Mid-nineteenth Century Research Articles

Latin America at the margins? Implications of the geographic and epistemic narrowing of ‘global’ health

ABSTRACT To explore the narrowing of the concept of ‘global’ in global health, this article traces how Latin America has held a place of both privilege and power as well as marginalisation in the field. We employ a modified extended case method to examine how Latin America has been ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ in understandings of global health, underscoring the region’s shifting role as a key site for research and practice in ‘tropical medicine’ from the mid-nineteenth century through World War II, to a major player and recipient of development assistance throughout the ‘international health’ era after World War II until the late twentieth century, to a region progressively marginalised within ‘global health’ since the mid-1980s/1990s. We argue that the progressive marginalisation of Latin America and Southern theory has not only hurt health equity and services, but also demonstrates the fundamental flaws in contemporary ‘global’ thinking. The narrowing of global health constitutes coloniality of power, with Northern institutions largely defining priority regions and epistemic approaches to health globally, thus impoverishing the field from the intellectual resources, political experience, and wisdom of Latin America’s long traditions of social medicine and collective health.

Dmytro Ivanovych Kachenovskyi – a legal scholar, educator and teacher (based on the materials of Kharkiv Law Society)

The article examines the scientific and pedagogical activities of the legal scholar, professor of Kharkiv University Dmytro Ivanovych Kachenovskyi (1827–1872). The researcher pioneered the national legal education and had a significant impact on its development. The study of the creative work of the mid-nineteenth century international law expert became relevant in the early twentieth century. In 1903, Kharkiv Law Society held a solemn meeting on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Dmytro Kachenovskyi’s death. Following the meeting, a collection of materials in memory of Dmytro Kachenovskyi was published. These materials are a valuable historical source that contain special information and contribute to a deeper study of the scientist’s scientific heritage. The study of the source expands the existing documentary base. The purpose of the study is to study and analyse the materials of the collection published by the Kharkiv Law Society in honour of Professor Kachenovskyi.
 The analysis of memoirs helps to reconstruct the key episodes of a scientist's life in more detail, to form an idea of his personality, to explore the directions of his scientific research, views on topical social issues, attitude to teaching, relationships with colleagues, and influence on students.
 It has been proved that the distinctive features of the scientist were humanistic guidelines, breadth of outlook, and diversity of scientific interests. His natural abilities, academic education, developed intellect, and ability to work determined his personality. His knowledge of foreign languages, foreign internships, personal contacts with foreign colleagues, and the study of European scientific literature in the original allows us to characterise him as a typical representative of the “inner West” who saw his mission in spreading education and the latest scientific achievements. His lectures, which were characterised by a comprehensive approach to teaching, brought up a generation of public and judicial figures of the era of great reforms.

«Tragedy and Ristori will die the same day». Contributions on the death of Romantic tragedy and the birth of art theatre in Portugal

«Tragedy and Ristori will die the same day». This is how António Feliciano de Castilho, the infamous ultra-Romantic Portuguese writer and polemist, refers to the great Adelaide Ristori, in an inflated article published in the «Revista Contemporanea de Portugal e Brazil» in 1859. Ristori was in Lisbon – for her premiere in Portugal – to present Montabelli’s adaptation of Medea at the National Theatre of São Carlos. Castilho, in eight full pages, depicts an elegant, hyperbolic short biography of the Italian actress, portrayed emphatically as the great muse Melpômene. This Romantic way to address the art of acting – exaggerated, elusive, emotional, immensely subjective – was standard in 19th century theatre criticism. Ristori was received in Portugal with the same ardour. This essay examines the way Ristori was receive by some Portuguese press, in 1859; and evaluates the critical discourse that encapsulates the way the ‘Grande Attore’ was perceived. This exercise will help to characterize the emergent Portuguese theatre criticism at the mid nineteenth century; as well as to compare the way other Portuguese actresses and Ristori were ‘criticised’ and elaborate on the way we can understand this anti-academism and the non-scientific approach to theatre as reasons to the death of Romantic tragedy and the birth of the Théâtre d’Art in Portugal.

