David Wharton (ed.), A Cultural History of Color in Antiquity

In 1972, Martha Vicinus edited Suffer and Be Still, a groundbreaking collection that introduced Victorian women into mainstream historical scholarship. Five years later, Vicinus brought out A Widen...

The article compares two epochs in the history of the Western cultural history writing, with main attention paid to their theoretical assumptions: that of the late 19th - early 20th century (called in the article "old history of culture") and that of the late 20th - early 21st century (known as "new cultural history"). Both of them emerged as challengers: the old history of culture was conceived as the alternative to the once dominant political history, and the new cultural history challenged the social history that dominated in the Western history writing since the 1960s. However, the theoretical sources of their respective concepts of culture are very different. The old history of culture shares its psychologistic, holistic, organicist, and essentialist ideas of culture with the philosophy of culture of the late 19th - early 20th century. New cultural history uses an analytical concept of culture peculiar to contemporary social science as its theoretical point of reference and considers the methods of field research in cultural anthropology as its methodological paradigm. From the analytical point of view (T. Parsons, C. Geertz), culture is an aspect of social reality, represented by the authoritative patterns for action and symbols. This idea of culture invites a historian to consider culture not as a specific set of social phenomena that are concentrated in the particular "cultural institutions" or segment of society, but as an aspect which can be detected in any social phenomena. This idea of culture opens the prospect of the cultural history of politics, cultural history of economy, and so on.

This article reviews the history of tradition and culture in Indonesia, where this discussion is in the IPAS book grade III SD Curriculum Merdeka. This study aims to find out how the history of traditions and culture in Indonesia such as traditional ceremonies, traditional celebrations, performing arts, religious and various culinary specialties of each region. This research is a type of qualitative approach research, namely the study of information collection literature by examining sources related to diversity, tradition, culture, history of tradition, cultural history and preservation. The theory or basis for discussing this material is obtained from the results of obtaining information from many sources which use journals, ebooks, and articles. The results of the researcher's research, that it turns out that the history of tradition and culture in Indonesia is amazing because the country of Indonesia is a diverse country, with many differences such as religion, ethnicity, language, race, ethnicity, ethnicity and culture. This shows that the Indonesian state has a very rich cultural wealth, although with this much diversity it can cause division. However, the Indonesian state can handle it. This tradition in Indonesia is not only passed on to generations, but redeveloped by following the times. The history of this culture was influenced by kingdoms such as the Majapahit Kingdom and Srivijaya.

Tomam-se, aqui, obras de Wilhelm Wundt e William James para mostrar que a psicologia nasce como projeto cientifico no final do seculo XIX. Esse projeto diferencia psicologia como ciencia de psicologia como metafisica. Dessa perspectiva, a historia da psicologia e concebida como historia da psicologia cientifica e a pre-historia da psicologia e concebida como historia da psicologia metafisica. Mas as concepcoes de ciencia de Wundt e James sao diferentes. Da perspectiva da epistemologia unitaria, a psicologia nao se constitui como ciencia. Nesse caso, a historia da psicologia e concebida como pre-historia dessa disciplina e sua historia como ciencia so comecara se ela adquirir unidade. Da perspectiva da epistemologia pluralizada, a historia da psicologia e historia da cultura, o que significa dizer que e historia das tradicoes de pensamento psicologico e filosofico e, tambem, historia das ideias. Conclui-se que, da perspectiva da epistemologia pluralizada, epistemologia e historia da psicologia adquirem uma perspectiva antropologica, o que equivale a dizer que a pre-historia da psicologia nao existe, e que a historia dessa disciplina pode comecar em qualquer epoca e lugar. E, finalmente, que o esclarecimento da psicologia como ciencia depende da historia da ciencia e da cultura psicologica.

In this scientific review, pursuing the objective of providing substantiation for the part played by Philippe Pinel’s reform in the history of psychiatry and culture as a whole, we make a critical assessment of Michel Foucault’s position, according to which the true significance of Philippe Pinel for the history of culture should be seen in the context of the ideology of antipsychiatry. Based on the historical-scientific and the sociocultural factual material we describe the civilizational mission of Philippe Pinel’s activity as a medical doctor and scientist on par with such great men of French science as Antoine Lavoisier, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Marie Francois Xavier Bichat, et al.

