Late 1840s Research Articles

Orkney, Shetland and the Networks of the Northern Reformation

This article explores the possible implications of the relationship between Orkney and Shetland and Norway for understanding the spread of the Reformation, focusing on the period between the late 1520s, when Reforming ideas began to be preached in Bergen, and 1560, when the Reformation was introduced into Scotland, including Orkney and Shetland. Draws on a scholarship which has shown the importance for the Reformation of language, trade, migration and urban/rural distinctions it investigates tantalising hints of contact between Orkney and Shetland, Norway (particularly Bergen) and Germany in questions of religion. This article does not seek to revise current understandings of the relationships of Orkney and Shetland to Scotland but seeks to explore what insights into (proto-)Reformation processes in Orkney and Shetland when possible influences from debates the Norwegian context – specifically Bergen – are considered alongside the influence of Scottish debates about religion. It concludes that whilst there is some evidence of contacts between individuals and that these contacts must have had aspects which related to religious practice, both the rural nature of Orkney and Shetland communities, and their relative isolation, meant that Reformation ideas were slow to take hold.

The Closing of the Constitution

Anyone who picks up a recent volume of the United States Reports or a prominent legal journal will be sure to find judges and lawyers debating, in agonizing detail, the meaning of a particular word or phrase in the Constitution. Marshaling late-eighteenth century dictionaries and legal treatises, records of debates from the drafting and ratifying conventions, and well-thumbed copies of the Federalist Papers, modern constitutional interlocutors will scrutinize text, structure, and history to discern an inherent logic. Above all, although disputants will endlessly contest what a particular provision means, they largely agree on what the Constitution itself is: as Jonathan Gienapp puts it in The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era, “an artifact circumscribed in time and space,” the “fixed Constitution” that we have been collectively dissecting since the late 1780s (10).

(2703) Proposal to conserve the name Tontelea attenuata against Maytenus amygdalina (Celastraceae)

(2703) Proposal to conserve the name <i>Tontelea attenuata</i> against <i>Maytenus amygdalina</i> (<i>Celastraceae</i>)

The Lévite Dress: Untangling the Cultural Influences of Eighteenth-Century French Fashion

During the final decades of the eighteenth century, France saw a massive vogue for women’s clothing styles that, while adhering to the fundamental norms of French dress, were directly influenced by Ottoman clothing. One of the most popular of these was the levite, a dress that was introduced in the late 1770s and continued in popularity through the late 1780s. Inspired by costumes worn in a staging of Racine’s play “Athalie,” which is set in the ancient Biblical era, the levite initially mimicked the lines of Middle Eastern caftans. Over time, the style developed into at least three different variations, connecting and merging with other popular French fashions with their own foreign influences, including the English-inspired robe a l’anglaise and redingote, as well as the Caribbean-derived chemise a la reine. In French fashion of this period, the “Deep Local” was a place where long-established dress forms merged and played with the concepts of “foreign” and “exotic.” Through a myriad of soures, including costume albums, traveller’s accounts, paintings and other artwork, masquerades, and the theater, Paris and Versailles themselves served as cross-cultural contact zones in which French people absorbed and adapted information about the dress of other nations. Drawing on sources including contemporary fashion magazines, personal and published writings, and artwork, this presentation will focus on understanding the levite as a fashion that began as a cultural fusion, then adapted and intertwined with other popular styles with their won foreign references. The levite’s cultural fluidity makes it an excellent lens through which to examine how French people used dress to experiment with and redefine national and cultural identity in the late eighteenth century.

A Microhistory of the Global Empire of Cotton: Ivanovo, The ‘Russian Manchester’*

Abstract The serf village of Ivanovo became one of the major centres of cotton production in tsarist Russia. This unexpected juxtaposition of serfdom and the beginnings of capitalist industry has made Ivanovo into an object of curiosity within histories of the Russian economy and of Russian serfdom. Thinking about Ivanovo as both a site of microhistory–the study of the ‘typical exception’–and as part of the global world of cotton both helps to explain Ivanovo’s development and helps to disrupt the notion of distinct phases of economic development that necessarily go along with distinct phases of political development. This article focuses on one period of Ivanovo’s history: a period beginning in the late 1820s, when Ivanovo’s owner, Count Sheremetev, began to manumit some of his wealthy serf industrialists. Many of them remained in the village and continued to produce the cotton calico that had already brought them their wealth and the village its fame. Although a feeling of a village society divided into separate classes had already begun to develop, this process gave new form to that development. In particular, the very institutional form of serfdom helped to create a stronger vision of a separate working class and industrial class.

