Excavations on the site of the Great Western Steamship Company’s Engine Works,Bristol

Abstract

Archaeological investigations on the site of the former Great Western Steamship Company’s Engine Works (1839–52) at the Great Western Dockyard, Bristol have revealed elements of the world’s first purpose-built integrated iron steamship works, created specifically to build Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s iron-hulled SS Great Britain. Its innovative engine and transmission gear were made in the Engine Works, a building of monumental design which demonstrated early use of both Portland Cement and gas lighting. Ultimately, the steamship works proved a failure and later uses of the Engine Works building included a tannery and a warehouse, before it was largely destroyed during air raids in the Second World War.     

‘Not fullye so loftye’: excavations at the Royal Fort,St Michael’s Hill,Bristol

The Royal Fort was the largest of Bristol’s northern ring of Civil War forts. Designed by Prince Rupert of the Rhine’s Dutch engineer, Bernard de Gomme, and constructed between 1643 and 1645, it was maintained during the Commonwealth long after its founder was in exile and his cause lost. Despite the intensity of subsequent development, it has survived as a place name for over 350 years. Recent excavations at the fort site have revealed unprecedented information on the scale and topographical adaptations of fort buildings, which, to date, may be unique in the British Isles. Features post-dating the forts’ decommissioning and reclamation of the land, particularly for the 18th- and 19th-century pleasure gardens of the wealthy mercantile Tyndall family, include a previously unknown ice house and evidence for heated glasshouses.     

Lincoln,Race, and the Spirit of ’76

Abstract

This essay examines how Lincoln dealt with race, slavery, and emancipation in antebellum America. It argues that despite a few controversial statements and policies regarding black Americans, Lincoln sought to preserve the American union and its system of self-government by reclaiming the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Unlike U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who exploited white bigotry in his promotion of local “popular sovereignty” as a solution to the slavery controversy, Lincoln highlighted the natural rights of blacks as a way to prevent the spread of slavery and thereby save what he would later call “the last best hope of earth.”     

Anton Dumitriu,the ‘Axiomatic Culture’ and the ‘Crisis of the West’

Anton Dumitriu (1905–92) was a Romanian philosopher and logician who attempted to develop the more or less consistent theory of an ‘axiomatic’ tradition, referring to culture and civilisation in the ‘East’ (defined actually as Far East) vs. the ‘West’ (mainly Europe, both Western and East-Central) especially in the inter-war and post-war periods. Dumitriu's essays on Romanian culture or on Eastern vs. Western culture as published in his book Eleatic and Heraclitic Cultures (1987) will make the object of this study. This work is a revised version of his East and West (1943). It should be noted that most of the material discussed here is actually still available only in Romanian since Dumitriu's work on Logic is already translated into English, but his musings on culture and civilisation are available only in Romanian and are, consequently, almost unknown outside the country. This study attempts to make up for that and also to connect Dumitriu's views on culture and civilisation or East and West both to earlier Romanian views and currents in defining culture as well as to contemporary general European trends, while also taking into account the context of the Communist regime in which the second edition of his book was issued.     

Bakhtin,Boredom, and the ‘Democratization of Skepticism’

This article examines recent scholarly work on boredom by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of modernity, irony, and mass skepticism. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin noted that, beginning in the 1840s, Western societies had been gripped by an “epidemic of boredom.” He was referring to a peculiarly modern form of mass boredom, associated with the “atrophy of experience” in a mechanized and urbanized social life—a boredom Elizabeth S. Goodstein has characterized as the “democratization of skepticism.” Although Bakhtin says little about “boredom” directly, he probes the sociocultural conditions that give rise to it. Bakhtin, for example, celebrates the liberatory and egalitarian promise of modern vernacular speech, which displays a healthy suspicion of “monotonic” qualities of elite genres, and which springs not from the pulpit or the palace, but from the street, the marketplace and the public square. Bakhtin is concerned about the nihilistic implications of this disenchantment of the world and the threats it poses—indifference, reification and alienation—to the “participative” mode of social life he favours.     

