GIUSEPPE FOLGHERAITER: THE ITALIAN PIONEER OF ARCHAEOMAGNETISM

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-335
Author(s):  
CLAUDIA PRINCIPE ◽  
JONAS MALFATTI

ABSTRACT The history of the science of archaeomagnetism conventionally starts in 1600 with the publication of William Gilbert's monumental work De Magnete, but the theoretical basis of this scientific field has to be positioned at the end of the nineteenth century. In Italy at that time, a number of scientists such as Giambattista Beccaria, Macedonio Melloni and Silvestro Gherardi, were working on magnetic field characteristics and their work variously contributed to the early study of Earth and rock magnetism. A major contribution to the birth of paleomagnetism as a science, and archaeomagnetism as a dating technique, was produced by Giuseppe Folgheraiter (1856–1913) by means of his research on the magnetic properties of volcanic deposits and his attempts to date ancient pottery of different epochs based on the magnetic properties of clay materials. Initially, Folgheraiter studied the rock magnetism of the volcanic rocks of Latium where he replicated the findings of Macedonio Melloni, who had studied Vesuvius lavas, and found that volcanic rocks are affected by a permanent magnetization. In addition, Folgheraiter verified the discovery by Filippo Keller of the Punti distinti. Folgheraiter also made the innovative proposal that lightning strongly influences the magnetic properties of lavas resulting in magnetic disorder. The main analytical effort of Folgheraiter at the end of the nineteenth century was dedicated to the study of the variations of magnetic inclination in different epochs as registered in archaeological pottery. He produced archaeomagnetic sets of analyses on 191 samples grouped into 10 epochs, that resulted in the first reconstruction of a geomagnetic secular variation curve (SVC). Even if nowadays the Folgheraiter analytical results have been replaced by more precise measurements, a great portion of the development of modern archaeomagnetic techniques originated with Folgheraiter’s experiments and intuitions. Many of those advances were improved upon only during the first half of the twentieth century by Emile Thellier (1904–1987). Actually, the well-known work by Thellier, resulting in the birth of the Saint Maur archaeomagnetic laboratory at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, had as a starting point the theories and suggestions developed by Giuseppe Folgheraiter. Based on the studies by Thellier, the well-known secular variation curve for France was derived, later to be perfected by Ileana Bucur in 1994.

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.


2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margery Masterson

AbstractThis article takes an unexplored popular debate from the 1860s over the role of dueling in regulating gentlemanly conduct as the starting point to examine the relationship between elite Victorian masculinities and interpersonal violence. In the absence of a meaningful replacement for dueling and other ritualized acts meant to defend personal honor, multiple modes of often conflicting masculinities became available to genteel men in the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering the security fears of the period––European and imperial, real and imagined––the article illustrates how pacific and martial masculine identities coexisted in a shifting and uneasy balance. The professional character of the enlarging gentlemanly classes and the increased importance of men's domestic identities––trends often aligned with hegemonic masculinity––played an ambivalent role in popular attitudes to interpersonal violence. The cultural history of dueling can thus inform a multifaceted approach toward gender, class, and violence in modern Britain.


2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPH HOFFMANN

AbstractIn 1823 the astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel gave notice of an observational error which is now known as the personal equation. Bessel, however, never used this phrase to characterize the finding that when noting the time of a certain event observers show a considerable ‘involuntary constant difference’. From this starting point the paper develops two arguments. First, these involuntary differences subverted the concept of the ‘observing observer’. What had previously been defined as a reference point of trust and precision turned into a source of an error that resisted any wilful intervention. Second, and contrary to later suggestions, Bessel's findings did not initially lead to discussions and measures of permanent control. In everyday astronomical work the influence of such differences could be avoided by comparatively simple means. Taking this into account offers a new perspective both on the history of the personal equation and on the significance of Bessel's findings. Whereas the former has to be read as the history of a rather particular reaction to the phenomenon of constant differences, the latter is connected with a rather fundamental transition in the epistemology of the observer.


Author(s):  
C. Bolognesi ◽  
D. Aiello

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> This paper describes the relationship among an important nineteenth-century monument, the Cloister of the Prior (located in the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan), its survey and the technical integration of different cultural information to be enjoyed in VR and AR during its visit. In this context, the surveying techniques have to face the problem related to the presence of white and smooth surfaces and the difficulty in obtaining a good result in the 3D modelling. Various tests have been performed to create a good point cloud from the photogrammetric survey of the cloister, conducted through the use of different camera lenses or post production interventions applied to the images, in order to obtain the best results. The 3D modelling is not only a base for creating virtual and augmented experiences (that, through digital contents, explain to the distracted public the history of this less known part of the monument) but also a starting point for possible further studies focused on the modifications that affected the cloister over the centuries.</p>


2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-5
Author(s):  
Katherine K. Preston

The history of music in nineteenth-century America, and the place of music within American culture of the period, is an area of scholarly inquiry that recently has received increased attention. It is also, as the varied articles collected in this issue illustrate, a complex topic and an area ripe for much additional research. The four articles deal with different aspects of nineteenth-century American music history and culture; in each, however, there are also areas of overlap and intersection. All four authors use as a starting point issues that have already been the subject of some scholarly attention, and examine these topics either more thoroughly or from a new theoretical or contextual point of view. The resulting aggregate should help readers to understand better a complicated and under-explored world, for all four articles highlight the complexity of musical life in America and explore some of the many ways that cultural life in the United States reflected and resonated with that of Europe. All four authors, furthermore, either hint at or explicitly mention areas that are ripe for further research.


