William Gilpin's Atmospheric Sympathy

Romanticism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-172
Author(s):  
Erin Lafford

The picturesque, especially as imagined by William Gilpin, has long been critiqued as lacking in social conscience. The picturesque tourist is more often considered as detached from both the views and the people he encounters than as being sympathetically involved in either the local environment or its communities. This essay argues that paying closer attention to the importance and prevalence of atmosphere in Gilpin's picturesque provides an opportunity to reconsider such disinterest, as well as to acknowledge anxieties surrounding an embodied environmental sympathy in his writings that bears the influence of eighteenth-century medical thought. As both the aerial and meteorological conditions of a particular place and as a surrounding emotional or moral element, atmosphere is a medium through which Gilpin negotiates physical and emotional distance and proximity, revealing the picturesque tourist as a subject who feels their way into relationship with places and people, but who also negotiates the limits of that feeling.

Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer

This chapter considers the prevailing notion in the eighteenth century that nobility was a necessary bulwark of political freedom. Whether in the interest of a more open nobility or of a more closed and impenetrable nobility, the view was the same. Nobility as such, nobility as an institution, was necessary to the maintenance of a free constitution. There was also a general consensus that parliaments or ruling councils were autonomous, self-empowered, or empowered by history, heredity, social utility, or God; that they were in an important sense irresponsible, free to oppose the King (where there was one), and certainly owing no accounting to the “people.” The remainder of the chapter deals with the uses and abuses of social rank and the problems of administration, recruitment, taxation, and class consciousness.


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 495-520
Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan

AbstractFrom the middle of the eighteenth century until the late 1830s, the idea of enslaved people as “peasants” was a commonplace among both antislavery and proslavery writers and activists in Britain. Slaveholders, faced with antislavery attacks, argued that the people they claimed to own were not an exploited labor force but a contented peasantry. Abolitionists expressed the hope that after emancipation, freedpeople would become peasants. Yet the “peasants” invoked in these debates were not smallholders or tenant farmers but plantation laborers, either held in bondage or paid low wages. British abolitionists promoted institutions and ideas invented by slaveholders to defend the plantation system. The idea of a servile and grateful “peasant” plantation labor force became, for British abolitionists, a justification for the “civilization” and subordination of freedpeople.


Author(s):  
B E A Fisher

An assessment of the effects of visible cooling tower plumes on the local environment can be a necessary part of any proposal for a new large industrial process. Predictions of the dispersion of plumes from cooling towers are based on methods developed for chimney emissions. However, the kinds of criteria used to judge the acceptability of cooling tower plumes are different from those used for stack plumes. The frequency of long elevated plumes and the frequency of ground fogging are the two main issues. It is shown that events associated with significant plume visibility are dependent both on the operating characteristics of the tower and on the occurrence of certain meteorological conditions. The dependence on atmospheric conditions is shown to be fairly complex and simple performance criteria based on the exit conditions from the tower are not sufficient for assessments.


2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-179
Author(s):  
Nigel Spivey

The front cover of John Bintliff's Complete Archaeology of Greece is interesting. There is the Parthenon: as most of its sculptures have gone, the aspect is post-Elgin. But it stands amid an assortment of post-classical buildings: one can see a small mosque within the cella, a large barrack-like building between the temple and the Erechtheum, and in the foreground an assortment of stone-built houses – so this probably pre-dates Greek independence and certainly pre-dates the nineteenth-century ‘cleansing’ of all Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman remains from the Athenian Akropolis (in fact the view, from Dodwell, is dated 1820). For the author, it is a poignant image. He is, overtly (or ‘passionately’ in today's parlance), a philhellene, but his Greece is not chauvinistically selective. He mourns the current neglect of an eighteenth-century Islamic school by the Tower of the Winds; and he gives two of his colour plates over to illustrations of Byzantine and Byzantine-Frankish ceramics. Anyone familiar with Bintliff's Boeotia project will recognize here an ideological commitment to the ‘Annales school’ of history, and a certain (rather wistful) respect for a subsistence economy that unites the inhabitants of Greece across many centuries. ‘Beyond the Akropolis’ was the war-cry of the landscape archaeologists whose investigations of long-term patterns of settlement and land use reclaimed ‘the people without history’ – and who sought to reform our fetish for the obvious glories of the classical past. This book is not so militant: there is due consideration of the meaning of the Parthenon Frieze, of the contents of the shaft graves at Mycenae, and suchlike. Its tone verges on the conversational (an attractive feature of the layout is the recurrent sub-heading ‘A Personal View’); nonetheless, it carries the authority and clarity of a textbook – a considerable achievement.


