Nineteenth Century Research Articles

Aphantasia avant le nom: historical perspectives on the absence or loss of visual imagery.

This study investigates the emergence and fragmentation of the modern lyrical self across two structurally analogous poetic traditions: Vietnamese Thơ Mới (New Poetry, 1932–1945) and Western modernist poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on existentialist philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and cultural semiotics, it develops the theoretical model of “crisis-structure” to conceptualize the lyrical subject as a fractured, ontologically destabilized construct shaped by global disruptions to symbolic order. Through close readings of seminal works by Xuân Diệu, Hàn Mặc Tử, Baudelaire, and T. S. Eliot, the analysis demonstrates that the lyrical self in both traditions ceases to function as a coherent center of meaning. Instead, it emerges as a site of rupture—where symbolic disintegration, linguistic instability, and metaphysical absence intersect. While Thơ Mới preserves a residual yearning for transcendence through love, religion, or aesthetic idealism, Western modernist poetry—particularly Eliot’s—pursues a more radical dismantling of redemptive frameworks, employing irony and intertextual fragmentation as existential strategies. Rather than framing the crisis of subjectivity in Thơ Mới as derivative of Western modernism, the study contends that both traditions constitute structurally convergent responses to globalized ontological upheaval. Within this framework, poetry functions not as ornament but as a philosophical medium that interrogates the very conditions of selfhood in modernity.

This article examines the Judeo-Spanish language and the linguistic culture of its speakers. It puts forward three ideas that have shaped language use and multilingual practices among Sephardic Jews in the Balkans. The first concerns the centrality of Hebrew, the language of the Torah, which ceased to be spoken around 400 CE yet continued to hold supreme ontological and theological authority as the ‘Holy Tongue’. The second, rooted in the experience of exile from the Iberian Peninsula, highlights the special status accorded to Sephardic Spanish as a specifically ‘Jewish’ language. The third points to the strong sense of loyalty to the spoken vernacular that emerged among Judeo-Spanish speakers in the late nineteenth century. The discussion of these three ideas provides a framework for understanding the range of terms employed by both present-day speakers and scholars to designate this language: Ladino, Judeo-Spanish, and Judezmo.

ABSTRACT This study examines the translation partnership between Scottish missionary-sinologist James Legge (1815–1897) and Chinese scholar Wang Tao 王韬(1828–1897) that produced the monumental The Chinese Classics (1861–1872). Moving beyond traditional narratives that minimize Wang's contributions, this study analyzes the complex interactions and modalities of production in their decade-long collaboration. Drawing on Wang's personal library records in the Records from Henghua Study (Henghua Guan Zalu 蘅華館雜錄) and textual analysis of their translations, this research employs collaborative translation theory and postcolonial perspectives to reveal how their partnership navigated colonial power dynamics in nineteenth-century Hong Kong. Wang provided crucial scholarly apparatus, philological insights, and cultural context that fundamentally shaped Legge's understanding of Chinese classical texts. Their co-translation methodology – combining Western philological approaches with Chinese exegetical traditions – created a distinctive ‘thick translation’ that made Chinese classics accessible to Western readers while preserving interpretive complexity. This case study illuminates co-translation as cultural mediation in colonial contexts and demonstrates how cross-cultural knowledge production created spaces for intellectual agency within asymmetrical power relations.

For decades, courts have grappled with the tension between compensating victims of mass harms and maintaining fairness to defendants when causation is difficult to prove. This Article argues that the Supreme Court’s due process jurisprudence provides a relevant framework for navigating this tension. We contend that the Court over the last three decades has established a consistent Fourteenth Amendment due process approach in punitive damages and personal jurisdiction cases, which is rooted in antecedents tracing to the nineteenth century and relies on a nexus of interests that balances individual rights, state interests, and federalism concerns. This framework, we argue, has significant implications for evaluating the constitutionality of state tort doctrines like market-share liability and innovator liability, which challenge traditional notions of causation. Our analysis reveals that these doctrines may be vulnerable in some applications to constitutional challenge under the Court’s modern due process approach. We trace the evolution of the Court’s jurisprudence, demonstrating how it emphasizes the relationship between a plaintiff’s harm, a defendant’s conduct, and the forum state’s interest. Applying this framework to market-share and innovator liability, we suggest that tort causation itself may have constitutional dimensions. This finding has far-reaching implications for mass tort litigation and could reshape how courts approach cases involving multiple actors and attenuated chains of causation. By bridging the gap between due process jurisprudence and tort law, this Article offers a new perspective on longstanding debates about liability in complex cases and provides a roadmap for courts navigating these challenging waters.

