“Removes All Obstacles”: Abortifacients in Nineteenth-Century Toronto and Beyond

Exploring the biographies of small artifacts from archaeological contexts is an endeavour that can expose unrealized or forgotten historical and cultural meaning at local, regional, national, and international levels. The recovery of a small glass bottle embossed with the name “Sir J. Clarke’s Female Pills” from a site in Toronto has drawn together the production history and advertising during the nineteenth century of a patent medicine product classed as an abortifacient. Furthermore, it connects the history of women’s health and fertility rights to the social and economic motivations influencing control over family planning.     

Liverpool’s Cotton Importers c. 1700 to 1914

Liverpool’s first cotton importers dealt in a range of commodities and this pattern continued until the late eighteenth century. As the British cotton industry grew and new sources of raw cotton – particularly the United States – emerged, some merchants specialized increasingly in cotton in the early decades of the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, the largest importers of cotton dealt in little besides cotton. The growing prosperity of Liverpool’s cotton trade drew companies from elsewhere in the United Kingdom to Liverpool to participate in this trade. By the mid nineteenth century, several key cotton importing houses had originated in the United States; by the end of the nineteenth century the largest importers there. The manner of importing cotton changed. At first, importers had to send a ship out with a captain or supercargo with broad instructions about what to freight the ship with. As communications improved, importers were able to control their purchases of cotton more closely. In the nineteenth century, a significant amount of cotton was imported through Liverpool by merchants acting on a commission basis but this form of importing declined in the later decades of the century.     

Theology,Idolatry and Science: John Williams’ Missionary Ethnography and Natural History of the South Pacific

This article contributes to the recent scholarly efforts toward a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Protestant missionaries and the practice of natural history and ethnography in the early nineteenth century. Exploring John Williams’ work in the South Pacific, I argue that not only was Williams practicing science in the form of ethnography and natural history, but that his theology was, in fact, central to his scientific work. Through a careful exploration of Williams’ account of his missionary activities in the South Pacific, I contend that Williams’ conception of idolatry served as an explanatory tool that shaped the practice of his ethnography. In the minds of missionaries like Williams, whereas Christianity’s truth was universal, idolatry was the worship of a false god: false because it was just a deification of a particular desire rather than worship of the universal God. This conception of idolatry shaped Williams’ contention, central to his ethnography, that the islanders’ religion was a product of their particular cultural needs. In this way, I argue, Williams used a theological concept to perform explanatory scientific work, contributing to the idea that religion is a product of culture, a notion that became central to nineteenth century studies of religion.     

Parnassus of the Evangelical Empire: Orientalism and the English Universities, 1800–50

Challenging the fundamental assumption of Edward Said that orientalism was a product of the secular Enlightenment, this article explores the state of oriental learning at England's most prestigious sites of intellectual and discursive production in the first half of the nineteenth century. By tracing the definitively Christian approach to empire propounded by the leading university orientalists of the period, the essay excavates an important era of orientalism overlooked by modern scholarship. From the most senior positions in the universities there spread a distinctly anti-secular and ‘providentialist’ reading of empire. Unlike the secular orientalism of the eighteenth and later nineteenth century, this new ‘evangelical orientalism’ formed the major institutionalised means of understanding Britain's Asian empire during the decades in which it was chiefly acquired. In place of the collusion of extractive imperialism and secular knowledge forms delineated by Edward Said, the article therefore outlines a relationship between orientalism and empire that was more fraught and contested.     

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.     

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.     

Seen but Not Told: Re-mapping Great Zimbabwe Using Archival Data,Satellite Imagery and Geographical Information Systems

The world renowned site of Great Zimbabwe is one of the most globally significant archaeological sites in Africa. Ironically, this importance is not matched by the little amount of information that is known about such an iconic site. The heritage of this regrettable situation was birthed by the destructive activities of late nineteenth and early twentieth century antiquarians who vandalised tons of evidence without record. Throughout the twentieth century, however, professional archaeologists made interventions that rescued information from various parts of the site but most of which was never published. A moratorium imposed on archaeological excavations at the site in the early 1990s failed to stimulate an active engagement with material that was archived since the first professional excavations began. Motivated by the need to understand the site in new ways, research was initiated to revisit the site’s patchy and scattered archives and to supplement them with field surveys. This paper discusses the re-mapping of the site which, for the first time, comprehensively produced themed layers of spatial, chronological and material culture distribution. The main outcome is that most existing maps ignored a large number of terraces on the hill and omitted evidence of occupation in key areas. When combined with excavation profiles that expose the massive rebuilding of the site by original residents, it becomes clear that settlement ebbed and flowed during the more than six centuries of occupation at the site.     

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.     

