Wrinkles in Time: Old Age,Gender and Temporality in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This article explores one of the classic questions in the history of old age: what happened to the status of the elderly in the nineteenth century? How do we explain the emergence of the modern notion of an old age defined by ‘declines’ of every sort (cognitive, physical, financial)? The article focuses on Germany, then and now a global leader on this issue, and it focuses on women, whose ageing was more widely discussed than that of men. It shows that the great nineteenth-century debate about the elderly was not about industrialisation, labour, health or social policy. It was a debate about time. The cultural understanding of the elderly changed because the culture of temporality did. The focus on futurity and the youth around 1900 is well known, as modern Germany became convulsed with imperial fantasies and electric urban life. This had, it turns out, negative repercussions for older Germans. No longer the accretions of a long past of wisdom and experience, they were identified instead with their short future of corporeal decline and death. The social attitude towards older people is therefore related to the broader social attitude towards time, history and change: a finding that might apply in other times and places, including our own.     

SahulTime: Rethinking Archaeological Representation in the Digital Age

SahulTime is an experimental development project to explore how archaeological knowledge might best be represented within a digitally native mode. The system incorporates an interactive, zoomable timeline with a changing geographic view, time-aware icons and detail-boxes that can themselves express temporal visualisations. The core knowledge domain currently represented is Australian archaeology in the context of changing sea-level, but the visualisation concepts developed are more generally applicable at a global level on all timescales, and may offer a first step towards the ‘Digital Earth’ vision of a top-down interface for exploring the world and its history.     

Woman in Nineteenth-Century America

The political use of Woman as a universal category, transcending social divisions, has fallen into disrepute. Yet it is necessary, in looking at gender history, to understand not just its obfuscations but its sources and political effects. The essay proposes an intellectual and political history of the uses of the term Woman and a social history of the heterogeneous mixtures of women from different social groups who seized the term and gave it force. Discussing recent scholarship on white and Afro-American women, Stansell argues for the importance of moments of extravagant universalising to the history of women in politics.     

Folk Elements in Nineteenth-Century Puritanism

THE IDIOM OF THE PEOPLE. By JAMES REEVES. Heinemann, 1958. Pp. xii, 244. Reviewed by Margaret Dean-Smith.

EUSKALERRIKO IPUIÑAK: Basque Folktales. Edited with notes and Spanish versions by A. IRIGARAY. Itxaropena Argitaldaria, Zarauz, 1957. Pp. 225, 40 pesetas. Reviewed by P. L. Henry.

DAHOMEAN NARRATIVE. A Cross-Cultural Analysis. By MELVILLE J. and FRANCES S. HERSKOVITS. Northwestern University Press, Evanstown, 1958. Pp. xvi, 490. Reviewed by Jack Berry.

FOLKLORE OF OTHER LANDS. By A. M. SELVI, L. KAHN, R. C. SOULE. S. F. Vanni; New York. Five dollars. Reviewed by K. M. Briggs.

ALTE NEWE ZEITUNG. A sixteenth-century collection of fables. Edited by ELI SOBEL. Folklore Studies x, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1958. Pp. xii, 64. Reviewed by E. Ettlinger.

BRAUCHTUMSGEBÄCKE UND WEIHNACHTSSPEISEN. Ein volkskundlicher Beitrag zur österreichischen Kulturgeographie. By E. BURGSTALLER. Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für den Volkskundeatlas in Österreich, vol. ii, Linz, 1957. Pp. 136, (18), 7; 5 plates, 22 maps. Reviewed by E. Ettlinger.

AN ANALYTICAL INDEX TO THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE, Vol. 1–67, 68, 69, 70. By TRISTRAM P. COFFIN. American Folklore Society, Philadelphia, 1958. Pp. xvi, 383. $6.50. Reviewed by Wilfrid Bonser.

DEUTSCHES HANDWERKERLEBEN UND DER AUFSTIEG DER STADT. By MAX RUMPF. W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1955. Pp. 244, 106 photographs. WÜRTTEMBERGISCHES JAHRBUCH FÜR VOLKSKUNDE, 1956. W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1956. Pp. 164; 12 photographs, 1 map and 2 drawings. Reviewed by E. Ettlinger.

DAS VOTIVBILD. By L. KRISS-RETTENBECK. Hermann Rinn, Munich, 1958. Pp. 185; Plates 173. Reviewed by E. Ettlinger.

THE SINGING MOUNTAINEERS. By RUTH STEPHANS. Thomas Nelson &; Sons, Edinburgh, 1958. 18s. net. Reviewed by C. A. Burland.

THE YOUNG TRAVELLER IN MEXICO. By BETTY ROSS. Phoenix House, London 1958. Pp. 136. 9s. 6d. net. Reviewed by C. A. Burland.

THE COLLECTING OF FOLK MUSIC AND OTHER ETHNOMUSICOLOGICAL MATERIAL. Edited by Maud Karpeles. Reviewed by A. H.

THE PREHISTORY OF AFRICA. By H. ALIMEN. Hutchinson, London, 1957. 63s. Reviewed by Robert A. Kennedy.     

数字时代的博物馆:快乐、体验和新知

在数字时代背景下,"快乐"成为博物馆体验的重要组成部分,同时也是现代博物馆吸引观众、提升自身竞争力的重要手段.数字媒体技术为博物馆提供了前所未有的工具,通过将快乐与博物馆展览相结合,可以更好地服务观众,为观众提供更加丰富的参观体验."游戏"作为一个重要展示方式,不仅对儿童具有强大吸引力,对成年人也同样重要,数字时代的博物馆应该充分利用游戏机制使展览变得更具吸引力.创造快乐也是实现博物馆教育功能的重要途径,数字时代博物馆需要将知识与趣味相结合,使观众在快乐的博物馆体验中获得新知.     

