History and the Contours of Meaning: The Abjection of Luisa Nevárez, First Woman Condemned to the Gallows in Puerto Rico, 1905

2009 ◽  
Vol 89 (4) ◽  
pp. 643-673
Author(s):  
María del Carmen Baerga-Santini
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Formidable Challenge

Abstract The article analyzes the case of Luisa Nevárez, the first woman condemned to the gallows in Puerto Rico at the beginning of the twentieth century. Convicted for the killing of her almost year-old daughter, she never admitted the crime nor showed any remorse. Yet, Luisa did not make an easy transition into the sphere of the criminal. The nascent identity that was being forged in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico configured the delinquent as a masculine subject who was acknowledged as possessing intellectual malice and the capacity for social action. Luisa’s condition as a woman, mother, and mulatta, her ignorance, and other factors deprived her of any possibility of entering the space of the criminal subject. Instead, the figure of Luisa oscillated between monster and madwoman in the discourses of the time. Around the mid-twentieth century her discursive figure emerges again, this time in the authorized voices of those concerned with criminal activities on the island. In this context, we find her embodying the prototype of the criminal woman: degenerate, ugly, black, and sexually insatiable. It is Luisa’s abject condition that places her on the threshold of history and on the borders of the intelligible. However, the impossibility of explaining her actions in a rational way constitutes a formidable challenge for the historian. In this respect, the article is also a reflection on the limits and possibilities of the representative faculties of the historical narrative.

The Islamic City Critique: Revising the Narrative

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Aldous
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Ideal Type ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The 1950S

Abstract In recent years scholars have challenged the concept of an Islamic city by constructing a historical narrative in which it derives from the orientalist tradition. They claim that French orientalists in the early twentieth century created an ideal type of the Islamic city as contrasted with its Western counterpart in order to support the assumptions of orientalist discourse. The first part of the article challenges this assumption by showing that the French orientalists did not in fact posit an Islamic city type. The second part offers an alternative explanation for the genesis of the concept by tracing it to the work of American anthropologists in the 1950s.

A Brief History of Motives—Composition

2021 ◽  
pp. 25-54
Author(s):  
Brent Auerbach
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music Composition ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Changing Role

Chapter 2 provides a brief history of the role of motives in Western music composition. Motive is posited as one of the several generative forces in music, alongside harmony, counterpoint, and form. Motive’s relative prominence is tracked in style periods of the last four centuries, with peak influence manifesting in the late Romantic and early twentieth-century periods. This changing role of motives is illustrated by a set of analyses of chronologically ordered pieces by Handel, Mozart, Brahms, Wagner, Holst, and Schoenberg. The musical examples, in addition to supporting the historical narrative, serve to introduce readers to the new conventions of nomenclature and rules motivic association that will be presented in detail in the methodology chapters of the book.

A Party of Ex-convicts: Bolívar Ochart, Carceral Logics, and the Socialist Party in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-99
Author(s):  
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
Formerly Incarcerated ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Labor Leaders

Abstract This article uses the case of Bolívar Ochart, a midlevel member of the Socialist Party of Puerto Rico, to explore the ways that labor leaders navigated the Puerto Rican polity after the 1898 US occupation of the archipelago. The Socialist Party radically challenged the new carceral logics through its prison reform stance. Since it was the only political party in which most of its leadership had all been imprisoned, it also offered a space for formerly incarcerated, self-educated workers to become career politicians. Ultimately, this essay tells the story of how Ochart went from being a convict to receiving an executive pardon, publishing a groundbreaking book, and later becoming an elected official.

