Massimo Quaini e il viaggio: il ruolo della verticalità

2021 ◽  
pp. 311-310
Author(s):  
Claudio Greppi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Geographical Knowledge ◽  
The Andes ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The One

In the issue of Geotema dedicated to travel (“Travel as source of geographical knowledge”), in 1997, Massimo Quaini’s article topic was “The geographical invention of verticality: for the history of the ‘discovery’ of mountains”. It concerns a fundamental segment of the history of geographical knowledge, between eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, involving both the Old and New World: Saussure in the Alps and Humboldt in the Andes. He had already worked on this same topic in other occasions, investigating institutions like CAI in Italy, and mountain’s role in the ‘official’ geography. Such lectures mark a path that, I think, finds a theoretical output in 2006 Parma conference, dedicated to the “end of the travel”, where Quaini spoke about “Between Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century: the travel and the new paradigm of geography”: a rich and problematic lecture, opening to further researches. But perhaps before this point of arrival, the new paradigm, I would suggest to think on an idea offered by the Geotema article, where we read: “so, if we want to fully speak of discovering the mountains it will be necessary that the culture of the outside travellers meet that of the mountaineers”. Actually, in Quaini's last lecture I take into consideration, the one at Forte di Bard in September 2006, his attention shifts definitely on the figures of alpine travellers, who may encounter knowledge acquired from local culture.

Sr. José, the Worker mélomane, or Opera and Democracy in Lisbon ca. 1850

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-105
Author(s):  
Gabriela Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Bel Canto ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
One Act ◽  
A Performance

Sr. José do capote, a worker and an opera lover, is the monad contemplated in this article. He is a theatrical figure, the protagonist of the one-act burlesque parody Sr. José do capote assistindo a uma representação do torrador (Sr. José of the Cloak attends a performance of The Roaster, 1855), but also an idea that expresses in abbreviated form the urban environment of nineteenth-century Lisbon, the theatrical and operatic sensibility of its citizens, and the politics of their engagement with the stage. This article is a history of Il trovatore and of bel canto claimed for a nascent culture of democracy in nineteenth-century Portugal.

scholarly journals Dialektik der Erschließung: The German–Austrian Alps between Exploration and Exploitation

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Sean Ireton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Exploration And Exploitation ◽  
Nördliche Kalkalpen ◽  
Austrian Alps ◽  
Limestone Alps ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps

Focusing on the so-called Nördliche Kalkalpen or Northern Limestone Alps of Germany and Austria, I will discuss how human interaction with these mountains during the age of the Anthropocene shifts from scientific and athletic exploration to commercial and industrial exploitation. More specifically, I will examine travel narratives by the nineteenth-century mountaineers Friedrich Simony and Hermann von Barth, juxtaposing their respective experiences in diverse Alpine subranges with the environmental history of those regions. This juxtaposition harbors a deeper paradox, one that can be formulated as follows: Whereas Simony and Barth both rank as historically important Erschließer of the German and Austrian Alps, having explored their crags and glaciers in search of somatic adventure and geoscientific knowledge, these very sites of rock and ice were about to become so erschlossen by modernized tourism that one wonders where the precise boundaries between individual-based discovery and technology-driven development lie. In other words, during the nineteenth century a kind of Dialektik der Erschließung (a variation on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung) manifests itself in the increasing anthropogenic alteration of the Alps.

Peak Pursuits

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Schaumann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
Mountain Regions ◽  
The Andes ◽  
New Models ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Alps

European forays to mountain summits began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the search for plants and minerals and the study of geology and glaciers. Yet scientists were soon captivated by the enterprise of climbing itself, enthralled with the views and the prospect of “conquering” alpine summits. Inspired by Romantic notions of nature, early mountaineers idealized their endeavors as sublime experiences, all the while deliberately measuring what they saw. As increased leisure time and advances in infrastructure and equipment opened up once formidable mountain regions to those seeking adventure and sport, new models of masculinity emerged that were fraught with tensions. This book examines how written and artistic depictions of nineteenth-century exploration and mountaineering in the Andes, the Alps, and the Sierra Nevada shaped cultural understandings of nature and wilderness in the Anthropocene.

