Sarcophagi from Xanthos

1933 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhart Rodenwaldt
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
British Museum ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fundamental Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Sir Charles Fellows writes on p. 503 of Travels and Researches:— ‘On the plain at the foot of the elevation upon which the city Xanthos was placed, we disinterred the remains of a mausoleum. In this room, which had vaults beneath, stood four sarcophagi, raised upon pedestals. … I have collected the fragments of each sarcophagus.’ The four sarcophagi are in the British Museum and are described in Vol. II of the Catalogue of Sculpture, nos. 957–960. As far as I am aware, there is no other reference to any of them in archaeological literature. Their obscurity in the Museum (no. 957 in the Mausoleum Room Annexe, the other three in the Sepulchral Basement), and also their association in the Catalogue with older, Greek sculptures have combined to withdraw attention from them. It can be readily understood that amid masterpieces of the archaic and classical periods these sadly fragmentary remains of late art failed to attract the eye. To-day, when sarcophagi are recognised as material of fundamental importance for the artistic and cultural history of the provinces of the Roman Empire, it seems appropriate to reconsider these fragments; for their provenience is certain and identical, and they present some new features to our study.

Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.

Puccini's La Bohème

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
La Boheme ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

La bohème is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world. But how did it come to be so adored? Drawing on an extremely broad range of sources, Alexandra Wilson traces the opera’s rise to global fame. Although the work has been subjected to many hostile critiques, it swiftly achieved popular success through stage performances, recordings, and filmed versions. Wilson demonstrates how La bohème acquired even greater cultural influence as its music and dramatic themes began to be incorporated into pop songs, film soundtracks, musicals, and more. In this cultural history of Puccini’s opera, Wilson offers a fresh reading of a familiar work. La bohème was strikingly modern for the 1890s, she argues, in its approach to musical and dramatic realism and in flouting many of the conventions of the Italian operatic tradition. Considering the work within the context of the aesthetic, social, and political debates of its time, Wilson explores Puccini’s treatment of themes including gender, poverty, and nostalgia. She pays particular attention to La bohème’s representation of Paris, arguing that the opera was not only influenced by romantic mythologies surrounding the city but also helped shape them. Wilson concludes with a consideration of the many and varied approaches directors have taken to the staging of Puccini’s opera, including some that have reinvented the opera for a new age. This book is essential reading for anyone who has seen La bohème and wants to know more about its music, drama, and cultural contexts.

scholarly journals Orenburg as the capital of autonomous Kazakhstan (1920-1925): the reasons of choice and attempts of search for alternatives

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 160-165
Author(s):  
Kuanysh Gazizovich Akanov
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Central Core ◽  
Territorial Disputes ◽  
Geographical Distance ◽  
Economic Potential ◽  
State Archive ◽  
Soviet Republic ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Administrative Center

The paper considers the history of approval of Orenburg city as the capital of Kirgiz (Kazakh) Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic (KASSR) which was formed by the decree from 26 of August, 1920, as well as the history accession of the city and some district of province to Kazakhstan. The reasons of choice of Orenburg as administrative center of Kirgiz Republic and possible proposed alternatives are researched. The author analyses publications of Kazakhstan and Russian scientists on the indicated theme. Among the objective reasons of choice of Orenburg as the capital, the author names the following ones: the importance of Orenburg for Kirgiz Republic of that time, as a city with developed infrastructure and industry, as well as cultural and economic potential; the presence of sufficiently strong stratum workers,; attempt to make the city a central core of politics and become closer to Asian and Turkic people; regulation of territorial disputes about question of accessory of Orenburg; temporariness of the capital status of Orenburg to Kyrgyzia, in view of geographical distance of the city from the other regions of Autonomy and little representatives of title Kazakh ethnos. The author introduces for scientific use some documents of the State archive of the Orenburg Region in the process of research.

scholarly journals A history of the city written in a map – cartography as the mirror of socio-political events in Gdańsk in the years of 1918–1939

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Bień
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Political Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Made In

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> A cartographic map of Gdańsk in the years of 1918&amp;ndash;1939 was very different from the other maps of Polish cities. The reasons for some differences were, among others, the proximity of the sea, the multicultural mindset of the inhabitants of Gdańsk from that period, and some historical events in the interwar period (the founding of the Free City of Gdańsk and the events preceding World War II). Its uniqueness came from the fact that the city of Gdańsk combined the styles of Prussian and Polish housing, as well as form the fact that its inhabitants felt the need for autonomy from the Second Polish Republic. The city aspired to be politically, socially and economically independent.</p><p>The aim of my presentation is to analyze the cartographic maps of Gdańsk, including the changes that had been made in the years of 1918&amp;ndash;1939. I will also comment on the reasons of those changes, on their socio-historical effects on the city, the whole country and Europe.</p>

Urban Formalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Faflik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The West ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Street Protest ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
The City

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.

