Family Estate Research Articles

Karol Szymanowski and multiculturalism

Karol Szymanowski and multiculturalism

PARK MONUMENT OF LANDSCAPE ART OF LOCAL IMPORTANCE VOLOKYTYNSKYI: HISTORY, CURRENT STATE, AND PROSPECTS AS A TOURISM OBJECT

The history of formation and the current state of the park monument of landscape art of local importance Volokytynskyi (village Volokytyne in Putyvl raion of Sumy oblast) are researched. The founding of the park monument of landscape art of local importance Volokytinskyi is connected to the name of Andriy Mykhailovych Myklashevskyi (1801-1895). In 1829 he began the construction of his family estate in the village Volokytyne, building a manor house and laying a park. In 1846-1857 a brick, cross-shaped, single-domed Church of the Intercession and a three-tiered bell tower on the western facade were built. The manor was surrounded by a high fence made of crude stone which had two gothic-style gates - entrance gates and so-called Golden Gates. These two gates are the only remains of the architectural structures of the palace and park ensemble which have survived to the present day. Due to their historical and artistic value, they can become an attractive tourist object. Some of the landmarks of nature are also of tourist interest, including a four-hundred-year-old two-stem oak, which is a dumb witness of the presence of the future hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi in the estate. Thus, the architectural complex of the park monument Volokytynskyi has suffered considerable losses, however, in view of the history of the estate and the prominent people associated with it (including hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi), the park monument of landscape art of local importance Volokytynskyi has the potential not only as an object of ecological tourist recreation but also of cultural and educational tourism. Keywords: Andriy Myklashevskyi (Andrey Miklashevsky), Myklashevskyi estate, village Volokytyne (Volokitino), Sumshchyna monuments.

Moralism and Monarchism: Visions of Power in 18th-Century Russia

Moralism and MonarchismVisions of Power in 18th-Century Russia Konstantin D. Bugrov (bio) The time-honored tradition of writing the history of Russian political thought as the history of constitutionalism describes it as a sequence of reform projects, unsuccessfully trying to circumscribe autocratic power with the use of new theories and concepts exported from the West. Marc Raeff depicted modernization in Russia by emphasizing the contrasts between Anglo-Saxon liberal individualism and continental collectivist "state dirigisme," yet the attempts to construct an effective Polizeistaat were halted by the autocratic monopoly of personalized power.1 David Ransel has spoken of the "paradox of a would-be reformer" characteristic of the political culture of 18th-century Russia.2 Some researchers insist that the principal conflict within Russian political thought in the 18th century was between absolutist arbitrariness and legal, procedural limitation.3 If the history of Russian political thought revolves around the problem of the unlimited power of the autocrat, then its key problem is the juxtaposition of arbitrariness and law. As Elise Wirtschafter puts it, "in a society in which property rights carried no judicial or administrative authority beyond the family estate, the development of an educated populace capable of employing reason to make independent judgments produced an abstract philosophical form of politics, [End Page 267] concerned more with moral principles than with the routine functioning of institutions."4 Morals are here juxtaposed with politics. Yet "moral alienation" could also lead to "rebellion."5 Thus political processes in the Russian Empire were supposedly shaped by collisions over moral issues, in which the expectations of enlightened elites collided with the severe reality of an increasingly bureaucratizing machinery of power. In this article I seek to capitalize on Wirtschafter's concept of "moral monarchy," elaborated in The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater. I consider Wirtschafter's analysis of 18th-century Russian political culture convincing, and I might add that monarchist moralism existed in a variety of genres, enabling the Russian elite to discuss a broad range of issues. While Wirtschafter analyzed 18th-century dramatic pieces, I concentrate on a general study of political texts of the period, including panegyrics, odes, dramatic pieces, and administrative projects. This article does not attempt to describe the whole range of ideas and concepts of 18th-century Russian monarchism. Such a task is far beyond the scope of any journal article. What I am trying to do is provide a reflection on certain political lexicons (or, to use J. G. A. Pocock's expression, "conceptual vocabularies"), manners of speech that—I would argue—were used by the elites of 18th-century Russia to describe the empire's political order.6 These political lexicons overlapped, and the same author could borrow concepts and rhetorical figures from different manners of speech, while conceptual similarities of these vocabularies allowed them to fuse effectively. The second section of the article, however, aims to correct Wirtschafter's concept of moral monarchy to some degree. The tensions that led the Russian elite to "rebellion" were, in my mind, not hidden in the mechanism of moral monarchy, which constantly promoted reconciliation rather than revolution. Its praise of peace and desire to avoid conflicts (I mean, of course, the rhetoric of conflict, not the actual practice of social conflict) were the foundation of moralist monarchism. Thus a radical change in political culture was to be found in the development of alternative political lexicons that would emphasize conflict as a legitimate social regime. In the last section of this article I briefly investigate the example of such a lexicon: Machiavellian civic republicanism. [End Page 268] The Conceptual Lexicons of 18th-Century Russian Monarchism The first was the providential lexicon of church preachers and bishops. Religious legitimation was historically important. For example, Giovanni Maniscalco Basile, in studying the political ideology of 16th-century Russia, writes of an "elastic ideological structure," which established that "the ascendant justification of power (i.e., in the Zemskie Sobory between the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century) but also the descendant one (from God to the car´) mix, expanding the (absolute) power of a car´, whose authority derives directly or indirectly from God."7 The...