Tzvetan Todorov,the ‘Responsible Intellectual’, and the new world disorder

This article assesses Tzvetan Todorov's intellectual evolution from structuralist literary critic to ‘responsible intellectual’. It contrasts his notion of the responsibility of the intellectual with traditional definitions of commitment, and analyses why for Todorov figures such as Camus, Aron, and Tillion are exemplary, whereas Communist intellectuals are not. The article examines Todorov's positions vis‐à‐vis current crises and controversies, including the bombing of Kosovo, the validity of the ICT, and America's war in Iraq. Finally, it discusses Todorov's ideas for a stronger and more independent Europe as articulated in his most recent book, Le Nouveau Désordre mondial.     

Tibetan livelihoods and the ‘Great Development of the West’:Modernization,pastoral resources,and the ‘urban future’ of the grasslands

1.Introduction Rural livelihoods in Tibet2 have,during the last fifteen years,undergone fast and profound processes of economic transformation and state-led modernization,both in the TAR and the Eastern parts of the Tibetan plateau.Local life styles have changed at a pace rarely seen in an area where people subsisted,until the late 1990s,almost entirely on nomadic mobile livestock production.New local socio-economic structures with peculiar characteristics have emerged.They include the decline of traditional livestock-based (mobile) pastoralism;the emergence of a ‘post-pastoral’ economy based on the extraction of medicinal fungi for Chinese and international markets;and the emergence,often from below,of new arrangements governing rangeland access and usage.     

Museums and the ‘Death of Experience’: singularity,interiority and the outside

This paper discusses a number of well-known critiques of the museum that seek to identify it as a problematic space for experience. The key argument put forward is that we can find within that analysis a critical geography around the museum that help us to understand the work that it does in relation to experience. Three spatial motifs are drawn from this analysis and discussed: the singular, the interior and the outside. The paper argues that museums since the nineteenth century have established a topos for experience based on a mimetic realism around the experience of both culture and history through the first two of these spatial expressions. Through them museums produces a fabulation of culture and history that supplements for the lack of topos for experience found within modern society as a whole. The latter spatiality – that of the outside – is found in the form of the absent–presence of the event in relation to the archiving principle of the museum, thereby continually unsettling the first two expressions and calling them into question. This dynamic reveals the museum as a space to critically think about what it does with experience and the importance of spatial analysis for that.     

’Refined,highfalutin’ principles’: The northern public,the constitution,and slavery, 1861–62

Early in the Civil War an anticonstitutional rhetoric arose on the Northern home front in response to military delays and defeats as well as congressional debates over the constitutionality of punitive actions against rebel citizens. This critique was based in part on the Constitution's protections of rebel citizens’ rights, especially their disputed right to hold human property. Impatient Northerners also perceived the political compromises with slavery throughout the sectional conflict as based on constitutional principles. As a result, some Northerners began to equate the Constitution with slavery, and began to demand that the document be revised or even rewritten. This essay argues, however, that in spite of their critique of the Constitution's perceived protections of slavery, war‐minded Northern citizens did not advocate immediate or widespread emancipation.     

‘‘This Secret Town’: British Intelligence,the Special Relationship,and the Vietnam War’

This article seeks to revise our understanding of Cold War intelligence as a practice. The conventional view is that Britain's MI6 waged a battle in the shadows consisting of espionage and covert action. However, a number of MI6 officers operated as observers, conducting what we might call ‘intelligence without espionage’. The dual identity of these officers raises important questions about how intelligence operated in the blurred space between traditional diplomacy and human espionage using agents. Using the case of MI6 officers in the British Consulate-General in Hanoi between 1965 and 1972, this article explores how a dual identity provided alternative means of acquiring intelligence within a highly secure state that exhibited remarkable paranoia about foreign spies. Furthermore, the United States lacked diplomatic representation in Hanoi and so the British Consulate provided a remarkable window for Western intelligence on the effect of ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’, Lyndon Johnson's escalating air campaign against North Vietnam. Both Johnson and Harold Wilson were avid readers of this material. Accordingly, in the context of the Cold War intelligence partnership between the UK and US, the consulate in Hanoi was an example of the ‘inverse’ special relationship, in which Britain enjoyed unique value.     

