bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Officers: Recruitment And Promotion
Authors: Davies J D
Published: November 2023

Given the complex patchwork of ranks and posts held by officers of the Restoration navy, and the variety of authorities by which they held those offices, it was inevitable that the system for acquiring them and advancing through them would be an intricate one, with many loopholes and anomalies. There was no naval ‘career pattern’ per se. As far as the commissioned officers were concerned, there were two common routes by which to attain !hat status. The older system involved entry into the service at an early age, often 9 or 10, as a captain’s or other officer’s servant, rising through various petty and warrant posts. This system was regulated in 1662-3, transforming such servants into apprentices indentured for seven years, rather than merely being covenanted for each voyage.
Thseeamen
Authors: Davies J D
Published: November 2023

In many respects, the manning of the navy was one of the most difficult administrative tasks which a seventeenth-century government could undertake: as Sir William Coventry once noted, ‘the greatest difficulty & vexation in a warrc is the manning of ships’. In wartime, up to 25,000 men had to be brought into naval service within a mat ter of a few weeks, got to the fleet, and retained for the duration of the campaign, all without disrupting the trade of the nation to an unacceptable degree.
Religion
Authors: Davies J D
Published: November 2023

Augustan polemicists, seeking the origins of what they perceived as the moral shortcomings of the navy of their own day, often contrasted the state of religious observance in the interregnum and Restoration navies, believing that the infectious libertinism of the court had transformed the latter into something ‘more like the suburbs of Hell than a Christian navy’. Whether the interregnum navy was really the bulwark of godliness which later pamphleteers claimed it to be is debatable; even so, it seems likely that the Restoration naval seaman was little more or less immoral, drunken, blasphemous, and ignorant in religious matters than his predecessors or successors.
The Restoration
Authors: Davies J D
Published: November 2023

During the 1650s, the navy seemed to have become one of the bastions of the republican state. Many of its officers and men held advanced religious or political views, and were therefore well qualified to carry out the primary task of the unprecedentedly powerful fleet, namely the defence of the regime against the Stuarts and their potential foreign backers. Yet by May 1660, the same fleet was prepared to bring the Stuarts back to England with every outward show of compliance, and even enthusiasm, ‘with pendants loose, guns roaring, caps flying, and the loud Vive 1c Roy’s echoed from one ship’s company to another…’.
The Second Dutch War And Its Aftermath
Authors: Davies J D
Published: November 2023

After his resignation as secretary to the duke of York, Sir William Coventry summarized the causes of the war of 1664-7 with his usual perception: ‘the truth is the Dutch warre arose by strange accidental! things … from severall parts & parties without any intent to helpc each other.’
The Tiiird Dutch War
Authors: Davies J D
Published: November 2023

The war of 1664-7 had been supported, at least at its outset, by a broad consensus of opinion, which embraced the belligerent attitudes of the most influential sea-officers. The disasters of that war deflated the optimism even of some of the anti-Dutch ‘hawks’, however, and less unanimity was apparent at the outbreak of the third war in 1672. Deep divisions in public opinion, and widespread opposition to the French alliance created by the treaty of Dover of 1670, were evident, and these sentiments were reflected in the navy.
Confrontation and defeat
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

IN the summer of 1789 Heinrich Steffens was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy living in Copenhagen. He heard that the Bastille had fallen from his father, an army surgeon down on his luck, who tearfully told him, ‘You are to be envied-what beautiful, happy times lie ahead.’ And so, Heinrich later recalled, ‘I was pulled from the quiet solitude of childhood.’ Long after he had become disillusioned with the revolution, Steffens remembered his initial enthusiasm as ‘something pure, even sacred’. Johanna Schopen- hauer, the young wife of a wealthy businessman, learned about the Bastille when her husband rushed home to their suburban villa near Danzig with the news. Like Steffens, Schopenhauer was drawn into the world of politics by the events of 1789. From then on, she wrote in her memoirs, a new life, filled with unprecedented hopes for total change throughout the world, surged inside me Perhaps only a few of my contemporaries will immediately recall this event, but after a moment they too will bring to mind the burning enthusiasm and that sublime, reckless sense of Freedom which inflamed the sensibility of the noblest youth.
Growth and Stagnation in German Society
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

Friedrich Engels (1820-95) was born and reared in Barmen, a fast-growing industrial city on the Wupper River, a few miles east of Diisseldorf. The Engels family had lived in the region since the sixteenth century, first as farmers, then as successful textile manufacturers. Like many of their neighbours, they were pious Calvinists, who combined commercial acuity with intense religiosity. But the Engels were also part of an economic network that extended far beyond the Wuppertal; their search for raw materials, markets, and capital led them to the Low Countries, Britain, and overseas. In 1837 Engels’s father opened a spinning mill in Manchester, the epicentre of the new industrial order. Here young Friedrich, after several false starts on a career closer to home, took a position in 1842. His observations of Manchester and its labour force were the basis for an influential book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, first published in 1845, and for his own life-long commitment to improving the conditions of working people.
The Cultural Establishment and its Critics
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

