scholarly journals Ferdinand Boberg och statistikmaskineriet. Om statistik som medium, attraktion och utställning, ca 1800-1930

1970 ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Anders Ekström
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Graphic Representations ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Visual Realism

Different types of statistical representations were among the most prolific visual media in late nineteenth century museums and temporary exhibitions. From the 1890s to the 1930s, several ”social” or ”statistical museums” were founded in Europe and North America, the most famously of which were established by the sociologist Patric Geddes in Glasgow, and by the philosopher Otto Neurath in Vienna. The first part of this paper gives a survey of the development of graphic representations in the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the visual pedagogics involved in statistical display. The second part of the paper is dedicated to two statistical displays developed by the Swedish architect Ferdinand Boberg at exhibitions in Helsingborg in 1903 and Stockholm in 1909. In particular, the analysis is focused on the ways in which Boberg’s ”machinery of statistics” – a series of moving, figurative and three-dimensional representations of statistics – related to other media presented at the exhibitions, and to the ways in which the audience was invited to interact with the displays. In the conclusion, the development and use of statistical media in early twentieth century museums are discussed in relation to an intermedial discourse on visual realism and the utopian idea of a universal visual language. 

Evangelist of Fragments: Doing Mite-Box Capitalism in the Late Nineteenth Century

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hillary Kaell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Market Capitalism

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.

Within Sight: Three-Dimensional Perspectives on Women and Banjos in the Late Nineteenth Century

2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-163
Author(s):  
Lydia Hamessley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Way

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, women figured prominently in a marketing campaign by banjo manufacturers who sought to make the banjo a respectable instrument for ladies. Their overarching aim was to "elevate" the banjo's status from its African-American and minstrel-show associations, thereby making the instrument acceptable in white bourgeois society. At the same time, stereoview cards, three-dimensional photographs produced by the millions, were a popular parlor entertainment featuring a variety of contemporary images, including women playing the banjo. Yet, instead of depicting a genteel lady in the parlor playing her beribboned banjo, the stereoviews presented humorous and sometimes risque scenes of banjo-playing women. Further, virtually no stereoviews exist that show the banjo played by a lady in a parlor setting. Through a study of stereoscopic depictions of women in a variety of scenes, I place these unexpected images of women's music-making in a context that explains their significance. In particular I examine the way stereoviews provide insights about the tensions regarding the position and status of women in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American culture as revealed in the figure of the New Woman. Typical of constructions of this threatening figure, stereographic images picture the New Woman wearing bloomers, riding bicycles, attending college, smoking, neglecting her wifely duties and children, and even indulging in lesbian eroticism. Yet, stereoviews are distinctive in that they also show the New Woman playing the banjo, and I argue that the link between the banjo and the New Woman had a decisive and negative impact on the effectiveness of the banjo elevation project. Through an examination of these three-dimensional views, and drawing on late-nineteenth-century writing and poetry about the banjo, I show how the banjo in the hands of the New Woman became a cautionary cultural icon for middle- and upper-class women, subverting the respectable image of the parlor banjo and the bourgeois women who played it. I place this new evidence in the context of Karen Linn's paradigm describing the banjo elevation project as one that sought to shift the banjo from the realm of sentimental values to official values. The figure of the New Woman does not fit within Linn's dichotomy; rather, she falls outside both sets of values. Often viewed as a third sex herself, in a sense mirroring the gender tensions surrounding the banjo, the New Woman helped to shift the banjo into a third realm, that of revolutionary and perhaps even decadent values. This study enhances what we know about the way musical instruments have been used to reconfigure attitudes toward gender roles in the popular imagination and furthers our understanding of the complex role women have played in the history of the banjo. Moreover, this evidence demonstrates how gender and sexuality can affect the reception of music, and musical instruments, through powerful iconographic images.

Icelandic Cake Fight: History of an Immigrant Recipe

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 28-41
Author(s):  
Laurie K. Bertram
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
North American ◽  
English Language ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Heritage ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Culinary Traditions ◽  
Oral History Interviews

This article explores the history of vínarterta, a striped fruit torte imported by Icelandic immigrants to North America in the late nineteenth century and obsessively preserved by their descendants today. When roughly 20–25 percent of the population of Iceland relocated to North America between 1870 and 1914, they brought with them a host of culinary traditions, the most popular and enduring of which is this labor-intensive, spiced, layered dessert. Considered an essential fixture at any important gathering, including weddings, holidays, and funerals, vínarterta looms large in Icelandic–North American popular culture. Family recipes are often closely guarded, and any alterations to the “correct recipe,” including number of layers, inclusion or exclusion of cardamom or frosting, and the use of almond extract, are still hotly debated by community members who see changes to “original” recipes as a controversial, even offensive sign of cultural degeneration. In spite of this dedication to authenticity, this torte is an unusual ethnic symbol with a complex past. The first recipes for “Vienna torte” were Danish imports via Austria, originally popular with the Icelandic immigrant generation in the late nineteenth century because of their glamorous connections to continental Europe. Moreover, the dessert fell out of fashion in Iceland roughly at the same time as it ascended as an ethnic symbol in wartime and postwar North American heritage spectacles. Proceeding from recipe books, oral history interviews, memoirs, and Icelandic and English language newspapers, this article examines the complex history of this particular dessert.

