scholarly journals Plantations and Homes: The Material Culture of the Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaican Elite

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christer Petley
2020 ◽  
pp. 181-204
Author(s):  
Dina Ishak Bakhoum

This chapter traces the most significant episodes of the Coptic Museum’s history and argues that the museum was not founded as a ‘minority’ museum but rather as an archaeological museum holding valuable religious Coptic art. Its foundation aimed at demonstrating that Coptic material culture had equivalent value in Egyptian history to Pharaonic, Greco-Roman and Islamic arts, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries already had their own museums. Unlike other museums, however, the Coptic Museum was established under the aegis of the Patriarch, giving it an unconventional status within Egyptian heritage owing to the religious nature of its initial collection. The essay presents the museum’s foundation during the early nineteenth century and discusses the context of its nationalization and transformation into a public domain museum (1931) as well as its expansion (1947).


2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Barford

In the 1830s and 1840s, the Hydrographic Office of the British Admiralty developed and oversaw one of the major state-run surveying projects of the nineteenth century. This involved a range of instruments whose circulation was increasingly regulated. Using extant museum collections and the correspondence of those involved, this article explores how such objects can be used to discuss both bureaucratic organization at a time of expanding government and the complex issues of sociability involved in hydrographic surveying. Surveying officers worked in a context in which the propriety of property on public service was a pervasive question. Instruments might be given as gifts between officers, appropriated as recompense, absorbed as state property, and disputed between friends. The ownership, provision, and treatment of instruments in particular could be used to demonstrate an officer’s peculiar zeal or institutional neglect. To those outside the ship, what was understood as over-instrumentation became amusing spectacle. On board, their use was part of a deeply hierarchical order of work in regions of colonial and mercantile importance. In examining the relationships around these instruments of survey, the paper proposes a richer understanding of the material culture of hydrography in the early nineteenth century.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Watt

Abstract The image of the Highland soldier as a brave, loyal warrior was central to nineteenth-century notions of Scottish national identity. This article uses material culture evidence alongside traditional archival sources to provide an interdisciplinary explanation of how the military dimension of Scottish identity was shaped in the early nineteenth century. It finds that it was the responses of the Highland Society of London to Scottish battlefield valour – rather than the actions themselves – that created the enduring popular perception of the Highland soldier as a desirable national symbol and as an icon of empire.


2022 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-235
Author(s):  
Danielle Kinsey

This article analyzes George IV’s coronation as a multisensory festive experience in order to understand the meanings of diamonds within British material culture in 1821. Reframing the coronation as a festival allows historical scholars to bridge the premodern/modern divide in early nineteenth-century historiography and demonstrates the ongoing centrality of festivals in consumer culture in the modern era. It also offers a vantage point from which to study sensory paradigm shifts and clashes that occurred in this context and evaluate diamonds in relation to other pieces of material culture outside of the confines of a formal marketplace. The article argues that the coronation shifted how diamonds were thought about in Britain, though this shift was subtle and deeply embedded in the turmoil of the moment. On a widespread scale, the event normalized the association of diamonds with monarchy, imperial power, and light, in ways that made diamonds seem like quotidian items. The article is based on accounts of the event in newspapers, periodicals, and official histories.


Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller

This chapter explores the ways amateur historical associations act as incubators of new thinking about how objects could tell stories. It draws from publications of German historical associations produced during the nineteenth century. Beginning in the first decade of the nineteenth century as a patriotic gesture and continuing for another fifty years, a new genre of German history flourished. It was often conducted at the scale of the region or territory, not the state, under the auspices of local historical associations and published in their newly created journals. In these regional associations, what had previously been a means to an end—material sources—became an end in itself: the subject matter of German history.


2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES POSKETT

AbstractLogbooks and sea charts may appear rather straightforward evidence to present at a naval court martial. However, their introduction into proceedings in the early nineteenth century reveals an important shift. Measuring the depth of water soon became a problem both of navigation and of discipline. Indeed, Captain Newcomb's knowledge of the soundings taken at the Battle of the Basque Roads proved crucial at Lord Gambier's court martial in June 1809. Through a case study of Edward Massey's sounding machine, this paper reveals the close connection between disciplinary practices on land and at sea. The Board of Longitude acted as a key intermediary in this respect. By studying land and sea together, this paper better explains the changing make-up of the British scientific instrument trade in this period. Massey is just one example of a range of new entrants, many of whom had little previous experience of the maritime world. More broadly, this paper emphasizes the role of both environmental history and material culture in the study of scientific instruments.


Author(s):  
Stefanie Gänger

This chapter discusses different ways of engaging with the Inca as an ancient past and their material culture as “antiquities” over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It holds that Inca “antiquities” had assumed principally three distinct functions by the early nineteenth century, which they were to retain into the recent era: primarily, that of “epistemic things,” objects of intellectual curiosity to antiquaries and archaeologists in Europe and across the Americas; second, that of political, predominantly “national,” symbols, available for the wider imagined collectivities of, initially at least, several South American republics; and third, that of commodities, as collectibles and museum exhibits traded on an ever-expanding trans-Atlantic antiquities market.


2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Moseley

Drawing on recent developments in improvisation studies, the author argues that the reconstruction of improvisatory practices in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European music entails the cultivation of archaeological (as well as historical) modes of inquiry and digital (as well as literary) sensibilities. The anthropological concept of entextualization is deployed to illustrate how aspects of improvisation that defy literal forms of representation might be accessed through material culture, algorithmic processes, embodied reenactment, and simulation.


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