bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Pitch and duration of yes-no questions in Nchufie
Authors: Byrd Dani
Published: February 2009

This paper will present a preliminary phonetic description of yes-no questions in Nchufie (also known as Bafanji), a Grassfields Bantoid language of the Nun group in the Mbam-Nkam family spoken in Northwestern Cameroon by approximately 8,500 people (Grimes 1988). As there is no published description of this language, a very brief review of the Nchufie segment inventory will be in order. Following this, an instrumental description of the yes-no questions in the language will be presented, focusing on the prosodic cues of duration and pitch. Of special interest will be the interaction of intonation with lexical tone and the representation and cross-linguistic significance of Nchufie yes-no question formation. Below is a brief description of the phonetic segment inventory of Nchufie. Due to the complexities of Nchufie phonology and tonology, the following description should be considered preliminary only; the details are not well understood.
Some aspects of Arabic duration
Authors: Mitleb Fares
Published: February 2009

The study of the temporal organization of spoken language has developed greatly over the past three decades. Segment based analyses, such as that of Chomsky & Halle (1968) looked at temporal patterns and other physical properties of speech as being “supplied by universal rules.” However, several researchers have published experimental evidence which indicates that temporal differences do exist between languages and have to be learned (Lehiste 1970, 1984, 1987, Port, Al-Ani & Maeda 1980, Keating 1979, Flege 1979, Flege & Port 1981, Mitleb 1984a, 1984b).
A Plaintive Note re the Recent IPA Revisions
Authors: Lisker Leigh
Published: February 2009

At the 1989 IPA Convention in Kiel it was decided that in the latest version of the IPA writing system no recognition be granted to a feature of force of articulation. At the time I questioned the advisability of this action, but another viewpoint won the day. Very possibly the refusal to allow for the notation of ‘fortis-lenis’ judgments in IPA transcription was based primarily on the conviction that ‘articulatory force’ has no generally accepted physical correlate, but whatever the basis for the decision, I would reiterate the opinion that it was wrongheaded, even though I too am reluctant to accept any of the suggested meanings attached to the terms ‘fortis’ and ‘lenis’ as sufficient for regarding force of articulation as an independent dimension of phonetic description. However, the function of the IPA alphabet is to facilitate the communication of phoneticjudgmentsof speech. It has not been proposed, so far as I know, that the IPA alphabet represent only those judgments couched in terms that allow for physical disconfirmation.
Letters to the Editor
Authors: Iivonen Antti , Hunt Geoffrey
Published: February 2009

Martin Kioster-Jensen (1991) has traced the origin of the view that [h] is a glottal fricative back to the German scholar Brücke (1876). According to MK-J, this wrong view has been repeated in the manuals of phonetics since then and appears again in the new IPA consonant chart.
Tukang Besi
Authors: Donohue Mark
Published: February 2009

Tukang Besi is an archipelago in southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, where an Austronesian language is spoken. The speech represented here is that of the north-west coast of the island of Wanci. With mainly slight lexical variation it represents the speech of the two northernmost islands in the archipelago, Wanci and Kaledupa.
A preliminary report on the click accompaniments in |Gui
Authors: Nakagawa Hirosi
Published: February 2009

This paper aims at describing the click accompaniments of |Gui, a little known Central Khoisan language, and presenting some new findings which may contribute to general phonetics as well as Khoisan linguistics. The phonetic features described here are based upon linguistic field research by the author into the |Gui language in the Xade area, Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana, from August to December in 1992, from August to October in 1993 and from August to December in 1994.
Palatogram reading as a phonetic skill: the answer to issue 24(1)'s EPG “mystery” sentence
Authors: Byrd Dani
Published: February 2009

In issue 24(1): 21–34 of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, we reviewed the technique of dynamic electropalatography (EPG) (also known as dynamic palatography or palatometry) for recording information about the tongue's contact with the hard palate over time (Byrd 1994). The purpose of that note was to provide an introduction to interpreting palatograms, much in the same way that phonetics students learn to read spectrograms. In this brief follow-up, we will decipher and discuss the “mystery” palatogram presented as Sentence 2 in the original tutorial. The frame-by-frame data on this sentence occurred on pages 32 – 34 there. Readers should consult these pages to follow along with the discussion below. Examples of palatograms for a variety of sounds as produced by the same speaker were also included there.
The trills of Toda
Authors: Spajić Siniša , Ladefoged Peter , Bhaskararao P.
Published: February 2009

