Parks and landmarks: planning the Eastern Capital along western lines

Urban parks became an increasingly common feature of European and American cities in the 19th century, and by around the middle of that century had begun to elicit the interest of visiting Japanese leaders. This paper discusses the introduction of the concept of the urban public park to Japan by the country's new Meiji oligarchs. It does this in the context of the radical re-shaping of the nation's capital city, Tokyo. The story is told through the prism of two sites. The first is a hill in the north of the city with longstanding associations with the Tokugawa shogunate; the second is a parade ground next to the site of the castle–palace. The hill became a park in name but in practice remained a site for public celebration, while the parade ground was transformed with considerable difficulty and over many years into a consciously fashioned recreational space. By drawing on these contrasts, this paper explores the hesitations that surrounded changing understandings of the role of capital city and its shifting symbolic landscapes, as well as the gradual process of domestication of the concept of a public park.     

Unterscheidung und Synthese: Rezeptionsformen akustischer Forschung in der Musikliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts

Differentiation and synthesis. Forms of reception of acoustical research in the musical literature of the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, both musical scholars and natural scientists discussed the relevance of acoustical research for the theory and practice of music. Whereas some musical theorists and acousticians plead together for an acoustical foundation of musical theory, other scholars questioned the significance of physical and physiological knowledge for a deeper understanding of music. Based on an analysis of musical journals, popular scientific writings, theoretical treatises and musical dictionaries this article demonstrates how musical scholars and natural scientists argued about the question which discipline should have the final say about musical concepts and terminologies. To merge both heterogeneous spheres – music and acoustics – or to carefully distinguish between them – these two positions shaped the dispute over the relationship between music and natural sciences in the nineteenth century.     

Streets as new places to bring together both humans and plants: examples from Paris and Montpellier (France)

Greening public city space is a growing issue in France. With examples drawn from Paris and Montpellier, this article seeks to understand what happens when city-dwellers green the public space outside their door and when policies encourage spontaneous flora on the street. Plants were already part of ancient cities and have been a tool for urban planning since the nineteenth century leading to the development of public green spaces and street-tree planting. Urban ecology sparked an interest for spontaneous flora in the 1980s. Public policies concerning water, climate, and biodiversity have been trying to take this unbidden vegetation into consideration since the beginning of this century. Besides, the social sciences have shown that city-dwellers are interested in plants to embellish their balcony, and in city gardens and parks. We tried to find out if this vegetation can be more than just a tool to plan, to green, to bring biodiversity, and to beautify urban space. We argue that letting planted and unbidden flora colonize sidewalks and allowing people to act directly on it brings residents and plants to co-inhabit and co-domesticate the streets, and challenges the timelessness of a city by introducing a life cycle.     

Music, Print and Presentation in Saxony During the Seventeenth Century

At the start of the seventeenth century composers such as MichaelPraetorius, Johann Hermann Schein and Heinrich Schütz sawmuch of their music into print; at the end of the century, however,musicians such as Johann Kuhnau or Nikolaus Adam Strungk enteredprint comparatively little, if at all. This article uses thedecline in music printing as a way to understand the changingrole of music and musicians in society. At the start of thecentury, the intensity of music printing testified to the Lutheranmarket for music, but also to the efforts of composers to promoteand present themselves in print. After the Thirty Years' War,however, the market for printed music collapsed, as many courtsand cities began to expect virtuoso performances and a constantsupply of new compositions.     

Into the Crater: The Mine Attack at Petersburg

In concentrating on spiritualism’s mediums and intellectual captains, scholars have paid little attention to the movement’s meaning to average séance‐goers. An investigation of spiritualism in nineteenth‐century California and Nevada – and especially in San Francisco – shows that mediums offered their patrons a valuable social product by tying together religion with entertainment and therapy. In doing so, spiritualists created a cultural technology of ‘spirit materialization’ that prefigured the electronic technology of spirit materialization in the twentieth century – telephone, film, radio, television. Spiritualists also helped create a therapeutic culture that prefigured psychotherapy. In reconciling Americans to the transience of nineteenth‐century social life, in offering them new conceptions of family and community, and by setting the stage for modern therapeutic culture and mass entertainment, Spiritualism became both a bridge to modernity and part of the infrastructure of modernity. The tension between religion, therapy, and entertainment, however, propelled spiritualism in contrary directions and ensured that it would not retain its popularity in the twentieth century.     

