From industrial change to historical inevitability: Annie Besant’s socialism and the philosophies of history

ABSTRACT

A leading figure of the British and Indian intellectual stage from the 1880s, Annie Besant (1847–1933) is chiefly remembered for her numerous and somewhat diverging commitments. This article seeks to account for her shift from socialism to theosophy by focusing on the latter as a system of thought and on the philosophical basis of her critique of capitalism. It is argued that the case for the common ownership of means of production that she makes throughout her socialist writings both results from her secularism and explains her eventual drift away from it. In an attempt to promote equality through democratic and pragmatic methods, Besant claimed to predicate her enterprise on the laws of evolution rather than on utopian schemes or revolutionary action. It is shown how this approach drew on philosophies of history: collectivism was deemed the necessary outcome of economic changes and the next stage of industrialization. It is also shown how Besant’s brand of socialism rested on a faith in progress, rather than on scientific reasoning. A secularized theology – her plea for socialism, it appears – was at odds with the philosophical foundations of democracy that she advocated throughout her life.     

Françoise d’Eaubonne, éco-féminisme et anarchie

Abstract

Although Luc Ferry contrasted eco-feminism with the feminism of Simone de Beauvoir, the concept was coined by one of her close friends, Françoise d’Eaubonne, who, admittedly, is not well known. This is why the author presents an outline of her thinking and her early feminism and how the latter came to be combined with environmentalism to result in a theory which is as much eco-feminist as it is anarcha-feminist.     

Art as research: an interview with Liliane Lijn by Barry Miles

ABSTRACT

In conversation with the biographer and author Barry Miles, the artist and poet Liliane Lijn talks about her early influences as a young American artist living and working in Paris, Athens and New York and the development of her practice between 1959 and 1970. She recalls her encounters with prominent surrealists, poets and artists of the Beat generation: André Breton, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and her enduring friendship with Greek sculptor Takis. Inspired by the experimental nature of their works, Lijn explains how her own work focused on research and invention. She describes her Poem Machines as ‘seeing sound’ and explains her growing interest in science and, in particular, light. Lijn details the long and complex gestation of Liquid Reflections, her most well-known cosmic work of the late 1960s, and how working with industry and technology allowed her to increase both the scale and complexity of her oeuvre.     

Lucy Hutchinson,Lucretius and Soteriological Materialism

Abstract

This article examines Lucy Hutchinson's pervasive materialism, arguing that her use of corporeal imagery – in part shaped by her early translation of Lucretius – contributes to the soteriological purposes of her later works in multiple ways. Criticism on Hutchinson has tended to divorce the materialist imagery of her translation from the Calvinistic themes of her other writings. I argue, however, for the lasting presence of a materialism constructed from the vocabularies of Lucretian Epicureanism, Neoplatonism and John Owen. Focusing especially on the poem Order and Disorder and Hutchinson's theological tract to her daughter, I show how she uses materialism as a “means” to achieving assurance and grace. I suggest that these various responses to physical experience are part of Hutchinson's enduring investigation into the ontology of “Order” and “Disorder”, and her quest for stable spiritual being.     

Solar Climate Control An Opportunity for World-wide Use of Solar Energy

Abstract

An investigation covering the United States, Europe and Japan has been carried out since 1973 to determine the use of solar energy for heating and cooling the inside of buildings. This study, supported by and on behalf of more than 100 industrial companies was led by the author who here for the first time reports his findings to the general scientific public. A large interdisciplinary team of engineers, economists, planners and building experts was involved and their methodology their technical considerations, as well as costs, marketing and constraint are reported. Detailed data obtained from the project have only been communicated to the sponsors and are not publicly available.     

China and Japan in Myanmar: Aid,Natural Resources and Influence

Abstract

This article highlights the parallels between Japan’s leveraging of foreign aid to secure access to strategic natural resources in the post-World War II period, and China’s similar use of foreign aid since the early 1990s. It then shows how both countries have applied similar strategies in their aid programs in Myanmar, and points out how dramatic shifts in Myanmar’s domestic politics have shaped their opportunities for economic engagement. China seized upon Myanmar’s political transition in 1988 to expand its aid program, while Japan has responded to Myanmar’s reform measures since 2010 by resuming its aid efforts. The article concludes by considering the potential for China–Japan cooperation through their aid programs in Myanmar.     

An archaeology of poverty: architectural innovation and pauper experience at Madeley Union Workhouse,Shropshire

Abstract

One of the world’s most important industrial heritage sites, Ironbridge Gorge has been the focus of numerous archaeological investigations into the area’s early, innovative industrialization. The region’s important contribution to the development of institutional architecture and early social care has not been explored. An archaeological study of Madeley Union Workhouse exposes the complexity of the evolving ideologies surrounding pauperism in the late 19th century. This article broadens our understanding of Ironbridge by analysing the region’s response to poverty and the New Poor Law, and considers the impact of institutional architecture on pauper identity and experience.     

