Late Nineteenth Century Research Articles

TOMBSTONE OF PRINCE DMYTRO KOZEKA: A «NEW AND OLD» LAPIDARY MONUMENT OF VOLYN OF THE 16th CENTURY

The Scientific Archive of the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine holds a drawing of the tombstone of Prince Dmytro Kozeka. The drawing on a sheet of paper was made in pencil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It contains two inscriptions (epitaphs) in Old Ukrainian and Latin and the princely coat of arms between them. The texts of the inscriptions were published twice in the nineteenth century. The large coat of arms on the tombstone has never been described. Its image, as well as the image of the inscriptions, is published for the first time. The large coat of arms has the shape of a heraldic shield inscribed in a circle. The shape of the shield is made in the Baroque style. Four heraldic signs are symmetrically arranged on the shield, the first of which, in the form of a bow and cross, is the minor coat of arms of the prince. This sign is present on the personal seals of Dmytro Kozeka. The second sign is still unknown in the heraldry of Ukraine in the sixteenth century. Two other signs belong to well-known arms used by many noble families. The paper is accompanied by illustrations that show a complete drawing of the prince’s tombstone and individual elements of this lapidary monument: two epitaphs and a great coat of arms, opening the way for studying the vocabulary of the inscriptions and performing paleographic analysis. The attribution of the coat of arms will allow us to clarify the genealogy of the Kozeka family. Prince Dmytro Kozeka died in 1583 and was buried in the Church of the Assumption of Our Lady in the monastery not far from Zymne village near Volodymyr city. The marble slab on the grave was installed by his wife Kateryna Falchevska. After the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is no evidence of the location of the slab. The Kozeka family appeared in Volhynia in the mid-fifteenth century. Their origin is not clear. Dmytro Kozeka is the most famous representative of this family, according to written sources. The paper describes some episodes of his biography, gives an overview of the princely estates, specifies the time period when his father died, and reveals the previously unknown names of his two sisters. The tombstone of Prince Dmytro Kozeka is a valuable historical source for the study of the elite stratum of the Ukrainian population of the early modern period.

Diplomacy of architecture and the Ghana National Mosque complex: concrete sign of a soft Turkish Imperium?

In a manner almost reminiscent of the Ottoman Empire’s frantic search (late nineteenth to early twentieth century) for müstemlekat (colonies) in Africa, modern Turkey seems to have revived its imperialist dreams in contemporary Africa. Following the elaboration of a proactive African foreign policy strategy, Turkey declared 2005 the Year of Africa, and established diplomatic relations with a raft of Muslim-majority African countries (MMACs). While Ghana is not an MMAC, Turkey re-established diplomatic ties with Accra in 2010, heralding a burgeoning relationship. Drawing on the theory of sub-­imperialism in tandem with the diplomacy of architecture (DoA) framework, this work will argue that Turkey has cleverly utilised the symbolism and siting of the Ghana National Mosque Complex (GNMC) to make the most visible and audacious broadcast yet of its imperial intentions in Africa, and in record time. In unpacking the argument my primary interest will be to canvass the view that architectural imprints have become a powerful cultural weapon in the geostrategic soft-power arsenal of recent rising powers.

‘Harmonise with the rest of the Empire’: Empire’s influence on religious instruction in Australian and New Zealand primary schools, 1880–1962

ABSTRACT This article argues that imperial identities embracing Britishness within Anglo-settler colonies significantly influenced provisions for religious education in Australia and New Zealand primary schools from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, corresponding with James Belich’s chronology of recolonisation. The article begins with an overview of the foundational Education Acts of Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and New Zealand, each of which included stronger legal provisions for secularity than in other Australian and settler colonial contexts. The article then tracks the enduring campaigns to promote additional religious instruction in classrooms, revealing a common imperial imaginary shared by Protestant settlers within Australian and New Zealand contexts. Proponents drew upon one another’s tactics, including campaigns for referenda, the creation of Bible-in-Schools Leagues, and parliamentary lobbying campaigns. They also drew upon the idea that Britishness necessitated Christianity, though their calls sometimes did not reflect the legislative reality in Great Britain itself. In the mid-twentieth century, the context of the Second World War precipitated a renewed focus on Britishness as a bulwark and protector of the British Empire. When combined with the diffusion of Agreed Syllabuses, this enabled religious instruction advocates to overcome fierce opposition to strengthen systems of religious instruction from 1940 to 1962.