Maternity and Spiritual Progression in Dhuoda’s Liber Manualis (840s CE)

Maternity and Spiritual Progression in Dhuoda’s Liber Manualis (840s CE) Dana M. Polanichka In November 841 CE, as civil war raged across the Carolingian world, a noblewoman in Uzès, twenty-five miles west of Avignon, faced her own battle: Dhuoda wrestled with the absence of her sons, William (fourteen years old) and Bernard (a mere eight months), as well as her husband, Bernard of Septimania. She chose to mitigate the distance and make herself present to her sons by composing, what she describes in her incipit as, “liber . . . Manualis [a handbook].”1 She directed her Liber manualis to her older son, asking that he eventually share it with his brother.2 In the incipit, she presents her book as a substitute for her presence: “Quod si absens sum corpore, iste praesens libellus tibi ad mentem reducat quid erga me, cum legeris, debeas agere [But though I am absent in body, this little book, when you read it, will remind you of what you should do for me].” She also writes, “et si defuerim deficiens, quod futurum est, habes hic memoriale libellum moralis [and in the future, should I fail you by my absence, you have this little moral book as a reminder]” (1.7).3 Near the end, she assures William that as his “ordinatrix tibi in cunctis assisto [instructor, I stand beside you in all things]” (11.1). Dhuoda is not unusual in her use of writing to connect distant individuals and bridge geographical divides in the Carolingian world; her contemporaries also proclaimed their letters, poems, and manuscripts to be substitutes for their physical presence.4 Nor is hers the only Carolingian book for which “materiality matters.”5 Dhuoda, however, employs her unique authorial status as a mother—specifically, mother to her handbook’s recipient—to intensify the physical ways in which a manuscript could connect author and audience. She, more forcefully than other Carolingian authors, elicits her son’s sensory experiences with her book, first by drawing on an established Carolingian hierarchy of the exterior [End Page 7] and interior senses that encouraged Christians to transition from materiality to immateriality in their spiritual journey.6 This mother then maps her son’s progression from his outer to inner senses onto her own maternity so that she might appear in her son’s mind’s eye, his heart’s ear, and his soul’s touch, if not within his actual vision, earshot, or grasp. More than simply highlighting her son’s transition from materiality to immateriality through the embodied act of reading her handbook, Dhuoda also reveals her shift from material to spiritual mother through her own embodied acts of procreation and composition. Through her emphasis on her and her son’s sensory experiences of the materiality of her manuscript, the Liber manualis became an actual surrogate for Dhuoda, transforming into the motherly face her sons could not see, the loving hands that could not touch them, the caring voice that could not speak to them, and the nourishment she could not physically feed them. Dhuoda, Writer and Bibliophile Dhuoda was born into an aristocratic family around 800 CE. In June 824, at the Aachen court, she married Bernard of Septimania. Her husband, chamberlain for Emperor Louis the Pious (r. 814–840), came into notoriety in 830 as the alleged lover of Louis’s second wife, Judith. One decade later, Bernard betrayed his new lord, Charles the Bald (823–877), and was compelled to offer his son William (b. 826) as a political hostage to the young king.7 When a second son was born to Bernard and Dhuoda in 841, Bernard had the infant brought to him in Aquitaine. Dhuoda was left alone at the family estate in Uzès, struggling to manage both the family finances and her maternal longing.8 To ease her suffering, she composed, from November 841 to February 843, the Liber manualis for William, which modern editors have divided into eleven books.9 Only three extant manuscripts contain her text in whole or part. The earliest dates from the ninth to eleventh centuries and includes nine noncontiguous fragments.10 The fourteenth-century copy, compiled with other pedagogical texts, was produced in...

