Mapping a New Kind of European Boundary: The Language Border between Modern France and Germany

ABSTRACT

During the nineteenth century, Europeans became fascinated with the idea of locating and mapping the borders between their languages. The barrier of language offered a new way of seeing, dividing and organizing European land according to cultural differences. The cartographic techniques that Europeans invented to map their language borders involved a combination of linguistic surveys, on-site observations and collaboration with locals. Once printed, language maps found a broad public audience and helped to structure debates over cultural identity in European borderlands. This article explores the nationalist and regionalist motivations behind linguistic map making along the French-German border, one of the most disputed in modern European history.     

Language as apparatus: entanglements of language,culture and territory and the invention of nation and ethnicity

Postcolonial linguistics has shown that African languages emerged from a complex figuration of missionary, scientific and colonial practices. The article interprets this emergence as the result of an existential onto-epistemological dislocation stabilised through the hegemonic project of colonialism. It rests on an apparatus of modernity that separated nature and culture/society and stabilised this new order with a particular notion of language as an autonomous object. In the nineteenth century, language enters a conjunction of territory and culture, which played out in Europe in the terms of a nationalist, hegemonic trajectory and in Africa as the fractionation of ethnic/linguistic groups and the pervasive linguo-ethnification of contemporary societies. Thus, language can be understood to be an apparatus productive of nationalism as well as ethnicity. In an attempt to demonstrate the plausibility of this conceptualisation, I show how today these trajectories have effects in that Afrikaans in South Africa as ethnified language loses and Swahili in Tanzania as national language gains ground at the respective universities. Both languages compete with global academic English, which despite its colonial heritage appears as a deterritorialised, culturally neutral language.     

Nationalism,Reform Judaism and the Hebrew Prayer Book

ABSTRACT. The Hebrew prayer book (siddur), the oldest of which dates from the ninth century, frequently expresses Jewish chosenness and hopes for the gathering of the exiles and the return to the Land of Israel. In nineteenth‐century German Reform prayer books, such references to Jewish nationalism were altered or eliminated. In an age of growing European nationalism, this attempt to ‘de‐nationalise’ Jewish identity was virtually unique. Responding to accusations that Jewish citizenship in the modern nation‐state was incompatible with Judaism, Reform rabbis, who were engaged in the struggle for Jewish emancipation, claimed that patriotic loyalty to the German fatherland must supersede Jewish national identity. This article discusses the offending nationalist content of the siddur and the historical context in which it was suppressed. It concludes that the German reformers, by drawing attention to the nationalist potential of traditional Judaism, indirectly prepared the way for the rise of Jewish nationalism in reaction to racial anti‐Semitism in the late nineteenth century.     

Loyalist,patriot, or colonizer? The three faces of Zheng Chenggong in Meiji Japan and late Qing China

ABSTRACT

This article examines the transformation of Zheng Chenggong’s image in Meiji Japan and late Qing China. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, Zheng Chenggong was often depicted as a Ming dynasty loyalist in Chinese narratives and as a Japanese hero adventuring in a foreign land in Japanese narratives. The two groups of narratives converged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, transforming Zheng Chenggong into a patriot, an anti-imperialist hero, and a conqueror and developer of Taiwan. Underlying the convergence of Chinese and Japanese narratives of Zheng Chenggong was surging nationalist sentiment in response to different forms of imperialism. This study aims to show how different nationalist agendas activated efforts to recreate Zheng Chenggong’s image in China and Japan at the turn of the nineteenth century.     

Viral nationalism: romantic intellectuals on the move in nineteenth‐century Europe

ABSTRACT. Intellectuals were important to the spread of nationalist ideology in nineteenth‐century Europe for a variety of reasons. Firstly, their works facilitated the international spread of the discourse of nationalism; secondly, they mediated between the fields of political institutions and cultural reflection. This article looks at the international mobility and networks of romantic‐nationalist intellectuals, and uses the case of August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798–1874) as an example.     

Romanticism,music, nationalism

In manifold ways, the stylistic and performative features and evolving genre conventions of nineteenth‐century ‘classical’ music reflect the increasing grip of nationalism on cultural attitudes in Europe. Conversely, music could become an important medium for the expression and dissemination of nationalist ideals. A cross‐national, European‐wide survey of this interpenetration between musical and ideological developments is applied towards a tentative typological outline of ‘musical nationalism’.     

