Burke and Wills

2011 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Northern Australia ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Scientific Legacy ◽  
Scientific Investigations ◽  
Scientific Exploration ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Scientific Value ◽  
First Time ◽  
Scientific Achievements

This book challenges the common assumption that little or nothing of scientific value was achieved during the Burke and Wills expedition. The Royal Society of Victoria initiated the Victorian Exploring Expedition as a serious scientific exploration of hitherto unexplored regions of inland and northern Australia. Members of the expedition were issued with detailed instructions on scientific measurements and observations to be carried out, covering about a dozen areas of science. The tragic ending of the expedition meant that most of the results of the scientific investigations were not reported or published. Burke and Wills: The Scientific Legacy of the Victorian Exploring Expedition rectifies this historic omission. It includes the original instructions as well as numerous paintings and drawings, documents the actual science undertaken as recorded in notebooks and diaries, and analyses the outcomes. It reveals for the first time the true extent and limits of the scientific achievements of both the Burke and Wills expedition and the various relief expeditions which followed. Importantly, this new book has led to a re-appraisal of the shortcomings and the successes of the journey. It will be a compelling read for all those interested in the history of exploration, science and natural history, as well as Australian history and heritage.

scholarly journals Śaivism after the Śaiva Age: Continuities in the Scriptural Corpus of the Vīramāheśvaras

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 222
Author(s):  
Elaine M. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Academic Practice ◽  
The Common ◽  
Popular Work ◽  
First Time

This article makes the case that Vīraśaivism emerged in direct textual continuity with the tantric traditions of the Śaiva Age. In academic practice up through the present day, the study of Śaivism, through Sanskrit sources, and bhakti Hinduism, through the vernacular, are generally treated as distinct disciplines and objects of study. As a result, Vīraśaivism has yet to be systematically approached through a philological analysis of its precursors from earlier Śaiva traditions. With this aim in mind, I begin by documenting for the first time that a thirteenth-century Sanskrit work of what I have called the Vīramāheśvara textual corpus, the Somanāthabhāṣya or Vīramāheśvarācārasāroddhārabhāṣya, was most likely authored by Pālkurikĕ Somanātha, best known for his vernacular Telugu Vīraśaiva literature. Second, I outline the indebtedness of the early Sanskrit and Telugu Vīramāheśvara corpus to a popular work of early lay Śaivism, the Śivadharmaśāstra, with particular attention to the concepts of the jaṅgama and the iṣṭaliṅga. That the Vīramāheśvaras borrowed many of their formative concepts and practices directly from the Śivadharmaśāstra and other works of the Śaiva Age, I argue, belies the common assumption that Vīraśaivism originated as a social and religious revolution.

The Origins of Unions: Some Miscellaneous Sydney Workers in 1910

1991 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-308
Author(s):  
Christopher Sheil
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Occupational Group ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Union Formation ◽  
Simple Fact ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

In considering the causes and possible corrections for the current decline in Australian trade union membership, it may help to reflect on the origins of the movement. This article presents evidence and an argument about one aspect of the origins of the Federated Miscellaneous Workers Union (FMWU). The evidence concerns the social history of watchmen, caretakers and cleaners, who formed the original core of the union's membership. The argument is that these workers amounted to such an improbable basis for a union that the simple fact of their organization represents a substantial challenge to the common assumption in labour history that it is the cohesion of an occupational group that empowers it. To the extent that the origins of the union are typical, it can be suggested that the period of tremendous Australian trade union formation and growth between 1907 and 1913 owed much more to general political and, by extertsion, social conditions than it did to the specific circumstances of any particular section of workers.

The Revolution in Freedoms of Press and Speech

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendell Bird
Keyword(s):  
First Amendment ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrow Definition ◽  
The Common ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
First Time

This book discusses the revolutionary broadening of concepts of freedoms of press and speech in Great Britain and in America during the quarter century before the First Amendment and Fox’s Libel Act. The conventional view of the history of freedoms of press and speech is that the common law since antiquity defined those freedoms narrowly. In that view, Sir William Blackstone in 1769, and Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in 1770, faithfully summarized that common law in giving very narrow definitions of those freedoms as mere liberty from prior restraint and not as liberty from punishment after printing or speaking (the political crimes of seditious libel and seditious speech). Today, that view continues to be held by neo-Blackstonians, and remains dominant or at least very influential among historians. Neo-Blackstonians claim that the Framers used freedom of press “in a Blackstonian sense to mean a guarantee against previous restraints” with no protection against “subsequent restraints” (punishment) of seditious expression. Neo-Blackstonians further claim that “[n]o other definition of freedom of the press by anyone anywhere in America before 1798” existed. This book, by contrast, concludes that a broad definition and understanding of freedoms of press and speech was the dominant context of the First Amendment and of Fox’s Libel Act. Its basis is hundreds of examples of a broad understanding of freedoms of press and speech, in both Britain and America, in the late eighteenth century. For example, a book published in London in 1760 by a Scottish lawyer, George Wallace, stated that it is tyranny “to restrain the freedom of speculative disquisitions,” and because “men have a right to think for themselves, and to publish their thoughts,” it is “monstrous … under the pretext of the authority of laws, which ought never to have been enacted … attempting to restrain the liberty of the press” (seditious libel law). This book also challenges the conventional view of Blackstone and the neo-Blackstonians. Blackstone and Mansfield did not find any definition in the common law, but instead selected the narrowest definition in popular essays from the prior seventy years. Blackstone misdescribed it as an accepted common law definition, which in fact did not exist, and a year later Mansfield inserted a similar definition into the common law for the first time. Both misdescribed that narrow definition and the unique rules for prosecuting sedition as ancient. They were leading a counter-revolution, cloaked as a summary of a narrow and ancient common law doctrine that was neither.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 437-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHRUTI KAPILA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bhagavad Gita ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Political Modernity ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
The Common ◽  
Bhagavad Gītā