L’enfance comme figure compassionnelle: étude transversale de l’iconographie de la famine aux dix-neuvième et vingtième siècles

Despite the growing interest in the use of child images in humanitarian contexts in the last few years, there has been no transverse study of the iconography of famines in contemporary times. On the contrary, this iconography has been analysed in a scattered way, in disciplinary boundaries that prevent a more global understanding of the birth and use of these images. By comparing the approaches of the history of humanitarianism and childhood, as well as of social photography and media analysis, the purpose of this article is to show that visuals of starving children eventually find their roots at the end of the nineteenth century, at a time when charitable organisations are using photography as a tool to mobilise civil society and governments as well as to internationalise the humanitarian response. This analysis of Western visual strategies and media mobilisations throughout the twentieth century helps to put into perspective the so-called rupture between a first and a second age of humanitarianism. It shows first how young generations have become a privileged form of representation since the nineteenth century, using an aesthetic universe that is morally compelling; then, later, how the depoliticisation of the victim’s figure engages a political message.     

Status,scale and secret ingredients: the retrospective invention of London porter

Porter, a dark style of beer that was the staple of London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is conventionally addressed as a discrete invention, suited to large‐scale production, whose appearance led rapidly to enclosure of the trade by a few industrial‐scale producers. This paper by contrast presents the capitalist industrialization of brewing as co‐extensive with, and reinforced by, the long‐term emergence of a consensus definition of porter; the invention story is a retrospective construct that telescopes a century or more of technical change. Balancing established economic accounts, I address the role of product identity as a rhetorical device. London’s greatest brewers were in part assisted in capturing smaller competitors’ trade by the enshrining of large‐scale production as a ‘secret ingredient’ in its own right, essential to the nature of the ‘true’ product.     

An investigation into the testamentary content of Stafford wills 1761–1860*

This research investigates the testamentary elements contained in the wills of Stafford residents during the period 1761–1860, a period of paradigm change which resulted in Stafford transforming from a small County Town with a population of almost four thousand in 1801, to an industrial centre of over twelve thousand by 1860. The article explores only a small portion of the testamentary content found in Stafford wills, but the results give a unique insight into aspects of life not always covered by other historical documents. Industrialisation resulted in cheaper goods being made available to more people, so the testamentary elements of Stafford wills were investigated to see if bequests of personal and household items increased. The nineteenth century also raised many social concerns, of which funerals were one. The first half of the nineteenth century was known for its extravagant and expensive funerals, so testator’s instructions were investigated to see what type of funeral arrangements were requested. The results highlight that changes cannot always be identified unless research covers a long enough timespan. Also, that despite campaigns to promote will making, in Stafford the number of testators as a percentage of the population declined in the nineteenth century. Industrialisation and the availability of cheaper goods also did not, as might have been expected result in an increase in testamentary bequests of specific ‘things’, but rather a decline. Using the preamble of a will for funeral arrangements also became less common in the nineteenth century.     

The ages of man. A study in medieval writing and thought

It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century after her death in 1797 due to the negative impact of her husband William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) on her posthumous reputation. By providing the first full-scale reception history of Wollstonecraft in continental Europe in the long nineteenth century—drawing on rare book research, translations of understudied primary sources, and Wollstonecraft scholarship from the nineteenth century to the present—this article applies a revised Rezeptionsgeschichte approach to tracing her intellectual influence on the woman question and organised feminism in Europe. Although the Memoirs and post-revolutionary politics everywhere dampened and even drove underground the reception of her persona and ideas in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft's reception in nineteenth-century continental Europe, like the United States, was more positive and sustained in comparison to the public backlash she faced as a ‘fallen woman’ in her homeland of Britain through the bulk of the Victorian era.     

Paris and Panoramic Vision: Lieux de Mémoire,Lieux Communs

From the totalizing perspectives of the panorama to metonymic fragments of a monumental Paris, what is celebrated is representational tradition and innovation. In an ongoing representation of Paris cityscapes, pictorialism of the nineteenth century offers an insight into (and an example of) what has come to be known as lieux de mémoire, while at the same time questioning the legacy through an interrogation of lieux communs. Through painting and photography in the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, this article addresses legacies in pictorialism, both in and of the nineteenth century, exploring how this pictorial legacy is interpreted and develops and how, in Hamon's terms, images of Paris increasingly propose ‘des référents “en raccourci”’. The partiality of the representation (in both senses of the term) is evidence both of the cultural prevalence of the legacy and of its potential for reinterpretation.     

