Coda

Author(s):  
Kélina Gotman

Modernity can be understood as the cultivation of a fantasy about the past: in the case of choreomania, this ‘past’ was imagined as a rumbling horde, a Bacchic chorus against which purposeful ‘modernity’ positioned itself. Meaningless gesture, after Agamben, epitomized in the nineteenth century in the figure of ‘chorea’, similarly became with the scientific discourse on choreomania a manner of thinking modernity’s double movement, forward and back, between efficient industrialization and the collective archaicity out of which this efficiency imagined itself to arise. Reperforming my own archival return to the still ‘living’ site of the Echternach dancing procession, I discover that the ever more institutionalized event highlights the power of choreopolitical organization displayed by the nation state. As in Meige’s day, the procession has been evacuated of nervous disorder or bodily disruption. My archival reperformance reveals an experience of historicity shorn of a historical encounter.

1998 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khaled Fahmy

“Could a Nation, in any true sense of the word, really be born without war?” Such was the question raised by Michael Howard, the eminent Oxford military historian in a public lecture delivered on the topic of “War and the Nation State”. Looking generally at European history in the past two centuries he argued that war was indeed central for the appearance of the modern nation-state and that modern armies are somehow intimately linked to the rise of nationalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century this argument could very well be applied to Egypt. Having been incorporated in the Ottoman Empire for more than two and a half centuries, Egypt, by the beginning the nineteenth century and mostly through an unprecedented war effort that was concurrent and often synonymous with state-building, had come to play an increasingly independent role on the international plane.


1994 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Davies

PEOPLES are back on the historian's agenda. Their return to the historical limelight, or at least out of the historical shadows, is doubtless in part a response to the growing awareness of the power of ethnicity in our own contemporary world. So it is with changes of historical fashion at all times. But it also no doubt arises in part from the growing recognition that the centrality that academic historians have so long given to the unitary nation state as the natural, inevitable and indeed desirable unit of human power and political organisation is itself a reflection of the intellectual climate in which modern academic historiography was forged in the nineteenth century. The linear development of the nation state is no longer of necessity the overarching theme and organising principle in the study of the past that it once was. Once our historical gaze could be shifted from the state and its institutions and from the seductive appeal of its prolific archives, other solidarities and collectivities could come more clearly into historical focus. Some of them seemed to have as great, if not occasionally greater, depth and historical resilience than did the nation state. At the very least they deserve to be studied alongside it. Not least in prominence among such collectivities are the peoples of Europe.


Author(s):  
James J. Coleman

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Brühwiler

This article examines public education and the establishment of the nation-state in the first half of the nineteenth century in Switzerland. Textbooks, governmental decisions, and reports are analyzed in order to better understand how citizenship is depicted in school textbooks and whether (federal) political changes affected the image of the “imagined citizen” portrayed in such texts. The “ideal citizen” was, first and foremost, a communal and cantonal member of a twofold society run by the church and the secular government, in which nationality was depicted as a third realm.


The nineteenth century saw a new wave of dictionaries, many of which remain household names. Those dictionaries didn’t just store words; they represented imperial ambitions, nationalist passions, religious fervour, and utopian imaginings. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. This volume investigates dictionaries in the nineteenth century covering languages as diverse as Canadian French, English, German, Frisian, Japanese, Libras (Brazilian sign language), Manchu, Persian, Quebecois, Russian, Scots, and Yiddish.


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):  
Roger Ekirch

Although a universal necessity, sleep, as the past powerfully indicates, is not a biological constant. Before the Industrial Revolution, sleep in western households differed in a variety of respects from that of today. Arising chiefly from a dearth of artificial illumination, the predominant form of sleep was segmented, consisting of two intervals of roughly 3 hours apiece bridged by up to an hour or so of wakefulness. Notwithstanding steps taken by families to preserve the tranquillity of their slumber, the quality of pre-industrial sleep was poor, owing to illness, anxiety, and environmental vexations. Large portions of the labouring population almost certainly suffered from sleep deprivation. Despite the prevalence of sleep-onset insomnia, awakening in the middle of the night was thought normal. Not until the turn of the nineteenth century and sleep’s consolidation did physicians view segmented sleep as a disorder requiring medication.


Author(s):  
C. Michael Shea

For the past several decades, scholars have stressed that the genius of John Henry Newman remained underappreciated among his Roman Catholic contemporaries, and in order to find the true impact of his work, one must look to the century after his death. This book takes direct aim at that assumption. Examining a host of overlooked evidence from England and the European continent, Newman’s Early Legacy tracks letters, recorded conversations, and obscure and unpublished theological exchanges to show how Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine influenced a cadre of Catholic teachers, writers, and Church authorities in nineteenth-century Rome. The book explores how these individuals then employed Newman’s theory of development to argue for the definability of the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary during the years preceding the doctrine’s promulgation in 1854. Through numerous twists and turns, the narrative traces how the theory of development became a factor in determining the very language that the Roman Catholic Church would use in referring to doctrinal change over time. In this way, Newman’s Early Legacy uncovers a key dimension of Newman’s significance in modern religious history.


Author(s):  
Edward Bellamy

‘No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.’ Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people’s everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont’s lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Flavio D’Abramo

AbstractThe establishment of international sanitary institutions, which took place in the context of rivalry among the great European powers and their colonial expansion in Asia, allowed for the development of administrative systems of international epidemiological surveillance as a response to the cholera epidemics at the end of the nineteenth century. In this note, I reflect on how a historical analysis of the inception of international epidemiological surveillance and pandemic management helps us to understand what is happening in the COVID-19 pandemic today.


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