O PRZEMIANACH PRAWA KRAJOWEGO PO ROZBIORACH RZECZYPOSPOLITEJ W ŚWIETLE WYKŁADU ‘PRAWO POLSKO-LITEWSKIE’ [IGNACEGO DANIŁOWICZA

W zbiorach lwowskich zachował się bardzo obszerny rękopis zawierający tekst wykładu na temat prawa polsko-litewskiego. Prawdopodobnie powstał on w końcu lat dwudziestych XIX w. i był dziełem Ignacego Daniłowicza. Tekst wykładu dostarcza okazji do poczynienia licznych obserwacji o zmianach jakich pod wpływem aktów rosyjskich doznało prawo polsko-litewskie w początkach XIX w. Zmiany te objęły w różnym stopniu wszystkie dziedziny prawa.

A secret brotherhood? The question of black Freemasonry before and after the Haitian Revolution

ABSTRACTLate eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue produced both a thriving Masonic movement and the most successful slave uprising in modern world history. Scholars have suggested but never proven that these two movements were linked. One biographer hypothesizes that white planters who knew the future Toussaint Louverture from colonial Masonic circles helped him organize the slave uprising of August 1791. This speculation is inspired by the fact that in the late 1790s Louverture signed his name with a distinctive pattern of dots. Many colonists and free men of color used similar symbols, which have been described as Masonic signatures.This article examines whether the approximately 300 men of all races who made such signatures in the 1780s and early 1790s were Masons. It finds little or no evidence that they were. It hypothesizes that men used these symbols to suggest their membership in secret societies that did not, in fact, exist.

Review: Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome, by Pamela O. Long

Pamela O. Long Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018, 368 pp., 73 b/w illus. $135 (cloth), ISBN 9780226543796; $45 (paper), ISBN 9780226591285 Giacomo Della Porta (1532–1602) was a northern Italian sculptor and stucco worker by training who moved to Rome in the late 1550s. He remade himself in the years that followed as an architect and surveyor, receiving several notable commissions, especially for civic building projects. He eventually became a leading architect and overseer of one of the era's most complicated hydraulic engineering works, the restoration of Rome's Acqua Vergine, the last ancient Roman aqueduct that still partially functioned in the sixteenth century. Stefano Duperac (ca. 1525–1604) was a Parisian painter and engraver who lived and worked in Rome in the 1560s–70s. During his successful career there as an artist, Duperac, like Della Porta, became fascinated with the study of Roman antiquities. He cultivated friendships with prominent antiquarians, ultimately becoming one himself. He also applied his extensive knowledge and experience to the study of cartography, which led to his producing innovative antiquarian maps of the city; after he returned to Paris, he continued to practice as a painter, architect, and garden designer. Domenico Fontana (1543–1607) was a stonemason and stucco worker who arrived in Rome in 1563 to join family members in a large architectural workshop. He eventually headed the family business and received building commissions from prominent church officials. As papal architect to Pope Sixtus V, he planned and coordinated the tricky project to move the Vatican obelisk to its present location in Saint Peter's Square and then published a definitive (if self-serving) treatise on the subject. These are just a few examples from the ambitious and protean cast of characters populating Pamela O. Long's Engineering the Eternal City . The story Long tells is firmly rooted in time and place: this is a book about later sixteenth-century Rome, concentrating on the roughly three …

Subscribing to Specimens, Cataloging Subscribed Specimens, and Assembling the First Phytogeographical Survey in the United States.

Throughout the late 1840s and the early 1850s, Harvard botanist Asa Gray (1810-1888) and his close friend George Engelmann (1809-1884) of St. Louis engaged themselves with recruiting men who sought to make a living by natural history collecting, sending these men into the field, searching for institutions and individuals who would subscribe to incoming collections, compiling catalogs, and collecting subscription fees. Although several botanists have noted Gray and Engelmann's bold experiment as having introduced America to a mode by which European naturalists had devised to organize scientific expeditions, historians of science have not taken the "subscription mode" seriously. I argue that it was specifically by undertaking the labor of cataloging species and charging subscription fees for the cataloged species that Gray established himself as a metropolitan botanist. One crucial consequence of Gray's rising profile was that he acquired sufficient "cataloging power" to secure his status as an authoritative cataloger of species, and as a kind of "mint" or "storehouse" (McOuat in Br J Hist Sci 34(1):1-28, 2001a) who produced well-pruned lists of American species to enable transactions between American and European botanists. But this essay is not focused on the Europeanization of American taxonomy. Drawing on work by scholars who place emphasis on how new forms of knowledge get produced when knowledge travels, my focus here is the evolution of the subscription mode when Gray and Engelmann adapted it to American natural history. My conclusion examines what historian of science Vanessa Heggie (Isis 105(2):318-334, 2014) identifies as the "danger of category dominance" in today's historiography of science and shows how a kind of "assemblage thinking" may help historians cope with this danger.