Franz Kugler, a merchant’s son from Stettin, established his scholarly reputation with influential works on Greek sculpture, European painting, and Prussian history. In 1835, when he was just twenty-seven, he became a professor at the Academy of Art in Berlin; eight years later he took charge of artistic affairs in the Prussian Ministry of Culture. In 1847 Kugler wrote an essay on art as an administrative concern in which he called for a series of state-initiated cultural programmes, including the creation of art schools, passage of copyright laws, establishment of awards for creative achievement, construction of museums and monuments, and the renovation or preservation of important historical buildings. ‘Just as science is designed to make people spiritually free,’ Kugler argued, ‘art gives them the mark of spiritual nobility. Therefore since one of the government’s duties is to further and direct the education of the Volk, this duty must include art as well as science.’ But, while Kugler saw the need for state initiative in the promotion of art, he also recognized that another, no less powerful force was at work; in addition to being an object of ‘administrative concern’, art was also an object of what he called ‘mercantile speculation’. Kugler found nothing wrong with this: ‘a fresh, mobile commerce’ belonged to a well-developed national existence and had its place in the realm of artistic production. But Kugler, like many German liberals, feared that commerce might lead to chaos and corruption, so he advocated a variety of governmental measures to preserve art’s purity and honour from ‘the remorseless drive of speculation’.The state and the market, the two fundamental forces at work in nineteenth-century social development, provided the institutional matrix for nineteenth-century culture.
Society in the Age of the Bürgertum
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

Germans do not have a theory of society, Lorenz von Stein wrote in 1842, because in Germany ‘the life of society and the struggle of its elements have not yet begun to develop independently’. Shortly thereafter Karl Marx made the same point when he explained German ‘ideology’ in terms of his society’s fundamental backwardness. But even as these theorists noted German underdevelopment, the social order was in the process of transformation. By the 1850s the concept of society-and the fact of social change-were part of the German scene. In 1851, for example, Robert von Mohl insisted that the autonomy of social forces made it necessary to study them outside the political realm. That same year Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl described ‘the emancipation of the idea of society from the despotism of the idea of the state’ as ‘the most genuine property of the present age, the source of a thousand conflicts and discontents, but also the hope of our political future’. This viewpoint was not universally accepted: political theorists like Heinrich von Treitschke regarded any effort to separate state and society as intellectually flawed and politically dangerous. Nevertheless, to radicals like Marx, liberals like Mohl, and conservatives like Riehl, the centrality of social forces was an inescapable fact oflife.
In Memoriam: Dr John Fletcher (1934-1996)
Authors: Denley Peter
Published: November 2023

Unexpectedly on Good Friday, 5 April 1996, Dr John Fletcher died of a heart attack in the sixty-first year of his life. As colleagues and friends our sense of loss is only matched by our sense of gratitude for the many good things we owe him. John was a very active member of the Editorial Board of History of Universities, of the International Commission for the History of Universities, and of course of the international community of university historians. We shall remember him as an engaging colleague who possessed great dedication to his research and seemingly boundless energy, and who was forthright in expressing his ideas. He often pushed the proffered microphone aside in meetings: his natural voice carried the message unaided by technology. The continuing bibliography on all aspects of the history of universities was his brainchild and he invested an inordinate amount of time in the project. The idea was launched in the context of the International Commission. Members were annually asked to be on the look-out for publications in their own countries and to send appropriate notifications of these to John Fletcher. Between 1974 and 1981 he edited these lists of publications on the history of European universities in separate booklets. In 1988 he resumed this work: within the context of History of Universities. ‘ After a hiatus which reflects the great loss which his death represents, the Commission and the journal are establishing a mechanism for the continuance of the bibliography in both printed and electronic form.
Rewriting History? the Parisian Secular Masters ‘ Apologia of 1254
Authors: Traver A G
Published: November 2023

