Early Insecticide Controversies and Beekeeper Advocacy in the Great Lakes Region

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Bonnell

Abstract This article examines the debates that surrounded incidents of honeybee poisoning in the southern Great Lakes region in the 1880s and 1890s. Drawing upon the records of beekeepers and allied entomologists from Ontario and neighboring states, it analyzes the history of insecticide use, knowledge development, and risk calculation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here, beekeepers emerge as an important and largely overlooked collective voice in the history of insecticide controversies, contributing as they did to legislation, education, and advocacy efforts on both sides of the US-Canadian border. Their actions in response to a cogent threat to their livelihoods mark them as early advocates for environmental protection. Deeply familiar with the amenities and threats of surrounding land uses for their honey crop, late nineteenth-century beekeepers pressed for prudent insecticide use and “bee-friendly” horticultural practices more than half a century before the more familiar insecticide controversies of the postwar period. By the turn of the century, these efforts had borne some success in reducing incidents of honeybee poisoning. As the frequency, quantity, and toxicity of insecticides increased in the early twentieth century, however, powerful fruit-grower interests left Great Lakes beekeepers (and their bees) to shoulder the risks of an increasingly toxic countryside or to fold their operations, as many chose to do. For environmental historians, their fight presents an early example of the effects of agricultural industrialization, and its associated environmental consequences, on minority producers and the animals they kept.

Author(s):  
Shelley Z. Reuter

Testing Fate looks at the racialized history of Tay-Sachs in the US and UK in its construction as a Jewish disease from the late-nineteenth century through to the present era of geneticization, where people are increasingly expected to make the “right” kinds of medical-genetic choices, including the choice to be screened for genetic disease. Taking Tay-Sachs as its exemplar and with a view to exploring what these developments have come to mean for human agency, the book demonstrates that authentic, free choice in genetic-decision-making on one hand, and responsible biocitizenship in a context of exclusion on the other, are a contradiction of terms.


1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 103-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Kolinsky

In the political and economic history of Germany, Leipzig alreadyheld a special place long before unification. Since the middle ages, ithas hosted one of the most important trade fairs in Europe. Whenindustrialization turned Germany in the late nineteenth century intoa leading European power, outpacing France and closely rivalingBritain, Leipzig added to its established and internationally acclaimedfur and book trade a mighty industrial sector in lignite-based chemicalsand vehicle production. At the turn of the century, Leipzig wasone of the largest and most affluent cities of Germany and indeedEurope. A rich stock of Gründerzeit houses remains to testify to thisillustrious past.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.


This chapter reviews the book Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 (2014), by Theodore H. Friedgut, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (edited and annotated by Theodore H. Friedgut). Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America is a two-in-one volume that explores an obscure episode in the history of the Jews in the late nineteenth century while at the same time connecting much of its content to the author’s own life experience as a son of western Canada’s Jewish farming colonies and, later, as an ideologically driven halutz on an Israeli kibbutz. Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America retells one branch of the mostly forgotten history of the Am Olam agricultural movement and brings a new layer into the discussion of global Jewish agrarianism, while Recollections of a Communist offers an edited and annotated version of a memoir written by Mandelkern.


Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

This book challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics. From an interdisciplinary array of scholars, a consensus has emerged: invariably, epidemics in past times provoked class hatred, blame of the ‘other’, or victimization of the diseases’ victims. It is also claimed that when diseases were mysterious, without cures or preventive measures, they more readily provoked ‘sinister connotations’. The evidence for these assumptions, however, comes from a handful of examples—the Black Death, the Great Pox at the end of the sixteenth century, cholera riots of the 1830s, and AIDS, centred almost exclusively on the US experience. By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics, reaching back before the fifth-century BCE Plague of Athens to the eruption of Ebola in 2014, this study traces epidemics’ socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture. First, scholars, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics: their remarkable power to unify societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion. Second, hatred and violence cannot be relegated to a time when diseases were mysterious, before the ‘laboratory revolution’ of the late nineteenth century: in fact, modernity was the great incubator of a disease–hate nexus. Third, even with diseases that have tended to provoke hatred, such as smallpox, poliomyelitis, plague, and cholera, blaming ‘the other’ or victimizing disease bearers has been rare. Instead, the history of epidemics and their socio-psychological consequences has been richer and more varied than scholars and public intellectuals have heretofore allowed.


Author(s):  
Mark Migotti

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422110252
Author(s):  
Ahmet Yusuf Yüksek

This study investigates the socio-spatial history of Sufism in Istanbul during 1880s. Drawing on a unique population registry, it reconstructs the locations of Sufi lodges and the social profiles of Sufis to question how visible Sufism was in the Ottoman capital, and what this visibility demonstrates the historical realities of Sufism. It claims that Sufism was an integral part of the Ottoman life since Sufi lodges were space of religion and spirituality, art, housing, and health. Despite their large presence in Istanbul, Sufi lodges were extensively missing in two main areas: the districts of Unkapanı-Bayezid and Galata-Pera. While the lack of lodgess in the latter area can be explained by the Western encroachment in the Ottoman capital, the explanation for the absence of Sufis in Unkapanı-Bayezid is more complex: natural disasters, two opposing views about Sufi sociability, and the locations of the central lodges.


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (162) ◽  
pp. 244-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leanne Calvert

AbstractThe history of sex and sexuality is underdeveloped in Irish historical studies, particularly for the period before the late-nineteenth century. While much has been written on rates of illegitimacy in Ireland, and its regional diversity, little research has been conducted on how ordinary women and men viewed sex and sexuality. Moreover, we still know little about the roles that sex played in the rituals of courtship and marriage. Drawing on a sample of Presbyterian church records, this article offers some new insights into these areas. It argues that sexual intercourse and other forms of sexual activity formed part of the normal courtship rituals for many young Presbyterian couples in Ulster. Courting couples participated in non-penetrative sexual practices, such as petting, groping and bundling. Furthermore, while sexual intercourse did not have a place in the formal route to marriage, many couples engaged in it regardless.


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