Heroic Reputation Research Articles

The Imperial Afterlife of Warren Hastings, 1818–1947

ABSTRACT This article examines the ‘afterlife’ or posthumous reputation of Warren Hastings, one of the most important and controversial figures in the foundation of British India. Exploring a wide range of sources, it argues that Hastings was a symbolic figure through which generations of imperial commentators vented the political and moral concerns of their own day. Accordingly, it uses his afterlife as a key indicator of the rise and fall of imperial sentiment and confidence in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain. Hastings’s afterlife can be divided into three distinct phases. In the first, between 1818 and 1890, the image of Hastings as a flawed hero – an empire-builder who committed crimes – was propelled into popular memory. In the second, between 1890 and 1915, Hastings was transformed into an untouchable imperial icon. Driven by contemporary concerns, a group of ex-Indian officials attempted to vindicate Hastings’s actions and exculpate his ‘crimes’. The third section explores the apotheosis of Hastings’s reputation amidst the growing uncertainty over the future of British India between 1915 and 1947. Following the elevation of a deeply controversial figure into an imperial hero, this article explores the methods and motivations behind the propagation of heroic reputations, demonstrating that our understanding of imperial figures has been mediated through the vagaries of contemporary politics.

Republican Relicts: Gender, Memory, and Mourning in Irish Nationalist Culture, ca. 1798–1848

AbstractIn the past two decades, remembrance has emerged as one of the dominant preoccupations in Irish historical scholarship. There has, however, been little sustained analysis of the relationship between gender and memory in Irish studies, and gender remains under-theorized in memory studies more broadly. Yet one of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century commemorations of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions is the relatively prominent role accorded to women and, in particular, Sarah Curran, Pamela Fitzgerald, and Matilda Tone, the widows of three of the most celebrated United Irish “martyrs.” By analyzing the mnemonic functions these female figures performed in nineteenth-century Irish nationalist discourse, this article offers a case study of the circumstances in which women may be incorporated into, rather than excluded, from national memory cultures. This incorporation, it is argued, had much to do with the fraught political context in which the 1798 rebellion and its leaders were memorialized. As the remembrance of the rebellion in the first half of the nineteenth century assumed a covert character, conventionally gendered distinctions between private grief and public remembrance, intimate histories and heroic reputations, and family genealogy and public biography became blurred so as to foreground women and the female mourner.

Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes, 1870–1939, by Berny Sèbe

Most of us probably think we know what a ‘hero’ is, or have some ideas about the qualities and achievements that might make someone ‘heroic’. Berny Sèbe’s monograph, however, is one of those books that reveal an unexpected complexity, taking a seemingly familiar concept and successfully defamiliarising it. Sèbe’s quarry here is the ‘heroic reputation’ and specifically that of the imperial hero from the 1870s to the outbreak of the Second World War. An imperial reputation, he argues, is not made by monumental actions alone, but is rather the result of complex political and cultural mechanics, and networks of ‘hero-makers’ with vested interests in their subject. Published in Manchester University Press’s longstanding Studies in Imperialism series, Sèbe’s work is an important contribution to the study of ‘popular imperialism’. Indeed, by showing how widely promoted imperial heroes were in popular culture, and by examining the political utility of their powerful reputations, the book reveals just how significant a regime of heroism was to empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sèbe, moreover, deals with heroic figures from both Britain and France. In deftly weaving British and French imperial history together, revealing both a cross-Channel heroic culture and conspicuous national differences, his book is important reading for those with interests in comparative empire studies.

‘Heroes of Charity?’ Between Memory and Hagiography: Colonial Medical Heroes in the Era of Decolonisation

This article focuses on two medical figures of significance, each of whom came to embody a different aspect of the colonial development ideal in the post-colonial period. Dr Eugène Jamot and Dr Albert Schweitzer became associated with competing forms of development or humanitarian work through the work of their hagiographers and commentators. While this article shows how their reputation resisted the end of their original colonial setting and how it was reinvented in the light of theological and medical interpretations of their lives, it also argues that this memorialisation became closely associated with fragmented groups and to private celebrations of their lives. Ultimately this amounts to a privatisation of heroic reputations.

