scholarly journals George IV’s Coronation as Festival

2022 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-235
Author(s):  
Danielle Kinsey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Modern Era

This article analyzes George IV’s coronation as a multisensory festive experience in order to understand the meanings of diamonds within British material culture in 1821. Reframing the coronation as a festival allows historical scholars to bridge the premodern/modern divide in early nineteenth-century historiography and demonstrates the ongoing centrality of festivals in consumer culture in the modern era. It also offers a vantage point from which to study sensory paradigm shifts and clashes that occurred in this context and evaluate diamonds in relation to other pieces of material culture outside of the confines of a formal marketplace. The article argues that the coronation shifted how diamonds were thought about in Britain, though this shift was subtle and deeply embedded in the turmoil of the moment. On a widespread scale, the event normalized the association of diamonds with monarchy, imperial power, and light, in ways that made diamonds seem like quotidian items. The article is based on accounts of the event in newspapers, periodicals, and official histories.

Egypt’s Coptic Museum: From Patriarchal to National

2020 ◽  
pp. 181-204
Author(s):  
Dina Ishak Bakhoum
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Religious Nature ◽  
Egyptian History

This chapter traces the most significant episodes of the Coptic Museum’s history and argues that the museum was not founded as a ‘minority’ museum but rather as an archaeological museum holding valuable religious Coptic art. Its foundation aimed at demonstrating that Coptic material culture had equivalent value in Egyptian history to Pharaonic, Greco-Roman and Islamic arts, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries already had their own museums. Unlike other museums, however, the Coptic Museum was established under the aegis of the Patriarch, giving it an unconventional status within Egyptian heritage owing to the religious nature of its initial collection. The essay presents the museum’s foundation during the early nineteenth century and discusses the context of its nationalization and transformation into a public domain museum (1931) as well as its expansion (1947).

scholarly journals England’s “Bloody Code” in Crisis and Transition: Executions at the Old Bailey, 1760–1837

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Devereaux
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old Bailey ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Execution Rates ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

The most celebrated and influential history of execution in England, V.A.C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree (Oxford, 1994), uses a survey of execution rates to make two very striking and seemingly persuasive assertions. First, more people were being hanged in early nineteenth-century England than at any time since the early modern era; and second, that the end of capital punishment came far more suddenly than previous studies have recognized. This article acknowledges and extends the importance of Gatrell’s first insight, while arguing that he nevertheless both understates the complexity of developments and overstates the suddenness with which both the letter and the practice of capital punishment were abandoned. It does so through a careful recalculation and analysis of execution rates at London’s Old Bailey courthouse, where execution was practiced on a far larger scale than in any other jurisdiction in the Anglo-American world, and whose practice most profoundly shaped the perceptions of both critics and proponents of capital punishment alike.

D.176: Sextants, numbers, and the Hydrographic Office of the Admiralty

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Barford
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bureaucratic Organization ◽  
Hierarchical Order ◽  
Hydrographic Surveying

In the 1830s and 1840s, the Hydrographic Office of the British Admiralty developed and oversaw one of the major state-run surveying projects of the nineteenth century. This involved a range of instruments whose circulation was increasingly regulated. Using extant museum collections and the correspondence of those involved, this article explores how such objects can be used to discuss both bureaucratic organization at a time of expanding government and the complex issues of sociability involved in hydrographic surveying. Surveying officers worked in a context in which the propriety of property on public service was a pervasive question. Instruments might be given as gifts between officers, appropriated as recompense, absorbed as state property, and disputed between friends. The ownership, provision, and treatment of instruments in particular could be used to demonstrate an officer’s peculiar zeal or institutional neglect. To those outside the ship, what was understood as over-instrumentation became amusing spectacle. On board, their use was part of a deeply hierarchical order of work in regions of colonial and mercantile importance. In examining the relationships around these instruments of survey, the paper proposes a richer understanding of the material culture of hydrography in the early nineteenth century.

