scholarly journals In Defiance of Discipline: Antiquarianism, Archaeology and History in Late Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-133
Author(s):  
Richard Marsden

The nineteenth century is often seen as the period in which old-fashioned antiquarianism gave way to modern archaeological science. Whilst that is certainly the case, this article argues that in Scotland that new emphasis on material evidence and prehistory remained part of a broad antiquarian sphere until the early twentieth century. Even towards the end of the 1800s, antiquarianism continued to encompass the study of both material culture and documentary sources. It was also, for a time at least, a major influence on narrative history-writing. Throughout this period, it was primarily in Scotland's antiquarian community, rather than its academic or professional institutions, that collective understandings of the nation's history were advanced. The article thus uses the Scottish case study to question common assumptions about the decline of polymathic antiquarianism and the rise of specialist disciplinarity in the later part of the nineteenth century.

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-463
Author(s):  
Hans Pols ◽  
Warwick Anderson

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mestizos of Kisar, a dry, almost barren island in the Dutch East Indies off the coast of East Timor, were a model for the study of race mixing or human hybridity. Discovered in the late nineteenth century, these ‘anomalous blondes’ of Dutch and Kisarese ancestry became subjects of intense scrutiny by physical anthropologists. As a German specialist in tropical medicine in search of a convenient empire after 1918, Ernst Rodenwaldt favourably evaluated the physique and mentality of the isolated, fair Mestizos in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Back in Germany in the 1930s, as professor of hygiene at Heidelberg, his views on race hardened to accord with Nazi doctrine. Yet after the war, Rodenwaldt successfully cited his earlier appreciation of mixed-race peoples in the eastern Malay Archipelago as grounds for rehabilitation. Once a celebrated case study in human hybridity, the Mestizos of Kisar were erased from anthropological discussion in the 1950s, when race mixing ceased to be a biological issue and became instead a sociological interest. Still, Rodenwaldt's work continues to exert some limited influence in the eastern parts of the archipelago and among the Kisarese diaspora, indicating the penetrance and resilience of colonial racialisation projects.


Author(s):  
Marion Thain

Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin impetuses of conceptual expansion and formal reduction’. It then goes on to outline the context of ‘cultural modernity’, to which it is suggested aestheticist lyric poetry is responding, in order to define further the ‘crisis’ in lyric. It also introduces the three conceptual frames that set the remit for the three parts of the book; these are three key axes around which lyric poetry operates: time, space and subjectivity. Chapter 1 ends with a preliminary case study from the work of ‘Michael Field’ (the assumed name of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) to demonstrate in practice the relevance of the three frames to aestheticist poetry.


Author(s):  
Brianna Theobald

This chapter lays the groundwork for the book’s use of the Crow Reservation in Montana as an extended case study. After providing an overview of Crow history to the late nineteenth century, the chapter sketches the parameters of a Crow birthing culture that prevailed in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Crow women navigated pregnancy and childbirth within female generational networks; viewed childbirth as a sex-segregated social process; and placed their trust in the midwifery services of older women. The chapter further explores government employees’ attitudes toward and interventions in Indigenous pregnancy, childbirth, and especially family life in these years, as these ostensibly private domains emerged as touchstones in the federal government’s ongoing assimilation efforts.


2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hillary Kaell

A century ago, the mite box (penny collection box) was ubiquitous in North America as a religious fundraising tool, especially for women and children. Using the Methodist Woman's Foreign Missionary Society as a case study, I ask what these boxes reveal about the intersection of gender, consumerism, and capitalism from circa 1870–1930. By cutting across traditional Weberian and Marxist analyses, the discussion engages a more complex understanding of religion and capital that includes emotional attachments and material sensations. In particular, I argue that mite boxes clarify how systematic giving was institutionalized through practices that created an imaginative bridge between the immediacy of a sensory experience and the projections of social policies and prayers. They also demonstrate how objects became physical points of connection that materialized relationships that were meant to be present, but were not tangible. Last, they demonstrate the continued salience of older Christian ideas about blessings and sacrifice, even in an era normally associated with the secularization of market capitalism and philanthropy.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Macleod

This thesis is a case study of 39 disbound album pages with 579 albumen photographic portraits, most attributed to James Inglis (1835-1904), an accompanying index book, four related documents, and two notes concerning the objects’ provenance. This object-based examination of these objects is intended to serve as a model for photographic and social historians when presented with inter-related, multi-part photographic objects. This extensively illustrated case study, which is supported by four appendices, reveals aspects of Montreal’s social history in the late nineteenth century and facilitates the objects incorporation into the McCord Museum’s collection. A brief biography and information on Inglis’ studio are included to contribute to the study of his career and nineteenth century portraiture in Montreal. While the exact function of these objects is still uncertain, this thesis explores their overall intellectual and historical value and is intended to foster further research in the collection.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 330-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meaghan Walker

Between 1860 and 1880, the years which hold the richest collection of log books at the Maritime History Archive in St. John’s, NL, an average of 4,400 seafarers died per year working in the British merchant marine. Each of these deaths potentially produced an inventory of effects showing the material wealth of working people at sea. These inventories reveal the material possessions of late nineteenth-century seafarers, particularly young working-class men who exposed themselves most to danger but also were the most numerous demographic. By analyzing both what these inventories contain, but also what inventories are missing, it is possible to understand material factors stemming from changing dynamics in a workforce undergoing technological and demographical change.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-350
Author(s):  
Nathan L. Lam

Late nineteenth-century organist-composers wrote liturgical music dans la tonalité grégorienne based on Niedermeyer and d'Ortigue's chant-accompaniment treatise Traité théorique et pratique de l'accompagnement du plain-chant (1857). The resulting music contained no musica ficta —, especially not raised leading tones in minor—a watershed moment in the nineteenth-century re-emergence of diatonic modality. Focusing on modes 1 and 2 (the Dorian modes) as a case study, part 1 of the essay discusses the historical background of Niedermeyer's treatise, part 2 examines features and theoretical implications therein, part 3 details large modal collections such as Guilmant's Soixante interludes dans la tonalité grégorienne, and part 4 analyses two Dorian marches: one from Guilmant's L'Organiste pratique and one from Gigout's Cent pièces brèves dans la tonalité du plain-chant.


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