scholarly journals The faces of death

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey E. Smith

The Rural Cemetery Movement ushered in a new way of thinking about cemeteries in American society after 1831. As these cemeteries became civic assets, they were widely visited by people and became a mediated space for articulating and expanding collective memory. The gravestones and monuments in these cemeteries erected in the second half of the nineteenth century combined increasingly secular messages and memory in a sacrosanct setting, thus blurring the lines in cemeteries between the secular and the sacred.

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 130-155
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Borsje

What makes the Celts so popular today? Anton van Hamel and Joep Leerssen published on the popularity of imagery connected with pre-Christian Celts, Van Hamel seeing the holistic worldview and Leerssen mysteriousness as appealing characteristics. They explain waves of ‘Celtic revival’ that washed over Europe as reaction and romanticising movements that search for alternatives from contemporaneous dominant culture. Each period has produced its modernized versions of the Celtic past. Besides periodical heightened interest in things Celtic, Van Hamel saw a permanent basis of attraction in Celtic texts, which accommodate ‘primitive’ and romantic mentalities. This article also analyses Celtic Christianity (through The Celtic Way by Ian Bradley and The Celtic Way of Prayer by Esther de Waal) on the use of Celtic texts and imagery of Celtic culture. Two case studies are done (on the use of the Old-Irish Deer’s Cry and the description of a nineteenth-century Scottish ritual). Both the current search for ‘spirituality’ and the last wave of ‘Celtic revival’ seem to have sprung from a reaction movement that criticizes dominant religion/culture and seek inspiration and precursors in an idealized past. The roots of this romantic search for a lost paradise are, however, also present in medieval Irish literature itself. Elements such as aesthetics, imaginative worlds and the posited lost beauty of pre-industrial nature and traditional society are keys in explaining the bridges among the gap between ‘us’ and the Celts. The realization that Celtic languages are endangered or dead heightens the feeling of loss because they are the primary gates towards this lost way of (thinking about) life.


X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Cecamore

The paper proposes a reading of the possible urban development of the historic centre of San Valentino in Abruzzo Citerore starting from the analysis of its architectural heritage. The image of a fortified hamlet surrounded by walls, represented in a painting dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, appears in cartographic reliefs and representations accessible at the local and extra regional archives. The reading of the current architectural set of givens, which are characterized by the continuous use of building techniques related to the processing of local limestones, seeks through comparison with the historic iconography to identify persistences and alterations of the urban fabric, tracing a possible developmental line of San Valentino in Abruzzo Citeriore from medieval castrum to Farnesiano fief up to the substantial interventions of modernization and revision of the historic center operated in the last century. The requests of functional and formal changes occurring at the turn of the nineteenth and twenteeth century implicates the dismantling of the walls, the typological change of the original building and of the urban layout and the loss of the urban imagine resulting consolidated in the collective memory. An awaking context of the main features of the historic and building development of this fortified reality in the Middle Adriatic area is today an indispensable step in this path of consciousness and awareness of the society regarding the urgent problem connected to the neglect and to the conservation of the historic centres.


Author(s):  
Nele Bemong

Between 1830 and 1850, practically out of nowhere there came into beinga truly 'Belgian' literature, written boch in Flemish and in French, but aimedat a single goal: the creation of a Belgian past and the conscruction of aBelgian national identity. The historical novel played a crucial role in thisconscruction and representation of a collective memory for the Belgian statejust out of the cradle. The prefaces to these historical novels are characterizedboth by the central role granted to the representacion of Flanders as the cradleof nineteenth-century Belgium, and by the organically and religiously inspiredimagery. Attempts were made to create an intimate genealogical relationshipwith the forefathers, in order to make the Belgian citizens feel closer to theirrich heritage. Through the activation of specific recollections from theimmense archive of the collective cultural memory, Belgian independencefound its legitimization both towards the international community andtowards the Belgian people.


Antíteses ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (20) ◽  
pp. 979
Author(s):  
Celso Kraemer ◽  
Dominique Santos ◽  
Aniele Crescêncio

RESUMO Ao observar as relações de Nietzsche com seus contemporâneos verifica-se que ele estava ciente das principais discussões relativas à Unificação da Alemanha (1871). Para a unificação era necessário que os 39 estados alemães compartilhassem o sentimento de pertencimento a uma pátria comum. Nesse meandro, os historiadores prussianos do século XIX desempenharam papel fundamental ao produzir um ambiente filosófico nacionalista, uma maneira científica e objetiva de pensar sobre a história. O objetivo deste trabalho é compreender as interações de Nietzsche com estes círculos intelectuais. Para isto, foram selecionados quatro dos chamados fragmentos póstumos de Nietzsche datados entre 1871 e 1873. De acordo com o ponto de vista de Nietzsche, as pretensões dos historiadores, não tinham nenhuma crítica, pois acreditavam, ingenuamente, que a verdade era um alvo tangível. Por outro lado, ele indicou a necessidade de uma história ligada à cultura, que era trabalhada em conjunto com "instintos artísticos".  ABSTRACT By observing the relationship of Nietzsche with his contemporaries one can notice that he was aware of the main discussions related to the unification of Germany (1871). Unification required 39 German states to share the feeling of belonging to a common homeland. Prussian historians of the nineteenth century played a key role in producing such a nationalist philosophical environment, a scientific and objectivist way of thinking about History. This work aim is to understand the interactions between Nietzsche and this intelectual circles. For this purpose, four of the so-called posthumous Nietzsche fragments, dated between 1871 and 1873, were selected. According to Nietzsche's point of view, some historians had a naive pretension to reach the truth, as if it were a tangible target. On another hand, he pointed out the necessity of a link between History and Culture, which should be understood altogether with ‘artistic instincts’. 


