Environmental Writing

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Long
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Natural Habitats ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
Environmental Writing

Most environmental writing in the United States through the 20th century is entangled with the concept of nature—the commonplace idea of a space apart from the human world. In American environmental writing this idea of nature is reproduced in narratives of exploration and pastoral visions of the landscape during the colonial and early national periods; in 19th-century mythographies of the American frontier; and in 20th-century social movements dedicated to preservation and conservation. By the middle of the 19th century, environmental writers were working in forms, such as the nature essay, to record individual experiences of nature and investigate the local knowledge of place-based communities. However, by the middle of the 20th century, environmental writers began considering human life as a part of the nonhuman world. Through this conceptual lens, environmental writing becomes radically inclusive as writers explore natural habitats such as the human body, material exchanges and unfolding biological processes, and the social and economic ecologies of built and urban environments. At the same time, environmental writing has chronicled the global environmental crisis in the Anthropocene—an epoch in which the slow violence of environmental change, accelerated by expanding human populations and inexorable economic growth, becomes visible in deforestation, the loss of soils, species extinction, bioaccumulation, ocean acidification, toxic emissions, and climate change.

Classical Architecture in Europe and North America since 1700

Classics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Classical Architecture ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The 19Th Century

Since the Western Roman Empire collapsed, classical, or Greco-Roman, architecture has served as a model to articulate the cultural, artistic, political, and ideological goals of later civilizations, empires, nations, and individuals. The Renaissance marked the first major, widespread re-engagement with classical antiquity in art, literature, and architecture. Debates over classical antiquity and its relation to the modern world continued ever since. One such important debate was that of the quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns, which resulted when Charles Perrault published his Parallèles des anciens et des modernes in 1688. This dispute focused on whether the modern age could surpass antiquity, especially in literature. The Greco-Roman controversy (1750s and 1760s) was another example of Europeans engaging with the classical past; this debate focused on whether Greek or Roman art was of greater historical value; an argument has continued unabated to this day. Figures like Johann Joachim Winckelmann argued (in publications such as Winckelmann 1764, cited under Early Archaeological Publications on Greece and Classical Ruins in the Roman East, on Greek art) for the supremacy of Greek forms, while others like Giovanni Battista Piranesi (whose 1748–1778 views of Rome are reproduced in Ficacci 2011, cited under Early Archaeological Publications on Italy) advocated for Rome’s preeminence. Such debates demonstrate how classical antiquity was an essential part of the intellectual and artistic milieu of 18th-century Europe. This bibliography focuses on the appropriation of classical architecture in the creation of built forms from 1700 to the present in Europe and North America, which is typically called neoclassical or neo-classical, both of which are acceptable. Scholars often define the neoclassical period as lasting from c. 1750 to 1830, when European art and architecture predominantly appropriated classical forms and ideas. The influence of classical architecture continued in popularity throughout the 19th century and early 20th century in the United States. The early 19th century saw the flourishing of the Greek Revival, where Greek forms dominated artistic and architectural production, both in Europe and the United States. The ascendance of Queen Victoria in 1837 marked a shift toward a preference for the Gothic and Medieval forms. Neoclassical forms saw a resurgence in the second half of the 19th century, as Roman architectural forms became increasingly popular as an expression of empire. The term “Neo-classical” was coined as early as January 1872 by Robert Kerr, who used the term positively. It later took on certain negative overtones, when it was used as a derogatory epithet by an unknown writer in the Times of London in 1892. Neoclassical architecture has fared no better with the rise of modernism in the early 20th century onward and since then it has been seen as old-fashioned and derivative. Neoclassical architecture was not a mindless imitation of classical architectural forms and interiors. The interest in classical architecture and the creation of neoclassical architecture was spurred on by important archaeological discoveries in the mid-18th century, which widened the perception of Greek and Roman buildings. The remarkable flexibility of ancient architecture to embody the grandeur of an empire, as well as the principles of a nascent democracy, meant that it had great potential to be interpreted and reinterpreted by countless architects, patrons, empires, and nation states—in different ways and at different times from the 18th to the 20th century. This bibliography is organized thematically (e.g., General Overviews; Companions, Handbooks, and Theoretical Works; Reference Works; Early General Archaeological Publications; The Reception of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Bay of Naples; and World’s Fairs and Expositions) and then geographically, creating country- or region-specific bibliographies. While this model of organization has some flaws, it aims to avoid repetition and highlights the interconnected nature and process of the reception of classical architecture in later periods.

