The Human Tide: A Review Essay

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 1322-1339
Author(s):  
Timothy W. Guinnane
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Age Structure ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Society ◽  
General Audience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Demographic Patterns

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World, by Paul Morland, argues for the importance of demography in both historical events and our current situation. Intended for a general audience, the book traces demographic developments from the late eighteenth century, arguing that the timing and pace of demographic change helps to explain why some countries became powerful and others did not. The author continues the story into the twentieth century, discussing the changes in age structure and internal ethno-religious balances that are consequences of demographic patterns. Many readers will find the questions and themes in The Human Tide interesting. Unfortunately, the book misrepresents some research findings and is confused about important demographic concepts. The Human Tide deals with fundamental changes in human society over the past two centuries, but for a clear account of those changes, readers will have to go elsewhere. (JEL I12, J11, J13, J15, K37, N30)

Late Novels

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-100
Author(s):  
Hugh Adlington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Blue Flower ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

This chapter examines the four ‘late’ novels that are the peak of Penelope Fitzgerald’s achievement as a writer: Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower. Each novel is, at least superficially, a work of historical fiction in that it is set in the past: in 1950s Italy, in revolutionary Russia, in Edwardian England, and in late-eighteenth-century Germany respectively. But history is decidedly not the defining feature of these novels. Rather, as this chapter shows, all four works are characterized by their bold experimentation with narrative form and style, reflecting an intense concern with profound questions of body, mind and spirit that culminates in Fitzgerald’s haunting masterpiece, the story of the idealized yearning of the German Romantic poet Novalis both for Sophie von Kühn, his ‘heart’s heart’, and for revelation. Through close analysis of Fitzgerald’s methods of research, composition and editing, this chapter proposes fresh ways of thinking about the stylistic means by which these late novels create fictional worlds that expand to fill the reader’s imagination, and even appear to possess an existence independent of the novels themselves.

scholarly journals Hospitality and the Nation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Romantik ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Jennifer Wawrzinek
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Commercial Exchange ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
And Control ◽  
National Borders

<p>In the summer of 1795, when Mary Wollstonecraft journeyed to Scandinavia, she was disillusioned with human society and the possibility of meaningful relation with others. She had recently been in Paris, where she had seen many of her moderate revolutionary friends executed under Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, and by the time of her arrival in Scandinavia her unsatisfactory relationship with Gilbert Imlay was coming to an end. The book that resulted from this journey, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, is remarkable for its critique of sovereignty and the reification of difference inherent to the construction of national borders and the drives of commercial exchange. The article argues that Wollstonecraft insists upon openness to the people and cultures she encounters through configuring epistemology as a twin process of experiential contact and sceptical inquiry. This a process that remains inherently and necessarily ethical because it resists the structures of tyranny, domination, and control, which Wollstonecraft perceives to be afflicting late-eighteenth-century Europe, whilst simultaneously allowing for a re-conception of politics and justice according to the demands both of the present and the not-yet-formalised future.</p>

scholarly journals Héroes nacionales como vehículos emocionales de conceptos / National Heroes as Emotional Vehicles of Political Concepts

2017 ◽  
pp. 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Isabel González Manso
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Siglo Xix ◽  
The Relationship

This article deals with the relationship between concepts, heroes and emotions. To that purpose it propounds an explicative mechanism through the comparative analysis of the use of heroes in Spanish politics in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. The spread of some political concepts was facilitated by their association with heroes of the past, which not only provide legitimacy but also a strong emotional burden in terms of the values they represented. The proposed methodology is applied to the examination of political uses of two historical figures: Padilla and Pelayo.Key WordsEmotions, national heroes, intellectual history, nineteenth centuryResumenEl presente artículo examina la relación entre conceptos, héroes y emociones. Para ello propone un mecanismo que se sirve del análisis comparado del uso de héroes en la política española de finales del siglo XVIII y de la primera mitad del XIX. La difusión de ciertos conceptos políticos se vio facilitada por su asociación con héroes del pasado que no solo aportaban legitimidad y prestigio sino también una fuerte carga emocional dado los valores que estos héroes representaban. Las consideraciones metodológicas se aplican al análisis de los usos políticos de dos personajes históricos: Padilla y Pelayo.Palabras claveEmociones, héroes nacionales, historia intelectual, siglo XIX

De rebellen van Berbice

2020 ◽  
Vol 136 (3) ◽  
pp. 130-146
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
The Past ◽  
Slave Revolt ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Strongly Connected ◽  
Hernan Cortes

Abstract In the preface to his neoclassical tragedy Monzongo, of de koningklyke slaaf (1774), Nicolaas Simon van Winter advocates for the gradual abolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies. He declares that he wrote this play in reaction to the brutal executions of African rebels after the nearly successful slave revolt in the Dutch colony of Berbice. The plot, however, centers around the enslavement of the Mexicans by Hernán Cortés in the early sixteenth century. Following Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s notion of ‘silencing’ the past (1995), this article explores the absence of the Dutch Atlantic in Monzongo. Van Winter’s choice to present enslaved Amerindians under a Spanish yoke, I will argue, is strongly connected to late-eighteenth-century ideas about suppression, the legitimacy of revolt, and ‘race’ in the Dutch Republic.