This essay revises the common assumption that non-violence has been central to political modernity in India. The “extremist” nationalist B. G. Tilak, through a foundational philosophical reinterpretation of the Bhagavad Gita, created a modern theology of the Indian “political”. Tilak did so by directly confronting the question of the possibility of the “event” of war and the ethics of the conversion of kinsmen into enemies. Writing in the aftermath of the Swadeshi movement and from a prison cell in Rangoon, Tilak interpreted action as sacrificial duty that created a vocabulary of violence in which killing was naturalized. Violence, whether conceptual or otherwise, was not directed towards the “outsider” but was of meaning only when directed against the intimate. Unlike the distinction between friend and foe that has been taken as central to the understanding of the political in the twentieth century, it was instead the fraternal–enmity issue that framed the modern political in India. Tilak foregrounded the idea of a de-historicized political subject, whose existence was entirely dependent upon the event of violence itself. This helps to explain both the unprecedented violence that accompanied freedom and partition in 1947 and also the fact that it has remained unmemorialized to the present day.

Towards a Less Orthodox History of Hausaland

1979 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. G. Sutton
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Ecological Process ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Single Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Invention ◽  
North Western ◽  
Written Sources

The historiography of Hausaland has laboured under a strong tradition of orthodoxy which recent secondary works have inherited from the more-or-less primary oral-cum-written sources. General cultural evidence (linguistic, ethnographic and archaeological) has been regarded as subsidiary, so that its potential for reconceptualization and for critical reevaluation of the conventional sources and orthodox interpretations has been missed. Instead, antiquarian approaches have been encouraged. Thus the view has persisted that Hausa as a cultural and linguistic entity has an antiquity running to several millennia, and also that it originated in the Sahara or around Aïr, whence it was pushed southward by desiccation or by Tuareg nomads. Contrarily, the clear message of linguistic geography and of Hausa's place within the Chadic family is that Hausa. expanded from east to west across the savanna belt of northern Nigeria. And the relative homogeneity of the language and culture within this vast zone indicates that the spread is quite recent (within the present millennium, say). It would have involved some assimilation, of previously settled peoples of the northern Nigerian plains, most of whom wouldl have spoken languages of the ‘Plateau’ division of Greenberg's Benue–Congo subfamily, of Niger-Congo.This Hausaization, as it proceeded from its old bases in eastern Hausaland, would have been both a cultural and an ecological process, through which woodland would have been converted into more open and continuous savanna to support grain-cultivation and a denser peasant population. This process would have reached western Hausaland (Zamfara and Kebbi) around the middle of this millennium. Cattle – and Fulani herdsmen – would in time have played an important role in this cultural ecology (and in restricting the tsetse zones).The old theory of a northern origin for the Hausa is bound up with the problem of Gobir in north-western Hausaland. Gobir's claim to be one of the original seven kingdoms (Hausa bakwai) is probably a late invention. Moreover, the common assumption that Gobirawa Hausa migrated from Aïr seems to derive from a misinterpretation of the written sources.Finally the bakwai legends are reconsidered. Despite the scepticism of some modern critics, the legends appear to reflect, albeit in idealized form, a real historical development. They represent a foundation charter for the Hausa as a multi-state ethnicity, and enshrine the vague memory of how Hausaland and ‘Hausaness’ began from a series of small centres and hill-bases on its eastern side. Thus the interesting argument of Abdullahi Smith, that the Hausa people emerged long before state systems arose among them, is disputed. Rather, these should be seen as two facets of a single process during the present millennium.