Frederick A. Cook: the role of photography in the making of his polar explorer-hero image

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to show how the photography of Frederick A. Cook (1865–1940) played an important role in the making of his polar explorer-hero image. It considers portraits and Arctic and Antarctic photographs that Cook used in his own publications and illustrated lectures, and which he provided for press articles. The paper is underpinned by discourse analysis and the concept of the photograph as a representation of reality filtered through various lenses. The visual impact and discursive messages of the photographs were aimed at situating readers and audiences in responsive attitudes that would generate a public persona which he exploited to increase his fame and heroic reputation. In time, Cook's photography also played a critical part in the collapse of the hero image.

Writing and Remembrance: New Directions in Livingstone Studies

ABSTRACTThis volume of essays contains some of the best recent work on the Victorian missionary and explorer David Livingstone (1813–1873), gathered together for the bicentenary of his birth. The following introduction delineates ‘Livingstone Studies’ as a field of research and directs attention to its inherently interdisciplinary nature. It summarises the various papers in the collection, gathered together under the two broad thematic categories of ‘writing’ and ‘remembrance’. Additionally, this introduction argues that the papers speak well beyond their Livingstone focus. In the first section scholars are directed to the margins of empire, as the articles articulate the importance of ‘peripheral’ spaces and intercultural interaction in shaping Victorian identities and geographical and imperial knowledge. The analytic approach and broader context of the papers, moreover, as they delve into the archive of exploration, will be of general interest to scholars of print culture and travel literature. The second section extends the collection's value beyond the nineteenth century altogether. For those interested in reception and reputation studies, the detailed examination of one heroic reputation will offer productive ways for thinking about the legacies of public figures.

Heroes, Presidents, and Politics

In 2008, we needed a hero. We still do. Political narratives are all about heroes, and never was it more plainly evident than in the 2008 presidential contest between Barack Obama and John McCain. Like all candidates, Obama and McCain worked to craft their own heroic narratives, from despair to redemption to, each hoped, glory. And sociologists watched as the American public joined in on this process, seeing their hopes, dreams, and concerns filtered through opinion polls that were used to form the politicians into just the heroes these times called for. Candidates and voters colluded in myth-making in that block-buster election, but how has the victor's heroic reputation served him as he holds office?

From menace to celebrity: the English police detective and the press, c.1842-1914

Surveying the changing image of the police detective from the inception of detective departments in the new police in the mid Victorian era through to its formative period in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is vital to our understanding of how the system of crime control was perceived at the time. Initially, the notion of undercover policing was widely rejected. By the eve of the First World War, however, police detectives, especially at Scotland Yard, enjoyed an almost heroic reputation. In the belief that the press was the most significant factor in shaping the dominant view on police detectives during this crucial period, this article examines their changing image as reflected in newspapers and periodicals, and the role played by the press in this metamorphosis.

Men for All Seasons? Carson, Parnell, and the Limits of Heroism in Modern Ireland

Charles Stewart Parnell and Edward Carson both failed in their fundamental political objectives (a socially and geographically united and autonomous Ireland, as against a wholly Unionist Ireland). However, both men were the objects of great reverence during their lifetimes; and each was the focus of careful image building. Their heroic reputations were swiftly defined in regal, mystical and sexual terms: the reputation of each was commodified. Both were redefined according the needs of later generations: Parnell's alleged radicalism grew with the passing of the years, and with the establishment of an independent Ireland under bourgeois Catholic domination; the complexities of Carson's career were masked by the demands of later Unionist generations. Both men have to some extent been superseded by rival heroic reputations within their respective cultures. Parnell's standing has been challenged by the insurgents of 1916—21, while Carson's legacy has been sometimes overshadowed by that of his former lieutenant, James Craig.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: What Should Historians Do with Heroes?: Reflections on Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century Britain

Teaching & Learning Guide for: What Should Historians Do with Heroes?: Reflections on Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century Britain

‘Part of the blood and dream’: surrogation, memory and the National Hero in the postcolonial Caribbean

