A HISTORY OF “RATIONALISM” IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSHUA BENNETT

“Rationalism” became the subject of intense debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article asks why this was so, by focusing on the usage and implications of the term in contemporary argument. Rationalism was successively defined and redefined in ways that reached to the heart of Victorian epistemological and religious discussion. By treating rationalism as a contextually specific term, and examining how its implications changed between the 1820s and the early twentieth century, the article brings new perspectives to bear on the development of nineteenth-century freethought and countervailing religious apologetic. It underlines the importance of history, and constructions of intellectual lineage, as ways of establishing the relationship between rationality and religion in a progressively wider-ranging Victorian debate about the sources of knowledge and value.

Love, Inc. ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 83-112
Author(s):  
Laurie Essig

Getting engaged now requires more emotional and financial resources than ever before. Here Essig traces the history of engagements from the birth of companionate marriages in the nineteenth century to the invention of rituals like the bended knee and fetish items like the diamond ring in the early twentieth century. But the real change happened at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as engagements became “spectacular,” requiring not just highly staged events but also highly produced videos and images that could then be disseminated to the larger world.


Author(s):  
Joseph Lawson

This chapter considers the history of alcohol in Nuosu Yi society in relation to the formal codification of a Yi heritage of alcohol-related culture, and the question of alcohol in Yi health. The relationship of newly invented tradition to older practice and thought is often obscure in studies that lack historical perspective. Examining the historical narratives associated with the exposition of a Yi heritage of alcohol, this study reveals that those narratives are woven from a tapestry of threads with histories of their own, and they therefore shape present-day heritage work. After a brief overview of ideas about alcohol in contemporary discourses on Yi heritage, the chapter then analyses historical texts to argue that many of these ideas are remarkably similar to ones that emerged in the context of nineteenth and early twentieth century contact between Yi and Han communities.


1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyatt Macgaffey

Recent accounts of the proto-history of Africa use data from physical anthropology, but also concepts of race which physical anthropologists in general have abandoned as unsatisfactory; the paper seeks to explain this phenomenon sociologically. Late nineteenth-century political and sociological trends helped to produce patterns of thought which can no longer be regarded as affording adequate explanations of social processes. These patterns combined idealism, or the method of contrasting ideal types, with pseudo-Darwinism, which sought the origins of political development in the interaction of differently endowed groups. In African ethnography of the early twentieth century such concepts led to the view that the continent was inhabited by two groups, Caucasoids and Negroids, and by mixtures of the two which remained mixtures, to be analysed as such. The Caucasoid and Negroid types were regarded as absolute and universal, represented equally in the biological, linguistic, cultural and political aspects of man.


Author(s):  
Barry Stephenson

‘The fortunes of ritual’ charts the history of ritual, its study, and its reception beginning with the Confucian text Liji. This outlines means to counter humanity's fallen state through devices, guides, and practices called li, which are imagined as knots binding society together. Jumping to Enlightenment Europe, ritual came to be viewed as staid and outmoded, a superstitious remnant of a primitive past, a past that prevented humanity from truly advancing. In the early twentieth century, ritual was given some credibility via the Durkhemian tradition of social functionalism and Julian Huxley's causal connection between society's ills and ineffectual ritualization in society. Recent ritual theory articulates the relationship between ritual and group solidarity as seen through participation in contemporary festivals.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 467-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Hawkins

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the development of marketing practice in Britain from the ancient to the early twentieth century. It builds upon the author’s chapter in the 2016 Routledge Companion to the History of Marketing. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on a review of secondary history and archaeology literature supplemented by digitised historic newspaper and magazine advertising. The literature is frameworked using a modified version of Fullerton’s 1988 periodization which has been extended to include the medieval and Roman eras. Findings One of the significant findings of this paper is the key role the state has played in the development of marketing practice in Britain, the construction of pavements being a good example. Originality/value Apart from Nevett’s 1982 history of British advertising and the author’s Routledge Companion to the History of Marketing chapter, this is the first survey of the historical development of British marketing practice. It assembles and presents in a useful way important information. This paper will be of interest to marketing historians, especially students and researchers new to the subject.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Ewell