Unexceptional exceptionalism: the origins of American football in a transnational context

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Collins
Keyword(s):  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
National Character ◽  
American Football ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Narrative Description

AbstractThis article explores the origins and early history of American football in relation to the development of rugby and similar codes in the English-speaking world of the last third of the nineteenth century. It suggests that the traditional narrative description of the emergence of the American game – which is ascribed in large part to the individual initiative of Walter Camp – fails to situate the sport in the context of the wider, transnational dynamics of the development of the various handling codes of football. In particular, it contends that the common assumption that the gridiron game's early development was a sporting expression of American exceptionalism is mistaken and that it only acquired its distinctive national character in the early twentieth century.

scholarly journals CHINA’S INVOLVEMENT IN THE SYRIAN CRISIS AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF ITS NEUTRAL STANCE IN THE WAR

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-65
Author(s):  
Mohamad Zreik
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Minister ◽  
The United States ◽  
Syrian Crisis ◽  
Peaceful Settlement ◽  
History Of ◽  
China’S Foreign Policy ◽  
The Common ◽  
Global Arena ◽  
China Today ◽  
First Time

China today is a powerful state and an influential player in the global arena, as was demonstrated during the Syrian crisis, when China took a counterposition to the United States’ stance in Syria and supported the Assad regime. Beijing put a veto on the international resolutions related to the Syrian crisis and abstained from voting, as it did in the past when dealing with the crises in the region. In a move that marked a new page in China’s foreign policy, Beijing backed what was known as the sixpoint plan, calling for a ceasefire and settlement of the crisis through internal dialogue and proclaiming the inviolability of Syrian national sovereignty. In a subsequent move, China sent its envoy Li Huaqing (former Chinese ambassador to Syria) to Damascus to encourage the initiation of a dialogue between government forces and opposition. Following that, China sent Assistant Foreign Minister Zhang Ming (who had previously visited Egypt, Saudi Arabia and France) to the region to discuss ways of approaching the Syrian crisis. For the first time in its modern history, China renounced its policy of non-interference in crises outside its direct interests and immediate geopolitical space. The following paper will focus on China’s stance in the Syrian crisis (supporting its peaceful settlement and keeping equal distance from all the parties in the conflict) and the future of Sino-Syrian relations based on the common history of the two countries.

scholarly journals Gerakan Keagamaan dan Identitas Kultural Masjid Jendral Sudirman Yogyakarta

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-194
Author(s):  
Fejrian Yazdajird Iwanebel
Keyword(s):  
Islamic State ◽  
Cultural Performance ◽  
Cultural Activism ◽  
Sacred Place ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Islamic Movement ◽  
Religious Piety ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Cultural Movement

Abstract: The article aims at explaining the root and the form of religious based cultural movement initiated by Jendral Sudirman Mosque (MJS) Yogyakarta. The conundrum departs from the common assumption that mosque is usually regarded as the sacred place, not as profane as cultural performance. Since 2011, the MJS has carried out various cultural activism that is unique, paradox and distinct from the common mosques which activites are generally centered on religious piety. It is in this case that this paper discusses MJS from two aspects: the history of the MJS and its cultural strategy. In its history, the MJS underwent three phases of movement. At first, the mosque was subjugated by the militant Islamic movement which aims at establishing an Islamic state. The movement, then, shifted into an educational movement of the children. And later, it changed totally into religious cultural movement. At this regard, the cultural movement carried out by the MJS reflects an effort in shifting their old identity, while at the same time they are involved in a discursive approach to respond the contemporary challenge of Islamism.  

scholarly journals Neumayer in Australia: his scientific legacy

2011 ◽  
Vol 123 (1) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Patrick Quilty
Keyword(s):  
Major Influence ◽  
Magnetic Survey ◽  
Scientific Legacy ◽  
Magnetic Parameters ◽  
Terrestrial Magnetism ◽  
Scientific Establishment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Major Figure ◽  
First Time

Georg von Neumayer (1826-1909) is a major figure in the history of Australian and Antarctic science. He came to Australia twice, in 1852 and 1857–1864, the first time as a sailor and the second as the scientist who established the Flagstaff Observatory in Melbourne. He came here at a time when the scientific tradition was firmly established in Europe (its home) but new to Australia where there was little or no homegrown scientific establishment. His main contributions are in the fields of terrestrial magnetism, the early days of oceanography, and the potential of polar research. He built and managed the Flagstaff Observatory, conducted a magnetic survey of Victoria, visited Tasmania to re-measure the magnetic parameters at Rossbank Observatory, worked to identify the most efficient sailing routes for shipping between Europe and Australia and collaborated with other scientists and artists during his sojourn here. On return to Europe, he became a major influence in the Heroic Era of Antarctic exploration.

Expanding Horizons in the History of Science

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. E. R. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Current Anthropology

This book challenges the common assumption that the predominant focus of the history of science should be the achievements of Western scientists since the so-called Scientific Revolution. The conceptual frameworks within which the members of earlier societies and of modern indigenous groups worked admittedly pose severe problems for our understanding. But rather than dismiss them on the grounds that they are incommensurable with our own and to that extent unintelligible, we should see them as offering opportunities for us to revise many of our own preconceptions. We should accept that the realities to be accounted for are multi-dimensional and that all such accounts are to some extent value-laden. In the process insights from current anthropology and the study of ancient Greece and China especially are brought to bear to suggest how the remit of the history of science can be expanded to achieve a cross-cultural perspective on the problems.

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