Author(s):  
Carolyn Marvin

Electrical professionals were the ambitious catalysts of an industrial shift from steam to electricity taking place in the United States and Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Thomas P. Hughes, Alfred Chandler, and others, that shift was made possible by key inventions in power, transportation, and communication, and by managerial innovations based on them that helped rescale traditional systems of production and distribution. The retooling of American industry fostered a new class of managers of machines and techniques; prominent among them were electrical professionals. The transformation in which these professionals participated was no class revolution, as David Noble has pointed out. Their job was to engineer, promote, improve, maintain, and repair the emerging technical infrastructure in the image of an existing distribution of power. Their ranks included scientists, whose attention was directed to increasingly esoteric phenomena requiring ever more specialized intellectual tools and formal training, electrical engineers, and other “electricians” forging their own new identity from an older one of practical tinkerer and craft worker. Servingmaid to both groups were cadres of operatives from machine tenders to telegraph operators, striving to attach themselves as firmly as possible to this new and highly visible priesthood. Electrical experts before 1900 were acutely conscious of their lack of status in American society relative to other professional groups. The American Institute for Electrical Engineers (AIEE), founded early in 1884, was the last of the major engineering societies to be organized in the nineteenth century. Professional societies had already been organized by civil engineers in 1852, mining engineers in 1871, and mechanical engineers in 1880. The prestige of other groups in the engineering fraternity, especially civil and mechanical engineers, came less from membership in professional societies, however, than from other circumstances. Their practitioners hailed from the upper and middle strata of society, were often products of classical education, and had developed distinctive professional cultures of their own well before the formation of their national organizations. This gave them an established and even aristocratic niche in society.


2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 396-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Markovitz

This article argues that coverage of the Kobe Bryant rape case illuminated bitter divisions in American society, because the allegations against Bryant brought forth tensions involving conceptions of Black masculinity, White femininity, and the role of sport and celebrity in public life. The divisions laid bare by the Bryant case involve long histories of discursive contests waged by social movements and state actors over the meanings of categories of race and gender. I argue that these struggles have influenced public understandings of history; that contemporary understandings of race, gender, and crime are very much indebted to rhetorical battles fought long ago; and that invocations of collective memory can help to determine how various audiences make sense of public dramas unfolding in the mass media.


1932 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Abdel Ross Wentz

About the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, a change came over the general spirit of American society. Historians have often noted the fact and they have described it and explained it in various ways. It was a time of storm and stress, a period of controversy and conflict and finally war. There was scarcely a single phase of life that was not infected. As if by some preconcerted signal the souls of men in most diverse groups and relationships suddenly became sensitive and combative. The result was one of those swift ruptures with the past that leave abiding scars in the body of society.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Sutherland

Kant's Mathematical World aims to transform our understanding of Kant's philosophy of mathematics and his account of the mathematical character of the world. Daniel Sutherland reconstructs Kant's project of explaining both mathematical cognition and our cognition of the world in terms of our most basic cognitive capacities. He situates Kant in a long mathematical tradition with roots in Euclid's Elements, and thereby recovers the very different way of thinking about mathematics which existed prior to its 'arithmetization' in the nineteenth century. He shows that Kant thought of mathematics as a science of magnitudes and their measurement, and all objects of experience as extensive magnitudes whose real properties have intensive magnitudes, thus tying mathematics directly to the world. His book will appeal to anyone interested in Kant's critical philosophy -- either his account of the world of experience, or his philosophy of mathematics, or how the two inform each other.


Author(s):  
Douglas McDermid

This chapter describes how Ferrier had the last laugh, despite his failure to be appointed to Sir William Hamilton’s Chair at Edinburgh in 1856. For by the end of the nineteenth century, it was apparent that several of the once-unpopular causes championed by Ferrier in the 1840s and 1850s had triumphed: Thomas Reid was no longer the beau ideal of most Scottish philosophers, the old meta-philosophy of common sense was decidedly out of favour, and idealism had supplanted realism as the metaphysic of choice in many Scottish universities. Although a few grizzled defenders of Reidian-inspired realism could still be found at home and abroad, their way of thinking seemed banal and un-nuanced to a generation of Scottish students who had cut their philosophical teeth on the subtleties of German speculation.


Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

Between 1771 and 1850 the Boston Massacre itself remained a part of the nation’s collective memory of the American Revolution. Some characterized it as a key event in forging colonial unity while others preferred to distance the Revolution from what they considered a disorderly riot. In either case, Attucks’s role and racial identity remained largely ignored, even among African Americans. A few scattered references to Attucks appeared during the first half of the nineteenth century, but he did not become a focal point for African American arguments for citizenship, inclusion, and equality until the 1850s, when African American activists recognized the central role Attucks might play in establishing blacks’ rightful place in the nation.


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