A black and white sermon: John Jasper’s capitalization on white exploitation in late nineteenth-century Virginia

Groups within southern society seized on John Jasper’s sermon arguing that the sun moved around the earth in order to reinforce ideas of African American inferiority. Jasper, however, took advantage of these efforts at exploitation. By embodying the stereotype whites sought to promote, Jasper became very popular with white visitors, and tourists to Richmond frequently requested renditions of the sermon. Through preaching his sun sermon on 253 occasions, Jasper was not only able to secure the financial and social independence of his church, but also provided inspiration to African Americans through highlighting that southern white supremacy could be overcome.     

Man vs. Machine: Betty’s Hope and the Industrialisation of 19th-Century Caribbean Factories

Factories of the 19th century have often been viewed as a secondary aspect of Caribbean plantations. However, factories of this period played a vital role in the expansion of cross-Atlantic trade as well as the development of modern social systems. The introduction of steam to the plantation, not just in the factory, revolutionised productive methodologies, spaces and products, forging new modes of manufacture, distribution and worker narratives. This article will discuss the development of steam technologies at the Betty’s Hope, Antigua, the flagship plantation on the island.     

Liberal,Liminal and Lost: India’s First Diplomats and the Narrative of Foreign Policy

Indian historiography has largely overlooked the contribution of Indian Liberals in the pre-independence era. It is worse in Indian diplomatic history where studies on pre-independence are few and far between. Responding to this double excision, this article traces the emergence of a new Indian narrative of foreign policy around the issues of equality and justice in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Anchoring their argumentativeness in diplomatic finesse, Indian Liberals such as Satyendra Prasanno Sinha, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri and Tej Bahadur Sapru relentlessly campaigned for racial equality and predominance of the rights of people over the rights of states at the Imperial Conferences. In the articulation of these views, South Africa, a country where ideas about the status of Indians and Indian civilisation were most contested, emerged as the singular foreign policy ‘other’ around which India’s foreign policy narrative was constructed.     

A place in the sun: the British housing market’s (de)construction of Andalusia

Abstract

Andalusia has become one of the main destinations for British residential tourists, attracted by leisure, a mild climate and the search for a better lifestyle. Prompted by its interest in selling houses, the real estate industry has devised an image of the Andalusian landscape that is, to all intents and purposes, partial and biased. The purpose of this research is to assess the importance of the elements and features that characterise this particular vision of this Spanish region, paying particular attention to more rural inland areas. For this, an empirical study has been conducted based on content analysis of real estate websites targeting British buyers. This study has revealed that: (i) the misrepresented and romantic projection of the image of Andalusia still persists to a certain extent. Among the main elements and attributes that characterise the landscape are all those that emphasise the region’s sublime, picturesque and exotic nature; other main landscape qualities and unique areas, specifically, any that today enjoy natural or cultural legal protection due to their heritage value, are less important in this cultural construction; (ii) the various parts of Andalusia are treated unequally. Malaga province and the rest of the Baetic Mountains are much better represented than other areas (the Guadalquivir Valley and the Sierra Morena mountains). This imbalance sometimes results in a distorted construction of the territory. This way of conceiving Andalusia puts Malaga at the heart of the region, and the further from the Costa del Sol, the more peripheral the regions become; (iii) the complexity of the landscape as a cultural expression is reduced to a set of simplified features that can be easily digested by a social group focused not on experiencing, but on consuming the landscape.     

Reflections on the History and Historians of the black woman’s role in the community of slaves: enslaved women and intimate partner sexual violence

Taking as points of inspiration Peter Parish’s 1989 book, Slavery: History and Historians, and Angela Davis’s seminal 1971 article, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” this probes both historiographically and methodologically some of the challenges faced by historians writing about the lives of enslaved women through a case study of intimate partner violence among enslaved people in the antebellum South. Because rape and sexual assault have been defined in the past as non-consensual sexual acts supported by surviving legal evidence (generally testimony from court trials), it is hard for historians to research rape and sexual violence under slavery (especially marital rape) as there was no legal standing for the rape of enslaved women or the rape of any woman within marriage. This article suggests enslaved women recognized that black men could both be perpetrators of sexual violence and simultaneously be victims of the system of slavery. It also argues women stoically tolerated being forced into intimate relationships, sometimes even staying with “husbands” imposed upon them after emancipation.     