A hundred years from now a large number of presently spoken languages will no longer be viable means of communication, and the distinctive sounds that they contain will have disappeared. Of the nearly seven thousand languages in the world listed by Grimes (1992), about ten per cent are spoken by around a thousand people or less. As the speakers of these languages grow old, and their children go to schools in which the main languages of the country predominate, phoneticians will no longer have access to the wide variety of sounds currently in use. Toda, a language spoken by about a thousand speakers in the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India, has some unusual sounds that will probably not exist in our great grandchildren's times. Among them are the six trills which this paper will describe. Tongue tip trills occur in about one third of the world's languages (Maddieson 1984). None of the languages in Maddieson's sample has two contrasting apical trills without secondary articulations, although they have been reported in Malayalam (Ladefoged 1971). To the best of our knowledge only Toda has three contrasting trills; and almost certainly no other language has surface contrasts between palatalized and non-palatalized versions of three lingual trills. Toda is a rich source for trill-seeking phoneticians.
Another R-tickle
Authors: Barry William J.
Published: February 2009

In the hope of provoking discussion, an attempt is made to combine articulatory, perceptual and acoustic considerations in relating the observed variants of R to one another. An underlying, and in itself debatable point of departure for the discussion is that is a universal non-lateral liquid from which all R variants ultimately stem.
The Formants of Monophthong Vowels in Standard Southern British English Pronunciation
Authors: Deterding David
Published: February 2009

The formants of the eleven monophthong vowels of Standard Southern British (SSB) pronunciation of English were measured for five male and five female BBC broadcasters whose speech was included in the MARSEC database. The measurements were made using linear-prediction-based formant tracks overlaid on digital spectrograms for an average of ten instances of each vowel for each speaker. These measurements were taken from connected speech, allowing comparison with previous formant values measured from citation words. It was found that the male vowels were significantly less peripheral in the measurements from connected speech than in measurements from citation words.
Problems of phonetic transcription: The case of the Hiberno-English slit-t
Authors: Pandeli Helen , Eska Joseph F. , Ball Martin J. , Rahilly Joan
Published: February 2009

Acoustic and electropalatographic data on the so-called Hiberno-English ‘slit-t’ are reported, and the implications these data have for an adequate transcription are discussed. Previous transcription suggestions highlight the difficulty posed by the lack of an IPA diacritic for tongue shape. We conclude that the adoption of an alveolar diacritic (as used in the extensions to the IPA for transcribing disordered speech) could get round these difficulties.
The dialect of Venice
Authors: Canepari L.
Published: February 2009

Venetian shows great vitality. In everyday life it is used by almost everybody: not only the general population but also physicians, lawyers, and teachers speak it regularly. It is estimated that it has at least 100,000 speakers.
More thoughts on the r-link business
Authors: Pring J. T.
Published: February 2009

In ‘Linking /r/ in the General British Pronunciation of English’ by J. Windsor Lewis (JIPA 5.1) the author expressed his view that ‘linking’ and ‘intrusive’ r can be regarded as one and the same thing, that both are regular practice in current usage, and that therefore foreigners ought to be taught to use both ‘irrespective of traditional orthography’. My purpose is to show that he does not make a convincing case with the evidence he puts forward.
Laterals and trills
Authors: Ladefoged Peter , Cochran Anne , Disner Sandra
Published: February 2009

The IPA does not have agreed symbols for some laterals. This is hardly surprising considering the relative infrequency of the contrasts involved. The majority of languages either have no contrasts involving laterals, or have at the most one lateral. A few languages, however, have two, three, or even four lateral approximants that contrast simply in place of articulation. Contrasts among trills are even more uncommon than among laterals. Most languages do not trill any articulator. Only a handful of languages have contrasts between trills made at different places. This note will present data on some unusual contrasts involving laterals and trills.
Meaningfulness as a factor in the successful imitation of spoken sentences
Authors: Lee W. R.
Published: February 2009

The purpose of the investigation was to discover whether there might be a connection between success in imitating short utterances and the meaningfulness of the utterance to the imitators.
A note on Sweet's house in Hampstead
Authors: MacMahon M. K. C.
Published: February 2009

A few months after his father's death in 1879 Henry Sweet moved from the family home, 140 Maida Vale, London, into lodgings at Mansfield Cottage in Hampstead where ‘the air … [was] very fine’ and where he could ‘get out into a very fine country in a few minutes’ (letter to Johan Storm of 27 November 1879). He was to remain there until his marriage in 1887. But for anyone interested in finding the Cottage today there is a problem since no building with this name exists now in Hampstead (there is however a Mansfield Place and a Mansfield Road). When Sweet wrote to Storm some years later on the occasion of a visit Storm was paying to England, he gave him instructions on how to reach Mansfield Cottage—‘… it is tolerably accessible from Woburn Place. There is an omnibus from Tottenham Court Road …’—and to help him find it drew a sketch-map (letter of 18 April 1884).
Observations on phonation
Authors: Buuren L. V.
Published: February 2009

