Tarnishing the Golden Stool

This thesis deals with the Asante federation (in modern-day Ghana ) in the nineteenth century, within the wider context of a general crisis of authority in African states in the later partof the century. African states were fighting against the external pressures of European imperial expansion while facing internal challenges to their structures of power. Asante was one of these states and this thesis examines why, because of a particular combination of internal and external challenges, Asante was unable to maintain its independence at the end of the nineteenth century.

Sexing the Male: Manifestations of Masculinity in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Villette

Abstract: This project considers Emily and Charlotte Brontë's constructions of masculinity in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Villette. There is a vast proliferation of scholarship focusing on gender in the Victorian Era, but as much of this criticism focuses on women, the analysis of heterosexual masculinity in these novels provides a unique perspective on the complexities involved in gender constructions during this period. Masculine identity was in a transitory state in the early nineteenth century, as Romantic values were replaced by Victorian conceptions of masculinity, largely influencing the expectations of men. This paper argues that based on an understanding of femininity and masculinity as defined in relation to each other, the Brontë heroes look to the female characters as a source of stability to define themselves against, constructing a stagnant feminine role to frame an understanding of how masculinity was changing. The female characters resist this categorization, however, never allowing the men to fully classify them into stable feminine roles, which leads both shifting gender roles to intertwine and collapse in the novels, undermining any conceptualization of a stable or universal understanding of gender. The paper considers the role of masculinity based in class, relationships with women, and the understanding of sexual passion, to argue that the Brontës' portrayal of men emulates the anxieties surrounding the shift from Romantic to Victorian values of manliness, ultimately rejecting any stable definition of the nineteenth-century man.

Muslim Literature in Serbo-Croat in Relation to the Serbian and Croatian Literatures

Mr. Tutnjevic set out to define the position of the Muslim community within the overall framework of literature in Serbo-Croat, particularly in terms of its relation to the Serbian and Croatian Literatures, on the basis of an extensive comparative study of primary and secondary sources relating to the most important Muslim writers in Serbo-Croat. Carried out against the background of an unprecedented civil war between these national groups, his research focused rather on the encounters between them on the historical and literary stages. He concludes that the Muslim national community was established and developed on a foundation of Slavic self-consciousness and oriental influences. The constantly changing relative weights of the influence of these two factors on the community shaped the specific nature of its literature as well as its place in the cultural environment of its neighbouring national communities, and Muslim literary traditions are inseparably linked with the total literature in Serbo-Croat. A real Muslim literature first emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and virtually all authors writing about this at the time emphasised its educational character and its importance for the process of national identification. At the same time there were visible results of the self-awareness process in which Muslim authors affiliated with Serbian or Croatian literary tradition, sometimes even substituting one with another. During the period between the two world wars Muslim literature reached maturity and while Muslim authors generally focused on their national milieu in terms of subject matter, their forms of expression and their understanding of the function of literature showed the same preoccupation as other Yugoslav authors of the period. When the ideological and class-related concept of society replaced the national character of literature after 1945, Muslim writers found themselves in the same position as writers from other ethnic groups. As in earlier times, writers sought to present themselves to as wide a market as possible and would provide grounds for consideration as Serbian or Croatian writers, sometimes even explicitly presenting themselves as such. Most of the writers of this period are described at times as Yugoslav, at others as Bosnian-Herzegovina, and at still others as Serbian, Croatian or Muslim. Mr. Tutnjevic quotes, for example, the case of Camil Sijaric, a Muslim from Sandzak who also wrote in Sarajevo and falls within the boundaries of Bosnian-Herzegovnian literature, but is also described as a Muslim, Montenegrin and Serbian writer, together with a number of other such examples. An understanding of this process provides the basis for a completely new perception of the intertwining of Serbian, Croatian and Muslim literary traditions, without the earlier visible prejudice on all three sides.

Federal Authority and the Development of Corporate Mining, 1807-1847

While the 1913-1914 copper country miners’ strike undoubtedly plays an important role in the identity of the Keweenaw Peninsula, it is worth noting that the model of mining corporations employing large numbers of laborers was not a foregone conclusion in the history of American mining. Between 1807 and 1847, public mineral lands in Missouri, in the Upper Mississippi Valley, and along the southern shore of Lake Superior were reserved from sale and subject to administration by the nation’s executive branch. By decree of the federal government, miners in these regions were lessees, not landowners. Yet, in the Wisconsin lead region especially, federal authorities reserved for independent “diggers” the right to prospect virtually unencumbered. In doing so, they preserved a comparatively egalitarian system in which the ability to operate was determined as much by luck as by financial resources. A series of revolts against federal authority in the early nineteenth century gradually encouraged officers in Washington to build a system in the copper country in which only wealthy investors could marshal the resources to both obtain permits and actually commence mining operations. This paper will therefore explore the role of the federal government in establishing a leasing system for public mineral lands in the years previous to the California Gold Rush, highlighting the development of corporate mining which ultimately set a stage for the wave of miners’ strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Role of Fraternal Organisation in Migration and Informal Labour Organisations in Mining Communities: Cornwall, the Keweenaw, and California Compared

