scholarly journals Mastering the Nile? Confidence and Anxiety in D. S. George’s Photographs of the First Aswan Dam, 1899–1912

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Grinsell

Abstract The first Aswan Dam was built at the dawn of the twentieth century and celebrated as a triumph of imperial engineering. Five years after its completion, workers returned to extend the dam. Photographer D. S. George recorded both the building and extension projects for the Egyptian Public Works Department in a series of images that give a unique insight into the place of engineering in the imperial imagination. The dam was built at the same time as Britain was seeking to secure its domination of the Nile Valley, having recently seized control of Sudan. Mastering the river’s water was vital to expanding agriculture in Egypt, a central plank of British policy in the region. Representations of the dam speak to a larger history of empire and power in northeast Africa. This article examines the tension between bombastic confidence and nagging anxiety in the ideologies of empire. Drawing together water, engineering, and environmental histories, it explores the connections between attempts to control the politics of the Nile Valley and efforts to harness its waters. The key themes found in the albums—nature, technology, work, and conservation—will be used as lenses through which to scrutinize the peculiar form of modernity that engineers attempted to forge on the world’s longest river. This analysis reveals that imperial officials sought total mastery of the environment but that the difficulties faced in realizing such grand schemes also generated persistent anxieties and so helps us understand the fears that accompanied the ambitions of imperial modernity.

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-159
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Rotter

The chapter provides a sensory history of empire in the two countries, India and the Philippines, at the turn of the twentieth century. By that point, the process of visualizing Indian and Filipino subjects was well underway by their colonizers. The chapter looks at sight and sound and how they can be used to narrate the story at this point. The dynamics of Anglo-American soundscapes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transferred readily and deliberately to sites of empire, to India and the Philippines. In particular, it looks at the music in the two empires at this time.


2020 ◽  
pp. 240-258
Author(s):  
Mary E. Sommar

This is the story of how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel and for others’ behavior toward such slaves. Chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods, along with an analysis of the various policies and statutes, provide insight into the situations of these unfree ecclesiastical dependents. Although this book is a serious scholarly monograph about the history of church law, it has been written in such a way that no specialist knowledge is required of the reader, whether a scholar in another field or a general reader interested in church history or the history of slavery. Historical background is provided, and there is a short Latin lexicon. This chapter summarizes the conclusions drawn in earlier chapters and provides a brief overview of the question of ecclesiastical servitude up to the twentieth century.


2005 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 221-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.O.Y. Keita ◽  
A.J. Boyce

Modern Egypt, the site of Africa's earliest state, lies near the crossroads of two other continents, and has had historic interactions with all its neighboring regions. This alone would make it an ideal place to study historical population biology. Egypt can also be conceptualized as a linear oasis in the eastern Sahara, one that traverses several regions of Africa. An oasis can be a way station or serve as a refugium, as well as be a place of settlement with its own special biological and cultural adaptive strategies. Both of these perspectives—crossroads and oasis/refugium—can be expected to provide insight into the processes that could have affected the Nile valley's populations/peoples. From these vantage points this presentation will examine aspects of what might be called the historical genetics of the Nile valley, with a focus on the Y chromosome. The time-frame is the late pleistocene through holocene; within this there are different levels of biocultural history. Of special interest here is patterns of north-south variation in the Egyptian Nile valley.


2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-52
Author(s):  
Viktoriya S. Vorontsova ◽  
Mikhail M. Kanarskii ◽  
Marina V. Petrova ◽  
Igor V. Pryanikov

Medical rehabilitation is a process aimed at promoting and facilitating recovery from physical injury, psychological and mental disorders and clinical illness. The history of medical rehabilitation is a fascinating journey through time, providing insight into many different areas of medicine. When modern rehabilitation emerges in the mid-twentieth century, it stems from a combination of management approaches focusing on orthopedic and biomechanical understanding of movement patterns, on mastering neuropsychological mechanisms, and on an awareness of the socio-professional dimension of everyday reality.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 489-514
Author(s):  
Lukas Engelmann

