scholarly journals Mediumistic Materializations in France During the Early 1920s

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-223
Author(s):  
Carlos S. Alvarado
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Circumstantial Evidence ◽  
Psychical Research ◽  
Research Context ◽  
Main Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Vital Forces ◽  
Research Studies

As I have argued before in this journal, there is a rich tradition of psychical research studies of materialization mediums published before 1930 (Alvarado, 2019a). The phenomenon, associated with many well-known mediums such as Eva C., Florence Cook, William Eglinton, D. D. Home, Franek Kluski, and Eusapia Palladino, has been reviewed by many both during the nineteenth century and later (e.g., Moses, 1884–1886; Richet, 1922, Part 3). Opinions about it have been diverse. In a review of nineteenth-century evidence about it in his book Modern Spiritualism, Frank Podmore (1902, Vol. 2, Chapter 6) was rather dubious about the existence of the phenomenon. In his later concise history of psychical research, Rudolf Tischner (1924) argued that we cannot be sure if “strict proof of the reality of materialization has been provided,” but there has been “circumstantial evidence of considerable strength” (p. 68; this, and other translations, are mine). More positively, Charles Richet (1922) wrote in his celebrated Traité de métapsychique that materializations could “take a definitive rank in science” even if “we understand absolutely nothing about it” (p. 690). Over the years these attitudes have been maintained by many writers and students of the subject, some of which speculate about vital forces and spirit action. In addition, there have been various reports of fraud with materialization mediums (e.g., Sitwell & Von Buch, 1880; Wallace, 1906). Students of the history of materialization phenomena are aware of the studies on the subject by French individuals such as Juliette Bisson and Gustave Geley. This is the main work reviewed by Antonio Leon, who has a doctorate in history from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. In Sessões de Ectoplasmia, which focuses on French developments during the 1920s, Leon analyzes materialization phenomena, some of which were studied at the Institut Métapsychique International (IMI) during the 1920s. This book appears at an appropriate time because IMI celebrated their centenary in 2019. Leon states that in his work about IMI he set out to investigate how the experiments took place, their organization, the precautions taken to prevent fraud, their procedures of control, the phenomena, their description, and who the mediums were and the investigators involved . . . [The book] aims to verify the various aspects that pervaded the experiments during the decade of the 1920s, . . . the values and rules of the investigations of ectoplasm of this period. It will also focus on the research context in which the experiments were located. (p. 19)

Adam Zalužanský’s “De sexu plantarum” (1592): an early pioneering chapter on plant sexuality

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
History Of Botany ◽  
Main Work ◽  
Botanical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.

An Introduction to the History of International Law

1924 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baron S. A. Korff
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
History Of International Law

For a long time writers on international law took it for granted that the subject of their studies was a relatively recent product of modern civilization, and that the ancient world did not know any system of international law. If we go back to the literature of the nineteenth century, we can find a certain feeling of pride among internationalists that international law was one of the best fruits of our civilization and that it was a system which distinguished us from the ancient barbarians. Some of these writers paid special attention to this question of origins and endeavored to explain why the ancient world never could have had any international law.

scholarly journals Medical and Chemical Expertise in English Trials for Criminal Poisoning, 1750–1914

2006 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine D Watson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Expert Testimony ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Legal Practice ◽  
Criminal Proceedings ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Medical Expertise ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

This article contributes to the literature on the history of medico-legal practice by using a survey of 535 poisoning cases to examine the emergence of forensic toxicological expertise in nineteenth-century English criminal trials. In emphasizing chemical expertise, it seeks both to expand upon a limited literature on the history of the subject, and to offer a contrast to studies of criminal poisoning that have tended to focus primarily on medical expertise. Poisoning itself is a topic of abiding interest to historians of forensic medicine and science because (together with insanity) it long tended to attract the greatest attention (and often confrontation) in criminal proceedings. In looking at a wide number of cases, however, it becomes apparent that few aroused true medico-legal controversy. Rather, the evidence from several hundred cases tried as felonies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries indicates that prior to the 1830s few presented any opportunity for “a battle of experts”. While Ian Burney and Tal Golan have shown that this was certainly not the case during the mid and late nineteenth century, this paper goes further by dividing the period under study into three distinct phases in order to show how expert testimony (and experts themselves) changed during the course of the century, and why this process opened a door to the potential for formalized controversy.

Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate

1984 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 199-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blair Worden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Moral Foundations ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Toleration is a Victorian subject, a monument to Victorian liberalism. ‘To us who have been educated in the nineteenth century’, proclaimed F. A. Inderwick in his book on the Interregnum, ‘any declaration inconsistent with religious toleration would be abhorrent and inadmissible’. His sentiment would not have seemed controversial to a generation raised on such best-selling works as Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England and Lecky’s History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism. It may be that the Victorians, enquiring into the origins of the toleration which they had achieved, were prone to congratulate the past on becoming more like the present. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when interest in the subject was perhaps at its peak, we can also detect, in the statements on toleration of a Creighton or a Figgis, a fear that the present might become more like the past: that materialism and religious indifference might destroy the moral foundations of toleration, and foster a new barbarism which would persecute Christians afresh.

