Blakespotting

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-64
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Computer Worms ◽  
Political Opportunities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multi Media ◽  
Dead Man

The chapter argues that the unpredictable viral behavior of William Blake’s proverbs in contemporary culture is critically and politically instructive. The widespread practice of citing Blake proverbs across various media platforms reveals the radical potential that Blake’s multi-media poetry possessed within the “original” historical contexts in which he wrote. Understanding the proverb form as a viral medium that spreads through a population’s contradictory desires for self-regulation illuminates proverbs’ centrality to Blake’s art and its challenge to the regulatory power of laws. The intellectual groundwork for this challenge lay in eighteenth-century practices of collecting national proverbs and in historical research into the Book of Proverbs. The chapter closes by analyzing how Blake’s proverbs relate to computer worms and also how they inform the ways that Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man laments America’s history of missed political opportunities.

Is Globalisation Yesterday’s News?

Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
A. G. Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lively Debate ◽  
The Subject

Globalisation is now a fashionable topic of historical research. Books and articles routinely use the term, though often in a loose manner that has yet to realise the full potential of the subject. The question arises as to whether globalisation, as currently applied by historians, is sufficiently robust to resist inevitable changes in historiographical fashion. The fact that globalisation is a process and not a single theory opens the way, not only to over-general applications of the term, but also to rich research possibilities derived in particular from other social sciences. One such prospect, which ought to be at the centre of all historians’ interests, is how to categorise the evolution of the process. This question, which has yet to stimulate the lively debate it needs, is explored here by identifying three successive phases or sequences between the eighteenth century and the present, and joining them to the history of the empires that were their principal agents. These phases, termed proto-globalisation, modern globalisation, and postcolonial globalisation provide the context for reviewing the history of the West, including the United States, and in principle of the wider world too.

Diderot, the Self, and the Science of Dreaming

2021 ◽  
pp. 212-232
Author(s):  
Charly Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Philosophy And Religion ◽  
Science Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dream State ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter presents Denis Diderot’s philosophy of the self in light of debates over the neuroscientific turn in historical research. Recent literature features an ideal of self-ownership that the history of philosophy shows to be radically contingent. Situating Diderot’s articles on dreaming and distraction in the Encyclopédie within the context of eighteenth-century theological and medical reflections on the self’s command over its ideas and actions, the chapter interrogates the relationship between science, philosophy, and religion. The dream state fascinated Diderot precisely because its structure and content allowed his contemporaries to reflect upon the fate of the human subject in a materially determined world.

scholarly journals Aeromania and Enlightenment: The Politics of Hot Air Balloons in Karamzin's "Letters of a Russian Traveler"

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Rodolphe Baudin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Hot Air ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Young Writer ◽  
Social Autonomy

This paper focuses on Karamzin’s depiction, in Letters of a Russian Traveler, of Abbé Miolan’s failed hot air balloon flight in Paris in July 1784. After briefly tracing the history of aeromania in late eighteenth-century France and England, as well as its contemporary Russian reception, notably by Catherine the Great, the paper identifies Karamzin’s sources of information on the event and analyses the reasons why the Russian writer mentioned it in his travelogue. It demonstrates that Karamzin’s depiction of a physical experiment embodying European capacity for innovation in the late eighteenth century was not an expression of scientific curiosity. Instead, the young writer used the episode as a metaphor of social and political management, in order to reflect on the questions of social autonomy and the relation of the enlightened public with State power in both France and Russia. By depicting Miolan’s failed flight as a condemnable nuissance to public order, reminiscent of the revolutionary trouble he had witnessed during his journey through France, Karamzin showed his endorsement of Catherine’s conservative conception of the Enlightenment. By depicting how the French public sphere dealt with Miolan and possibly implicitly comparing it with the way Catherine had dealt with Radishchev, he nevertheless showed the superiority of self-regulation over political violence in managing the nobility’s growing longing for autonomy.

scholarly journals Enlightenment and Erudition: Writing Cultural History at the Académie des inscriptions

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Anton M. Matytsin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
Research Institute

This article explores continuities between the antiquarian erudition of humanist historians and Enlightenment philosophical histories, showing that supposedly revolutionary developments in eighteenth-century historiography emerged from an older scholarly tradition. It focuses on the research of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, a learned society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France that went from serving as a propaganda tool for promoting King Louis XIV's absolutist regime to becoming the first modern historical research institute and a cradle of the Enlightenment. The article examines the emergence of what might be called “cultural history” or “the history of culture” (histoire des moeurs, as eighteenth-century authors called it). It analyzes how the academicians studied pagan beliefs and speculated about the functions of ancient myths and cults, thus transforming the views about the origin of religion and its role in society. The article also discusses how the academicians made sense of customs and daily practices and how they understood the causes of the progress and decline of civilizations.

A history of botanical collections in the Luangwa Valley, Zambia

1998 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-291
Author(s):  
P.S.M. PHIRI ◽  
D.M. MOORE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Environmental Impact ◽  
Impact Assessment ◽  
Vascular Plants ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Peak Activity ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Made In

Central Africa remained botanically unknown to the outside world up to the end of the eighteenth century. This paper provides a historical account of plant explorations in the Luangwa Valley. The first plant specimens were collected in 1897 and the last serious botanical explorations were made in 1993. During this period there have been 58 plant collectors in the Luangwa Valley with peak activity recorded in the 1960s. In 1989 1,348 species of vascular plants were described in the Luangwa Valley. More botanical collecting is needed with a view to finding new plant taxa, and also to provide a satisfactory basis for applied disciplines such as ecology, phytogeography, conservation and environmental impact assessment.

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