A revisionist account of Zionist history, challenging the inevitability of a one-state solution, from a bold, path-breaking young scholar The Jewish nation-state has often been thought of as ...Zionism's end goal. In this bracing history of the idea of the Jewish state in modern Zionism, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century until the establishment of the state of Israel, Dmitry Shumsky challenges this deeply rooted assumption. In doing so, he complicates the narrative of the Zionist quest for full sovereignty, provocatively showing how and why the leaders of the prestate Zionist movement imagined, articulated, and promoted theories of self-determination in Palestine either as part of a multinational Ottoman state (1882-1917), or in the framework of multinational democracy. In particular, Shumsky focuses on the writings and policies of five key Zionist leaders from the Habsburg and Russian empires in central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-Leon Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha'am, Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and David Ben-Gurion-to offer a very pointed critique of Zionist historiography.
This essay considers Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera's "La novela del tranvía" (1882) in light of the literature of collective urban transportation in the nineteenth century. The first part of the study ...explores how the Mexican text represents the tram and how its narrator-passenger attempts to deal with the vastness and unfamiliarity of the urban space by projecting clichés and commonplaces onto his fellow travelers. The second part compares and contrasts the work with Benito Pérez Galdós's short story "La novela en el tranvía" (1871), which similarly features a narrator who projects plots onto other tram passengers. The essay concludes with some reflections on the esthetic classification of the Mexican work.
Originally published in 2003. In Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America Helen Tangires examines the role of the public marketplace—social and architectural—as a key site in ...the development of civic culture in America. More than simply places for buying and selling food, Tangires explains, municipally owned and operated markets were the common ground where citizens and government struggled to define the shared values of the community. Public markets were vital to civic policy and reflected the profound belief in the moral economy—the effort on the part of the municipality to maintain the social and political health of its community by regulating the ethics of trade in the urban marketplace for food. Tangires begins with the social, architectural, and regulatory components of the public market in the early republic, when cities embraced this ancient system of urban food distribution. By midcentury, the legalization of butcher shops in New York City and the incorporation of market house companies in Pennsylvania challenged the system and hastened the deregulation of this public service. Some cities demolished their marketing facilities or loosened restrictions on the food trades in an effort to deal with the privatization movement. However, several decades of experience with dispersed retailers, suburban slaughterhouses, and food transported by railroad proved disastrous to the public welfare, prompting cities and federal agencies to reclaim this urban civic space.
This essay highlights how nineteenth-century epidemic diseases catalyzed environmental thinking in architecture by examining air and vapor bathing technologies and their role in transmitting ...environmental medical principles into British building culture. Vapor baths were popular medical devices used to fortify a patient's health by passing hot or cold air charged with steam over the skin, a vital membrane through which impurities were thought to be excreted from the body. This essay discusses vapor bathing's role in establishing environmental mediation as an underlying principle of modern British architecture. It shows how bathing practices were adapted to deliver localized forms of atmospheric medicine inside buildings, making architectural interiors a key site for the formulation of Victorian ideas of public health. Bathing offers evidence of how the climate-controlled interior emerged out of a confluence of medical ecology, moral demography, and technical innovation.
The essay considers the claim that slavery played a leading role in the acceleration of US economic growth in the nineteenth century. Although popular among pro-slavery apologists, the proposition ...fails under rigorous historical scrutiny. The slave South discouraged immigration, underinvested in transportation infrastructure, and failed to educate the majority of its population. It is not even clear that the region produced more cotton than it would have under a counterfactual alternative settlement by free family farmers, on the free-state pattern. The grain of truth in recently popular narratives is that many northerners and business interests were complicit in the crime of slavery: routinely engaging in transactions with slaveholders, even promoting activities that facilitated slavery and the domestic slave trade. Complicity complicates simple historical moralism, but it is quite different from the notion that the prosperity of the nation as a whole derived from slavery in any fundamental way.
Despite his prolificacy, Washington Irving remained an underexamined figure among literary scholars at the time William L. Hedges published his definitive study of the author in 1965. Most ...contemporary scholars believed that Irving's central contribution to the American literary tradition was that his work was polished and suave. These scholars maintained that Irving's aristocratic sensibilities defined the stylistic choices of his literary works. To assume this, Hedges contends, is to both let the man and the work slip beyond one's grasp. Hedges demonstrates that much of Irving's work can be understood in the context of his conflict between federalist and conservative politics. Irving, in other words, found himself incapable of committing to a coherent set of beliefs or attitudes, and this cultural uneasiness manifested itself in his early work. Hedges's book tries to correct some of the misapprehension about Irving's place in nineteenth-century American literature.
An Open Access edition of this book is available on the
Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.
The world-historical significance of the Haitian Revolution is
now firmly established ...in mainstream history. Yet Haiti's
nineteenth-century has yet to receive its due, this despite
independent Haiti's vital importance as the first nation to
permanently ban slavery and its ongoing struggle for sovereignty in
the Atlantic World.
Louis-Joseph Janvier (1855-1911) is one of the foremost Haitian
intellectuals and diplomats of the late-nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. His prolific oeuvre offered enduring
challenges to racist slanders of Haiti and critiques of the global
inequalities that arose from European colonialism and the
Transatlantic Slave Trade. Through his writings, Janvier influenced
the international debates about slavery, race, nation, and empire
that shaped his era and, in many ways, remain unresolved today.
Arguably his most powerful work, Haiti for the Haitians
(1884) provides a searing critique of European and U.S.
imperialism, predatory finance capitalism, and Haiti's domestic
politics. It offers his vision of Haiti's future expressed through
a remarkable phrase: Haiti for the Haitians.
Haiti for the Haitians is the first major English
translation of Janvier. Accompanied by an introduction,
annotations, and an interdisciplinary collection of critical
essays, this volume offers unprecedented access to this vital
Haitian thinker and an important contribution to the scholarship on
Haiti's nineteenth century.
