Exeter-Hall Science and Evangelical Rhetoric in Mid-Victorian Britain

In the early and mid-Victorian period public pronouncements by evangelicals were often described as the antithesis of rational speech. The voice of science, on the other hand, was routinely equated with the voice of reason. This disparity was particularly clear in satirical and critical commentary about the platform rhetoric associated with London’s Exeter Hall, a key meeting place for evangelicals and a metonym for evangelical expressions of Christian belief. It was against this backdrop that the fledgling Young Men’s Christian Association inaugurated a popular series of lectures in 1845. Held in Exeter Hall from 1848, the series ran until 1865 and proved to be immensely popular. By investigating the ways in which the promotion of science was combined with religious exhortation in the YMCA lectures, this paper examines how evangelicals positioned themselves with respect to the growing cultural authority of science. The paper also argues that these efforts were indelibly marked by the Hall and the communicative medium in which they were made. As such, the paper sheds light on the significance of platform culture within and beyond evangelicalism and on the importance of venue and audience in understanding science and religion relations in an age of lecturing.

Low-cost digital signature architecture suitable for radio frequency identification tags

Continuing achievements in hardware technology are bringing ubiquitous computing closer to reality. The notion of a connected, interactive and autonomous environment is common to all sensor networks, biosystems and radio frequency identification (RFID) devices, and the emergence of significant deployments and sophisticated applications can be expected. However, as more information is collected and transmitted, security issues will become vital for such a fully connected environment. In this study the authors consider adding security features to low-cost devices such as RFID tags. In particular, the authors consider the implementation of a digital signature architecture that can be used for device authentication, to prevent tag cloning, and for data authentication to prevent transmission forgery. The scheme is built around the signature variant of the cryptoGPS identification scheme and the SHA-1 hash function. When implemented on 130 nm CMOS the full design uses 7494 gates and consumes 4.72 mu W of power, making it smaller and more power efficient than previous low-cost digital signature designs. The study also presents a low-cost SHA-1 hardware architecture which is the smallest standardised hash function design to date.

The Decline of the Cow: Agricultural and Settlement Change in Early Medieval Ireland

This article considers cows and dairying as the basis a17of value system in early societies, particularly in Ireland. Only in a very few instances is it possible to demonstrate that such systems existed. When it does, it can be shown that cows and dairying were imbedded in the social or religious institutions of these cultures. Cattle had a value and meaning much greater than their economic worth in terms of food, hides, tallow etc. Such a systems, however, does not allow economic development as dairy produce does not easily lend itself to the production, and accumulation, of significant surplus nor is dairy produce particularly suitable for economic expansion based on trade. Its perishable nature militates against both roles. In order to develop political power that is based on economic power and wealth it is necessary to change the emphasis from livestock to cereal production.

Towards a Poetics of the Cinematographic Frame

In delineating a poetics of the cinematographic frame, this article presents a typology of framing styles, and demonstrates how filmmakers use the frame as an expressive resource and how the frame uses them. The examples discussed are modernist in orientation, and each has a particular association with a city - its history, architecture, and cultural character. Although it is common practice to refer to some framing situations as instances of 'deframing', the article enquires into the problematic nature of this term, suggesting alternative visual and cinematographic contexts more amenable to its deconstructive implications. As the boundaries between cinema and the other arts continue to converge and relations between frame, image, and screen become more complex, this article offers a reassessment of some first principles of film language, especially the aesthetic integrity of the cinematographic frame.

Covenanter Politics: Evangelicalism, Political Liberalism and Ulster Presbyterians, 1798-1914

Historians of Ireland have devoted considerable attention to the Presbyterian origins of modern Irish republicanism in the 1790s and their overwhelming support for the Union with Great Britain in the 1880s. On the one hand, it has been argued that conservative politics came to dominate nineteenth-century Presbyterianism in the form of Henry Cooke who combined conservative evangelical religion with support for the established order. On the other hand, historians have long acknowledged the continued importance of liberal and radical impulses amongst Presbyterians. Few historians of the nineteenth century have attempted to bring these two stories together and to describe the relationship between the religion and politics of Presbyterians along the lines suggested by scholars of Presbyterian radicalism in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. This article argues that a distinctive form of Presbyterian evangelicalism developed in the nineteenth century that sought to bring the denomination back to the theological and spiritual priorities of seventeenth-century Scottish and Irish Presbyterianism. By doing so, it encouraged many Presbyterians to get involved in movements for reform and liberal politics. Supporters of ‘Covenanter Politics’ utilised their denominational principles and traditions as the basis for political involvement and as a rhetoric of opposition to Anglican privilege and Catholic tyranny. These could be the prime cause of Presbyterian opposition to the infringement of their rights, such as the marriage controversy and the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in the early 1840s, and they could also be employed as a language of opposition in response to broader social and political developments, such as the demands for land reform stimulated by the agricultural depression that accompanied the Famine. Despite their opposition to ascendancy, however, the Covenanter Politics of Presbyterian Liberals predisposed them towards pan-protestant unionism against the threat of ‘Rome Rule’.