British Detective Fiction in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Humpherys
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Auguste Dupin ◽  
Agatha Christie ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Critical Interest

From ancient Greece on, fictional narratives have entailed deciphering mystery. Sophocles’ Oedipus must solve the mystery of the plague decimating Thebes; the play is a dramatization of how he ultimately “detects” the culprit responsible for the plague, who turns out to be Oedipus himself. In the Poetics, Aristotle defines a successful plot as one that has a conflict (which can include, and often does include, a “mystery”) that rises to a climax, followed by a resolution of the conflict, a plot line that describes not only Oedipus Rex but also every Sherlock Holmes story. A particular genre of mystery writing is defined by the mystery at the center of the story that is crucially, definitively solved by a particular person known as a detective, either private or police, who by ratiocination (close observation coupled with logical patterns of thought based on material evidence) uncovers and sorts out the relevant facts essential to a determination of who did the crime and how and why. The form of detective fiction throughout most of the 19th century was the short story published in various periodicals of the period. A few longer detective fictions were published as separate books in the 19th century, but book-length detective fiction, such as that by Agatha Christie, was really a product of the 20th century. Most critics of detective fiction see the beginning of the genre in the three stories of Edgar Allan Poe which feature his amateur detective, Auguste Dupin, and were published in the 1840s. Although Poe’s 1840s stories as well as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, which first appeared in the 1880s, are probably the most well known of 19th-century detective fictions, a number of other writers of generically recognizable detective fiction published stories in the almost fifty years between Poe and Conan Doyle, including a number that featured female detectives. Finally, from the 1890s into the early 20th century, a plethora of new detective fictions, still in short-story form for the most part, appeared not only in Britain but also in France and the United States. Detective fiction has always been popular, but serious critical interest in the genre only developed in the 20th century. In the second half of that century, this critical interest expanded into the academic world. The popularity of the genre has only continued to grow. Both detective fictions (now nearly all novel length) and critical interest in the genre from a variety of perspectives are now an international phenomenon, and detective novels dominate many best-seller lists.

Race and Religion in the United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan P. Jordan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
American History ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Racial Prejudice ◽  
Western History

For centuries before the European colonization of North America, sectarian, ethnic, and racial discrimination were interrelated. The proscription of certain groups based on their biological or other apparently ingrained characteristics, which is one definition of racism, in fact describes much religious prejudice in Western history—even as the modern term “racism” was not used until the 20th century. An early example of the similarities between religious and racial prejudice can be seen in the case of anti-Semitism, where merely possessing “Jewish blood” made one inherently unassimilable in many parts of Europe for nearly a thousand years before the initial European conquest of the New World. Throughout Western history, religious values have been mobilized to dehumanize other non-Christian groups such as Muslims, and starting in the 16th century, religious justifications of conquest played an indispensable role in the European takeover of the Americas. In the culture of the 17th- and 18th-century British colonies, still another example of religious and racial hatred existed in the anti-Catholicism of the original Protestant settlers, and this prejudice was particularly evident with the arrival of Irish immigrants in the 19th century. In contemporary language, the Irish belonged to the Celtic “race” and one of the many markers of this race’s inherent inferiority was Catholicism—a religious system that was alternatively defined as non-Western, pagan, or irrational by many Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who similarly saw themselves as a different, superior race. In addition to the Irish, many other racial groups—most notably Native Americans—were defined as inferior based on their religious beliefs. Throughout much of early American history, the normative religious culture of Anglo-Protestantism treated groups ranging from African slaves to Asian or Middle Eastern immigrants as alternatively unequal, corrupt, subversive, or civically immature by virtue of their religious identity. Historians can see many examples of the supposedly dangerous religious attributes of foreigners—such as those of the Chinese in the late 19th century—as a basis for restricting immigration. Evangelical Protestant ideas of divine chosen-ness also influenced imperial projects launched on behalf of the United States. The ideology of Manifest Destiny demonstrates how religious differences could be mobilized to excuse the conquest and monitoring of foreign subjects in places such as Mexico or the Philippines. Anglo-Protestant cultural chauvinism held sway for much of American history, though since the mid-1900s, it can be said to have lost some of its power. Throughout its history, many racial or ethnic groups—such as Hispanic Americans, African-Americans, or Asian Americans in the United States have struggled to counter the dominant ethnic or racial prejudice of the Anglo-Protestant majority by recovering alternative religious visions of nationhood or cultural solidarity. For groups such as the 20th-century Native American Church, or the African American Nation of Islam, religious expression formed an important vehicle to contest white supremacy.