Reviews 547© 1997 by University ofHawai'i Press Hoyt Cleveland Tillman and Stephen H. West, editors. China under Jurchen Rule: Essays on Chin Intellectual and Cultural History. Foreword by Herbert Franke. SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1995. xxi, 385 pp. Hardcover $59.50, isbn 0-7914-2273-9. Paperback $17.95, ISBN 0-7914-2274-7. As "a pioneering work" that encourages further research on the Chin period (1115-1234) (p. 19), this volume is certainly a welcome contribution to the ongoing study of China's conquest dynasties. The Foreword by Herbert Franke and the Introduction by the two editors highlight its "outstanding achievement" (p. xxi), not only in examining a period between the Sung and the Yuan, but also in placing "the culture of the Chin era in Chinese cultural history" (p. 19). A corrective to the old notion that the cultural life of the Chin was "barbarous," a "void," or an "unproductive transitional phase" (pp. xx-xxi), this is even more ofan achievement considering the scarcity of Chin sources, a fact that owes mainly to the destruction and general disruption of civil culture as a result ofwarfare between the forces ofthe Chin and the Sung and die Mongols, and the disempowerment of the Chin literati. Throughout the volume, Chin culture is discussed in terms of two kinds of cultural relations. The first kind, between the Jurchens and their Chinese contemporaries , is examined in terms of the sinicization ofthe Jurchens along with "elements ofJurchen tribal organization and lifestyle," which, throughout the century ofJurchen dominance in North China, helped the Chin to maintain "a mixed system ofrelatively pluralistic and polyethnic character" (p. 24). Second, a discussion ofJurchen-Khitan and Jurchen-Mongol relations and a briefcomparison of the Chin with the Manchu Ch'ing address the issue ofmutual influence ofpreceding and subsequent dynasties. Efforts are made to integrate the Chin into the Chinese society and culture with which it coexisted, to evaluate the conquest dynasty in the context ofmainstream Chinese history, to recognize the legitimacy of a nonHan dynasty, and to make use of scanty primary source materials to construct a cultural history of a people for whom (as with many other non-Han peoples) a written historical record in their own language is incomplete. All ofthese discussions , although specific to Chin culture, offer valuable general theories and methodological approaches to the study ofall of China's conquest dynasties. Well-organized, the volume's three essays in part 1 survey the cultural and institutional history ofthe Chin in the context of Chinese history overall; three essays in part 2 examine the Chin religion and Confucian thought, and four essays in part 3 discuss literature and art in relation to sociopolitical and cultural developments. 548 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 1997 In chapter 1, Hoyt Tillman traces the evolution of the Chin away from Jurchen tribal practices and toward Chinese imperial institutions. Claiming that "Jurchen interaction with Chinese institutions is indicative of their attitudes and policies toward Chinese culture, and institutional changes are often more concrete and better documented than cultural interaction" (p. 23), Tillman uses the institutions of the Jurchens to study their cultural history. Moving away from the T'ang political culture, which the Liao had inherited, the Chin made a shift "in cultural judgement to adopt Sung models" (p. 38), and there were further significant institutional differences arising largely from the Chin tribal heritage. As for the Mongols, Tillman found, the Chin dealt with them "in much the same way that Chinese regimes had brought steppe tribes into the Chinese political order as vassals" (p. 24). In chapter 2, James Liu introduces a new explanation for the rise of neoConfucianism in the Southern Sung in context of the alien invasion. He declares that "invaders from the northern borderlands had never set their eyes on the Yangtze until the Jurchen," who became, in the early twelfth century, "the first steppe or pastoral-nomadic nationality in Chinese history to cross the Yangtze" (p. 39). The Jurchen confrontation with the Southern Sung "had long-range effects on the Southern Sung government." The most important was the rise of "neo" Confucianism. The...

