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How Modern Is the French Revolution?
Review Essay Paradigms and Paranoia: How Modern Is the French Revolution? REBECCA L. SPANG It is a truth, widely acknowledged, that the study of history has changed dramatically 1 since the end of World War II. Cliometrics has come and gone; the new social history has become old hat; narrative has been revived. Structuralist approaches associated, at least in part, with the Annales school, have been superseded by the notionally poststructuralist turns of the linguistic screw; total history has yielded to micro history; we all recognize Eurocentrism when we see it. How surprising it is, then, to note how remarkably constant textbooks have been in 2 assessing the import of the French Revolution. From classics of Cold War "Western" historiography to recent efforts to write history within a global framework, the fundamental message remains the same: the Revolution of 1789 is the turning point of the modern world. 1 The wording may vary, but the substance does not. Said to mark "the beginning of modern history," the French Revolution is deemed "a decisive event in world history" that initiated a "century of rapid and tremendous change"; after the events of 1789–1815, "the clock could not really be set back." 2 Authors may emphasize different aspects of this modern period—political Liberalism, triumphant individualism, nationalistic militarism—but their accounts coincide in treating the revolution as an identifiable period of rapid, irreversible change. An evocative but, in this non-geological context, far from precise word—watershed—has provided one popular metaphor for conveying some sense of the revolution's relation to modernity. -
The Unacknowledged Revolution
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxi + 794 pp. $54.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-521-29955-8. Reviewed by Shannon E. Duffy Published on H-Ideas (June, 2000) [Note: This review is part of the H-Ideas Ret‐ Ancient and Medieval scribes had faced tremen‐ rospective Reviews series. This series reviews dous difficulties in preserving the knowledge that books published during the twentieth century they already possessed, which, despite their best which have been deemed to be among the most efforts, inevitably grew more corrupted and frag‐ important contributions to the feld of intellectual mented over time. With the establishment of history.] printing presses, accumulation of knowledge was Elizabeth Eisenstein's comprehensively-re‐ for the frst time possible. Rather than spending searched 1979 book is a study of the frst century most of their energies searching for scattered of printing, particularly the period from 1460 to manuscripts and copying them, scholars could 1480, when printing presses went from rare to now focus their efforts on revision of these texts common, and as a consequence changed the way and the gathering of new data. New observations knowledge was preserved and conveyed. It is pri‐ from a widely scattered readership could be in‐ marily a work of synthesis, although Eisenstein cluded in subsequent editions. According to Eisen‐ displays a masterful knowledge of the relevant stein, the shift to printing reversed the whole ori‐ primary materials. Her goal is to show how intel‐ entation of attitudes towards learning. -
A Quantitative Study of History in the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC), 1470–18001
Vol. 25, no. 2 (2015) 87–116 | ISSN: 1435-5205 | e-ISSN: 2213-056X A Quantitative Study of History in the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC), 1470–18001 Leo Lahti Laboratory of Microbiology, Wageningen University, The Netherlands [email protected] Niko Ilomäki Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Finland [email protected] Mikko Tolonen Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki, Finland [email protected] Abstract This article analyses publication trends in the field of history in early modern Britain and North America in 1470–1800, based on English Short- Title Catalogue (ESTC) data.2 Its major contribution is to demonstrate the potential of digitized library catalogues as an essential scholastic tool and part of reproducible research. We also introduce a novel way of quantita- tively analysing a particular trend in book production, namely the publish- ing of works in the field of history. The study is also our first experimental analysis of paper consumption in early modern book production, and dem- onstrates in practice the importance of open-science principles for library and information science. Three main research questions are addressed: 1) who wrote history; 2) where history was published; and 3) how publishing changed over time in early modern Britain and North America. In terms This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License Uopen Journals | http://liber.library.uu.nl/ | URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-117388 Liber Quarterly Volume 25 Issue 2 2015 87 A Quantitative Study of History in the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC), 1470–1800 of our main findings we demonstrate that the average book size of history publications decreased over time, and that the octavo-sized book was the rising star in the eighteenth century, which is a true indication of expand- ing audiences. -
Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste Elizabeth C
The Journal of Modern Craft Sustainable Socialism: Volume 4—Issue 1 William Morris on March 2011 pp. 7–26 Waste DOI: 10.2752/174967811X12949160068974 Elizabeth C. Miller Reprints available directly from the publishers Photocopying permitted by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is Associate Professor of English at licence only the University of California, Davis. She is currently working © Berg 2011 on a book titled Slow Print: Print Culture and Late-Victorian Literary Radicalism. Her first book, Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle, was published in 2008, and her articles have appeared in Modernism/Modernity, Feminist Studies, Literature Compass, Victorian Literature and Culture, The Journal of William Morris Studies, The Henry James Review, and elsewhere. Abstract While William Morris has long been recognized for his radical approach to the problem of labor, which built on the ideas of John Ruskin and informed his contributions to the Arts and Crafts philosophy, his ideas about waste have received much less attention. This article suggests that the Kelmscott Press, which Morris founded in 1891, was designed to embody the values of durability and sustainability in sharp contrast to the neophilia, disposability, and planned obsolescence of capitalist production. Many critics have dismissed the political value of Kelmscott Press on the basis of the handcrafted books’ expense and rarity, but by considering Morris’s work for Kelmscott in light of his fictional and non-fictional writings about waste around the time of the press’s conception, we can see how Kelmscott laid the groundwork for a philosophy of sustainable socialism. Keywords: William Morris, Kelmscott Press, printing, waste. -
Syllabus History 615 Fall 2008
History 615: Topics in Early Modern Europe University of Massachusetts Amherst, Fall 2008, class # 78025 Tuesday 1-3:30 p.m., Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies Course website: http://people.umass.edu/ogilvie/615/ Professor Brian Ogilvie, Herter 614, 545-6791, [email protected] Office hours: M 11:15-12, Tu 10-11:30, W 11:15-12, and by appointment Course description An introduction to classic interpretations, recent scholarship, and sources in intellectual history, cultural history, and the history of science, c. 1450-1700. Topics will include humanism and scholarship, natural philosophy and science, witchcraft and the occult, the arts, the organization of literary and intellectual life, and circulation of knowledge between different disciplinary and national contexts. Assignments will include a review, an annotated bibliography and bibliographical essay, and a historiographical synthesis. Interested students may continue with a research seminar in the spring. Course structure This course is a seminar. We will meet each week for about 2.5 hours, with a brief pause about halfway through. Except for the first week, the first part of each meeting will be led by two student presenters. After the break, we will focus on practical research methods and skills for approaching early modern European intellectual and cultural history, often drawing on the resources available at the Renaissance Center. The seminar format places much of the burden of learning on you and your fellow students. Not preparing for discussions will harm them as well as you. Though presenters will organize and lead the discussion, you should come prepared to every class; otherwise you’ll be letting them down. -
Review of Zeev Gries, the Book in the Jewish World 1700-1900
University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Scholarship at Penn Libraries Penn Libraries 12-2008 Review of Zeev Gries, The Book in the Jewish World 1700-1900 Arthur Kiron University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/library_papers Part of the Jewish Studies Commons, and the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation Kiron, A. (2008). Review of Zeev Gries, The Book in the Jewish World 1700-1900. Judaica Librarianship, 14 80-87. http://dx.doi.org/10.14263/2330-2976.1075 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/library_papers/95 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Review of Zeev Gries, The Book in the Jewish World 1700-1900 Abstract An important milestone in the study of the Jewish book was marked in 2002 with the publication of Ze'ev Gries's ha-Sefer ke-sokhen tarbut, be-shanim 1700-1900 ("The Book as an Agent of Culture, 1700-1900"). In this "slim volume," as he subsequently and modestly would refer to it, Gries introduced his readers to what he calls in Hebrew "toldot ha-sefer ha-Yehudi" (the "History of the Jewish book"). The book, based on his twenty-five previous years of research in the field, offered new insights and raised new questions. Thanks to this 2007 English-language edition, Gries's scholarship happily can reach a broader audience. Moreover, as Gries explains in his preface to the English edition, "the present volume draws heavily on (the Hebrew edition) but is not a direct translation." At the same time, Gries acknowledges and thanks Jeffrey Green for translating the original "Hebrew text as the basis of the present book." Originally published in Hebrew by ha-J9buts ha-me'ul).ad at the suggestion of its founding editor, Meir Ayali, the English edition is published appropriately by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, a cultural broker that brings to the English reading public important works of classical Jewish literature and modern scholarship that were originally written in Hebrew. -