Richard Kirwan a [united] Irish man of science in Europe

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have long been considered as a formative period for modern Irish political traditions such as nationalism, republicanism and unionism. For Europe it was the time of a turnover in science moving from observation to experiment and from speculation to fact. Richard Kirwan was a well known natural philosopher in Europe and a respected man of science in his time. Throughout all the wars, he was connected with his colleagues in a network reaching across Europe and even to America. Using a few examples, this article is intended to provide an insight how the network worked in a time that was marked by political conflicts and revolutionary events in both science and social life.

Inheritance, Marriage and Adoption: Changing Judicial Practices in Hyderabad State

Although Hindu banking firms in Hyderabad state had an advantage over Muslim ones because Hindu law allowed adoptions while Islamic law did not, adoptions were nonetheless a source of great conflict and division for firms. Before the late nineteenth century, inheritance practices in Hyderabad privileged both Hindu and Muslim nobles and officials, but as Hyderabad’s courts and advocates began to be connected to courts and advocates based in British India, contesting family members turned from the family and customary law generally administered in Hyderabad to the evolving standardisation of Hindu and Islamic law in British India. Hyderabad’s government, however, continued to privilege Hindu and Muslim nobles well into the twentieth century, although more research is needed about changing judicial practices in Hyderabad and other native states.

South Africa’s Haymarket: the Knights of Labor and political violence in the United States and South Africa, 1886–1892

Abstract This article compares and connects two episodes of political violence in the late nineteenth century: the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886 and the bombing of the offices of the De Beers Company, chaired by Cecil Rhodes, at Kimberley on the South African diamond fields in 1891. These episodes were connected by the existence in both countries of an American and then global movement, the Knights of Labor/Labour. The Knights’ American history was shaped by Haymarket. Their South African history was radically altered by the De Beers explosion, which both the Knights and their enemies interpreted through the prism of Haymarket. They drew lessons from it that determined their own conduct and may have contributed to the demise of the South African Knights less than two years later. This article charts those connections and the context to the De Beers explosion, the trial that followed, and the lessons that South African Knights drew from the experiences of their American brothers and sisters.

Unearthed, Smuggled and Decontextualized Carl Schmidt and the Provenance of Hamburg’s Papyrus Bilinguis 1

Abstract Information regarding the provenance of papyrological material that was acquired in the Egyptian antiquities market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is scarce and often unreliable. This article investigates the provenance of Hamburg’s Papyrus Bilinguis 1, famed for containing the apocryphal Acta Pauli. By researching archival files documenting the acquisition and the context of the find, the papyrus is shown to have been acquired in breach of the Egyptian antiquities law of 1912. The article reveals how Carl Schmidt (1868–1938), the collector who acquired the manuscript for the Hamburg library, by concealing information, tried to cover up his own criminal involvement in the smuggling of the manuscript. Through the investigation of a manuscript that was acquired by a public German institution in awareness of its illegality, the article hopes to contribute to current debates on the translocation of cultural heritage artefacts to Europe and the US in the age of European colonialism and imperialism.

Blind Spots in Crowds, Masses, and Multitudes

The brief historical overview comprises an account of classical crowd theories and their contemporary metamorphoses to contextualize the thematic section of the journal. Regarding the proverbial “age of the crowd” of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, a variety of attempts of conceptualization proved controversial but productive. Hyppolite Taine, Scipio Sighele, or Gustave Le Bon approached the phenomenon dominantly in psychological terms foregrounding the destructive elements of mass dynamics. In the interwar period, however, a first wave of differentiation might be detected, insofar as younger academic sub-disciplines, i.e., social statistics, seek to grasp the crowd as a structure with its intricate and partly paradoxical qualities. In recent scholarship, however, the diversification of the concept seems to have become even more complex: by shifting the focus from the “object crowd” to the “subject crowd”, descriptions of the multitude, the network, the swarm, or the assembly reflect the need to think of the crowd as an autonomous agency with emancipatory potentials.

