The Roots and Varieties of Political Conservatism in India

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christophe Jaffrelot

A country that has not gone through a revolution, India has been the crucible of several reform movements as early as the nineteenth century. But none of them intended to break with the past. They even sometimes prepared the ground for revivalism. In parallel, Hindu traditionalism developed in reaction to social and cultural change. In the twentieth century, these schools of thought found political expressions in the Congress party where they inhibited the fights against the caste system and land reform. These trends continued after 1947, in reaction to Nehruvian views, till conservative Congressmen created the Swatantra party and then the Congress (O).

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald G. Knapp

AbstractAmerica’s first documented wooden covered bridge was erected at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1805. Hundreds were constructed within two decades and at least 10,000 by the later 1800s. As settlers moved West, broad rivers were crossed with inventive structures incorporating timber trusses ingeniously developed by carpenters. Called covered bridges because of the roof and siding needed to protect the timber trusses, they became ubiquitous features on the American landscape. Over the past two centuries, most covered bridges were lost to flood, ice, arson, lightening, decay, as well as “progress,” replaced by “modern” iron, concrete, and steel spans. Of some 700 covered bridges remaining, many are mere replicas of their original forms no longer supported by timber trusses. Genuine historic bridges remain largely from the last half of the 1800s while civic boosterism has led to claims of earlier dates with often questionable authenticity. This essay presents three wooden covered bridges constructed in the 1820s along a 10-mile stretch of the Wallkill River in New Paltz, New York. Of the three, only Perrine’s Bridge, constructed first in 1821 and covered in 1822, is still standing with intact Burr timber trusses. Perrine’s is an iconic structure with exceptional heritage value because of authentic re-building and restoration in 1834, 1846, 1917, and 1968. Using documentary records, this essay establishes an accurate intertwined chronology for the three bridges, detailing nineteenth century building practices and contentious mid-twentieth century struggles pitting preservationists wanting authentic restoration against those wanting removal.


ICONI ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 126-136
Author(s):  
Nadezhda A. Tsareva ◽  

The relevance of the topic is due to the attention to trends in the development of culture. The synthesis of cultural forms is one of the important factors in the dynamics of culture. The teaching of Russian symbolism about the synthesis of cultures was analyzed in the scientifi c literature of the entire twentieth century. The novelty of the research is to compare the idea of art synthesis in the early twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. Two aspects of the idea of synthesis are considered: 1) the relevance of the idea of art synthesis in the postmodern era; 2) music and the visual series as organizing centers of art synthesis in the era of information technology. The purpose of this article is to examine the teaching of Russian symbolism about the integration of various forms of art and the features of synthesis in the postmodern era. The idea of integrating cultural forms was one of the key elements in Russian symbolism at the beginning of the twentieth century and was interpreted as a real prospect for the development of culture. In a broad sense, synthesis in symbolism meant the integrity of life, the integration of all spheres of human activity, the “organic connection” of cultures of the past and present. The synthesis can be realized on the basis of the art of symbolism, which can create a new culture. The synthesis of arts was understood as the beginning of the formation of a new culture. The core of the synthesis of arts, the symbolists saw music. Postmodern art is characterized by synthetism. Computer and information technologies create new forms of synthetic media art. The video series becomes the center of integration construction of postmodern audiovisual culture forms. The symbolist idea of the synthesis of arts as the beginning of cultural change in the postmodern era remains a utopian project. But the creation of new art forms in postmodern culture i s based on integration. New technologies are becoming a factor that determines the specifi cs of the synthesis of arts and infl uences the dynamics of culture. Both in Russian symbolism and in modern art, the goal of art synthesis is to present an integral image of the world, to form a system of worldview attitudes.


2020 ◽  
pp. 303-308
Author(s):  
Xiaoqun Xu

The conclusion points out the multidimensional interactions of many factors in the functions of Chinese law and justice in the past and present and delineates four overlapping historical contexts for an understanding of such functions. These are the indigenous traditions in the long history of China; Western influences from the nineteenth century and especially on the transformations in the twentieth century; interactions between lawmakers and state agents, and between state actions and societal responses; and the reality of justice being done in relative and imperfect ways under the best circumstances, due to human fallibility.


Author(s):  
A. Zarankin ◽  
Melisa A. Salerno

Antarctica was the last continent to be known. Human encounters with the region acquired different characteristics over time. Within the framework of dominant narratives, the early ‘exploitation’ of the territory was given less attention than late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘exploration’. Nineteenth-century exploitation was especially associated with sealing on the South Shetland Islands. Dominant narratives on the period refer to the captains of sealing vessels, the discovery of geographical features, the volume of resources obtained. However, they do not consider the life of the ordinary sealers who lived and worked on the islands. This chapter aims to show the power of archaeology to shed light on these ‘invisible people’ and their forgotten stories. It holds that archaeology offers a possibility for reimagining the past of Antarctica, calling for a revision of traditional narratives.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43
Author(s):  
Michael E. Scharf ◽  
Brittany F. Peterson

