Our Floating Commonwealth

2021 ◽  
pp. 41-76
Author(s):  
Bill Bell

Drawing on personal diaries, correspondence, and printed sources, this chapter offers a history of reading on seaborne journeys to emigrant destinations in the nineteenth century. It explores the distinction between official sources, such as church and emigrant recruitment agencies, and the everyday experiences of emigrants themselves, as well as the cultural and educational differences that helped define them. Examining the different conditions between classes on board emigrant ships, it offers several personal accounts of the difficulties faced by reading at sea. The publication of shipboard newspapers, in both manuscript and print, provided a means of entertainment but also assisted social order on board many voyages. The deprivations of many, contrasted with the social advantages of the few, indicate that distinctions on land could be even more marked on the high seas. Nevertheless, the use of print and manuscript by representatives of almost all classes in the nineteenth century allowed for the imagination of cultural connection and the exercise of cultural memory far from home.

2001 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 273-291
Author(s):  
Sean Stilwell ◽  
Ibrahim Hamza ◽  
Paul E. Lovejoy

A powerful community of royal slaves emerged in Kano Emirate in the wake of Usman dan Fodio's jihad (1804-08), which established the Sokoto Caliphate. These elite slaves held administrative and military positions of great power, and over the course of the nineteenth century played an increasing prominent role in the political, economic, and social life of Kano. However, the individuals who occupied slave offices have largely been rendered silent by the extant historical record. They seldom appear in written sources from the period, and then usually only in passing. Likewise, certain officials and offices are mentioned in official sources from the colonial period, but only in the context of broader colonial concerns and policies, usually related to issues about taxation and the proper structure of indirect rule.As the following interview demonstrates, the collection and interpretation of oral sources can help to fill these silences. By listening to the words and histories of the descendents of royal slaves, as well as current royal slave titleholders, we can begin to reconstruct the social history of nineteenth-century royal slave society, including the nature of slave labor and work, the organization the vast plantation system that surrounded Kano, and the ideology and culture of royal slaves themselves.The interview is but one example of a series of interviews conducted with current and past members of this royal slave hierarchy by Yusufu Yunusa. As discussed below, Sallama Dako belonged to the royal slave palace community in Kano. By royal slave, we mean highly privileged and powerful slaves who were owned by the emir, known in Hausa as bayin sarki (slaves of the emir or king).


Author(s):  
Nadina Milewska-Pindor

This article presents a short history of the origin and creation of the Almanac “Women and Russia,” which began as a samizdat underground publication devoted to the problem of women and childrearing in the USSR. The idea for creating such an Almanac originated in the mid 1970s in the Leningrad circle of ‘unofficial culture’, at the initiative of the artist Tatyana Mamonova, religious philosopher Tatyana Goricheva, and the women author Natasha Malachovska. The women writers featured in the first edition of the Almanac addressed not only questions about the social conditions prevailing in the USSR, but above all exposed the consequences for women living and functioning ina patriarchal social order, and ironically one where all the questions concerning ‘women’s rights’ were deemed to have been resolved in a progressive fashion much earlier. Not only is the substance of the Almanac important, but the circumstances surrounding its publication and the subsequent consequences related to its publishing also reveal the state of the ‘women’s movement’ in the USSR of that time. These include the reactions of the representatives of the dissident culture, the interventions of the security apparatus and the attendant repression of the women activists and its effect on their lives, and the support of feminist organizations from abroad. Each of the afore-mentioned reactions and consequences became an element of and shaped the everyday lives of the activists involved in the creation of the Almanac. The events related in this work confirm the opinion of those researchers who consider that the publication of the Almanac marked the beginning of the resurrection of the feminist movement in Russia.


2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 387-392
Author(s):  
John Pearn

Human genetics spans every facet of biology from molecular science, through laboratory and clinical practice, to psychology and anthropology. In each of these areas, the history of human genetics has been punctuated by paradigm shifts in knowledge. Each such new concept has been received with skepticism, often with perplexity, and sometimes with frank incredulity. Such comprise the datum milestones along the path leading to our present corpus of genetic knowledge. In parallel to the personal threats to Copernicus and Galileo in the field of astronomy in the 17th century, almost all genetic discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries were seen as challenges to the received wisdom, and sometimes the social order, of their time and place. Researchers, scientists and clinicians encountering such new and often-heretical paradigm shifts have required considerable resolve to promote and publish their work. Just as in the field of astronomy, new directions in genetics have threatened not only the reputations and sometimes the careers of scientists, but also have been challenges to fundamental religious and sociological beliefs in society more broadly. Examples followed the discovery of biological sexual dimorphism (in plants as well as animals) by Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712). Darwinian evolution, Mendel's First and Second Laws, the existence of mitochondrial genes, apoptosis and its genetic basis, and uniparental disomy are more recent examples. Many of these new revelations, which today have led to the current understanding of fundamental biology, were discovered by individuals working in relative isolation. To promote and publish findings that fundamentally challenge received wisdom continues to require considerable resolve, if not courage. Herein lies a message for all clinicians and researchers.


Author(s):  
ROY PORTER

The physician George Hoggart Toulmin (1754–1817) propounded his theory of the Earth in a number of works beginning with The antiquity and duration of the world (1780) and ending with his The eternity of the universe (1789). It bore many resemblances to James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" (1788) in stressing the uniformity of Nature, the gradual destruction and recreation of the continents and the unfathomable age of the Earth. In Toulmin's view, the progress of the proper theory of the Earth and of political advancement were inseparable from each other. For he analysed the commonly accepted geological ideas of his day (which postulated that the Earth had been created at no great distance of time by God; that God had intervened in Earth history on occasions like the Deluge to punish man; and that all Nature had been fabricated by God to serve man) and argued they were symptomatic of a society trapped in ignorance and superstition, and held down by priestcraft and political tyranny. In this respect he shared the outlook of the more radical figures of the French Enlightenment such as Helvétius and the Baron d'Holbach. He believed that the advance of freedom and knowledge would bring about improved understanding of the history and nature of the Earth, as a consequence of which Man would better understand the terms of his own existence, and learn to live in peace, harmony and civilization. Yet Toulmin's hopes were tempered by his naturalistic view of the history of the Earth and of Man. For Time destroyed everything — continents and civilizations. The fundamental law of things was cyclicality not progress. This latent political conservatism and pessimism became explicit in Toulmin's volume of verse, Illustration of affection, published posthumously in 1819. In those poems he signalled his disapproval of the French Revolution and of Napoleonic imperialism. He now argued that all was for the best in the social order, and he abandoned his own earlier atheistic religious radicalism, now subscribing to a more Christian view of God. Toulmin's earlier geological views had run into considerable opposition from orthodox religious elements. They were largely ignored by the geological community in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, but were revived and reprinted by lower class radicals such as Richard Carlile. This paper is to be published in the American journal, The Journal for the History of Ideas in 1978 (in press).


Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.


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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shohei Sato

AbstractThis article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.


Author(s):  
Georgia Lindsay

After over a decade of reports, designs, and public outreach, the United Nations Plaza in San Francisco was dedicated in 1976. Using historical documents such as government reports, design guidelines, letters, meeting minutes, and newspaper articles from archives, I argue that while the construction of the UN Plaza has failed to completely transform the social and economic life of the area, it succeeds in creating a genuinely public space. The history of the UN Plaza can serve both as a cautionary tale for those interested in changing property values purely through changing design, and as a standard of success in making a space used by a true cross-section of urban society.


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