数字时代高校图书馆用户教育模式的构建

数字技术的发展改变了高校图书馆用户教育的环境和传统图书馆的用户教育模式,并孕育着适应新的数字时代的用户教育模式。这种用户教育模式应从用户教育对象与目标的扩展、用户教育的内容变革和用户教育的组织设计三个方面来构建。     

The Karaghiozis Performance in Nineteenth-Century Greece

Abstract

Out of the vacuum of the sparsely developed dramatic environment of nineteenth-century Greece grew a performance totally unrelated to the largely literary and western-European oriented theatre of Athens under the influence of the king and his court. It was a performance which, unlike the literary theatre, aroused the interest of the common man through its use of folk tales, anecdotes, songs, dialects, costumes and characters as the basis of its presentation. Originating in the Turkish folk form Karagöz, the Greek performance, called Karaghiozis, found its roots in an entertainment with which Greeks both on the mainland and in other parts of the Balkans and Middle East were already familiar.     

Representative Ideas of the Deathwish in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

The extensiveness of Alfonso X’s Libro del saber de astrología created such a challenge that only one of the nine subsequent, variant copies attempted to copy it in its entirety: Vatican Library, Ms. Vat. lat. 8174. None of them, including this one, however, contains all of the original text. It is the intricacy of design of the first treatise, the Libro de las figuras de las estrellas fijas que son en el ochavo cielo, however, that posed the greatest challenge for copyists. The Vatican copy and Ms. 1197 of the Biblioteca Nacional de España approximated the design of text of the constellation to the left with a wheel diagram of the various stars to the right as found in the original. The way that Ms. 9-28-8 5707 of the Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia negotiated this arrangement by using two conjugate folios, placing the star wheel diagram across the interior two pages and the text on the first and fourth page, which left a considerable amount of blank space that invited over the years several kinds of writings—tallies, signatures, memorias (a record of transactions), and billet doux (essentially, love messages sent via a go-between). The billet doux form the greatest literary interest given their date, their content, and the name of the male protagonist—Felisardo, which aligns them with Lope de Vega’s work called Novelas a Marcia Leonarda, and in particular the one titled La desdicha por la honra—published in 1624.     

Nineteenth-Century London in William Godwin's Diary

The Leverhulme-funded editing of William Godwin's diary aims to ‘to construct a picture of London's literary and extra-parliamentary political life’, following the diary's ‘remarkably detailed map of radical intellectual and political life in the turbulent period of the 1790s’ <http://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/godwin_diary/>. However, this map also extends far beyond the 1790s, with the diary's total span reaching from 1788 until Godwin's death in 1836. Critics and biographers have long assumed that Godwin's radical phase was over by 1800, and London to him was only ever a meeting point for free-floating, alienated intellectuals. By contrast, this paper presents new evidence showing his immersion in the material conditions and popular politics of nineteenth-century London. Following Godwin's movements in 1810 from his home and shop in Skinner Street, his perambulations around the city, and visits to dine with fellow radicals and publishers the article examines his immersion in the material conditions and popular politics of nineteenth-century London. It sees him campaigning against the abominable conditions in nearby Smithfield market; joining street protests to demand the release of Burdett from the Tower; and meeting Cobbett in Newgate. Godwin's circulations, recorded in his diary, bring to our attention the cross-fertilization between philosophic and popular radicalism and compel us to re-think the relationship between the conversations at private dinners and the protests in the streets in order to locate and better understand the nineteenth-century metropolitan critical public sphere.     

Portraits of the Poor in Early Nineteenth-Century Radical Journalism

This paper compares the social-exploration literature of radical, mostly Owenite and Chartist, and liberal journalism in the first half of the nineteenth century, though the focus is on the less known ‘portraits of the poor’ in radical papers. In the paper I argue that against the developing liberal practice of intricately mapping poverty and categorizing the poor, radical papers under-represented particular cases of poverty, using an obfuscating syntax to document the poor. In doing so, radicals differentiated themselves from their middle-class counterparts, primarily as a way to challenge the assumption that poverty was a function of individual error and to turn the public’s gaze onto the social causes of poverty. Highlighting the political dimensions of poverty and minimizing the language of ‘personal responsibility’, radicals demonstrated that the activist agenda concerned itself with the economic and social as much as with the political, even while offering political solutions to economic and social problems.     

Christmas in the Workhouse: Staging Philanthropy in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical

This article provides an overview of the representation of workhouse philanthropy in the nineteenth-century periodical. In the 1830s and 40s, the popular representation of the workhouse was of a cruel institution in which paupers were systematically beaten and starved. However, the ideological significance of the workhouse shifts in the depictions of privately funded philanthropy that proliferated in magazines and newspapers during the Christmas publishing season. In representations of the workhouse at Christmas, paupers are shown receiving gifts and enjoying entertainments against a festively decorated backdrop. Middle-class benevolence is at the heart of these Christmas performances: these treats are not funded by the poor rates, but by individuals, who are frequently depicted in attendance at the workhouse Christmas. The institution, now redolent with ideas of care, charity and goodwill, functions in these texts as a stage for the projection of a bourgeois philanthropic self; the reader, the audience of this ideological performance, is encouraged to self-identify with the middle-class values that overlay these workhouse scenes. Entwined with these depictions of private philanthropy are underlying ideas of discipline and control. Just as the middle-class guests enact an idealized identity, so too do the paupers enact the role of the indebted and grateful poor. This article examines how the nineteenth-century periodical constructs the workhouse as a performance space for the middle classes; it explores the various agendas of these constructions and analyses the ideological messages they convey.