Printing, Propaganda, and Public Opinion David
Printing, Propaganda, and Public Opinion David Bagchi ___________________________________________________________________________ Summary Luther had a notoriously ambivalent attitude towards what was still the new technology of the printing press. He could both praise it as God’s highest act of grace for the proclamation of God’s Word, and condemn it for its unprecedented ability to mangle the same beyond recognition. That ambivalence seems to be reflected in the judgment of modern scholarship. Some have characterized the Reformation as a paradigmatic event in the history of mass communications (a Medien- or Kommunikationsereignis), while others have poured scorn on any reductionist attempt to attribute a complex movement to a technological advance and to posit in effect a doctrine of ‘Justification by Print Alone’. The evidence in favour of some sort of correlation between the use of printing and the success of the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland is certainly formidable. Thousands of German Reformation pamphlets (Flugschriften) survive to this day in research libraries and other collections (with Luther’s own works predominant among them), suggesting that the Holy Roman Empire was once awash with millions of affordable little tracts in the vernacular. Contemporary opponents of the Reformation lamented the potency of cheap print for propaganda and even for agitation among ‘the people’, and did their best either to beat the evangelical writers through legislation or else to join them by launching their own literary campaigns. But, ubiquitous as the Reformation Flugschrift was for a comparatively short time, the long-term impact of printing on Luther’s Reformation was even more impressive, above all in the production and dissemination of Bibles and partial Bibles which used Luther’s German translation. -
Travelling Chronicles
Travelling Chronicles <UN> Library of the Written Word volume 66 The Handpress World Editor-in-Chief Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews) Editorial Board Ann Blair (Harvard University) Falk Eisermann (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preuβischer Kulturbesitz) Ian Maclean (All Souls College, Oxford) Alicia Montoya (Radboud University, Nijmegen) Angela Nuovo (University of Udine) Helen Smith (University of York) Mark Towsey (University of Liverpool) Malcolm Walsby (University of Rennes) Arthur der Weduwen (University of St Andrews) volume 51 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lww <UN> Travelling Chronicles News and Newspapers from the Early Modern Period to the Eighteenth Century Edited by Siv Gøril Brandtzæg Paul Goring Christine Watson leiden | boston <UN> This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the prevailing cc-by-nc-nd License at the time of publication, which permits any non-commercial use, and distribution, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Cover illustration: [News vendors at Bristol] Woodward del.; Cruikshank d. London: Pubd. by Allen & West, 15 Paternoster Row, Octr. 22, 1796. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2018001107 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1874-4834 isbn 978-90-04-34040-4 (hardback with dustjacket) isbn 978-90-04-36287-1 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by the Editors and Authors. This work is published by Koninklijke Brill nv. -
Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste
The Journal of Modern Craft ISSN: 1749-6772 (Print) 1749-6780 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfmc20 Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste Elizabeth C. Miller To cite this article: Elizabeth C. Miller (2011) Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste, The Journal of Modern Craft, 4:1, 7-25 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/174967811X12949160068974 Published online: 16 Apr 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 36 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfmc20 Download by: [University of California Davis] Date: 07 February 2016, At: 18:25 The Journal of Modern Craft Sustainable Socialism: Volume 4—Issue 1 William Morris on March 2011 pp. 7–26 Waste DOI: 10.2752/174967811X12949160068974 Elizabeth C. Miller Reprints available directly from the publishers Photocopying permitted by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is Associate Professor of English at licence only the University of California, Davis. She is currently working © Berg 2011 on a book titled Slow Print: Print Culture and Late-Victorian Literary Radicalism. Her first book, Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle, was published in 2008, and her articles have appeared in Modernism/Modernity, Feminist Studies, Literature Compass, Victorian Literature and Culture, The Journal of William Morris Studies, The Henry James Review, and elsewhere. Abstract While William Morris has long been recognized for his radical approach to the problem of labor, which built on the ideas of John Ruskin and informed his contributions to the Arts and Crafts philosophy, his ideas about waste have received much less attention. -