Abstract The arrival of bubonic plague in San Francisco in 1900 has become a pivotal case study in the history of American public health. The presence of plague remained contested for months as the evidence provided by the federal bacteriologist Joseph Kinyoun of the Marine Hospital Service was rejected, his laboratory methods disputed and his person ridiculed. Before the disease diagnosis became widely accepted, Kinyoun had been subjected to public caricature; his expensive and disruptive pragmatics for containing the epidemic were ridiculed as a plague of ‘Kinyounism’. Not only does this history offer insight into the difficult and contradictory ways in which bacteriology became an established science, it also provides an early twentieth-century example of ‘politicised science’. This paper revisits the controversy around Kinyoun and his bacteriological practice through the lens of caricature to sharpen the historical understanding of the shifting and shifty relationships between science, medicine, public health and politics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMILY THOMAS

AbstractDuring the early twentieth century, British novelist and philosopher May Sinclair published two book-length defenses of idealism. Although Sinclair is well known to literary scholars, she is little known to the history of philosophy. This paper provides the first substantial scholarship on Sinclair's philosophical views, focusing on her mature idealism. Although Sinclair is working within the larger British idealist tradition, her argument for Absolute idealism is unique, founded on Samuel Alexander's new realist beliefs about the reality of time. Her metaphysics takes idealism and pantheism in new directions and provides fresh insight into 1920s debates between British idealisms and realisms.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 454-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mithi Mukherjee

This article is a historical inquiry into the sedition trial in 1908 of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of the most important anticolonial leaders in twentieth-century India. It argues that Tilak, in the grand spectacle of this political trial, rejected the British discourse of imperial justice that had served as the ground of the British Empire until then, and claimed a new discourse of legislative freedom for the people of India. The trial thus marked a fundamental discursive rupture in the history of empire and paved the way for mass anticolonial movements under the leadership of Gandhi.


2003 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Szreter ◽  
Robert A. Nye ◽  
Frans van Poppel

Demographic, cultural, and oral-history approaches to the study of falling fertility in nineteenth-and twentieth-century France, Canada, Britain, Holland, Norway, and Finland confirm the importance of the persistent usage of “traditional” methods of birth control—such as coitus interruptus, abortion, and forms of periodic abstinence—throughout the period when fertility fell, though fertility fell in each case at a different point in time. These studies also use qualitative evidence that provides insight into the reasons for contraceptive preference, thereby combining the history of changing sexualities with the analysis of demographic change.


Author(s):  
Holly Morse

Within popular Western interpretative traditions, as well as the majority of modern works on the reception history of Adam and Eve, the first woman’s role as a mother has ultimately been eclipsed by her action in the garden. Nonetheless, Eve is, according to the Bible, the first female to give birth to a child and begin the cycle of human procreation, thus representing a potent symbol of female creative power. Furthermore, some of the most poignant aspects of Eve’s story are bound up in her maternity; she is mother to all living but her children will know mortality because of her actions; she will suffer pain and anguish in order to bring about new life; and she will experience the death of her second son Abel at the hands of her firstborn, Cain. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which Eve’s motherhood is represented by a number of different trajectories growing out from the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish and Christian interpretations, visual art, and the work of pre-twentieth-century women writers. Each of these categories of interpretation offers their own unique insight into mother Eve, while also sharing considerable imagery and themes between them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-175
Author(s):  
Daryl Meador

This paper critically listens to the Oral History of the Texas Oil Industry archives, a concatenation of slightly drawling white oilmen recorded in the mid twentieth century. The uniformity of the authorial voices in this archive helps to construct a monolithic white historiography that sanitizes collective memory in Texas. The archive offers insight into the sonic qualities of power in Texas as it is mediated through an idealized Texan identity via accent. In an effort to unsettle the authority of this totalizing Texan identity and its voice, this paper also listens to the history of Creole music as it migrated into Texas and transformed in contact with the state's oil industry. Placing these two different vocal histories together, one self-assured and one characterized by stretching its own limits, interrogates how we listen to the voice in history, attuned to sonic and vocal notations of power as it has alternately been enjoyed or endured.


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