scholarly journals Of Human Seismographs: The Multifaceted Roles of Pictures in the Meaning Making of Earthquakes

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 485-493
Author(s):  
Susanne Leikam
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Cultural Efficacy ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Seismic Forces ◽  
Pictorial Representations ◽  
Political Economic

AbstractThis article investigates the multifaceted roles that pictorial representations of the human body have played in earthquake visualizations. From the first conventional repertoires in early modern Europe to the photographic iconographies of the early-twentieth-century United States, human bodies have served as tangible proxies—human seismographs—visualizing not only the actual intensity of the seismic forces but also the severe disruption of contemporary cultural ideas, beliefs, and worldviews. As a general pictorial motif, the human body moreover allows viewers to emotionally identify and develop empathy, enhancing the pictures’ cultural efficacy. Drawing on samples from San Francisco’s earthquake of 1906, the study shows how the staging of bodies has stayed a central signifier of the cultural disruption even after seismology brought about the demystification of earthquakes. With the financialization of earthquakes and the shift of the public’s attention to the aftermath of earthquakes, human bodies became materialized ideology, strategically appropriated in order to promote political, economic, and ideological agendas. As such, the human body emerges as a juncture in the popular earthquake iconographies linking—but also complicating—competing categories such as, for instance, mind and matter, private and public, local and (trans)national, individual and collective.

“So that Every Subject Knows How to Behave”: Social Disciplining in Early Modern Bohemia

2006 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheilagh Ogilvie
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
Political Economic

“Social disciplining” is the name that has been given to attempts by the authorities throughout early modern Europe to regulate people's private lives.1 In explicit contrast to “social control,” the informal mechanisms by which people have always sought to put pressure on one another in traditional societies, “social disciplining” was a set of formal, legislative strategies through which the emerging early modern state sought to “civilize” and “rationalize” its subjects' behavior in order to facilitate well-ordered government and a capitalist modernization of the economy.2 Whether viewed favorably as an essential stage in a beneficent “civilizing process” or more critically as an arbitrary coercion of popular culture in the interests of elites, social disciplining is increasingly regarded as central to most aspects of political, economic, religious, social, and cultural change in Europe between the medieval and the modern periods.3

Small Is Beautiful

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cyrus Schayegh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Economic

In scholarship on the Middle East, as on other regions of the world, the sort of social history that climaxed from the 1960s through the 1980s, and in Middle East history through the 1990s—that is, studies of categories such as “class” or “peasant”—has been declining for some time. The cultural history that replaced social history has peaked, too. In the 21st century, the trend, set by non-Middle East historians, has been to combine an updated social-historical focus on structure and groups with a cultural–historical focus on meaning making. Defining societyagainstculture and policing their boundaries is out. In is picking a theme—consumption or travel, say—then studying it from distinct yet linked social and cultural or political/economic angles. This trend has spawned new journals likeCultural and Social History, established in 2004, and has been debated in established journals and memoirs by leading historians of the United States and Europe.

Egyptian Fiscal History in a World of Warring States, 664–30 bce

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Andrew Monson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Fiscal Institutions ◽  
Warring States ◽  
Tax State ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Political Economic

From China to the Mediterranean, interstate competition transformed the political, economic, and social order in the mid-first millenniumbce. The case of Egypt from the Saite reunification in 664bceto the Roman conquest in 30bceillustrates this phenomenon, which resembles the rise of fiscal-military states under the pressure of war in early modern Europe. The New Fiscal History that has sought to explain this rise in Europe tends to produce a linear historical account of centralization and increasing fiscal capacity from feudal societies to the modern tax state. In Egypt, by contrast, the process was interrupted by integration into the imperial structures of Achaemenid Persia and Rome. It thus provides a convenient laboratory to compare the development of fiscal institutions in a political environment characterized by warring states, and one dominated by a single empire.

Venice and Venetian Intelligence in the European Panorama

2019 ◽  
pp. 28-55
Author(s):  
Ioanna Iordanou
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Secret Service ◽  
General Overview ◽  
Italian City ◽  
City States ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Intelligence Service

This chapter discusses the politico-economic and sociocultural landscape in which Venice’s secret service evolved and developed in the sixteenth century. It also provides a general overview of the intelligence pursuits of some of the most significant players—politically and economically—in early modern Europe, including major Italian city states—such as Milan, Florence, Genoa and Rome—Spain, England, France, and the Ottoman Empire. The chapter analyses the gradual emergence of systematized intelligence in sixteenth-century Europe, as it was instigated by momentous political, economic, social, and religious events. Through this historical analysis, Venice’s centrally administered state intelligence service emerges as an idiosyncratic phenomenon, setting the scene for its nuanced examination in the ensuing chapters.

The Public Anatomy Lesson

2020 ◽  
pp. 217-262
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
State Building ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Dutch Painter

This chapter analyses a crucible of the state’s making in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the public anatomy lesson. The body, this piece of ‘natural’ property that every human ‘has’, was being increasingly opened up and peered into for the purposes of finally seeing human nature itself. Bringing together visual studies and international relations, the chapter charts the scopic regime that established vision as modernity’s primary ordered instrument and that was honed upon the body dissected in public. To map its contours, it begins with the writings of anatomist William Harvey and scientist-statesman Francis Bacon. The chapter then tracks how this scopic regime was institutionalised by the spread of the highly popular public anatomy lesson across early modern Europe. It then analyses Renaissance and early modern representations of the public anatomy lesson, notably the frontispiece of the first manual of modern medicine, Andrea Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body (1943), and Dutch painter Rembrandt’s anatomy lesson paintings. The chapter examines the work of boundary-drawing and state-building wrought by these public performances by tracking the roles of the female and the poor body in their crafting.

Coda: American Patrimonialism

2011 ◽  
Vol 636 (1) ◽  
pp. 204-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Lachmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Social Form ◽  
The World ◽  
Bureaucratic Rationalism ◽  
Do So

Patrimonialism, until fairly recently, seemed an archaic social form, largely replaced by bureaucratic rationalism. That confident view of modernity, in the histories that Max Weber and his followers wrote, deserves to be challenged as patrimonial regimes reappear in states and firms throughout the world. This article is my attempt to mount that challenge. I first revisit Weber’s conception of patrimonialism and discuss how gendered and elitist studies of early modern Europe require a reevaluation of patrimonialism’s dynamics and resilience. I then present an overview of evidence for the return of patrimonialism and of ideological justifications for its legitimacy, focusing on the United States. Since Weber and his successors all see patrimonialism and bureaucracy as incompatible, it is necessary to develop a theory of how the dynamics of elite conflict within bureaucratic, capitalist societies can generate patrimonialism. I do so in the penultimate section of this article, and I then explore the implications of that theory for predicting the future course of patrimonialism in the twenty-first century.

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