British geography 1500–1900

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
David N. Livingstone
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Religious History ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Local Identity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
Royal Courts ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Mathematics

This chapter presents an impressionistic, and thus imprecise, sketch of the history of British geography from 1500 to 1900. Over these 400 years, British geography has assumed many different forms in many different arenas. Whether as a species of natural philosophy and mathematics, as a form of regional portraiture, as overseas lore, or expeditionary travel; whether in universities curricula or at royal courts, in school texts or learned societies; whether as a vehicle of national and local identity or as a channel of imperial desire: geography has been inextricably intertwined with the social, intellectual, political and religious history of the British Isles.

scholarly journals On the invisibility and impact of Robert Hooke’s theory of gravitation

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 266-282
Author(s):  
Niccolò Guicciardini
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Interplanetary Space ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Void Space ◽  
Trading Zone ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Of Gravitation ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Scientific Framework

AbstractRobert Hooke’s theory of gravitation is a promising case study for probing the fruitfulness of Menachem Fisch’s insistence on the centrality of trading zone mediators for rational change in the history of science and mathematics. In 1679, Hooke proposed an innovative explanation of planetary motions to Newton’s attention. Until the correspondence with Hooke, Newton had embraced planetary models, whereby planets move around the Sun because of the action of an ether filling the interplanetary space. Hooke’s model, instead, consisted in the idea that planets move in the void space under the influence of a gravitational attraction directed toward the sun. There is no doubt that the correspondence with Hooke allowed Newton to conceive a new explanation for planetary motions. This explanation was proposed by Hooke as a hypothesis that needed mathematical development and experimental confirmation. Hooke formulated his new model in a mathematical language which overlapped but not coincided with Newton’s who developed Hooke’s hypothetical model into the theory of universal gravitation as published in the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687). The nature of Hooke’s contributions to mathematized natural philosophy, however, was contested during his own lifetime and gave rise to negative evaluations until the last century. Hooke has been often contrasted to Newton as a practitioner rather than as a “scientist” and unfavorably compared to the eminent Lucasian Professor. Hooke’s correspondence with Newton seems to me an example of the phenomenon, discussed by Fisch in his philosophical works, of the invisibility in official historiography of “trading zone mediators,” namely, of those actors that play a role, crucial but not easily recognized, in promoting rational scientific framework change.

Before Kṛṣṇa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kanika Kishore Saxena
Keyword(s):  
Historical Data ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Coherent Picture

Mathura is famous for its association with Vāsudeva‒Kṛṣṇa, an important deity of the Hindu pantheon. However, apart from the sanctity attached to this place by Hindus, it has also provided conditions for the nurturing of Buddhist, Jaina, nāga and yakṣa traditions. This book engages in a wide range of epigraphic, archaeological and art historical data from the various sites in the Mathura area and weaves this to present a coherent picture of the variegated religious history of the area from c.600 CE to c.1000 CE, which witnessed various religions/cults/sects competing for attention and patronage. The chapters in this book have been divided according to religious traditions, namely, Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism, along with the Kṛṣṇa, yakṣa, nāga, and mātṛkā cults. It raises many important issues related to Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism as well as older cults of the yakṣas and nāgas. The objects of donation ranged from images, stūpas, temples to tanks and gardens. Donations by monks and nuns; together with laity from different locations within and beyond Mathura, amply reflect on the social mosaic of the time. The role of monastics and laity, the nature of patronage, and the social and political underpinnings of the religious history are also examined, all within a long, diachronic frame. This book reveals the complexity of the religious history of Mathura to provide the reader a taste of its diversity and plurality.

scholarly journals Christianity and Islam under the Sultans of Konia

1913 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 191-197
Author(s):  
F. W. Hasluck
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
The Political ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
The Social ◽  
Artistic Achievement ◽  
History Of

At the first appearance of the Ottomans, towards the close of the thirteenth century, Christian and Turk had already been living for two centuries side by side in the interior of Asia Minor under the rule of the Seljouk Sultans of Roum. The political history of this period is still emerging from obscurity: the social and religious history has hardly been touched. The Byzantine historians, concerned only incidentally with provinces already in partibus, give us no more than hints, and we have none of those personal and intimate records which are apt to tell us much more of social conditions than the most elaborate chronicle.The golden age of the Sultanate of Roum is undoubtedly the reign of Ala-ed-din I. (1219–1236), whose capital, Konia, still in its decay bears witness by monument and inscription to the culture and artistic achievement of his time. Ala-ed-din was a highly-educated man and an enlightened ruler. He was familiar with Christianity, having spent eleven years in exile at Constantinople. One of his predecessors, Kaikhosru I. (1192–6, 1204–10) who likewise spent an exile in Christendom, nearly became a Christian and married a Christian wife.