American Intellectual History and the Cultural Turn Ryan C. McIlhenny (bio) Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 222 pp. Notes and index. $18.95. It seems that no other branch of historical study is as buoyant as intellectual history. There have been dips in terms of its popularity, especially in relation to what may be the sexier developments within cultural studies, but intellectual history consistently reappears to provide critical assessment not only of historical changes but also changes in the methods of historical research. In the generation after Merle Curti, Perry Miller, or Henry Commager, intellectual history went through a revival in the late 1970s, due in no insignificant way to the Wingspread Conference of 1977, a gathering of historians including Paul Conkin, John Higham, Gordon Wood, David Hollinger, Dorothy Ross, Henry May, and Thomas Bender. Wingspread played an important role in joining older approaches to intellectual history with new creative discoveries within the humanities, breathing new life into this mode of historical writing. Distinct from the history of ideas and the history of philosophy, intellectual historians, according to Peter Gordon, see ideas as “historically conditioned” and thereby “best understood within some larger context, whether it be the context of social struggle and institutional change, intellectual biography (individual or collective), or some larger context of cultural or linguistic dispositions (now often called ‘discourses’).”1 Aware of the historical conditions from which ideas emerge—not to mention, as Daniel Wickberg does in American Labyrinth (2018), the contingency of contexts—intellectual historians are also cognizant of how such contingencies shape the way that they understand the methods of their own craft. Disciplines across the intellectual spectrum have been influenced by developments in cultural studies. Scholars—not just those in the humanities or social sciences, but also in the hard sciences—have demonstrated greater historical awareness, becoming increasingly wary of presenting ideas as normative or static. Social history steeped in the turbid currents of the 1960s, emphasizing long-ignored marginalized groups, was followed almost immediately by cultural history, which considered at a deeper philosophical level the social identities created through textual discourse. The [End Page 165] attendees at Wingspread, as well as those who helped author the collection of essays in New Directions in Intellectual History (1979), engaged the messiness of ideas, especially those articulated by iconoclastic intellectuals like Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz. The cultural presupposes the social and thus edges ever closer to the philosophical. Cultural historians are often reluctant to attribute causation to ideas, but Ratner-Rosenhagen and others would argue that causation can be the result of ideas, including cultural ones related to identity. Consequently, the cultural, especially in regard to ideas, has provided fodder for intellectual historians, since both are “invested in decoding meaning,” write Raymond Haberski and Andrew Hartman in American Labyrinth (2018), and thus “interested in language as a historical source.”2 For James Livingston, cultural change “is the groundwork of intellectual innovation.”3 Benjamin Alpers likewise suggests that cultural history has had an important impact on “intellectual historical practice” and that cultural and intellectual history should be viewed “as a single subfield.”4 Since the 1980s, cultural history has emphasized the pluralistic and unintended happenings from below and from the periphery, challenging first-principles foundationalism, eschewing any form of unidirectional history—whether top-down, bottom-up, or side-to-side (core-periphery)—and welcoming the ongoing creations of and negotiations within these spaces. The revolt of cultural scholars against simplistic bifurcations has led to an acceptance of ideas as contingent, inherently unstable, yet rich with possibilities, revitalizing in turn a dialectical method without a rigid teleology. Since Wingspread, contemporary intellectual historians have come to appreciate such dynamism, expanding interpretive boundaries and injecting the field with new and relevant insights. Following the success of American Nietzsche (2011), Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas that Made America embraces the creative possibilities of intellectual history, making the multiple worlds of ideas more palatable for readers. Daniel Rodgers, a leading figure among contemporary intellectual historians, identifies movement “as a central motif in intellectual history,” comparing it to a kind of “borderlands history.”5 Ratner-Rosenhagen agrees...