This article originated as a paper given to the Colloquium of British Academic Phoneticians in September 1978. That was based on an auditory-cum-proprioceptive investigation of some 200 ‘interesting voices’, taped from radio, TV and from some early jazz-records made available by Mr. P. Gras of Dutch radio.
The tones of English and French
Authors: Kenning Marie-Madeleine
Published: February 2009

In a previous article (Kenning, 1979) I presented a description of French intonation within a similar framework to that used by Halliday (1967, 1970) and El-Menoufy (1969) in their studies of English intonation. In the present paper I want to compare English and French with regard to the third set of choices recognized by the studies: TONAL choices. After a few general remarks I shall discuss first the shapes and meanings of the formal categories called tones, then the way in which these categories are expounded phonetically.
Methodology for the Transcription and Labeling of a Speech Corpus
Authors: Autesserre D. , Pérennou G. , Rossi M.
Published: February 2009

SAM, an international project funded by the European ESPRIT initiative, is concerned with the methodology of assessment of the speech interface with computers. The applications at which the SAM Project aims require that recorded-speech corpora be both defined and created on a European scale. Within the present stage of development (called the “extension phase”) some three different aspects of this work have to be specified and developed:
An acoustic study of Kabardian vowels
Authors: Choi John D.
Published: February 2009

The results of a spectrographic study of the Kabardian vowel system confirm reports in the literature that phonetic vowel quality in Kabardian is determined by the preceding consonant. The data further show that there are three distinct phonetic categories along the F1 axis in the vowel space, and that the contextually determined variation in vowel coloring generally respects this division. Durationally, a correspondence was found between vowel height and duration. While the durational differences were found to be comparable to those reported in languages with contrastive vowel length, the differences were interpreted as a phonetic strategy to enhance the perceptual salience of the vertical vowel system.
Chinese (Hong Kong Cantonese)
Authors: Zee Eric
Published: February 2009

The style of speech illustrated is that typical of the educated younger generation in Hong Kong. The recording is that of a 22-year-old female university student who has lived all her life in Hong Kong.
Labiodental Flaps in Mangbetu
Authors: Demolin Didier , Teston Bernard
Published: February 2009

Labiodental flaps exist in several African languages, and were first described by Doke (1931) in a study of Shona. Westermann and Ward (1933: 76) quote data from Tucker, who notes labiodental flaps in Kreish, a Central Sudanic language of the Sara-Bongo-Baguirmi group. In the same group of languages, Thomas (1981: 262) claims to find them in Bongo-Gberi and in Binga-Kara. Thomas defines these sounds as “vibrantes labiodentales” (see also Caprile 1981: 238). Hoffman (1963) and Ladefoged (1964) both identify these sounds in Margi. Cloarec-Heiss (1981: 225) reports such sounds in Banda, but describes them as “labiodentales lâches”, transcribed [ǔ]. Maddieson (1984) quotes two sounds of this type in the UPSID data base, one in Margi and the other in Gbeya.
The common [ʕ] is an approximant and not a fricative
Authors: Laufer Asher
Published: February 2009

As an extensive study of Hebrew and Arabic has revealed that [ʕ] is an approximant in ordinary speech, and as we have no reason to believe that [ʕ] is different in other languages, we should consider [ʕ] to represent not a fricative but a voiced pharyngeal approximant.
Phonetic Structures of Scottish Gaelic
Authors: Ladefoged Peter , Ladefoged Jenny , Turk Alice , Hind Kevin , Skilton St. John
Published: February 2009

Scottish Gaelic is an endangered language with very few fluent speakers under 60. Recordings were collected in the neighbourhood of Greater Bernera, Lewis, from 11 native speakers. Aerodynamic and palatographic data were collected from one 70-year-old male speaker. Palatographic data made in 1955 by Frederick Macaulay, a Gaelic speaker from South Uist, provided additional information. Analysis showed that all the stops were voiceless unaspirated or aspirated, with the aspirated stops being preaspirated intervocalically. Spectra of various consonants were also determined. Vowel analyses showed the nature of the 7 long and short vowels. Special attention was paid to the back unrounded vowels. Problems of syllabicity were examined and shown to affect pitch contours.
Rural versus urban accent as an influence on the rate of speech
Authors: Hewlett Nigel , Rendall Monica
Published: February 2009

Speakers of rural accents have been said to speak more slowly than speakers of urban accents. However, there would appear to have been no previous empirical investigation of such a claim. In the study reported here, recordings were made of 12 Orkney English speakers and 12 Edinburgh English speakers, during a reading task and in conversation with the experimenter. Measurements, in syllables per second, were made of both the Speaking Rate and the Articulation Rate (i.e. the rate calculated after excision of pauses) of each speaker in reading mode and in conversation mode. Comparison of the results for the two groups revealed no tendency for the urban (Edinburgh) speakers to speak faster than the rural (Orkney) speakers. The claim that rural speakers speak more slowly than urban speakers therefore still awaits empirical support. Some discussion is offered concerning the possible relationships among speech tempo, lifestyle and accent.
On Percussives
Authors: Ball Martin J.
Published: February 2009

In this paper the nature of the so-called percussives is investigated. It is shown that these sounds are often produced on oral airstream mechanisms, resulting in what can be termed ‘resonating percussives’. The three percussives so far identified are described together with the nature of their differing oralic airstream mechanisms, and recommended transcriptions are given.
Soil trampling in an Antarctic Specially Protected Area: tools to assess levels of human impact
Authors: Tejedo P. , Justel A. , Benayas J. , Rico E. , Convey P. , Quesada A.
Published: February 2009

Research in extremely delicate environments must be sensitive to the need to minimize impacts caused simply through the presence of research personnel. This study investigates the effectiveness of current advice relating to travel on foot over Antarctic vegetation-free soils. These are based on the concentration of impacts through the creation of properly signed and identified paths. In order to address these impacts, we quantified three factors - resistance to compression, bulk density and free-living terrestrial arthropod abundance - in areas of human activity over five summer field seasons at the Byers Peninsula (Livingston Island, South Shetland Islands). Studies included instances of both experimentally controlled use and natural non-controlled situations. The data demonstrate that a minimum human presence is sufficient to alter both physical and biological characteristics of Byers Peninsula soils, although at the lowest levels of human activity this difference was not significant in comparison with adjacent undisturbed control areas. On the other hand, a limited resilience of physical properties was observed in Antarctic soils, thus it is crucial not to exceed the soil's natural recovery capability.
The socio-economic and demographic characteristics of port cities: a typology for comparative analysis?
Authors: Lee Robert
Published: February 2009

This article addresses a range of conceptual issues relating to the history of European port cities in order to construct a framework for comparative research. Port cities played a key role in European urban development and their growth was often determined by common factors. Particular attention is paid to the demography of port cities, their specific labour markets and the dominant ideology of merchant capital. The article establishes a basis for analysing case studies of individual port cities and for exploring their location within the overall process of European urbanization.
Keeping up with London's Past: Local History in the Metropolis
Authors: Reeder D. A.
Published: February 2009

The growing popularity of local history in towns and cities raises some questions for urban historians. What contribution is being made to our knowledge of the urban past by groups of people for whom local history is a leisure-time occupation? Are they poles apart from the interests and approaches of urban history? Can guide-lines be laid down? There is no general agreement on these matters. Opinions range from the view that local history is best left to develop its own canons, to the view that it can supply a source of labour for academics under their direction and control. Another, possibly more sympathetic view, is that the two kinds of work might feed into each other, provided that local historians are willing to move more purposively into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So they are urged to take on new subjects, to ‘flesh out’ the urban process, and to develop a more ‘vital approach’, making their ‘touchstone the real life experiences of people themselves’, But how responsive are local historians likely to be?
Religion in the City
Authors: McLeod Hugh
Published: February 2009

Interpretation of the role of religion in the cities of Europe and America during the last one hundred and fifty years has been dominated by a single issue: the relationship between urbanization and secularization, which recent writings continue to amplify.
From ‘Feudal’ Lords to Figureheads
Authors: Cannadine David
Published: February 2009

The importance of landowners' influence on the timing, scale and type of development in many large nineteenth-century towns is a platitude of urban history. But the power which it gave a large, aristocratic, urban landowner to influence local affairs – political, cultural, religious and philanthropic – has received much less attention. Most historians would agree with Ralph Nevill that during the nineteenth century ‘the political influence of the English land-owning class must in any case have disappeared with the development of the great towns and the increase in population’. But while that change has been described and investigated as it occurred at Westminster and in the country-side, the actual shift in the balance of power in the towns – from those who owned and managed urban estates to those who lived on them as leasehold tenants – has received much less attention. The purpose of this article is to review the literature at present available on the subject, and to offer some suggestions as to the directions in which future research might proceed.
Marriage Data as Indicators of Urban Prosperity
Authors: Brown Graham
Published: February 2009

‘The number of marriages in a nation perhaps fluctuates independently of external causes, but it is a fair deduction from the facts, that the Marriage Returns in England point out periods of prosperity little less distinctly than the funds measure the hopes and fears of the money market. If the one is the barometer of credit, the other is the barometer of prosperity, present in part, but future, expected, anticipated, in still greater part.’ This view was expressed by George Graham, the Registrar-General, in his 8th Annual Report for 1845, published in 1848. He argued that the fluctuatiòns in the marriages of a country expressed the views which the great body of the people took of their prospects in the world and noted that the fluctuation could be clearly seen in the towns even when the variations of the annual marriage totals were not considerable in the kingdom as a whole. D. V. Glass, in his study of marriage frequency and economic fluctuations also found that ‘the whole period, 1856 to 1932, showed a close connection between marriage and prosperity’.
H. J. Dyos: an appreciation
Authors: Reeder David
Published: February 2009

From the early 1960s until his sudden and unexpected death in August 1978, Jim Dyos was the chief inspiration, proselytizer and ambassador of urban history in Britain. Through many personal contacts and friendships in various parts of the world, he gave to all those connected with his chosen pursuit the sense of belonging to a great international family. It was entirely in keeping with his ambitions that he had been planning a major international conference to chart the progress made since the earlier agenda for urban history was set out at Leicester in 1966, and to highlight those methodological issues which should be confronted if urban historians are to sustain an innovative role into the 1980s. This conference will still take place with the help of a committee which had been working with him, the intention being to publish a volume based on the proceedings as the most fitting tribute to his memory. Nevertheless, it seemed right to begin this issue of theYearbookwith a short appreciation of the way Jim Dyos contributed to the study and enjoyment of urban history through his own teaching, research and writings.
Urban Decline in the Later Middle Ages: Some problems in interpreting the statistical data
Authors: Rigby S. H.
Published: February 2009

The medieval period is often regarded as part of the statistical ‘Dark Ages’ in English history before the nineteenth century. The figures which are available were mostly collected for immediate administrative or fiscal purposes far removed from the future needs of historians and by a state lacking the comprehensive administrative organization of a census-taking modern government. Medieval man in particular is usually thought to have had little concept of the meaning of high numbers. In 1371, for instance, the English parliament believed that there were 40,000 parishes in the country when in fact there were less than 9,000. Again, ‘when the pope was assured by his advisers that the Black Death had cost the lives of 42, 836, 486 throughout the world, or the losses in Germany were estimated at 1, 244, 434, what was meant was that an awful lot of people had died’. Estimates of total populations have of course been a famous source of controversy. ‘Medieval man like classical man before him was little interested in figures. Neither showed any desire to formulate a precise estimate of population, and when figures were called for they hazarded only the wildest guesses.’ Even for England, where more promising evidence survives than for any other country, Professor Postan concluded that it was not possible to measure the total size of the population at any given point of time. For 1086 for example, estimates of total population could have a ‘heroic’ margin of error of up to 150 per cent. Historians, he decided, should rather be concerned with the dynamics of medieval population than with global numbers.
The Law and Urban Change: Some Nineteenth-Century Scottish Evidence
Authors: Rodger Richard
Published: February 2009

The constitutional change which was embodied in the Union of Parliaments in 1707 provided for the retention of distinctive Scottish codes governing banking, the church and the law. Such a guarantee ensured that the economic, social and cultural idiosyncracies of Scotland would not be absorbed or Anglicized, and that in the long term the unique institutional framework would continue to stamp its character upon most aspects of daily Scottish life, urban and rural. The tacit acceptance of these legal and institutional differences in certain parts of the kingdom became compounded over the decades so that attempts to modify most aspects of Scottish urban life required separate treatment rather than an extension of British Statutes. Indeed tables of parliamentary statutes in most years display a significant number of purely Scottish bills, thereby reflecting the necessity of specialized legal draughtsmanship, skilled in the peculiarities of Scots law, to accommodate the changes desired north of the border. Two important consequences of these arrangements are worth noting. First, the basis of the Scottish legal and administrative structure was distinct, and second, to amend that framework, separate Scottish bills were frequently required, and thus the timing, coverage and intent of the law were at variance with the remainder of the country.
Australian Urban History: a Progress Report
Authors: Davison Graeme
Published: February 2009

Australia was possibly ‘the first suburban nation’. Already at the end of the nineteenth century the American statistician Adna Weber noticed the peculiar demography of this ‘newest product of civilization’ whose population, he calculated, was more urbanized than any other country's. Yet the large coastal cities in which most town—dwellers lived were less densely occupied—more suburbanized—than the cities of Europe or North America. Here, Weber suggested, was ‘the representative of the new order of things towards which the modern world is advancing’. Later research on urban development has largely confirmed Weber's opinion. Australian city-dwellers enjoyed among the highest per capita incomes and levels of individual home-ownership in the nineteenth-century world and were among the first to display the low birth and death rates characteristic of ‘modern’ societies. They were early and enthusiastic users of railways, tramways and other forms of public transport. In 1900 about one in five Austalians lived in detached houses in the suburbs of the capital cities but by the early 1970s the proportion had risen to about three in five. A traveller flying in over Sydney or Melbourne now sees ‘the newest product of civilization’ spread out in a monotonous mosaic of green lawns, terra cotta roofs and sparkling backyard swimming pools.
Urban history in France: achievements, tendencies and objectives
Authors: Roche Daniel
Published: February 2009

In the last ten years, a significant development in the study of urban history has allowed French historians to begin to consider some of the problems which have preoccupied their foreign colleagues, notably in Britain and the United States, for some time. The attraction of the town for the French historian is due, clearly enough, to two main factors. On the one hand, the town's growing dominance over the location of employment and population is bound to attract attention—in 1980 80 per cent of the population of France live in towns, exactly reversing the distribution of 200 years ago. On the other hand, this same distension of the town demands historical attention. It places the town at the centre of a very long-term development in which the urban criterion becomes increasingly dominant, defining a particularly appropriate field for the measurement of the linking mechanisms which regulate relationships between the different levels of social reality. Urbanity, in short, brings together the whole gamut of questions posed by the development of our system of civilization over the centuries. To reconstruct its history is to indulge in nostalgia for a past which appears all the richer in comparison with the drabness of our own day. It is also to dream of a city of the future, capable of reconciling community and social control, nature and culture. In France the history of towns is inseparable from a long process of examination which began with the humanist enthusiasm for the city, continued through the speculations of the Enlightenment and the tentative researches of nineteenth-century local anti-quarians, and has recently been supplemented by the more precise discoveries of the urban historian.
The study of social conflict in English industrial towns
Authors: Lees Lynn Hollen
Published: February 2009

The problem of social conflict is central to the historiography of nineteenth-century cities. Since Friedrich Engels wrote his powerful indictment of social relations in English industrial towns, urban historians have told and retold tales of dramatic struggles between workers and their middle-class employers. Whether seen from a Marxist or non-Marxist perspective, the standard books on social life in industrial towns abound with strikes, demonstrations, confrontations, and other more subtle signs of conflict. A. Temple Patterson and Malcolm Thomis depict the often tumultuous responses of Leicester and Nottingham framework knitters to their economic decline. Accounts of urban Chartism regularly link workers’ economic and social demands to strong middle-class disapproval and disavowal within a local context. Books on the 1830s and 1840s are particularly rich in incidents of confrontation, but the growing literature on the late nineteenth century also emphasizes this theme. Gareth Stedman Jones places middle-class misconceptions and fears at the centre of his analysis of casual labour in London, and Robert Grey's discussion of Edinburgh artisans assumes the reality of class conflict as a determinant of urban social relations. Nevertheless our understanding of divisions among urban social groups and of the relationships of one group to another remains primitive and unsatisfactory.
Title deeds: a key to local housing markets
Authors: Green Geoffrey
Published: February 2009

Title deeds are an invaluable source of information on the evolution of local housing markets. They are also a key to three other data sources. First, they complement plans registered with a local authority before a house was built. Second, by recording the deaths of most rentier landlords they give an entry point into the Probate Registry. Third, they check property ownership as listed in rate books. Finally, they are complementary in a more general sense. They are reliable (because solicitors take special care to see that the facts are correct) and each event in the history of a house is made intelligible by being recorded as part of a time sequence. But information is limited to one house or at most a block. Only by painstaking accumulation of a large number of deeds is it possible to discern economic patterns. Even then a sample of deeds drawn from a whole city might be insensitive to the finely balanced economic equations of, for example, landlords' rental income and their offsetting payments to mortgagees, agents, and ground landlords. Confined to a more manageable suburb, a sample of deeds may be atypical of the city. On the other hand, complementary data from the other registers is comprehensive, covering big geographic areas and large numbers of houses or people. But it comes as snapshots, aggregated appearances which are difficult to make socially or economically intelligible: the atomised names of otherwise anonymous builders on a building plan, landlords in a rate book, and property owners in the Probate Registry.
‘Community’ and the social geography of Victorian cities
Authors: Dennis Richard , Daniels Stephen
Published: February 2009

Quantitative studies of nineteenth-century cities have made rapid advances in the last decade in terms of both the complexity of techniques and the range of sources to which techniques have been applied. Simple representations of material from the census enumerators' books like graphs and pie diagrams have been superseded by location quotients, indices of segregation and factor analyses. Synchronic descriptions of urban structure have been supplemented by assessments of change (for example, of residential persistence and mobility) and analyses of relationships (for example, journeys to work and marriage patterns). Researchers have ventured beyond the census to examine other nominal listings—in directories, electoral registers, ratebooks and church records—often using record linkage techniques to check or supplement information from one source with another. Our enthusiasm to apply new techniques to new sources has often left us exposed to Anderson's criticism that ‘we have been paying too little attention to the question of why we are measuring what we are measuring’. Many quantitative historical geographers justify their enterprise as the testing of modern theory on such subjects as migration and modernization. Some such theories, particularly those concerned with Sjoberg's and Burgess' stereotypes of pre-industrial and industrial cities and the ‘transitional’ nature of Victorian cities, are little more than rough generalizations and some urban historians have been more than sceptical about them. Certainly the retrospective application of the methods, concepts and theories of contemporary social research is a critical issue. In this paper we consider the significance of ‘what we are measuring’ for a particularly contentious concept, that of ‘community’. We assess the usefulness or relevance of more sophisticated methodological techniques to the identification and investigation of communities in Victorian cities.
Urban history atlases: A survey of recent publications
Authors: Wik Lempi Borg , Hall Thomas
Published: February 2009