Marrying in the city in times of rapid urbanization

Economic, social, political, and demographic processes changed Western European cities strongly during the nineteenth century. Especially during this time, the northern part of Belgium (Flanders) became highly urbanized. Investigating the long-term development of the marriage pattern in the cities of Antwerp, Aalst, and Ghent gives a detailed picture of the evolution of the urban marriage pattern. In this article, specific emphasis is on gender, social, and migration distinctions. The results confirm that there is a male-female difference and variation among various social and migrant groups in the age at first marriage during the period 1800-1906. Moreover, regional differences are also visible. In the port city of Antwerp, massive immigration caused a unique evolution in the age at first marriage during the last decades of the nineteenth century, which did not appear in the textile cities of Aalst and Ghent during this time.     

Becoming Rafinesque: Market Society and Academic Reputation in the Early American Republic

This article focuses on how knowledge came to be valued in conflicting ways in the American Republic during the 1820s and 1830s – one based on a market model that considered knowledge to be a commodity for sale, and another that produced cultural value through social connections created in new academic institutions. Constantine Rafinesque, who taught at Transylvania University in Kentucky, and his research in the natural sciences serve as an example of the first sort of scholarship. His life also illustrates how a market society could lead to dandies, like Rafinesque himself, even in academia, and how that threatened both new middle class social proprieties and a system of clubby social relations that had come to dominate America’s colleges and universities in the early nineteenth century.     

县级城镇居民休闲行为研究——以云南蒙自县为例

随着社会经济的发展,城市居民自由时间的增多,休闲日益社会化和大众化。本文以县级城镇云南蒙自为例,通过调查分析,得出城镇居民休闲行为的一般特征,并对其形成原因进行相关分析。此结论可以为县级城镇进行城市休闲设施的供给与空间布局提供支持,为多种形式的城市休闲产业的发展提供参考。     

“(S)he Conquers Who Endures”: Theodora DeWolf Colt and the Birth of a New Cultural Elite

This essay explores the intersection of gender and class in the making of the new “high brow” culture of the late nineteenth century, represented by the matriarch of Bristol, Rhode Island, Theodora Goujaud DeWolf Colt. Through her poetry and salons, Theodora, like other wealthy women of the time, helped fashion a new bourgeois culture, which, though centered in New York and Boston, radiated outward to the smaller cities of the U.S., such as Bristol. Although the gendered norms and practices of the time excluded her from participation in much of public life, Theodora represented a new model of autonomy for upper-class women, for she was unmarried, not dependent on a man, and an independent intellectual. Her work also demonstrated the gendered tensions inherent in the formation of this new culture, as she developed a distinctive literary perspective that subtly criticized the paternalism and bourgeois values of that era.     

Irrational amusements,theatre law,and moral reformers in nineteenth-century America: implications for later popular music study

This paper considers several case studies of conflicts between moral reformers active in US cities and venues catering to working-class audiences from the 1860s to 1880s. For moral reformers, theatrical entertainments, particularly forms with no educational or moral purpose, were deeply corrupting and threatened not only the well-being of the individual, but also that of the nation. These case studies show that tensions emerged when popular styles sought to expand their audience beyond their traditional patrons or to move into respectable areas of the city – in other words, when they did not stay in their traditional place. This is also true of the many hybrid musical forms that combined European-based folk or religious styles with African-American music. Forms such as jazz and rock ‘n’ roll did not elicit significant protest until they began to find an audience in northern cities among middle- and lower-middle-class youth. Exploring how laws were changed in response to earlier conflicts adds a crucial historical perspective to popular music studies, which tends to remain firmly focused on music from the mid-twentieth century onwards.     