’Gypsies’, Natural Monogamy, and Violence Full of Love

The paper examines modern knowledge about non-human primates in Czech travel narratives concerning Africa and biological journals from the late nineteenth century to the end of the interwar period. Particular attention is given to the way discourse on primates and anthropological discourse mutually influenced each other. Inspired by the intersection of human – animal studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, the paper emphasizes the anthropomorphizing character of biological discourse and popular travel narratives. At the time, presentations of primates created a specific anthropological resource and, in addition, helped to naturalize the dominant racial and gender ideologies. In the context of the Austrian–Hungarian and Czechoslovakian relative inability to obtain colonial possessions in the way western powers did, the representations of anthropomorphized non-human primates can also be interpreted as a specific field where Czech colonial fantasies about dominance were expressed.

Medicalizing the Body and the Locale: Kala Azar and Disease Thinking in Assam, 1824-1900.

The article examines two seemingly unconnected occurrences at the nineteenth-century north east frontier of British India. The first is the production of a pathological space via moral, social, and cultural codes enacted by medical topographies on the region since the first Anglo-Burmese war (1824-1826) and the subsequent rise of disease thinking. The second is the ambivalence in disease thinking that is brought to fore through the mysterious malady called kala azar (visceral leishmaniasis), which was geographically designated as Assam fever. This article contends that the geographical designation of kala azar as Assam fever is not just coincidental or a nosological confusion of the late nineteenth century but rather has its origin in the preceding pathological carving of space at the frontier. Further, it explores the troubled ontology between research on malaria and kala azar investigations to show that the old codes enacted by medical topographies hinged upon the era of laboratory medicine.

Cabaret and decency: how contemporary definitions of cabaret are shaped by censorship

The abundant ‘cabaret’ events that populate London’s contemporary entertainment scene strategically adopt specific structures and aesthetics. Common points of reference include the Weimar Republic, Berlin clubs of the 1920’s, ‘salacious’ female nudity, ‘outrageous’ camp reveals and inevitable references to Bob Fosse’s ‘Cabaret’. The events often promise to provide a ‘high quality’ drinking and dining experience. In this way ‘nostalgia’ can be turned into financial success. This formulaic approach defines the contemporary understanding of cabaret, omitting vital aspects of the genre while turning it into a purely commercial commodity. My artistic practice as research interrogates the experimental nature of the cabaret of late nineteenth century Paris within a contemporary British context. Setting itself apart from the allure of ‘flesh and cash’ of the West End cabaret, Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret, regularly programmed at Hoxton Hall, London, since 2016, focuses on exploring an updated experience of European cabaret within the abandoned British Music Hall and Variety tradition. The wider cultural discourse fails to report on the possibility of different approaches to cabaret. I will draw on particular examples from my practice – how a 60-something performer clad in Y-fronts, for example, was regarded by a certain audience as obscene – to explore the subtleties of contemporary censorship and what it says about our cultural landscape. The ‘body reveal’ – one of the commercial selling points of West End cabaret replica productions – becomes unacceptable in the different context of Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret. This article examines how censorship operates in relation to contemporary experimental cabaret, providing an alternative account of the contemporary development of traditional cabaret and suggesting that there are different angles from which to approach discussion of the genre.

