“To Feel at Home in the Wonderful World of Modern Science”: New Chinese Historiography and Qing Intellectual History

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-358
Author(s):  
Ori Sela
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Historiography ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Way ◽  
At Home

ArgumentIn recent decades a large body of scholarship on the first half of twentieth-century China has successfully shown the ways in which history and historiography had been constructed at the time, as well as the links between history, national identity, education, and politics that was forged during this period. In this paper, I examine Qing intellectual history, in particular that of the mid or “High Qing.” I discuss the development of the historiography of this field in the early twentieth century by drawing on the larger developments in historiography; by demonstrating how these developments had shaped Qing intellectual history for later times; by focusing on the historical actors’ sense of the importance of “science,” being “scientific,” and “modernization”; and, by unraveling the intimate connections to older historiographical narratives going back all the way to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Faeries, Aliens, and Leviathans: Science and Fantasy in Ian McDonald's King of Morning, Queen of Day

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-303
Author(s):  
Richard Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Unexplored Area ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Movement

Irish science fiction is a relatively unexplored area for Irish Studies, a situation partially rectified by the publication of Jack Fennell's Irish Science Fiction in 2014. This article aims to continue the conversation begun by Fennell's intervention by analysing the work of Belfast science fiction author Ian McDonald, in particular King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), the first novel in what McDonald calls his Irish trilogy. The article explores how McDonald's text interrogates the intersection between science, politics, and religion, as well as the cultural movement that was informing a growing sense of a continuous Irish national identity. It draws from the discipline of Science Studies, in particular the work of Nicholas Whyte, who writes of the ways in which science and colonialism interacted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland.

Breeding Better Babies in the Eugenic Garden City: ‘Municipal Darwinism’ and the (Anti)Cosmopolitan Utopia in the early Twentieth Century

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Currell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Core Beliefs ◽  
Garden City ◽  
New Town ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Body ◽  
Practical Level ◽  
The Way

Showing how ‘modernist cosmopolitanism’ coexisted with an anti-cosmopolitan municipal control this essay looks at the way utopian ideals about breeding better humans entered into new town and city planning in the early twentieth century. An experiment in eugenic garden city planning which took place in Strasbourg, France, in the 1920s provided a model for modern planning that was keenly observed by the international eugenics movement as well as city planners. The comparative approach taken in this essay shows that while core beliefs about degeneration and the importance of eugenics to improve the national ‘body’ were often transnational and cosmopolitan, attempts to implement eugenic beliefs on a practical level were shaped by national and regional circumstances that were on many levels anti-cosmopolitan. As a way of assuaging the tensions between the local and the global, as well as the traditional with the modern, this unique and now forgotten experiment in eugenic city planning aimed to show that both preservation and progress could succeed at the same time.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Essentials of Hindutva: A Study of Its Philosophical Elements to Hindu Nationalism

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-160
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Hindu Nationalism ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Rhetorical Style ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Jawaharlal Nehru ◽  
Extended Essay

In the early twentieth-century, the concepts of Hindutva, Samyavada or Nationalism and national identity, reconstructed amid currents of globalization and neo-colonialism. During this period, the calls for an independent India reached its height. While, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru believed modern India’s strength depended on incorporating the solidarities of all Indians as they stood on the precipice of the postcolonial age, Veer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966), an ethnocentric nationalist, held that a strong Hindu nation was the only way to guarantee India’s security against the Muslim other and the British imperialism. Being the philosopher of Hindutva, Savarkar represented the ethno-nationalistic component to Hindu nationalism and looked to cultural motifs in order to unify the “true” people of India. He, therefore, wrote glorified histories of India and its millennia-old cultural traditions in his essays. This article analyzes and historically contextualizes the timing and the rhetorical style of V. D. Savarkar’s infamous extended essay “Essentials of Hindutva”. Received 9th December 2020; Revised 2nd March 2021; Accepted 20th March 2021

Rituals and Records: the Films of the 1924 and 1928 Olympic Games

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke McKernan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
Slow Motion ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Olympic Sport ◽  
Film Record ◽  
Landmark Study ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Olympic Games

The title of Allen Guttmann's landmark study of sports history,From Ritual to Record, captures the way cinematic treatments of the Olympic Games, Europe's most resonant sporting invention, developed in the early twentieth century. Projected film and the modern Olympic Games began in the same year, 1896, and the way the two phenomena have grown together demonstrates a progression from formality and ritual to an ever-increasing emphasis on individual, nation and achievement. This transition from ritual to record is demonstrated by two Olympic films from the European Games of Paris 1924 and Amsterdam 1928,Les Jeux Olympiques Paris 1924andDe Olympische Spelen. These cinematic records are not only documentary records of the events they portray, but are an important reminder that modern sports are witnessed by most not as stadium spectators but as viewers – in the case of the 1924 and 1928 films, as members of a cinema audience. The film record is essential to our understanding of the popularisation of modern sports, while through their contrary impulses to document and to idealise (particularly through the use of slow-motion photography), the two films demonstrate what is meaningful about Olympic sport.