Temporal and Narrative (Dis)junctures: Guillermo Núñez’s Aesthetics of Memory and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Santiago,Chile)

Focusing primarily on Guillermo Núñez’s work, this essay juxtaposes two almost-identical exhibits of his ‘exculturas’ (sic: xculptures/ex-cultures) – one at the Chilean-French Cultural Institute in 1975, which resulted in his detention and exile, the other in 2010 for the official inauguration of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (MM) – to explore their relationships to memory production in Chile four decades after the military coup. In the first, Núñez offered a pointed critique of the repressive post-coup context through a series of caged and netted objects; the second reconstructed the first as a memory gesture, framed within the ultra-modern, state-sponsored MM, in its designated art space, at once included and physically separated from the historical narrative of the Museum. How do the politics, aesthetics and design of the MM work to complement, complicate, or contradict Núñez’s – and, perhaps, any – artistic proposal? What challenges might the aesthetic of memory in Núñez’s work pose to the Museum’s narrative frame? Examining Núñez’s ‘exculturas’ (and, briefly, Gonzalo Díaz’s reconstructed Lonquén) reveals several tensions – around politics of inclusion and exclusion, the state’s role in memorysites, and the relationships between human rights concerns and museological and artistic strategies – marking the social production of memory in Chile today.     

Matters of Sex and Gender in F. J. Gall’s Organology: A Primary Approach

The originator of phrenology, F. J. Gall (1758–1828), saw himself as a natural scientist and physiologist. His approach consisted of brain anatomy but also of palpating skulls and inferring mental faculties. Unlike some of the philosophical principles underlying Gall’s work, his conception of sex/gender has not yet been examined in detail. In this article, I will focus on Gall’s treatment of men and women, his idea of sex differences, and how far an assumed existence of dichotomous sexes influenced his work. In examining his primary writings, I will argue that Gall held some contradictory views concerning the origin and manifestation of sex/gender characteristics, which were caused by the collision of his naturalistic ideas and internalized gender stereotypes. I will conclude that Gall did not aim at deducing or legitimizing sex/gender relations scientifically, but that he tried to express metaphysical reasons for a given social order in terms of functional brain mechanisms.     

Information and Confusion: Russian Resident Diplomacy and Peter A. Tolstoi’s Arrival in the Ottoman Empire (1702–1703)

Abstract

This article explores the arrival of the first Russian resident ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in a period when Russian diplomacy underwent major transformations. It focuses on Peter A. Tolstoi’s network and the management of information gathered during the first year of his appointment in Adrianople (1702–03). The article revisits the notion of resident ambassador, not as a hallmark of ‘modern European diplomacy’ with an overemphasis on the diplomat as a state-representative and office-holder, on the states system, or on institutional reform, but to suggest that a resident embassy in the early modern period was more than a formal, self-contained, and sovereign institution located in a particular place. The transformation from ad-hoc to resident diplomacy in Russian–Ottoman relations did not originate from the adoption of European diplomatic norms alone: it created new or relied on the existing trans-imperial networks of the ambassador rather than on bilateral inter-state relations. The example of Russian–Ottoman relations demonstrates that while the new diplomacy introduced by Peter I was driven by Europeanization and reform, the transformations emerged from the adaptation to circumstances in different locations and depended on the development of contacts embedded in the geo-cultural and religious entanglements of the region.     

A Compaignye of Sondry Folk: Mereology,Medieval Poetics and Contemporary Evolutionary Narrative in Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale

Abstract

Thus far, certainly in English, most engineering history has been based on the lives of engineers or the chronologies of particular enterprises, with the two often woven together. Much of this work, as conventional biography or narrative history, has been well done, in many cases is a good read, and frequently is valuable as a basis for further study. But its preoccupation with who, when and where too often leaves unaddressed questions of how and why. Attempting to understand the intellectual and creative components of engineering's history, especially its early history for which written records are rare or nonexistent, is exceptionally difficult. In this short survey the possibilities of retrospective analysis are discussed, and some of the potential pitfalls are identified by considering the particular case of cathedral building. Over the last twenty or thirty years cathedral studies have generated more publications in the field of retrospective analysis, in this case structural analysis, than possibly any other. Whether or not very much has been learned about the history of the engineering of cathedrals, however, is a good question, and is part of what follows.     