Fall-Spring 02-03 History 3010 Exam Field Preparation in Early Modern
Fall-Spring 02-03 History 3010 Exam field preparation in Early modern France 1450-1715 and/or Early modern Europe 1450-1715 Students are invited to form their personal reading list for their general exam field from this list, by selecting from it and adding to it according to their particular needs and interests. Students should try to gain familiarity with as many of these books as possible, while selecting a smaller number for careful reading. * indicates must-reads for all students S indicates that the book is available for purchase in paperback Part I (Fall 02): structures of the Ancien Regime Fri 9/20: organizational meeting Special session at Houghton Library: Thurs 9/26, 2-4:30 with Hist 2320 Meet in Houghton Library Lobby. *Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book (1976) Rudolf Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading 1450-1550 (1967) Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983)or The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) Anthony Grafton, "The Importance of Being Printed," Journal of Interdisciplinary History (1980) for more references, consult reading lists for Hist 1318 Session I (Fri 9/27): French historiography and geography *Peter Burke, French historical revolution: the Annales School 1929-89 (S)(1990) *Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, vol. 1 (1988) Stuart Clark, ed. The Annales School. Critical assessments, 4 vols. (vols. 1-2 general issues; vol. 3 on Braudel; vol. 4 on Febvre, Bloch, Goubert among others) (1999) Roger Chartier, "The Two Frances: The History of a Geographical Idea," Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (1988) (photocopy). -
Professor Elizabeth Eisenstein
The Independent Scholar Vol. 2 (September 2016) ISSN 2381-2400 TIS The Independent Scholar A peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal ISSN 2381-2400 Volume 2 (September 2016) General Editor Shelby Shapiro [email protected] Humanities Editor STEM Editor Amanda Haste Joan Cunningham [email protected] [email protected] OPEN ACCESS CONTENTS FROM THE EDITOR ABOUT THE AUTHORS CRITICAL ESSAYS BOOK REVIEWS NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS Disclaimer Although the articles presented in The Independent Scholar have been subjected to a robust peer review process to ensure scholarly integrity, the views expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of the TIS editorial board or of NCIS. The Independent Scholar Vol. 2 (September 2016) ISSN 2381-2400 ELIZABETH L. EISENSTEIN (1921-2016) NCIS and scholars worldwide join in mourning the death of historian Elizabeth Lewisohn Eisenstein. Her pioneering work on the effects of the Gutenberg Press laid the theoretical and factual groundwork for the field today known as Print Culture or Book History. A native of New York City, she obtained her BA at Vassar College and her MA and Ph.D. degrees from Radcliffe. She came from a prominent German-Jewish family in Manhattan: Lewisohn Stadium, a Doric-colonnaded amphitheater built on the campus of the City College of New York in 1915 and demolished in 1973, and Columbia University’s Lewisohn Hall were named after her paternal grandfather Adolph Lewisohn, a financier, mining magnate and philanthropist. Today she is best remembered for her two-volume classic, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. -
The Market for Ideas and the Origins of Economic Growth in Eighteenth Century Europe
The Market for Ideas and the Origins of Economic Growth in Eighteenth Century Europe Joel Mokyr Depts. of Economics and History Northwestern University Berglas School of Economics Tel Aviv University revised: Sept. 2006 I am grateful to Marianne Hinds and Michael Silver for loyal and competent research assistance. The comments of Avner Greif on an earlier version are much appreciated. 1 Two statements summarize much of the conventional wisdom about the historical experience of growth in the West: (1) Modern economic growth was ignited by the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, and (2) the Industrial Revolution was, as everybody had always suspected, primarily about technology. Both statements must be qualified and nuanced: growth proper did not start until the second third of nineteenth century, and technology (to say nothing of “industry”) was not all there was to it. Yet when all is said and done, the place of technology in the economic miracle that occurred in Europe in the nineteenth century remains central. Technology, in its widest sense, is about new ideas and the growth of useful knowledge.1 Yet the economic impact of new technology, no matter how ingenious, can be realized only if the institutional environment is conducive and allows for the exploitation of inventions in an effective manner. In a simple economic model, it is hard to know whether conducive institutions “cause” technological change or the other way around. It is arguable that neither are truly exogenous, and instead both depend on the formation process of ideologies and beliefs that follows its own rules. Do ideas affect the outcomes of economic history? In a famous paragraph, John Maynard Keynes wrote that "the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas ...