Putting the Past under Glass: Preservation and the Idea of History in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Prospects ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 243-278
Author(s):  
Henry D. Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Legislature ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Society ◽  
The Past

In 1840, edward jarvis of the two-year-old Kentucky Historical Society wrote to Samuel Haven, Librarian of the American Antiguarian Society, complaining of the difficulties faced by the new organization in its efforts to collect and preserve materials relating to Kentucky's past. Despite enthusiastic support from the citizens of Louisville and from the state legislature, Jarvis explained, the task was an enormous one, for “the southern and western people are not in the habit of saving documents.”

The Changing Landscape of the Past: New Histories in Thailand Since 1973

1995 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thongchai Winichakul
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Historical studies in Thailand have been closely related to the formation of the nation since the late nineteenth century, and until recently the pattern of the past in this elitist craft changed but little. It presented a royal/national chronicle, a historiography modern in character but based upon traditional perceptions of the past and traditional materials. It was a collection of stories by and for the national elite celebrating their successful mission of building and protecting the country despite great difficulties, and promising a prosperous future. The plot and meaning of this melodramatic past have become a paradigm of historical discourse, making history an ideological weapon and a source of legitimation of the state.

Hybridity in the Vernacular: Nineteenth-Century Muslim Reform and Resistance

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-178
Author(s):  
Maryam Wasif Khan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Large Collection ◽  
The Past ◽  
Colonial Culture ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Theoretical Conception ◽  
Dark Space ◽  
Colonial Text

[W]hat attracted Nussooh's immediate attention was a cabinet of books. There was a large collection of volumes; but whether Persian or Urdu, all were of the same kind, equally indecent and irreligious. Looking to the beauty of the binding, the excellence of the lithography, the fineness of the paper, the elegance of the style, and the propriety of the diction, Kulleem's books made a valuable library, but their contents were mischievous and degrading; and after Nussooh had examined them one by one, he resolved to commit them also to the flames.—Nazir Ahmad, The Repentance of NussoohIn the past twenty-five years, no theoretical conception has summed up the complexity of the colonial experience, and the possibilities of its interpretation, as well as Homi K. Bhabha's “hybridity.” “he sign of the productivity of colonial power,” but also the “name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal,” hybridity exposes the uncomfortable state in which colonial culture settled and expanded and, today, continues to beleaguer the state of being “postcolonial” (Bhabha 112). Signiied by the “discovery of the book,” hegemony was marked by the miracle of an object that was at once authoritative and unknowable, one that the supposedly unlettered native could hold in reverent hands (102). In the dark space of the native's hands and narrated within a native register, however, the “colonial text emerges uncertainly” (107). he intent to civilize and anglicize a body of social, religious, and aesthetic practices in the colony, then, is adulterated, perhaps even unconsciously resisted, once it is disseminated by way of the seemingly irrefutable book.

“To Make Them Serve”: The 1871 Transvaal Commission on African Labour as a Source for Agrarian History

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 39-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan S. Bergh
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Preliminary Attempt ◽  
Industrial History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

In the past twenty to twenty-five years valuable contributions have been made to southern African agrarian history. Stanley Trapido's publications, for example, opened up stimulating perspectives on the processes and forces inherent to nineteenth-century Transvaal agrarian history. Although he was modest in his 1980 chapter, “Reflections on Land, Office, and Wealth in the South African Republic, 1850-1900,” and referred to it as “a tentative and preliminary attempt to outline some important aspects of these social relationships,” it has provided historians and others with an important instrument of analysis.However, there are still themes, regions, and periods that need attention, one of these being the central districts of the Transvaal before the industrial revolution. In this regard a little-known source which may contribute to our knowledge of the pre-industrial history of the Transvaal, and which will be published this year as an annotated source publication, should be taken note of. This is the 1871 Commission on African labor in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR). Despite the valuable information contained in its documents on agrarian history and various aspects of race relations, especially with regard to the central districts of the Transvaal, it has been neglected by historians in the past. Of the few historians who refer to the 1871 Commission, most have merely utilised the report of the commission and have probably missed the important testimonies, correspondence, and minutes. Very few have managed to locate these documents, which are concealed among the supplementary documents of the State Secretary for 1871 in the Transvaal Archives.