Tuberculosis on Display: Tuberculosis Travelling Museums in Wilhelmine Germany

Abstract At the beginning of the twentieth century, the overcoming of chronic illnesses such as tuberculosis, venereal disease and alcoholism became a central issue in public health measures in Europe. Tuberculosis had the highest mortality rate among these three illnesses and was therefore a particular priority. Anti-tuberculosis campaigns gained momentum. This article focuses on one particular form of communication that sought to convey information about this illness: the travelling museum. An ‘exhibition era’ had started in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, and health education campaigns of the time favoured the use of exhibitions, for example the Dresden International Hygiene Exhibition of 1911, as an educational medium. As this article shows, tuberculosis exhibitions were first established on the initiative of local organizations, but their number grew as a result of cooperation between central organizations and local advocates. Instructions were issued for how travelling exhibits might be displayed and advertised, and when they departed the exhibitions often left behind a new energy for tackling the problems associated with tuberculosis. While the exhibits sought to communicate scientifically established facts, the article notes that issues that were pending resolution were also raised without recognition of ongoing debate. By the 1920s, travelling museums as a means of communication were being overtaken by film.

Exploring Christological Controversies in the Gondarine Period: The Significance of Amba Č̣ara Council and the Role of Täwahədo and Qəbat Monastic Clergies, 1622-1854

This paper attempted to explores the nature of religious controversy among Täwahədo, Şäggočč, and Qəbatočč. It also tried to figure out its far reaching consequences on the state politics in the mid nineteenth century. Although religious controversy within the Ethiopian Orthodox Church was appeared following the advent of Catholic missionaries in the early sixteenth century, the issue was hot agenda during the first fourteen years of the episcopacy of Abunä Sälama III who was said to have deeply affected by theological disputes. The researcher used qualitative research methodology and consulted both primary and secondary sources. The findings of the research revealed that the empowerment of the metropolitan’s authority over the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwahədo Church by Emperor Tewodros II at the council of Amba Č̣ara led to the foundation stone for the termination of the factions which has great implication for the unity of the state. This council became a vital launching spring board for the Boru Meda synod that was held in 1878. Since the defeat of the various war lords silenced the religious factions that considerably enriched Sälamas space for action. Therefore, the pattern of relations which was established between Abunä Sälama III and Tewodros II at the council of Amba Č̣ara proved a guideline principle for succeeding rulers of Ethiopia.

Oxford mathematics at a low ebb? An 1855 dispute over examination results

ABSTRACT Between December 1855 and March 1856, a public dispute raged, in British national newspapers and locally published pamphlets, between two teachers at the University of Oxford: the mathematical lecturer Francis Ashpitel and Bartholomew Price, the professor of natural philosophy. The starting point for these exchanges was the particularly poor results that had come out of the final mathematics examinations in Oxford that December. Ashpitel, as one of the examiners, stood accused of setting questions that were too difficult for the ordinary student, with the consequence that, in Price’s view, further mathematical study in Oxford – never as robust as in Cambridge – would be discouraged. We examine this short-lived affair, and use it not only to gain insight into the status of mathematical study in Oxford in the mid-nineteenth century, but also to point towards the increasing importance of competitive examinations in British public life at that time.

From The Germ Theory to Antimicrobials and Antibiotic Resistance

The recognition that microorganisms (germs) are the major cause of human disease, not surprisingly, eventually had a dramatic impact on medicine. Although there were some farsighted proponents of the germ theory during the late seventeen hundreds, until well into the mid-nineteenth century the theory that disease was caused by bad air (so-called Miasma) held sway. The recognition that microbes can cause disease led to major improvements in hygiene and eventually led to the introduction of antiseptic and then aseptic surgery. The development of penicillin and other antibiotics at last provided a means of controlling bacterial infection, allowing for the application complex medical procedures, such as open heart and transplant surgery. The appearance of antibiotic resistance is no threatening the so-called golden age of antibiotics and there is a desperate need to develop new antibiotics, or new approaches to disease control. This review aims to provide a broad account of the history of the germ theory, which highlights some common misconceptions about the work of some of the pioneers involved, and emphasises the neglected contribution of others.

Winter-Quartering Tribes: Nomad–Peasant Relations in the Northeastern Frontiers of the Ottoman Empire (1800s–1850s)

AbstractFocusing on the winter quartering of Kurdish nomadic tribes among peasant villages, this article discusses the patterns of Kurdish nomadism and nomad–peasant relations in the Ottoman sanjaks of Muş, Bayezid, and Van during the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the political structure of these regions and the requirements of animal husbandry among the nomads not only created a distinct pattern of nomadism among the Kurdish tribes, but also led to the polarization of relations between nomads and peasants. Moreover, the article observes how nomad–settled, tribe–peasant relations in these regions evolved as a result of the gradual sedentarization of the pastoral nomads and related changes in their subsistence economies starting from the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, this article provides a background for a better understanding of the intercommunal tensions and conflicts over land in the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The New Perception Developed by Weekly Journals in the Mid-Nineteenth Century and Its Influence on the Narration of A Tale of Two Cities

