scholarly journals Mobility, Transport and Social Inclusion: Lessons from History

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Pooley

This paper argues that although it is now possible to travel more quickly and easily than ever before, transport-related social exclusion is more likely than it was in the past. Using evidence drawn from life writing and oral testimonies I examine the ways in which people accessed everyday transport over the past two centuries. In the early nineteenth century mobility options were limited and most people travelled in similar ways, though the rich always had access to the fastest and most comfortable transportation. From the mid-nineteenth century the railways provided fast travel for most people. Progressively, in the twentieth century British society became car dependent so that those without access to a car were disadvantaged. Such transport-related social exclusion was exacerbated by the denuding of public transport, and by heightened expectations for mobility which often could not be achieved. It is argued that a return to a less differentiated mobility system could increase transport-related social inclusion.

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.


2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.


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.


2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).


2003 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 121-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myles Jackson

ArgumentDuring the early nineteenth century, the German Association of Investigators of Nature and Physicians (Versammlung Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte) drew upon the cultural resource of choral-society songs as a way to promote male camaraderie and intellectual collaboration. Investigators of nature and physicians wished to forge a unified, scientific identity in the absence of a national one, and music played a critical role in its establishment. During the 1820s and 30s, Liedertafel and folk songs formed a crucial component of their annual meetings. The lyrics of these tunes, whose melodies were famous folk songs, were rewritten to reflect the lives of investigators of nature and physicians. Indeed, the singing of these Liedertafel songs played an important part in the cultivation of the Naturforschers’ persona well into the twentieth century.


2021 ◽  
pp. 23-43
Author(s):  
Agnes Arnold-Forster

This chapter explores the senses and emotions that attended living with and dying from cancer in the early nineteenth century. The archives of The Middlesex Hospital consist of registers of cancer patients from 1792 through to the twentieth century, and a potted selection of casebooks. This chapter, therefore, tells the stories of sixty patients from 1805 to 1836. From these case notes, flesh and blood can be added to the lived experience of cancer and go some way towards recovering the patient voice. We can follow in their footsteps from home to hospital, and in multiple literal and metaphorical ways appreciate the distances they travelled in their ‘cancer journeys’.


Author(s):  
Brian Stanley

In any survey of influential British missionary thinkers, Scottish names would occupy a prominent place. The Scottish contribution was not confined to those who served with the missions of the Presbyterian churches: some influential Scottish missionaries served with English societies, and some were not even Presbyterians. Nevertheless, five generalizations can be offered: (1) Scots Presbyterians opted to do mission through ecclesiastical structures, rather than through voluntary societies. (2) Scottish Presbyterian missions aimed to bring the entire life of Christian communities under the rule of Christ. (3) Scottish missionaries tended to insist that education was integral to the missionary task. (4) Scottish missionaries trained in the early nineteenth century drew deeply from the Scottish Enlightenment. (5) From the late nineteenth century, Scottish (like English) missionary theology was affected by philosophical idealism, though the mid-twentieth-century ascendancy of Barthianism may have helped to sustain the Scottish missionary movement in the turbulent post-war environment.


Author(s):  
Tobias Harper

This chapter examines the creation of new orders at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was the culmination of a prolonged period of “unprecedented honorific inventiveness” starting in the late nineteenth century. In Britain the new Order of the British Empire was branded the “Order of Britain’s Democracy” in recognition of the fact that it extended far deeper into non-elite classes in British society than any previous honour. Between 1917 and 1921 more than 20,000 people in Britain and throughout the British Empire were added to this new Order. This was an unprecedented number, orders of magnitude larger than honours lists in previous years. While the new Order was successful in reaching a wider, more middle-class audience than the honours system before the war, which was socially narrow, there was a substantial backlash to what was widely perceived by elites to be an excessive (and diluting) opening-up of the “fount of honour.” This backlash was connected to political controversies about the sale of honours that eventually helped bring about Lloyd George’s downfall. This chapter also contains a brief description of all the components of the British honours system at the beginning of the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Claudia Tobin

When Virginia Woolf sought to evoke Roger Fry’s qualities as an art critic, she reached for the image of him as a humming-bird hawk-moth, ‘quivering yet still’ in his absorbed attention to Post-Impressionist paintings. This chapter argues that modes of ‘active’ stillness and receptive, vibratory states of being were crucial to Woolf’s experience and representation of art. It traces ‘quivering’ as a talismanic word across a range of her fiction and non-fiction, and explores the pervasive figure of the insect in Woolf’s re-imagining of the human sensorium, with particular focus on her essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and on Sketch of the Past (1939). The second half of the chapter addresses Woolf’s underexplored biography of Roger Fry and her confrontation with the problem of ‘writing’ Fry under the imperative not to ‘fix’ her subject, but rather to register his ‘vibratory’ non-physical presence. It considers the role of vibration more widely in Woolf’s life-writing and in Fry’s art theory, in the context of twentieth-century spiritualism, Quakerism and new communication technologies. It proposes that by examining the different functions and meanings of still life (visual and verbal) in Woolf’s and Fry’s work, we can further illuminate their approach to the relationship between art and life.


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.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document