In February 1254, the University of Paris promulgated a tract addressed to all the prelates of Christendom but more specifically aimed at influential university graduates who had been promoted to higher ecclesiastical dignities. This document summarizes, through the eyes of the secular masters of theology, the University ‘s relationship with the mendicant orders from their incorporation into the University of Paris until the early 1250s. Although often taken at face value by historians, it contains assertions which contradict prima facie certain known facts. Some contemporaries denounced the perceived discrepancies: the Master General of the Dominicans, Humbert of Romans, referred to it as a ‘letter of rare untruth and infamy ‘ . His confrere, Thomas of Cantimpre, simply dismissed it as plenas mendaciis-a pack of lies. Modern historians have likewise expressed their reservations about the letter ‘s veracity. One of the topics disputed by them, on the basis of this apologia, concerns both the exact number of magisterial chairs present within the theological faculty in 1254 and the percentage of these chairs held by the regular clergy. The 1254 letter reveals not only a subjective and selective version of recent history by the seculars, but also a dramatic shift in university strategy vis a vis the mendicant orders. When faced both with the rapid encroachments of the friars upon time honored academic procedures and the seemingly pro-mendicant policies of Pope Innocent IV (1243-54), the University set aside its traditional papal alliance and began to court the support of the secular clergy outside of the university milieu.
University Officers and the Universities ‘ Institutional Crisis: Caen (1450-1549)*
Authors: Roy Lyse
Published: November 2023

University officers have held little interest for historians of the university. Since they were not scholars, these officers were doubtless perceived as incidental to the corporate organisation and as lacking in influence upon the institution ‘s structure. My own research into the University of Caen, however, has revealed a different picture. The presence within the university of a privileged group of non-academics caused major and recurring conflicts with urban authorities throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These clashes provided the parlementaires with the opportunity to meddle in the affairs of the institution and to subjugate it to their author ity.2 The study of this constituent segment of the university corporation allows us to understand better the studium/regnum relations during this period of institutional crisis. Since Charles VII ‘s reign, the State no longer tolerated the presence of a large autonomous body within its realm. Public authorities interfered more and more in universities ‘ internal affairs. Ultimately, universities lost some of their autonomy, their privileges were violated, and they were subjected to the examination of local parlements, which forced reforms upon them. Academics saw their ecclesiastical benefices threatened by local ecclesiastical powers and their fiscal and judicial privileges were infringed upon by local civil powers. However, in this conflictual situation, the officers of the university also played a crucial role that has to be examined. This article examines the nature and extent of the conflicts arising between the city of Caen and the University from 1450 to 1549, and highlights the role of university officers in their institution ‘s loss of autonomy. The research was made possible thanks to the availability of the many rich documentary sources of the University of Caen, most notably its register and minutes of the general assemblies.
Estate Management, Maps and Map-making in Oxford and Cambridge 1580-1640*
Authors: Bendall Sarah
Published: November 2023

What part did the universities and colleges of Oxford and Cambridge play in the early years of making manuscript estate maps in England? These colleges formed a group of educated landowners, who participated in the lively sixteenth-century land market and added former monastic lands to their holdings. They held estates across England and Wales and land was a vital source of income: the extent of a college ‘s landholdings was an indication of its wealth or poverty. Besides being major landowners, the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge might be expected to have contributed to carto graphic developments as they were the places in the country that provided the highest level of education, where there was considerable interest in mathematics, geography and maps. It is thus instructive to examine the extent to which the colleges patronized land surveyors and commissioned maps, the uses to which plans were put, and instances when maps were not drawn. Comparison of the two universities enables each to be seen in a wider context. Many men in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Cambridge owned maps. One was Laurence Hitchcock BA, pensioner of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, who died in 1573 and left ‘a mappe of the whole world ‘ and four other maps together with five legal works and those of Cicero and Sallust. ‘ Hitchcock was one of those book owners whose probate inventories were presented in the Vice-Chancellor ‘s court between 1535 and 1601, over one-quarter of whom owned maps. About three-quarters of these people owned one or two maps; under one-quarter owned more than four. Among the map-owners were booksellers, clergymen and junior members, but the majority (77 per cent) were fellows or masters of colleges, or incumbents of Regius chairs. Some owned maps to help in particular studies; others used their maps as a form of decoration .
Dichotomy and Status: Leeds University Librarianship to 1934
Authors: Morrish P S
Published: November 2023

An academic library without an able librarian can readily sink into confusion, and a disorderly library helps nobody. It is particularly opportune to examine the librarianship of one of those English universities whose origin lay in the 1870s because accounts of these institutions, mostly published in official celebration of a centenary, normally refer proudly to their library buildings and book-stocks but tend to pay less attention to their librarianships. Of course, no claim can be made of any one university that it typifies all, yet despite some arbitrariness here in the choice of Leeds for examination, development of its librarianship nevertheless illuminates general points. The formative years of the librarianship at the University of Leeds extend up to 1934 when Senate admitted the librarian to its membership. Not only did that event mark an important constitutional change in relations between library and governing body, but also recognised the importance of a librarianship. The previous sixty years reveal tensions and arguments over the appropriate management of a university library, and over the role and status of its librarian. Primary sources for a study of this period are numerous though occasionally laconic, and include official papers and minutes, now preserved by the University of Leeds either in its Archives or its Brotherton Library. Various letters and diaries shed additional light, even waspish comment, as does a published essay on university librarianship by one of the protagonists. ‘
The Orb as the Symbol of the State in the Pictorial Cycle by Rubens Depicting the Life of Maria de’ Medici
Authors: Winner Matthias
Published: November 2023

