The walking stick in the nineteenth-century city: Conflicting ideals of urban walking

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-291
Author(s):  
Peter K Andersson

This article reflects on the role of the walking stick in the nineteenth-century city and explores the nature of the criticisms directed at it. The criticism and mocking of certain ways of holding the cane display the deep conflicts within the culture of urban strolling concerning how to take part in it, and who were allowed to do so. By identifying an irritation with canes, we see that there was a conflict between the purposeful culture of walking and the superficial culture of performativity and display, which forced Victorian men to be extremely careful of how their behaviour was perceived. By bringing the walking stick to the fore, the paper illustrates its role in a struggle between ostentation and sobriety and how its importance in cultures of both self-possession and flamboyance is indicative of aspects of the history of urban walking.

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G.W. Kirk ◽  
Neil Pemberton

While some historians have noted the absence of animals in medical history, few have made the animal the central object of their historical gaze. Twenty years ago W.F. Bynum urged medical historians to follow historians of science in paying attention to the role of non-human animals in the material practices of medicine. Yet few have responded to his call. In this paper we again ask the question: what work can the non-human animal achieve for the history of medicine? We do so in the light of the conceptual possibilities opened up by the rapidly emerging field of ‘animal studies’. This interdisciplinary and sophisticated body of work has, in various ways, revealed the value of the ‘animal’ as a tool for exploring the co-constitution of species identity. We asked ourselves, surely, in our present biomedical world, this must be an area that we as medical historians are best placed to comment on; and what better place to start than the well-known, yet surprisingly little-studied, medical leech?


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mir Kamruzzman Chowdhary

This study was an attempt to understand how the available alternative source materials, such as oral testimonies can serve as valuable assets to unveiling certain aspects of maritime history in India. A number of themes in maritime history in India failed to get the attention of the generation of historians, because of the paucity of written documents. Unlike in Europe, the penning down of shipping activities was not a concern for the authorities at the port in India. The pamphlets and newsletters declared the scheduled departure of the ship in Europe but, in India, this was done verbally. Therefore, maritime history in India remained marginalised. Hence, in this article, I make an endeavour to perceive how the oral testimonies can help shed some new light on certain aspects of maritime history in India, such as life on the ship, maritime practices, and perceptions among the littoral people in coastal societies. This article also outlines an approach on how the broader question on the transformation of scattered maritime practices among coastal societies can be adapted and transferred into an organised institution of law by the nineteenth century, and how these can be pursued in future. I also suggest in this article that the role of Europeans, especially the British, in the process of transformation, can be investigated further through oral testimonies in corroboration with the colonial archival records.


This book addresses the sounds of the Crimean War, along with the many ways nineteenth-century wartime is aurally constructed. It examines wide-ranging experiences of listeners in Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Daghestan, Chechnya, and Crimea, illustrating the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the modes by which wartime sound was archived and heard. This book covers topics including music in and around war zones, the mediation of wartime sound, the relationship between sound and violence, and the historiography of listening. Individual chapters concern sound in Leo Tolstoy’s wartime writings, and his place within cosmopolitan sensibilities; the role of the telegraph in constructing sonic imaginations in London and the Black Sea region; the absence of archives for the sounds of particular ethnic groups, and how songs preserve memories for both Crimean Tatars and Polish nationalists; the ways in which perceptions of voice rearranged the mental geographies of Baltic Russia, and undermined aspirations to national unity in Italy; Italian opera as a means of conditioning elite perceptions of Crimean battlefields; and historical frames through which to understand the diffusion of violent sounds amid everyday life. The volume engages the academic fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, literary studies, sound studies, and the history of the senses.


Author(s):  
Stefan Collini

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.


Author(s):  
Sarah Collins

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.


Author(s):  
Rodney Harrison

The focus of this article is stone tools. The history of stone tool research is linked integrally to the history of archaeology and the study of the human past, and many of the early developments in archaeology were connected with the study of stone artefacts. The identification of stone tools as objects of prehistoric human manufacture was central to the development of nineteenth-century models of prehistoric change, and especially the Three Age system for Old World prehistory. This article draws on concepts derived from interdisciplinary material culture studies to consider the role of the artefact after being discarded. It suggests that it is impossible to understand the meaning or efficacy of stone tools without understanding their ‘afterlives’ following abandonment. This article aims to complement contemporary metrical studies of the identification of stone tools and the description of their production. A brief history of the stone tools is explained and this concludes the article.


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.


2021 ◽  
pp. 88-108
Author(s):  
Marie Brossier

Senegal has a history of representative politics dating from the nineteenth century, and has experienced political stability since independence in 1960. Progressive political liberalization since the 1980s has occurred without coups or national conferences, making the country an outlier in the region. However, despite two peaceful transitions of power in 2000 and 2012, Senegal’s politics have also been continuously marred by autocratic behavior and periodic limitations on civil liberties. As such, Senegal remains a “patrimonial democracy.” The country’s social and generational inequalities have been exacerbated by mismanagement of resource reallocation by the state, as well as by its dependence on international aid and remittances. The worrisome socioeconomic situation has sparked migration but also bolstered the engagement of younger generations, with social movements increasingly active in the public arena and more women participating in politics. In addition, religious diversification and greater religious pluralism have increasingly challenged the historically central role of Islam, and especially the Sufi orders, in politics.


2018 ◽  

This book reviews the role of British Foreign Secretaries in the formulation of British policy towards Japan from the re-opening of Japan in the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. It also takes a critical look at the history of British relations with Japan over these years. Beginning with Lord John Russell (Foreign Secretary 1859-1865) and concluding with Geoffrey Howe (Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs, 1983-1989), the volume also examines the critical roles of two British Prime Ministers in the latter part of the twentieth century, Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher, who ensured that Britain recognized both the reality and the opportunities for Britain resulting from the Japanese economic and industrial phenomenon. Heath’s main emphasis was on opening the Japanese market to British exports. Thatcher’s was on Japanese investment. This volume is a valuable addition to the Japan Society’s series devoted to aspects of Anglo-Japanese relations which includes ten volumes of Britain & Japan: Biographical Portraits as well as British Envoys in Japan.


Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins

The introduction sets the scene by exploring the role of Edinburgh as a centre for the development and propagation of pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories. It gives essential background on natural history in the Scottish capital in early nineteenth century and the history of evolutionary thought and outlines the aims and objectives of the book. In addition, it explores some of the historiographical issues raised by earlier historians of science who have discussed the role of Edinburgh in the development of evolutionary thought in Great Britain.


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