Revisiting the Past: How the Bing Archives Came to Light in Montevideo

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-153
Author(s):  
Dov Bing

Siegfried Bing (Hamburg 1838-Paris 1905) and August Bing (Hamburg 1852-Kassel 1918) led the West’s exposure to and interpretation of Japanese arts and crafts at the turn of the nineteenth century. Their collecting, curating and sharing gave rise to an epoch of new artistic feeling in Western visual arts (figs 1 and 2). With August managing the family’s enterprises in Japan and China (1879-1889), Siegfried overseeing the Parisian gallery of Asian art which was to become the Maison de l’Art Nouveau in 1895, and Siegfried’s brother-in-law Michael Baer, Germany’s Honorary Consul in Tokyo, also active, the Bing family exhibited a connoisseurship and taste for adventure that redefined the collecting and making of art. The family’s travels, artistic discoveries and collecting of Asian objects became widely known through Siegfried Bing’s writings, the efforts of researchers to retrace the gallery’s inventory, and recent scholarship and exhibitions devoted to Siegfried Bing. My family worked from 2004 to 2009 to continue to preserve the Bing legacy by re-securing the hitherto undiscovered photographic, cartographic, business and personal correspondence archives of Siegfried and August Bing and Michael Baer. The efforts of my son Ira, his wife Genevieve, my wife Maru and me, which between us involved five journeys to Montevideo, Uruguay, are recounted here.


Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 239-262
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald

One of the primary reasons I became interested in film studies was the seeming open-endedness of the field. Cinema was new, I reasoned, and would continue to be new, unlike other academic fields, and particularly those devoted to historical periods: as a scholar and a teacher, I would face the future, endlessly enthralled and energized by the transformation of the potential into the actual. That my development as a film scholar/teacher increasingly involved me in avant-garde film seemed quite natural — a logical extension of the attraction of film studies in general: Avant-garde film was the newest of the new, the sharpest edge of the present as it sliced into the promise of the future. Scholars in some fields may empathize with the attitude I describe, but scholars in all fields will smile at its self-defeating implications: of course, I can see now how typically American my assumptions were — as if one could maintain the excitement of youth merely by refusing to acknowledge the past! Obviously, film studies, like any other discipline, is only a field once its history takes, or is given, a recognizable shape.


1960 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 149-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chester G. Starr

Within the past five decades a great volume of work has advanced our knowledge of the Roman Empire. No single essay can hope to describe this mass in detail or even to consider fully the many cross-currents of opinion. If there is a common tide in recent scholarship, it flows less clearly than did the course of investigation in the nineteenth century. Here I shall try first to single out some of the main forces which have shaped the views of the present and past generations; then shall comment on developments in the utilization of evidence and on shifts in the areas of our principal concern; and finally shall suggest an assessment of the present position of research on the Roman Empire.


Author(s):  
James J. Coleman

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry


Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.


Author(s):  
Roger Ekirch

Although a universal necessity, sleep, as the past powerfully indicates, is not a biological constant. Before the Industrial Revolution, sleep in western households differed in a variety of respects from that of today. Arising chiefly from a dearth of artificial illumination, the predominant form of sleep was segmented, consisting of two intervals of roughly 3 hours apiece bridged by up to an hour or so of wakefulness. Notwithstanding steps taken by families to preserve the tranquillity of their slumber, the quality of pre-industrial sleep was poor, owing to illness, anxiety, and environmental vexations. Large portions of the labouring population almost certainly suffered from sleep deprivation. Despite the prevalence of sleep-onset insomnia, awakening in the middle of the night was thought normal. Not until the turn of the nineteenth century and sleep’s consolidation did physicians view segmented sleep as a disorder requiring medication.


Author(s):  
C. Michael Shea

For the past several decades, scholars have stressed that the genius of John Henry Newman remained underappreciated among his Roman Catholic contemporaries, and in order to find the true impact of his work, one must look to the century after his death. This book takes direct aim at that assumption. Examining a host of overlooked evidence from England and the European continent, Newman’s Early Legacy tracks letters, recorded conversations, and obscure and unpublished theological exchanges to show how Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine influenced a cadre of Catholic teachers, writers, and Church authorities in nineteenth-century Rome. The book explores how these individuals then employed Newman’s theory of development to argue for the definability of the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary during the years preceding the doctrine’s promulgation in 1854. Through numerous twists and turns, the narrative traces how the theory of development became a factor in determining the very language that the Roman Catholic Church would use in referring to doctrinal change over time. In this way, Newman’s Early Legacy uncovers a key dimension of Newman’s significance in modern religious history.


Author(s):  
Isaac Land

This chapter is central to the volume’s chronological contentions, as its argument accounts for the specialized, one-dimensional Dibdin of ‘Tom Bowling’ that has endured into recent scholarship. Focusing on Dibdin’s posthumous reception, it examines the moral and rhetorical difficulties of repackaging Dibdin’s works for a Victorian sensibility; it explores the specifics of mid-century concert culture previously highlighted by Derek Scott and William Weber as central to changes in nineteenth-century taste and programming; and it develops the theme of nostalgia into a revelatory consideration of the relationship between new naval technologies, national pride, and military training, and the songs, people, and language of a remembered Napoleonic ‘golden age’—to which Dibdin proves to have been as central, in the Victorian imagination, as Nelson.


Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.


Author(s):  
Edward Bellamy

‘No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.’ Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people’s everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont’s lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Flavio D’Abramo

AbstractThe establishment of international sanitary institutions, which took place in the context of rivalry among the great European powers and their colonial expansion in Asia, allowed for the development of administrative systems of international epidemiological surveillance as a response to the cholera epidemics at the end of the nineteenth century. In this note, I reflect on how a historical analysis of the inception of international epidemiological surveillance and pandemic management helps us to understand what is happening in the COVID-19 pandemic today.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document