Amateurs and the Rise of Astrophysics 1840–1910

This essay examines the role of amateurs in founding the astronomical subdiscipline of astrophysics. During 1840–1870, they initiated many of the observing programs that came to comprise the new specialty. And during 1870–1910, they participated both in the ongoing research of the field and the campaign to provide it with an institutional base. These general trends are illustrated by examples from the lives of ten prominent amateur solar physicists.     

‘The Dining Room Should Be the Man's Paradise,as the Drawing Room Is the Woman's’: Gender and Middle‐Class Domestic Space in England, 1850–1910

In the middle‐class home in late nineteenth‐century England, drawing rooms, morning rooms and boudoirs became increasingly associated with women, while dining rooms, studies and smoking rooms were viewed as male spaces. Historians have linked this to the exclusion of women from social power and a male ‘flight from domesticity’. This article questions these interpretations and explores gendered space through advice manuals, inventories and sale catalogues, and autobiographies. While the notion that domestic space should be divided between men and women had considerable cultural purchase, the ways in which this should occur were subject to dispute and limited by the practical contingencies of everyday living. In homes where gendered material culture was present, it exerted a powerful influence on childhood experience and the formation of adult identities.     

Science, sovereignty and nation: Canada and the legacy of the International Geophysical Year, 1957–1958

This paper considers some of the Canadian scientific and political responses to the International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1957–1958. Histories of the IGY have hitherto often concentrated on scientific activity in Antarctica and advances in satellite technology, made manifest in the Soviet launch of Sputnik. Such histories hint at a contradiction at the heart of the IGY – attempts at international scientific cooperation were always concurrent with cold war national rivalries. These tensions were not limited to the superpowers and the IGY helped focus scientific competition between other national polities, including Canada. By examining the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Government of Canada's Polar Continental Shelf Project in April 1958, the paper investigates attempts to mobilize a pan-Canadian nationalism in response to perceived American and Soviet incursions upon territorial sovereignty during the IGY. The PCSP's ostensible purpose was to collect geophysical data for US satellite launch tests in the Canadian High Arctic. However, by placing the founding of the PCSP within the political context of the First UN Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1958, and the unprecedented electoral success of the Progressive Conservatives across Canada during the same year, the paper develops a more sensitive appreciation of the complicated historical geographies of the IGY.     

A Most Unmanly War: British Military Masculinity in Macedonia,Mesopotamia and Palestine, 1914–18

This article argues that the most severe crisis of masculinity among British and Dominion soldiers in the First World War did not take place on the Western Front. Instead, British and Dominion soldiers serving on the war's sideshows in Macedonia, Mesopotamia and Palestine believed most acutely that their manliness was in question. Unlike soldiers on the Western Front, they were not battling the main German Army, they were not fighting to liberate occupied France and Belgium, and their war was not to preserve the rights of small nations and the inviolability of international law. This article explores how military masculinity played out much differently on the war's peripheral fronts in two ways. First, it suggests that where a soldier fought mattered more to military masculinity than a soldier's method of enlistment or any other variable. British and Dominion soldiers were fully aware that the home front only considered France and Flanders as the real war, and they actively argued against this misconception to loved ones and in their memoirs. Second, this article demonstrates an additional crisis of masculinity on the war's peripheral fronts: the lack, or more often effacement, of non‐white colonial (Eastern Mediterranean and Arab) women. Not only was British and Dominion military masculinity under assault on the war's peripheral fronts, heteronormative sexual relations were also being transformed in a world where few, if any, racially acceptable women were available.     

Hebrew Literature and Jewish Nationalism in the Tsarist Empire 1881–1917

Abstract. After 1881, Hebrew literature in the tsarist empire became an integral part of the rise of Jewish nationalism, and it created literary norms which were transplanted to mandatory Palestine. This literature, in contrast to most pre-1881 Hebrew literature, is aesthetically on a very high level. Led by Mendele Mocher Sefarim in prose fiction and by Chaim Nachman Bialik in poetry, it asserted Jewish national feeling even when not overtly nationalistic. In doing so, it subverted tsarist authority and indirectly declared the Jews to be independent of the empire. Yet, in many of its main concerns this literature shows the influence of Russian literature, especially of the Reform Era, but also afterwards (Chekhov, in particular), and itmight even be regarded as an ethnic branch of Russian literature. Both literatures depicted the failings of their society with the aim of achieving social change. However, while Russian literature pointed to revolution, Hebrew literature after 1881 pointed to Palestine where most of the Hebrew writers of that period eventually emigrated.     

Competing Masculinities: Fraternities,Gender and Nationality in the German Confederation, 1815–30

Immediately after the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon (1815), university students, particularly the nationalist fraternity, the Burschenschaft, sought to connect the German nation with martial values. They practised gymnastics, duelled and commemorated veterans of the Napoleonic wars. The era after the Wars also illustrates greater mediation in the discourse of masculinity than has generally been acknowledged, however. University students never achieved consensus on what masculine identity or German identity entailed. By applying enlightened principles to notions of honour and the practice of the duel, Burschenschafter also articulated a new, more moral vision of the German man, one based more on rationality and self‐discipline than on martial values.     

Christianity,Gender, and the Working Class in Southern Dunedin, 1880–19401

This article is a study of the southern suburbs of Dunedin, which during the late nineteenth century became the most industrialized and working class urban area of New Zealand. Analyzing the social composition of fifteen southern Dunedin churches, I question the idea, widely held by New Zealand historians, that the working classes had largely turned their backs on organized religion. In keeping with recent scholarship in the social history of British and Irish religion, I show that unskilled workers were better represented in many southern Dunedin congregations that previous historians have acknowledged and that skilled workers numerically dominated most churches. When women are included in the analysis, working class predominance increases further. Signing the suffrage petition in remarkable proportions, working class Christian women turned the southern suburbs into a world‐leading first wave feminist community. Moreover, varieties of popular Christianity flourished beyond the ranks of active churchgoers. I conclude by suggesting that New Zealand historians need to rethink the old “lapsed masses” and “secular New Zealand” assumptions and to investigate the diverse varieties of Christianity shaping the culture, and their sometimes conflicting this‐worldly meanings.