The Movement of Satirical Prints between London and Dublin in the Late 1820s: Daniel O’Connell and Catholic Emancipation

This article examines the exchange of satirical printed images between London and Dublin in 1828–9. Through the close visual analysis of three prints, two published in London and one in Dublin, it addresses how these images responded to news, used humour as a mechanism for provoking shared laughter, and shaped debates on both sides of the Irish Sea about Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847) and Catholic emancipation. By analysing an emergent motif of movement of people (marching, processing, leading and following), it is shown that revolutionary implications were constructed in printed images, especially for power in, and governance of, the Union.

A New Letter from Poe to Lowell on the Pioneer

Abstract Edgar Allan Poe's tale “The Tell-Tale Heart” was first published in the premiere issue of the Pioneer, an ambitious and short-lived literary journal edited by James Russell Lowell and Robert Carter. In 2013, a previously unpublished letter from Poe to Lowell, dated November 24, 1842, was auctioned at Christie's and is now in private hands. This letter contains Poe's offer of the tale to Lowell and his first mention of its title to the editor that went on to publish it. This article, based on direct examination of the letter, provides its full text, along with a contextual discussion of the Pioneer's brief existence and an exploration of the relationship between Poe and Lowell from their first correspondence in 1842 to their falling out and mutual criticism in the late 1840s. The newly discovered letter gives us a more complete picture of the publication of one of Poe's best-known tales and of the relationship between two major figures of nineteenth-century American literature.

The Connection between Charles Darwin's Evolutionary Theory of 'Heredity of Behaviors' and the 19th Century Neuroscience: The Influence of Neuroscience on Darwin's Overcoming of Lamarck's Theory of Evolution.

The nineteenth century neuroscience studied the instinct of animal to understand the human mind. In particular, it has been found that the inheritance of unconscious behavior like instinct is mediated through ganglion chains, such as the spinal cord or sympathetic nervous system, which control unconscious reflexes. At the same time, the theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics (hereafter 'IAC') widely known as Lamarck's evolutionary theory provided the theoretical frame on the origin of instinct and the heredity of action that the parental generation's habits were converted into the nature of the offspring generation. Contrary to conventional knowledge, this theory was not originally invented by Lamarck, and Darwin also did not discard this theory even after discovering the theory of natural selection in 1838 and maintained it throughout his intellectual life. Above all, in the field of epigenetics, the theory of 'IAC' has gained attention as a reliable scientific theory today. Darwin discovered crucial errors in the late 1830s that the Lamarck version's theory of 'IAC' did not adequately account for the principle of the inheritance of unconscious behavior like instinct. Lamarck's theory regarded habits as conscious and willful acts and saw that those habits are transmitted through the brain to control conscious actions. Lamarck's theory could not account for the complex and elaborate instincts of invertebrate animals, such as brainless ants. Contrary to Lamarck's view, Darwin established the new theory of 'IAC' that could be combined with contemporary neurological theory, which explains the heredity of unconscious behavior. Based on the knowledge of neurology, Darwin was able to translate the 'principle of habit' into a neurological term called 'principle of reflex'. This article focuses on how Darwin join the theory of 'IAC' with nineteenth century neuroscience and how the neurological knowledge from the nineteenth century contributed to Darwin's overcoming of Lamarck's 'IAC'. The significance of this study is to elucidate Darwin's notion of 'IAC' theory rather than natural selection theory as a principle of heredity of behavior. The theory of 'IAC' was able to account for the rapid variation of instincts in a relatively short period of time, unlike natural selection, which operates slowly in geological time spans of tens of millions of years. The nineteenth century neurological theory also provided neurological principles for 'plasticity of instinct,' empirically supporting the fact that all nervous systems responsible for reflexes respond sensitively to very fine stimuli. However, researchers of neo-Darwinian tendencies, such as Richard Dawkins and evolutionary psychologists advocating the 'selfish gene' hypothesis, which today claim to be Darwin's descendants, are characterized by human nature embedded in biological information, such as the brain and genes, so that it cannot change at all. This study aims to contribute to reconstructing the evolutionary discourse by illuminating Darwin's insights into the "plasticity of nature" that instincts can change relatively easily even at the level of invertebrates such as earthworms.

Tricky, Fine, and Trapped: Painting the Femme Forte in Early Seventeenth-Century France

Abstract Between the late 1620s and late 1640s, Jacques Blanchard, Simon Vouet, and Claude Vignon all painted the femme forte (strong woman), an exemplary, heroic femal type whose popularity was linked to the presence of Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria on the royal stage of France. This article puts early seventeenth-century French paintings of femmes fortes into conversation with period discourse regarding the reception of paintings and the status of women. Pictorial representation tended to cast the femme forte into contexts that compromised her exemplary status. Nude, on the verge of death by her own hand, the figure of the femme forte invited the very kind of sensual consumption that the femme forte herself attempted to disavow. Yet the ultimate threat posed by the femme forte was that her image might ‘trick’ male viewers into unwise actions.

