In My Time of Dying

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Over Time

This book is the first detailed history of death and the dead in Africa south of the Sahara. Focusing on a region that is now present-day Ghana, the book explores mortuary cultures and the relationship between the living and the dead over a 400-year period spanning the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. The book considers many questions from the African historical perspective, including why people die and where they go after death, how the dead are buried and mourned to ensure they continue to work for the benefit of the living, and how perceptions and experiences of death and the ends of life have changed over time. From exuberant funeral celebrations encountered by seventeenth-century observers to the brilliantly conceived designer coffins of the late twentieth century, the book shows that the peoples of Ghana have developed one of the world's most vibrant cultures of death. The book explores the unfolding background of that culture through a diverse range of issues, such as the symbolic power of mortal remains and the dominion of hallowed ancestors, as well as the problem of bad deaths, vile bodies, and vengeful ghosts. The book reconstructs a vast timeline of death and the dead, from the era of the slave trade to the coming of Christianity and colonial rule to the rise of the modern postcolonial nation. With an array of written and oral sources, the book richly adds to an understanding of how the dead continue to weigh on the shoulders of the living.

scholarly journals “A Way of Thinking Backwards”

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 300-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Hepler-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Computer Program ◽  
Organic Chemical ◽  
Complex Molecules ◽  
Retrosynthetic Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Computer Automation ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This article addresses the history of how chemists designed syntheses of complex molecules during the mid-to-late twentieth century, and of the relationship between devising, describing, teaching, and computerizing methods of scientific thinking in this domain. It details the development of retrosynthetic analysis, a key method that chemists use to plan organic chemical syntheses, and LHASA (Logic and Heuristics Applied to Synthetic Analysis), a computer program intended to aid chemists in this task. The chemist E. J. Corey developed this method and computer program side-by-side, from the early 1960s through the 1990s. Although the LHASA program never came into widespread use, retrosynthetic analysis became a standard method for teaching and practicing synthetic planning, a subject previously taken as resistant to generalization. This article shows how the efforts of Corey and his collaborators to make synthetic planning tractable to teaching and to computer automation shaped a way of thinking taken up by chemists, unaided by machines. The method of retrosynthetic analysis made chemical thinking (as Corey perceived it) explicit, in accordance with the demands of computing (as Corey and his LHASA collaborators perceived them). This history of automation and method-making in recent chemistry suggests a potentially productive approach to the study of other projects to think on, with, or like machines.

The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in the English Courtroom

1999 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tal Golan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Expert Testimony ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Scientific Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Law Courts ◽  
The One ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The ArgumentThis paper provides a historical perspective to one of the liveliest debates in common law courts today — the one over scientific expert testimony. Arguing against the current tendency to present the problem of expert testimony as a late twentieth-century predicament which threatens to spin out of control, the paper shows that the phenomena of conflicting scientific testimonies have been perennial for at least two centuries, and intensely debated in both the legal and the scientific communities for at least 150 years.

Writing self and kin: diasporic mourning in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet

2019 ◽  
pp. 151-174
Author(s):  
Gigi Adair
Keyword(s):  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Queer Diaspora ◽  
Kinship Bonds ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Contemporary Britain

This chapter considers how queer diaspora may be generated via mourning. Jackie Kay’s novel shows how mourning makes visible and performatively constructs kinship bonds, and that it is also an active process which rewrites the lives of the dead and living. This process of mourning and the constitution of self and kin in the novel takes place in the ‘diaspora space’ of contemporary Britain. Mourning is a force which creates queer diasporic bonds, affirming connections with the dead and transforming the living, enfolding the past into the future. It becomes clear that mourning and kinship are not only individually determined, but also influenced by a shared Black Atlantic history of loss, displacement and racialization. The novel suggests that two modes of kinship – one state-recognized, governed by genealogy or legal recognition, the other mobile, performative and created by shared experience and aesthetic creation – coexist in the context of late twentieth-century Britain, and that these latter, queerly diasporic notions of kinship have shaped contemporary Britain in numerous ways.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Made In

This brief conclusion considers a group of films and videos about cinema made in the late twentieth century. Cinema has always been a favorite topic for filmmakers, and that tendency continued at the turn of the millennium. Rather than frame film as a perpetually modern medium, this work views it as an aging, fragile, and exhausted art, though it also considers the history of cinema as a paradoxical source of innovation and renewal. This conclusion surveys key examples of cinema trained on itself and links this reflexive filmmaking to the era’s dominant themes, including belatedness and nostalgia. A final discussion of the Derek Jarman’s Blue highlights the relationship between surface and depth, aesthetics and history explored in this archaeomodern cinema.