Henry Dresser and Victorian Ornithology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry A. McGhie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
Museum Studies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bird Conservation ◽  
Conservation Movement ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This book explores the life of Henry Dresser (1838–1915), one of the most productive British ornithologists of the mid-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it is also an exploration of ornithology during a period when the subject changed dramatically. The book is based on previously unpublished letters, diaries and photographs to provide the first detailed biography of any of the independent industrialist–naturalists who dominated nineteenth century British ornithology. Dresser travelled widely in Europe, New Brunswick and to Texas during the American Civil War before settling down to work in London in the timber and iron trades. He built enormous collections of skins and eggs of birds, many of which came from famous travellers and collectors. These collections formed the basis of over 100 publications on birds including some of the finest and some of the last of the great bird books of the late nineteenth century, combining cutting-edge scientific information with masterpieces of bird illustration. Dresser played a leading role in scientific society and in the early bird conservation movement. His correspondence and diaries reveal the inner workings, motivations, personal relationships and rivalries that existed among the leading ornithologists. This book is aimed at anyone interested in birds, history and natural history, and as a textbook for courses relating to history, history of science and museum studies.

History of the Historiography of Spanish Textbooks and Treatises on International Law of the 19th Century

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Yolanda Gamarra Chopo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Late Development ◽  
Spanish History ◽  
Principal Axes ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century

The bibliography of Spanish international law textbooks is a good indicator of the evolution of the historiography of international law. Spanish historiography, with its own special features, was a recipient of the great debates concerning naturalism v. positivism and universalism v. particularism that flourished in European and American historiography in the nineteenth century. This study is articulated on four principal axes. The first states how the writings of the philosophes continued to dominate the way in which the subject was conceived in mid-nineteenth century Spain. Secondly, it explores the popularization and democratization of international law through the work of Concepcion Arenal and the heterodox thought of Rafael Maria de Labra. Thirdly, it examines the first textbooks of international law with their distinct natural law bias, but imbued with certain positivist elements. These textbooks trawled sixteenth century Spanish history, searching for the origins of international law and thus demonstrating the historical civilizing role of Spain, particularly in America. Fourthly, it considers the vision of institutionist, heterodox reformers and bourgeois liberals who proclaimed the universality of international law, not without some degree of ambivalence, and their defence of Spain as the object of civilization and also a civilizing subject. In conclusion, the article argues that the late development of textbooks was a consequence of the late institutionalization of the study of international law during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the legacy of the nineteenth century survives in the most progressive of contemporary polemics for a new international law.

scholarly journals Experiences in Common: Slavery and “Freedom” in the Process of Rio de Janeiro’s Working-Class Formation (1850–1910)

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Badaró Mattos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Work And Life

SummaryThe present article is based on research into the process of working-class formation in Rio de Janeiro in the period between the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. It explores the significant shared experiences of workers subjected to slavery and “free” workers in the process of working-class formation, and aims to demonstrate that the history of that process in Brazil began while slavery still existed, and that through shared work and life experience in Rio de Janeiro, as in other Brazilian cities where slavery was strong during the nineteenth century, enslaved and “free” workers shared forms of organization and struggle, founding common values and expectations that were to have a central importance in later periods of class formation.

The Mid-Nineteenth Century Electoral Structure

1976 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard W. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present State ◽  
Divergence Of Opinion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Electoral Structure

It is far too early to talk with any real certainty about the mid-nineteenth century electoral structure. The very materials of which it was built are in dispute, let alone the shape of the edifice. A deference school of historians is challenging traditional notions of the growth of political individualism in the period, while so-called quantitative historians are beginning to question the assumptions and approach of both deference historians and traditionalists. Serious and detailed study of the questions involved has hardly begun. Still, some comment on the present state of the controversy may not be entirely out of place. An enduring interpretation can only be constructed of sound materials; and I am by no means certain of the soundness of some of those now being put forward for our use.W. O. Aydelotte, in a paper read a couple of years ago and soon to be published in a series of essays entitled The History of Parliamentary Behavior, notes the divergence of opinion among historians on the role of the electorate in shaping parliamentary opinion after 1832. As he rightly suggests, Norman Gash in his Politics in the Age of Peel appears to be of two minds on the subject, depending on whether one reads his introduction or his text. In the former Professor Gash stresses the increase of popular influence on Parliament, in the latter the continuance of traditional influences over the mass of the electorate. D. C. Moore comes down heavily on the side of the latter influences, contending that a relatively few leaders of what he has called “deference communities” represented effective electoral opinion, which was simply registered by the mass of the electorate.

Playing ‘follow my leader’ in Anglo-Norman studies

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Rothwell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Important Phenomenon ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
French And English ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThroughout the present century the nature of Anglo-Norman and its role in the history of both French and English has been misunderstood and misrepresented by the endless repetition at second hand of views that have their origin in the nineteenth–century ‘reconstructionist’ movement in French philology. Evidence readily available from original sources of many kinds shows that the French used in England between the Conquest and the end of the fourteenth century is at once a more complex and far more important phenomenon than current writing on the subject would suggest, especially as regards the history of the English language.

The Stem Family in Ireland

1978 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Gibbon ◽  
C. Curtin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Patriarchal Family ◽  
The Family ◽  
Sociological Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Primary Socialization ◽  
Main Family

The subject of this paper is the question of the stem family, in the sociological literature and in anthropological studies of Ireland. The notion of the stem family is said to derive from the work of the nineteenth-century French sociologist Frederic Le Play (1806–82). Le Play divided the history of the family into three stages. Ancient societies were supposedly characterized by what he called the ‘patriarchal’ family, in which all the sons were retained within the household, over which the oldest member of the family ruled and in which any number of generations resided. Most of the world's population were said however to have experienced their primary socialization in the ‘stem’ family. The stem family was a threegenerational structure which functioned to retain its original location (land and/or house) by means of dispersing most younger members, while preserving the main family stem by a principle of single inheritance. Parents married off and kept within the group only those children nominated as successors. Finally, there was the modern, ‘unstable’ family which formed upon marriage and dissolved upon the death of the parents.

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