Andrew Jackson Downing and the Tyranny of Taste

The following essay examines the published writing of Andrew Jackson Downing, the early nineteenth century architect and landscape gardener. As the most popular writer and commentator on house and landscape design of his time Downing profoundly shaped – both literally and metaphorically – the social and geographical environment of the emergent middle class. Relating his writing to the promotion of a shared nationalism as embodied in the landscape painting of the Hudson River School, the essay assesses Downing's drive to order by seeing it as a response to the general violence and disorder of the antebellum American city and demonstrates that the defining logic of Downing's project was the universalization of bourgeois taste, uniting the mutually legitimating discourses of privacy, consumption and self‐control.     

Country Music and the South: A Cultural Geography Perspective

Cultural geographers have failed to examine one of the most significant culture items unique to the American South— country music. Examination of the history, folklore, and sociology literature provides data on the area of origin and diffusion routes of the vocal and instrumental characteristics of early country music. The mixing of musical cultures in the South led to the origin and evolution of seven substyles of country music during the twentieth century: traditional, singing cowboy, western swing, honky tonk, bluegrass, country pop, and country rock. Despite recent cultural homogenization in the United States, country music continues to maintain its regional association with the American South.     

Relationship Between Green Areas and Urban Conservation in Historical Areas and Its Reflections: Case of Diyarbakir City,Turkey

City planning is essential for providing physical environment for better community life and for providing green areas, while conserving historical heritage is an important achievement in city planning, particularly for historical cities such as Diyarbakir city. The focus of this paper is to outline how increasing the ratio of green area in the city centre of Diyarbakir, Turkey, with a land-use betterment model exemplified sustainable urbanism. We observed an applied urban design project that included both opening up free space to the public and increasing the amount of available green area. The project addressed an area adjacent to the Diyarbakir city walls, which are important not only for their history but also as reflections of the urbanization process of Diyarbak?r from prehistoric time to the twenty-first century. We have noticed that changes in the design area provided understanding of the city planning by public and supplied more green areas for children and women. Thus, the city became more desirable and more sustainable.     

A Preliminary Study of the Theatres Built by Cantonese Merchants in the Late Qing*

Around the year 1891, four theatres were established in the Guangzhou Prefecture. Three were located in the provincial city of Guangzhou, and one was in the town of Foshan. For a long time, Chinese operas were, on most occasions, performed either in private gardens or in public outdoor spaces. We may presume that the rise of these theatres as an urban phenomenon in the late nineteenth century would ultimately transform the form and style of opera performance in one way or another. However, material concerning the above-mentioned theatres is too limited for us to understand their buildings, furnishings, stage and seat arrangements, lighting and sound effects, and other related aspects. It is therefore very difficult for us to explore the possible connection between the physical elements of these theatres and the style of opera performances. Fortunately, in the mid-nineteenth century, some Cantonese merchants who were active in San Francisco hired a number of opera troupes from Guangzhou to travel to San Francisco and perform in American theatres. Some years later, they even built their own theatres in China Town especially for the performance of Chinese opera. English materials describing these overseas performances and theatres allow us to have some idea of what a Chinese theatre might be like, and to speculate how these overseas experiences may have left an impact on local opera troupes back in Guangzhou.     

Constructing Community: Experiences of Identity, Economic Opportunity, and Institution Building at Boston’s African Meeting House

The African Meeting House in Boston became a center of the city’s free black community during the nineteenth century. Archaeological excavations at this site recovered material from the Meeting House backlot and a neighboring apartment building occupied by black tenants. These artifacts reveal strategies the community used to negotiate a place for themselves, create economic opportunities, and build community institutions. The Meeting House helped foster community success and became a powerful center for African American action on abolition, educational equality, and military integration. The present study argues that the archaeological and historical evidence from the African Meeting House demonstrates the power of the actions of individuals in the black community to counter widespread racial inequality with personal and community success.     