scholarly journals Documentary and ecosemiotics: Frames and faces in the work of Johan van der Keuken

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 186-208
Author(s):  
Hing Tsang
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Coastal Area ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Physical Processes ◽  
Natural Habitats ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Relationship

This article argues that the work of the late Johan van der Keuken offers a contribution to ecological semiotics, and that it also defines the relationship between the semiotic animal and nature in ways that avoid glottocentricism. Taking from the recent work of Kalevi Kull, Jesper Hoffmeyer, and John Deely amongst others, I will argue that van der Keuken’s documentaries offer a view of ecology that is broader than a study of bio-physical processes that might reduce ecology to a narrow political issue.In order to support this argument, I will be looking at two contrasting films from van der Keuken – Flat Jungle (1978) and Face Value (1991). The first film examines natural habitats within a confined coastal area in Western Europe, while the second film looks at human beings in the different urban environments of late-20th-century Europe. I will then argue that van der Keuken does not collapse the vital distinctions between umwelt and Lebenswelt, yet his films also succeed at reminding us of their constant interdependence.

Latino Catholicism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Matovina
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
Church Structures

The Latino/Latina or Hispanic Catholic presence spans the colonial era, the period of U.S. expansion during the 19th century, and the waves of new immigrants in the 20th and 21st centuries. A long-standing element of Latino Catholic history, the struggle for justice both in church and society, became even more prominent during the 20th century. While Catholics in the thirteen British colonies were a minority in a Protestant land, in Hispanic settlements from Florida to California, Catholicism was the established religion under Spain and, in the Southwest, under Mexico after it won independence in 1821. Spanish subjects founded numerous missions intended to Christianize and Hispanicize native populations. They also established parishes, military chaplaincies, and private chapels to serve the religious needs of Hispanic settlers. From the standpoints of original settlement, societal influence, and institutional presence, the origins of Catholicism in what is now the United States were decidedly Hispanic. The first large group of Hispanic Catholics incorporated into U.S. territories was Mexicans in the Southwest, who, as a common adage puts it, did not cross the border but had the border cross them during U.S. territorial expansion. When military defeat led Mexico’s president to cede nearly half his nation’s territory to the United States in 1848, Mexicans underwent the disestablishment of their Catholic religion along with widespread loss of their lands, economic well-being, political clout, and cultural hegemony. Many continued their traditional expressions of faith, which enabled them to defend their sense of dignity, to collectively respond to the effects of conquest, and to express their own ethnic legitimation. Nascent 19th-century Latino immigration to the United States quickened over the course of the 20th century, expanding the diversification of national-origin groups among Latinos in the United States. Mexican immigration increased substantially after the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and has continued into the 21st century. Significant numbers of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, and Central Americans have also come, along with some South Americans. Each group of Latino newcomers has fostered ministries and church structures that served the needs of their compatriots. Latino Catholic activist efforts range from local initiatives such as establishing Spanish-language masses and prayer groups to broader endeavors such as the recent National Hispanic Pastoral Encuentros of the 1970s and 1980s, major events that enabled Hispanic leaders to articulate their ministerial needs and demands to Catholic bishops and the wider church. Latino Catholics have also been active in social causes such as the plight of farmworkers, immigration, and faith-based community organizing.

