Introduction

Author(s):  
Masanori Kaji ◽  
Helge kragh

Even though there have already been many studies of the reception of scientific discoveries and theories, only a few discoveries have been systematically examined from a comparative perspective, in particular Darwin’s theory of evolution in biology and Einstein’s relativity theory in physics. In the field of chemistry, the periodic system of the elements is a good candidate for such comparative reception studies. Although the discovery of the periodic system and its later history have generated numerous inquiries, its reception has received only partial or scanty attention. In his noted paper published in 1996, the American historian of science Stephen G. Brush explored the role that successful predictions and accommodation of known facts played in persuading scientists to accept scientific discoveries. He systematically examined textbooks and comprehensive chemistry reference works, observing that, “[the] number of explicit references to the periodic law to be found in late nineteenth-century chemistry journals is small and fluctuates irregularly.” Relying on a survey of textbooks and reference works written between 1871 and 1890 and existing in American libraries, he concluded that the periodic law had been generally accepted in the United States and Britain by 1890. In a footnote to the same paper, he suggested the need to extend this study of texts to other countries, especially Germany and France. In fact, two years before Brush’s paper was published, Ludmilla Nekoval-Chikhaoui had completed her dissertation on the diffusion of Mendeleev’s periodic classification in France. She studied this subject as part of a project on the diffusion of scientific knowledge from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Basing her examination on scientific journals and chemistry books, Nekoval-Chikhaoui analyzed the diffusion of the periodic system in the French scientific community. She also surveyed the introduction of periodic classification in higher and secondary education based on an analysis of chemistry textbooks, higher education courses, and public education programs. At the end of her dissertation, she called to conduct a comparative analysis of the diffusion of Mendeleev’s discovery in different European countries.

Author(s):  
Fabiana Da Silva Viana

Neste artigo dedico-me ao estudo das relações estabelecidas entre pais de família, professores primários e autoridades locais em Minas Gerais, nas primeiras décadas do século XIX. Para tanto, recorri a um grande número de documentos produzidos por presidentes de província, bem como pela Assembleia Legislativa e pelas autoridades responsáveis pela fiscalização das escolas primárias mineiras. Já no alvorecer do século XIX, o desejo de civilizar e formar o cidadão trabalhador motivara a elaboração de dispositivos legais voltados à organização e ampliação do serviço de instrução pública. Foi neste contexto que intelectuais e políticos defenderam a educação das crianças e a generalização da instrução pública primária, considerando-as como as medidas mais adequadas à formação da nação brasileira. Em Minas Gerais, o que se observa a partir daí é a intensificação, nos discursos de intelectuais e dirigentes, de uma preocupação com a infância e sua preparação para a vida adulta. Preocupação, contudo, alicerçada em uma percepção um tanto preconceituosa e negativa em relação à moralidade das famílias mineiras e na compreensão de que elas eram incapazes de zelar pelo futuro de suas crianças. O que tais intelectuais e políticos não esperavam, contudo, é que os pais de família resistissem a essas representações, demonstrando a fragilidade das críticas que lhes eram dirigidas e o caráter ainda incipiente das ações do governo do Estado.Family encounter school: poverty, conflicts and compulsory school in Minas Gerais of the 19th century. In this paper I study the relations established among parents, primary teachers and local authorities in the first decades of the nineteenth century in Minas Gerais. To do so, I relied on a large number of documents produced by provincial presidents, by the Legislative Assembly and by the authorities responsible for supervising primary schools in Minas Gerais. In the late nineteenth century, the desire to civilize and to form the working citizens motivated the elaboration of legal devices whose aim was to organize and to expand the public education service. It was in this context that intellectuals and politicians defended the children’s education for all and the generalization of primary public education as the most appropriate measures for the formation of Brazilian nation. In Minas Gerais, what is observed from there is the intensification in the discourses of intellectuals and leaders of a concern with childhood and its preparation for adult life. This concern was based on a prejudiced and negative perception of the morality of Minas families and on the understanding that they were unable to take care of the future of their children. What such intellectuals and politicians did not expect, however, was the resistance of the parents to these representations. They demonstrate the fragility of the criticisms directed against them and the incipience of the state government policies. Keywords: Public education; Compulsory school; Family-school relationship.