Balcanica ◽  
2004 ◽  
pp. 159-169
Author(s):  
Tomislav Jovanovic

A rather small portion of old Slavonic literatures is thematically linked with the journey to the Holy Land. Of many Serbian pilgrims over the centuries only three left more detailed descriptions of Bulgarian places and parts: patriarch Arsenije III, Jerotej of Raca and Silvestar Popovic. They described, each in his own way, some of the places and areas along the road to Istanbul or Salonika. Their vivid depiction of encounters with people and observations about the places they saw on their way reveal only a fragment of life in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman empire. In a seemingly ordinary way, they incorporate into their own epoch the legends heard from the people they met. The descriptions of Bulgarian parts in the Serbian accounts of pilgrimage have all the appeal that generally characterizes travel literature. Although their literary value is modest they belong among the works characterized by the simplicity and immediacy of experience. Rather than being the result of a strong literary ambition, they are witness to the need to speak about the great journey, quite an adventurous enterprise at the time.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 179
Author(s):  
Azwir Azwir

Learning the Quran is regarded as an essential activity in Muslim world in order to educate their young generations. However, in Aceh Besar district, many children and teenagers are not accustomed to reciting the Quran after the sunset prayer, but instead wandering around the street. Therefore, in 2012, the local government initiated a program of Beut al-Quran Ba’da Magrib in all villages in Aceh Besar district. This study attempted to figure out the effectiveness of the implementation of the program, strategy used, and impacts on the people in Aceh Besar. Held in Aceh Besar district, the study used cluster-based purposive sampling in Banda Safa, Lamcot, and Meunasah Karieng Lamlhom villages. The research participants were the Head of Islamic Law Office of Aceh Besar, teungku (Islamic teachers) of the program, santri (students) of the program, and community figures. In addition, the researcher had also collected some important documents reagrading this program. The data were collected by interview, observation, and documentation. The data were also triangulated. The findings indicated that the implementation of Beut al-Quran Ba’da Magrib program was not effective as expected. The strategy used was requiring school aged children to take part in the program. The impacts, however, were very good as the program has induced positive spirit of the young learners, as well as of the community and local environment. The positive impacts have encouraged other villages to implement similar programs. Nevertheless, there were still some obstacles that need to attention during the implementation of the program.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Martoyo Martoyo ◽  
Nahot Tua Parlindungan Sihaloho

The purpose of this study is to explore and analyze the variables that determine the success of implementing dynamic governance in West Java. This research was conducted qualitatively using a literature review research design. The data obtained were then analyzed following the steps of qualitative data analysis by Miles, Huberman & Saldana. The results of this study reveal that there are at least four elements that contribute significantly to the success of dynamic governance in West Java, namely the typical pentahelix collaboration, creative funding, digital government, and the Jabar Open Data program. The implications of this study confirm two things. First, program forms in dynamic governance are based on problems in the local environment, so that each region has a different type of program. It's just that in principle the program must be adaptive and accommodating. Second, the design of dynamic governance is the most reliable design for the needs and conditions of the people of West Java today. It could be that the design of agile governance will be adopted by the West Java Provincial Government when dynamic governance is deemed irrelevant and unsolvable.


Author(s):  
Michael Keevak

This chapter focuses on the emergence of new sorts of human taxonomies as well as new claims about the color of all human groups, including East Asians, during the course of the eighteenth century, as well as their racial implications. It first considers the theory advanced in 1684 by the French physician and traveler François Bernier, who proposed a “new division of the Earth, according to the different species or races of man which inhabit it.” One of these races, he suggested, was yellow. Then in 1735, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published Systema naturae, in which he categorized homo sapiens into four different skin colors. Finally, at the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, also a physician and the founder of comparative anatomy, declared that the people of the Far East were a yellow race, as distinct from the white “Caucasian” one.


Author(s):  
T. C. Smout

This book presents an overview of the first six decades of the Union of the Crowns. It also provides a picture of the uses to which judicial torture was put after 1660 and a summary of the straits in which Scotland found itself in the opening years of the eighteenth century. It then explores the problems which union posed to maritime lawyers of both nations, the dark reception that the Scots received in eighteenth-century England, and the way Enlightenment Scotland viewed the British unions. It examines the ambitions of Scottish élites in India, the frame for radical cooperation in the age of the Friends of the People and later, and the background for the sojourn of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in London. It finally outlined the Anglo-Scottish relations on the political scene in the nineteenth century. The parliamentary union did little in the short run for Anglo-Scottish relations. It is shown that Scots are indeed worried and worry a lot about Anglo-Scottish relations, but the English worried and worry about them hardly at all, except in times of exceptional crisis, as in 1638–54, 1703–7, 1745–7 and perhaps much later in the 1970s after oil had been discovered.


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