Havana

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guadalupe García
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Urban Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The City

The Cuban city of San Cristóbal de la Habana has been a nodal point of economic, commercial, political, and cultural exchange since its 1519 founding on Cuba’s northern shore. Residents’ decision to locate the city next to the natural deepwater harbor that became today’s harbor, illustrates the importance of geography, space, and environment in Havana’s early history. Through the distinct environs of Havana, enslaved, free black, Spanish, immigrant, criollo (and later Cuban) residents defined and gave new meaning to a geography marked by the city’s colonial origins. The end of the 19th century and early 20th century marked the end of Spanish colonialism in Cuba (1898) and the beginning of the US occupation of the island (1899–1902). The political transition solidified the importance of Havana as the economic and political center of Cuba. The city became a broker of a new set of cultural, social, and political exchanges as the country’s economic prosperity—the result of an affinity for US and global capitalist markets—also inaugurated a booming and pervasive tourist economy. Western influence and a neocolonial relationship between Cuba and the United States engendered an urban renaissance that emphasized cosmopolitanism and a dynamic, highly mobile urban population. Havana’s built environment oriented residents and visitors alike to its modern architecture, seaside resorts, and dynamic nightlife. The city’s concentration of wealth, however, underscored continued disparities between Cuba’s urban and rural populations as well as within sectors of the urban population. There is a well-developed body of scholarship that addresses the complicated history of the city, especially for the colonial period and the early 20th century. Until recently, there was a scarcity of literature on the city following the revolutionary transition of 1959. This changed, however, with the onset of the 1980s. In 1982 UNESCO declared the colonial core city of Havana a World Heritage Site. Urban renewal and preservation became topics of scholarly discussions around administrative efforts to preserve, restore, and orient the direction of the city. Then, in the early 1990s, urban development in Havana (like all development in Cuba) come to an immediate halt after the dissolution of the USSR ended Soviet subsidies and precipitated one of the worst economic disasters in Cuban history. The country’s political and economic situation and the liberalization of the economy and the growth of tourism brought an ever-increasing interest in the issues and environment of the city, with scholars taking up the now familiar themes of access to the city, political inclusion and exclusion, and urban patrimony in their scholarship. As a field of study the literature on Havana mirrors the frameworks found in the broader field of urban history. The literature breaks down into two distinct subfields; those studies that examine “the history of the city” and those that examine “histories that unfold within cities” (See Brodwyn Fisher’s article Urban History in Oxford Bibliographies). The former has long dominated the literature on Havana, and only recently has new scholarship begun to approach the city as a subject in its own right or from the vantage points of disciplinary perspectives outside of history, architecture, and planning. In this essay I have chosen to introduce readers to the vast literature that centers explicitly on the development of the city, much of which was published in Cuba from the 19th century onward. This literature forms part of a well-known cannon in Cuba (including work in the Spanish-language press produced outside of the island) but might be lesser known to non-specialists. I have also included well-established, as well as recent and emerging, works where Havana assumes a central role in the narrative. I have done this in order to broaden the categorical analysis of what constitutes a history of or about Havana. As with any bibliographic essay, I have excluded much in order to provide an overview of Havana and familiarize readers with scholars who explore thematic interests in questions of race, slavery, or culture through the social fabric of the city. Where appropriate, I have organized the essay according to time period or publication date (in order to give the reader an idea of the scholarship on colonial architecture, for example). Finally, most titles on this list can easily be placed in more than one of the categories listed in the Table of Contents; for the sake of space I have cross-listed only a few of these works, but indicated when readers might find other sections of the essay useful.

scholarly journals Understanding Edward Muybridge: historical review of behavioral alterations after a 19th-century head injury and their multifactorial influence on human life and culture