A major trend in European urban history research, during the past few decades, has been the increasing attention given to town plans and topographical conditions. Even in the 1930s, little attention was paid to the physical aspects of urban development, and it was not uncommon for town plans to be totally absent from works on urban history. A turning point was reached in two classical studies, viz. Fernand Vercauteren, Etudes sur les civitates de la Belgique seconde (1934) and F. L. Ganshof, Etude sur le développement des villes entre Loire et Rhin au Moyen Age (1943). The Stadtkernforschung begun in postwar Germany, when bomb damage enabled archaeological investigations of central city areas to be carried out on an entirely different scale than had been previously possible, was also of great importance for continued development.
New perspectives on English architectural history: a review of recent writing
Authors: Thorne Robert
Published: February 2009

In two of its aspects the writing of architectural history has as long a pedigree as any kind of historical scholarship. In the first place, the urge to study buildings has been provoked by the sense of loss at their destruction, from the time of the Reformation onwards. The shocked response to the sight of monastic ruins was a spur to recording their past, so producing some of the earliest achievements in historical research and writing. John Aubrey's plea—‘I wished monastrys had not been putte downe, that the reformers would have been more moderate as to that point’—underlines the sentiment that led his contemporaries Sir William Dugdale and Roger Dodsworth to compile theirMonasticon Anglicanum(3 Vols., 1655–73), as well as the publication of more purely architectural works such as Dugdale'sHistory of St. Paul's Cathedral(1658) and Anthony Wood'sAntiquities of Oxford(1674). Three hundred years later it is easy to observe the same kind of impulse in the countless books written from a sense of outrage at the destruction of buildings by war and redevelopment. Architectural history derives much of its energy, and its wide popularity, from the desire to preserve tangible reminders of the past.
Towns in societies–medieval England
Authors: Hilton Rodney
Published: February 2009

There is an old historical tradition which saw the towns in the middle ages as being an antagonistic element within the whole society which was seen—quite rightly of course—as being predominantly rural and agricultural. Put in more abstract terms the agrarian economy was seen as a natural economy and as such incompatible with the exchange economy of the towns. This simplistic vision could hardly stand the test of empirical investigation since clearly the urban and rural economies could not operate independently of each other. More sophisticated writers indeed saw the towns, not as an antagonistic element but as innovatory. The towns were literally responsible for a civilizing process. They sowed the seeds of the future in the not always receptive soil of feudal society.
The records of the Charity Commissions a source for urban history
Authors: Grady Kevin
Published: February 2009

Officially sponsored investigation of charities has a long history encompassing the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century commissions issued under the Statutes of Charitable Uses of 1597 and 1601, and the brief national inquiry made for the Gilbert returns of 1787–8. It was in the nineteenth century, however, that the first detailed general surveys of English and Welsh charities were made. In August 1818, amidst revived interest in the more effective utilization of charitable funds, the Brougham Commission was appointed by parliament to examine the state of charitable trusts for educational purposes in England. With the renewal and widening of its powers in the following year, it spent almost two decades investigating charitable trusts of all types in England and Wales. The Commission expired in 1837 but, after lengthy vacillation, parliament set up a permanent body in 1853. Like its predecessor, this new commission began collecting up-to-date information about charitable trusts; a task it still performs today. The invaluable products of the two commissions are several voluminous series of reports and digests printed in Parliamentary Papers between 1819 and 1913, and extensive records dating from 1819 held by the Charity Commission and the Public Record Office. This article discusses these sources and their value to the urban historian.
South African urban history
Authors: Pirie G. H.
Published: February 2009

Johannesburg, in certain respects the Republic's leading urban centre, celebrates her centenary in 1986. Acquisitive citizens and indifferent officials have, however, long driven much of her past from the streets. Today carnival history is being manufactured hurriedly beyond remote tarmac parking grounds and behind ticketing turnstiles. Although its popularization is also overdue, scholarly interest in South African urban history fortunately has not attracted only whimsical attention. In the brief review which follows an attempt is made to sketch the outlines of the South African urban past, to capture the flavour of substantive research into South African urban history and to contour the intellectual climate in which this has been conducted and shaped. Emphasis is placed on research reported in scholarly outlets. Not unexpectedly there is a wide range of other publications which contain elements of urban historical interest, these ranging from newspapers and magazines to general historical texts and finely liveried, lavishly illustrated Africana. For the purposes of this presentation, the ‘modern period’ of South African urban history is closed during the 1950s.
A new source for the historian of urban poverty: a note on the use of charity records in Leicester 1904–29
Authors: Page Stephen J.
Published: February 2009