Ahistorical interpretation of the Torah narratives in the Wisdom of Solomon

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-88
Author(s):  
Karina Martin Hogan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Divine Justice ◽  
Wisdom Of Solomon ◽  
Justice And Mercy

The traditional scholarly title (since the early twentieth century) for the last section of the Wisdom of Solomon, chapters 11–19 (or for some, 10–19) is the “Book of History.” This is a misleading designation because the author of the Wisdom of Solomon chose to present certain events from the exodus and wilderness traditions of ancient Israel not in the context of a continuous historical narrative, but rather as paradigmatic examples of God’s justice and mercy toward both the righteous and the ungodly. The purpose of the second half of the Wisdom of Solomon is pedagogical and apologetic rather than historical. The author’s avoidance of proper names and the consistent division of humanity in moral terms (the righteous vs the ungodly/unrighteous) rather than along ethnic lines (Israel vs Egyptians or Canaanites) should be taken seriously as an effort to universalize the lessons of Israel’s stories. The consistent message of both the antitheses and the excurses in chapters 11–19 is that God manifests both justice and mercy in disciplining human beings (both the righteous and the unrighteous) with suffering. Thus, it would be preferable to call chapters 11–19 either the “Book of Discipline” or the “Book of Divine Justice and Mercy.”

‘The Willing Captive of Home?’: The English Catholic Women's League, 1906–1920

1991 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula M. Kane
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Short List ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Henry Cardinal Manning wrote in 1863 that he wanted English Catholics to be “downright, masculine, and decided Catholics—more Roman than Rome, and more ultramontane than the Pope himself.” Given this uncompromising call for militant, masculine Roman Catholicism in Protestant Victorian England, frequently cited by scholars, it may seem surprising that a laywomen's movement would have emerged in Great Britain. In 1906, however, a national Catholic Women's League (CWL), linked closely to Rome, to the English clergy, and to lay social action, emerged in step with the aggressive Catholicism outlined by Manning 40 years earlier. The Catholic Women's League was led by a coterie of noblewomen, middle-class professionals, and clergy, many of them former Anglicans. The founder, Margaret Fletcher (1862–1943), and the league's foremost members were converts; the spiritual advisor, Rev. Bernard Vaughan, was the son of a convert. A short list of the clergy affiliated with the CWL reveals an impressive Who's Who in the Catholic hierarchy and in social work in the early twentieth century: Francis Cardinal Bourne (Archbishop of Westminster from 1903 to 1935), Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (a convert and well-known author), and influential Jesuits Bernard Vaughan, Charles Plater, Cyril Martindale, Joseph Keating, Leo O'Hea and Joseph Rickaby. The CWL was born from a joining of convert zeal and episcopal-clerical support to a tradition of lay initiative among English Catholics.

Modeling, Diagramming, and Early Twentieth-Century Histories of Invention and Entrepreneurship: Henry Ford, Sherwood Anderson, Samuel Insull

2002 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-512
Author(s):  
JEFFORY A. CLYMER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Sherwood Anderson ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Henry Ford ◽  
Famous Book ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
American Society

The historical narrative arguing that independent artisans were increasingly transformed into mere tenders of complicated machinery during the second half of the nineteenth century, leading ultimately to Henry Ford's minute division of labor in the assembly line, is both conventional and well known. Technology became more complex, its inner workings were less self-evident or easily comprehensible, and the material conditions of production, exemplified by modern factories built around a division of labor, became too large and systematic to be understood from the viewpoint of a single worker selling his or her labor. And, while industry was imagined more and more as an intricate system at the turn of the twentieth century, American society, analogously, under the increasing pressure of urbanization and immigration, came to be regarded as too complex to be understood from a single viewpoint. Exposés, for instance, on “how the other half lives,” to quote the title of Jacob Riis's famous book, attest both to the yearning and to the perceived inability to understand society as an entirety.This article suggests and examines the ways in which two older forms of imagining large systems, specifically, the methods of model-making and diagramming, were rearticulated at the turn of the twentieth century in response to a perceived greater complexity of both technology and American society. Models and diagrams are necessary when it seems that one can no longer envision a large system; they literally provide an imaginative site for a complex system. To understand the social roles of diagramming and model-making, I detail the ways each was imagined and deployed in the cultural history of invention and entrepreneurship in the early twentieth century.

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