The New Perception Developed by Weekly Journals in the Mid-Nineteenth Century and Its Influence on the Narration of A Tale of Two Cities

Book Review: The First National Museum’: Dublin’s Natural History Museum in the Mid-Nineteenth Century by Sherra Murphy

Book Review: <i>The First National Museum’: Dublin’s Natural History Museum in the Mid-Nineteenth Century</i> by Sherra Murphy

How the Priesthood of All Believers Became American

Abstract: This article examines how the common priesthood or priesthood of all believers emerged from a narrow German Lutheran context and became “Americanized” in the nineteenth century. References to the common priesthood in any of its variations were seldom in early America, and the article traces how Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, especially the church historian Philip Schaff, drew on new understandings of the common priesthood in nineteenth-century Germany propagated by August Neander, among others, and applied it to the American republican context. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had gained wide currency among Protestants in America and would become a key element of American Protestant self-understanding. Lutherans drew on it as well, but many remained ambivalent about broader claims, especially as it might impinge on the authority of the ordained office. In the formulation “the priesthood of all believers,” the common priesthood continues to resonate in the twentieth century among a diverse range of American denominations from peace church Quakers to conservative Evangelicals, although interpretations of it continue to vary widely.

Ellen Craft's “Spanish” Masquerade: Racially (Mis)Reading Hispanicism in Her Cross-Dressing, Feigning Disability, and Running to Sea

An overlooked advertisement, entitled “An Incident at the South” (1849), calls attention to Ellen Craft's Spanish masquerade during her 1848 escape from American slavery. The author underscores her masculine costume, feigning disability, running to sea, and “a darkness of complexion that betokened Spanish extraction.” Despite contemporary criticism, the advertisement asserts Spanish-ness in the production history of Ellen's escape; thus the essay considers a reinterpretation of Ellen's transnational masquerades by reexamining the advertisement (1849) and in relation to her portrait (1850) and slave narrative (1860). Of emphasis is a history of hemisphere conflict – over land, at the borderlands, and at sea – during Anglo-American expansion, Spanish/Mexican displacement, and antebellum enslavement. Ellen's story is also contextualized with rising literary traditions of the mid-nineteenth century.

Business, Politics, and Patriotism: Relationships Between Antonio López de Santa Anna and Foreign Nationals in Mexico, 1829–1847

Antonio López de Santa Anna is one of the most well-known yet misunderstood figures in North American history. His periods of rule in the mid-nineteenth century helped bring Mexico its independence, lost Mexico nearly half of its territory, and shaped its future conceptions of what a leader is and should be. He is often remembered as a simple caudillo, a strongman who built relationships with foreign actors for personal gain. But how does this perception compare to the evidence of such interactions, and how can Santa Anna’s relationships with foreigners help us better understand Mexican history? This article critically assesses Santa Anna’s key personal and diplomatic relationships with foreigners during the formative 1829–1847 period to improve our understanding of Santa Anna’s relationship to and impact upon Mexico, and explore their influence upon Mexico’s international relations. We then offer a concluding assessment of the lasting implications of these relationships, incorporating how his caudillo leadership style carried a significant influence upon Mexico’s legacy of its nation-building endeavor.

The beginnings of the Notre Dame’s sister school in Trnovo

The religious Congregation of the School Sisters of Notre Dame was founded in the mid-nineteenth century in Bavaria in response to an urgent need for educating particularly girls. The new religious order addressed the needs and expectations of society by founding schools offering different courses and grades and boarding houses. The first institutions were established in the German-speaking world. In 1857, a school and a boarding house were founded in Gorizia. With the help of Jakob Missia, Bishop of Ljubljana, the sisters expanded their activities to Šmihel near Novo Mesto (1886) and Trnovo near Ilirska Bistrica (1888). They were also the first to provide education of deaf youth. The paper presents the beginning of the school and boarding house in Trnovo.

The Cuenca Family: Two Visions of Poe in Spain

Abstract The reception of Poe’s works in Spain begins in the mid-nineteenth century. Many interpretations of Poe were plagued with misconceptions and stereotypes derived from Charles Baudelaire’s influential writings. However, in 1930 Carlos Fernández Cuenca published a seventy-page prologue to a selection of Poe’s stories titled “La caja oblonga.” Fernández Cuenca offers a series of comments on Poe’s secondary writings, such as letters, criticism, and marginalia. His avant-garde aesthetic ideas also play an influential role in the prologue. That level of accuracy would be lost in Spain for decades. Fernández Cuenca’s distant relative Luis Alberto de Cuenca, a poet and a scholar on myth criticism and fantasy literature, has been publishing essays on Poe for the past twenty years. In spite of his expertise in other fields of the genre, those essays seem to have lost a great deal of their heights achieved in 1930. This article analyzes how the image of Poe has evolved in Spain over the past ninety years, juxtaposing the writings of two members of the same family to determine how preconceived depictions and mythical errors have had a strong weight.

Occupational Percentile Rank: A New Method for Constructing a Socioeconomic Index of Occupational Status

In this paper, we propose a method for constructing an occupation-based socioeconomic index that can easily incorporate changes in occupational structure. The resulting index is the occupational percentile rank for a given cohort, based on contemporaneous information pertaining to educational composition and the number of workers at the occupation level. An occupation may experience an increase or decrease in its occupational rank due to changes in relative sizes and educational compositions across occupations. The method is flexible in dealing with changes in occupational and educational measurements over time. Applying the method to U.S. history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, we derive the index using IPUMS U.S. Census microdata from 1850 to 2000 and the American Community Surveys (ACSs) from 2001 to 2018. Compared to previous occupational measures, this new measure takes into account occupational status evolvement caused by long-term secular changes in occupational size and educational composition. The resulting percentile rank measure can be easily merged with social surveys and administrative data that include occupational measures based on the U.S. Census occupation codes and crosswalks.

The American Southern Baptist Mission and Maps of Yorùbáland: The Evolution of a Cartographic Style

ABSTRACT The Southern Baptist cartographic style portraying Yorùbáland in the mid-nineteenth century shifted the graphic appearance of this geographical space. This paper asserts that this graphic appearance reflects the evangelical thought of spreading the gospel and marked a very significant transition in the visual portrayal of West-Central Africa. Employing an historical-stylistic analysis, this paper examines the Christian missionary contribution to the appearance of the Yorùbá landscape in nineteenth-century maps. The Southern Baptist missionary maps of the 1850s, resulting from evangelical discourses and missionary work, highlighted geographical features that gave a new landscape identity to Yorùbáland. The map design of this ethno-territorial space emphasises an evangelical concern for well-populated regions. Hence, this study highlights the role of missionary maps in the distinctive visual expression of an ethnic territory in West African geography.

Crafting racism, civilization, and margins through plaster busts of Icelanders

ABSTRACT In the mid-nineteenth century, Iceland’s small population under Danish rule tried establishing itself as part of Europe's civilized and progressive population. The production of racist texts and images that emphasized Iceland's natural place with ‘progressive’ European nations reflect Iceland's relationship with colonialism and the anxieties of being categorized with colonized others. The paper focuses on plaster casts of Icelandic faces, which were a part of collections meant to showcase racial diversity in the late nineteenth century in France and Spain. The analysis of the making and commercialization of the busts reflects one of the multiple ways Iceland was engaged in a world of imperialism and colonialism, underlining Iceland's ambiguous status in mid-nineteenth century Europe as a marginal European country. This status shaped Icelandic identity during the 19th and twentieth century, characterized by a strong need to position themselves as civilized subjects.

Rejudaized Jesus: The Early Transylvanian Sabbatarian Concept of the Messiah

Abstract The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Transylvanian Sabbatarians represented one of the most radical form of the Reformation whose only retained doctrinal link to Christianity was belief in Jesus. By the mid-nineteenth century, even this last doctrine dropped out of their faith and they officially converted to Judaism, thus founding the only proselyte congregation in contemporary Europe. They were immediately suspected of having ulterior motives for their conversion, and in the twentieth century, accusations proliferated of deliberate Jewish proselytizing and bribery. Here, we go back to the beginnings and search the Sabbatarians’ earliest texts for the original, theological grounds that they themselves asserted. The working hypothesis is that analysis of this key article of faith, belief in Jesus, is sufficient to mark out the later course of the Sabbatarians’ theological development. The interpretation of the messianic mission and tasks clearly indicates which side the Sabbatarians would lean to in the course of their several centuries of balancing between Christianity and Judaism.

Myths, Science, and Literature – Different Fields, the Same Essence

Abstract The present study aims at analysing the relationship and establishing the similarities between ancient Eastern myths, literature, and today’s leading scientific views such as quantum physics. In ancient times, the mythic worldview was the only one being widely accepted, a dominancy that lasted up into, roughly put, the mid-nineteenth century, when most sciences as known today started to flourish and overtook the place of mythology, invalidating it. Nowadays, however, ancient myths and modern sciences have begun getting closer to each other and, at a deep insight, one may discover that they reveal the same truth. Thus, the paper shall discuss and compare ancient Buddhist texts with leading quantum theories and literary works by Béla Hamvas and Sándor Weöres that facilitate the comprehension of the essence.1