Translation into Arabic A study of the negatives and positives

The research aims to shed light on the importance of translation in the Arab Renaissance and its development of the Arabic language in the modern era. Translation is considered one of the most important factors of the modern Arab Renaissance, which began at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The translation movement expanded in Egypt and the Levant in the late nineteenth century, to the point of Some historians believe that it was more active than the translation movement in those countries today. Translation contributed to the development of the Arabic language, as it enabled it to introduce modern terminology and the emergence of new literary genres in Arabic literature, etc.. Through the descriptive and analytical approach followed in the study, I concluded that the impact of translation on the Arabic language has two aspects: one positive and the other negative: the positive impact is represented by enriching Arabic with thousands of vocabulary in science, technology and arts through Arabization, and with very large numbers of vocabulary and expressions through translation, but translation began to negatively affect the nature of the Arabic language in terms of structure, derivation, and incision of new words. The importance of the research is due to mentioning the virtue of translation in enriching the Arabic language in various fields, studying the positives and negatives related to translation into the Arabic language, and clarifying the obstacles that stand before the translator during the translation process and how to deal with them. 2

American imperial exceptionalism? Texas secondary World History depictions of American empire, 1925–2016

ABSTRACT This article explores the connection between American exceptionalism and empire denialism by examining high-school World History textbooks approved for use in the state of Texas from the 1920s to 2016. Scholarship suggests that the powerful ideology of American exceptionalism is deeply uneasy about the role of the United States as an imperial power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But despite this widespread assumption, World History textbooks for the past century have routinely labelled the United States an empire, and directly compared US actions with those of European colonising powers. Some textbooks portrayed this as a unique and aberrant time in US history. But other textbook accounts over the past century have made the case that US imperialism brought about material and political benefits to colonised peoples. In other words, a common thread in World History textbooks suggests that America created an exceptional empire. American imperialism was linked to an underlying narrative of the spread of European or Western civilisation, viewed as a cornerstone of modern world history.

“Swoop and Grab Your Rights”

Abstract This article centers community archives as sources of history as well as sites of theory to map interconnected social and ecological struggles in the Niti Valley of the central Himalayas from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Tolchha and Marchha communities have integrated different ecological belts over centuries through lifeways of trade, pastoralism, and herb gathering. Colonial and postcolonial policies threatened to sever these lifeways through militarized borders, timber extraction, and the demarcation of the exclusive boundaries of the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve. Yet tribal communities have fought to maintain ancestral relations with land by infringing upon colonial restrictions and defying dichotomies of nature and culture through the postcolonial Chipko and Jhapto Cheeno movements. Juxtaposing official archives with community archives from Lata Village, this article argues that leaders of people's movements have sought to reclaim authority over Himalayan history and resituate rural struggles within the framework of Indigenous spatial knowledges.

The Chinese Freshwater Jellyfish Unbound

Jellyfish are commonly known as dangerous sea creatures that humans should avoid. Focusing on the newly discovered freshwater jellyfish in the late nineteenth century, this article explores a global history of Craspedacusta sowerbii, a species native to China first noted in nineteenth-century Britain but since traveling the world over. The worldwide distribution of C. sowerbii, as both polyps and medusae, made it a global subject of scientific inquiry. However, no independent study has examined the history behind the origin, circulation, and implication of the freshwater jellyfish and its relationship with marine types. The late nineteenth century was the period when our premodern knowledge of jellyfish transformed from it being purely a marine life to the modern recognition of jellyfish as both marine and freshwater organisms, triggered by the discovery and discussion of the Chinese freshwater jellyfish C. sowerbii among naturalists and philosophers. This article focuses on Arthur de Carle Sowerby’s engagement with C. sowerbii in terms of narratives of evolution, nomenclature, and bioinvasion between 1880 and 1941. I argue that jellyfish, as a lowly form of invertebrates, should be taken more seriously by historians of modern China and historians of biology who are interested in the diverse roles of animals in shaping human–animal interactions in the Anthropocene. While the scientific research of jellyfish’s global bloom abounds, the interpretation of the global rise of jellyfish could benefit from a historically and culturally bound analysis of this classical animal. This is particularly so as scientists recognized the diverse perceptions of jellyfish. The global jellyfish bloom requires historical perspectives on a topic that has hitherto received scant attention from historians of science.