Reviewed by: The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History by Richard Lyman Bushman Jacob Bruggeman Richard Lyman Bushman, The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 294 pp. $40.00 (cloth). Richard Lyman's Bushman's The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century is a comprehensive study of the farmer and farming as omnipresent parts of early American culture and society. Bushman, a historian of United States cultural and social history, is best known for his scholarship on Mormonism and, more broadly, religion in America. But American Farmer, based upon two decades of primary source research set forth in captivating, forceful writing, offers a new history far more interesting than its title may imply. Its pages provide readers of all backgrounds points of interest. Indeed, rather than a tome intended for specialists and agricultural enthusiasts, Bushman's is an accessible book that avoids jargon. It offers in its stead a cornucopia of insightful analyses about an image central to American culture and history: that of the farmer and the farm. However, scholars of the Midwest and Midwesterners in general should be particularly interested in this volume, for farming—a practice encoded in the cultures and pictures of the Midwest—remains a relatively common occupation in that place. Additionally, and for better or worse, images of farmers continue to dominate public perceptions of the region. This new history can serve as both a monument to the past and a tool for reclaiming popular images of the Midwest in the present. Bushman consumes a wide diet of sources, including correspondence, diaries, and farm records of prominent individuals such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Bushman describes his research [End Page 182] process as searching for golden nuggets—those crucial kinds of data that make up historical narratives. "But," Bushman warns, "in mining the ore and refining the gold, we may lose sight of the mountain" that represents "a cultural system, a set of routines, a vast map of social interactions and human purposes;" its complexities can neither be captured nor conveyed by the glimmer of any one nugget (23). Colonial farmers' records—principally deeds, wills, tax documents, promissory notes, and other legal documents—comprise their "crystallized experience[s]" that represent "peculiarly intense" pieces of the past. In the "focused form" of a written document, they capture both the aspirations and day-to-day, grinding goings-on of colonial farm life (24). Drawing from this diversity of sources, Bushman's history attempts to enliven and enrich academic and popular depictions and discussions of farmers and farming. Indeed, while the farmer-as-male formulation is central to the book—and the father, Bushman contends, "like the king, governed by divine right"—the author's project is, at its core, an attempt at broadening the American farmer's portrait (12). Moreover, as readers make their way through Bushman's book, its scope expands beyond portraiture to become a landscape painting. In it, he beckons readers to imagine other actors behind and beside the American farmer. Daughters and wives, toiling in the home and at the hearth, and sons, out in the fields taking cues from their fathers, figure prominently in this articulation of American farmers' lives. "Work bonds," Bushman emphasizes, "and family ties were interwoven" (10). Enslaved people and masters' vicious "techniques of control," usually placed precariously near the edge of the frame in popular culture, are center stage, their labors and profits essential components of American agriculture (244). Native Americans, whose lands were stolen and used by farmers, and whose communities faced violence from them, also figure prominently. Their story casts a shadow over the American farmer, who, in Bushman's words, was "ultimately responsible for the conquest of America and the subordination of its original inhabitants" (22). In the background, readers also see bevies of "squatter-settlers," homeless and hungry and looking for land, who were oft en "left in limbo" as they moved west "without legal rights to their lands" (61). The growing landless class, whose dreams of land and success never materialized, was a major source of social tension in the eighteenth century. The tensions surrounding...

Learning from Rivers

The article is devoted to the definition of basic concepts and methodological principles of the organization of the humanities, in particular culture studies in a diachronic perspective. The shift of the field of cultural research in the process of understanding its historical principles is studied. In particular, there is a pattern of shifting humanities knowledge from direct identification with the field of "human sciences" ("Geisteswissenschaften") to the study of the fundamental multiplicity of human way of life, and, accordingly, exposing the transcendental status of culture and the need to understand the basic principles of interaction of different cultures in the diachronic dimension. Recognition of the original guideline of cultural diversity presupposes a rethinking of the historical sequence as an evaluative guideline, but, on the other hand, the avoidance of a futile denial of the principle of historicism in general. Thus, understanding the history of culture requires the study of cultural history as the basis of historical understanding of the very knowledge of culture. In general, the discipline – the history of culture or even "history of cultures" is derived from the concept of culture as a whole in two dimensions: defining the scope and content of the term "culture". As well as the recognition of its original non-homogeneity, and hence the need for reflection on the basic principles of its classification; the initial guideline for cultural diversity provides for the possibility of defining not only a synchronous but also a diachronic perspective; Thus, cultural history is a theoretical field of cultural research, which captures, comprehends and formulates the subject field and methodological guidelines for understanding the historical dynamics of culture in its correlation with the content of basic concepts. Thus, the subject field of cultural history implicitly provides the context of the history of culture, and the history of culture – the need to reflect on the order of organization of their theoretical and empirical guidelines.