ABSTRACT This article explores the gendered dimensions of Chala identity in Soviet and post-Soviet Tajikistan, focusing on a Persianate Jewish community historically shaped by forced religious conversion and enduring social marginalization. 1 In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term Chala denoted Jews who had converted to Islam, often under coercion, yet remained socially distinct and spatially positioned between Muslim and Jewish quarters. Russian imperial sources categorized them as ‘Jewish-Muslims’ (evrei-musulmane), highlighting their hybrid status. While Soviet indigenization policies opened some paths for Chala men to seek social mobility and professional success, women’s options remained limited. Through personal narratives, memory practices and embodied knowledge, such as culinary traditions, this article reveals how Chala women involuntarily maintained the Chala heritage under conditions of silence. This study argues that identity is transmitted not only through formal genealogies but also through informal channels such as rumour, reputation and the intergenerational memory, processes that disproportionately shape women’s experiences.

The goddesses of metal and fire were the patron deities of Chinese smelters. This article examines this artisans’ cult through historical texts, ethnographic reports, and historical reconstruction of the smelting processes. It demonstrates that the cult was initially tied to the state-managed iron industry under Mongol rule (1271–1368), and later spread across geographical regions, encompassing diverse fire-related industries, including casting, bell making, tin smelting, and pottery. I argue that the cult constituted an integral part of artisans’ material imaginary – a worldview that helped them comprehend the material transformation through fire, their bodily experience of extreme heat and danger, and the anxieties that were inherent to fire-related crafts. However, this widespread religious practice appears differently in historical texts, where Confucian scholars and state officials reframed the narratives about the goddesses, contributing to the cult's gradual disappearance in textual records. This study emphasises the limitations of conventional historical sources and advocates for combining historical reconstruction and folklore with archival research to recover marginalised forms of artisanal knowledge. Moreover, it argues that artisans’ religious practices should not be separated from technological processes but rather treated as important components of artisanal knowledge systems.

Archimandrite Melchizedek (Zabolotsky) (1754–1794), one of the closest assistants to Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) of Moscow, held several key church positions in the period from the 1780s to the early 1790s: he was rector of the famous Trinity Seminary and the Slavic-Greco-Latin Academy, vicar of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and the Vysokopetrovsky monastery in Moscow. However, despite such important posts, no detailed biographical information has been preserved about him, he did not leave a visible trace in history. Examining the archival material of the Trinity Seminary and Academy, the Pereslavl Consistory and the Moscow Synodal Office, it was possible to identify, clarify and supplement important data for compiling the biography of Archimandrite Melchizedek, and, as a consequence, the history of the Moscow Theological Academy and the Trinity-Sergius Monastery. The name of Archimandrite Melchizedek, who was twice nominated to the episcopal see, is closely connected with the personality of Metropolitan Nikanor (Klementyevsky), as well as a number of famous hierarchs of the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries.

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to analyze the features of specialized legal language and lexis in three essential legal translations in Latvian: The Laws on the Peasants of Livonia of 1804, The Book of Laws on the Peasants of Courland of 1817, and The Laws for the Peasants of Livonia of 1819. The study provides new evidence regarding specific features of the initial attempts to elaborate legal texts in Latvian. The analysis illustrates German and Russian interference, numerous instances of inconsistent translations, lack of terminological equivalents, and translation failures amounting to a misleading message of the text units.

Gender reforms, feminism and late femocracy have been topical in social and political discourse in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and at the turn of the new millennium. The article seeks to outline and critically analyse gender reforms of the Reformed Church in Zimbabwe (RCZ) considering the predominantly patriarchal mission field in which the Church is ministering. The presentation employed a literature review, documentary reviews such as church magazines, and oral interviews because it is historical in nature. The results of the findings show that the Reformed Church in Zimbabwe (RCZ) is the preferred institutional setting of the investigation. It is restricted to the geographical frontiers within which the said Church is operational in Zimbabwe. The most reported challenges were that the reforms triggered the unintended consequence of perpetuating patriarchal hegemony by further entrenching congregants in their resistance to gender reforms, and reluctance to accept women’s ministry in some of the congregations and involve them in Church administration. It was recommended that the Reformed Church in Zimbabwe should endeavour to capacitate gender reforms and address the perpetuation of patriarchal hegemony. The paper will be of immense value to the fields of oral history and humanities particularly when it comes to the promotion of a harmonious co-existence between patriarchy and gender reforms inclined towards feminism.

Abstract Land use-land cover (LULC) change is widely implicated in coastal water quality degradation, but we often lack understanding of how LULC change has varied spatiotemporally because so much change occurred before the advent of modern mapping. In this study, we overcome this challenge by using forensic mapping techniques of LULC change over the past 175 years in coastal watersheds on the Atlantic Coast of Florida, USA. We benchmark historical mapping products to modern mapping standards using historical products. These include maps and notes from the Public Land Survey System, military campaigns, and navigation surveys from the nineteenth century, and aerial imagery, soil surveys, topographic maps, and LULC maps from the 20th and 21st centuries. Through this mixed approach, we mapped wetlands and lakes, as well as natural and constructed channels in the 1850s, 1950s, 2000s, and 2020s. Results illustrate the stunning transformation of these coastal watersheds over the past 175 years, including an 89% loss of wetlands and lakes and a 25,000% increase in drainage density, initially mostly due to agricultural conversion. These changes have greatly increased the hydrological connectivity between inland landscapes and the adjacent estuaries. Interestingly, these changes occurred over different intervals, with most wetland and lake loss occurring between the 1950s–2000s but most of the increase in drainage density occurring earlier between the 1850s–1950s. These more nuanced and spatially explicit understandings of LULC change are facilitating efforts to restore wetlands and drainage networks, including ongoing stakeholder efforts to plan land acquisition for conservation and water-quality restoration.

The rise of the movement propagating the abolition of the slave trade in Britain was accompanied by the increasing engagement of women in the antislavery cause. These women claimed a voice on the public stage by pointing to the fact that slavery was a domestic institution. By the early nineteenth century, family separation had become one of the most popular abolitionist tropes and it gave women an important role in the later immediatist movement that emerged in opposition to gradualism. This article deals with the evolution of the abolitionist cognitive tool “mental metempsychosis,” which was made use of to argue against family separations, by looking at religiously inspired ideas notably tied to Christian Kabbalism that challenged the concept of the heritability of slavery. These ideas were initially developed by female Nonconformist ministers to repudiate the biblical story of Eve’s transgression as justification for original sin and for women’s subjugation to men.

ABSTRACT Catherine Hall has helped to rewrite British history, turning attention to gender, colonialism, and racial capitalism. This presents an in-depth interview with Hall, surveying her career from the late 1960s to the present, starting with her recent work unearthing the history of British slaveowning in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, notably in working to build the archive, The Legacies of British Slavery, as well as writing a case study of the slaveholder and early historian of Jamaica, Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the history of racial capitalism (2024). Such a focus contributes to what Hall calls a ‘reparative history’. Overall, the interview recounts Hall’s path as an historian, responding to cultural and political movements, especially to feminism and anti-racism. Influenced by radical historians, such as E.P. Thompson, who drew attention to the working class, Hall turned attention to the role of gender in making the English class system, notably in Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class 1780–1850 (co-authored with Leonore Davidoff and Hall 1987). Through the 1980s and 90s, she focused more concertedly on the nation, race, and colonialism in books such as Civilising subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (2002). In addition, Hall also reflects on history writing itself, as well as comments on her lifelong partnership with Stuart Hall, in particular the time in Birmingham during the 1960s and 70s while he was directing the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Archaeology of Architecture and Production in Industrial Sugar-Mill Contexts. Technological and Productive Changes in the Ingenio Lastenia Site (Tucumán, Argentina) During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract The nineteenth century marks a period in which the Ottoman Empire began to decline in many respects, particularly in comparison to the West. At the same time, it was also an era in which both the causes of this decline were contemplated and debated, and remedies were sought to rescue the Empire from its deteriorating condition. Although the reigns of Selim III and Mahmud II had already witnessed efforts to address the Empire’s challenges, it was during the Tanzimat period that the most comprehensive reforms were undertaken in an attempt to preserve the Ottoman state. Namık Kemal, one of the prominent intellectuals of the late Ottoman period, lived through the Tanzimat era and devoted himself to seeking solutions to the Empire’s predicament vis-à-vis the West, while also articulating influential ideas in this regard. Although Namık Kemal made significant contributions across a wide spectrum ranging from literature to politics, this study specifically examines his ideas concerning politics and political thought. To this end, primary attention has been given to his writings in the weekly newspapers İbret and Hürriyet, which he published in England and the Ottoman Empire in order to grasp his political views of the time, followed by an analysis of secondary sources, including books and scholarly articles on Namık Kemal.