Music and Physics: A Cultural,Interdisciplinary History

This essay investigates the triangular exchange among physicists, musicians, and instrument makers in nineteenth‐century Germany by proffering a material, cultural, and interdisciplinary history. It does so by analyzing four concrete examples of such exchanges: the relationship between musical automata and virtuosi, the reed pipe as an object of music and scientific measurement, the history of standardizing performance pitch, and the attempts to measure musical virtuosity. The goal of the essay is to suggest ways in which interdisciplinary cultural histories, which take the scientific content seriously, can be an improvement upon purely disciplinary histories.     

Material Culture and the Politics of Personality in Early Victorian England

This article uses the insights of material culture studies to explore the role of objects in the development of a politics of personality in the first half of the nineteenth century. Political objects were part of a broader material culture of fame and recognition in this period, encompassing a wide range of public figures such as royalty, military heroes and authors. These artefacts acquired agency, playing an important role in the construction of their subjects as recognizable public figures: an asset for popular politicians whose primary constituencies lay beyond the ranks of the enfranchised. By representing key moments in the public narrative of a politician's career, objects and other representations helped to cement the connection between individuals and the causes with which they were chiefly associated. Some objects, including jugs, teapots and other practical items, may have been used in the public performance of rituals of loyalty to a particular figure. Others, including the famous Staffordshire figurines, were designed for display in the home, becoming vehicles for the domestic re-enactment of public narratives and the performance or construction of personal loyalties and identities. The article concludes by considering the way in which objects associated with famous political figures, including autograph letters, signed prints or even more intimate objects such as locks of hair, could be used to forge real or imagined relationships between politicians and individual members of their wider public.     

Nineteenth-century urbanization as sacred process: insights from German Strasbourg

This article examines a crucial site for modernity’s encounter with religion during the long nineteenth century, albeit one largely ignored both by religious and urban historians: the modern big city. Drawing on evidence from Strasbourg, which joined the ranks of Germany’s big cities soon after the Franco-Prussian War, it points out first, that urbanization had a significant urban dimension. It altered the absolute and relative size of the city’s faith communities, affected the confessional composition of urban neighborhoods, and prompted faith communities to mark additional parts of the urban landscape as sacred. Second, while urban growth—both demographic and physical—frequently challenged traditional understandings of religious community, it also facilitated the construction of new understandings of piety and community, especially via voluntary organizations and the religious media. Thereby, urbanization emerged as a key force behind sacralization in city and countryside as the nineteenth century ended and the twentieth began.     

有价值的乌托邦--对霍华德田园城市理论的一种认识

19世纪末英国社会改革家埃比尼泽·霍华德提出的田园城市理论 ,不仅是城市规划的理论 ,还是关于社会改革的学说。它针对 19世纪工业化、城市化给城市带来的弊病而提出 ,具有丰厚的历史文化和社会背景 ,以及多种社会改革学说的渊源。田园城市理论虽具有很强的乌托邦色彩 ,但至今仍对城市和社会发展有借鉴意义。     

Fashioning the Italian nation: Risorgimento and its costumeall'italiana

This article retraces the debate that emerged during the nineteenth century about the need to create a modern Italian fashion that could restrain the popular use of foreign clothing, in particular that imported from France and Austria. While we usually refer to the 1950s when we think of Made-in-Italy fashion, it was during the Risorgimento that a public discussion began to take shape on the possibility of creating a national self, vested in Italy's specific character and history. Made of black velvet and accompanied by a hat with a feather, the nineteenth-century costume all'italiana was supposed to incarnate the essence of the modern Italian, although it never turned into a commercial reality. What it did, however, was successfully to communicate a message of national unity based on the notion of national sacrifice and expressed through a visual image of blackness – a message that resonated widely in Italy's nationalist discourse throughout and beyond the nineteenth century.