This article reviews the potential use of charity records in reconstructing the lives of the poor in the early twentieth-century city and suggests how computer-assisted modes of quantitative and qualitative techniques of analysis can expand the known source base of research on poverty. Although the poor have themselves left only a small direct imprint on the historical record, the historian of poverty has managed to use the diverse and voluminous Victorian records generated by officials of the Poor Law which has resulted in a variety of administrative and institutional analyses of pauperism within various urban and regional settings. These studies have attracted a certain amount of criticism because of their dependence upon a narrow range of sources and orthodox historical methodology. It can be argued, however, that the full potential of Poor Law records in terms of what they contribute as well as what can be done with them has not yet been fully exploited. There is scope, for example, for the linkage of Poor Law material with demographic sources, such as the census enumerators' returns, to explore the geography of urban poverty in the nineteenth century. The value of Poor Law records would be enhanced if research questions could be phrased in relation to the socio-geographical context of the city, taking into account the dynamics of urbanism. For example, in Victorian and Edwardian Leicester it is possible to consider the consequence of socio-economic changes in a move from a domestic to a predominantly factory-based mode of production in the hosiery and footwear trades and the impact of the Poor Law during this transformation as patterns of discrimination characterized the provision of relief in certain districts of the town.
The study of urban history in the People's Republic of China
Authors: Buck David D.
Published: February 2009

Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, most of the topics associated with the study of urban history have languished largely unstudied beneath a pall of ideologically based neglect. The list of understudied subjects includes urban population, physical structure, social structure, economic activity, urban politics, urban planning and the environment, and urban culture. This lack of interest in urban history directly reflects the emphasis on the role of the peasantry as a creative force in Chinese history. The history of Chinese peasant uprisings and wars became the focus of attention and left little interest for what changes might have taken place in urban settings. Today, a combination of forces has generated considerable changes in the institutional structure of historical studies in China, as well as compelling historians to reconsider established research preferences. In this atmosphere it appears that for the first time since 1949 topics that concern urban historians in the West and Japan are receiving serious attention in the People's Republic of China. While it is still too early to speak of urban history in China, continuation of current trends in historical research over the next five to ten years will almost certainly bring this specialization into existence.
Occupation and social stratification revisited: the census enumerators' books of Victorian Britain
Authors: Dennis  , Mills Joan
Published: February 2009

Urban historians are much concerned with the need to study their towns from the perspective of social class and socio-spatial segregation, especially in periods of rapid industrialization. The models of such scholars as Engels, Sjöberg, Burgess, Hoyt and others are predicated on the possibility of identifying clearly the members of defined social classes. The manuscript census enumerators' books (CEBs) are one of the basic sources used for Victorian Britain (1841–81), but it is no simple matter to attribute the occupational descriptions found in them to a range of social classes. Problems occur at two levels: those associated with the conceptual validity of systems of class distinction, and those encountered in attributing occupations within such systems. As this article shows, there is also a degree of interaction between the two levels since it is useless to pursue concepts that cannot be systematically and straightforwardly related to the information available.
Review essay: Celebrating Calcutta
Authors: Datta Partho
Published: February 2009

Calcutta celebrated its tercentenary in 1990. The city rose to the occasion handsomely with floats, exhibitions, seminars, the usual flurry of publications and some soul-searching. So it has been an exciting year for Indian urban historians. A decade has elapsed since Narayani Gupta reviewed the state of current research on urban India, and after a brief examination of writings on colonial cities, attention is devoted here to a more extensive survey of works on Calcutta including those published on the occasion of the tercentenary.
Accidents, disasters and cities
Authors: Luckin Bill
Published: February 2009

Despite a massive proliferation in the literature on ‘risk’ and ‘disaster management’ in the contemporary world, historians have been slow to clarify their thoughts on these issues. The paper seeks to remedy this state of affairs. For the purposes of exegesis, it separates disasters, mishaps and accidents into ‘natural’, ‘social’, ‘symbolic’ and ‘individual’ categories, before summarizing and interrogating the influential theoretical work of Karl Figlio in this field. In terms of conclusions, the article suggests a provisional social-historical methodology for the recovery and reconstruction of the individual ‘moment’ of the accident; proposes a breaking down of the barriers between ‘domestic’ and ‘non-domestic’ occurrences of this type; and analyses reasons for lack of scholarly interest in the area as a whole. Focused predominantly on Britain, the paper also draws selectively on European and extra-European experience; and deploys numerous examples derived from urban history in order to press home its major points.