scholarly journals Rethinking Science, Religion and Nature in Environmental History: Drought in Early Twentieth-Century New Zealand

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Beattie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Opportunities ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Settler Society ◽  
Scientific Ideas

This article investigates popular and elite conceptions of science and religion in an early twentieth-century European settler society. It uses the case-study of rainmaking experiments and prayers in North Otago, New Zealand, in 1907, to challenge two dominant paradigms about New Zealand society: first, that scientific rationalism was automatically antipathetic to religion and, second, that by the early twentieth century scientific ideas were secularizing New Zealand society. North Otago's residents viewed prayer and experiment as complementary activities designed to meet the same ends; there was no distinctive, hermetically sealed division between the secular and the profane. Rainmaking also offers a fascinating way of exploring contested notions of science. While local residents enthusiastically embraced the use of explosives to bring rain, meteorologists decried these measures as unscientific and amateurish, thereby attempting to increase the legitimacy of their own profession. The reaction to North Otago's rainmaking prayers and experiments differed considerably from that of other societies such as in England and Australia in which similar prayers and experiments were undertaken. These differences reflected the special social and cultural characteristics of each country and, in New Zealand's case, its greater religious tolerance and social opportunities.

scholarly journals Rethinking Science, Religion and Nature in Environmental History: Drought in Early Twentieth-Century New Zealand

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Beattie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Opportunities ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Settler Society ◽  
Scientific Ideas

This article investigates popular and elite conceptions of science and religion in an early twentieth-century European settler society. It uses the case-study of rainmaking experiments and prayers in North Otago, New Zealand, in 1907, to challenge two dominant paradigms about New Zealand society: first, that scientific rationalism was automatically antipathetic to religion and, second, that by the early twentieth century scientific ideas were secularizing New Zealand society. North Otago's residents viewed prayer and experiment as complementary activities designed to meet the same ends; there was no distinctive, hermetically sealed division between the secular and the profane. Rainmaking also offers a fascinating way of exploring contested notions of science. While local residents enthusiastically embraced the use of explosives to bring rain, meteorologists decried these measures as unscientific and amateurish, thereby attempting to increase the legitimacy of their own profession. The reaction to North Otago's rainmaking prayers and experiments differed considerably from that of other societies such as in England and Australia in which similar prayers and experiments were undertaken. These differences reflected the special social and cultural characteristics of each country and, in New Zealand's case, its greater religious tolerance and social opportunities.

“It’s Really Where Your Parents Were”

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Case Study Approach ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Children And Parents ◽  
Missionary Children

This essay focuses on early twentieth-century missionary British world missionary children and their families to provide a point of comparison with an existing body of work on nineteenth-century missionary children. Through a case study approach, focusing on two Presbyterian missionary families (Scottish and New Zealand) and using both written and oral sources, it asks how we might usefully historicize their lives. The case studies indicate that early twentieth-century children’s historical lives were primarily framed within the religiously defined narratives of the missionary family—albeit narratives that varied depending on geographical, cultural, theological, and temporal contexts or with respect to points of family origin—and that these narratives were articulated differently from children’s and parents’ perspectives. While family is central to the analysis, the article makes a case for attending to the voices of both children and parents, within broader historiographical and historical contexts.

The Obligation to Choose

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Past ◽  
Light Quanta ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wave Particle Duality ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Chapter 1 explores Woolf’s writings up to the end of 1925 in relation to scientific ideas on wave-particle duality, providing the ‘retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels’ which Michael Whitworth has suggested shows that she was working ‘in anticipation of the physicists’. The chapter as a whole challenges this idea of anticipation, showing that Woolf was actually working in parallel with physicists, philosophers, and artists in the early twentieth century, all of whom were starting to question dualistic models and instead beginning to develop complementary ones. A retrospect on wave-particle duality is also provided, making reference to Max Planck’s work on quanta and Albert Einstein’s development of light quanta. This chapter pays close attention to Woolf’s writing of light and her use of conjunctions, suggesting that Woolf was increasingly looking to write ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. Among other texts, it considers Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and ‘Sketch of the Past’.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, the Introduction sets out the approach adopted across this study as a whole as one which will combine, but also distinguish between, the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. Rejecting the previous critical focus on 1919 in studies of Albert Einstein’s cultural impact in favour of 1905, it argues for a more precise engagement with the scientific ideas, as well as a clearer acknowledgement of similar ideas across a broader range of disciplines in the early twentieth century. It also highlights Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence as particularly apt literary figures for such a study, given their complicated individual relationships with the science of their day, relationships which combine a dislike of science in general with more positive responses to the new physics.