From Traditional History to Maskilic History in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany

2001 ◽  
pp. 9-70
Author(s):  
Shmuel Feiner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Historical Phenomenon

This chapter discusses how ‘maskilic history’, developing in the circle of German maskilim during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, broke with ‘traditional Jewish history’. Just as the European Enlightenment had constructed a new picture of the past and proposed a kind of ‘philosophical history’, the Haskalah, functioning within the framework of its critical goals and demands for a reformed society, also created a new image of the past that presented a clear alternative to the traditional version. The new legitimization of historical study, the new division of history into periods, the belief in the historical turning-point and the shaping of ‘a modern age’, stemming from awareness of modernity, together with progressive programmes and realistic explanations, all characterized maskilic awareness of the past. They also made it possible to identify maskilic history as a specific historical phenomenon and an element of the consciousness of those Jewish intellectual circles that made pragmatic and didactic use of history. Maskilic history presented exemplary types, elevated historical heroes, and proposed moral explanations of events, all aimed at realizing the maskilic aspiration of creating a new, ideal Jew who would also be a universal man and a citizen of his country.

The Pasts of a Pāḷaiyakārar: The Ethnohistory of a South Indian Little King

1982 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 655-683 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas B. Dirks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sovereign Authority

This article examines a text containing the late eighteenth-century family history of a line of South Indian “little kings,” or pāḷaiyakārars. The text provides the basis for a discussion of the Maṟavar caste of the Tirunelvēli region in southern Tamil Nāṭu and the notions held by this and other related groups concerning royal appropriateness and sovereign authority, political and social relations, and kingly privileges and gifts. Further, the text is seen as a cultural form of “history” that has an integrity of its own. Indeed, a structural analysis of the text reveals that the text can not be separated into “fanciful” and “historical” sections, and that underlying assumptions about the past are revealed by the form as well as the content of the text. The results of this analysis are seen to have significance not only for understanding how the past is viewed from within, but also for how it must be analyzed from outside the cultural context. Thus, ethnohistory is asserted to be not simply one agenda for “history” but a way of setting the actual agenda of “history.”

The Perception of Time and the Meaning of History among Spanish Intellectuals of the Nineteenth Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-84
Author(s):  
Ana Isabel González Manso
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Features ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Time Perceptions ◽  
Perception Of Time

This article investigates how the perception of living in novel times influenced Spanish intellectuals from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century when they wrote or thought about history. The perception of time would influence the way in which history was written, and in turn this would reflect the model of society that Spanish intellectuals aspired to when they turned to the past for the political and social features they wanted for their present and future. At that time, different time perceptions coexisted and combined in a very complex fashion; the present article, however, is focused on the perception of time mainly as an opportunity, with its advances and retreats, doubts and problems. The article will show how those intellectuals thought about history and the various solutions they put forward for society’s problems.

Key-Mood Association: A Self Perpetuating Myth

2005 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Powell ◽  
Nicola Dibben
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Correlation ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Equal Temperament ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Shed Light

The association of certain keys with specific moods continues to be widespread despite technical evidence that all equally tempered keys are identical. This paper provides experimental results which shed light on this phenomenon. First, approximately three-quarters of participants questioned claimed to have key-mood associations. Second, the key-mood associations held by participants showed a very strong correlation to late eighteenth century associations which attributed brightness to keys with sharps in their key signature and mellowness to those with flats. Third, key-mood associations were proven to be invalid for the modern, equal temperament keyboard; the participants showed no ability to be able to identify mood from key or key from mood and, overall, there was no change in perceived mood of a piece if it was performed in a different key. One reason why the key-mood association myth persists to the present day is the tradition of associating sharp keys with bright and positive moods and flat keys with dark and negative moods, which has been perpetuated by some musical commentators over the past two hundred years. In addition, there are a number of aspects of early musical training which encourage these associations for the sharp and flat keys.

Celts and Romans on Tour

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-140
Author(s):  
Mary-Ann Constantine
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter explores the presence of Romans and Britons in the tour literature of late-eighteenth-century Britain. It argues that the deeply ingrained narratives of Classical authors such as Caesar and Tacitus offered many tourists a framework not only for reading the past in the landscape, but also the present, as the recollection of former conflicts in situ stimulated questions of loyalty and cultural diversity within a recently ‘united’ Britain. An examination of a selection of tourist accounts from the 1770s to the early 1800s shows how certain key texts, notably Thomas Pennant’s Tours of Wales and Scotland, set the historical agenda for many decades, and reveals how the power dynamics of that ancient Classical/Celtic conflict could be usefully re-animated in different contemporary political contexts.

On the recent history of low vowels in English

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-567
Author(s):  
RAYMOND HICKEY
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Horizontal Axis ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Low Back ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Continuous Movement ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

The development of low vowels in the history of English is one which shows continuous movement, usually upwards along earlier back and later front trajectories. In addition, low vowels have been subject to lengthening processes which have compensated for the loss of earlier instances of long low vowels. Shifts along a horizontal axis, from low front to low back, can also be discerned throughout the history of English. The present study begins by examining the situation in late eighteenth-century English, using the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database and the works of various prescriptivist writers, to determine the outset for later developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also scrutinises realisations of low vowels in these varieties in order to offer a possible chronology for the overall development of low vowels in the past two centuries.

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