Early Lithuanian nationalism: sources of its legitimate meanings in an environment of shifting boundaries

The objective of this article is to formulate the problem of modernity of the nation more specifically with reference to early Lithuanian nationalism. The problem is to find out how national solidarity emerges in the modernising social context in which factors reflecting nationally relevant conflicts of group interests are more valid. The argument, to summarise, is that the decisive phase of Lithuanian nationalism came with the external religious conflict, on the one hand, and the secular liberal movement, on the other. The analysis also explains why early Lithuanian nationalism was of the ‘belated’ type. It was the interaction of ethno–religious factors, socio–economic interests and the rapidly increasing role of the intelligentsia that reinforced the symbolic relations of language and social solidarity.     

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.     

Imagining the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: The Politics and Economics of the Rebuilding of Trakai Castle and the ‘Palace of Sovereigns’ in Vilnius

Abstract

In 1884 the prominent nation-builder Jonas Basanavi?ius declared that castle mounds and literature were the only appropriate elements from which to build the Lithuanian nation. Basanavi?ius’s view, this article suggests, had a lasting influence on the public uses of history in twentieth-century Lithuania. The study explores the construction of two iconic images of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Trakai Castle and the ‘Palace of Sovereigns’ in Vilnius. Built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Trakai Castle was once the seat of the Grand Duke of Lithuania, but fell into neglect before its reconstruction in the 1960s. Dating back to the thirteenth century, the Palace in Vilnius deteriorated during the eighteenth century, was dismantled at the beginning of the nineteenth, and has been completely rebuilt since 2000. It is striking that the reconstructions of castles were the largest state investments in culture in both the Soviet and post-Soviet regimes. The reconstruction of Trakai Castle was criticized on economic and ideological grounds by Nikita Khrushchev. The rebuilding of the Palace polarized Lithuanian intellectuals. The presentation compares the intellectual, social, and political rationales which underpinned the two projects and explores the changes and continuities in the uses of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under the Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.     

Myths and symbols in the political culture of Catalan nationalism (1880–1914)

Historiography on the phenomenology of nationalisms has often pointed to the importance of myths and symbols in the construction of these political movements, underlining how the past is transfigured and/or particular historical episodes are recast for use in creating a given political discourse in the present. By adopting this viewpoint, the aim of this paper is to analyse the evolution of historiographical thinking on the use of myths and symbols in contemporary politics, giving particular attention to how they were brought to bear in the early days of the Catalan nationalist movement. This initial period, covering the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is of special interest in the case of Catalan nationalism because it was a phase of politicisation marked – much as it was in other nationalist movements across Europe – by a nationalisation of history, a selection of foundation myths and historical milestones, and a crystallisation of the movement's symbols.     

Conflicting nationalist traditions and immigration: the Basque case from 1950 to 1980

Immigration from the different regions in Spain to the Basque Country has traditionally opposed Basque and Spanish nationalism. This article provides an overview of the discourse of both nationalist traditions with respect to the intra‐regional migration movement of the second half of the twentieth century as well as of the resulting controversy. Whereas the Basque nationalist movement claims to have defended the need to integrate immigrants since the middle of the twentieth century, particularly through politics, Spanish nationalism claims that Basque nationalism has helped marginalise these same immigrants. A qualitative analysis is used to contrast this controversy by consulting the opinion of the Spanish immigrants who settled in the Basque Country and did not avail of the political integration proposed by Basque nationalism. The main conclusion is that these immigrants tend to avoid the heart of the matter of discord between both nationalist traditions, granting little importance to political and cultural elements though stressing their social integration in the Basque Country.     

Discreet Proto‐Pentecostals: The Catholic Apostolic Church in North America

Much recent work has been undertaken on the beginnings of Pentecostalism in North America, and its antecedents in the nineteenth century. These efforts have outlined the theological contributions of the Holiness movement, revivalism, and nineteenth‐century healing movements. One group that has been largely overlooked is the Edward Irving influenced Catholic Apostolic Church, which has been seen as making a minimal contribution as a precursor to Pentecostalism in general; it has especially been seen as peripheral in the Americas. This article will use contemporary newspapers and recently digitised primary sources to argue that the Catholic Apostolic Church was a significant force in the pre‐history of American and Canadian Pentecostalism, with hundreds of followers in key cities, regularly exhibiting prophecy and glossolalia throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.     

The Practice of Identity and an Irish Sense of Place

Following in the wake of Benedict Anderson's work in particular, cultural geographers and cultural studies scholars have analyzed the nation and nationalism as primarily 'imagined' or abstract entities. Coincidentally, the greatest analytic attention has been given to nationalist representations of place, rather than to the everyday discursive practices constitutive of the nation as lived. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's practice theory, in this paper I develop the beginnings of a corporeal approach to the nation. Here the relationship between the practice of identity (the embodiment of gendered and sexualized subjectivities via discursive practice within culturally defined spaces) and an Irish nationalist sense of place is explored. In this approach, analytic considerations of identity and space are collapsed within the shared material and metaphoric medium of the body. Irish nationalism and the nation are analyzed as corporeal materialities via an ethnohistorical focus on late nineteenth-century changes in the political economy of 'peasant' and nationalist bodies. The analysis suggests that a particular matrix of constructions of femininity and masculinity was extended paradigmatically throughout the society in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These paradigmatic changes are characterized as a 'heterosexing' of bodies and places linked to economic change and the rise of the confessional state.     