Diálogos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 205
Author(s):  
Eliete Lucia Tiburski

O artigo apresenta a questão da história do tempo presente e suas relações com o conceito de história no início do século XIX no Brasil. As reflexões serão feitas a partir do trabalho de Gonçalves de Magalhães intitulado Memoria Historica e Documentada da Revolução da Provincia do Maranhão desde 1839 até 1840, publicado na Revista do IHGB em 1848. Trata-se de analisar a condição do historiador enquanto sujeito que intervém em seu próprio tempo, a delimitação do campo da história, seus procedimentos e limites. Abstract The Present Past or as it was written the history of the present time in nineteenth century. Gonçalves de Magalhães and the Memória Histórica da Revolução da Província do Maranhão (1839-1840) This paper presents the question about the history of present time and its relations with the concept of history in the early nineteenth century in Brazil. The starting point of the discussion is the article Memoria Historica e Documentada da Revolução da Provincia do Maranhão desde 1839 até 1840, published by Gonçalves de Magalhães an influential Brazilian history journal in 1848. The goal is to analyze the condition of the historian as a subject involved in his own time, the delimitation of history field, its methods and limits. Resumen El pasado presente o cómo escribir la historia del tiempo presente en el siglo XIX. Gonçalves de Magalhães y la Memória Histórica da Revolução da Província do Maranhão (1839-1840). El artículo presenta la cuestión de la historia del tiempo presente y sus relaciones con el concepto de historia, en el comienzo del siglo XIX, en Brasil. Las reflexiones están realizadas a partir de la obra de Gonçalves de Magalhães, titulada Memoria Historica e Documentada da Revolução da Provincia do Maranhão desde 1839 até 1840, publicada en la Revista IHGB en 1848. Se trata de analizar la condición del historiador como sujeto que interviene en su propio tiempo, la delimitación del campo de la historia, sus procedimientos y límites.


Author(s):  
Amalia D. Kessler

The Conclusion reflects on the accuracy of the nineteenth-century American perception that the United States possessed a distinctively adversarial legal culture and considers how developments traced in this book relate to the present. A comparative overview of nineteenth-century continental European and English civil procedure reveals that Americans were correct that their legal culture was uniquely adversarial. But the postbellum emergence of industrialization and concomitant birth of the regulatory state gave rise to new specialist lawyers, valued more for their expertise and negotiating skills than for their ability to litigate. The path connecting the late nineteenth-century zenith of adversarialism to the present was thus indirect. Nonetheless, the Conclusion argues that the history recounted in this book contributed to making American legal culture today distinctively adversarial. And it suggests that, while there are virtues to adversarialism, Americans have paid a high price for this inheritance—including comparatively greater difficulty in obtaining access to justice. Although a comprehensive reform proposal lies beyond this book, the Conclusion explores some nonadversarial possibilities raised by Americans’ forgotten history of equity and conciliation courts. The starting point, it argues, is to abandon the (constructed and contingent) assumption that due process and adversarial procedure are necessarily the same.


1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Rendall

It is by now accepted that James Mill’s History of British India, which exercised such influence over the British image of India and Indians throughout the nineteenth century, was cast in the mould of‘philosophical history’, the kind of historical writing typical of the Scottish Enlightenment By the 1790s such an approach was faught at Edinburgh by Dugald Stewart, and in Glasgow by John Millar; and their teachings and writings did much to form Mill’s approach, overlaid though it later was by the Benthamite political message. The characteristics of ‘ philosophical history’ can be identified. Writers of the Scottish Enlightenment were concerned to apply to the study of man and society methods of enquiry comparable to those of the natural sciences, and this, for them, involved the formulation of general laws on the basis of observation, and the available evidence about the history, economy, culture, and political institutions of different societies. Certain guidelines were evolved. The starting point was the close interrelationship between all aspects of men's life within society, between the economy, government, culture, and social life of a people. Secondly, a civilisation, by which was implied all these aspects of a society, could be located on an evolutionary scale, a ladder of civilizations running from ‘rudeness’ to ‘refinement’.


Africa ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 510-518 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vera Viditz-Ward

Opening ParagraphIn recent years scholars have shown considerable interest in the early use of photography by non-Western peoples. Research on nineteenth-century Indian, Japanese and Chinese photography has revealed a rich synthesis of European and Asian imagery. These early photographs show how non-Western peoples created new forms of artistic expression by adapting European technology and visual idioms for their own purposes. Because of the long history of contact between Sierra Leoneans and Europeans, Freetown seemed a logical starting point for similar photographic research in West Africa. The information presented here is based on ten years of searching for nineteenth-century photographs made by Sierra Leonean photographers. To locate these pictures, I have visited Freetonians and viewed their family portraits and photograph albums, interviewed contemporary photographers throughout Sierra Leone, and researched in the various colonial archives in England to locate photographs preserved from the period of colonial rule. I have discovered that a community of African photographers has worked in the city of Freetown since the very invention of photography. The article reviews the first phase of this unique photographic tradition, 1850–1918, and focuses on several of the African photographers who worked in Freetown during this period.


Author(s):  
Katarzyna Garczewska-Semka

Abstract The National Library of Poland holds three historical collections with a unified visual form. The arrangement of the Wilanów collection was carried out in the first half of the nineteenth century, whereas the Krasiński collection was arranged in the early twentieth century respectively the 1950’s or 1960’s in the case of drawings by Norwid. This contribution describes the structure of mountings found in these collections, as well as the historical context in which they were created. It serves as a starting point to provide an outline of the history of conservation methods and preservation of prints’ and drawings’ collections in Poland.


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