Pergamum as Paradigm

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernhard Weisser
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Solid Base ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Geographical Mobility ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Imperial Family ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

The Editors of this Book Requested a study of an individual city to contrast with the broader regional surveys. This contribution attempts to demonstrate the advantages of a fuller exploration of the specific context of a civic coinage by focusing on selected issues from the coinage of Pergamum— alongside Ephesus and Smyrna one of the three largest cities in the Western part of Asia Minor. In the Julio-Claudian period Pergamum’s coin designs were dominated by the imperial succession and the city’s first neocorate temple (17 BC–AD 59). In AD 59 Pergamum’s coinage stopped for more than two decades. When it resumed under Domitian (AD 83) new topics were continuously introduced until the reign of Caracalla (AD 211–17). These included gods, cults, heroes, personifications, architecture, sculpture, games, and civic titles. After Caracalla the city concentrated on a few key images, such as Asclepius or the emperor. At the same time, coin legends— especially civic titles—gained greater importance. This trend continued until the city’s coinage came to an end under Gallienus (AD 253–68). The overall range of Pergamum’s coin iconography was broadly similar to that of other cities in the East of the Roman empire. Coins of Pergamum from the imperial period fall into (at least) sixty-four issues, the most diverse of which employed twenty different coin types. In all, around 340 different types are currently known. They provide a solid base from which to explore various relationships. These include the relationship between coin obverses and reverses, as well as the place of an individual coin type within its own issue, and within the city’s coinage as a whole. Coin designs could allude to objects and events within Pergamum itself, or focus on the city’s connections with the outside world: with small neighbouring cities, with the other great cities within the province of Asia, or with Rome and the imperial family. Communication via the medium of civic coinage was in the first instance presumably directed towards the citizens of Pergamum. At the same time coinage also reflected developments outside the city. Social and geographical mobility was encouraged by an imperial system which allowed distinguished members of local elites access to the highest military and administrative posts.

Cuba Through A New Lens

2008 ◽  
Vol 81 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 265-270
Author(s):  
Jean Stubbs
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

[First paragraph]The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered. Samuel Farber. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. x + 212 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Cuba: A New History. Ric hard Gott . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xii + 384 pp. (Paper US$ 17.00)Havana: The Making of Cuban Culture. Antoni Kapcia. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005. xx + 236 pp. (Paper US$ 24.95) Richard Gott, Antoni Kapcia, and Samuel Farber each approach Cuba through a new lens. Gott does so by providing a broad-sweep history of Cuba, which is epic in scope, attaches importance to social as much as political and economic history, and blends scholarship with flair. Kapcia homes in on Havana as the locus for Cuban culture, whereby cultural history becomes the trope for exploring not only the city but also Cuban national identity. Farber revisits his own and others’ interpretations of the origins of the Cuban Revolution.

Biography and (Global) Microhistory

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Gamsa
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Northeast China ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Forthcoming Book ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Origin ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

AbstractThis article has two goals. It reflects on the recent developments and agenda of an approach to historical writing that is now becoming known by the name global microhistory, and it analyses the attention which this approach pays to individual lives. It also explores some of the challenges in writing the biography of a city alongside the life history of a person. The city is Harbin, a former Russian-managed railway hub in Manchuria, today a province capital in Northeast China. The person is Baron Roger Budberg (1867–1926), a physician of Baltic German origin who arrived in Harbin during the Russo-Japanese war and remained there until his death, leaving published works and unpublished correspondence in German and Russian. My forthcoming book about Budberg and Harbin challenges the distinction between writing “biography”, on the one hand, and “history”, on the other, while navigating between the “micro” and “macro” layers of historical enquiry.

Two ‘Virtues’ of Tiberius: A Numismatic Contribution to the History of his Reign

1939 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. H. V. Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

Mr. M. P. Charlesworth's Raleigh Lecture, ‘The Virtues of a Roman Emperor: Propaganda and the Creation of Belief,’ serves admirably to illuminate a new aspect of the history of the Roman Empire, in which the debt of pure history to numismatics (and notably to the work of Mr. Mattingly in the British Museum Catalogues) will be plain. From the numismatic point of view there is, indeed, one curious omission in Mr. Charlesworth's argument; and attempts to make good the omission have opened up a series of speculations which are here discussed.

URBAN FOOTBALL PERFORMANCES: PLAYING FOR THE NEIGHBOURHOOD IN SENEGAL, 1950s–2000s

Africa ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susann Baller
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Youth ◽  
Social Space ◽  
National Football League ◽  
Local Level ◽  
The State ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTIn Senegal, neighbourhood football teams are more popular than teams in the national football league. The so-called navétanes teams were first created in the 1950s. Since the early 1970s, they have competed in local, regional and national neighbourhood championships. This article considers the history of these clubs and their championships by focusing on the city of Dakar and its fast-growing suburbs, Pikine and Guédiawaye. Research on the navétanes allows an exploration of the social and cultural history of the neighbourhoods from the actor-centred perspective of urban youth. The history of the navétanes reflects the complex interrelations between young people, the city and the state. The performative act of football – on and beyond the pitch, by players, fans and organizers – constitutes the neighbourhood as a social space in a context where the state fails to provide sufficient infrastructure and is often contested. The navétanes clubs and championships demonstrate how young people have experienced and imagined their neighbourhoods in different local-level ways, while at the same time interconnecting them with other social spaces, such as the ‘city’, the ‘nation’ and ‘the world’.

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