On 26 February 1622, Peter Paul Rubens entered into a contract with Maria de’ Medici, the mother of King Louis XIII of France. According to the terms of the agreement, the painter was to execute twenty-four canvases illustrating the ‘story of the life and heroic deeds’ of the queen mother for a gallery in her new Palais de Luxem bourg.’ In addition, pictures depicting the battles and triumphs of her murdered husband King Henry IV were to be painted for the corresponding gallery in the west wing of the palace. The contract refers to subjects which were agreed with Rubens during his four-week stay in Paris and which were recorded in a specific order on a list which is unfortunately lost. At that time the themes of nineteen pictures were specified for the queen mother’s gallery; a further five were to be sent to Rubens at a later date. In addition, all finished works were to be submitted to Maria de’ Medici for inspection, and she reserved the right to reject any painting she deemed unsatisfactory.
Visual Images of Papal Power: The Legitimation of Papal Power in the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
Authors: Danbolt Gunnar
Published: November 2023

The primary material for this chapter is the decoration of two rooms in Rome, one in the Capella di San Silvestro in the church of SS Quattro Coronati dated 1246, and the other in the Stanza dell’ Incendio in the Vatican, painted in the period 1514-17. We will not consider these two fresco cycles as aesthetic objects (even though they certainly are), but as historical documents from the past. As historical documents they may be used in several ways, depending on which questions one is seeking to answer.
Visual Ideas of Papal Authority: The Case of Bologna
Authors: Preimesberger Rudolf
Published: November 2023

The restoration of papal power based on territorial dominions was concluded in the period between the Councils of Basle and Trent.’ A number of factors contributed to this: first, the growing consolidation of the patrimony of St Peter which, since Nicholas V, tended towards a centralized state. A second factor was the very nature of papal rule as a political system sui generis, characterized by its unique voting system, and the continual integration of new families into central positions of power, resulting in the well-known phenomenon of nepotism. As a third reason the system of legates and vice-legates ad tempus for the important cities of the Papal State and the general tendency for papal administration to be dominated by clerics who formed a class of professional high functionaries should be mentioned. Finally there was the tacit renunciation of municipal rights by almost every single civitas within papal territory in the sixteenth century. Papal success in reducing urban autonomy is especially evident in the period from the capture of Bologna and the Romagna by Julius II to the seizure of Ferrara in 1598 by Clement VIII.
Beneath the Ceilings of Versailles: Towards an Archaeology and Anthropology of the Use of the King’s ‘Signs’ during the Absolute Monarchy
Authors: Sabatier G érard
Published: November 2023

The great political decoration, which flourished from the fifteenth century onwards on both the walls and ceilings of the apartments, galleries, and other ceremonial rooms in the palaces and dwellings of the princes, the merchant oligarchies, and those close to power, constituted the highest form of figurative state discourse. Even more than panel paintings, statues or equestrian groups, medals or engravings (which necessarily expressed a limited and specific message even though the extensive multiplication of referential ‘signs’ was a common amplifying method), sculpted or painted iconographical programmes, because they constituted a series, allowed for the articulation of an entire discourse in all its completeness and complexity. Because of the sumptuousness their size gave them, the luxury of the materials used, and the prestige of the place of exposition, these programmes were literally the highest expression of majesty.
The Renaissance
Authors: Grafton A T
Published: November 2023

Thomas Smith jr. and Sir Humphrey Gilbert debated for Marcellus, Thomas Smith senior and Dr Walter Haddon for Fabius Maximus, before an audience at Hill Hall consisting at the time of me, John Wood, and several other gentlemen. At length the son and Sir Humphrey yielded to the distinguished Secretary; perhaps Marcellus yielded to Fabius. Both of them worthy men, and judicious. Marcellus the more powerful; Fabius the more cunning. The former was not weak, nor the latter imprudent; each as necessary as the other in his place. There are times when I would rather be Marcellus, times when I would rather be Fabius.
Virgil
Authors: Griffin Jasper
Published: November 2023

Of all Latin poets Virgil is unquestionably the most influential. In his lifetime he was recognized as the poet for whom educated Romans had been waiting (one thinks of the waiting, in the 1920s and 30s, for ‘the great American novel’): the writer who would raise Latin literature to an equality with Greek. He began by putting himself through a scrupulous poetic training, beginning with poems on a modest scale, based upon the work of a fairly recent Greek poet, and avoiding the attempt at the highest flights of style and subject-matter. That book of ten pastoral poems, the Eclogues, at once established Virgil as the poet of his generation, regarded by Horace as a friend and also as a respected model, and brought by his connection with Macccnas into close links with Octavian, the heir of Julius Caesar, soon to be the unrivalled ruler of the Roman world under the name of Augustus. Henceforth a note of Augustan propaganda was never absent from his work.
Pastoral
Authors: Jenkyns Richard
Published: November 2023