XIX century represents a transformative epoch in the history of world fine arts, marking the decisive transition from the disciplined rationality of Classicism to the expressive freedom of Modernism. This period reflected the profound social, political, and philosophical shifts of an industrializing and increasingly globalized world. Artists began to challenge traditional hierarchies of beauty, truth, and representation, moving away from idealized forms toward explorations of emotion, perception, and individuality. Through successive movements—Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and Symbolism—art became a mirror of modern consciousness, capturing the complexity, uncertainty, and dynamism of contemporary life. The democratization of artistic production, the rise of the independent artist, and cross-cultural exchanges expanded the boundaries of artistic creation and interpretation. Ultimately, the 19th century laid the intellectual and aesthetic foundations of Modernism by redefining art as a medium of personal vision rather than imitation. It was an age of both continuity and rupture, where the ideals of the past coexisted with the impulses of innovation. In bridging the classical and the modern, the century forged a new artistic language—one that continues to shape global visual culture and the evolving quest for meaning in art today.

Interlinear translations have been known in Indonesia’s Islamic communities since at least the late 16th century with extant evidence in the form of manuscripts pointing to their ongoing popularity in the following centuries. Such translations encompass important works composed in Arabic and rendered in the languages of the archipelago, and they touch upon key fields of knowledge, among them Islamic law, theology and grammar. But has this textual abundance been matched by the range of scholarly writings produced about this phenomenon? This paper asks if and how interlinear texts from Indonesia were studied by scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does not attempt to offer an exhaustive survey but rather raises questions about how interlinear translations were perceived and points to possible trends that have helped shape the scholarly context for the Textual Microcosms project, currently exploring interlinear translation across the Indonesian-Malay world. Keywords: Indonesia, Java, Interlinear translation, colonial scholarship, pesantren

The West has shown the utmost curiosity for the Middle East's culture, tradition, society, and the Hajj pilgrimage. This region was considered the least explored on the world map until the nineteenth century. Over the decades, a handful of adventurers and explorers have undertaken various perilous journeys to find answers and satisfy the inquisitiveness of a larger, knowledge-thirsty populace. Travel writing, Hajj pilgrimage travel writing, can still not be considered an established area of study. This paper aims to highlight the pilgrimage travelogues of the nineteenth century by drawing scholarly attention to the genre of Hajj pilgrimage travel writing, its significance, and the need for more academic attention. The paper critically analyses Sir Richard Burton’s travelogue A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah (1855), which recounts his journey to the cities of Mecca and Medina and the Hajj pilgrimage from the nineteenth century. He undertook the Hajj pilgrimage in disguise as a Muslim pilgrim, a journey fraught with numerous challenges and dangers. The paper primarily critically analyses the motivations of this so-called pilgrim from the West, his reflections on the Oriental society, culture, religious sites, and life in the Middle East, along with the challenges he faced during this perilous journey. It also critically examines how he attempted to reconcile his Englishness with an adopted Muslim guise or identity and its impact on the narration and description in the travelogue.

This article offers a comprehensive analysis of the reasons for the phased abolition of the Courts of Conscience ( sovestnye sudy ) in the Russian Empire during the 1820s to 1850s. The source base includes administrative records from the collections of the Russian State Historical Archive, legislative acts of the Russian Empire from the first half of the nineteenth century, and contemporary memoirs. The novelty of this research lies in its focus on a subject that has hitherto been largely overlooked in the historiography, thereby filling a significant gap in the scholarly literature. Furthermore, the study introduces into academic discourse a substantial body of previously unexamined archival documents. The author concludes that the formal justifications for the abolition of the Courts of Conscience served merely as a pretext for their closure as independent judicial institutions. It is argued that the root cause of their abolition was intrinsically linked to their unique character. The article emphasizes that within the context of the growing dominance of legal positivism — a philosophy embraced by the senior officials of the Ministry of Justice — the distinctive, equity-focused nature of the Courts of Conscience rendered them incompatible with the Russian legal framework of the pre-reform era, which was predominantly based on the principles of formalistic legal proceedings.

ABSTRACT This article examines the historic Methodist practice of communing the sick and its continuation in the United States, focusing specifically on Methodist Episcopal Church, Methodist Church, and United Methodist Church contexts to explain how The United Methodist Church has arrived at its current liturgical form and practice of administration of the Lord’s Supper to the sick. Beginning with a summary of the importance of receiving Communion with the sick in mid-eighteenth century England, the article tracks the development of the order for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper with the sick included in John Wesley’s Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America, through rubrics in the church’s Discipline in the nineteenth century, across various official and unofficial orders developed in the twentieth century, to its present form in the “Service of Word and Table with Persons who are Sick or Homebound” found in The United Methodist Book of Worship.