John Ashton (1952–2008)

Il Kalevala, O La Poesia tradizionale dei Finni, studio storico - critico sulle origini belle grandi epopee nazionali. DEL DOMENICO COMPARETTI. Firenze, 1891.

DER KALEVALA, ODER DIE TRADITIONELLE POESIE DER FlNNEN, ETC. Von DOMENICO COMPARETTI. (The authorised German edition.) Halle, 1892. By John Abercromby.

Vestiges de Paganisme dans la Région situé entre les cours supérieurs de l'oka et du Don. Par N. Troitzky. Congrès international d' Archiologie préhistorique et d' Anthropologie. Moscou, Août 1892, t. i. By A. C. Haddon.     

The Magnus-Rademaker Scientific Film Collection: Ethical Issues on Animal Experimentation (1908–1940)

The Magnus-Rademaker scientific film collection (1908–1940) deals with the physiology of body posture by the equilibrium of reflex musculature contractions for which experimental studies were carried out with animals (e.g., labyrinthectomies, cerebellectomies, and brain stem sections) as well as observations done on patients. The films were made for demonstrations at congresses as well as educational objectives and film stills were published in their books. The purpose of the present study is to position these films and their makers within the contemporary discourse on ethical issues and animal rights in the Netherlands and the earlier international debates. Following an introduction on animal rights and antivivisection movements, we describe what Magnus and Rademaker thought about these issues. Their publications did not provide much information in this respect, probably reflecting their adherence to implicit ethical codes that did not need explicit mentioning in publications. Newspaper articles, however, revealed interesting information. Unnecessary suffering of an animal never found mercy in Magnus’ opinion. The use of cinematography was expanded to the reduction of animal experimentation in student education, at least in the case of Rademaker, who in the 1930s was involved in a governmental committee for the regulation of vivisection and cooperated with the antivivisection movement. This resulted not only in a propaganda film for the movement but also in films that demonstrate physiological experiments for students with the purpose to avert repetition and to improve the teaching of experiments. We were able to identify the pertinent films in the Magnus-Rademaker film collection. The production of vivisection films with this purpose appears to have been common, as is shown in news messages in European medical journals of the period.     

La Bataille,l'armee et la gloire (1745–1871)

This paper would like to contribute to the discussion on the formation of the idea of Europe and contextually shaping of the debate on the New World in early modern and modern history. Following an important Italian historiographic tradition, the paper discusses the eighteenth-century within a wider objective and subjective historical development.

The first part of the paper focuses on the Eurocentric realigning of the relations in the Atlantic world. It argues that this realignment remains basically a middle period phenomenon. The resistance by the Anglo and Hispano-American colonies to the “reforms” and the internationalisation of the crisis of American Empires actually caused a real caesura in the political history of the Atlantic.

The second part of the paper focuses on the impact of the Eurocentric reorganisation of European/American relations on collective consciousness, political ideologies and historical discourses on both sides of the Atlantic. It argues that this impact was much more lasting and profound.

The paper focuses finally on the anti-Eurocentrism matured in the Americas in the late eighteenth-century. It argues that this attitude declines to present the European cultural and ideological heritage, on the basis of an age-long American experience that historiography presents by now as multiethnic, multicultural and métisse. The paper suggests in particular that this American anti-Eurocentrism can be considered to some extent prototypical of a phenomenon destined to develop in nineteenth and twentieth century in the framework of the apogee, crisis and decline of Europe in the international world system and international world society.     

La exportación de la Ilustración Peruana. De Alejandro Malaspina a José Ignacio de Lecuanda (1794–1799)

Este artículo analiza la desconocida divulgación de la ilustración peruana en Madrid a partir del discurso que sobre la ‘idea del Perú’ impulsó la Sociedad de Amantes del País en el Mercurio Peruano a fines del siglo XVIII. Este proyecto utilitario de los mercuristas se hizo manifiesto durante tres momentos: primero, en la confección del informe político sobre el Perú que redactó el marino ilustrado Alejandro Malaspina en 1795; segundo, en la divulgación que impulso el ilustrado vasco José Ignacio de Lecuanda en las páginas del periódico titulado Viajero Universal en 1798; tercero, en el diseño que patrocinó el propio Lecuanda en el Cuadro de historia civil, natural y geográfica del Perú pintado por Luis Thiebaut (1799). El estudio discute las razones por las cuales Malaspina y Lecuanda creyeron que la exportación de este proyecto ilustrado iba a convertir al Perú en un reino utilitario para la Monarquía hispánica.     

Obituary. Wolfgang Scharfe (1942–2003)

At the turn of the twentieth century, a popular mania developed around the idea that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings. This obsession was originally based in the science of the time, but it outlasted astronomers' certainty regarding the red planet's conditions of habitability. Cartography was vital to the popular construction of Mars as an inhabited world and created a powerful landscape icon that differed significantly from the observations of astronomers. Acceptance of a Martian civilization began to wane only when cartography's status as an objective representational format was weakened by new photographic technology in the early 1900s. Although the processes and formats of cartography are rarely considered primary factors in the Mars mania, they were integral to the origin, development and expiration of the conceptualization of Mars as a world that was possibly inhabited.