“This Greater Issue of Light against Darkness”: Sereno Edwards Bishop,Missionary Religion,and the Hawaiian Islands, 1827–1909

The history of nineteenth‐century missions provide a fruitful field to explore the development of religious thought and practice in a secular setting. This article shows how the religious views of the clergyman and educator Sereno Edwards Bishop, born in Hawai‘i of American missionary parents, were shaped by his childhood among the mission community in Hawai‘i and by his American college education. These instilled in him a liberal approach to theology that was informed by a spiritually alert sense of Hawaiian geography and environment. Contrary to the notion that he cast his faith aside in addressing matters of wider social and political importance, Bishop emerges as someone who thought critically about mid‐nineteenth‐century Protestant Christianity, grounding his perspective on politics, society, and natural history in Hawai‘i according to his religious principles. Given Bishop’s specific intellectual and cultural heritage, it is difficult to subsume his perspective within broader narratives of American expansion; rather, both Pacific and mainland American elements shaped the thought of such mission‐descended figures.     

SCHOPENHAUER'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Contained mostly within one brief chapter of his The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer's philosophy of history has long been considered either hostile or irrelevant to nineteenth‐century philosophy of history. This article argues that, on the contrary, Schopenhauer maintained what would become a widely accepted criticism of the methodological identity of historiography and the natural sciences. His criticism of Hegel's teleological historiography was more philosophically rigorous than is commonly acknowledged. And his proposal of a “genuine” historiography along the model of art became a major influence on the historiography of Burckhardt, Emerson, and Nietzsche. This article accordingly aims to restore Schopenhauer to the conversation of nineteenth‐century philosophy of history.     

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.     

Women and the History of the Neurosciences

Since the closing decades of the nineteenth century, women have been contributing in a significant way to the neurosciences. This article looks at the contributions of some of the leading women pioneers in this field. It also deals with women who have written on the history of the neurosciences and the representation of women in the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences, the largest neuroscience history organization. Trends suggest that books and articles from and about women in the history of the neurosciences will increase markedly in the future.     

Women and the history of the neurosciences

Since the closing decades of the nineteenth century, women have been contributing in a significant way to the neurosciences. This article looks at the contributions of some of the leading women pioneers in this field. It also deals with women who have written on the history of the neurosciences and the representation of women in the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences, the largest neuroscience history organization. Trends suggest that books and articles from and about women in the history of the neurosciences will increase markedly in the future.     

The Rolt Memorial Lecture, 1978 Sir Humphry Davy: His Life and Work

Abstract

Sir Humphry Davy, a largely self-taught genius of humble birth, made major contributions to the development of chemistry, physics, geology and natural history in the early nineteenth century. Much of his research was directly beneficial to various industries principally agriculture, mining and metallurgy, electro-chemicals and leather processing. He is best remembered for his miners' safety lamp and the story of its development forms the core of this paper.     

Differentiation between Seizure and Hysteria in a Tenth-Century Persian Text: Hidāyat of al-Akhawayni (d. 983 AD)

Although hysteria is associated largely with the nineteenth century, we find the subject treated in a tenth-century Persian medical text, the Hidayat al-Muta`allemin Fi al-Tibb [A Guide to Medical Learners] by al-Akhawayni Bukhari (d. 983 AD), a prominent physician in the Persian history of medicine. In this article, we discuss al-Akhawayni’s views on seizure and hysteria and his differentiation between the two conditions, and we place it in a historical context.     

The neuroscience of Helmholtz and the theories of Johannes Müller. Part 1: Nerve cell structure,vitalism, and the nerve impulse

Hermann Helmholtz made monumental contributions to the neural sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century. Among his earliest achievements were experiments that challenged vitalism, microscopic studies on the structure of the nerve cell and its processes, and the first reasonable estimates of the speed of nerve transmission based on physiological experiments. In this, the first of a two-part article, we review Helmholtz's early contributions in biographical context and with reference to Johannes Müller's own thoughts. We reveal how Johannes Müller, considered by many to be the greatest physiologist of the first half of the nineteenth century, helped to launch and shape Helmholtz's career. We also show that Helmholtz was only willing to accept some of his mentor's theories, even though he had great admiration for Müller. The point will be made that Helmholtz owed a great debt to Müller, but even from his student days in Berlin he was an independent thinker with his own agenda, and never his strict disciple.     

This Sporting Cloth: Tweed,Gender and Fashion 1860–1900

Abstract

This article explores the manufacturing, design and consumption of tweed cloth in relation to issues of gender in the late nineteenth century. It focuses on tweed produced on mainland Scotland by factory methods and the wider influence of that industry on woollen manufacturers in other areas of Britain. Exploring the history of this textile reveals the shifting ambiguities linked to male and female social and sartorial identities and the gender coding of tweed in the late nineteenth century.     