Анастасийцы Алтайского края: этапы становления поселения родовых поместий

The article considers the movement of Anastasians andits main activity-the practice of establishing of the family estates and the settlements consisting of such. Based on the field materials of the Altai krai, the main stages of the establishing of the villages of family estates are identified and characterized.

Анастасиевцы Алтайского края. История родовых поселений и современные реалии

The Anastasia movement (“Ringing Cedars of Russia”, the Anastasians) was born in Russia in the mid-1990s under the influence of the publication of V. Megre’s works. It developed from reading clubs and festivals to big projects of family estates and the form of political party. In the Altai region (Altai krai) we can registrate 12 settlements at different stages of formation. In religious studies, the anastasians are considered as the one of the new religious movements that is based on the ideology and practices related to Slavic neo-paganism. In Russian Ethnology/anthropology there are attempts to characterize the Anastasians in terms of subculture, as a community with a complex identity that includes a quasi-ethnic plane. Their culture is based on the natural peasant economy. The main concept of self-organization is the idea of family estates.

Z dziejów potomstwa i wdowy po zmarłym podkomorzym kaliskim Rafale z Gołuchowa (zm. 1442). Przyczynek do historii życia rodziny szlacheckiej w późnośredniowiecznej Polsce

The aim of the paper is to present these events and experiences whose occurrence in the life of a noble family in late‑medieval Poland was the consequence of the death of husband and father. This was achieved by means of reconstructing the life story of Elżbieta, the fourth wife of the Kalisz‑district chamberlain Rafał of Gołuchowo from the Wieniawa family, as well as that of his sons and daughter (Iwan, Rafał, Jan, Andrzej, and Cherubin, and their sister Barbara), after his death. This reconstruction essentially provided insight into such activities undertaken by them or with their participation as taking ownership of the property left to the widow, establishing custody of the children that had not yet come of age and of their assets, establishing guardianship of the as yet unmarried daughter and regulating the payment of her part of the family money in the form of a monetary dowry, and, in time, dividing the family estate between the brothers. These actions were, in a way, a natural consequence of the death of husband and father, and were a part of the life of most families living in those times. An analysis of their realisation in social practice based on relevant records in court’s registers allow to understand the underlying legal customs, only partly reflected in the norms of the written law, as well as the events and experiences which resulted from the death of husband and father for his wife and children, and the role played by their relatives in this period of their lives.

“Versöhnung – Ja, Verzicht – Nein“? Marion Gräfin Dönhoff 1946-1970: Territorialer Paradigmenwechsel und neue Sicht auf Polen

This article will examine Marion Gräfin Dönhoff’s articles published in the Hamburg-based “Die Zeit“ weekly in the years 1946-1970. Dönhoff, a renowned German journalist, had to leave East Prussia and her family estate in 1945. The articles under analysis demonstrate an evolution of her views on the problem of losing the so-called German East, from the initial inability to come to terms with the new postwar territo-rial reality, to the eventual recognition that Germany’s loss of provinces in the East is permanent and final.

Les vignerons « installés-à-côté » de l’exploitation familiale

La transmission familiale de l’exploitation et de la place professionnelle est toujours le modele largement privilegie dans le secteur viticole. Ce schema inclut une designation, une habilitation qui passe par la socialisation, familiale puis scolaire, au metier. Le processus de transmission a un hors cadre familial se fait differemment et plus tardivement mais dans les deux cas, le repreneur s’inscrit dans une filiation reelle ou symbolique et devient le depositaire d’un heritage qu’il devra transmettre a son tour. Nous nous interessons ici a une categorie particuliere d’installes hors du cadre familial, que nous appelons les « installes-a-cote ». Il s’agit de viticulteurs non-heritiers ayant cree leur propre exploitation a proximite de celle de la famille. Cette categorie interroge de maniere particuliere les processus d’acquisition de la place et d’inscription dans la lignee familiale et professionnelle.