During the second half of the nineteenth century fraternal and benevolent associations of numerous descriptions grew and prospered in mining communities everywhere. They played an important, but neglected role, in assisting transatlantic migration and movement between mining districts as well as building social capital within emerging mining communities. They helped to build bridges between different ethnic communities, provided conduits between labour and management, and networked miners into the non-mining community. Their influence spread beyond the adult males that made up most of their membership to their wives and families and provided levels of social and economic support otherwise unobtainable at that time. Of course, the influence of these organisations could also be divisive where certain groups or religions were excluded and they may have worked to exacerbate, as much as ameliorate, the problems of community development. This paper will examine some of these issues by looking particularly at the role of Freemasonry and Oddfellowry in Cornwall, Calumet, and Nevada City between 1860 and 1900. Work on fraternity in the Keweenaw was undertaken in Houghton some years ago with a grant from the Copper Country Archive and has since been continued by privately funded research in California and other Western mining states. Some British aspects of this research can be found in my article on mining industrial relations in Labour History Review April 2006

Construction and Operation of a Laboaratory Size Thum Cell

Electrolytic silver refining was not perfected until the end of the nineteenth century. During the process of development, two systems of silver refining have come into prominence: the Moebius and the Thum types.

Empowering Interactions. Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State. in Europe 1300-1900

The emergence of the state in Europe is a topic that has engaged historians since the establishment of the discipline of history. Yet the primary focus of has nearly always been to take a top-down approach, whereby the formation and consolidation of public institutions is viewed as the outcome of activities by princes and other social elites. Yet, as the essays in this collection show, such an approach does not provide a complete picture. By investigating the importance of local and individual initiatives that contributed to state building from the late middle ages through to the nineteenth century, this volume shows how popular pressure could influence those in power to develop new institutional structures. By not privileging the role of warfare and of elite coercion for state building, it is possible to question the traditional top-down model and explore the degree to which central agencies might have been more important for state representation than for state practice. The studies included in this collection treat many parts of Europe and deal with different phases in the period between the late middle ages and the nineteenth century. Beginning with a critical review of state historiography, the introduction then sets out the concept of 'empowering interactions' which is then explored in the subsequent case studies and a number of historiographical, methodological and theoretical essays. Taken as a whole this collection provides a fascinating platform to reconsider the relationships between top-down and bottom-up processes in the history of the European state.

What’s the Problem? Precarious Youth: Marginalisation, Criminalisation and Racialisation.

Since the nineteenth century invention of adolescence, young people have been consistently identified as social problems in western societies. Their contemporary status as a focus of fear and anxiety is, in that sense, nothing new. In this paper, I try to combine this sense of historical recurrence about the youth problem with some questions about what is different about the present – asking what is distinctive about the shape of the youth problem now? This is a difficult balance to strike, and what I have to say will probably lean more towards an emphasis on the historical conditions and routes of the youth problem. That balance reflects my own orientations and knowledge (I am not expert on the contemporary conditions of being young). But it also arises from my belief that much contemporary social science is profoundly forgetful. An enthusiasm for stressing the newness, or novelty, of the present connects many varieties of contemporary scholarship. One result is the construction of what Janet Fink and I have referred to as ‘sociological time’ in which

Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia

Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between ad 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period ad 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

Floods of the Upper Danube River and Its Tributaries and Their Impact on Urban Economies (c. 1350–1600): The Examples of the Towns of Krems/Stein and Wels (Austria)

This paper examines the impact of disastrous and ‘ordinary’ floods on human societies in what is now Austria. The focus is on urban areas and their neighbourhoods. Examining institutional sources such as accounts of the bridge masters, charters, statutes and official petitions, it can be shown that city communities were well acquainted with this permanent risk: in fact, an office was established for the restoration of bridges and the maintenance of water defences and large depots for timber and water pipes ensured that the reconstruction of bridges and the system of water supply could start immediately after the floods had subsided. Carpenters and similar groups gained 10 to 20 per cent of their income from the repair of bridges and other flood damage. The construction of houses in endangered zones was adapted in order to survive the worst case experiences. Thus, we may describe those communities living along the central European rivers as ‘cultures of flood management’. This special knowledge vanished, however, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, when river regulations gave the people a false feeling of security.