Termites have long been studied for their symbiotic associations with gut microbes. In the late nineteenth century, this relationship was poorly understood and captured the interest of parasitologists such as Joseph Leidy; this research led to that of twentieth-century biologists and entomologists including Cleveland, Hungate, Trager, and Lüscher. Early insights came via microscopy, organismal, and defaunation studies, which led to descriptions of microbes present, descriptions of the roles of symbionts in lignocellulose digestion, and early insights into energy gas utilization by the host termite. Focus then progressed to culture-dependent microbiology and biochemical studies of host–symbiont complementarity, which revealed specific microhabitat requirements for symbionts and noncellulosic mechanisms of symbiosis (e.g., N2 fixation). Today, knowledge on termite symbiosis has accrued exponentially thanks to omic technologies that reveal symbiont identities, functions, and interdependence, as well as intricacies of host–symbiont complementarity. Moving forward, the merging of classical twentieth-century approaches with evolving omic tools should provide even deeper insights into host–symbiont interplay.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-102
Author(s):  
Jossianna Arroyo

This response essay reviews the six contributions to the special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation.” These key interventions on the Spanish Caribbean Confederation projects in the nineteenth century and the West Indies Federation in the twentieth century provoke the following questions: Could we call these two Caribbean confederation projects failures if their centrality in Caribbean political imaginaries suggests otherwise? What are some of the insights that these two projects could offer to Caribbean sociohistorical processes, culture, and political developments? Even though these two projects seem to share a similar political goal, they are also radically different. The author reviews the contributions to the special section in dialogue with examples from Puerto Rico in order to assess the critical intervention in theories of nationalism produced by the past projects of federation and the possible futures they give rise to.


Author(s):  
Francis Robinson

In his Islam in Modern History, published in 1957, yet still a work remarkable for its insights, Wilfred Cantwell Smith refers to the extraordinary energy which had surged through the Muslim world with increasing force in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He talks of:dynamism, the appreciation of activity for its own sake, and at the level of feeling a stirring of intense, even violent, emotionalism…The transmutation of Muslim society from its early nineteenth-century stolidity to its twentieth-century ebullience is no mean achievement. The change has been everywhere in evidence.This surge of energy is closely associated with a shift in the balance of Muslim piety from an other-worldly towards a this-worldly focus. By this I mean a devaluing of a faith of contemplation of God's mysteries and of belief in His will to shape human life, and a valuing instead of a faith in which Muslims were increasingly aware that it was they, and only they, who could act to fashion an Islamic society on earth. This shift of emphasis has been closely associated with a new idea of great power, the caliphate of man. In the absence of Muslim power, in the absence, for the Sunnis at least, of a caliph, however symbolic, to guide, shape and protect the community, this awesome task now fell to each individual Muslim. I hazard to suggest that this shift towards a this-worldly piety, and the new responsibilities for Muslims that came with it, is the most important change that Muslims have wrought in the practice of their faith over the past one thousand years. It is a change full of possibilities for the future.


1997 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 585-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Murray

Whether anthropometric-mortality risk relationships as found in present day populations also characterized past populations is disputed. This article finds U-shaped body mass index (BMI)-mortality risk relationships among nineteenth-century men that were similar to such relationships as found in twentieth-century men. No relationship between height and mortality could be detected. This article infers from the socioeconomic homogeneity of the sample that the BMI-mortality risk relationship, although apparently invariant with respect to time, is driven by noneconomic factors.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin G. Barnhurst

Since the nineteenth century, more kinds of news outlets and ways of presenting news grew along with telegraphic, telephonic, and digital communications, leading journalists, policymakers, and critics to assume that more events became available than ever before. Attentive audiences say in surveys that they feel overloaded with information, and journalists tend to agree. Although news seems to have become more focused on events, several studies analyzing U.S. news content for the past century and a half show that journalists have been including fewer events within their coverage. In newspapers the events in stories declined over the twentieth century, and national newscasts decreased the share of event coverage since 1968 on television and since 1980 on public radio. Mainstream news websites continued the trend through the 2000s. Instead of providing access to more of the “what”, journalists moved from event-centered to meaning-centered news, still claiming to give a factual account in their stories, built on a foundation of American realism. As journalists concentrated on fewer and bigger events to compete, audiences turned away from mainstream news to look for what seems like an abundance of events in digital media.


2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Paul J Maglione

Multiple sclerosis has a long, fascinating, serendipi- tous, and well-documented history. The first recorded mention of the disease can be dated back to the fifteenth century, while a truly exhaustive investigation of the disorder began with the nineteenth century’s burgeoning neurologists. These records reveal a fascinating story of meticulous science aimed at comprehending a truly perplexing illness, one that even today is not completely understood. The great nineteenth century French neurologist Jean-Marie Charcot became very interested in studying this disease, and through his celebrity garnered much attention to a previously unknown affliction. Here we review a story of pioneering research that grants brief tribute to some of the more remarkable experiments, wondering if ideas born in the past may help develop solutions in the future. 


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