Pastoral, said William Empson, is a process of’putting the complex into the simple’–perhaps the most famous of modern attempts to explain this curious genre in terms of its aesthetic or social function. This chapter is mainly concerned with a more humdrum task: to examine what actually happened, and to consider why pastoral exists at all, how it came into being, and how it has changed. The more we know about its odd and accidental history, the better we shall understand why it has been so various and elusive.
Ovid, Horace, and Others
Authors: Martindale Charles
Published: November 2023

Gilbert Highet in The Classical Tradition argued that modern classical scholars, with their overspecialization and disregard for popularizing, had, to a considerable degree, been responsible for the decline in their subject. Whatever the truth of that, no one could ever have said the same of their Renaissance forerunners. Erasmus, greatest of the humanists and the foremost Biblical scholar of his age, was the educator of Europe and particularly of northern Europe; in golden words from Aubrey’s brief life, ‘he was the Prodromos [‘forerunner’] of our knowledge, and the man that made the rough and untrodden ways smooth and passable’. In England, under his influence, a fairly uniform educational system was put in place in the sixteenth century, based on the study of classical Latin, with the emphasis on literature, including poetry. It is fashionable in some circles to criticize this humanist education, and even to compare it unfavourably with the scholastic education it displaced.
“The Child is father of the Man”
Authors: Wright Jonathan
Published: November 2023

Stresemann opened an autobiographical sketch, which he wrote shortly before becoming chancellor in August 1923, by using Wordsworth’s words as an introduction to his early life. It was a typical literary touch, and he went on to explain that in his last year at school he had intended to study literature and history rather than, as later became his degree subjects, political economy and economics. Throughout his life he maintained his interest in literature and history, and sometimes regretted that he had not followed his first inclinations. The problem had been to know how he could combine them with a career. As he explained, in an essay about himself written when he was 18 as part of the school-leaving examination (Abitur), he would have liked to become a teacher, but because of the kind of school he had attended he would have been eligible to teach only modern languages or natural sciences.
“For the greater, freer Germany of the future”
Authors: Wright Jonathan
Published: November 2023

The two central themes of Stresemann’s political career before 1914, nationalism and liberalism, were both given new impetus by the war. The combination was expressed in the title he gave to a volume of his speeches in 1917, “Power and Freedom”. Like most Germans, Stresemann was convinced that Germany was not responsible for the war. He blamed it on the enmity of Britain for any power which was capable of challenging British mastery of the seas and her unique empire. Britain, he claimed, had forged the coalition of Continental powers which had fallen on Germany “like the thief in the night”, just as a hundred years before it had organized a Continental coalition against Napoleon. It followed for Stresemann that German war aims must include guarantees against the renewal of such a coalition in the future. That meant inevitably a “greater Germany” which could dominate the Continent, preventing a renewal of the Franco-Russian alliance, and also occupying the Channel ports as a deterrent against British attack.
Peaceful Revision in the Balance, 1927-1928
Authors: Wright Jonathan
Published: November 2023

“So there arises a double task for international politics and especially for German policy: the securing of a free Germany with equal rights and the inclusion of such a Germany together with all other states in a stable international structure. The last years of Stresemann’s life were dominated by disappointment and frustration. Peaceful revision, which had been so successful in the previous three years, came to a standstill in 1927-28. Hopes of a general settlement with France faded as Briand became increasingly evasive. In any case, a solution depended on the United States since the issues of Rhineland evacuation, a final reparations settlement, and war debts became linked, and no progress could be expected until after the American presidential elections at the end of 1928.
Conclusion
Authors: Wright Jonathan
Published: November 2023

“Only he who changes remains a kindred spirit.” Stresemann’s death came as a shock although he had been seriously ill for over a year and close to death for at least two months. The sense of shock was partly because he had been active until the end. It was also because he was widely seen as irreplaceable. Kessler noted in his diary, “It is an irreparable loss whose consequences cannot be foreseen.”2 Stresemann was given a state funeral, which has been described as “the last great ceremony of the Weimar Republic”.
Eighteenth-century Culture
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER, a teacher’s son in the Prussian town of Mohringen, swiftly exhausted the meagre intellectual resources available to him at home and in the local school. By the time he was ten or eleven he had begun to wander the streets looking for new books; when he saw one through a window, he would ask to borrow it at once. Towards the end of his life, when he was a venerable figure on the cultural scene, Herder told an audience of schoolboys how joyfully he recalled his earliest encounters with authors old and new: ‘Scarcely anything in later years matched this pleasure, this sweet astonishment.’ Since we live in a culture awash with printed matter, we may find it difficult to share that sense of awe and wonder that books produced in intellectuals of Herder’s generation. For them the written word was sacred. While Herder may have praised folk culture in his theories, the culture to which he belonged was the culture of print. For every hour he spent watching peasants dance and recording their songs, he spent thousands pouring over the latest publications, writing responses to what he liked or disliked, discussing what he had just read or written.
Culture in the Revolutionary Era
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

