Views and Commentaries: What Difference Does Feminist Theory Make?

This discussion explores what difference a feminist perspective makes in our understandings of the past in two ways. The first section examines to what extent feminist research questions were asked in the preceding papers by Lu Ann De Cunzo, Eleanor Casella, and Susan Piddock. The second section shows what difference feminist theory has made in asking new questions that have produced new gendered understandings of the global historical context of these papers. As a whole, this discussion shows how feminist theoretical approaches change our understanding of the lives of historic women and men in nineteenth century reform institutions within their larger gendered cultural context. While the introduction to this volume presents the broader ungendered historical context, this discussion focusses on the gendered cultural context that was foundational to the gender relationships embodied in the arrangement of architectural spaces and material culture at the sites in the preceding three papers.     

Introduction and Historical Context to the Archaeology of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Almshouses

This introduction discusses both the western cultural context of, and research issues behind, the following three articles on institutions founded to house the poor in Holland, England, and their American colonies. It also discusses the connections between this volume on colonial-era institutions for the poor and the previous volume on nineteenth century asylums and prisons.     

Being a nation through the crown. Banal monarchism and nation-building in Spain, 1833–68

ABSTRACT

Studies on nationalism have rarely given importance to the role played by the monarchy. In the Spanish case, studies have principally underlined its negative impact at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article aims to approach the origins of this political and cultural junction between the crown and the phenomenon of nationalism in Spain. A process that took place during the reign of Queen Isabel II (1833–68) and that followed very similar times and formulas to its neighbouring countries. It is first discuss the challenge that the monarchy faced in resignifying and relocating itself politically and symbolically in the nineteenth century. On this path, the crown found in the nation a perfect partner. However, liberalism also used the historical legitimacy of the monarchy to construct a nationalist discourse where monarchical identity was a structuring and undeniable piece of the national essence. Then, the author studies two typologies of strategies undertaken by them to convey their idea of nation, to mobilize people and to engender national loyalty: royal travel and images of the monarchy – both literal and figurative – used by the state. A comparative perspective with different European cases is always follow, particularly with Queen Victoria.     

A Context for Concealment: The Historical Archaeology of Folk Ritual and Superstition in Australia

Are there traditions of folk ritual practice in Australian historical contexts, and are they observable in the archaeological record? Studies from the US and UK have documented a range of practices suggesting the persistence of British and European traditions of folk magic well into the twentieth century and previous historical work has identified numerous examples of ritual concealments in Australian buildings. In examining over 4,500 Australian historical archaeological sources, however, we found very few examples of possible folk ritual practices. This raises the question of why such practices are not being captured by current archaeological recording methods. As counterpoint, a general model is constructed from US, UK and Australian work that raises intriguing possibilities for the situating of superstitious behavior in Australian historical archaeology, including the contexts in which people might be more prone to practise such behaviors and how they might be materially identifiable.     

For the Community: Scottish Historical Archaeology and the Politics of Land Reform

In Scotland, land reform is, historically and still today, a defining political issue and a subject of debate. Central to this debate are different ideological understandings of the rural past. In this paper, I discuss the nature of the Scottish land question and explore several of the main—sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting—ideologies concerning land, as put forward or supported by different constituencies: politicians; landowners; crofters; Scots more generally; and members of the Scottish diaspora. I consider the histories to which these ideologies relate and seek to locate the historical archaeology of rural Scotland in its political and social contexts.     

The Relevance of Nineteenth-Century Religion to the Archaeological Record: An Example from the Home of Ellen White, Prophetess of Seventh-Day Adventism

Religion is one of the least tangible aspects of the past, yet it was very real and very important in the lives of past people. Understanding the impact nineteenth-century evangelical Christianity had on the archaeological record will add substantially to studies of historic households in the United States and around the world. One of the most aggressive of these denominations was Seventh-day Adventism, which grew out of the Millerite movement under Ellen White. A brief case study based on a home occupied by her family is used as a way to explore some of these themes.     

Philosophical Instruments and Toys: Optical Devices Extending the Art of Seeing

In the nineteenth century, there was a continuous debate on the structure and function of the brain, focusing on localization of function and on epilepsy. France, Germany, and England played a leading role. This article addresses the question of what happened with respect to the study of epilepsy in the Netherlands in that period. A systematic search of the literature has been performed and papers by Schroeder van der Kolk, Huet, Jelgersma, and Niermeijer are discussed. Also two dissertations were selected for discussion, those of Kroon and Langelaan. It is concluded that from a scientific point of view, only the paper by Schroeder van der Kolk deserved and received international attention.     

Resisting Traditions: Ceramics, Identity, and Consumer Choice in the Outer Hebrides from 1800 to the Present

On a number of levels, peripheral status has been imposed on the Outer Hebrides (Scotland) since the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745. Drawing on a series of interviews with Hebridean families, this paper explores the changing meanings of ceramics imported into the islands from the early nineteenth century and displayed on wooden dressers. It is argued that in renegotiating their identity in the face of a series of externally generated economic changes, rural communities in the Hebrides have acted as thoughtful consumers, appropriating mainland material culture to their own ends. Throughout this process, imports have behaved ambiguously. This ambiguity is crucial to our understanding of the relationship—here characterized not as resistance but as resistant adaptation—between the Hebrides and the mainland.     