The Contradictions of Reform: Prosecuting Infant Murder in the Nineteenth-Century United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Felicity Turner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
State Legislature ◽  
The State ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Death Sentences ◽  
The Us ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

“The Contradictions of Reform” analyses the complications of reform of legislation regulating punishment for women convicted of infanticide in Connecticut between 1790 and 1860, within the context of broader social, cultural, and legal understandings of the crime within the US. These changes are investigated through a close reading of petitions for clemency to Connecticut's General Assembly in which women convicted of the crime petitioned the state legislature seeking reduced sentences. The article argues that although the nineteenth century opened with legislation that promised death to all women convicted of infanticide, in practice courts and juries never imposed the penalty. Instead, juries proved reluctant to convict and/or death sentences were not imposed, even if juries found women guilty. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Connecticut Assembly reformed existing infanticide law in response to a number of social debates about the merits of the death penalty, particularly for women. The article argues, however, that these reforms counter-intuitively resulted in less favorable outcomes for those convicted of the crime, as they found themselves facing lengthy prison sentences. Such an outcome was unlikely in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The article, therefore, demonstrates, the “contradictions of reform.”

scholarly journals Legitimacy of Power: the View of French Liberalism in the second half of the XIX century

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-94
Author(s):  
S V Bochkarev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Legal Science ◽  
Xix Century

The problem of the legitimacy of power is of great interest, both in domestic and in French legal science. In France over the past two centuries, there have been five republics, two empires, and various transitional regimes and forms of government. The end of the XVIII - first half of the XIX centuries in France is characterized by the most frequent changes in the state and legal sphere, which caused increased attention of researchers to the legitimacy or legitimacy of power. The contribution of representatives of the French liberal school of the second half of the XIX century is noted in the article in the development of the concept of legitimacy of power. The main approaches to this problem of the most prominent representatives of the French liberal school have been analyzed, whose work was significantly inf luenced by the conceptual formation of the concepts of legitimacy, in particular, and the legitimacy of power in general. It is noted that representatives of French liberalism of the second half of the nineteenth century considered the legitimacy of power in the discourse of the idea of justice, emphasizing the three elements that should be embodied in the state, which in turn should ensure the legitimization of power.

‘v.’ Revisited: Harrison, Rimbaud and the French Radical Tradition

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-154
Author(s):  
Christine Regan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Social Models ◽  
Political Poetry ◽  
Paris Commune ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World

In v. ‘Tony Harrison’ explains his essential identity as an unlikely union of high cultural poet and dispossessed vandal, an idiosyncratic loner who finds his ghostly twin in a nineteenth-century French poet, Rimbaud. To understand the significance of Harrison’s claim that he is as one in spirit with Rimbaud, it is important to remember that the literary and political rebel was a poet of the Paris Commune, and v. is responsive to the literary and republican history Rimbaud lived in. In v. Harrison’s signature poetics of occupation engages with Parisian’s aesthetic and political occupation of their city in 1871 and 'artisanal' political poetry. As poet-mythologers, Harrison and Rimbaud champion traditions of resistance to the state and capital, illuminating the shared hopes uniting different struggles. The significance of the 1984 miners’ strike, Thatcher, Marx and Morris for Harrison’s state of the nation poem, and for the political sonnets, is discussed too. v. suggests alternative social models to Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution and late capitalism in England, and suggests the wish for fundamental change. The past is full of paths not taken, and v. suggests visiting Paris 1871, with Rimbaud as ‘the first poet of a civilization that has not yet appeared’, to illuminate utopian possibilities about transforming the world and ‘changer la vie’.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Cicero
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
State Legislature ◽  
The State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Conventions

The introduction outlines the history of Illinois, focusing on populations of southerners, immigrants, Indians, and enslaved blacks and their various effects on four constitutional conventions held between 1818 and 1869. The biography of Abraham Lincoln organizes the discussion: his migration to the state with other southerners, his service in the state legislature and as a U.S. representative as a Whig, his debates with Stephen Douglas, his election to president representing the new Republican Party, and the legacy of his efforts to unite the nation and to emancipate blacks during the Civil War. Themes of north versus south, rural versus urban (i.e., Chicago), slavery versus freedom, economic and railroad development, and debates about executive, legislative, and judicial powers shaped each of Illinois’s nineteenth-century constitutional conventions.

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