REVIEWS 367 and institutional biographies that constitute the backbone of this study. Through these diverse case studies, David-Fox reveals a depth of subtlety to Soviet interactions with Western intellectuals that is often missed, while also uncovering the influence of this relationship on the development of key features of the Soviet system. Department of Slavonic Studies Claire Knight University of Cambridge deGraffenried, Julie K. Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War. Modern War Studies. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 2014. xvi + 248 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. The history of Soviet childhood in the Great Patriotic War is coming into its own. After the visionary Svetlana Aleksievich’s oral history Last Witnesses (Moscow, 1985) and Olga Kucherenko’s path-breaking study of child soldiers (Oxford, 2011), Julie K. deGraffenried now provides a detailed study of Soviet children at war. A powerful chapter on children’s wartime experiences sets the stage, followed by an equally enlightening exploration of child labour in support of the Soviet war effort. Next comes a chapter on the values the Soviet state attempted to instil (largely successfully, as deGraffenried argues) on its little subjects, before the ‘Art of Conflict’ chronicles ‘the widely varying images of the child disseminated by the Soviet state during the war’ (p. 104). Shifting from cultural to organizational history, the next chapter then analyses the attempts to regain the control lost at the outset of the war, before the final chapter shifts to how the state tried to remember what had happened between 1941 and 1945 once the war was over. The legacies of wartime childhoods are explored in a succinct conclusion. Following current fashion, then, cultural history — or, rather, the history of representation — takes up many pages. DeGraffenried is at her best, however, where she combines cultural, demographic, social and economic history. Chapters one and two as well as the conclusion provide much food for thought even to historians familiar with the socio-economic history of this war and its legacy. Carefully chosen statistics make powerful points about the significance of the topic and often adjust our vision of how important the agency of children was in Soviet war-making. By mid 1941, for example, more than a third of the Soviet population was fourteen and younger. Between 10 and 18 per cent of industrial workers during this war were adolescents. In numerical terms, then, child labour in industry was much more important to the war effort than the more famous heroics of child soldiers (about 0.2 per SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 368 cent of five- to fifteen-year-olds), while the greatest contribution was made by children working in agriculture. Bucking current trends, deGraffenried thus not only gives serious attention to economic history and to demographic facts, but also does not shy away from exploring the psychological cost of this war on the generation of war children. All the while, she also engages in serious cultural analysis, demonstrating how combining a variety of approaches helps historical understanding. DeGraffenried argues that while there was more than one war experience of Soviet children, there were over-arching traits all shared. Deprivation, loss, displacement, hunger and fear were experienced by most, if not all children. They left deep psychological and physical scars. The state shifted from an essentially passive construction of children as receivers of a ‘happy childhood’ to treating its youngest citizens as little adults, who were expected to participate in the war effort just like their elders. While much of the suffering was ultimately caused by the German aggressors, decisions made by the Soviet side added to the misery. The Soviet state focused on winning the war, and winning the war only. Everything else was dropped for the duration, including the welfare of children. After the war, this basic neglect was papered over by resurrection of the myth of the caring state. When the Soviet welfare state eventually emerged in reality under Khrushchev, the aspirations of many members of the war generation to provide their own children with a carefree childhood coincided with the state’s attempts to live up to some of its promises. The memories of the war years...

(2004). Thinking about the X Factor, or, What's the Cultural History of Cultural History? Cultural and Social History: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 217-224.

Reviewed by: Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History Kevin Grant Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History By Emma Robertson . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. This well-structured and clearly written book examines the English cocoa and chocolate industry, which has long marketed the purity of its products and its ethical, beneficent employment practices. Focusing on the firm Rowntree & Co., Ltd., Robertson problematizes the paternalistic image of the industry at large by revealing the integral, subordinate roles of women in the so-called cocoa chain between a Yoruba village in Nigeria and the city of York. Robertson draws upon company archives, municipal and national archives, published sources, and a small number of oral histories to represent the daily lives of working women in the context of global capitalism and gender and racial discrimination. "This book begins with the romantic construction of chocolate," Robertson explains, "but will attempt to understand the actual human endeavors, and systematic exploitation, which have made such chocolate fantasies possible." (3) Accordingly, chapters 1 and 2 recount and critique nineteenth- and twentieth-century advertising by Rowntree and other firms, demonstrating how they blended imperial histories of chocolate into their own romantic, marketable narratives. Chapter 3 then uses oral histories to examine African women's experiences of cocoa farming, and Chapter 4 explains how Rowntree represented this colonial exploitation to its employees and the city of York in promoting an imperial culture of which the community was largely unselfconscious. Chapter 5 uses oral histories of female Rowntree factory workers to demonstrate the women's experiences of "gendered and raced labour in chocolate manufacture." (12) The study articulates York's relationship not only to imperial culture, but also to colonial labor. The third chapter on African women farmers is followed by a chapter—the strongest of the book—in which Robertson uses the Rowntree in-house publication, Cocoa Works Magazine, to offer a detailed picture of the activities through which York's working class, and especially women, engaged with an imperial world. In view of the African women's lives illuminated by the preceding chapter, the reader can appreciate the company's mediation of a colonial reality of which the Rowntree employees were dimly aware, despite the fact that the African women made their work possible. There is a productive tension in the book between local cultural and social history and global labor history. Robertson's analysis would have been given more weight by a larger number of oral histories, but she deserves credit for pushing the boundaries of the local with a creative combination of historical sources. This book is also a women's history in which the author reveals women as "active agents" who negotiated their ways between and across gendered and raced boundaries. Robertson asserts that African women "are not and never have been passive bystanders in the cocoa economy." (117) The implication that there is a prevailing perception of passivity is difficult to reconcile with fine scholarship on African women's labor history since the 1980s, such as work by Iris Berger and Elizabeth Schmidt. In addressing the activities of women in York, the author's analysis of "minority women" tends to collapse the significant cultural differences between the three women of her case study. One woman was born to Cantonese parents in Liverpool before moving to York with her family, the second was recruited by Rowntree from Malta, and the third was born to an Asian family in Zimbabwe before moving to Uganda and ultimately migrating to England as a refugee in the 1970s. (190-93) The category of minority needs nuance, as it appears equivalent here to the category of non-white. To her credit, Robertson acknowledges that the women in question sometimes do not see the same boundaries that frame her own analysis. In referring to Asian refugees from Uganda, she states, "The Rowntree firm...had a part to play in the acceptance of refugees as workers, even as they were positioned as workers within a capitalist, racist and patriarchal system." (186) She subsequently notes that the three minority women with whom she spoke "simply did not feel that they had been subjected to racial prejudice either...