Extractivist Geographies: Mining and Development in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century Peru

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Himley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
National Level ◽  
National Development ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Siglo Xix ◽  
Extractive Economies

In Peru, development dreams have not infrequently been hitched to the expansion of mining and other extractive activities. While the Peruvian state pursued strategies to stimulate mining expansion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the geography of capitalist mining that emerged mapped poorly onto the national development imaginaries of the country’s elites. State-led efforts to mobilize subsurface resources in the service of national-level development conflicted with the tendency for extractive economies to exhibit uneven and discontinuous spatialities. Attention to the long-run unevenness of extractive investment in global resource frontiers such as Peru promises to deepen understandings of both world environmental history and the contemporary politics of resource extractivism. En el Perú, los sueños de desarrollo han sido enganchados con frecuencia a la expansión de la minería y otras actividades extractivas. Mientras que el estado peruano siguió estrategias para estimular la expansión minera a fines del siglo XIX y principios del XX, la geografía de la minería capitalista que surgió no se proyectó bien en los imaginarios de desarrollo nacional de las élites del país. Los esfuerzos dirigidos por el estado para movilizar los recursos del subsuelo al servicio del desarrollo a nivel nacional contradijeron la tendencia de las economías extractivas a mostrar espacialidades desparejas y discontinuas. La atención al carácter desparejo a largo plazo de la inversión extractiva en las fronteras de recursos globales, como Perú, promete profundizar el entendimiento tanto de la historia ambiental mundial como de la política contemporánea del extractivismo de recursos.

scholarly journals SACRALISATION AND THE COLONIAL-INDIGENOUS ENCOUNTER IN SOUTHERN AFRICAN CHRISTIAN HISTORY: THE MEMORY AND LEGACY OF JOHANNES DU PLESSIS AS CASE STUDY

2015 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Retief Muller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indigenous Knowledge ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Biblical Scholar ◽  
Christian History

The role of the Dutch Reformed Church’s mission policies in the development of apartheid ideology has in recent times come under increased scrutiny. In terms of the formulation of missionary theory within the DRC, the controversial figure of Johannes du Plessis played a significant role in the early twentieth century. In addition to his work as a mission theorist, Du Plessis was a biblical scholar at Stellenbosch University who was found guilty of heresy by his church body, despite having much support from the rank and file membership. This article asks questions regarding the ways in which his memory and legacy are often evaluated from the twin, yet opposing perspectives of sacralisation and vilification. It also considers the wider intellectual influences on Du Plessis such as the missiology of the German theologian, Gustav Warneck. Du Plessis’s missionary theory helped to lay the groundwork for the later development of apartheid ideology, but perhaps in spite of himself, he also introduced a subverting discourse into Dutch Reformed theology. Some of the incidental consequences of this discourse, particularly in relation to the emerging theme of indigenous knowledge, are furthermore assessed here.

The significance of aesthetic landscape appreciation to modern geotourism provision

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Hose
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Lake District ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
English Lake District ◽  
European Engagement ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Nineteeth Century

Many of the stakeholders involved in modern geotourism provision lack awareness of how the concept essentially ermeged, developed and was defined in Europe. Such stakeholders are unaware of how many of the modern approaches to landscape promotion and interpretation actually have nineteeth century antecedents. Similarly, many of the apparently modern threats to, and issues around, the protection of wild and fragile landscapes and geoconservation of specific geosites also first emerged in the ninetheeth century; the solutions that were developed to address those threats and issues were first applied in the early twentieth century and were subsequently much refined by the opening of the twenty-first century. However, the European engagement with wild and fragile landscapes as places to be appreciated and explored began much earlier than the nineteenth century and can be traced back to Renaissance times. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a summary consideration of this rather neglected aspect of geotourism, initially by considering its modern recognition and definitions and then by examining the English Lake District (with further examples from Britain and Australia available at the website) as a particular case study along with examples.

Smoking Bans and Shop Floor Resistance during the Early Twentieth Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Wood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Large Mass ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Smoking Bans ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Paper Company ◽  
Time Away

This chapter explores early-twentieth-century employers' opposition to smoking in the workplace, focusing on a case study of smoking practices and shop floor disputes at the Hammermill Paper Company in Erie, Pennsylvania, during the long, hot summer of 1915. Uniquely detailed reports of working conditions and workers' behaviors in this large mass-production factory, written by a pair of curious labor spies, documented nicely the ongoing efforts of many workers to circumvent the company's prohibition of smoking. In response to the refusal of management to allow smoking, workers improvised an assortment of surreptitious strategies that would allow them to smoke at work and enjoy time away from their jobs. As the Hammermill case illustrates, the wide extent of worker subversion made the no-smoking rule a dead letter, much to the constant frustration of management and the spies themselves.

An Agitator Abroad

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Clayworth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Compulsory Arbitration ◽  
Transnational Network

Patrick Hodgens Hickey, a New Zealander, was a labor activist who introduced American ideas of revolutionary industrial unionism and socialist political action to the country of his birth. Hickey grew up in rural New Zealand at a time of industrial peace under a compulsory arbitration system and initially had little interest in unions or socialism. He learned mining skills while working as an itinerant laborer in the United States, becoming part of a transnational network of mine workers. He was radicalized by his experiences of American class conflict and his involvement with the militant Western Federation of Miners. Returning to New Zealand, he became a leader of a workers’ revolt against the compulsory arbitration system in the period from 1907 through to 1914. Hickey was a key organizer of the union peak body that became the New Zealand Federation of Labour, the “Red Feds.” Following the defeats of the Waihi strike of 1912 and the Great Strike of 1913, Hickey suffered blacklisting. He went to Australia in 1915 to escape the blacklist and the threat of wartime conscription. In Australia he worked as a union activist and anticonscription campaigner. Hickey’s life and career illustrate the transnational migration of workers and their ideas in the early twentieth century.

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