Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 229-244

This concluding chapter assesses the importance of Dmitrii Mendeleev as an individual. One could in principle similarly follow the paths of many figures in Imperial Russia or in nineteenth-century science—or, in fact, in almost any place or time. Yet Mendeleev offers a particularly valuable perspective on the history of both Russia and chemistry. The educated elite in Imperial Petersburg was quite small, and individuals who were prominent in several groups—such as Sergei Witte or Feodor Dostoevsky—were able to imprint their concepts deeply on Russia's state or its culture. Mendeleev, on the other hand, unified artists, writers, scientists, and bureaucrats while preserving their traces in his sizable personal archive; his life illustrates what it was like to live and work in St. Petersburg. Moreover, his chemical ideas demonstrate how European science functioned, as well as how barriers of language and culture placed constraints on scientific attempts at attaining universality.

CEM ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 218-238
Author(s):  
Cristiana Vieira ◽  
Ana Catarina Antunes ◽  
Sónia Faria

The present work explores the recognition of the past and present genius loci of three spaces of Porto city center as remaining and transformed representations of spaces with distinct, interconnected and pertinent botanical missions in the nineteenth century landscape of the city. Through the exploration of sources left by the interveners or graphic testimonies of the urban landscape from 1850 to the present day of these (ethno-)botanical spaces, we explore how the interveners and spaces of the Jardim Botânico da Academia Polythecnica do Porto, the Horto-pharmacêutico da Botica da Hospital Real de Santo António and the Horto das Virtudes mutually influenced. On the other hand, it is demonstrated how these spaces determined a time of special interest in botany that would not be repeated in the history of the city and its population.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-55
Author(s):  
Joshua Bennett

The chapter introduces the process by which progressive and developmental ideas of history became authoritative in Protestant intellectual culture: a process affecting Anglicans and nonconformists; liberals and evangelicals; and religious and secular critics. It argues that the religious revivalism of the earlier part of the century tended to express itself in terms of static conceptions of religious tradition. Religious and secular varieties of liberalism, by contrast, began to rely upon more dynamic ideas of the religious past. Religious liberals challenged traditionalists by interpreting religion in developmental terms. Rooting the wider progress of civilization in the different phases of the history of the church, they elevated history into a new kind of natural theology, often with reference to different kinds of German Idealism. Their unbelieving critics, on the other hand, understood progress as the history of secularization. The chapter grounds these debates in the institutions and publishing culture of the Victorian public sphere.


1968 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart B. Schwartz

Few epochs in the history of the Portuguese colonial empire have received less attention from historians than the sixty years from 1580–1640 when Portugal and Spain were jointly ruled by the Spanish Hapsburgs, Philip II, III, IV (or I, II, III by Portuguese reckoning). The union of the crowns in 1580 brought together the two greatest maritime empires of the sixteenth century, yet, curiously, this phenomenon has remained relatively unstudied. Portuguese neglect is based on the premise that the union with Spain was a “Babylonian Captivity“ during which the Spanish rulers and their policies destroyed in a half century what had taken the Portuguese two hundred years to build. Nationalism has prompted Portuguese scholars to concentrate on the loss of independence in 1580 or its triumphant restitution in 1640, but although this motivation is still present, a new generation of Portuguese historians has begun to turn from the shibboleths of their nineteenth-century predecessors. Spanish historiography, on the other hand, disdains the topic; hardly surprising since even today to many Spaniards “a Portuguese is a Galician who speaks poorly.” Moreover, there is the embarrassing fact that the Portuguese were able to wrest their independence from Spanish rule.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Freidin ◽  
Juan Uriagereka ◽  
David Berlinski

The following remarks attempt to place Jean-Roger Vergnaud’s letter to Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik more centrally within the history of modern generative grammar from its inception to the present.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
William Skiles

