Fugitive Borders explores a new archive of 19th-century autobiographical writing by black authors in North America. For that purpose, Nele Sawallisch examines four different texts written by formerly ...enslaved men in the 1850s that emerged in or around the historical region of Canada West (now known as Ontario) and that defy the genre conventions of the classic slave narrative. Instead, these texts demonstrate originality in expressing complex, often ambivalent attitudes towards the so-called Canadian Promised Land and contribute to a form of textual community-building across national borders. In the context of emerging national discourses before Canada's Confederation in 1867, they offer alternatives to the hegemonic narrative of the white settler nation.
In science, sometimes it is best to keep things simple. Initially discrediting the discovery of neurons in jellyfish, mid-nineteenth-century scientists grouped jellyfish, comb-jellies, hydra, and sea ...anemones together under one term - "coelenterates" - and deemed these animals too similar to plants to warrant a nervous system. In Dawn of the Neuron, Michel Anctil shows how Darwin's theory of evolution completely eradicated this idea and cleared the way for the modern study of the neuron. Once zoologists accepted the notion that varying levels of animal complexity could evolve, they began to use simple-structured creatures such as coelenterates and sponges to understand the building blocks of more complicated nervous systems. Dawn of the Neuron provides fascinating insights into the labours and lives of scientists who studied coelenterate nervous systems over several generations, and who approached the puzzling origin of the first nerve cells through the process outlined in evolutionary theory. Anctil also reveals how these scientists, who were willing to embrace improved and paradigm-changing scientific methods, still revealed their cultural backgrounds, their societal biases, and their attachments to schools of thought and academic traditions while presenting their ground-breaking work. Their attitudes toward the neuron doctrine - where neurons are individual, self-contained cells - proved decisive in the exploration of how neurons first emerged. Featuring photographs and historical sketches to illustrate this quest for knowledge, Dawn of the Neuron is a remarkably in-depth exploration of the link between Darwin's theory of evolution and pioneering studies and understandings of the first evolved nervous systems
The Coach Fellas are known to almost all tourists who traverse the Irish countryside. Ostensibly bus drivers, they are also the tour guides who provide the crucial component in the branding of ...“people, place, and pace” upon which Irish heritage tourism depends. Kelli Costa’s ethnography of these highly trained and informed working class men highlights a previously ignored component of the tourism industry. She also demonstrates their importance in providing a visitor-specific vision of heritage that contrasts with the realities of contemporary economic development.
This valuable book considers the reception of the composer, pianist, organist and conductor Felix Mendelssohn in nineteenth-century England, and his influence on English musical culture. Despite the ...composer's immense popularity in the nation during his lifetime and in the decades following his death, this is the first book to deal exclusively with the subject of Mendelssohn in England. Mendelssohn's highly successful ten trips to Britain, between 1829 and 1847, are documented and discussed in detail, as are his relationships with English musicians and a variety of prominent figures. An introductory chapter describes the musical life of England (especially London) at the time of Mendelssohn's arrival and the last two chapters deal with the composer's posthumous reception, to the end of the Victorian era. Eatock reveals Mendelssohn as a catalyst for the expansion of English musical culture in the nineteenth century. In taking this position, the author challenges much of the extant literature on the subject and provides an engaging story that brings Mendelssohn and his English experiences to life.
Complementing other published works about travel by nineteenth-century women writers by locating and creating 'space' for Japan is missing within recent critical discourses on travel writing, it ...examines narratives of women writers who travelled to Japan from the mid-1850s onwards, and became a highly desirable travel destination thereafter.
This edition of his journal is perhaps the first serious scholarly effort to place Tocqueville's journey to Ireland in its proper intellectual, geographical, and historical context.
In 1845, seven years after fleeing bondage in Maryland, Frederick Douglass was in his late twenties and already a celebrated lecturer across the northern United States. The recent publication of his ...groundbreakingNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slavehad incited threats to his life, however, and to place himself out of harm's way he embarked on a lecture tour of the British Isles, a journey that would span seventeen months and change him as a man and a leader in the struggle for equality.
In the first major narrative account of a transformational episode in the life of this extraordinary American, Tom Chaffin chronicles Douglass's 1845-47 lecture tour of Ireland, Scotland, and England. It was, however, the Emerald Isle, above all, that affected Douglass--from its wild landscape ("I have travelled almost from the hill of 'Howth' to the Giant's Causeway") to the plight of its people, with which he found parallels to that of African Americans. Writing in theSan Francisco Chronicle,critic David Kipen has called Chaffin a "thorough and uncommonly graceful historian." Possessed of an epic, transatlantic scope, Chaffin's new book makes Douglass's historic journey vivid for the modern reader and reveals how the former slave's growing awareness of intersections between Irish, American, and African history shaped the rest of his life.
The experience accelerated Douglass's transformation from a teller of his own life story into a commentator on contemporary issues--a transition discouraged during his early lecturing days by white colleagues at the American Anti-Slavery Society. ("Give us the facts," he had been instructed, "we will take care of the philosophy.") As the tour progressed, newspaper coverage of his passage through Ireland and Great Britain enhanced his stature dramatically. When he finally returned to America he had the platform of an international celebrity.
Drawn from hundreds of letters, diaries, and other primary-source documents--many heretofore unpublished--this far-reaching tale includes vivid portraits of personages who shaped Douglass and his world, including the Irish nationalists Daniel O'Connell and John Mitchel, British prime minister Robert Peel, abolitionist John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln.
Giant's Causeway--which includes an account of Douglass's final, bittersweet, visit to Ireland in 1887--shows how experiences under foreign skies helped him hone habits of independence, discretion, compromise, self-reliance, and political dexterity. Along the way, it chronicles Douglass's transformation from activist foot soldier to moral visionary.
This work depicts Otto Bauer as the main politician of the SDAP and attempts a critical-analytical interpretation of his socio-political theories, which are shown against the background of the ...debates within the First and Second Internationals, political events within the SDAP, the international workers' movement, and the socio-historical processes in Austria and Europe at the time.
Gegenstand des Buches ist die Darstellung Otto Bauers als führende Gestalt des Austromarxismus und der SDAP, sowie die kritisch-analytische Lesart seiner philosophisch-historischen, wirtschaftlichen, soziologischen und sozialpolitischen Theorien, die vor dem Hintergrund der damaligen Diskussion in der II. und der III. Internationale, der politischen Ereignisse in der SDAP, der internationalen Arbeiterbewegung und den sozial-geschichtlich-politischen Prozessen in Österreich und in Europa gezeigt wurden. Der Schwerpunkt des Buches wurden auf die Analysen Bauers: Philosophisch-ethischen und historiosophischen Erörterungen, der Theorie des Imperialismus, der Theorie der Nation, der Lösung der Nationalitätenfrage, der Auffassung von den Wegen zu Sozialismus, der Kriegs- und Friedensfrage, der faschistischen Theorien, sowie auf seine politische Tätigkeit gelegt.
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