Contribution of Woldemar von Knieriem to the Training and Experimental Farm «Peterhof» of Riga Polytechnicum and Riga Polytechnic Institute

The article is dedicated to Professor Woldemar von Knieriem (1849– 1935), who has made a significant contribution to the development of agricultural science, headed the Department of Agriculture of Riga Polytechnic Institute (1903–1906), as well as Training and Experimental Farm «Peterhof» (1880– 1915) near Olaine city. It became a model farm not only in the Baltic region but also throughout the Russian Empire. Professor W. von Knieriem was the Director of RPI (1906–1916), an outstanding organizer and author of scientific works. He provided students with extensive theoretical and practical knowledge in agriculture, focusing on practical, scientifically approbated lessons about the management of agricultural land and manors and trying to raise the general level of culture and the horizons of young people. Professor W. von Knieriem was Rector of the Baltic Technical University in Riga (1918) and worked in the Herder Institute in Riga (1920–1927). He spent his last years in his family estate in Livonia writing memories of his life and enjoying the company of grandchildren – one of them later became Prime Minister of Sweden Ulof Palme (1927–1986). W. von Knieriem died in January 1935 and was buried in the Great Cemetery in Riga.

Individuos y espacios domésticos: estrategias de transmisión de la propiedad de las mujeres viudas en la España rural (extremadura, siglo XVIII)

This article discusses the distribution of paternal property within rural communi-ties in the interior of the Iberian Peninsula, through an analysis of familial inher-itance of a widow from Extremadura. As a source for the study, the author draws on the Cadastre Ledger of the Marquis of Ensenada (1761), kept in the General Archive of Simancas (AGS), capturing changes in the family estate of a country widow (living in the village of Alcuéscar) in the mid-eighteenth century resulting from a transfer of property. Using the method of quantitative analysis developed by the Annales School, the author examines the issue from several standpoints; on the one hand, this enables insights into the increases and reductions in the volume of real estate (urban and rural) and the real estate assets of such women through pur-chases and sales. On the other, the author is also able to analyze and outline the distribution ofa widow’s property during her life and after her death.

Nostalgic Fragments in the Thick of Things: Yuan Kewen (1890–1931) and the Act of Remembering

Abstract This article delves into the nexus of nostalgia, memory, and visuality by examining the images, objects, and events surrounding Yuan Kewen's remembrances of his father, Yuan Shikai, and their family estate in Huanshang. It also considers Zhang Boju's remembrance of his interactions with Yuan Kewen as another layer of historical memory. Phenomenological analysis of the act of remembering, especially in the work of Edward Casey, will be shown to yield rich insights when applied to China's early twentieth-century Republican culture. Surviving fragments—poems, anecdotes, photographs, and paintings—replete with sensuous and affective images of the past become the loci of memory in which these historical figures lived. Lamentation and reminiscence are also conducted through performance of historical dramas whose gestures of mourning and remembrance allowed Yuan to cultivate feelings of perpetual nostalgia through personal artistic expressions. The act of remembering became symptomatic for Yuan, Zhang, and to a large extent the entire generation of literati who experienced drastic social-political changes in the twentieth century.

Grigoryan , Bella Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861 (review)