ABSTRACT According to Joseph Roach, ‘surrogation’ is a key mechanism for the reproduction of collective social memory within the ‘circum-Atlantic world’, a term he uses in Cities of the Dead (1996) to describe the oceanic system connecting the Americas, Africa and Europe that emerged in the sixteenth century and that was forged, in particular, through the trade in and enslavement of millions of African people. Surrogation consists of a process through which attempts are made to fill ‘cavities’ created by death or other forms of departure with replacements. While this idea has mainly been used to understand processes of cultural representation in the colonial circum-Atlantic world, it can also be applied to postcolonial contexts, such as the processes of nation-building in the formally decolonized Caribbean that rest on the articulation of history and memory. In Barbados, this process involved the creation in 1998 of a pantheon of ten National Heroes. First among these is Bussa, an enslaved man commemorated by politicians, academics and, to some extent, ordinary people for leading the largest revolt against slavery on the island in 1816. Bussa is a ‘surrogate’ in at least three ways: 1) his heroic reputation fills the space left by others who suffered the physical and epistemic violence of slavery, and about whom little is known; 2) he represents ‘Africa’ in a thoroughly creolized society searching for its pan-African roots; and 3) he makes good the (supposed) absence of a national tradition of radicalism on the island. Yet, surrogation is rarely successful in exactly replacing loss because substitutes invariably fail to meet—or even exceed—expectations. Symptomatic of this has been the controversy over Bussa's status as rebel leader and African, with angry exchanges taking place between and among local and foreign historians. Although issues of archival integrity and folk memory have been to the fore in these debates, Lambert neither considers ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ histories in antagonism, nor contrasts ‘Caribbean’ with ‘metropolitan’ historiographic traditions. Instead, he considers how the conflict and division surrounding the creation of this National Hero reveals the difficulties with surrogation and, hence, the problematic nature of the articulation of memory and history in the post-slavery/postcolonial circum-Atlantic world.

What Should Historians Do With Heroes? Reflections on Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century Britain

AbstractThis article reviews research on modern British heroes (in particular Henry Havelock, Florence Nightingale, Amy Johnson and Robert Falcon Scott) to argue that heroes should be analysed as sites within which we can find evidence of the cultural beliefs, social practices, political structures and economic systems of the past. Much early work interpreted modern heroes as instruments of nationalist and imperialist ideologies, but instrumental interpretations have been superseded within the New Cultural History by broader analyses of the range of gendered meanings encoded in heroic reputations. Studies of heroic icons have generated important insights for historians of masculinity and femininity. More research, however, is needed on the reception rather than the representation of heroic icons, on visual and material sources, and on the changing forms and functions of national heroes after 1945.

A hero for their times: early biographies of NewtonIliffeRobKeynesMiloHiggittRebekaheds. Early biographies of Isaac Newton, 1660–1885(2 vols). Pickering & Chatto, London2006. pp. lxix +387; xlvii +420. £195.00 (hardback).1-85196-778-8.

Rob Iliffe, Milo Keynes, Rebekah Higgitt. eds. Early biographies of Isaac Newton, 1660–1885 (2 vols). Pickering & Chatto, London 2006. pp. lxix +387; xlvii +420. £195.00 (hardback). 1-85196-778-8. Though biography be no longer an act of worship, it is not yet a solemn and impartial judgment: we

Lafayette’s Mémoires and the Changing Legacy of Two Revolutions

By publishing his posthumous memoirs in 1837, Lafayette’s family intended to insure his reputation and promote the liberal cause. This article explains the varied and often surprising reasons for the failure of this enterprise, including the effects of copyright laws, finance and editing decisions. By examining the responses of contemporaries to the memoirs, this article also explores the shifting meaning of Lafayette’s legacy in both France and the United States, the changing meaning of revolution in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the difficulties of sustaining a heroic reputation when it is no longer politically useful.

John F. Kennedy and the Limited Test Ban Treaty: A Case Study of Presidential Leadership