From the Archives: Women's History in Baker Library's Business Manuscripts Collection

2000 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-476
Author(s):  
Laura Cochrane
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Business History ◽  
Large Firms ◽  
Big Business ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Successful Business ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Women’S History

“[O]ur ladies know nothing of the sober certainties which relate to money and they cannot be taught,” wrote Frederic Tudor in 1820, in a sweeping indictment of women's financial abilities that was common for the period. Despite such stereotypes, many women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries participated in commerce, both as merchants and as manufacturers. Because they mainly oversaw small and shortlived concerns, however, their enterprises did not fit into traditional understandings of successful business, either in their own time or later, when the field of business history developed in the twentieth century. As a consequence, when Harvard Business School's Baker Library began amassing business manuscripts, curators generally concentrated on collecting the records of large firms and well-known industrialists. Their big-business bias not only affected what was collected, but also how manuscripts were processed. Search aids and cataloging records did not distinguish materials made by or about women because gender was not a compelling issue for early twentieth-century historians.

The Meaning[s] of "Without": An Exploration of Liszt's Bagatelle ohne Tonart

2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 230-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Berry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Future ◽  
Piano Composition ◽  
Musical Evolution ◽  
Future Direction ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
The Way

In this essay, I explore historical and theoretical issues germane to an understanding of an 1885 piano composition with an intriguing title: LisztÕs Bagatelle ohne Tonart--a bagatelle "without tonality" or "without a key." After briefly describing the workÕs history and musical associations with other compositions by Liszt, I survey two present-day approaches that reveal ways in which the work defies tonality: octatonic interpretations via set-class examinations, and Schenker-influenced prolongational models. I then turn to focus instead on how the Bagatelle fit within the framework of nineteenth-century musical thought; how its processes were supported by contemporaneously evolving theories of chromaticism. Partly through an analysis based on the practice of Gottfried Weber (1779-1839), I demonstrate that the Bagatelle is not a piece "without tonality" as much as it is one "without the fulfillment of the tonic." It maintains harmonic tension by avoiding anticipated resolutions, as well as by preserving a sense of ambiguity as to what the actual "missing" key is. Next, I consider why Liszt was prompted to write a piece in such a manner. We know that he was a proponent of musical progress--of Zukunftsmusik ("music of the future")--but for this fact to be relevant we must confirm, first, that Liszt had definite ideas about a Zukunftsharmoniesystem; and second, that such a system is reflected in the processes exhibited by the Bagatelle. I argue that the BagatelleÕs traits are indeed in accordance with theoretical views about musicÕs future direction, to which Liszt subscribed. Relevant theories of Karl Friedrich Weitzmann (1808-80) and Franois-Joseph FŽtis (1784-1871) are assessed. Lastly, in a "Schoenbergian epilogue" I explore connections between LisztÕs operations and SchoenbergÕs ideas, addressing historical associations that conjoin their views of composing "ohne Tonart."I conclude that the 1885 BagatelleÕs attenuation of tonality was part of a tradition that extended from the mid-nineteenth into the early twentieth century--one that stretched from Liszt and his contemporaries through Schoenberg and his pupils and beyond, embracing along the way the theoretical prescriptions of Weitzmann, FŽtis, and Schoenberg himself. The various threads of theory and analysis explored in this article contribute to an understanding of the same strand of musical evolution: the increasing circumvention of tonality to the point that a piece could be written "ohne Tonart."

The Institution of Meter

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Martin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Prime Mover ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primary Measure ◽  
Successes And Failures ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins with a discussion of metrical mastery, outlining the way that Robert Bridges's intervention in his best-selling treatise Milton's Prosody expanded and popularized the theories that he and Gerard Manley Hopkins discussed together. It shows how Bridges and his influential competitor, George Saintsbury, were jostling for position during the height of the prosody wars between 1900 and 1910, and how their successes and failures characterize much of our contemporary thinking about early twentieth-century prosody. Author of the three-volume History of English Prosody (1906–10), Saintsbury was a prime mover in both the foundation of English literary study and the institutionalization of the “foot” as the primary measure of English poetry. Infused with Edwardian-era military rhetoric, Sainstbury's foot marched to a particularly English rhythm, which he traced through the ages with wit and martial vigor.

Understanding the Properties of “Numbers”

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor J. Katz ◽  
Karen Hunger Parshall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Algebraic Systems ◽  
Modern Algebra ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Way

This chapter looks at how mathematicians sought to understand the properties of “numbers” and in doing so pave the way for modern algebra. As mathematicians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries struggled to understand what Fermat's alleged proof of his so-called “last theorem” might have been, they, as well as others motivated by issues other than Fermat's work, eventually came to extend the notion of “number.” And, they did this in much the same spirit that Évariste Galois had extended that of “domain of rationality” or field, that is, through the creation and analysis of whole new types of algebraic systems. This freedom to create and explore new systems—and new algebraic constructs like the determinants and matrices that were encountered in the previous chapter—became one of the hallmarks of the modern algebra that developed into the twentieth century.

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