Sight and Sound on the Western Front: Surveyors,Scientists, and the ‘Battlefield Laboratory’, 1915–1918

Abstract

The Japanese were a race who considered themselves to possess a mission in the world, and were a military race from beginning to end. In a comparatively short space of time Japan had brought three wars to a successful conclusion.

Admiral Earl Beatty, First Sea Lord (1919–1927), 3 July 1925

it is on record that one young samurai… was so convinced at first that bravery by itself was sufficient to overcome the power of the western ‘barbarians’, that he swam out to Perry's flag-ship with his sword in his teeth, intending to fight the whole ship's company single-handed. This man was Yamagata, who died but recently.

Captain M.D. Kennedy, Military Language Officer in Japan (1917–1920), 1928     

The Provision of Allotments in Derbyshire Industrial Communities

Abstract

This article examines how allotments fitted into the overall context of a range of paternalistic provisions; attempts to identify the extent to which workers' demand for allotments was a factor in their provision, and argues that the provision of allotments played a significant part in the shaping and development of some industrial communities. The review concentrates on five industrial communities in Derbyshire, although comparisons are drawn with similar establishments in other parts of England.     

Differentiated regional entrepreneurial discovery processes. A conceptual discussion and empirical illustration from three emergent clusters

ABSTRACT

The paper aims to contribute to better understanding of entrepreneurial discovery processes and regional industrial growth by examining (1) how different regional contexts affect entrepreneurial discoveries, and (2) how entrepreneurial discoveries support specific types of industrial path development in different regions. The paper includes empirical studies of the formation and growth of three ‘official’ regional clusters supported by Innovation Norway’s programme for immature clusters. The paper argues that entrepreneurial discoveries should be institutionalized (by system level entrepreneurs) to achieve considerable regional industrial effects. In our cases institutionalization occurs through the creation of cluster organizations and development of the knowledge infrastructure.     

“Ill‐natured comparisons”: Racism and relativism in European representations of ni‐Vanuata from Cook's second voyage

Landes’ anthropological theorizing, highlighting the connections between race, gender, sexuality and class, expressed an Eastern European Jewish female praxis well-established by the late 1920s and early ‘30s when Landes began her research career. Landes’ changing Jewish identification through her life resulted from gendered aging and the reformulation of Jewish racialization processes in the U.S. Her late life reflections are evidence of what Susan Watkins calls ‘gendered late-style’ as well as Jewish conceptions of time as anti-linear and counter-normative. I investigate how her Jewish socialist Yiddish-speaking family background inflected her interpersonal and professional networks and her writings on anti-racist, class and gender-based themes.

Abbreviations: RLP: Ruth Landes Papers; NAA: National Anthropological Archives; SI: Smithsonian Institution; RBP: Ruth Benedict Papers; ASC: Archives and Special Collections Library; VCL: Vassar College Libraries     

Margherita of Cortona: Women,Preaching, and the Writing of Hagiography

Abstract

This article examines Margherita of Cortona (1247–97), who took a penitent habit in the late 1270s. In 1290 Margherita was granted permission to rebuild the church of San Basilio near her cell and a secular priest became her confessor. After her death in 1297, her former confessor, the Franciscan Giunta Bevegnati, composed Margherita's Legenda, which provides an account of her life, conversion and penitence, her conversations with Christ, and her charitable works. In addition to the Legenda, there is also an altarpiece, portraying Margherita and scenes from her life, and the seventeenth-century watercolour paintings that reproduce the frescos which once decorated the church of Santa Margherita, the former San Basilio. Following a short introduction to Margherita's life, and a brief examination of preaching for women in the Middle Ages and its prohibitions, the article examines how the biographer, Giunta Bevegnati, represents the relationship of Margherita to preaching and sermons, in particular focusing on passages in Margherita's Legenda, where her efficacious speech or performance has a clear impact on an audience and her biographer does not use the term 'preach' for her utterances. Finally, the extent to which Margherita's biographer uses hagiography for homiletic purposes is discussed.     

The Gothic-Romantic Hybridity in Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales

ABSTRACT

Mary Darby Robinson is well known for writing her final volume of poems, the Lyrical Tales (1800), as a direct answer, sometimes poem by poem, to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads. What has been less studied is how deliberately hybrid in style and allusions her response-poems are in the Tales, especially how prominently they foreground Gothic imagery, theatricality, and hyperbole in poems that also ape the emerging “romantic” mode of the Ballads themselves. Part of that “cheekiness,” I argue, stems from the condemnation of the Gothic that both Wordsworth and especially Coleridge had articulated in print, while also echoing it, albeit in highly modified ways, in their poetry. Most of what Robinson attempts with her hybrid Tales, though, develops the penchant in Gothic for symbolizing deep and unresolved ideological conflicts in Western culture. Her answers to Wordsworth and Coleridge, which I exemplify with selected Robinson Tales, therefore, bring out those very conflicts underlying, haunting, and even tormenting the speakers and the subject-matter in the original Lyrical Ballads.     