ON New Year’s Day 1792, as the impact of the political revolution was just beginning to be felt east of the Rhine, Franz Dautzenberg, the editor of the Aachener Zuschauer, published an essay on ‘the spirit of our age’, which he defined as ‘the almost universal drive for a new existence’. There is hardly anywhere on earth, he went on, ‘where the disagreeable urge to change civil conditions has not expressed itself, either forcefully or hesitantly.’ Eight years later, a Protestant pastor greeted the new century with the same sentiments: ‘The unmistakable character of our era’, he told his congregation, ‘is the vital, free struggle for something new and better.’ In 1804 Hermann von Boyen, then a junior officer in the Prussian infantry, began his prize-winning essay on tactics by expressing the conviction that ‘the first, holiest law of the human spirit’ is ‘tireless progress’.In the last two chapters we have observed how, during the quarter century after 1789, a sense of political possibility quickened the blood of ambitious men throughout Europe, men eager to take advantage of apparently unprecedented opportunities for power, wealth, and glory. Innovation also was at work in some people’s private lives, which seemed to be charged with new, intensified feelings about love and betrayal, sorrow and joy, achievement and loss. At the same time, some people were moved by enlarged dreams of artistic accomplishment and cultural renewal. A young man like Hegel, who set out to grasp the meaning of th spirit’s journey from its creation to the present, was fired by aspirations no less extraordinary than those that drove an obscure Corsican subaltern to his own triumphs and defeats. From its most talented and energetic children, the age seemed to demand nothing less than greatness.
Restoration Politics, 1815-1830
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

N 1815 Heinrich Olivier, just returned from military service with the Free Corps, painted a picture celebrating the Holy Alliance formed by Austria, Russia, and Prussia. In the foreground of the painting stand the Emperors Francis and Alexander and King Frederick William, their hands joined in an expression of solidarity, which was meant to recall their common victory over Napoleon and to affirm their common stand against further upheavals. The sovereigns are dressed in the cumbersome ceremonial armour of the late Middle Ages, crusaders’ crosses adorn their cloaks, a heavy Gothic altar-piece stands behind them. Here Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant came together in an enterprise whose symbols evoked the Christian heritage they shared. Olivier’s Holy Alliance is not a very good painting, but it does exemplify the medieval idiom through which some people in restoration Europe tried to express their distaste for revolutionary change. Architecture and design, the settings of novels and the background of paintings, the subject-matter of historical monu¬ ments and the focus of scholarly research all reflected this fascination for the Middle Ages. To be sure, medievalism was sometimes merely a temporary refuge, an escape from contempor¬ary cares into the apparently more cohesive and peaceful world of chivalry and cathedrals. The fake castle built by William IX of Hesse-Kassel was supposed to provide an ambience in which such escapism might flourish, as was Franzenburg, constructed by the Emperor Francis outside Vienna. We probably should not make too much of these masquerades. But for some Europeans, the medieval world was more than a refuge; it provided a stardard against which current shortcomings might be judged, a set of symbols with which deep-seated longings might be captured, and a model of how society and culture should be organized.
The Growth Of Participatory Politics, 1830-1848
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

IN HIS introductory essay to the first edition of. the Staatslexikon (1834), Theodor Welcker described the contemporary period as a distinctively ‘political era’. Never before, he argued, had the ambitions of individuals and nations taken such a manifestly political form, never had the clash of parties so dominated people’s thought and action. Welcker was surely correct. During the 1830s and 1840s Germans’ interest in public affairs steadily increased. Political news, diluted but not destroyed by the censors, found its way into the daily Press; theories and opinions on political matters were expressed in lexicons and lecture halls, periodicals and public meetings. The social, literary, and scholarly institutions that sustained the public sphere extended their reach, diversified their functions, and deepened their social base. ‘All of human reality’, Julius Froebel believed, ‘is subsumed under the unity of politics’. Politics even threatened to permeate the private space of Biedermeier sociability: as one hostess complained in the 1830s, ‘The affliction of political conversation was no longer to be excluded from the drawing room’. The growth of participatory politics in the German states was part of the historical process set in motion by the great revolution¬ary upheavals of the late eighteenth century and furthered by the social, economic, and cultural developments we have considered in the preceding chapters. More and more Germans felt themselves to be part of this process, which brought to some the hope of emancipation and progress, to others the fear of chaos and destruction. But in addition to the grand drama of revolutionary change being played out on the European stage, everyday considerations also drew Germans towards public affairs.
Revolution and Reaction
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