Supreme Court Advocacy in the Early Nineteenth Century

The early nineteenth century was transformative of the Supreme Court's practices. Yet understanding those fundamental changes requires some appreciation of practice before the Court in the late eighteenth century, and the developments in the early nineteenth century produced changes in the Court's practices that are still felt today. In this first half-century or so of the Court's existence, more dramatic developments and changes occurred in oral argument practice than in any other period of the Court's history. ¹     

Looking to the Southeast Antilles: Iñigo Abbad y Lasierra's Geopolitical Thought in his Historia geográfica,civil y natural de la Isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico (1788)

Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra’s Historia geográfica, civil y natural, completed in 1782 and published in 1788, is widely seen as the founding colonial history of Puerto Rico’s national history. This essay examines this imperial and comparative account, which cannot be dissociated from Abbad y Lasierra’s first important writing, his Diario del viaje a América completed in 1781. I argue that his observations and reflections on the condition and prospects of Puerto Rico are deeply influenced by his travel in the Caribbean’s southeastern circuit and, in addition, his readings of Spain’s foreign polemical detractors, in particular Guillaume-Thomas Ábbe Raynal and his Histoire philosophique et politique. This essay also sheds light on Bourbon dynamics in Puerto Rico and Abbad y Lasierra’s appeal to Romantic liberal creoles seeking abolition of slavery and sovereignty from Spain in the nineteenth century. Thus, the basis of Puerto Rican patriotic identity is found in Abbad y Lasierra’s intellectual appropriations sustaining his ideas on rational development and progress for the island.     

The Neuroscience of Helmholtz and the Theories of Johannes Müller Part 1: Nerve Cell Structure,Vitalism, and the Nerve Impulse

Hermann Helmholtz made monumental contributions to the neural sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century. Among his earliest achievements were experiments that challenged vitalism, microscopic studies on the structure of the nerve cell and its processes, and the first reasonable estimates of the speed of nerve transmission based on physiological experiments. In this, the first of a two-part article, we review Helmholtz's early contributions in biographical context and with reference to Johannes Müller's own thoughts.We reveal how Johannes Müller, considered by many to be the greatest physiologist of the first half of the nineteenth century, helped to launch and shape Helmholtz's career. We also show that Helmholtz was only willing to accept some of his mentor's theories, even though he had great admiration for Müller. The point will be made that Helmholtz owed a great debt to Müller, but even from his student days in Berlin he was an independent thinker with his own agenda, and never his strict disciple.     

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.     

En tiempos del condestable Dávalos: Enrique de Aragón,poeta quejoso en Crónica. Año de 1420, de Jerónimo de la Escosura

Infants of Aragon are very important figures in the history and literature of the nineteenth century, but it is rare that one of them, Don Enrique, is the protagonist. This work analyzes the romantic story Cronica. Año de 1420, published by Jerónimo de la Escosura in 1839. In it, Enrique de Aragón is a cunning courtier and a poet in love, and he manages to change history because he changes the story with his verses.     

Pathologizing male sexuality: Lallemand, spermatorrhea, and the rise of circumcision

Although spermatorrhea as a disease entity and an episode in nineteenth-century medical history has received significant scholarly attention over the past decade, many aspects of its nature, origins, and consequences remain obscure. The aim of this article is to indicate its origins in and links with medical anxiety about masturbation and to discuss the therapies devised to treat the condition. Particular attention is given to the work of Claude-Francois Lallemand and his influence on English doctors, especially William Acton, and the implications of their identification of the foreskin as the major risk factor for childhood masturbation and later spermatorrhea. It is further argued that fear of spermatorrhea was an important factor in the acceptance of circumcision as a valid medical intervention in the late nineteenth century.     

Persian Monshi,Persian Jones: English Translations of Saʿdi’s Golestān from the Late Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Centuries

From the seventeenth century, Mosleh al-Din Sa?di Shirazi (d. 1291), a key figure in Persian classical literature, became the center of Europeans’ attention: his name appeared in travelogues and periodicals, and selections of his tales were published in miscellaneous Latin, German, French, and English works. To follow Sa?di’s impact on English literature, one needs to search for the beginning of the “Sa?di trend” and the reasons that led to the acceleration of the translation process of his works into the English language in the nineteenth century. This article examines the role of the British educational institutions in colonial India in the introduction of Sa?di and his Golestān to the English readership, and, in parallel, it uncovers the role of the Indo-Persian native scholars (monshis) who were involved in the preparation of translations. The article discusses how the perception of the British towards Sa?di’s literature developed in the first half of the nineteenth century and how their approach towards the translation of the “text” and its “style” evolved in the complete renderings of the Golestān.     

‘A Repository,a Switchboard,a Dynamo’: H.L. Beales,a Historian in a Mass Media Age

The historian H.L. Beales (1889–1988) managed to propagate a wider interpretation of nineteenth century social history through non-academic means. Whilst Beales failed to write much in the way of history, his parallel career as an adult education tutor, radio broadcaster and editor of Pelican books meant that he acted as an important propagator of the subject. This, combined with wide influence over a considerable proportion of the younger generation, means that he should be considered as a singularly important historian of the period, who realised and adapted to the potential of new mass media to reach new audiences.     

The 1864 Sully Expedition and the Death of Captain John Feilner

This article addresses an area of nineteenth century American history that is often ignored in history textbooks. While a great deal of emphasis is often placed on the Civil War era (1861–65), it is also important to realize that other notable events occurred during the same time on the northern plains of the United States. As a result of the 1862 Minnesota Uprising by the Santee Sioux, the United States military began an aggressive campaign to break the will of the Sioux Indian nation. General Alfred Sully’s first retaliatory campaign in 1863, which resulted in the disgraceful events at Whitestone Hill, and his follow‐up campaign of 1864, in which Captain John Feilner was killed, reflect the attitudes and hostilities that existed during the 1860s. This article addresses the situation on the northern plains as whites continued to move westward.