Universally translated into English as “mode,” the Russian term лад (“lād”) first appeared in 1830 as a translation from German Tonart, which is usually translated into English as “tonality.” To Tchaikovsky a lād was, in fact, a tonality, but by century’s end lād had come to signify its pre-tonal cousin, mode. Boleslav Yavorsky’s work on the subject in the early twentieth century gave lād new post-modal and post-tonal meaning with respect to quasi-tonal and post-tonal music. In this article, I delve deeply into the history of this uniquely Russian concept, from its inception to its highly modified mid-twentieth century form. Rather than trying to find an English equivalent, I leave “lād” in its transliterated form, which disentangles it from inaccurate translations. I examine a 1945 Chopin analysis by Yavorsky’s student, Sergei Protopopov, which outlines new interpretations for Russian lād. Sketches for this analysis, from the Russian National Museum of Music, provide a backdrop for a reexamination of basic tonal constructs such as cadence, phrase, form, harmonic function, and melodic diminution. I then look at a famous 1930 conference on Yavorsky’s theories as an example of the high stakes involved in creating a Marxist musical science, in which lād played a primary role. I also briefly discuss Yavorsky’s theories as a counterweight to Hugo Riemann’s encroaching functionality, which was brought to Russia by Gregori Catoire in the early twentieth century. It is my hope that this work on lād will fill in many gaps for the English-language reader, and possibly spur further studies on this uniquely Russian concept.


2015 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer R. Sheppard

ABSTRACTThis article explores ways in which music intersected with the growth of sports in Victorian Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. Although there have been valuable studies of music and sports recently, their main emphasis has been on popular music and contemporary sporting events; a study of the period when playing and watching sports began to acquire its present-day shape has yet to be undertaken. This article moves towards that by examining connections between music and sports through broader social and cultural developments, in particular new ideas about morality, health and physical fitness. It situates commentaries about the healthfulness of music in relation to nineteenth-century discourses about sport, in addition to contextualizing notions of singing and health in the increasing professionalization of Victorian medicine. Finally, this article extends and relocates early twentieth-century encapsulations of singing as physical exercise in the context of concern over degeneration in national fitness.


Author(s):  
Adeana McNicholl

ABSTRACT This article traces the life of a single figure, Sufi Abdul Hamid, to bring into conversation the history of the transmission of Buddhism to the United States with the emergence of new Black religio-racial movements in the early twentieth century. It follows Hamid's activities in the 1930s to ask what Hamid's life reveals about the relationship between Buddhism and race in the United States. On the one hand, Hamid's own negotiation of his identity as a Black Orientalist illustrates the contentious process through which individuals negotiate their religio-racial identities in tension with hegemonic religio-racial frameworks. Hamid constructed a Black Orientalist identity that resignified Blackness while criticizing the racial injustice foundational to the American nation-state. His Black Orientalist identity at times resonated with global Orientalist discourses, even while being recalcitrant to the hegemonic religio-racial frameworks of white Orientalism. The subversive positioning of Hamid's Black Orientalist identity simultaneously lent itself to his racialization by others. This is illustrated through Hamid's posthumous implication in a conspiracy theory known as the “Black Buddhism Plan.” This theory drew on imaginations of a Black Pacific community formulated by both Black Americans and by government authorities who created Japanese Buddhists and new Black religio-racial movements as subjects of surveillance. The capacious nature of Hamid's religio-racial identity, on the one hand constructed and performed by Hamid himself, and on the other created in the shadow of the dominant discourses of a white racial state, demonstrates that Buddhism in the United States is always constituted by race.


2021 ◽  
pp. 25-36
Author(s):  
David Lloyd Dusenbury

In the late 1920s an Austrian historian of religion, Robert Eisler, introduced a riveting new theory about the trial and death of Jesus. On the strength of a dossier of Old Russian manuscripts, Eisler became convinced that Jesus went to Jerusalem shortly before his death with a cohort of “secretly armed” disciples. Once in the holy city, Eisler conjectured, Jesus and his cohort of fighters must have gained control of “the strongly fortified Temple”. It is this action which must have led to Jesus’ arrest and death. Eisler’s most momentous claim, however, is that Pilate’s notes on Jesus’ trial were rediscovered the nineteenth century and published in the early twentieth century. This chapter examines some of Eisler’s sources, and his place in the reception-history of Jesus’ Roman trial. Eisler is unique for his stress on the fascinating question of what Pilate wrote.


2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 566-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raúúl A. Ramos

This article explores the usefulness of Chicano/a history to teaching and representing the nineteenth-century history of northern Mexico, U.S. imperial expansion, and the constructed nature of borders. Typically considered a twentieth-century discipline, Chicano/a historians have a long history of engaging the subject in the nineteenth century. This focus dovetails with recent critical works on race and gender in the U.S. West as well as transnational approaches to history. This article makes the case that the perspective on the nineteenth century provided by Chicano/a historians forces readers to reframe their understanding of the sweep of U.S. history.


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