Labour's True Man: Organised Workingmen and the Language of Manliness in the USA, 1827–1877

This essay examines the language of manliness that both marked and shaped nineteenth‐century mainstream labour activism during a formative period of craft bastardisation, class formation, and movement building. It sketches the logic and meanings of manliness embedded in labour newspapers, journals, addresses, and trade‐union proceedings from the period. The analysis recovers a persistent, complex, and problematic racialised and gendered/classed language central to skilled white workingmen's collective self‐identification. Assimilationist in thrust, it beckoned workingmen to an ambivalent double identity defined as much by manly character as by class characteristics. Thus it both facilitated and limited labour activism and class consciousness.     

Common misperceptions: the press and Victorian views of crime

After a string of successes in the early nineteenth century, the Victorian movement to reform criminal punishment began to falter. Despite evidence to the contrary, the populace grew convinced that violent crime was on the rise. A frequency analysis of The Times and The Manchester Guardian suggests that this misperception was due to a drastic increase in crime coverage by the periodicals of the day.     

Welsh migration to England in the mid-nineteenth century

Conventional migration theory suggests that rural to urban movement was a one-way once and for all movement which resulted in the severance of ties to a rural homeland and the gradual adoption of an urban lifestyle and culture. Analysis of Welsh migration to English towns in the mid-nineteenth century suggests that by no means all migrants conformed to this stereotype. Whilst Welsh migrants displayed similar characteristics to other rural-urban movers and fitted easily into an urban labour market, they were able to retain many of their rural traditions and customs in an English urban environment. They also maintained close links with Wales whilst some engaged in return migration. Although easily accepted into English urban society, the Welsh were able to live in two culture worlds for much of the nineteenth century. It is suggested that detailed longitudinal studies of other migrant groups will demonstrate diversity in the extent to which rural traditions were subsumed by urban culture in the nineteenth century.     

Military Nationalism and the State: the Case of Fin‐De‐Siècle Spain

Abstract. Military culture can play an important role in the rise of modern nationalism, as developments in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain demonstrate. Like many Europeans, Spanish army officers turned increasingly to nationalist ideology as they lost faith in the ability of liberal institutions to meet their needs. Because Spain, where army officers had much influence on politics and society, lacked other strong movements of modern, Castile‐centred nationalism, military culture had a significant and long‐lasting influence on the subsequent development of notions of Spanish national identity. The case of turn‐of‐the‐century Spanish military nationalism lends credence to a general understanding of nationalism as a political phenomenon in which the state plays a central role.     

The countryside as educator: schools, rurality and citizenship in inter-war Wales

This paper examines the ways in which the educational system in inter-war Wales reflected wider debates about national identity, rurality and citizenship. It begins by outlining the role of education in the “rebirth” of Wales at the end of the nineteenth century, and the emergence of the central figure of O. M. Edwards. It then traces his legacy into the inter-war period and the work of the Welsh department of the Board of Education and its permanent secretary Alfred Davies. Themes of nature and the rural, citizenship and Welshness are examined in the context of the Board's Scheme for the Collection of Rural Lore in Schools. These educational debates are linked to others within Welsh youth movements likeUrdd Gobaith Cymru, academic geography (especially the work of H. J. Fleure), and the emerging Welsh nationalist movement. The paper ends by noting the contested role of education in Welshness.     

The Implications of Analytic Philosophy of History for the Practicing Historian

An article by John O'Hagan and Elish Kelly in 2005 (see Historical Methods 38:118-25) discussed collecting information on visual artists that would allow a broad historical ranking based on "prominence." O'Hagan and Kelly collected these data to examine prominent artists' birth locations, work locations, and their consequential patterns of labor movement during several long periods. In this article, the authors examine artists' migration for four periods (based on their date of birth): Renaissance Italy, Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the Western world in general for the periods 1850-99 and 1900-49. The data show that important artists clustered in all periods at a remarkably high level. Florence and Rome dominated in Renaissance Italy, with significant clustering because of the artists' birthplaces and domestic migration. Paris and London witnessed a marked clustering of artists born in the first half of the nineteenth century, with Paris continuing to dominate among artists born in the second half of the nineteenth century. Artists born in the first half of the twentieth century clustered in New York City, with all prominent American artists clustering there.     

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.