REVIEWS 347 place in all libraries that have a place for books about Jewish life including antisemitism, and the literature and history of Belarus. London Arnold McMillin Grigoryan, Bella. Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762– 1861. Studies of the Harriman Institute. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2018. ix + 189 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.00 (paperback). Starting with discussion of reflections by the youthful Lev Tolstoi on the Instruction produced by Catherine II for the Legislative Commission she convoked in 1767, Bella Grigoryan considers the evolution of Russian ideas about the relationship between the nobility and the autocratic state over the century between Catherine’s accession to the throne in 1762 and the abolition of serfdom in 1861. She links this evolution to the gradual emergence of the Russian novelistic tradition, aiming in the process to ‘chart and interpret the rise of the Russian novel in relation to the political, legal, and cultural definitions that accrued to the nobility as a social estate’ (p. 4). This endeavour entails study of the interplay, in various cross-pollinating forms of writing, between the notions of subject and citizen and of the search for definitions of noble identity with which, Grigoryan rightly contends, many Russian writers were preoccupied. It is a corollary of the author’s findings that imperial Russia suffered less than has often been supposed from the relative underdevelopment of a civil public sphere. Certain ‘institutional cores’ of Russian civil society (p. 9), such as the press, the gentleman’s club, the noble assembly, voluntary associations and indeed imaginative literature, she maintains, were less at odds with the polity than much historiography on the Russian intelligentsia leads us to believe. Grigoryan provides a dense introductory chapter in which she examines the development of the nobleman’s sense of himself as gentleman farmer as this concept emerged in the pages of Novikov’s satirical journals and in writings by Fedor Rostopchin, Andrei Bolotov, Nikolai Karamzin and others. She also helpfully explores here the use of the letter as both a private genre and a tool for the ‘rhetorical construction of a public’ (p. 17). There follow chapters devoted to unfinished short prose works by Alexander Pushkin, including his novel Dubrovskii, Faddei Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin (1829), Nikolai Gogol´’s Dead Souls (especially its incomplete second part), Ivan Goncharov’s three novels, A Common Story (1847), Oblomov (1859) and The Precipice (1869), and Sergei Aksakov’s nostalgic Childhood Years of Bagrov the Grandson (1858). A place is SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 348 also found in the conclusion for brief discussion of Anna Karenina (1875–77), where Tolstoi paints, in his character Levin, what is perhaps the definitive portrait of the landowner who retires to the gentry’s private rural world. The diverse texts Grigoryan considers, which range from works of prose fiction to examples of non-fictional prose such as manuals on agriculture, conduct and housekeeping, respond to the insecurity of noble rights and status in autocratic Russia. They reflect the cultural anxieties of the nobleman who does not formally serve the state, after the emancipation of the nobility by Peter III in 1762, but who still feels a patriotic obligation to be of use. This sense of duty finds expression in the landowner’s performance of the role of manager of an ancestral estate. (Grigoryan makes it clear that it is the male landowner she is dealing with, not the noblewoman, who frequently did manage the family estate but whose social identity was not so closely bound up with this role.) The landowner might wonder whether nobility was an innate characteristic or a ‘set of qualities’ that could be ‘acquired, learned and cultivated, or performed’ (p. 48). Up to a point, he was ‘a man created by the public discourse of the epoch’ (p. 66). Thus, in the prose of the period in question, Grigoryan argues, the notion of noble identity in its various ‘iterations’ was ‘novelized’. Given the productivity of Russia’s classical prose writers and the breadth and depth of their engagement with social and political issues, selection of texts to study is bound to present difficulties. Grigoryan’s focus on a small number of...

The Values and Usefulness of Same-Sex Marriages Among the Females in Igbo Culture in the Continuity of Lineage or Posterity

The Igbo world in Southeastern Nigeria, as a patriarchal society, believes in passing the family inheritance along the male line excluding the female. This sociocultural belief and practice leads to gender role problems, especially in the case of families with no children or male child who will inherit the family estate. Same-sex marriage among women is used to bridge the gap created by the challenges of the socially and culturally constructed gender roles with the aim of “male daughters” and “female husbands” becoming sons and husbands to wives for procreation and continuity of the family’s lineage. Through Gender Studies and Gender and Power theory, this study examines the reasons and benefits of such practices, the risks the practices expose women to, as well as the sociocultural implications of the practice to the Igbo worldview.

The Honey of Souls: Cassiodorus and the Interpretation of Psalms in the Early Medieval West by Derek A. Olsen