The colour of the facades in Siena’s historical centre: I. Glazings (calcium oxalate films s.s.) and other finishes on the stone materials of the Cathedral’s main facade

This paper focuses on the long-debated topic of the so-called calcium oxalate films: their origin and meaning but also their age and original appearance. The restoration of the main facade of the Siena Cathedral provided a unique opportunity to this end, thanks to the possibility of an extensive and detailed sampling and (as rarely happens) a sufficiently accurate historical knowledge of the construction vicissitudes. This work, mainly based on a polarising microscopy study (coupled with X-ray diffraction and SEM-EDS analyses) of over a thousand thin and ultra-thin sections of 400 microsamples, demonstrates that the current relicts of films are the result of alteration and decay of ancient treatments. In most cases, these were linseed oil-based glazings (the use of this substance is confirmed by historical documents) and pigments. Their role was essentially aesthetic; their use dates the beginning of the fourteenth century and continued at least until the eighteenth century.

A Witness to the Early Reception of Bonaventure’s Collationes in Hexaëmeron: Nicholas of Ockham’s Leccio at Oxford (c. 1286) — Introduction and Text

Abstract

This essay presents a brief introduction to and an edition of Nicholas of Ockham’s Leccio at Oxford, which begins with the biblical verse, O altitudo diviciarum sapiencie et sciencie Dei (Romans 11. 33). This leccio may have been Nicholas’s inaugural sermon as a Master of Theology at Oxford and therefore dates to 1286. Whatever the precise genre of Nicholas’s leccio, the text is also important because much of it copies entire sections of St Bonaventure’s (d. 1274) Collationes in Hexaëmeron. Nicholas’s text is therefore a witness to Oxford University practices of the late thirteenth-century and to the late thirteenth-century reception of Bonaventure.     

Transatlantic unity on display: the “white legend” and the “pact of silence” in Madrid’s Museum of the Americas

This article examines the history and recent pro-immigrant installations of the postcolonial Museum of the Americas in Madrid. It critically relates the Hispanist “White Legend” regarding the benevolence of Spanish colonialism to both the “pact of silence” following Spain’s Civil War and the current Spanish orientation towards immigrants from Latin America. Despite significant recent reconceptualization, the museum continues to put forward a narrative in which Spain is represented as a benevolent and civilizing contributor to Latin America. The museum’s more recent inclusionist turn to welcoming and serving Latin American immigrant communities in Spain does not complicate the pro-colonialism stance but rather, through a strategically neutral curatorial style, further serves to insist on a positive framing of the past. The exhibit analysed in this article highlights the innocence of Latin American children in order to frame immigration as positive while simultaneously supporting the “White Legend”. Contemporary Spanish tendencies towards forgetting or silencing the past have a deeper history than is usually recognized, and in this case study, these tendencies work to occlude not just the violence of the colonial period but also the inequities of today’s immigration.     

‘It’s a different time. It’s a different era. It’s a different place’: the Legacy of Vietnam and Contemporary Memoirs of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Abstract

This article examines censorship of US journalists in World Wars I and II and the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Persian Gulf War, and from war to war, trends in types of censored information. This article also answers whether any censorship has avoided bloodshed or been legitimate, and concludes by examining how, in any future US wars, the government or military could most legitimately ensure safe reporting.     

Beyond Nussbaum’s Ethics of Reading: Camus,Arendt, and the Political Significance of Narrative Imagination

The article contributes to current theoretical debates about the political significance of narrative imagination by drawing on Camus’s and Arendt’s existential aesthetic judging sensibility. It seeks to displace the prevalent tendency to probe literature for its moral-philosophical insights, and instead delves into the experiential reality of our engagement with literary works. It starts from Martha Nussbaum’s recognition of the literary ability to account for the fragility of human affairs, yet finds her reduction of narrative imagination to the role of furthering moral lessons wanting politically. Against this background, the article reclaims Camus’s and Arendt’s dialogical-representative judging orientation and its insight into the narrative ability to respond to the intersubjective character of politics. As such, their aesthetic sensibility reveals the potential political significance of literary imagination in its capacity to open a public space where the contradictions of our situated existence can be confronted through politics between plural equals.