Men, Women and an Integrated History of the Russian Revolutionary Movement

Since its emergence as a discipline in the 1960s, women’s history has had a profound effect on the study of the past. Scholarship on women’s experiences of and contributions to the Russian revolutionary movement has increased exponentially since the publication of a number of biographies of Aleksandra Kollontai in the 1970s and 1980s and a comprehensive picture has emerged of women’s involvement in all the major revolutionary parties, as leading figures as well as rank and file activists. Despite this wealth of historical discovery, remarkably little has found its way into so-called ‘general’ histories of the revolution. An integrated history, which is the ultimate aim of women’s history, has yet to be produced for the Russian revolutionary movement, even though recent prosopographical studies of revolutionary women have made clear the numerous ways in which men and women cooperated and interacted on a daily basis in the underground. This article explores the nature of and reasons for this failure, makes a case for why incorporating women’s experiences into the grand narrative of the Russian revolution is important and discusses how this might be achieved.

Irish social thought and the relief of poverty, 1847-1880

This paper investigates the way in which the ‘problem of poverty’ in Ireland was encountered, constructed and debated by members of the Irish intellectual and political elite in the decades between the Great Famine and the outbreak of the land war in the late 1870s. This period witnessed acute social upheavals in Ireland, from the catastrophic nadir of the Famine, through the much-vaunted economic recovery of the 1850s–1860s, to the near-famine panic of the late 1870s (itself prefigured by a lesser agricultural crisis in 1859–63). The paper focuses on how a particular elite group – the ‘Dublin School’ of political economists and their circle, and most prominently William Neilson Hancock and John Kells Ingram – sought to define and investigate the changing ‘problem’, shape public attitudes towards the legitimacy of welfare interventions and lobby state officials in the making of poor law policy in this period. It suggests that the crisis of 1859–63 played a disproportionate role in the reevaluation of Irish poor relief and in promoting a campaign for an ‘anglicisation’ of poor law measures and practice in Ireland.

Popular Writers: Women Historians, the Academic Community and National History Writing

The research for this paper formed part of the European Science Foundation project on Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe. Using data generated by the project, the article traces the emergence of professional academic women historians in twentieth-century European universities. It argues that the marginalisation of women historians in academia until the 1980s led women history graduates to develop research-based careers outside the university. In particular, the ambiguous attitude of academic historians towards popular history writing opened up a space for the woman author. The article analyses the careers and writings of five historians who pursued very successful careers as authors of popular history in England, France, Ireland and Scotland. They were among the first 'public' historians.

Acoustic solitary waves in dusty and/or multi-ion plasmas with cold, adiabatic, and hot constituents

Large nonlinear acoustic waves are discussed in a four-component plasma, made up of two superhot isothermal species, and two species with lower thermal velocities, being, respectively, adiabatic and cold. First a model is considered in which the isothermal species are electrons and ions, while the cooler species are positive and/or negative dust. Using a Sagdeev pseudopotential formalism, large dust-acoustic structures have been studied in a systematic way, to delimit the compositional parameter space in which they can be found, without restrictions on the charges and masses of the dust species and their charge signs. Solitary waves can only occur for nonlinear structure velocities smaller than the adiabatic dust thermal velocity, leading to a novel dust-acoustic-like mode based on the interplay between the two dust species. If the cold and adiabatic dust are oppositely charged, only solitary waves exist, having the polarity of the cold dust, their parameter range being limited by infinite compression of the cold dust. However, when the charges of the cold and adiabatic species have the same sign, solitary structures are limited for increasing Mach numbers successively by infinite cold dust compression, by encountering the adiabatic dust sonic point, and by the occurrence of double layers. The latter have, for smaller Mach numbers, the same polarity as the charged dust, but switch at the high Mach number end to the opposite polarity. Typical Sagdeev pseudopotentials and solitary wave profiles have been presented. Finally, the analysis has nowhere used the assumption that the dust would be much more massive than the ions and hence, one or both dust species can easily be replaced by positive and/or negative ions and the conclusions will apply to that plasma model equally well. This would cover a number of different scenarios, such as, for example, very hot electrons and ions, together with a mix of adiabatic ions and dust (of either polarity) or a very hot electron-positron mix, together with a two-ion mix or together with adiabatic ions and cold dust (both of either charge sign), to name but some of the possible plasma compositions.