The scientist and the advertisement: Reklamegutachten in imperial Germany

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-532
Author(s):  
Joris Mercelis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Ethical Practice ◽  
Knowledge Service ◽  
Institutional Integrity ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
The Face ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, the integration of product-evaluating certificates and reports ( Gutachten) into advertisements triggered repeated condemnations of “advertisement- Gutachten” ( Reklamegutachten), and scientists and science administrators introduced various restrictions to prevent the appearance of such documents. At the same time, the provision of Gutachten to private individuals and firms seemed crucial to the success of many private and public laboratories. Some chemical and other professionals, moreover, argued that the authoring and use of Reklamegutachten could represent a “scientific” and, therefore, ethical practice. By examining the contested history of the advertisement- Gutachten, this article reveals how a previously tolerated knowledge service lost its legitimacy in a particular place and period of time, and highlights the challenges of eliminating this practice or restoring its legitimacy afterward. The article also explores how professional scientists’ approaches to maintaining a reputation for integrity in the face of commercial and competitive pressures related to the better-known efforts of professionals in other fields, particularly the medical. I emphasize that, in determining whether a Gutachten qualified as scientific, the nature and transparency of the underlying research process was only one of the criteria that were considered, and often not the most significant yardstick. At the same time, however, ideas about the personal and professional/institutional integrity of providers of Gutachten were inextricably connected with assessments of the honesty and objectivity of their research.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

scholarly journals “The Lord Breathed On The Face Of Underworld”: Maximilian Voloshin and Kabbala

2021 ◽  
pp. 125-149
Author(s):  
K.Yu. Burmistrov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European ◽  
Written Sources

The acquaintance of Maximilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin (1877–1932), one of the central figures in the history of Russian culture in the first third of the twentieth century, with the tradition of Western European esotericism, as well as with the concepts of Jewish Kabbalah, is still poorly understood. At the same time, it is known that they played an important role in his worldview and creativity. The article offers an analysis of several topics related to Kabbalah, which had a noticeable impact on the work of Voloshin. Particular attention is paid to the problem of establishing written sources of borrowings and interpretations of Kabbalistic ideas, clarifying concepts, as well as ways of transmitting elements of Kabbalah among European and Russian esotericists. Through the study of various works of Voloshin, his diary entries, drafts and correspondence, the names of esoteric authors who are especially important for the study of this topic have been identified (E.P. Blavatsky, A. Fabre d'Olivet, A. Franck, Eliphas Levi and etc.). Through a thorough analysis of the methods of perception and transmission of the ideas of Kabbalah among European esotericists, it was shown that, strange as it may seem, the result of studying such sources and their interpretation by Voloshin was a fairly accurate and adequate use of Kabbalistic concepts both in theoretical works and in poetry.

Collecting Chinese Objects in Slovenia at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-180
Author(s):  
Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Specific Position ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Connections ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article addresses the practices of collecting Chinese objects that were brought to the territory of present-day Slovenia by sailors, missionaries, travellers, and others who travelled to China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time, this territory was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; we will, therefore, begin with the brief historical context of the Empire and its contact with China, followed by a discussion on the nature of collecting Chinese objects in Slovenian territories at that time. We will further examine the status of the individuals who travelled to China and the nature and extent of the objects they brought back. The article will also highlight the specific position of the Slovenian territory within the history of Euro-Asian cultural connections, and address the relevant issues—locally and globally—of the relationship between the centres and peripheries with regard to collecting practices.

The Southern Levant and the Ancient Near Eastern Canon

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-65
Author(s):  
Rachel Hallote
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Southern Levant ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

When the artistic canon of the Southern Levant coalesced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars thought of the region, then Ottoman Palestine, as the locus of the Bible. The small-scale nature of the archaeological finds as well as their relative dearth reinforced a reliance on biblical narratives as a framework for understanding the culture of the region. Moreover, early scholarship did not recognize the complex regionalism of the Southern Levant or the diversity of its populations. Consequently, the artistic canon that developed did not represent the historical and archaeological realities of the region. This chapter examines the history of how the artistic canon of the Southern Levant formed over the past century of scholarship, why various scholars of the early and middle twentieth century included particular items in the canon, and why these now entrenched representations may or may not be helpful to the discipline’s future.

Educating

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-159
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Rotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
History Of Empire

The chapter provides a sensory history of empire in the two countries, India and the Philippines, at the turn of the twentieth century. By that point, the process of visualizing Indian and Filipino subjects was well underway by their colonizers. The chapter looks at sight and sound and how they can be used to narrate the story at this point. The dynamics of Anglo-American soundscapes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transferred readily and deliberately to sites of empire, to India and the Philippines. In particular, it looks at the music in the two empires at this time.

Gay Affections

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard P. Loughlin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Gay Identities

This chapter considers how gay identities—and so gay affections—were formed in the course of the twentieth century, building on the late nineteenth-century invention of the ‘homosexual’. It also considers earlier construals of same-sex affections and the people who had them, the soft men and hard women of the first century and the sodomites of the eleventh. It thus sketches a history of continuities and discontinuities, of overlapping identities and emotional possibilities. The chapter resists the assumption that gay identity and experience can be reduced to anything less than the multitude of gay people, and that as Christians they have to give an account of themselves in a way that heterosexual Christians do not. The chapter warns against thinking gay identity undone in Christ.

Concepts of race in the Historicography of northeast Africa

1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyatt Macgaffey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Physical Anthropology ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Recent accounts of the proto-history of Africa use data from physical anthropology, but also concepts of race which physical anthropologists in general have abandoned as unsatisfactory; the paper seeks to explain this phenomenon sociologically. Late nineteenth-century political and sociological trends helped to produce patterns of thought which can no longer be regarded as affording adequate explanations of social processes. These patterns combined idealism, or the method of contrasting ideal types, with pseudo-Darwinism, which sought the origins of political development in the interaction of differently endowed groups. In African ethnography of the early twentieth century such concepts led to the view that the continent was inhabited by two groups, Caucasoids and Negroids, and by mixtures of the two which remained mixtures, to be analysed as such. The Caucasoid and Negroid types were regarded as absolute and universal, represented equally in the biological, linguistic, cultural and political aspects of man.

Debating the Legal Status of the Ornaments Rubric: Ritualism and Royal Commissions in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 434-454
Author(s):  
Dan D. Cruickshank
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Royal Commission ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Parliamentary Oversight ◽  
The Church

This article uses the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to explore the emergence of claims to self-governance within the Church of England in this period and the attempts by parliament to examine how independent the legal system of the church was from the secular state. First, it gives an overview of the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the various editions of the Book of Common Prayer and the Acts of Uniformity, presenting the legal uncertainty left by centuries of Prayer Book revision. It then explores how the Royal Commission into Ritualism (1867–70) and the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) attempted to control Ritualist interpretations of the Ornaments Rubric through secular courts. Examining the failure of these attempts, it looks towards the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline (1904–6). Through the evidence given to the commission, it shows how the previous royal commission and the work of parliament and the courts had failed to stop the continuation of Ritualist belief in the church's independence from secular courts. Using the report of the royal commission, it shows how the commissioners attempted to build a via media between strict spiritual independence and complete parliamentary oversight.

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