Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter's Wolf

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Wothers
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Periodic Table ◽  
Chemical Elements ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The World ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
Elegant Form ◽  
The French Revolution

The iconic Periodic Table of the Elements is now in its most satisfyingly elegant form. This is because all the 'gaps' corresponding to missing elements in the seventh row, or period, have recently been filled and the elements named. But where do these names come from? For some, usually the most recent, the origins are quite obvious, but in others - even well-known elements such as oxygen or nitrogen - the roots are less clear. Here, Peter Wothers explores the fascinating and often surprising stories behind how the chemical elements received their names. Delving back in time to explore the history and gradual development of chemistry, he sifts through medieval manuscripts for clues to the stories surrounding the discovery of the elements, showing how they were first encountered or created, and how they were used in everyday lives. As he reveals, the oldest-known elements were often associated with astronomical bodies, and connections with the heavens influenced the naming of a number of elements. Following this, a number of elements, including hydrogen and oxygen, were named during the great reform of chemistry, set amidst the French Revolution. While some of the origins of the names were controversial (and, indeed incorrect - some saying, for instance, that oxygen might be literally taken to mean 'the son of a vinegar merchant'), they have nonetheless influenced language used around the world to this very day. Throughout, Wothers delights in dusting off the original sources, and bringing to light the astonishing, the unusual, and the downright weird origins behind the names of the elements so familiar to us today.

scholarly journals IUPAC Periodic Table Challenge

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-21
Author(s):  
Juris Meija ◽  
Javier Garcia-Martinez ◽  
Jan Apotheker
Keyword(s):  
General Public ◽  
Periodic Table ◽  
Chemical Elements ◽  
Global Competition ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
The World

AbstractIn 2019, the world celebrated the International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements (IYPT2019) and the IUPAC centenary. This happy coincidence offered a unique opportunity to reflect on the value and work that is carried out by IUPAC in a range of activities, including chemistry awareness, appreciation, and education. Although IUPAC curates the Periodic Table and oversees regular additions and changes, this icon of science belongs to the world. With this in mind, we wanted to create an opportunity for students and the general public to participate in this global celebration. The objective was to create an online global competition centered on the Periodic Table and IUPAC to raise awareness of the importance of chemistry in our daily lives, the richness of the chemical elements, and the key role of IUPAC in promoting chemistry worldwide. The Periodic Table Challenge was the result of this effort.

The Glory and the Sorrow

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Tackett
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Small Time ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Ordinary Citizen ◽  
Best Friend ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Intermediary ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The book describes the life and the world of a small-time lawyer, Adrien-Joseph Colson, who lived in central Paris from the end of the Old Regime through the first eight years of the French Revolution. It is based on over a thousand letters written by Colson about twice a week to his best friend living in the French province of Berry. By means of this correspondence, and of a variety of other sources, the book examines what it was like for an “ordinary citizen” to live through extraordinary times, and how Colson, in his position as a “social and cultural intermediary,” can provide insight into the life of a whole neighborhood on the central Right Bank, both before and during the Revolution. It explores the day-to-day experience of the Revolution: not only the thrill, the joy, and the enthusiasm, but also the uncertainty, the confusion, the anxiety, the disappointments—often all mixed together. It also throws light on some of the questions long debated by historians concerning the origins, the radicalization, the growth of violence, and the end of that Revolution.

scholarly journals Periodic Law, Mendeleev Society and Mendeleev Congresses

Vestnik RFFI ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 17-24
Author(s):  
Aslan Yu. Tsivadze
Keyword(s):  
Periodic Table ◽  
Chemical Elements ◽  
Chemical Society ◽  
World Science ◽  
Strategic Development ◽  
Mendeleev Russian Chemical ◽  
Saint Petersburg ◽  
Periodic Law ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking

In November 1868, the Ministry of Enlightenment of Russia approved the Charter of the Russian Chemical Society (RCS), one of the Founding Members of which had been Dmitri Mendeleev. The first report on Mendeleev Periodic Table of Chemical Elements was delivered during a meeting of the RCS in March 1869. Therefore 1869 is considered by the world science as the year of discovery of the Periodic Law and formulation of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements. Year 2019 is the 150th anniversary since Dmitry Mendeleev discovered the Periodic System, and the United Nations proclaimed this year to be the International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements (IYPT2019). After a series of transformations, in 1992 the RCS became the Mendeleev Russian Chemical Society. In 2019, the RCS is holding anniversary events. The extraordinary Mendeleev Congress on General and Applied Chemistry is one of them. It will be held in Saint Petersburg in September 2019 and will host approximately 3,000 foreign and Russian participants. English-speaking symposia, conferences and round tables on current issues of strategic development of science and technology are planned as a part of the Congress.

THE APPEARANCE OF AMERICAN GIRLS, AS VIEWED BY MOREAU DE SAINT-MÉRY ABOUT 1795

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-167
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Young Girls ◽  
The North ◽  
North Side ◽  
The World ◽  
The French Revolution

The French jurist, Méderic Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819), was driven into exile during the French Revolution by Robespierre's accession to power. From 1794 to 1798 Moreau lived in the United States. In the journal he kept during these years, he described American young girls as follows: American girls are pretty, and their eyes are alive with expression; but their complexions are wan, bad teeth spoil the appearance of their mouths, and there is also something disagreeable about the length of their legs. In general, however, they are of good height, are graceful, and, in enumerating their charms, one must not forget the shapeliness of their breasts. Philadelphia has thousands of beauties between fourteen and eighteen. To offer but a single proof: on the north side of Market Street, between Third and Fifth Street, on a single winter's day I saw four hundred young maidens promenading, each one of whom would surely have been followed in Paris, a seductive tribute that could be offered by perhaps no other city in the world. But these girls soon became pale, and an indisposition which is reckoned among the most unfavorable for the maintenance of the freshness of youth is very common among them. They have thin hair and bad teeth, and are given to nervous illnesses. The elements which embellish beauty, or rather which compose and order it, are not often bestowed by the graces. Finally, they are charming, adorable at fifteen, dried up at twenty-three, old at thirty-five, decrepit at forty or fifty.