Reviewed by: The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm 1760–1830 by Janina Wellmann Jocelyn Holland Janina Wellmann. The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm 1760–1830. Translated by Kate Sturge. New York: Zone, 2017. 424 pp. There is much to learn from Janina Wellmann's book, which is a translation of Die Form des Werdens: eine Kulturgeschichte der Embryologie 1760–1830 (2010). The "cultural history" in question does not just have to do with early embryological theory, but rather—and even more so—with a word absent from the original German title: rhythm. The idea of rhythm is central to the entire project and, in particular, informs the readings of the first six chapters, with their focus on literature (including Klopstock, Hölderlin, Moritz, Novalis, and A. W. Schlegel), late eighteenth-century music theory, Schelling's Naturphilosophie and Philosophie der Kunst, and various aspects of "biological rhythm" (Wolff, Goethe, Reil). As Wellmann points out in her introduction, we lack a history of the concept of rhythm and, with the exception of more etymologically grounded studies, "there has been practically no research on the cultural and scientific history of rhythm before 1900" (19). Rhythm's connection to embryology lies, as Wellmann understands it, in the problem of "developmental thinking" around 1800: how to conceptualize the "form of becoming" in living nature and the activities of human culture. More concretely, it could be formulated as the question of how an organism could "continually change, yet still be ordered": "How could the parts combine into a highly complex formation when they themselves were all changing as incessantly as did the whole?" (16). Wellmann begins with the premise that such questions are equally valid in aesthetic and biological terms. Each of her subsequent arguments centers around the general claim that a new "episteme of rhythm" was established around 1800 whereby, in numerous fields of human inquiry, the idea of change over time was understood as "rhythmical": "Rhythm described the emergence and formation of life not as a mere progression in time, but as an ordering of time" (17). Wellmann identifies her own approach as a kind of expanded "history of concepts" that also [End Page 341] considers methods and questions from various fields, including cultural history, visual studies, and the history of science. Her sense for historical detail will likely also appeal to those who can appreciate how well it resonates with intellectual culture in Germany and Europe around 1800, particularly where the areas of Romanticism and Naturphilosophie are concerned. At the same time, Wellmann's stated agenda, to pursue the "episteme of rhythm," also presents her with her most significant conceptual and methodological challenges, which include: (1) a working understanding of rhythm general enough to be applicable in those fields in which the term itself could have vastly different meanings and, (2) attributing rhythmic structures to the "form of becoming" in various contexts where the word "rhythm" itself is nowhere to be found. Due in part to these challenges, The Form of Becoming is not a particularly easy book to review, and there is a further complication that has to do with the time lapse of seven years between the publication date of the German volume and the English translation. These years have witnessed, among other developments, the rapid growth of "sound studies"—a field to which the concept of rhythm is deeply connected, even if it is not completely congruent with those discourses of greatest interest to Wellman. Although Form of Becoming does contain a few bibliographic references to works published between 2010 and 2017 (mostly in the form of lists and embedded in the notes, because this volume contains neither a bibliography nor a works cited section), it does not engage directly with any of the literature from this time period in any of its chapters. This is unfortunate because many of the arguments in question touch upon very actual debates concerning literature and the life sciences. Another, more challenging, reason is that, by identifying the emergence of an "episteme" of rhythm in contexts where the "word" rhythm is not (yet) foregrounded, The Form of Becoming requires its readers to take a rather extreme...

(2009). The British Domestic Interior and Social and Cultural History. Cultural and Social History: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 97-107.