The Origins of Russian Scenery: Volga River Tourism and Russian Landscape Aesthetics

Slavic Review ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 666-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Ely
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Volga River ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Essential Idea ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The essential idea of landscape, that a section of terrain can be appreciated as a visual or aesthetic object, is largely a phenomenon of modern history, tied to processes such as urbanization and the development of tourism. Although the appreciation of landscape in Russia was influenced by European aesthetics, Russia developed a unique approach to its own natural environment, and the Volga River played an important role in that process. When steamship tourism appeared on the Volga in the late nineteenth century, the river became a crucial location for the articulation of a new, scenic aesthetic. But this aesthetic competed with earlier views of Russian landscape, which held that the simple and unspectacular character of the native countryside contrasted favorably with the overly picturesque and inauthentic landscapes of western Europe. Images of the Volga that emerged in guidebooks, travelogues, and visual media took shape in attempts to negotiate between the touristic impulse to appreciate beautiful scenery and more established conceptions of Russian nature as appealing precisely in its lack of picturesqueness.

Zen Art before Nothingness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory P. A. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Intercultural Encounters ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Chapter One describes the uncertain beginnings of Zen and Zen art within modern intercultural encounters between Japan and Europe and North America. The representations and perceptions of Zen in the West arising from initial contacts in the sixteenth century and thereafter from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth were not uniform with what we discover from the 1920s and 1930s onward, and certainly not identical to those of the postwar Zen boom. As a genealogical sketch, this history of Zen art before “Zen art,” suggests a sensibility of ambivalence or nascent interest during the mid-to-late nineteenth century leading to one of infatuation in the early twentieth, at which time there emerged a range of geo-political conditions and a group of active Zen campaigners promoting the formation of a specifically differentiated and instrumentalized Zen and Zen art.

Future Publics

2019 ◽  
pp. 27-67
Author(s):  
Alex Dika Seggerman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Image Reproduction ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
Diverse Groups

This chapter argues that late nineteenth-century satirical cartoons and portrait photography in Egypt created a public conversant in a shared visual language of art and politics, and thus laid the groundwork for a modern art movement. The increased availability of mechanical image reproduction technology in Egypt, in addition to the country’s strategic position in international politics, fostered a visual system for identifying and critiquing late nineteenth-century Cairene politics among a transnational elite. This public included Ottoman, French, Italian, Syrian Christian, and Jewish individuals in addition to “local” Egyptians. The shared visual language spoke to all these diverse groups. I trace the visual history of caricature embedded in the satirical, illustrated Arabic- and French-language lithographic journal Abou Naddara Zarqaʾ, published by Yaʿqub (James) Sanua (1839–1912), and the significations of the cross-dressing by Princess Nazli Fazil (1853–1913) in photographic portraits. Both interpellate a public by means of images that reference a wide network of histories. Through visual analysis, I plot a constellation of complex visual and textual connections that, I argue, forms the “future public” of Egyptian modernism.

Empire Federalism and Imperial Parliamentary Union, 1820–1870

1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ged Martin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British North America ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The movement for imperial federation has traditionally been regarded as a late nineteenth century phenomenon, which grew out of a supposed reaction against earlier ‘anti-imperialism’. J. E. Tyler set out to trace its growth ‘from its first beginnings… in and around 1868’. Historians were aware of the suggestions made before the American War of Independence that the colonies should send M.P.s to Westminster, but tended to dismiss them as of antiquarian rather than historical interest. A few also noted apparently isolated discussions of some Empire federal connexion in the first half of the nineteenth century, but no attempt was made to establish the existence of a continuous sentiment before 1870. C. A. Bodelsen did no more than list a series of examples he had discovered in the supposed age of anti-imperialism. In fact between 1820 and 1870 a debate about the federal nature of the Empire can be traced. Like the movement for imperial federation after 1870, there was only the vaguest unity of aim about the mid-century projects, and before 1870, as after, the idea was never consistently to the fore, but enjoyed short bursts of popularity. It is, however, fair to think of one single movement for a federal Empire throughout the nineteenth century. There is a clear continuity in ideas, in arguments, and in the people involved. Ideas of Empire federalism were influential, not so much for themselves as for their relationship to overall imperial thinking: to ignore the undercurrent of feeling for a united Empire is to distort the attitudes of many leading men. In the mid-nineteenth century general principles of imperial parliamentary union were argued chiefly from the particular case of British North America, the closest colonies to Britain and the most constitutionally advanced. This Canadian emphasis strengthened the analogies with the United States which occurred in any case.

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