What Returns, What Remains

Abstract: In February 2020, a group of Kanaka 'Ōiwi cultural practitioners arrived in Cambridge, England, to repatriate ancestral remains stolen from Hawai'i in the late nineteenth century. This essay explores the possession, return, and interpretation of these remains, specifically fourteen iwi po'o (human skulls) originating from the Pali, an important historic battle site in the Ko'olau mountain range of O'ahu. In telling the story of their possession and dispossession, I draw upon theories of haunting from Indigenous studies and Black studies in order to challenge the way that settler colonial structures work to limit and potentially foreclose Hawaiian relationships to spiritual presence and placemaking. Through the Native Hawaiian concept of ho'opahulu, which, in 'ōlelo Hawai'i (Hawaiian language), encompasses both spectrality and the exhaustion of land from overfarming, this essay highlights connections between land, spirit, and haunting that provide a more comprehensive framework for understanding spectral placemaking beyond colonial geographies. In doing so, I argue against possessive logics, showing how contemporary Hawaiian cultural geographies fundamentally refuse, upend, and replant relations that exceed the American state.

"I wouldn't trust that map": Fraudulent Geographies in Late Victorian Lost World Novels

Abstract: This article examines the connection between the late Victorian lost world novel and the fraudulent or flawed maps that frequently punctuate its narratives. Drawing on sociological risk theory, it argues that the model of adventure structuring these texts is one of liminality and 'experiential tension,' and that their fraudulent geographies are a spatial counterpart to this liminal model. They promote an adventure characterized by perpetual potential and possibility, one we might more accurately term 'meta-adventure.' This model was central to both the imperialist enterprise during the late nineteenth century and to the discourse of 'hypothetical masculinity' that helped bolster and uphold it. The problematic geographies of these texts illuminate the ways in which fiction, masculinity, and adventure were mutually productive processes during the fin de siècle, and the ways in which this interrelationship was facilitated, at least in part, by the 'unmapping' of adventurous space.

Non-Western Scholars, Bourgeois Virtues, and the International Scientific Community in the Age of Empire, 1870–1920

AbstractHistorians have long argued that science was fashioned as a bourgeois, Western cultural practice by the late nineteenth century, in ways that allowed its practitioners to exclude or distance themselves – through a rhetoric of endeavour, utilitarianism, and progress – from the more useless, ‘frivolous’ learning of aristocrats, women, or, indeed, native ‘informants’ in the colonies. This article examines the case of scholars from outside northern Europe and North America – Japanese literati, creole intellectuals, and Lebanese scholars – who managed to participate in the period’s Western scientific networks as peers. It holds that these men were able to establish epistemic credibility not because their lower rung in a political and racial hierarchy was ever irrelevant, but because their status as upper-middle-class professionals and their bourgeois habitus – their ‘civility’, and ‘manners’ – in some measure made up for it. The article reveals, rather than forthright ‘exclusion’ and ‘silencing’ of non-Europeans, complex epistemic hierarchies and geographies of knowledge. It exposes the mechanisms of epistemic inclusion and its limits in the period: the functioning of an academic community that was – in many, rather significant ways – also a social world.

Street Children in European Cities during the Late Nineteenth and the Early Twentieth Centuries: Looking into the Pages of the Late Imperial Austrian Press

Street Children in European Cities during the Late Nineteenth and the Early Twentieth Centuries: Looking into the Pages of the Late Imperial Austrian Press

Justin S. Morrill and the meaning of protection

ABSTRACT Historians state that the protectionism that arose in the nineteenth century resulted from the new Republican party embracing its Whig roots while acquiescing to lobbyists and “greedy manufacturers.” Justin S. Morrill, Republican Congressman then Senator from Vermont, was the person most responsible for both the tariff and internal revenue measures enacted during the American Civil War. I argue that by studying Morrill, we find that there were many reasons for the extraordinary increase in tariff rates during the war. This is significant because the rise in tariff rates during the war has been associated with the pressure exerted by manufacturers through lobbying during the war to increase tariff rates, subsequently leading to the “new industrial order” of the late nineteenth century. Morrill’s attempt to balance internal revenue and tariff legislation played a significant role in this development. Morrill’s goal was to elevate farmers and “the interests of laborers” – he was never a shill for manufacturers. Protecting agricultural products and laborers remained at the heart of Morrill’s agenda. This can be seen in both the tariff and internal revenue legislation enacted during the Civil War.