Selling civilization: toward a cultural analysis of America's economic empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

This essay builds on work that is exploring the convergence of economic and cultural approaches to understanding imperialism through an examination of the particular case of American commercial expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on my archival research into the promotional and practical strategies of five of the largest American companies that were international in sales, I suggest some of the ways that an analysis of commercial imperial representations of, and knowledges about, race, gender and civilization adds to our understanding of the multiplicity of imperialisms. I argue that examining these multiplicities can help contribute to a critical postcolonial perspective.     

The Periphery's Terms of Trade in the Nineteenth Century: A Methodological Problem Revisited

Abstract.

There is a major downward bias in the trend of most existing estimates of the periphery's nineteenth-century terms of trade. By using prices from the North Atlantic core as proxies for prices in the peripheral countries themselves, historians ignore the dramatic price convergence that took place during the nineteenth century. Measured correctly, the periphery's nineteenth-century terms-of-trade boom would appear considerably longer, greater, and more widespread than Jeffrey Williamson (2008 Williamson, J. G. 2008. Globalization and the great divergence: Terms of trade booms, volatility and the poor periphery, 1782–1913. European Review of Economic History 12:355–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S136149160800230X.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2011 ———. 2011. Trade and poverty: When the Third World fell behind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]) supposes, greatly reinforcing his grand narrative about the relation between globalization and the “great divergence.” Many of the details of his narrative, however, must be revised. This is illustrated by the case of India.     

Illustrating the Phaenomena: Celestial Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Abstract

The Ordnance Survey's Boundary Survey, carried out between 1841 and 1888, was a major undertaking which resulted in the local administrative boundaries of the whole of Great Britain being reliably mapped for the first time. This was not achieved by imposition but by the use of local knowledge of boundaries, thus making permanent a communal memory of administrative geography and rendering it globally accessible through maps. The Boundary Survey aided the reform of local government areas, a process which started during the same period and provided derived data for the burgeoning collection of statistics in the nineteenth century.     

Context and Interpretation: An Archaeology of Cultural Production

This paper examines the construction of modern-world contexts in historical archaeology. To help draw out and understand the social and cultural contexts of capitalism, colonialism, and modernity, and how they may be materially understood, an explanation of the German history of everyday life school (Alltagsgeschichte) is presented. In this approach, the objects of historical study become the everyday cultural interpretations of past people and how these interpretations actively produced and reproduced cultures. This approach is illustrated by a landscape archaeology of the Bordley–Randall site in Annapolis, Maryland.     

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.     

Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

This article sheds light on the period of revolutionary turbulence by demonstrating how the concept of revolution was introduced in the Finnish print culture through foreign news reports during the early nineteenth century. The examination draws on the use of multilingual digital newspaper collections provided by the National Library of Finland. By combining key word searches to a close reading of newspaper texts, the article explores the ways in which different revolutionary movements were present in the Finnish newspapers during the early decades of the nineteenth century. The article proposes that the role of foreign news flow was crucial in the process of shaping the understanding of revolution in Finland.     

Re-emerging Frontiers: Postcolonial Theory and Historical Archaeology of the Borderlands

The article considers the importance of frontier studies in historical archaeology and discusses applicability of some of the concepts deriving from postcolonial theories for a better understanding of human relationships in the frontier zones. The conditions of frontiers and borderlands are compared with the characteristics of the “Third Space” described by Homi Bhabha as a realm of negotiation, translation and remaking. It is argued that concepts developed in postcolonial theories, such as “Third Space,” “in-betweeness” or hybridity, are useful not only to address cultural and social processes in borderlands that were created by colonial empires. They are also an apt way to conceptualize relationships in frontiers that lacked colonial stigma. To illustrate this point, two different historical examples of borderlands are scrutinized in this paper: the medieval frontier region that emerged between Denmark and the Northwestern Slavic area and the creation of the colonial frontier in Northeastern America through the establishment of the Praying Indian Towns.     

Contesting Conquests: Nineteenth-Century German and Polish Historiography of the Expansion of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Union

The problem of conquests and territorial expansion, including their interpretation, evaluation, and legitimisation, has been crucial for European national historiographies. Consequently, attempts by the Holy Roman emperors, particularly of the Saxon and Hohenstaufen dynasties, to control Italy and Burgundy were hotly debated among nineteenth-century German historians, while Poland's union with Lithuania, and the annexation of the vast territories of the east which followed, was a central topic for Polish historians of the time. Modern historians of historiography in both countries have carefully analysed these narratives, emphasising their ideological and political contexts, such as their involvement in the Grossdeutsch versus Kleindeutsch controversy and the controversy between the so-called Cracow and Warsaw historical schools. In this paper I propose a comparative analysis of these two discourses which dealt with analogical issues and, as I demonstrate, developed with a parallel dynamic. Such an analysis, I argue, allows an escape from the paradigm of national exceptionalism, and the discovery of what was typical or, perhaps, constitutive of the discourse on territorial expansion of the time, instead of focusing on the uniqueness of the national context. This analysis embraces the conceptualisation, argumentation, and rhetoric of those nineteenth-century German and Polish historians discussing the expansion of the medieval Holy Empire and early-modern Poland. Moreover, it locates their interpretations within an international context of a broader Western historiographical tradition, involving issues of domination, cultural transfer, and colonialism. Finally, it examines the parallel mechanism of searching for, advocating, and perpetuating the idea of uniqueness of national history.