The Highland Society of London, material culture and the development of Scottish military identity, 1798–1817*

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Watt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Symbol ◽  
The Military

Abstract The image of the Highland soldier as a brave, loyal warrior was central to nineteenth-century notions of Scottish national identity. This article uses material culture evidence alongside traditional archival sources to provide an interdisciplinary explanation of how the military dimension of Scottish identity was shaped in the early nineteenth century. It finds that it was the responses of the Highland Society of London to Scottish battlefield valour – rather than the actions themselves – that created the enduring popular perception of the Highland soldier as a desirable national symbol and as an icon of empire.

Material Culture in the Amateur Historical Associations of Early Nineteenth-Century Germany

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
The State ◽  
German History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Sources ◽  
New Thinking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Regional Associations

This chapter explores the ways amateur historical associations act as incubators of new thinking about how objects could tell stories. It draws from publications of German historical associations produced during the nineteenth century. Beginning in the first decade of the nineteenth century as a patriotic gesture and continuing for another fifty years, a new genre of German history flourished. It was often conducted at the scale of the region or territory, not the state, under the auspices of local historical associations and published in their newly created journals. In these regional associations, what had previously been a means to an end—material sources—became an end in itself: the subject matter of German history.

Courting the Cerebellum: Early Organological and Phrenological Views of Sexuality

1987 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Shortland
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Moment ◽  
First Time ◽  
To Receive ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Valuable Function

Although phrenology has begun to receive serious attention as a doctrine of mind, as popular science, as part of medical history, as a vehicle for social and ideological interests, and as an important component of American and European (especially British) culture in the early nineteenth century, there is one aspect of it which has evaded the eye of contemporary historians.’ This is the place within phrenology of the understanding of human sexuality. This is a subject of manifest general historical interest, and one whose neglect by scholars seems all the more striking once it is recognized that phrenologists themselves often judged it the most crucial, the best evidenced, and the most impressive part of their system of beliefs. In turning for the first time to phrenological attitudes to sex, my objective in what follows is not to offer an exhaustive treatment but rather to set down the broad lines of development followed by organological and phrenological doctrines. It is hoped that this will encourage and enable historians to consider the subject in further detail and from other perspectives. Other topics of research may also be suggested by the material that is presented here. For example, if phrenology was as important in the early decades of the nineteenth century as is now widely accepted, and if the views of sexual instinct within the theory and practice of phrenology were of the kind which I shall suggest, then it may be that our general attitudes to sexuality during the period under consideration stand in need of reassessment. This is an issue to which I hope to devote a further article; for the moment, a presentation of materials within a mainly expository framework may serve a valuable function.

scholarly journals Burned Out Myths and Vapour Trails: Vaporwave’s Affective Potentials

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 626-638 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic Killeen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Music Genre ◽  
Unique Vantage

Abstract As a “born digital” audiovisual music genre and visual aesthetic, vaporwave channels remnants of popular culture, advertising, and consumer technology from the 1980s and early 1990s. retrieving the strange sense of affective potential that still echoes within the outmoded, depleted myths of that era. In doing so, it opens up a unique vantage-point on our present moment, and our contemporary attachments to digital media and a still unrelenting consumer culture. Just as Walter Benjamin believed “revolutionary energies” to resound in the outmoded objects of nineteenth century culture, vaporwave invites us to recognise the affective potentials still incipient in the sounds and images of the recent past and, in doing so, to acknowledge the affective potential available in our own cultural moment.

scholarly journals MATERIAL TURNS IN BRITISH HISTORY: II. CORRUPTION: IMPERIAL POWER, PRINCELY POLITICS AND GIFTS GONE ROGUE

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margot C. Finn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
East India Company ◽  
North India ◽  
British History ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Material Politics ◽  
The Family ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Dynastic Politics

ABSTRACTThis address examines the ‘Old Corruption’ of Georgian Britain from the perspective of diplomacy and material culture in Delhi in the era of the East India Company. Its focus is the scandal that surrounded the sacking of Sir Edward Colebrooke, the Delhi Resident, during the reign of the penultimate Mughal emperor, Akbar II. Exploring the gendered, highly sexualised material politics of Company diplomacy in north India reveals narratives of agency, negotiation and commensurability that interpretations focused on liberal, Anglicist ideologies obscure. Dynastic politics were integral to both British and Indian elites in the nineteenth century. The Colebrooke scandal illuminates both the tenacity and the dynamic evolution of the family as a base of power in the context of nineteenth-century British imperialism.

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