scholarly journals Framing the Latin American nutrition transition in a historical perspective, 1850 to the present

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-253
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Ablard

Abstract This paper argues that many of the foundations and trends that led to the rise in obesity and other diet-related health problems in Latin America began to develop in the late nineteenth century. The tendency towards presentism in the nutrition transition literature provides a much abbreviated and limited history of changes in diet and weight. Whereas medical and nutrition researchers have tended to emphasize the recent onset of the crisis, a historical perspective suggests that increasingly global food sourcing prompted changes in foodways and a gradual “fattening” of Latin America. This paper also provides a methodological and historiographic exploration of how to historicize the nutrition transition, drawing on a diverse array of sources from pre-1980 to the present.

Author(s):  
Nicola Miller

This chapter recounts the Latin American countries that welcomed foreign innovation and expertise for technically demanding infrastructure projects. It mentions how the American continent's first railways were built by Spanish American engineers under contract to the respective states, contrary to the common belief that British or US American companies always led the way. It also focuses on the visibility and intensity of public concern about the relationship between science and sovereignty in late nineteenth-century Latin America. The chapter reviews the overlooked history of resistance in Latin American countries on handing over infrastructure projects to private companies, especially if they were foreign owned. It disputes conceptions of the role of the state and provides further evidence for the argument that free-market liberals did not have their own way in nineteenth-century Latin America.


Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu

This was the way that one of the executive members of the Swiss National Museum phrased, at the end of the nineteenth century, the changes that had taken place in the previous decades: the interest in the national past was replacing the former emphasis on the Great Civilizations. Another transformation that had occurred was that the study of prehistory, rather than the history of the Roman and medieval periods, was definitively on the agenda. This change of emphasis, which took place between the 1860s and 1880s, had been in motion throughout the century but had finally crystallized in the last two decades of the century. By then, nationalism had transformed its character into a predominantly conservative doctrine. Another adjustment was also apparent. The acceptance of evolutionism had emerged as a major scientific theory to explain change. Issues of nationalism, regionalism, and imperialism became intertwined with scientific theory and further nourished the interest in the remote past. The development of methods to study evolution in the natural sciences promoted a scientific approach to the prehistoric period. At the same time, this affected attitudes towards the Roman and the medieval past. In this chapter, therefore, I reject the view expressed by other historians of archaeology such as Trigger (1989: 148) and to a certain degree Sklenár (1983: 123–6), who think that nationalism constituted a threat to cultural evolutionism and its eventual dismissal. This, they think, took place when scholars moved towards the adoption of the culture-historical perspective in the first decades of the twentieth century. The following pages will reveal, however, that the belief in evolutionism was not contrary to the nationalist cause. Late nineteenth-century archaeologists believed in the evolutionary theories to a greater or lesser extent. Despite this, they also became deeply implicated in the construction of their national past, to a degree not seen in previous decades. Culture-history did not oppose evolutionism; it accepted its tenets and moved beyond them.


1969 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
Richard C. Howard

Many of us who have studied the modern history of China first learned of the late nineteenth-century reform movement in texts with chapters or sections entitled, “The Hundred Days of Reform,” or “The Reform Movement of 1898.” In such works our attention was directed to that group of politically inexperienced idealists who sought to impose upon a recalcitrant bureaucracy and apathetic populace a series of reforms designed to rescue the empire from impending dismemberment at the hands of foreign powers. The main emphasis of these standard accounts was upon the events of 1898 and their significance in China's political history. During the past twenty years, however, scholarly interest in the reformers has shifted from a preoccupation with their activities in 1898 to a more general consideration of their intellectual antecedents and the ideological content of their reform programs. Studies along these lines have placed the events of 1898 in a broader historical perspective—as the climax of a movement that was more than a decade in the making. This recent trend in scholarship is reflected in the four papers of this symposium. Separately and collectively, these papers confirm what earlier studies have suggested, that the reformers' objectives in 1898 can best be understood in the context of an intellectual movement that assumed its distinctive characteristics during the decade of the 1890's.


Author(s):  
Michael B. Collins

This article considers the friendship between the Cuban leader José Martí and the US journalist Charles Anderson Dana in relation to questions of transnationalism, print culture, modernist aesthetics, and the politics of dissent during the era of the Cuban War of Independence (1895–8). It investigates the radical potential and aesthetic difficulties of rendering genuine affection in print at a time in which American friendliness towards Cuba often served to mask imperialist intentions. I offer a reading of Charles Dana’s obituary for José Martí as a text that destabilizes assumptions about Cuban–American relations in the late nineteenth century by presenting an alternative political vision that incorporated the possibility of an autonomous Cuban subjectivity. In doing this, I resurrect the work of Charles Dana as a proto-modernist alternative vision of US culture that deployed the history of American Transcendentalism within the forms of late-nineteenth-century print media to register his opposition to the rise of modern press magnates such as W.R. Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. This article challenges dominant narratives on two fronts: first, by suggesting an alternative to normative accounts of the development of the late-nineteenth-century commercial press; second, by exploring the mutual interpenetration of Latin American and US American radical history.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.


This chapter reviews the book Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 (2014), by Theodore H. Friedgut, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (edited and annotated by Theodore H. Friedgut). Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America is a two-in-one volume that explores an obscure episode in the history of the Jews in the late nineteenth century while at the same time connecting much of its content to the author’s own life experience as a son of western Canada’s Jewish farming colonies and, later, as an ideologically driven halutz on an Israeli kibbutz. Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America retells one branch of the mostly forgotten history of the Am Olam agricultural movement and brings a new layer into the discussion of global Jewish agrarianism, while Recollections of a Communist offers an edited and annotated version of a memoir written by Mandelkern.


Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.


Author(s):  
Mark Migotti

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422110252
Author(s):  
Ahmet Yusuf Yüksek

This study investigates the socio-spatial history of Sufism in Istanbul during 1880s. Drawing on a unique population registry, it reconstructs the locations of Sufi lodges and the social profiles of Sufis to question how visible Sufism was in the Ottoman capital, and what this visibility demonstrates the historical realities of Sufism. It claims that Sufism was an integral part of the Ottoman life since Sufi lodges were space of religion and spirituality, art, housing, and health. Despite their large presence in Istanbul, Sufi lodges were extensively missing in two main areas: the districts of Unkapanı-Bayezid and Galata-Pera. While the lack of lodgess in the latter area can be explained by the Western encroachment in the Ottoman capital, the explanation for the absence of Sufis in Unkapanı-Bayezid is more complex: natural disasters, two opposing views about Sufi sociability, and the locations of the central lodges.


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