‘No condition is permanent’: ethnic construction and the use of history in Akuapem

Africa ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Law Courts

AbstractThis article concerns a recent political crisis which led to the fragmentation, in the main along ethnic lines, of the small Ghanaian kingdom of Akuapem. The situation is complex, though one may choose to frame it too simply in terms of hegemony (Akan vis-à-vis Guan) or even as a double hegemony in the sense that arguments on both sides appeal to ‘modern’ notions, to law courts, the constitution and ‘freedom’, and to newspapers in order to propagandise a position rather than to appeal to the authority of ‘traditional’ arbitration, destoolment, ancestral shrines and gods. Ethnicity and identity are notions with many and ill-defined meanings that fragment when separated from the specific situations in which they are used or constructed. To examine ethnicity one must see how ethnicities are ‘entangled’ and relate to each other; one needs, too, an historical perspective, for, whatever selfhood was in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, it is obviously different today. The dense historical and ethnographic details in the article are essential to point to the shape of the social order and to reveal in all their complexity the factors behind the recent fighting and continuing tension in the kingdom.

Who Was This Man?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

Re-imagining the Social Order

2018 ◽  
pp. 155-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Innes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
The State ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
Old Order ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw attempts around the Mediterranean world to replace an old order of privilege and delegated power with one in which all subjects were equal before the state. Across southern Europe, revolutionary France provided the model: under French and subsequently liberal regimes, privilege in state, church, and economy was cut back; there were analogous changes in the Ottoman world. Legal change did not always translate into substantive social change. Nonetheless, new conceptions of a largely autonomous ‘society’ developed, and new protocols were invented to relate state to ‘society’, often entailing use of tax status as a reference point for the allocation of rights and duties. The French Doctrinaires argued that the abolition of privilege made society ‘democratic’, posing the question, how was such a society best governed? By the middle of the nineteenth century, this conception was widely endorsed across southern Europe.

The Social Division of Welfare

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Richard M. Titmuss
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Social Betterment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Effective Operation ◽  
Interpretation Of Change ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter looks at how some students of social policy see the development of ‘The Welfare State’ in historical perspective as part of a broad, ascending road of social betterment provided for the working classes since the nineteenth century and achieving its goal in the present time. This interpretation of change as a process of unilinear progression in collective benevolence for these classes led to the belief that in the year 1948 ‘The Welfare State’ was established. Since then, successive governments, Conservative and Labour, have busied themselves with the more effective operation of the various services. Both parties have also claimed the maintenance of ‘The Welfare State’ as an article of faith.

scholarly journals The Use of Marriage Data to Measure the Social Order in Nineteenth-Century Britain

1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Prandy ◽  
W. Bottero
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Very High ◽  
Underlying Dimension

This article describes the construction of a measure of the social order in the nineteenth century, which will subsequently be used as a basis for studying processes of social reproduction (or social mobility). The technique of correspondence analysis is used to map the ordering of groups of occupations in two time periods 1777-1866 and 1867-1913. The data are derived from the occupations at marriage of the groom, his father and his father-in-law (the occupations of brides, unfortunately, being very much under-recorded). Marriage, it is argued, is a socially significant act linking, on average, families that occupy similar positions in the social order and analyses of the patterns of social interaction involved provide a means of determining the nature of the social space within which similarity is defined. The three occupations provide three pair-wise comparisons and each comparison gives a mapping of the row occupations and the column occupations six in all. Since any one of these should provide a measure of the social order, assuming there to be any consistency in such a concept, we would expect that, at both time periods, the result of the analyses would be six closely-related estimates of the same underlying dimension. This is what is found; the inter-correlations are very high. Furthermore, there is a very strong relationship between the measures of the social order constructed for the two time periods. The analyses are presented within a framework that emphasises the value of the procedures used for understanding the nature of measurement in social science.

The Comic Grotesque

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-66
Author(s):  
Jean Lee Cole
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Logical Basis ◽  
Ethnic Populations ◽  
The Social

A particularly grotesque form of the comic sensibility emerged in the closing years of the nineteenth century in the works of George Luks. Luks was called on to take over Richard Outcault’s phenomenally popular Yellow Kid comic strip at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1896; he soon made the Yellow Kid his own. As Outcault’s duplicate or twin, Luks capitalized on the grotesque potential of twinning, doubling, and replication to question the social order from below, laying bare—and then savagely mocking—fears of the rapidly growing immigrant and ethnic populations in the United States. In subsequent strips, including The Little Nippers and Mose’s Incubator, his representations of polyglot America become positively fantastical, even monstrous, reflecting the interchangeability and reproducibility of ethnic identity that formed the logical basis of the “melting pot.”

The Social Functions of Voluntary Associations in a Nineteenth-Century American Town

1977 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don H. Doyle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Class Leaders ◽  
American Society ◽  
New Research

Recent research in American urban history has given us a polarized view of the social order of nineteenth-century cities. At one extreme the studies of urban spatial and social mobility have revealed a restless shifting population of individuals moving through the city attached by little more than a brief term of employment. “American society…,” concluded one such mobility study, “was more like a procession than a stable social order. How did this social order cohere at all?” To a large extent the answer to this question has come from another body of studies which have reexamined a variety of institutions from police to public schools and found them to be part of a broad effort among Protestant middle-class leaders to bring control and order to this strange new urban world. The new research on mobility and social control has enlarged our understanding of American social history in many important ways, however, our emphasis on mobility and the mechanisms of coercive social control may obscure the social order that citizens of nineteenth-century communities defined for themselves.

scholarly journals The education during the announcement period of republic within the construction and trnsformation period

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 53 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Mehmet Bozaslan ◽  
Emel Çokoğullar
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Education System ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Change Transformation

Every society is bound to struggle to create the conditions and mechanisms in convenient with the own life experience within the historical perspective. This struggle aims to provide the social order or change the existing social structure. The institution of education becomes the primary actor of changing in line with shaping the individual targets. After the establishment of the Republic in 1923, the education system has been reorganized and determined its own principles in order to enhance the mission of social change, transformation and construction. Therefore, the education system has transformed into a mixed, compulsory, rationalist and secular character and hence the interruption has been witnessed with the creating of new social structure by liberating from the traditional forms.Keywords: the announcement of republic, transformation, education, construction, social structure

City of Second Sight

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin T. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Art Galleries ◽  
City Life ◽  
Reciprocal Influence ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The City ◽  
The U.S

In the decades before the U.S. Civil War, the city of Boston evolved from a dilapidated, haphazardly planned, and architecturally stagnant provincial town into a booming and visually impressive metropolis. In an effort to remake Boston into the "Athens of America," neighborhoods were leveled, streets straightened, and an ambitious set of architectural ordinances enacted. However, even as residents reveled in a vibrant new landscape of landmark buildings, art galleries, parks, and bustling streets, the social and sensory upheaval of city life also gave rise to a widespread fascination with the unseen. Focusing his analysis between 1820 and 1860, Justin T. Clark traces how the effort to impose moral and social order on the city also inspired many—from Transcendentalists to clairvoyants and amateur artists—to seek out more ethereal visions of the infinite and ideal beyond the gilded paintings and glimmering storefronts. By elucidating the reciprocal influence of two of the most important developments in nineteenth-century American culture—the spectacular city and visionary culture—Clark demonstrates how the nineteenth-century city is not only the birthplace of modern spectacle but also a battleground for the freedom and autonomy of the spectator.

scholarly journals Science, industry, and the social order in Mulhouse, 1798–1871

1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Fox
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern France ◽  
Total Control ◽  
The Rich ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The Ideal

There is a story, which historians of modern France often tell, of the ministerial official in Paris who had only to glance at his clock in order to know the exact passage of Vergil being construed and the law of physics being expounded in every school throughout the country. Invariably, the story is told for a purpose. It is used to demonstrate the high degree of centralization and the attendant rigidity of the French educational system, usually with special reference to the nineteenth century. The story, which has its roots in the rich corpus of Napoleonic legend, serves this purpose very well, but unfortunately it is both apocryphal and misleading. For while it is true that most nineteenth-century ministers with responsibility for education aspired to the ideal of total control, not one of them came close to it in reality.

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