Reviewed by: The Honey of Souls: Cassiodorus and the Interpretation of Psalms in the Early Medieval West by Derek A. Olsen Frans van Liere The Honey of Souls: Cassiodorus and the Interpretation of Psalms in the Early Medieval West. By Derek A. Olsen. (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press. 2017. Pp. xii, 313. $44.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8146-8414-6.) Few biblical commentaries in the Middle Ages were as influential as the sixth-century Explanation of the Psalms by Cassiodorus. Its author lived in an age in which educational and political institutions were being challenged at a rapid pace. Descended of an ancient noble Roman family, Cassiodorus served as statesman [End Page 562] under the Gothic kings of Italy, who had taken over from the last of the Roman emperors in the Western part of the empire. It is not clear what eventually prompted him to become a monk and transform his family estate, Vivarium, into a flourishing center of monastic learning. Unlike the asceticism of his contemporary, Benedict of Nursia, Cassiodorus' monastic vocation was found in the preservation of classical learning and the dedication to the Christian study of Scriptures. His love of the Book of Psalms may have played a major role in his conversion to the monastic life, Olsen speculates. Derek Olsen offers in this study much more than just a sketch of Cassiodorus' life and an analysis of his Psalms commentary. He gives a compelling introduction to the role and importance of the Psalms in the medieval Church. Not only were the Psalms the liturgical means to praise God; they were also regarded as a compendium to all of Scripture. Everything that was contained elsewhere in the entire Bible was referenced here in a spiritual manner. Psalms were the spiritual life-blood of early medieval Christians, and Olsen convincingly shows how their memorization and their liturgical use served as a way to overcome what he calls the "technological challenges" of the early Church: language, literacy, and the textual transmission of the Scriptures. Olsen's book details the influences on Cassiodorus' commentary: Origen, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and, most importantly, Hilary of Poitiers, and Augustine. In chapters eight and nine, Olsen takes the reader by the hand and offers some detailed samples of Cassiodorus' reading of the Psalms. But what makes this book a model approach to medieval exegesis is where Olsen takes us to the manuscripts (a ninth-century manuscript from Saint Gall, to be precise), to show how Cassiodorus' commentary techniques were embedded in the educational system of its own time. He devised an intricate system of marginal notes and signs to signify figures of speech and other allusions to the liberal arts, a system that would endure in the later medieval manuscript tradition. A chapter on the distribution and influence of the commentary concludes the book, and Olsen convincingly shows the key to the enduring success of the commentary: its adaptability to the demands of later centuries. Indeed, the reader of Olsen's book will be convinced that Cassiodorus' commentary has lost nothing of its relevance for today's Christian spiritual life, too. Olsen provides a very readable introduction to the whole world of early medieval spirituality and exegesis. The book is written in an extremely accessible yet never condescending language that clearly originates in classroom practice. If there is anything to criticize, it is a lack of references and footnotes, which have been kept to an absolute minimum. The bibliography is also rather sparse; suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter would have been welcome. These minor flaws aside, this book is a delight to scholar and layman alike. [End Page 563] Frans van Liere Calvin University Copyright © 2019 The Catholic University of America Press

The Noble Families of Butovan and Botono in Medieval Zadar

This paper presents the genealogy (family structure), urban family estates, and social life of the Zadar-based noble families of Butovan and Botono during the 13th and 14th centuries (until the 1390s) in order to determine their similarities and differences (whether they were one or two different families). Research has been based on various types of sources, primarily published and unpublished archival material preserved at the State Archive in Zadar (notarial and court documents)

A Spoken Silence: Rabindranath and the Ecology of Modern Consciousness

Rabindranath’s enormous corpus of varied work has been widely un-derstood as that of a poet, a writer, a playwright, a musician and a man of letters. He has only rarely been interpreted as a philosopher, and almost never as an ecological philosopher. Preliminary research shows that he is perhaps India’s first modern ecological philosopher - at growing odds with modernity. The essay argues that Tagore’s perspectives and insights are unique and his intellectual contribution in this area is indispensable to an understanding of the ecological and spiritual implications of technological, industrial modernity. There are few thinkers during the last hundred years anywhere more relevant when it comes to teaching us the significance of how we relate to the natural world (including, needless to add, our very own bodies) and what it tells us about ourselves and the way we have come to live.The focus in this paper is on what we can learn about Tagore’s outlook on the natural world and our relationship to it from a set of letters he wrote to his niece during his years as a young man, looking after his family estate in East Bengal (now, Bangladesh).

Maria Hempel – botanik i etnobotanik. Portret odkurzony

Maria Hempel (1834–1904), urodzona iwychowana w Chełmskiem, wywodziła się zrodziny o bogatych tradycjach wojskowych ipatriotycznych. Sama też była zaangażowanaw walkę niepodległościową w okresie powstaniastyczniowego. Znalazła się w gronienajważniejszych w Lubelskiem kobiet-kurierekpowstańczych i niezwykle ofiarnych samarytanek.Po utracie rodzinnego majątku, do końca życia tułała się po innych dworach.Mimo przeciwności losu i braku stosownegowykształcenia, położyła niemałe zasługiw dziedzinie botaniki i etnobotaniki.Udokumentowała stanowiska wielu cennychgatunków roślin, często już historycznych,na wschodzie Lubelszczyzny i lewym brzeguWisły. Materiały etnobotaniczne zgromadzoneprzez nią w powiatach chełmskim i janowskimdostarczają wiedzy na temat wykorzystaniadziko rosnących roślin naczyniowychi grzybów do celów spożywczych, leczniczych,gospodarskich, obrzędowych i magicznychna wsi polskiej drugiej połowy XIX w.

