The ‘habitual criminal’ in nineteenth-century England: some observations on the figures

Urban History ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 37-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. J. Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Writer ◽  
Downward Trend ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Penal Policy ◽  
Principal Reason ◽  
Social Reactions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Habitual Criminal

The history of crime, penal policy and policing is currently enjoying a vogue — and not least fashionable among the topics under discussion has been the question of the nineteenth-century English ‘criminal class’, the origins of the term and its social significance. Critics are divided more or less equally into quantifiers and phenomenologists, optimists and pessimists about real trends. Few are the questions about the known facts but no agreement appears in sight on the subject of their interpretation. The principal reason for disagreement, as it appears to the present writer, is the central dominance of predicative, mono-thematic perspectives and explanations — any of which will fit the facts quite well but all of which seem insusceptible to conclusive proof. First let us consider the range of dispute among the phenomenologists — each of whom may also be characterized as a univer-salist, in the sense that they seem to believe the possible range of criminal events illimitable and the figures on crime merely a reflection of external social reactions rather than evidence of any upward or downward trend in measurable events.

An Introduction to the History of International Law

1924 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baron S. A. Korff
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
History Of International Law

For a long time writers on international law took it for granted that the subject of their studies was a relatively recent product of modern civilization, and that the ancient world did not know any system of international law. If we go back to the literature of the nineteenth century, we can find a certain feeling of pride among internationalists that international law was one of the best fruits of our civilization and that it was a system which distinguished us from the ancient barbarians. Some of these writers paid special attention to this question of origins and endeavored to explain why the ancient world never could have had any international law.

scholarly journals Medical and Chemical Expertise in English Trials for Criminal Poisoning, 1750–1914

2006 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine D Watson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Expert Testimony ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Legal Practice ◽  
Criminal Proceedings ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Medical Expertise ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

This article contributes to the literature on the history of medico-legal practice by using a survey of 535 poisoning cases to examine the emergence of forensic toxicological expertise in nineteenth-century English criminal trials. In emphasizing chemical expertise, it seeks both to expand upon a limited literature on the history of the subject, and to offer a contrast to studies of criminal poisoning that have tended to focus primarily on medical expertise. Poisoning itself is a topic of abiding interest to historians of forensic medicine and science because (together with insanity) it long tended to attract the greatest attention (and often confrontation) in criminal proceedings. In looking at a wide number of cases, however, it becomes apparent that few aroused true medico-legal controversy. Rather, the evidence from several hundred cases tried as felonies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries indicates that prior to the 1830s few presented any opportunity for “a battle of experts”. While Ian Burney and Tal Golan have shown that this was certainly not the case during the mid and late nineteenth century, this paper goes further by dividing the period under study into three distinct phases in order to show how expert testimony (and experts themselves) changed during the course of the century, and why this process opened a door to the potential for formalized controversy.

Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate

1984 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 199-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blair Worden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Moral Foundations ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Toleration is a Victorian subject, a monument to Victorian liberalism. ‘To us who have been educated in the nineteenth century’, proclaimed F. A. Inderwick in his book on the Interregnum, ‘any declaration inconsistent with religious toleration would be abhorrent and inadmissible’. His sentiment would not have seemed controversial to a generation raised on such best-selling works as Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England and Lecky’s History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism. It may be that the Victorians, enquiring into the origins of the toleration which they had achieved, were prone to congratulate the past on becoming more like the present. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when interest in the subject was perhaps at its peak, we can also detect, in the statements on toleration of a Creighton or a Figgis, a fear that the present might become more like the past: that materialism and religious indifference might destroy the moral foundations of toleration, and foster a new barbarism which would persecute Christians afresh.

Henry Dresser and Victorian Ornithology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry A. McGhie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
Museum Studies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bird Conservation ◽  
Conservation Movement ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This book explores the life of Henry Dresser (1838–1915), one of the most productive British ornithologists of the mid-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it is also an exploration of ornithology during a period when the subject changed dramatically. The book is based on previously unpublished letters, diaries and photographs to provide the first detailed biography of any of the independent industrialist–naturalists who dominated nineteenth century British ornithology. Dresser travelled widely in Europe, New Brunswick and to Texas during the American Civil War before settling down to work in London in the timber and iron trades. He built enormous collections of skins and eggs of birds, many of which came from famous travellers and collectors. These collections formed the basis of over 100 publications on birds including some of the finest and some of the last of the great bird books of the late nineteenth century, combining cutting-edge scientific information with masterpieces of bird illustration. Dresser played a leading role in scientific society and in the early bird conservation movement. His correspondence and diaries reveal the inner workings, motivations, personal relationships and rivalries that existed among the leading ornithologists. This book is aimed at anyone interested in birds, history and natural history, and as a textbook for courses relating to history, history of science and museum studies.