Intersectionality and Marxism: A Critical Historiography

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Bohrer
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
First Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Critical Historiography ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractIn recent years, there has been renewed interest in conceptualising the relationship between oppression and capitalism as well as intense debate over the precise nature of this relationship. No doubt spurred on by the financial crisis, it has become increasingly clear that capitalism, both historically and in the twenty-first century, has had particularly devastating effects for women and people of colour. Intersectionality, which emerged in the late twentieth century as a way of addressing the relationship between race, gender, sexuality and class, has submitted orthodox Marxism to critique for its inattention to the complex dynamics of various social locations; in turn Marxist thinkers in the twenty-first century have engaged with intersectionality, calling attention to the impoverished notion of class and capitalism on which it relies. As intersectionality constitutes perhaps the most common way that contemporary activists and theorists on the left conceive of identity politics, an analysis of intersectionality’s relationship to Marxism is absolutely crucial for historical materialists to understand and consider. This paper looks at the history of intersectionality’s and Marxism’s critiques of one another in order to ground a synthesis of the two frameworks. It argues that in the twenty-first century, we need a robust, Marxist analysis of capitalism, and that the only robust account of capitalism is one articulated intersectionally, one which treats class, race, gender and sexuality as fundamental to capitalist accumulation.

A Walk in the Woods

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ehrenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
California Coast ◽  
Light Rain ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Guided Tour ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The forest was small by American standards, perhaps fifty or sixty acres, but in the rolling Devon countryside with its parceled fields and narrow, hedge-enclosed lanes, it felt appropriately spacious. I was enjoying the guided tour in one of my favorite parts of the world. The light rain and chilly July breezes felt right; the English ivy carpeting the ground seemed right; the leafy hardwoods looked right (although I didn’t know the species and could easily have been fooled); and the probably medieval bank and ditch running through the woods at right angles to the path gave everything an impressive air of authenticity. The path turned. As we rounded the corner, I saw ahead the darker shade of conifers. Soon we were in the midst of a grove of youthful but already towering California-coast redwoods. A deep silence hung like a benediction over the dark wood, but it was quickly shattered. “I’d give anything to be allowed to cut them down,” said our guide, Stephan, in an angry voice. This incident passed out of my thoughts until weeks later back in New Jersey, when I was reading the chapter on conservation in Oliver Rack-ham’s The History of the Countryside, an account of the origins of Britain’s landscapes, flora, and fauna. The British landscape of the late twentieth century, Rack-ham wrote, is suffering from an acute loss of meaning—the unique messages once conveyed by many historic woodlands, witness to millennia of slow and painstaking change, have been garbled beyond recognition in five or six decades of modern planting, “restoration,” development, and agriculture. The more I read in this remarkable book, surely one of the most profound and eloquent descriptions of people and nature ever written, the more I understood Stephan’s feeling that his Devon woodland had been desecrated by the planting of those redwoods. I also began to understand how little I knew about the long discourse between people and trees in Britain, where the history of the relationship is probably as well documented as in any place on earth.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

URBAN DISPLACEMENT AND LOW-INCOME COMMUNITIES: THE CASE OF THE AMERICAN CITY FROM THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 06 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Knight ◽  
Mohammad Gharipour
Keyword(s):  
Urban Communities ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Urban Redevelopment ◽  
Minority Populations ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Cultural Connections ◽  
American Cities ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

How can urban redevelopment benefit existing low-income communities? The history of urban redevelopment is one of disruption of poor communities. Renewal historically offered benefits to the place while pushing out the people. In some cases, displacement is intentional, in others it is unintentional. Often, it is the byproduct of the quest for profits. Regardless of motives, traditional communities, defined by cultural connections, are often disrupted. Disadvantaged neighborhoods include vacant units, which diminish the community and hold back investment. In the postwar period, American cities entered into a program of urban renewal. While this program cleared blight, it also drove displacement among the cities’ poorest and was particularly hard on minority populations clustered in downtown slums. The consequences of these decisions continue to play out today. Concentration of poverty is increasing and American cities are becoming more segregated. As neighborhoods improve, poorer residents are uprooted and forced into even more distressed conditions, elsewhere. This paper examines the history of events impacting urban communities. It further reviews the successes and failures of efforts to benefit low-income communities.

Muscovy and the Tatars

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-431
Author(s):  
Bulat R. Rakhimzianov
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Political ◽  
East European ◽  
Central Eurasia ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mutual Relations ◽  
Forest Line ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article explores relations between Muscovy and the so-called Later Golden Horde successor states that existed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the territory of Desht-i Qipchaq (the Qipchaq Steppe, a part of the East European steppe bounded roughly by the Oskol and Tobol rivers, the steppe-forest line, and the Caspian and Aral Seas). As a part of, and later a successor to, the Juchid ulus (also known as the Golden Horde), Muscovy adopted a number of its political and social institutions. The most crucial events in the almost six-century-long history of relations between Muscovy and the Tatars (13–18th centuries) were the Mongol invasion of the Northern, Eastern and parts of the Southern Rus’ principalities between 1237 and 1241, and the Muscovite annexation of the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates between 1552 and 1556. According to the model proposed here, the Tatars began as the dominant partner in these mutual relations; however, from the beginning of the seventeenth century this role was gradually inverted. Indicators of a change in the relationship between the Muscovite grand principality and the Golden Horde can be found in the diplomatic contacts between Muscovy and the Tatar khanates. The main goal of the article is to reveal the changing position of Muscovy within the system of the Later Golden Horde successor states. An additional goal is to revisit the role of the Tatar khanates in the political history of Central Eurasia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...

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