Early Socialism in Canada: International and Regional Impulses

International and regional impulses have shaped Canadian socialism from the movement’s origins in the nineteenth century to the present. Many of Canada’s early socialists arrived as ready-made socialists from abroad. From the British Isles, continental Europe, and the United States, these idealists and dissidents imported radical political ideals, which they subsequently adapted to meet the emerging conditions of an industrializing, urbanizing Canada. Directed at a broad cross-section of society, the early Canadian socialist rainbow featured many colours: Chartists, Christian socialists, cooperators, and, by the nineteenth century’s end—communists, anarchists, and other adherents of European radical movements. This process of importation, adaptation, and change took different forms in the distinctive regional contexts of Canada’s multi-ethnic federal state. Building on an interdisciplinary literature, the authors illuminate the ways in which international and regional impulses shaped Canada’s socialist tradition, helping to explain persistent tensions and forces within contemporary Canadian politics.     

Myths of ancestry

This article examines the national significance of fifth‐century BC Greek sculpture and especially the so‐called Elgin Marbles. It examines the significance of these archaeological remains not for the Greek nation but for the British, and specifically the English, nation during the nineteenth century. The national significance of fifth‐century BC Greek art lies in its incorporation into nineteenth‐century debates concerning the identity of the English nation. At a time when physical appearance or race was accepted as an important and, indeed, determining component of the ‘self’ and a measure of collective belonging, Greek sculpture, which was primarily figural in its subject‐matter, came to be seen as an image of the English ‘self’. The belief in the Greek identity of the English caused a Greek revival in English life and art. In life, this revival took the form of care for the body and the imitation of the athletic practices of Greek youth through the practice of sport in English school and university education. It was thus that nineteenth‐century English youth turned itself into a work of art.     

Italian history and gli italiani nel mondo,Part II

Abstract

Italian historians have not yet seriously confronted the emigration of 27 million Italians as an interpretative theme. Part II of this two‐part article studies Italian migrants’ experiences in France, South America, Switzerland and Germany, comparing ‘Latin’ and ‘Germanic’ receiving areas to the English‐speaking world discussed in Part I. A focus on these other sections of the Italian diaspora challenges some fundamental interpretations of historians of Italy about emigration: Italian migrations to these areas were neither limited to the late nineteenth century, sparked by the economic crises of those yean, nor a product of the ‘problem of the Mezzogiomo’. Italian historians have special opportunities to study return migration to Italy, and to interpret Italy's own evolution into a multicultural receiving country, by comparing it to the models of multi‐ethnic nations where Italian migrants once settled around the world.     

A Voice in the Nation: Women Journalists in the Early Nineteenth‐Century South

Recent work on southern women and intellectual life in the nineteenth‐century South has focused on women novelists. Relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to literary periodicals as important vehicles through which women earned financial reward and often regional or national reputations as authors and editors. Perhaps most significantly, southern women viewed periodicals as opportunities to speak out boldly on politics and current events, much more so than in the novel. The wide availability after 1820 of magazines and newspapers, made possible by their low cost and portability, provided the perfect forum for women who wished to push against traditional gender boundaries. In examining southern women’s contributions to early nineteenth‐century periodical culture, one sees a vital part of the foundation being laid for later movements for women’s suffrage.     

‘Western Perversions’ at the Threshold of Felicity: The European Prostitutes of Galata‐Pera (1870–1915)

Istanbul in the late nineteenth century grew to be a hub of the so‐called “white slave trade”, the trafficking of women predominantly from the Eastern Habsburg provinces to brothels from South America to East Asia. As a strong movement to suppress this trafficking grew in Europe, the Habsburg authorities’ incapability to suppress the trade endangered Austria‐Hungary’s standing in the Eastern Question, that is, its attempt to play a significant role in the Ottoman territories. The article investigates how contemporary discourses on gender, imperialism and nationalism combined to turn the issue of Austrian prostitutes in Istanbul into an issue that was strongly contested especially between the Ottoman authorities and the Habsburg diplomats at the beginning of the twentieth century.     

How the Pokagon Band Avoided Removal: Archaeological Evidence from the Faunal Assemblage of the Pokagon Village Site (20BE13)

Abstract

The Removal period is the time between the Treaty of Greenville in A.D. 1795 and the final expulsion of most Potawatomi from Michigan and Indiana by 1840. It was a time of rapid social change, when Native Americans developed many different adaptive strategies that are revealed by great cultural diversity in time and space. Archaeological investigations of the Pokagon Village site (20BE13) have provided new insights into the strategies that the wkama Leopold Pokagon and his associates used to avoid the removal of their band. The faunal assemblage from two middens at the site is compared with assemblages from other early nineteenth century Native American sites in the region, showing that the development of economic self-sufficiency through the adoption of European domesticated animals was an important part of the Pokagon Band’s anti-removal strategy.