All Societies Die

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Common Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Drug Cartels ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
The French Revolution

The author of this book asks us to prepare for the inevitable. Our society is going to die. What are you going to do about it? But the author also wants us to know that there's still reason for hope. In an immersive and mesmerizing discussion, this book considers what makes societies (throughout history) collapse. It points us to the historical examples of the Byzantine empire, the collapse of Somalia, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism, the rise of drug cartels in Latin America, and the French Revolution, to explain how societal decline has common features and themes. While unveiling the past, the message to us about the present is searing. Through an assessment of past and current societies, the book offers us a new way of looking at societal growth and decline. With a broad panorama of bloody stories, unexpected historical riches, crime waves, corruption, and disasters, the reader is shown that although our society will, inevitably, die at some point, there's still a lot we can do to make it better and live a little longer. This inventive approach to an “end-of-the-world” scenario should be a warning. We're not there yet. The book concludes with a strategy of preserving and rebuilding so that we don't have to give a eulogy anytime soon.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Paul Rusnock ◽  
Jan Šebestík
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Public Forum ◽  
The World ◽  
Joseph Ii ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Bolzano’s life coincides almost exactly with what has been called the Age of Revolutions. Born in 1781, he lived through the revolution from above launched by Joseph II in 1780, the French Revolution, the triumphs and defeats of Napoleon, the conservative reaction embodied in the Metternich System, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the July revolution of 1830, and finally the uprisings of 1848, the last year of his life. It was a time of exaggerations, of great hopes and fears, sudden reversals, and crushing disappointments, a time of vast enthusiasms and general confusion, as unprecedented forces were let loose upon a world almost completely unprepared for them. The world of letters was not spared, as authors strove to make their voices count in an ever more crowded and noisy public forum. Novelty was everywhere sought, overreach and passion common on all sides....

Review of J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960)

2021 ◽  
pp. 325-326
Author(s):  
Martin Wight
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
The World ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The French Revolution

Wight noted that in an earlier book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, Professor Talmon identified Rousseau as the ‘main source’ of ‘the totalitarian messianism of the French Revolution’. In this sequel he examines ‘the vast effervescence of utopian political thought between 1815 and 1848, which produced modern nationalism and Communism’. He aims to place the genesis of Marxism ‘in a wider historical setting than histories of socialism usually supply, against a background not only of Owen and Fourier, Fichte and Hegel, but of the whole romantic range of the Saint-Simonists and Lamennais, Michelet, Mazzini, and Mickiewicz’. The complex outcome is ‘the world we still live in, where national particularities seek to justify themselves in the service of a universal ideal, but revolutionary war makes national frontiers irrelevant; where national uniqueness is the strongest adversary of international revolution, nationalism finds its fulfilment by turning socialist, and socialism cannot establish itself except within national boundaries’.

Lauener, Michael, Schutz der Kirche und Stabilität des Staates durch Absenz von religiöser ,Seichtigkeit': die religionspolitischen Anschauungen von Jeremias Gotthelf und Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel aus dem Geist der Versöhnung

2019 ◽  
Vol 105 (1) ◽  
pp. 280-349
Author(s):  
Michael Lauener
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Strong State ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Church ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract Protection of the church and state stability through the absence of religious 'shallowness': views on religion-policy of Jeremias Gotthelf and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel out of a spirit of reconciliation. The article re-examines a thesis of Paul Baumgartner published in 1945: "Jeremias Gotthelf's, 'Zeitgeist and Bernergeist', A Study on Introduction and Interpretation", that if the Swiss writer and keen Hegel-opponent Jeremias Gotthelf had read any book of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, some of this would have received his recognition. Both Gotthelf and Hegel see the Reformation to be the cause of the emergence of a strong state. For Gotthelf, this marks the beginning of a process of strengthening the state at the expense of the church. Hegel, on the other hand, considers the modern state to be the reality of freedom, produced by the Christian 'religion of freedom' (Rph, §270 Z., p. 430). In contrast to Gotthelf, for whom only Christ can reconcile the state and religion, Hegel praises the French Revolution as "reconciliation of the divine with the world". For Gotthelf, the French Revolution was only a poor imitation of the process of spiritual and political liberation initiated by the Reformation, through which Christ reduced people to their original liberty. Nevertheless, both Gotthelf and Hegel want to protect the state and the church from falling apart, they reject organizational unity of state – religion – church in the sense of a theocracy, and demand the protection of church communities.

Christianity as Insurrection

1991 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-324
Author(s):  
P. Matheson
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Women Slaves ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Social Upheaval ◽  
The French Revolution

To suggest that authentic Christianity is an insurrectionary faith, a standing provocation to the conventional values of society is, on the face of it, to invite derision. Yet the ferocity with which the first Christians were persecuted was in no small part due to their subversive teachings and practices which gave women, slaves and artisans ideas above their station. This subversive dimension may often have been forgotten. It can hardly have been very evident to the inhabitants of Wittenberg in 1515, for example, yet within a decade Germany was to be embroiled in an unprecedented crisis of authority, one which led not only to turmoil in the world of student and scholar and cleric, but to the greatest social upheaval prior to the French Revolution, to the uffrur we know as the Peasants' War.

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