The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders' Case for an Activist Government by Steve Pincus

Reviewed by: The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders' Case for an Activist Government by Steve Pincus Nasser Behnegar (bio) The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders' Case for an Activist Government steve pincus New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016 207 pp. It is a pleasure to find a compact historical monograph in a fluid, clear, and engaging style by a writer who shows mastery of the art of narration. But it is a boon when such a work also sheds new light on well-studied events, making us rethink the relevance of the past to contemporary political debates. Steve Pincus's study of the Declaration of Independence is such a work. The well-crafted title of the work that plays on the two meanings of heart ("the inner core of a thing" and "the organ of love or sympathy") expresses its thesis. Today reverence for the American founders is more common among conservatives than left-leaning liberals who tend to look askance at the founders with, at best, ambivalent eyes; Pincus's work, insofar as it intends to influence contemporary affairs, tries to give the liberals a reason for appropriating the founders as their own. According to him, "the Declaration of Independence is—and should remain—'American Scripture'" (2), not so much because of its articulation of abstract principles for which it is so famous but because it addresses "quintessential issues of the modern era" that deal with immigration, race, and especially economics. Of course, the declaration would not deserve this status simply for addressing these issues. Pincus suggests that it addresses them in the right way or in the right spirit, and he interprets his American Bible less through an exegesis of the text than through the recovery of its historical background, and ultimately of a partisan political position, of which the declaration was one expression. [End Page 230] Pincus takes issue with the opinion that "American Patriots founded their new nation … in defense of small government and of local American culture against foreign imposition" (92). He questions the second part of this opinion by arguing that the American Revolution was a consequence of British partisan politics. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Whigs had ceased to be a unified party, splintering into two factions over questions of taxation and imperial politics. One side, the side that came to dominate the government first under Robert Walpole and later under George Grenville, "believed that John Locke … had shown that labor created property, and therefore any productive workforce, whether free or unfree, would generate economic prosperity" (30). The other side, who called themselves the Patriots, also followed Locke but argued that "economic prosperity was created not through production alone, but by means of dynamic interaction of human production and human consumption" (32). The establishment Whigs "privileged the British Sugar Islands," preferred a pacific policy toward the Spanish Empire to protect trade with these islands, and sought tax relief for landowners at home. The Patriots wished to promote the manufacturing sector and saw the potential of a prosperous North America as a market for British goods. They sought to promote this prosperity by encouraging immigration to the colonies and by forcing the Spanish to open their markets to American colonies. After the Seven Years' War, the tension between the followers of Grenville and the Patriots intensified as the former sought to reduce the debt incurred by the war by taxing the colonies while the latter argued for measures that would stimulate the economy of the colonies. The American Revolution, Pincus argues, was the result of despair over the failure of Patriot politics in England and the hope that it could be implemented in North America. Throughout, Pincus persuasively shows the links between American founders and English Patriots, including some curious anecdotes. We learn, for instance, that George Washington's elder brother renamed their family estate, "the Little Huntington Creek Plantation," Mount Vernon in honor of the Patriot admiral and vocal critic of Walpole Edmund Vernon, and he did so in honor of not a victory but a defeat, the disastrous but honorable attempt to conquer the city of Cartagena in the War of Jenkins' Ear (Jenkins was a captain...

THE PALEOBOTANICAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF CHARLES JAMES FOX BUNBURY (1809–1886)

ABSTRACT During the 1850s, Charles James Fox Bunbury, 8th Baronet Bunbury, was Britain's leading paleobotanist, who published a series of papers on fossil floras of Carboniferous, Jurassic and Neogene age. He also planned a major synoptic review of paleobotany, to rival Brongniart's Histoire de végétaux fossiles. He was financially comfortably-off, and well-connected with the scientific community in the London of his day. However, he failed to fulfil his ambitions in this field due to a combination of a lack of experience, and that on the death of his father he had to take over the running of the family estate. Today he is mainly remembered as the author of a number of names of still widely used fossil-taxa. Nevertheless, he fulfilled an important role in maintaining paleobotanical interest in Britain during the middle part of the nineteenth century.