This article examines the nature and frequency of comments about Jews and Judaism in sermons delivered by Confessing Church pastors in the Nazi dictatorship.  The approach of most historians has focused on the history of antisemitism in the German Protestant tradition—in the works, pronouncements, and policies of the German churches and its leading figures.  Yet historians have left unexamined the most elemental task of the pastor—that is, preaching from the pulpit to the German people.  What would the average German congregant have heard from his pastor about the Jews and Judaism on any given Sunday?  I searched German archives, libraries, and used book stores, and analyzed 910 sermon manuscripts that were produced and disseminated in the Nazi regime.  I argue that these sermons provide mixed messages about Jews and Judaism.  While on the one hand, the sermons express admiration for Judaism as a foundation for Christianity, an insistence on the usage of the Hebrew Bible in the German churches, and the conviction that the Jews are spiritual cousins of Christians.  On the other hand, the sermons express religious prejudice in the form of anti-Judaic tropes that corroborated the Nazi ideology that portrayed Jews and Judaism as inferior: for instance, that Judaism is an antiquated religion of works rather than grace; that the Jews killed Christ and have been punished throughout history as a consequence.  Furthermore, I demonstrate that Confessing Church pastors commonly expressed anti-Judaic statements in the process of criticizing the Nazi regime, its leadership, and its policies.


2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (128) ◽  
pp. 401-417
Author(s):  
Paul van Tongeren

Is friendship still possible under nihilistic conditions? Kant and Nietzsche are important stages in the history of the idealization of friendship, which leads inevitably to the problem of nihilism. Nietzsche himself claims on the one hand that only something like friendship can save us in our nihilistic condition, but on the other hand that precisely friendship has been unmasked and become impossible by these very conditions. It seems we are struck in the nihilistic paradox of not being allowed to believe in the possibility of what we cannot do without. Literary imagination since the 19th century seems to make us even more skeptical. Maybe Beckett provides an illustration of a way out that fits well to Nietzsche's claim that only "the most moderate, those who do not require any extreme articles of faith" will be able to cope with nihilism.


1898 ◽  
Vol 63 (389-400) ◽  
pp. 56-61

The two most important deviations from the normal life-history of ferns, apogamy and apospory, are of interest in themselves, but acquire a more general importance from the possibility that their study may throw light on the nature of alternation of generations in archegoniate plants. They have been considered from this point of view Pringsheim, and by those who, following him, regard the two generations as homologous with one another in the sense that the sporophyte arose by the gradual modification of individuals originally resemblin the sexual plant. Celakovsky and Bower, on the other hand, maintaint the view tha t the sporophyte, as an interpolated stage in the life-history arising by elaboration of the zygote, a few thallophytes.


2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Kaye

Much of the critical writingon Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault'sThe History of Sexuality(1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus'sThe Other Victorians(1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world thatThe History of Sexualityhad so forcefully undermined.


1985 ◽  
Vol 24 (95) ◽  
pp. 327-340
Author(s):  
Francis Thompson

The Irish land act of 1881, it is generally agreed, was a victory for the Land League and Parnell, and nationalist policy with regard to the act and the attitude of southern tenants towards it have been many times subjected to detailed examination by historians of this period. In these analyses of the events of 1880–81, however, little reference is normally made to the part played by the different parties and interests in the north of the country. It is often assumed, for example, that the Ulster tenants held aloof from the campaign for reform, lending no more than occasional vocal support to the agitational efforts of tenants in the south and west. Indeed, they were later excoriated by William O'Brien, Michael Davitt and others not only for giving no support to the land movement but also for sabotaging Parnell's policy of testing the 1881 act by precipitately rushing into the land courts to take advantage of the new legislation: ‘that hard-fisted body of men, having done nothing themselves to win the act, thought of nothing but turning it to their own immediate use, and repudiating any solidarity with the southern and western rebels to whom they really owed it’. If, however, northern tenants were harshly judged by nationalist politicians in the years after 1881, the part played by the northern political parties in the history of the land bill has been either ignored or misunderstood by historians since that time. The Ulster liberals, for example, are rarely mentioned, the implication being that they made no contribution to the act even though it implemented almost exactly the programme on which they had been campaigning for much of the previous decade. The northern conservatives, on the other hand, are commonly seen as leading opponents of the bill, more intransigent than their party colleagues in the south, ‘quick to denounce any weakening of the opposition’ to reform, and ‘determined to keep the tory party up to the mark in defending the landlord interest’


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