Tehran’s subway: gender,mobility, and the adaptation of the ‘proper’ Muslim woman

Tehran’s subway, the most affordable means of public transportation in the city, offers a useful context to study the relationship between women’s spatial mobility, the construction of self, and social production of space. This study focuses on Line 1 of Tehran’s subway that connects Tehran’s Bala Shahr (Northern Tehran) and Paeen Shahr (Southern Tehran) neighborhoods. This study draws upon 46 semi-structured interviews with women who were using subway Line 1 in the fall and winter of 2012. The average hour-long interviews examine how women’s emotional states as well as their perceptions of self and space vary as they traverse the city on Line 1. Representing a cultural as well as a spatial transect through the city, the perceptions of women on subway’s Line 1 convey the repudiation of the state’s attempt to promote a singular Muslim female identity. The findings suggest that similar to women’s perception of space, their gendered identities are constantly changing through the enhanced mobility that is facilitated by Tehran’s subway system. In contrast to what is presumed in the West, with a simple change in their hijab style or make-up, Iranian women innovatively negotiate contrasting spaces.     

‘A Just and Liberal Landlord’: Manliness,Work, and the Landed Gentleman in the Brontës’ Novels

The Brontës’ many striking depictions of landowners are rife with ambiguities, particularly as these characters are seldom presented at work in their traditional roles as landlord and magistrate. While the Victorian landed gentleman’s status was partially predicated on not having to work for money, both the new Victorian professional ideal and traditional conceptions of paternalist care affected the ways this class was viewed by middle-class commentators at mid-century. In the Brontës’ novels, traditional paternalist responsibilities are fused with aspects of the professional ideal in depictions of reformed landed gentlemen, but even this new, ideal figure is represented as unsatisfactory. In this article, I consider how landowners were written about in contemporary periodicals and how the Brontës engage with these expectations. The Irish tenant and landlord problem, which was covered extensively in the periodical press, shaped Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in a profound way, as the novel serves as an important, but until now overlooked, reworking of Maria Edgeworth’s representations of landowning masculinity in Castle Rackrent (1800). The Brontës repeatedly depict landowners retreating into the domestic sphere, which I argue forms an implicit narrative challenge to this figure’s social authority. This article opens up new ground for the examination of Victorian discourse on professionalization in relation to the Brontës’ works and a consideration of the ways in which this discourse was applied to landowners both in the periodical press and the Victorian novel.     

Cerebral Automatism,the Brain,and the Soul in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Neither literary critics nor historians of science have acknowledged the extent to which Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is indebted to late-Victorian neurologists, particularly David Ferrier, John Burdon-Sanderson, Thomas Huxley, and William Carpenter. Stoker came from a family of distinguished Irish physicians and obtained an M.A. in mathematics from Trinity College, Dublin. His personal library contained volumes on physiology, and his composition notes for Dracula include typewritten pages on somnambulism, trance states, and cranial injuries.

Stoker used his knowledge of neurology extensively in Dracula. The automatic behaviors practiced by Dracula and his vampiric minions, such as somnambulism and hypnotic trance states, reflect theories about reflex action postulated by Ferrier and other physiologists. These scientists traced such automatic behaviors to the brain stem and suggested that human behavior was “determined” through the reflex action of the body and brain—a position that threatened to undermine entrenched beliefs in free will and the immortal soul. I suggest that Stoker’s vampire protagonist dramatizes the pervasive late-nineteenth-century fear that human beings are soulless machines motivated solely by physiological factors.     

‘Fertility’ and the Carnival 1: Symbolic Effectiveness,Emic Beliefs,and the Re-enchantment of Europe

This article examines European festive culture through the lens of two ethnographic case studies of carnivals, conducted in Italy and the Czech Republic, respectively. The article considers the general problem of studying festivals in Europe today, and then focuses on the emic beliefs related to the ‘ritual magical’ acts of these two carnivals, their social relevance, their effectiveness, and the meanings and functions to which they are bound today. I argue that these acts constitute empirical evidence that supports theories about the ‘re-enchantment’ of Europe in post-modern times. This article is the first part of a broader study divided into two parts.     

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