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. E4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunil Manjila ◽  
Gagandeep Singh ◽  
Ayham M. Alkhachroum ◽  
Ciro Ramos-Estebanez
Keyword(s):  
Head Injury ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Human Locomotion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Clinical Neurology ◽  
Behavioral Alterations ◽  
Life Journey ◽  
Anglo American

Edward Muybridge was an Anglo-American photographer, well known for his pioneering contributions in photography and his invention of the “zoopraxiscope,” a forerunner of motion pictures. However, this 19th-century genius, with two original patents in photographic technology, made outstanding contributions in art and neurology alike, the latter being seldom acknowledged. A head injury that he sustained changed his behavior and artistic expression. The shift of his interests from animal motion photography to human locomotion and gait remains a pivotal milestone in our understanding of patterns in biomechanics and clinical neurology, while his own behavioral patterns, owing to an injury to the orbitofrontal cortex, remain a mystery even for cognitive neurologists. The behavioral changes he exhibited and the legal conundrum that followed, including a murder of which he was acquitted, all depict the complexities of his personality and impact of frontal lobe injuries. This article highlights the life journey of Muybridge, drawing parallels with Phineas Gage, whose penetrating head injury has been studied widely. The wide sojourn of Muybridge also illustrates the strong connections that he maintained with Stanford and Pennsylvania universities, which were later considered pinnacles of higher education on the two coasts of the United States.

Utopia and Reality: An Image of the United States in Russian Liberal and Radical Publications (End of the 19th to the Beginning of the 20th Century)

Prospects ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 491-520
Author(s):  
Dmitry Shlapentokh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Modern Russian

In the 19th century, some Russian intellectuals concluded that democracy was the country's probable future. By the middle of the century, this eventually led to the West and its democratic traditions being directly linked to images of Utopia. From that date forward, this approach to the West has had a central role in modern Russian political thought.

scholarly journals Evolution of epidemiological thought in medicine taking into account the evolution of Polish epidemiology in the 20th century

2020 ◽  
pp. 169-179
Author(s):  
Renata E. Paliga
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Epidemiological Studies ◽  
Population Based ◽  
Communicable Diseases ◽  
Non Communicable Diseases ◽  
Administrative Services ◽  
The 19Th Century

Communicable diseases have accompanied humanity since the beginning of its existence. The first descriptions of diseases appeared in the 8th century B.C. in the Iliad, Homer. Epidemics of communicable diseases were often described in social context by poets, historians, and chroniclers. Medicine as a science until the 19th century could not provide answers concerning the aetiology of epidemic diseases or propose therapies with measurable benefits. For centuries the fight against epidemics was the duty of administrative services. Quarantine, isolation (including forced isolation), sanitary cordons, and disinfection procedures involving the moxibustion, burning of objects, clothing and bodies, etc. were introduced very early on. The knowledge of practical measures taken during repeated epidemics of various communicable diseases in Europe laid the foundations for the development of social medicine in the 18th century. In the 19th century, methods such as statistics, comparison of patient groups, mathematics and others were introduced to assess the effectiveness of prophylactic and therapeutic measures. In the 19th century it became possible to distinguish a new science – epidemiology. The missing element was the so-called “bacteriological breakthrough”. After the discovery and description of bacteria, there was a tumultuous development of bacteriology, vaccines were created and huge financial resources were allocated to bacteriological institutes. After extensive use of chemotherapeutics and antibiotics, it turned out in the mid-20th century that the mortality from communicable diseasesis statistically lower in some countries than in others.In the 1940s, population-based cardiological studies using epidemiological patterns were introduced in the United States, and in the 1950s epidemiological congresses worldwide accepted that it was reasonable for epidemiology to investigate the occurrence and causes of communicable and non-communicable diseases. In Poland, in 1964, at the 4th Congress of the Polish Society of Epidemiologists and Doctors of Infectious Diseases in Cracow, a decision was made to extend epidemiological studies to non-communicable diseases.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document