John F. Kennedy's foreign policy leadership style has evoked contradictory historical evaluations. The early assessments written by administration officials like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Theodore Sorensen, and Roger Hilsman depicted Kennedy as a consummate pragmatist, skilled crisis manager, and, more generally, a great world leader.(1) Kennedy's almost heroic reputation as a foreign policy leader came under attack for the first time in the early 1970s with publication of works by David Halberstam, Louise Fitzsimons, Richard J. Walton, and Henry Fairlie.(2) Whereas Halberstam put at least some of the blame for America's unfortunate involvement in the Vietnam War on Kennedy's shoulders, the work of the three other writers referred to Kennedy as the great cold warrior and considered his foreign policy as imperialist in fact, if not in intent. Neither the portrayal of Kennedy as a decisive and courageous statesman nor his depiction as an irresponsible and dogmatic cold warrior went unchallenged in light of growing insight into the U.S. policy-making process during the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Emerging from the new body of sources and literature of the 1980s was a far more ambiguous Kennedy, whose foreign policy decisions were often characterized by vacillation and indecisiveness, marked by rhetorical overkill on one hand and restrained pragmatism on the other. At the same time, it became clear that Kennedy's ambiguity often had to be attributed to the interplay of domestic and foreign concerns and their influence on Kennedy's foreign policy.(3) Despite the considerable number of books and articles written about Kennedy, his foreign policy achievements and presidential leadership style still await a balanced assessment.(4) This article contributes to our understanding of Kennedy's foreign policy by examining Kennedy's leadership in successfully concluding the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT). The authors conclude that Kennedy pursued the goal of signing a nuclear test ban with vigor and persistence from his first days in office through the trilateral debate of the treaty's language among American, Soviet, and British representatives in July 1963. Before the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, however, Kennedy felt that his domestic as well as his foreign policy position was too weak to take on arguments of those opposed to negotiating a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. Kennedy's room for maneuver expanded with successful conclusion of the Cuban missile crisis. The months leading up to the final, two-week-long negotiation of the LTBT were marked by Kennedy's willingness to use his greater political freedom and take the lead in pushing the test ban. In doing so, he was prepared to take considerable risks both domestically and in terms of U.S. relations with its allies. The test ban case reveals Kennedy as an active and flexible but still cautious president. His personal leadership and flexible organization of the policy process features that might have been a weakness regarding decision making on other issues formed the basis for successful negotiation of the first effective arms control agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union. While Kennedy was clearly not the cold warrior that Fitzsimons, Walton, and Fairlie accused him of being, his foreign policy decisions were subject to political considerations related to domestic and foreign pressures to a far greater degree than Schlesinger, Sorensen, and Hilsman lead the reader to believe with their emphasis on Kennedy's personal skills as a foreign policy leader and crisis manager. Senator Kennedy, a Nuclear Test Ban, and Nuclear Nonproliferation The issue of a nuclear test ban was not a new one in the 1960s. American, Soviet, British, and French delegations had discussed draft agreements to end nuclear weapons tests as early as the Truman administration. But during the early years of the cold war, the arms control and disarmament talks in Geneva never really left the realm of propaganda, and no substantive progress on the test ban issue was achieved. …

Simon Newcomb's Early Astronomical Career

Previous articleNext article No AccessSimon Newcomb's Early Astronomical CareerArthur L. NorbergArthur L. Norberg Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 69, Number 2Jun., 1978 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/352004 Views: 5Total views on this site Citations: 16Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1978 History of Science Society, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Newcomb, Simon, (Sep 2012): 389–391.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118150719.ch119David Aubin, Charlotte Bigg, H. Otto Sibum Introduction, (Jan 2010): 1–32.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-001Simon Werrett The Astronomical Capital of the World, (Jan 2010): 33–57.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-002Massimo Mazzotti The Jesuit on the Roof, (Jan 2010): 58–85.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-003David Aubin Eclipse Politics in France and Thailand, 1868, (Jan 2010): 86–117.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-004Simon Schaffer Keeping the Books at Paramatta Observatory, (Jan 2010): 118–147.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-005Guy Boistel Training Seafarers in Astronomy, (Jan 2010): 148–173.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-006Sven Widmalm Astronomy as Military Science, (Jan 2010): 174–198.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-007Martina Schiavon Geodesy and Map Making in France and Algeria, (Jan 2010): 199–224.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-008 Michelson and the Observatory, (Jan 2010): 225–252.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-009 Even the Tools Will Be Free, (Jan 2010): 253–284.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-010 “I thought this might be of interest …”, (Jan 2010): 285–304.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-011 Staging the Heavens, (Jan 2010): 305–324.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-012 The Berlin Urania, Humboldtian Cosmology, and the Public, (Jan 2010): 325–343.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-013 Bibliography, (Jan 2010): 345–365.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392507-014David Aubin, Colette Le Lay Bibliographie générale, Cahiers François Viète , no.I-11/12I-11/12 (Sep 2006): 177–190.https://doi.org/10.4000/cahierscfv.1680