Science and Pseudoscience

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
Frank L. Holt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Sponsored Research ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
University Curricula ◽  
Industrial Revolutions

In the nineteenth century, political, social, and industrial revolutions shattered the class ceiling of Renaissance and early modern numismatics. Wealthy enthusiasts and dedicated academics from outside European aristocracy gained greater access to collectible coins and soon organized themselves into clubs and learned societies. They sponsored research journals, adopted new technologies such as photography, introduced new investigative methods such as the die study, and established numismatics as a scientific discipline with a foothold in university curricula. Yet, even as numismatics became more and more scientific in its aims and methods, old notions endured about coins and physiognomy. The rise of phrenology as a pseudoscience infiltrated the field and still undermines the historical value of some numismatic research. Another unfortunate development has been the estrangement of numismatics and archaeology because the latter now repudiates its antiquarian origins and generally denounces coin collecting as a form of looting.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Nexus of self-organization: the expansion of collective responsibility networks among boatmen in nineteenth-century Chongqing

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Yiying Pan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Local State ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Regional Diversity ◽  
Labor Relationship ◽  
The City

Abstract This article investigates the collective responsibility organizations among boatmen in nineteenth-century Chongqing, when the city became one of the most important metropolises on the southwest Qing frontier. It also introduces two successive turning points in self-organization that were associated with two different classes of boatmen – skippers and sailors. First, in 1803, skippers gained the authority to institutionalize their organizations through their negotiations with the local state regarding official services and service fees. Second, when similar service and fiscal tensions emerged between skippers and sailors in the mid-nineteenth century, the skippers facilitated and supervised the institutionalization of collective responsibility organizations that were run by the sailors themselves. By contextualizing this expansion of collective responsibility organizations within the multilayered interactions between skippers and sailors, this article proposes that the perspective of interclass networks is crucial for deepening the study of state−society interactions, the capital−labor relationship, as well as the tension between imperial integration and regional diversity in early modern China.

Medical Martyrs: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Early Modern Inquisitorial Persecution of Spanish Physicians

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 135-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Keitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
National Identities ◽  
History Of

Abstract This essay examines the discourse on medicine and the Inquisition in nineteenth-century Spain. It traces how liberal reformers selectively appropriated aspects of the history of Spanish medicine in the service of their contemporary political and scientific agendas, and how in doing so they contributed to the formation of new professional and national identities.

Figures of Authority in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Western World ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Emotional Politics ◽  
Print Cultures

This interdisciplinary collection investigates the forms that authority assumed in nineteenth-century Ireland, the relations they bore to international redefinitions of authority, and Irish contributions to the reshaping of authority in the modern age. At a time when age-old sources of social, political, spiritual and cultural authority were eroded in the Western world, Ireland witnessed both the restoration of older forms of authority and the rise of figures who defined new models of authority in a democratic age. Using new comparative perspectives as well as archival resources in a wide range of fields, eleven chapters show how new authorities were embodied in emerging types of politicians, clerics and professionals, and in material extensions of their power in visual, oral and print cultures. Their analyses often eerily echo twenty-first-century debates about populism, the suspicion towards scholarly and intellectual expertise, and the role of new technologies and forms of association in contesting and recreating authority. Several contributions highlight the role of emotion in the way authority was deployed by figures ranging from O’Connell to Catholic priests and W.B. Yeats, foreshadowing the perceived rise of emotional politics in our own age. This volume stresses that many contested forms of authority that now look ‘traditional’ emerged from 19th-century crises and developments, as did the challenges that undermine authority.

Open Houses from Etic to Emic Perspectives: Casa Aperta in Early-Modern and Nineteenth-Century Italy

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 440-463
Author(s):  
Raffaella Sarti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Local People ◽  
Geographical Differences ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
The Status ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Over Time

What did early-modern and nineteenth-century Italians mean when they used the expressions tener casa aperta or aver casa aperta, literally to keep open house and to have an open house? In this article I will try to answer this question, which is far less trivial than one might imagine. Before tackling the topic, a premise is necessary. In some previous works, I used an etic category of ‘open houses’, i.e. a category I elaborated to interpret the implications of the presence, in many households, of domestic staff from different classes, places, races than their masters/employers. Such a presence made those houses open. The border between different peoples and cultures was inside the houses themselves that were places of exchanges, confrontations and clashes. In this article, I will develop a different approach: I will map the emic uses of the ‘open-house’ category, i.e. I will analyse how early-modern and nineteenth-century Italians used the expressions tener casa aperta or aver casa aperta. While some uses had to do with hospitality and sociability, others had legal meanings, referring to citizenship rights and privileges, the status of aristocrats, the differences between foreigners and local people and taxpaying. I will pay particular attention to the latter, also suggesting possible geographical differences and changes over time. This will present an opportunity to delve into the cultural and legal world of early-modern and nineteenth-century Italians, and to unveil the importance of houses for one's status.

HISTORY AND OPERATION OF THE DOCUMENTALISTICS COMMISSION

2021 ◽  
pp. 147-159
Author(s):  
Nataliya G. Surovtseva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Complex Problem ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Records Management ◽  
Archival Studies ◽  
Automated Control ◽  
Information Classification ◽  
Huge Impact ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 1960S

The article deals with the history of the creation and activity of the Documentalistics Commission which functioned between the 1960s and 1980s under the Scientific Council on the Complex Problem of Cybernetics. The Commission’s activities are related to the formation of documentalistics as an independent scientific discipline, its object is presented by large documentary systems, the use of new technologies in the processes of collecting, processing, searching, storing and using information. The author focuses on the transformation of the Commission’s research directions throughout the entire period of its existence. In the first years of the Commission’s work, the issues of the information classification and the use of new technological solutions in working with documents (punch cards and microphotoreproduction) were prevalent. The heyday of the Commission’s activities is associated with the work on the creation of the unified documentation systems and all-Union classifiers of information for the automated control systems. The interdisciplinary nature of the Commission’s activities influenced the subject of documentalistics and the organizational form of its existence. Despite the fact that by the end of the 1980s the Documentalistics Commission had virtually ceased to exist, documentalistics as a scientific direction had a huge impact on the development of records management and archival studies in Russia.

The Concept of Asia: From Geography to Ideology

2006 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Hiroshi Mitani
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Asian People

In the contemporary world the word “Asia” invokes a sense of regional integration or solidarity among Asian peoples. This sense of the word is rather recent and can only be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that period, Japan called on Asian people to unify against the Western threat under its leadership. But until the late nineteenth century, “Asia” was a purely geographical term; merely the name of one of the five continents-a concept that had been modeled by early modern Europeans.In this essay I will discuss how and why the political usage of the word “Asia,” stressing Asian solidarity, was invented by the Japanese around the 1880s. I also investigate the ways in which this sense of the word spread to the rest of the geographical region of Asia. In order to understand the unfolding of this historical process, we should first examine the traditional concepts of world geography in Japan and how the European concept of Asia was introduced into East Asia.

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