2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wells

As U.S. cities burgeoned in the late nineteenth century, their environmental problems multiplied. In response, some urban elites worked to rebuild the city to alleviate its environmental ills; others relocated to more environmentally enticing surroundings in new suburban developments. For members of both groups, new forms of transportation infrastructure profoundly shaped how they responded to the era's environmental crisis. Whereas efforts to rebuild and retrofit downtown were hampered by the difficulties and expense of working in densely built and populated areas, efforts to build on the urban fringe faced few serious obstacles. As a result, the most significant late nineteenth-century attempts to use transportation to remake city dwellers' relationships with nature in the United States - including tools developed with an eye on rebuilding dense city centers - exercised far greater influence on the expanding periphery of cities than on their environmentally fraught cores.


Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.


2019 ◽  
pp. 38-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter will explore the similarities and differences between late nineteenth-century debates on the British settler Empire and more recent visions of the Anglosphere. It suggests that the idea of the Anglosphere has deep roots in British political thought. In particular, it traces the debates over both imperial federation and Anglo-American union from the late nineteenth century onwards into the post-Brexit world. I examine three recurrent issues that have shaped arguments about the unity and potential of the ‘English-speaking peoples’: the ideal constitutional structure of the community; the economic model that it should adopt; and the role of the United States within it. I conclude by arguing that the legacy of settler colonialism, and an idealised vision of the ‘English-speaking peoples’, played a pivotal role in shaping Tory Euroscepticism from the late 1990s onwards, furnishing an influential group of politicians and public intellectuals, from Thatcher and Robert Conquest to Boris Johnson and Andrew Roberts, with an alternative non-European vision of Britain’s place in the world.


Author(s):  
Kate Flint

This chapter assesses how attitudes started to shift at the beginning of the twentieth century—partly under the influence of Western movies, partly as modernist writers and artists started to idealize the Indian for their own ends, and as other wannabe Indians, most notably Grey Owl, began to develop the association of Indianness with environmental preservation. It also looks at some contemporary writing by native peoples—especially James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko—that aims to reappropriate nineteenth-century transatlantic history in a range of imaginative ways. By writing this fiction today, both Silko and Welch reclaim and rewrite the possibilities inherent for native peoples in the late nineteenth century. In so doing, they demonstrate that despite the importance, then and now, of tradition as both concept and practice within Indian society, identity, and modes of thought, it stands not isolated from modernity, but rather in mediation and dialogue with it. At a time when critical attention within American studies has increasingly turned toward imperialism and transnationalism, to explore the importance of the transatlantic Indian is to provide an important reminder that the internal colonial relations of the United States cannot be separated from these other trajectories.


2003 ◽  
Vol 102 (667) ◽  
pp. 383-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael T. Klare

The United States … wants to enhance its own strategic position in south-central Eurasia, much as Great Britain attempted in the late nineteenth century. This effort encompasses anti-terrorism and the pursuit of oil, but many in Washington also see it as an end in itself—as the natural behavior of a global superpower engaged in global dominance.


Author(s):  
Robert Jackson

Chapter 5 examines lynching, a longstanding practice in the United States that became more regionally associated with the South in the late nineteenth century, as a force in film history from the earliest days of the medium through a cycle of anti-lynching films during the years around midcentury. Paradoxically, the Western genre is important here, absorbing many of the common rituals and generating a powerful ideological defense of lynching. During different periods across this half-century, different attitudes about lynching led to a variety of film representations, culminating with a number of films in the late 1930s and beyond questioning both lynching and its cinematic traces.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 808-809
Author(s):  
James Farr

In Race and the Making of American Political Science, Jessica Blatt argues that the professionalization of the discipline was deeply entwined with ideas about racial difference, and the concomitant attempt by leading scholars to define and defend a system of racial hierarchy in the United States and beyond. Although it focuses on the period from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, the book also raises fundamental questions about the historical legacy of racialist arguments for professional political science, the extent of their continuing resonance, and contemporary implications for both academic and broader civic discourse. We have asked a range of leading political scientists to consider and respond to Professor Blatt’s important call for scholarly self-reflexivity.


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