Ten Demi-Culverins for Aldeburgh: Whitehall, the Dunkirkers, and a Suffolk Fishing Community, 1625–1630

AbstractHistorians have not paid close attention to the activities of freebooters operating out of Dunkirk in the late 1620s. This essay corrects that omission by first studying the threat from Dunkirk to England's east coast and then addressing how the central government, counties, and coastal towns responded. A surprisingly rich vein of manuscript material from Great Yarmouth and particularly from the Suffolk fishing community of Aldeburgh informs this case study of the impact of this conflict around the North Sea.

The Legislature at War: Bandits, Runaways and the Emergence of a Virginia Doctrine of Separation of Powers

The politics of war severely divided the Virginia Southside during the American Revolution. Laborers, ship pilots and other landless men and women bitterly resented the efforts of the patriot gentry to stop trade with Great Britain and to establish a military force. Planters feared that the presence of the British Navy would encourage slaves to flee or attack their masters. What role did law play in the patriot response to these conditions? This essay uses the case of Josiah Philips, who led a banditti residing in the Great Dismal Swamp, to show how law intersected with class and race in patriot thinking. The gentry's view of the landless as dependent and lacking in self-control and its view of black slaves as posing a constant threat of violence supported the application of special legal regimes suited to these dangers. In particular, Philips was “attainted” by the General Assembly, a summary legislative legal proceeding traditionally employed against offenders who threatened government itself. While the attainder was uncontroversial when it passed, the significance of the Assembly's intervention changed over time. By the late 1780s, some among the state's legal elite regarded the Assembly as having unnecessarily interfered in the ordinary course of justice, which they were then seeking to reform. This opened the way to recharacterize the Assembly's extraordinary legal jurisdiction as an arbitrary exercise of lawmaking power.

Of 'Rage of Party' and the Coming of Civility

Of 'Rage of Party' and the Coming of Civility

Наблюдать и сочувствовать: «Псевдореализм» и литературная программа «Отечественных записок» на рубеже 1840–1850-х гг.

Наблюдать и сочувствовать: «Псевдореализм» и литературная программа «Отечественных записок» на рубеже 1840–1850-х гг.

The Contested Inspiration of Kent's Landscaping Innovation: Native Ingenuity, Renaissance Italy, Ancient Rome, or China

In a small but most prophetic way, the design of English gardens moved away from the regularity and discipline of classical European art in the late 1720s and early 1730s. Then as later, the trail‐...

Translating the Jansenist Controversy in Britain and Ireland

Abstract This article explores perceptions of Jansenism in Britain and Ireland in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Grounded in the theology of Cornelius Jansen, the Catholic bishop of Ypres, the wider Jansenist ‘movement’ was a controversial group of theologians, philosophers, clergy and nuns whose disputes with the papacy and French monarchy endured well into the eighteenth century. These centred on questions of divine grace, papal fallibility and even political dissent. In exploring the translation and reception of these ideas, this article foregrounds a moment in the late 1670s when the natural philosopher Robert Boyle and a group of like-minded Protestants attempted to incorporate Jansenist writings into a translation of the Bible into Irish. Enthusiasm for this was based on widely held perceptions that the Jansenists represented a more rational strain of Catholicism which anticipated a broader reform of Catholic Europe. The ensuing ‘Jansenist Preface’ was intended to help unify Christendom by bringing about a more rational religion among Ireland’s Catholics. The shock felt by Boyle and his collaborators upon actually reading Jansenist works, and the reappraisal this engendered, provides the foundation for a wider exploration of how ideas and representations of the Jansenist controversy moved, were translated, and subsequently engaged with across these confessional spaces. In doing so, this article sets British and Irish interests in Jansenism against wider questions of interconfessional dialogue and European reformation, and explores the place of mobility and translation in the framing of the reformation process.

&amp;#x93;No man shall suffer for the murder of a Savage&amp;#x94;: The Augusta Boys and the Virginia and Pennsylvania Frontiers

ABSTRACT In the mid- to late 1760s, a series of murders perpetrated by Anglo-Americans against Native Americans occurred in the colonial backcountry. Although not unusual events in this region, the attempted prosecution of the murderers resulted in tension between Anglo-Americans who desired punishment and those who rejected punishment for killing an Indian. Those opposing stances reveal a larger battle over different understandings of English constitutionalism and frontier societies' use of rights. What is unusual historiographically is that these murders and the subsequent contestation of authority between frontiersmen and government transpired in Virginia. By examining these understudied events, this article reconsiders the depiction of inter-Anglo-Virginian society as tranquil, connects the Virginia backcountry to similar events in Pennsylvania, and credits frontiersmen with the political knowledge and sophistication usually reserved for Anglo-Americans who lived in coastal, urban settlements.