History of the Historiography of Spanish Textbooks and Treatises on International Law of the 19th Century

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Yolanda Gamarra Chopo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Late Development ◽  
Spanish History ◽  
Principal Axes ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century

The bibliography of Spanish international law textbooks is a good indicator of the evolution of the historiography of international law. Spanish historiography, with its own special features, was a recipient of the great debates concerning naturalism v. positivism and universalism v. particularism that flourished in European and American historiography in the nineteenth century. This study is articulated on four principal axes. The first states how the writings of the philosophes continued to dominate the way in which the subject was conceived in mid-nineteenth century Spain. Secondly, it explores the popularization and democratization of international law through the work of Concepcion Arenal and the heterodox thought of Rafael Maria de Labra. Thirdly, it examines the first textbooks of international law with their distinct natural law bias, but imbued with certain positivist elements. These textbooks trawled sixteenth century Spanish history, searching for the origins of international law and thus demonstrating the historical civilizing role of Spain, particularly in America. Fourthly, it considers the vision of institutionist, heterodox reformers and bourgeois liberals who proclaimed the universality of international law, not without some degree of ambivalence, and their defence of Spain as the object of civilization and also a civilizing subject. In conclusion, the article argues that the late development of textbooks was a consequence of the late institutionalization of the study of international law during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the legacy of the nineteenth century survives in the most progressive of contemporary polemics for a new international law.

The Mid-Nineteenth Century Electoral Structure

1976 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard W. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present State ◽  
Divergence Of Opinion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Electoral Structure

It is far too early to talk with any real certainty about the mid-nineteenth century electoral structure. The very materials of which it was built are in dispute, let alone the shape of the edifice. A deference school of historians is challenging traditional notions of the growth of political individualism in the period, while so-called quantitative historians are beginning to question the assumptions and approach of both deference historians and traditionalists. Serious and detailed study of the questions involved has hardly begun. Still, some comment on the present state of the controversy may not be entirely out of place. An enduring interpretation can only be constructed of sound materials; and I am by no means certain of the soundness of some of those now being put forward for our use.W. O. Aydelotte, in a paper read a couple of years ago and soon to be published in a series of essays entitled The History of Parliamentary Behavior, notes the divergence of opinion among historians on the role of the electorate in shaping parliamentary opinion after 1832. As he rightly suggests, Norman Gash in his Politics in the Age of Peel appears to be of two minds on the subject, depending on whether one reads his introduction or his text. In the former Professor Gash stresses the increase of popular influence on Parliament, in the latter the continuance of traditional influences over the mass of the electorate. D. C. Moore comes down heavily on the side of the latter influences, contending that a relatively few leaders of what he has called “deference communities” represented effective electoral opinion, which was simply registered by the mass of the electorate.

Playing ‘follow my leader’ in Anglo-Norman studies

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Rothwell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Important Phenomenon ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
French And English ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThroughout the present century the nature of Anglo-Norman and its role in the history of both French and English has been misunderstood and misrepresented by the endless repetition at second hand of views that have their origin in the nineteenth–century ‘reconstructionist’ movement in French philology. Evidence readily available from original sources of many kinds shows that the French used in England between the Conquest and the end of the fourteenth century is at once a more complex and far more important phenomenon than current writing on the subject would suggest, especially as regards the history of the English language.

The Stem Family in Ireland

1978 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Gibbon ◽  
C. Curtin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Patriarchal Family ◽  
The Family ◽  
Sociological Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Primary Socialization ◽  
Main Family

The subject of this paper is the question of the stem family, in the sociological literature and in anthropological studies of Ireland. The notion of the stem family is said to derive from the work of the nineteenth-century French sociologist Frederic Le Play (1806–82). Le Play divided the history of the family into three stages. Ancient societies were supposedly characterized by what he called the ‘patriarchal’ family, in which all the sons were retained within the household, over which the oldest member of the family ruled and in which any number of generations resided. Most of the world's population were said however to have experienced their primary socialization in the ‘stem’ family. The stem family was a threegenerational structure which functioned to retain its original location (land and/or house) by means of dispersing most younger members, while preserving the main family stem by a principle of single inheritance. Parents married off and kept within the group only those children nominated as successors. Finally, there was the modern, ‘unstable’ family which formed upon marriage and dissolved upon the death of the parents.

History of instruments used for mastoidectomy

2009 ◽  
Vol 123 (6) ◽  
pp. 583-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
A Mudry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Irrigation System ◽  
Ear Surgery ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Mastoid Surgery

AbstractAim:To present the historical development of specific instruments used for mastoidectomy and their resulting implications for this surgery.Method:Compilation of original written documents, trade catalogues and collections of instruments used in mastoid surgery, with a review of the secondary literature on the subject.Results:The first surgical opening of the mastoid was performed by Petit in 1736 with a trepanation system. More than one and a half centuries later, in 1873, Schwartze codified the operation using chisels and gouges. At the end of the nineteenth century, Macewen introduced the electrical dental burr for mastoid surgery, but it remained largely unrecognised. At the beginning of the 1950s, the systematic use of the microscope in ear surgery allowed generalised use of the drill and improvement of the suction-irrigation system.Conclusion:Three instrumental periods are recognisable in the history of mastoidectomy: the trepan period, the chisel and gouge period, and the electrical drill period.

scholarly journals Proclaiming East Timor: Historical Reflections on Political Declarations

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Kammen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Timor ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many

East Timor celebrated its independence in 2002, but behind the euphoria the subject of the celebration was hotly contested. While most foreign observers treated this as the achievement of independence, according to the Constitution and the first government 20 May 2002 marked the restoration of independence that was first proclaimed by Francisco Xavier do Amaral in November 1975. Given the significance that declarations of independence hold, this article traces the history of political declarations in East Timor over the course of three centuries. It examines a curious pair of declarations in 1702-1703, the many declarations of vassalage in the nineteenth century, the declaration of the Portuguese Republic in 1910, the competing political declarations in 1975, and a curious declaration of a breakaway republic in 2005. 

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