WHY oo people rebel? Our instinctive answer is, because they find their lives intolerable. But this is obviously no answer at all: not only is it circular, it ignores the unhappy truth that, while intolerable conditions are common, rebellions are rare. Suffering alone is not enough; it is a necessary but not a sufficient cause for revolution. Before they rebel, those who suffer must believe, if only for a short time, that their rebellion will lead to a better life for themselves or their communities. Only in this belief can people find the courage to act, the strength to break the bonds of habit and run the risks rebellion inevitably involves. By itself, suffering will not provide this strength and courage; indeed, suffering is more likely to weaken and demoralize than to incite and inspire. Revolutions are rare because they require an unusual conjunction of suffering and hope, a sense of outrage and an act of faith. To understand the great mid-century revolutions, therefore, we must bear in mind not only the social and political crises that inflicted hardships on so many during the 1840s but also the sense of hope and possibility that simultaneously reverberated through¬ out Europe. Everywhere we look in 1846 and 1847 we find expressions of faith-in thespecial parliaments summoned by the kings of Wilrttemberg, Prussia, and Saxony, in the meetings of professional groups and scholarly societies, in cafes and taverns, city halls and bureaucratic offices, lecture halls and students’ rooms.
Culture in the Age of the Bürgertum
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

OUR day’, wrote Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl in 1851, ‘the Burgertum unquestionably possesses overwhelming moral and material power. Our entire era has a burgerlich character.’ Riehl believed that the Burgertum was the epitome of modern society; other groups were no more than ruined residues of a bygone age. And he knew that, as usual, this social fact was reflected in the way people talked about their world. ‘Now we speak of burgerlich honour, burgerlich death, where once we had spoken more generally of social honour, social or political death. Instead of speaking of members of the state, current usage takes the most significant part for the whole and refers to Staatsburger.’ Riehl himself acknow¬ ledged the Burgertum’s universal significance when he entitled his study of contemporary society Die burgerliche Gesellschaft. Riehl’s perceptions cut against the grain of conventional histori¬ ography, which emphasizes how the political failure of German liberalism was connected to the social and cultural failure of the German Burgertum. According to this view of the nineteenth century, burgerlich elements in the German lands were either too weak or too self-serving to assert themselves against the forces of reaction.
The University of Prague, Czech Latin Schools, and Social Mobility 1570-1620
Authors: Pešek Jiří
Published: November 2023

The last decades of the sixteenth century and the early ones of the seventeenth century are usually treated as an inglorious period in the history of Prague University. It is often argued-mainly on the basis of nineteenth century historiography-that the instruction provided paid little attention to the practical needs of early-modern society and to contemporary progress in the natural sciences. The University, it is claimed, played no part in the generation of novel ideas and concepts and its curriculum and organization remained wedded to a medieval tradition. The list of charges could go on. But it is advisable to raise the question whether these charges are justified or whether they are anachronistic in light of the historical role of the University in the decades before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Most of these charges might also be levelled against other universities and academies in neighbouring countries of the time, whose structures resembled those of Bohemia and where the role of institutions of higher education was similar. We should rather consider the performance of the University and the municipal Latin schools with which it was closely associated from the position of what people at the time expected of higher education. The present paper concentrates on one aspect of the social history of the University during this period: the career opportunities for the University's graduates who came from relatively humble backgrounds.
Colonists and Immigrants
Authors: Byron Reginald
Published: November 2023

Over 4 million people from Ireland settled in the United States in the nineteenth century. More than a million arrived in just seven years, from 1847 to 1854, nearly twice as many as had emigrated to the United States during the previous half-century. Their impact on American society was enormous, in some places transforming the previous social fabric in less than a decade. One of these places was Albany, New York. By 1855, a quarter of the city’s population was Irish-born, and by 1875 this former Dutch colonial outpost and British garrison town had become one of the most Irish and Catholic places in the United States. Why so many Irish immigrants settled in Albany, and how they became integrated into American society has much to do with the circumstances of the city’s historical development: what kind of social order the Irish encountered in the midnineteenth century, what economic conditions then prevailed, and how its political and religious institutions received them.
Irish-Catholic-Democrat
Authors: Byron Reginald
Published: November 2023

In the rank-order of American cities, Albany was second only to Boston in the proportion of the population reporting themselves to be of Irish ancestry in the 1980 US Census.1 Nearly all those people to whom we spoke in Albany, and who identified themselves as Irish, said that they were Roman Catholics, despite the care we took in our methodological procedures to guard against any bias in our assumptions about what might constitute Irishness in Albany. This makes Albany an atypical place, since across the country as a whole, only 33 per cent of the Irish-ancestry population are Roman Catholic. Albany also has a history of ward politics and clientelism that is very reminiscent of Boston and New York.
The Importance of being Irish
Authors: Byron Reginald
Published: November 2023