Exportando “marginalidad”: Consuelo Tamayo Hernández, “la Tortajada” (1867–1957)

Abstract

Although nowadays barely remembered, the dancer and singer Consuelo Tamayo Hernández, “la Tortajada” (1867–1957), once was a Spanish performer of considerable talent. She was a diva skilled at self-fashioning who knew how to exploit her public image both on and off stage. Born in Santa Fe (Granada, Spain), Tortajada hardly ever performed in her country of birth. But although her presence on the Spanish stage was merely marginal, as a “Spanish dancer” she achieved celebrity status in the music halls of Europe and the United States. Tortajada perfectly exemplifies the mobility and cultural transfer that took place between the cosmopolitan stages at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. This article explores how Tortajada obtained international fame and success, not so much because of the authenticity of her performances—which were often contaminated by the music halls where she performed—but because of her ability to export a certain idea of Spanish “otherness” and “marginality” by staging a series of traditional movements and dances. It is by skillfully embodying a stereotype construction of “Spanishness” (elapsing it into an Oriental fantasy) and a certain type of femininity that the artist achieved international celebrity.     

Kobe and Northridge Two earthquakes compared

Abstract

The earthquakes striking Northridge, California in 1994 and Kobe, Japan just a year later highlighted the vulnerability of modern cities to natural hazards. The Northridge quake affected a suburban area, consisting of a mixture of residential and commercial districts but having no industrial plants of any great size. In Kobe, by contrast, the entire urban area, having a high concentration of population and buildings in the city centre, major industrial plants, and a large port area, was hit. This fact, and the higher price levels in Japan, explain why the extent of the losses in Kobe was significantly higher. The Kobe tremor demonstrated that much more attention must be paid in future to reinforcing important older buildings or buildings that are especially at risk. The fact that many modern high rise buildings survived intact showed that it is possible to design earthquake resistant structures, although the safety of steel frame structures, hitherto thought to be good, is now more questionable. Theories predicting that a similar event in a conurbation such as San Francisco or Tokyo–Yokohama could affect the entire world economy must now be viewed as having greater credibility.     

Cloth and Community: The Local Trade in Resist-Dyed and Block-Printed Textiles in Kachchh District,Gujarat

Abstract

The Khatris are an hereditary caste of dyers and block-printers in Kachchh district, Gujarat. This article reviews the traditional market for the Khatris' textiles, discussing in detail items made for specific client castes, chiefly the farmers and herders of Kachchh. It analyzes factors that have affected this traditional market in the post-colonial period, such as the wholesale industrialization of manufacture and changing patterns of agriculture. It goes on to identify the emergence of new, globalized markets and how the Khatris are developing new products in response to those markets.     

A History of von Recklinghausen's NF1

ABSTRACT

The ability to maintain human brain explants in tissue culture was a critical step in the use of these cells for the study of central nervous system disorders. Ross G. Harrison (1870–1959) was the first to successfully maintain frog medullary tissue in culture in 1907, but it took another 38 years before successful culture of human brain tissue was accomplished. One of the pioneers in this achievement was Mary Jane Hogue (1883–1962). Hogue was born into a Quaker family in 1883 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and received her undergraduate degree from Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. Research with the developmental biologist Theodor Boveri (1862–1915) in Würzburg, Germany, resulted in her Ph.D. (1909). Hogue transitioned from studying protozoa to the culture of human brain tissue in the 1940s and 1950s, when she was one of the first to culture cells from human fetal, infant, and adult brain explants. We review Hogue’s pioneering contributions to the study of human brain cells in culture, her putative identification of progenitor neuroblast and/or glioblast cells, and her use of the cultures to study the cytopathogenic effects of poliovirus. We also put Hogue’s work in perspective by discussing how other women pioneers in tissue culture influenced Hogue and her research.     

The Senzai Maru's visit to Shanghai and its understanding of China

ABSTRACT

The significance of the Senzai Maru’s 1862 journey to Shanghai was great. From this opportunity, Japan not only learned from its neighbor the danger of closing off one’s borders and refusing to change, but also the importance of expanding its horizons and “learning from the world.” From these lessons, Japan transitioned from “expelling barbarians” toward “enlightenment,” from conservative to “reformist.” After successfully overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan’s Meiji reforms thrived.     

Issues in Urban Industrial Conservation: The Nottingham Lace Market

Abstract

The preservation of industrial buildings of historic interest is of prime importance to the industrial archaeologist. Yet many of these buildings are to be found within the heart of the great manufacturing cities. How are they to be conserved alongside the built environments within which they were originally set? This article takes the Nottingham Lace Market, which contains some of the finest examples of nineteenth century industrial buildings, and addresses itself to the question of how various public agencies have attempted to make the area economically viable in order to facilitate conservation and preservation work.