“Most Beautiful Sewer”

Author(s):  
John T. Cumbler

The reforms of the late nineteenth century did help protect New England’s drinking water. The plague of water-borne diseases that made the region’s cities so infamously dangerous to live in seemed to be in retreat. For a moment, it looked as if the new century would bring a world in which there did not have to be trade-offs between economic development and environmental quality. The ideal articulated by Lyman and Mills—that professional expertise would transcend conflicts of interests between manufacturers and reformers—seemed at hand. Yet there were still problems that these optimists overlooked. And these problems broke into view again in the new century. Despite the health gains, New England’s rivers and streams continued to receive massive influxes of pollution of both industrial wastes and human sewage. The larger cities along the major river systems continued their practice of dumping raw sewage downstream, while manufacturers still saw running water as a natural disposal system for their wastes. Industrial wastes, although less central in the conversation around public health and the environment, were clearly polluting water systems, and reformers never completely gave up the struggle to clean water of industrial pollutants. In its 1896 report, the Massachusetts State Board of Health discussed possible solutions to the problems of “waste liquors or sewage from those manufacturing industries in the State which pollute or threaten to pollute our rivers and ponds.” The Lawrence station experimented with different methods of removing industrial wastes. Yet the “problem of successful and economical disposal of this sewage [remained].” As people began to look at clean water as an aesthetic as well as a health issue, the ability of water to sustain live fish, which had been dismissed twenty years earlier, now became a concern. Commissions on fisheries that had focused attention on fishways and fish cultivation in the nineteenth century began to revisit the issue of water pollution as they noticed their hatchery fish dying in polluted waters; oyster growers complained to the commissions that their oyster beds were being polluted.

Author(s):  
Lisa Sheppard

This chapter offers a case study of the Welsh-language women’s monthly domestic magazine, Y Gymraes (The Welshwoman). The first magazine called Y Gymraes was founded in 1850 in response to accusations of immorality against Welsh women made in the 1847 Reports of the Commissioners of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales. The chapter focuses on the second incarnation of the magazine, published between 1896 and 1934, which was the official magazine of the Temperance movement in Wales. Women’s publications in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Wales have begun to receive critical attention over the past few decades, but little has been written about their development during the interwar years. This chapter seeks to remedy this by examining conflicting notions of Welsh and British womanhood in the domestic ideals presented by the magazine at a time of increased Welsh national consciousness.


2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).


2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dewi Jones

John Lloyd Williams was an authority on the arctic-alpine flora of Snowdonia during the late nineteenth century when plant collecting was at its height, but unlike other botanists and plant collectors he did not fully pursue the fashionable trend of forming a complete herbarium. His diligent plant-hunting in a comparatively little explored part of Snowdonia led to his discovering a new site for the rare Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum), a feat which was considered a major achievement at the time. For most part of the nineteenth century plant distribution, classification and forming herbaria, had been paramount in the learning of botany in Britain resulting in little attention being made to other aspects of the subject. However, towards the end of the century many botanists turned their attention to studying plant physiology, a subject which had advanced significantly in German laboratories. Rivalry between botanists working on similar projects became inevitable in the race to be first in print as Lloyd Williams soon realized when undertaking his major study on the cytology of marine algae.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Amanda Lanzillo

Focusing on the lithographic print revolution in North India, this article analyses the role played by scribes working in Perso-Arabic script in the consolidation of late nineteenth-century vernacular literary cultures. In South Asia, the rise of lithographic printing for Perso-Arabic script languages and the slow shift from classical Persian to vernacular Urdu as a literary register took place roughly contemporaneously. This article interrogates the positionality of scribes within these transitions. Because print in North India relied on lithography, not movable type, scribes remained an important part of book production on the Indian subcontinent through the early twentieth century. It analyses the education and models of employment of late nineteenth-century scribes. New scribal classes emerged during the transition to print and vernacular literary culture, in part due to the intervention of lithographic publishers into scribal education. The patronage of Urdu-language scribal manuals by lithographic printers reveals that scribal education in Urdu was directly informed by the demands of the print economy. Ultimately, using an analysis of scribal manuals, the article contributes to our knowledge of the social positioning of book producers in South Asia and demonstrates the vitality of certain practices associated with manuscript culture in the era of print.


2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. BRINK-ROBY

This paper argues that, for a number of naturalists and lay commentators in the second half of the nineteenth century, evolutionary – especially Darwinian – theory gave new authority to mythical creatures. These writers drew on specific elements of evolutionary theory to assert the existence of mermaids, dragons and other fabulous beasts. But mythological creatures also performed a second, often contrapositive, argumentative function; commentators who rejected evolution regularly did so by dismissing these creatures. Such critics agreed that Darwin's theory legitimized the mythological animal, but they employed this legitimization to undermine the theory itself. The mermaid, in particular, was a focus of attention in this mytho-evolutionary debate, which ranged from the pages of Punch to the lecture halls of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Crossing social boundaries and taking advantage of a range of venues, this debate arose in response to the indeterminate challenge of evolutionary theory. In its discussions of mermaids and dragons, centaurs and satyrs, this discourse helped define that challenge, construing and constructing the meanings and implications of evolutionary theory in the decades following Darwin's publication.


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