Peter M. Beattie, The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1864–1945. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. xxiv + 390 pp. $64.95 cloth; $19.95 paper

2004 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 213-215
Author(s):  
James P. Woodard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Military Recruitment ◽  
Labor Practices ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Duke University ◽  
Brazilian History

The Tribute of Blood has already earned an audience among historians of nineteenth and twentieth-century Brazil, who have found in Peter M. Beattie's analysis of military recruitment and enlisted service an innovative and often compelling exploration of a neglected facet of Brazilian history. But the book deserves a wider audience, not least because of Beattie's stated ambition of providing the first book-length study, “that explicitly focuses on impressment and conscription as transatlantic tribute labor systems intricately linked to other labor practices and relations in broader society” (14). Prospective members of such an audience not only stand to learn a great deal about Brazil (indeed, the novice might read The Tribute of Blood as an introduction to the socio-cultural history of Brazil during a “long nineteenth century” of its own). They also might be forced to rethink some of their own assumptions regarding military service in particular and institutional modernization more generally, and draw inspiration from Beattie's impressive command of a wide range of Brazilian sources and his willingness to extend comparisons to and borrow approaches from fields situated at some remove—geographic and otherwise—from his own.

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.

Genius in France

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
History Of

This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, the book examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. The book traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. The book considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. It then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. The book shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and discusses the different ways major theorists—including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva—have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. The book brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.

The Meaning of The Ikhtilāf Al-madhāhib In 'Abd Al-wahhāb Al-sha'rānī's Al-mīzān Al-kubrā

2004 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuela Pagani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Legal Reform ◽  
Substantial Agreement ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Legal Theorist

AbstractThe Mīzān kubrā by 'Abd al-Wahhāb al-ShaAErānī (d. 973/1565) was cited by nineteenth-century Muslim scholars to support a wide range of mutually exclusive conceptions of religious authority. In the twentieth century, modern students of Islamic law have given different assessments of ShaAErānī's view of the relationship between the madhāhib: while some stress its innovativeness and potential for legal reform, others regard it as a conservative restatement of scholastic tradition. In substantial agreement with the latter view, I discuss some of ShaAErānī's theories, focusing on the significance of his peculiar blending of Sufi and legal discourses for the cultural history of Islam in the early Ottoman period. I argue that ShaAErānī's aim is to bring Ibn 'Arabī's spiritual hermeneutics of the revelation into line with the "age of taqlīd." As a "legal theorist" no less than a h agiographer, ShaAErānī was an imaginative and reliable witness of the religious values and mentalités of his time. Far from calling into question the established system of the legal schools, he assigned a pivotal role to the metaphysical validation of ikhtilāf in order to strengthen a pluralist view of mainstream Islam.

Towards the Inner History of the Nation: Defining ‘Cultural History’ in Nineteenth-Century Finland

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heli Rantala
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Political History ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Official History ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
History Of

This article contributes to the discussion on the European roots of cultural history by exploring the nineteenth-century understanding of cultural history from a Finnish perspective. The article argues that the Finnish case opens a fresh perspective to the history of cultural history by connecting it with the French historiography instead of German Kulturgeschichte. In Finland there is a special tradition of cultural history dating back to the early twentieth century, inspired by the German tradition of Kulturgeschichte. This article focuses on the earlier period, on the mid-nineteenth-century discussion concerning the scope of history and the ways the works of several European historians were reviewed in Finland. In this discussion the orientation was not so much in the German tradition but towards the French way of writing history. An important element in the Finnish discussion was the separation of political or official history from the so called inner history of the people, which was considered as more fundamental and comprehensive than political history. This orientation towards the history of the people was considered as cultural history. The article explores the question of ‘cultural history’ in Finland by drawing on the writings of influential Finnish thinker Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806–1881).

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