You didn’t have to think of who you were. Everyone around you was the same. We all went to mass together. We all went out on Monday night to a novena and had a Coca-Cola afterwards. Everybody you knew was Irish; everybody that you went to school with. We didn’t know very many Protestants. And the old joke in our house, more than a joke, was if you went around with someone we asked, ‘What does her father do?’ and ‘What is his name?’ and ‘Who are they?’ They had to be a certain way or else you weren’t supposed to go around with them. I had a few girlfriends that were Protestants but it never went too far. Mama found out that I once went with a girlfriend to St Peter’s Episcopal church to some sort of function. She said, ‘Well, you really don’t have to go there again, do you?’ This is how it was. You didn’t go around with people who weren’t your own kind.
The Wearing of the Green
Authors: Byron Reginald
Published: November 2023

While Irish immigrants, and their descendants, have formed a large part of Albany’s population since the mid-nineteenth century, the St Patrick’s Day parade is a recent civic invention dating only from 1951. Since then, the parade has become one of the city’s biggest annual events. Several hundred people march in the parade, and thousands more line the streets to watch the spectacle and celebrate the day in the city’s Irish bars and social clubs. Tens of thousands of other people in Albany and other towns and cities in upstate New York participate vicariously in the festivities by watching the event on television in their local Irish bar, or at home with friends. The day is one of intense sociality. The normally deserted winter streets are filled with people ‘wearing the green’; throughout the day and late into the evening, the city’s bars, clubs, and restaurants are thronged with people drinking, dancing to Irish tunes, eating Irish food, and having a riotously good time. Most of the people of Irish ancestry taking part will have driven into Albany from the suburbs, since few of them still live in the old city-centre neighbourhoods.
Evenkis in the Lower Yenisei Valley
Authors: Anderson David G
Published: November 2023

THE PURPOSE OF this book is to answer the primary question of my field hosts: who are the Evenkis of Taimyr As the following chapters will show, this is a complex question which will consider the history of a single reindeer brigade, the nature of identity when it is questioned by bureaucratized organs of power, and the utility of nationalist rhetoric for making political claims. Although Evenkis in the lower Yenisei valley are far from articulating a nationalist project in a classic sense, their recent circulation of claims to national pedigrees, exclusive territories, and kin linkages illuminate the origins of social movements focused upon national identity. Through identifying three ways in which Evenkis wield their identities, I present an ethnographic account of the everyday life, culture, and economy for Evenkis in this region of Arctic Siberia. The key foci for national identity in Taimyr are an inflated concept of nationality, a consciousness of territory, and a feeling of solidarity for one’s kollektiv.
The State Ethnographers
Authors: Anderson David G
Published: November 2023

UNDERLYING THE SPECTACULAR mountains surrounding the Khantaika, there are said to be rich lodes of valuable metals. Their precise location is a secret known only to certain tundroviki who have long ago moved on to the Upper World and the brusque geologists who map these veins for eventual sale on foreign markets. Nevertheless the effects of the buried metals are pervasive. According to local rumour, the radio static which blocks communication between the settlement, the city, and neighbouring communities for days on end emanates from magnetic anomalies hidden below the surface. A less subtle impact of the metal ore is in the oxide taste of the north wind wafting down from Noril’sk.
National Inflation
Authors: Anderson David G
Published: November 2023

CONTEMPORARY NATIONAL RIVALRY on the Khantaika is expressed in murmured accusations over tea or as a cold acknowledgement on the street. People demonstrate their group of belonging through the company that they keep, the guests whom they entertain, or the choice of a partner for a voyage on the land which may last several months. Sometimes, always after the consumption of much alcohol, differences erupt into a fight with fists, knives, or hunting weapons. In such instances it is difficult to assign a reason for an injury or death, but recently these fighters have often cited nationality as their cause. It is not an unusual phenomenon that a community recognizes difference between its members. Difference was felt and expressed on the Khantaika well before the resettlement and political reforms of the last two decades. However, the current political context now encourages people to imagine their differences vociferously, using categories crafted by ethnographers and statesman rather than achieved in practice. It has now become thinkable to demand the expulsion of a particular nationality or to divide land exclusively amongst certain residents. The possibility and indeed the necessity of the division of a common territory between groups only arose with the privatization initiatives originating from the centre. Perhaps for the first time in the history of the lower Yenisei valley differences of origin, accent, and behaviour imply solidarity with others living apart at great distances and also differing rights to territory and goods to those who live side by side.