Cycles of Cathay

Transfers ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward J.M. Rhoads

Introduced into China in the late nineteenth century, the bicycle had to compete with a variety of alternative modes of personal transportation that for a number of years limited its appeal and utility. Thus, during the 1920s and 1930s it took a back seat to the hand-pulled rickshaw and during the 1940s to the pedicab (cycle rickshaw). It was only in the 1950s that the bicycle became the primary means of transportation for most urban Chinese. For the next four decades, as its use spread from the city to the countryside, China was the iconic “bicycle kingdom.“ Since the 1990s, however, the pedal-powered bicycle has been overtaken by the automobile (and motorcycle). Nevertheless, with the recent appearance and growing popularity of the e-bike, the bicycle may yet play an important role in China's transport modal mix. This overview history of the bicycle in China is based on a wide range of textual sources in English and Chinese as well as pictorial images.

2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 363-377
Author(s):  
Jana Laslavíková

The establishment and development of the Municipal Theater in Pressburg in the period 1886–1920 was closely linked with the cultural and social development of the city in the period following the Austrian-Hungarian Compromise in 1867. The theater was built by the rising stratum of Pressburg townsmen, based on a requirement of the Hungarian government. The theater was in the possession of the town that rented it to theater directors and their German and Hungarian companies. The theater had a primacy among provincial theaters in Hungary. This was mainly due to the vicinity of Vienna and the efforts to resemble the metropolis, notably by the local patriotism of Pressburg inhabitants who wanted their locality to be regarded as a leading Hungarian town. The opera performances and their reception in the newspapers demonstrate the history of culture of the town, mentalities and collective identifications of its citizens, and last but not least the history of culture of Central Europe.


T oung Pao ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 95 (4) ◽  
pp. 287-333
Author(s):  
Xun Liu

AbstractThis paper examines the role played by the Quanzhen Daoist Xuanmiao monastery in the defense of Nanyang (Henan) during the Taiping rebellion. It shows that Daoist loyalty to the Qing state and to the local community did not just stem from the abbot's personal hatred of the Taiping; it also mirrored the monastery's established pattern of collaboration with the imperial state since the early Qing and its long history of ritual service to and economic involvement in the local community. Because of its wealth and cultural and political influence the Xuanmiao monastery functioned as a vital and dynamic actor in shaping the history and society of late nineteenth-century Nanyang. Cet article est consacré au rôle joué par un monastère taoïste Quanzhen, le Xuanmiao guan, dans la défense de Nanyang (Henan) pendant la rébellion des Taiping. Il montre que la loyauté des taoïstes envers l'État Qing et la communauté locale n'était pas simplement l'effet de la détestation qu'inspiraient les Taiping au supérieur du monastère; elle reflétait aussi un modèle bien établi de collaboration avec l'État impérial depuis le début des Qing, ainsi qu'une longue histoire de service rituel et d'intervention économique au bénéfice de la communauté. Grâce à sa richesse et à son influence politique et culturelle, le monastère Xuanmiao a été un acteur important et dynamique dans l'histoire et l'évolution sociale de Nanyang à la fin du xixe siècle.


Collections ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 155019062098783
Author(s):  
Cara Grace Tremain

The origin of the Museum of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, dates to the late nineteenth century—only a few years after the city was formally incorporated. Initially intended to showcase curios and items of interest, among the early donations were objects from various Mesoamerican cultures. Over the years the Mesoamerican archaeology collection grew not from a deliberate collecting strategy, but from chance donations by residents of the city. Not long after the re-focus to a civic museum the collection ceased to grow, and today the collection is consigned to the museum’s storage area. Despite not being of immediate relevance to the museum’s mission, the history of the collection reveals a fascinating insight into the lives of past Vancouver residents and demonstrates the utility of investigating the provenance of previously little-known collections.


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.


This chapter reviews the book Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 (2014), by Theodore H. Friedgut, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (edited and annotated by Theodore H. Friedgut). Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America is a two-in-one volume that explores an obscure episode in the history of the Jews in the late nineteenth century while at the same time connecting much of its content to the author’s own life experience as a son of western Canada’s Jewish farming colonies and, later, as an ideologically driven halutz on an Israeli kibbutz. Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America retells one branch of the mostly forgotten history of the Am Olam agricultural movement and brings a new layer into the discussion of global Jewish agrarianism, while Recollections of a Communist offers an edited and annotated version of a memoir written by Mandelkern.


Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.


Author(s):  
Mark Migotti

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
W. Walker Hanlon ◽  
Casper Worm Hansen ◽  
Jake Kantor

Using novel weekly mortality data for London spanning 1866-1965, we analyze the changing relationship between temperature and mortality as the city developed. Our main results show that warm weeks led to elevated mortality in the late nineteenth century, mainly due to infant deaths from digestive diseases. However, this pattern largely disappeared after WWI as infant digestive diseases became less prevalent. The resulting change in the temperature-mortality relationship meant that thousands of heat-related deaths—equal to 0.9-1.4 percent of all deaths— were averted. These findings show that improving the disease environment can dramatically alter the impact of high temperature on mortality.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422110252
Author(s):  
Ahmet Yusuf Yüksek

This study investigates the socio-spatial history of Sufism in Istanbul during 1880s. Drawing on a unique population registry, it reconstructs the locations of Sufi lodges and the social profiles of Sufis to question how visible Sufism was in the Ottoman capital, and what this visibility demonstrates the historical realities of Sufism. It claims that Sufism was an integral part of the Ottoman life since Sufi lodges were space of religion and spirituality, art, housing, and health. Despite their large presence in Istanbul, Sufi lodges were extensively missing in two main areas: the districts of Unkapanı-Bayezid and Galata-Pera. While the lack of lodgess in the latter area can be explained by the Western encroachment in the Ottoman capital, the explanation for the absence of Sufis in Unkapanı-Bayezid is more complex: natural disasters, two opposing views about Sufi sociability, and the locations of the central lodges.


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