern world in which western cultures and nations are posited by default as the centre or metropolis and the rest as peripheries whose social and scientific developments may be seen to be of exotic interest, but merely derivative and peripheral.

Christians, Muslims and the State in Twentieth-Century Egypt and Indonesia

2015 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 412-434
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Communal Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
Historical Relationship

Surveys of the historical relationship between Christianity and other faiths often suggest that through a process of theological enlightenment the churches have moved from crusade to cooperation and from diatribe to dialogue. This trajectory is most marked in studies of Christian-Muslim relations, overshadowed as they are by the legacy of the Crusades. Hugh Goddard’sA History of Christian-Muslim Relationsproceeds from a focus on the frequently confrontational inter-communal relations of earlier periods to attempts by Western theologians over the last two centuries to define a more irenic stance towards Islam.1 For liberal-minded Western Christians this is an attractive thesis: who would not wish to assert that we have left bigotry and antagonism behind, and moved on to stances of mutual respect and tolerance? However laudable the concern to promote harmonious intercommunal relations today, dangers arise from trawling the oceans of history in order to catch in our nets only those episodes that will be most morally edifying for the present. What Herbert Butterfield famously labelled ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ is not irrelevant to the history of interreligious relations. In this essay I shall use the experience of Christian communities in twentieth-century Egypt and Indonesia to argue that the determinative influences on Christian-Muslim relations in the modern world have not been the progressive liberalization of stances among academic theologians but rather the changing views taken by governments in Muslim majority states towards both their majority and minority religious communities. Questions of the balance of power, and of the territorial integrity of the state, have affected Christian Muslim relations more deeply than questions of religious truth and concerns for interreligious dialogue.

Ireland and the Black Atlantic in the eighteenth century

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (126) ◽  
pp. 174-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nini Rodgers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Western World ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Actual Operation

In the second half of the twentieth century few subjects have excited more extensive historical debate in the western world than black slavery. American investigation has centred upon the actual operation of the institution. An impressively wide range of historical techniques, cliometrics, comparative history, cultural studies, the imagination of the novelist, have all been employed in a vigorous attempt to recover and evaluate the slave past. In Britain, the first great power to abolish the Atlantic trade and emancipate her slaves, the emphasis has been on the development of the anti-slavery movement, described by W. E. H. Lecky in 1869 as ‘a crusade’ to be rated ‘amongst the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations’, and therefore an obvious candidate for twentieth-century revision. Any discussion of black slavery in the New World immediately involves the historian in economic matters. Here the nineteenth-century orthodoxy launched by Adam Smith and developed by J. S. Mill and his friend J. E. Cairnes, author of The slave power (1862) and professor of political economy and jurisprudence in Queen’s College, Galway, saw slavery as both morally wrong and economically unsound, an anachronism in the modern world. Since the 1970s this view has been challenged head-on by American historians arguing that, however morally repugnant, slavery was a dynamic system, an engine of economic progress in the U.S.A. Such a thesis inevitably revives some of the arguments used by the nineteenth-century defenders of slavery and has equally inevitably attracted bitter anti-revisionist denunciation.

Hitting two birds with one stone: An afterword on archeology and the history of science

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-391
Author(s):  
Mirjam Brusius
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Variation ◽  
Institutional Infrastructure ◽  
History Of

This afterword comments on the articles gathered together in this special section of History of Science (“Disassembling Archaeology, Reassembling the Modern World”). Criticizing the consistent lack of institutional infrastructure for histories of archaeology in the history of science, the piece argues that scholars should recognize the commonality of archaeology’s practices with those of the nineteenth and twentieth century field sciences that have received more historical attention. The piece also suggests avenues to help take this approach further, such as combining expertise from historians of the biological sciences and of antiquarianism and archaeology to look at the history of the understanding of human variation and race. Finally, the afterword suggests that scholars should reconsider the idea of archaeology’s reliance on institutionalised practices, thinking about the use and re-use of material culture in more diverse and pragmatic social contexts.

Introduction: The Ottoman Empire and its Frontiers

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. C. S. PEACOCK
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Middle Ages

Stretching across Europe, Asia and Africa for half a millennium bridging the end of the Middle Ages and the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was one of the major forces that forged the modern world. The chapters in this book focus on four key themes: frontier fortifications, the administration of the frontier, frontier society and relations between rulers and ruled, and the economy of the frontier. Through snapshots of aspects of Ottoman frontier policies in such diverse times and places as fifteenth-century Anatolia, seventeenth-century Hungary, nineteenth-century Iraq or twentieth-century Jordan, the book provides a richer picture than hitherto available of how this complex empire coped with the challenge of administering and defending disparate territories in an age of comparatively primitive communications. By way of introduction, this chapter seeks to provide an overview of these four themes in the history of Ottoman frontiers.

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