Unveiling Modernity: Verdi’s America and the Unification of Italy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Körner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
New World ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
American Opera ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Un Ballo In Maschera

This chapter examines the creation of Giuseppe Verdi's American opera Un ballo in maschera, first performed around the time of Italy's Second War of Independence, in 1859. Un ballo in maschera was the first modern Italian opera set across the Atlantic. The history of its creation and the subsequent debate around it serves as a classic example of the cultural imagination surrounding life in the New World as well as the wider social impact of political ideas in nineteenth-century Italy. The chapter first considers Un ballo's close connection to the Unification of Italy before offering a reading of the opera. It also explores how Verdi depicted America in his opera and how his depiction relates to Italian debates about America at the time. Finally, it assesses the impact of censorship on the plot of Un ballo.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 194-202
Author(s):  
Ilaria Scaglia
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Winter Olympics ◽  
Medical Institutions ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps ◽  
The One ◽  
First World

This book’s journey through the history of a broad range of political, leisure, educational, and medical institutions in the Alps shows that emotions constituted an essential ingredient in the development of internationalist ideas and practices in the interwar period. After the First World War—a traumatic event that contemporaries blamed on mismanaged passions—internationalists constructed the Alps—a recent battleground and the markers of national borders—as ideal sites for instilling amicable feelings among nations. The staging of large-scale international events such as the 1924 Winter Olympics strengthened the image of mountains as a natural backdrop for peaceful encounters. The commercialization of “typical” convivial products such as cheese fondue and the “cup of friendship” further reinforced this association. At the same time, in an age of increasing industrialization, the Alps attracted both public and private entities interested in large infrastructure projects (including roads, electrical plants, railway lines, and tunnels like the one celebrated in ...

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.

The “Orient” in the “New World”: The Carreira da Índia and the Flows between Asia and Portuguese America

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 32-50
Author(s):  
Jorge Lúzio
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Portuguese Empire ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Connections ◽  
Asian People ◽  
Brazilian Ports

The history of Brazil in its colonial period is characterized by the movement of Asian people, goods, and merchandise radiating from Brazilian ports that received ships via the Carreira da Índia, the main sea route integrating the Portuguese Empire both commercially and politically. Asian memory and imagination were present in the urban centres of the Portuguese American colonies in the form of cultural material before the actual presence of Asians, which began to occur through cycles of immigration into Brazilian lands during the nineteenth century. This article traces the circulation of ivory carvings from Asia into Portuguese America as a way of illustrating the presence of Asian material cultures in the New World, as well as the relevance of the Carreira da Índia to these cultural connections.

The Alchemy of Modernity. Alonso Barba's Copper Cauldrons and the Independence of Bolivian Metallurgy (1790–1890)

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
TRISTAN PLATT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Linear Mode ◽  
The Andes ◽  
Elective Affinities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
European Method ◽  
The 19Th Century

Those natures which, when they meet, quickly lay hold on and mutually affect one another we call affined. This affinity is sufficiently striking in the case of alkalis and acids which, although they are mutually antithetical … most decidedly seek and embrace one another, modify one another, and together form a new substance … It is in just this way that truly meaningful friendships can arise among human beings: for antithetical qualities make possible a closer and more intimate union.Goethe, Elective affinities (1809)A linear mode of historical understanding relegated alchemy to a ‘pre-scientific’ era, with the enlightenment's New Chemistry creating a break between ‘empirical’ and ‘scientific’ metallurgies. Similarly, Bolivia's early Republican silver-production has been regarded as ‘stagnant’ and ‘colonial’ from the ‘modern’ perspective of late nineteenth century liberalism. This article questions both periodisations by documenting an ‘alchemical renaissance’ in Bolivian silver-refining methods during the first part of the 19th century. The relaunch of Alonso Barba's ‘hot method’ of amalgamation in copper cauldrons (1609), and its associated technical discourses, expressed a creole desire for an independent ‘modernity’. This rediscovery of a seventeenth century technology, carried out shortly before the Independence War in the Potosí provinces (Chichas), and slightly later in Oruro and Carangas, is distinguished from the version reinvented in Central Europe by Ignaz von Born (1786), as well as from two pre-Bornian experiments in Potosí and New Spain. Its nineteenth century consolidation was, in part, a little-known reaction to Nordenflicht's failure to introduce the new European method of rotating barrels to the Andes during the 1790s. The article shows that this ‘alchemy of modernity’ held its ground for several decades, suggesting a fresh approach to America's postcolonial ambiguities from the perspective of a comparative history of technology.

A Work of Combat: Mulatto Historians and the Haitian Past, 1847-1867

1974 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Nicholls
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Party ◽  
The South ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Prejudice And Discrimination ◽  
The One

One of the striking facts about the social and political history of Haiti from independence in 1804 to the present is the deep gulf separating the largely mulatto elite groups from the predominantly black masses. The war of the South in 1799 between Toussaint and Rigaud, and the conflicts between Christophe and Pétion, while not primarily caused by color factors, were reinforced by suspicions and hostilities between black and mulatto, with each group accusing the other of prejudice and discrimination. Politics in the rest of the nineteenth century can generally be seen as a tussle between a mulatto elite centered in the capital and in the cities of the South, on the one hand, and a small black elite often in alliance with army leaders and peasant irregulars, on the other. In the years following 1867 these groups formalized themselves into a largely mulatto Liberal Party, and a preponderantly black National Party.

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