Americanization of Karl August Rauschenbusch, 1816–1899

1955 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
Carl E. Schneider
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Early History ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

An interest in August Rauschenbusch may be motivated by the hope that perchance in the life of the father we could discover factors which would illuminate the social-gospel interests of his more famous son. The importance of Rauschenbusch in the early history of German Baptists in North America, particularly as founder and virtual head of the “German Department” of Rochester Theological Seminary for thirty-two years (1858–90), should alone, it could be urged, establish his significance for the religious history of that day. However, it is the primary and less ambitious purpose of this paper to place Rauschenbusch within the framework of the German and American religious situation of the mid-19th century on the basis, largely, of twenty-two of his unpublished letters and a smaller number addressed to him, running from April 12, 1845 to September 27, 1854. These were recently discovered in the archives of the Rhenish Missionary Institute, Wuppertal-Barmen, Germany.

Coffee, Coffeehouses, and the Nocturnal Rituals of Early Modern Jewry

AJS Review ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliott Horowitz
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Material Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Food And Drink ◽  
The One

Although religious history has traditionally concerned itself with the transcendent dimension in human life, and social history with the mundane, the latter approach can also be used to illuminate the ways in which religion works itself out on the social plane. In fact, it might be argued that inquiries of this sort should occupy a prominent place on the agenda of any social and religious history of the Jews. Among historians of the Annales school, for whom the study of material life was long considered the backbone of historical inquiry, there has been a discernible move in recent years toward the study of religious life, especially in its popular forms. Whereas, for example, previous volumes in the valuable Johns Hopkins series of “Selections from the Annales” were devoted to such topics as food and drink in history, the one published in 1982 was entitled, significantly, Ritual, Religion and the Sacred.

The uses of analogy: James Clerk Maxwell's ‘On Faraday's lines of force’ and early Victorian analogical argument

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
KEVIN LAMBERT
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sacred And Profane ◽  
History Of ◽  
Collective Experience ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Analogical Argument ◽  
Lines Of Force

AbstractEarly Victorian analogical arguments were used to order the natural and the social world by maintaining a coherent collective experience across cultural oppositions such as the ideal and material, the sacred and profane, theory and fact. Maxwell's use of analogical argument in ‘On Faraday's lines of force’ was a contribution to that broad nineteenth-century discussion which overlapped theology and natural philosophy. I argue here that Maxwell understood his theoretical work as both a technical and a socially meaningful practice and that embedding his use of analogy in the social and intellectual context of Victorian Britain provides a means of telling a sociocultural history of Maxwell's development of a new cognitive tool: a way of thinking on paper analogous to thinking with objects in the laboratory.And analogy can do no more, immediately or directly, than shew such and such things to be true or credible considered only as matters of fact.Bishop Butler, 17361

scholarly journals The pharmakon of ‘If’: working with Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-514
Author(s):  
MICHAEL WINTROUB
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Social ◽  
Heuristic Strategy ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Strategy I

AbstractWhilst the ‘local culture’ of experimental natural philosophy in seventeenth-century England drew on ‘resources’ supplied by the gentlemanly identity of men like Robert Boyle, this culture found much of its distinctiveness in a series of exclusions having to do with faith, gender and class. My concern in this essay is less with these exclusions, and the distinctions they enabled, than with their surreptitious returns. Following from this, as a heuristic strategy, I will try to understand how Boyle and Co. used and reacted to, repressed and cathected, that which they sought to exclude. By charting the movements of exile and return across the contested frontiers of class, gender and faith, truth and lies, authenticity and performance, we can, I believe, fruitfully complicate our understandings of both the social history of truth, and the social history of our ‘post-truth’ predicament.

scholarly journals The X-Club. A social network of science in late-Victorian England

1970 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-322 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Professional Networks ◽  
The Social ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
Probable Significance ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Historian ◽  
Victorian Science

AMONG the more significant features of nineteenth-century British science was the emergence of social and professional networks which helped to shape or influence the course of scientific activity. By and large, the most conspicuous arbiters of scientific values were the learned societies, the British Association and the universities. These formal bodies, however, almost always reflected the attitudes and assumptions of small, informal, often obscure and sometimes anonymous, clusters or networks of individuals. Until recently, most of these groups have been overlooked or neglected (i), but growing interest in the social history of science has stimulated fresh research into the history of scientific societies generally, and into scientific élites in particular. The ‘X-Club’, recalled by the contemporary American historian, John Fiske, as ‘the most powerful and influential scientific coterie in England’ (2), was one of the most important and instructive of these groups. The following pages will inquire into the origins, the development, and the probable significance of this ‘coterie’ in the social climate of late-Victorian science.

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