Historically Speaking— the “New Mathematics” in Historical Perspective

1969 ◽  
Vol 62 (7) ◽  
pp. 579-585
Author(s):  
Howard Eves ◽  
F. Lynwood Wren

There are probably very few teachers of mathematics today who have not been asked at least once the question: “What is the ‘new mathematics’?” In an effort to build an informative background on the evolution of mathematics as a serious study in our schools, one is almost compelled to review at least four periods of history. These four periods are (1) 300 B.C.; (2) the second quarter of the seventeenth century; (3) the second quarter of the nineteenth century; and (4) the four decades of the twentieth century from 1925 to 1965.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Sablin ◽  
Kuzma Kukushkin

Focusing on the term zemskii sobor, this study explored the historiographies of the early modern Russian assemblies, which the term denoted, as well as the autocratic and democratic mythologies connected to it. Historians have discussed whether the individual assemblies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could be seen as a consistent institution, what constituencies were represented there, what role they played in the relations of the Tsar with his subjects, and if they were similar to the early modern assemblies elsewhere. The growing historiographic consensus does not see the early modern Russian assemblies as an institution. In the nineteenth–early twentieth century, history writing and myth-making integrated the zemskii sobor into the argumentations of both the opponents and the proponents of parliamentarism in Russia. The autocratic mythology, perpetuated by the Slavophiles in the second half of the nineteenth century, proved more coherent yet did not achieve the recognition from the Tsars. The democratic mythology was more heterogeneous and, despite occasionally fading to the background of the debates, lasted for some hundred years between the 1820s and the 1920s. Initially, the autocratic approach to the zemskii sobor was idealistic, but it became more practical at the summit of its popularity during the Revolution of 1905–1907, when the zemskii sobor was discussed by the government as a way to avoid bigger concessions. Regionalist approaches to Russia’s past and future became formative for the democratic mythology of the zemskii sobor, which persisted as part of the romantic nationalist imagery well into the Russian Civil War of 1918–1922. The zemskii sobor came to represent a Russian constituent assembly, destined to mend the post-imperial crisis. The two mythologies converged in the Priamur Zemskii Sobor, which assembled in Vladivostok in 1922 and became the first assembly to include the term into its official name.


PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (5) ◽  
pp. 577-582
Author(s):  
Harry Modean Campbell

In his discerning book entitled Emerson's Angle of Vision, Sherman Paul has pointed out two fundamental ways in which Whitehead, in spite of some obvious differences, is like Emerson. Both Emerson and Whitehead, says Paul, exalted the moral, ethical, and imaginative science of the seventeenth century over the analytical rationalism of the eighteenth century, and, as a logical consequence of this emphasis, both condemned Lockean sensationalism in the same way. Following Professor Paul's suggestion, the purpose of this study is to explore in some detail the basic views of Emerson and Whitehead about religion—man's relation to Nature and God. The remarkable similarities between the views of Emerson and those of Whitehead on this subject may not indicate much, if any, indebtedness of the twentieth-century philosopher to his nineteenth-century predecessor, but if these parallels are extensive and important enough, they may well indicate that Whitehead's total achievement in the philosophy of religion is like that of Emerson—that, religiously, Whitehead may be said to be a kind of twentieth-century Emerson, in one important way, as may appear, more of a transcendentalist than Emerson. Indeed, though the obscurity of his style will prevent him from being as popular as his predecessor, Whitehead's influence as a leader in the religious revolt against the “philosophy of logical analysis” and the other philosophies that make ours an “age of analysis” may in time be as great as that of Emerson in the similar romantic-transcendentalist revolt against the analytical rationalism of the age of “Enlightenment.” More of this later, but first let us examine the evidence.


2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-164
Author(s):  
Lex Renda

Variations in the loss of seats in the House of Representatives by the president's party in midterm elections between 1854 and 1998 are analyzed from a historical perspective. Whereas in the latter three-fourths of the nineteenth century the president's party lost, on average, 22% of its share of House seats, in the twentieth century the average loss was 13%. Using district-level data, the author attributes the problematization of “midterm decline” to the growing power of incumbency (a consequence of the development of the Australian ballot), the decline in the number of partisanly competitive districts in open-seat elections, and the limitation, since 1912, of the size of the U.S. House of Representatives.


2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-164
Author(s):  
JOHN BUTT

I clearly remember that when this journal was first devised there lay some niggling doubt behind my tremendous enthusiasm for this timely initiative. Wasn’t there something problematic about viewing the eighteenth century as a whole? Did I intuit some sort of fundamental divide, perhaps somewhere between the deaths of J. S. Bach and Handel, one that somehow cast this century into two irreconcilable worlds? The seventeenth century was perhaps enough of a mess for its disunity to become a historiographical topic in its own right, its separate threads providing at least some narrative potential, even if these could never convincingly be drawn into a single whole. And the nineteenth century was perhaps sufficiently punctuated with various revolutions and restorations, together with an overriding story of industrial progress, to fall into a coherent (if divisive) family of narratives. Even the twentieth century – that which surely saw the largest number of changes in the human condition and the exponential pluralizing of ‘legitimate’ musical traditions – seems to have a clear enough trajectory, much of the music at its end having a discernible genealogical connection with that of its beginning. So what was it that was worrying me about the eighteenth century?


Author(s):  
Marlé Hammond

This chapter introduces the fictional tale by tracing its evolution from its unknown origins in what was probably the seventeenth century to its historicisation and Christianisation in the nineteenth century, to its infiltration of popular culture and the fine arts in the twentieth century. Its adaptations across various media, including literature, cinema and music, are explored. The chapter furthermore shows how the tale inscribes the endemic paradigms of the ʿUdhrī love narrative and the popular epic or sīra with the western model of the damsel-in-distress fairy tale. Finally, the chapter relates the process by which the tale becomes absorbed into Arabic culture to Yuri Lotman’s notion of the ‘boundary’ as the site of artistic innovation and the creation of new genres.


Author(s):  
Gavin Flood

On the one hand, we have the development of science from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, while on the other, we have a focus on life in philosophy at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Here, life is understood in terms of nature as a dynamic process linked to impulse or drive. Partly stemming from a mystical discourse in the seventeenth century, the concern for life comes to be disseminated through the history of both Romantic poetry and Romantic philosophy. This vitalist spirit can be traced through to the twentieth century. Life itself comes to be articulated through a mystical theological discourse that ends in Romantic poetry and through a philosophical discourse that ends in phenomenology.


Author(s):  
Alexander Kluge

This chapter details the dialogue between Christian Schulte and Alexander Kluge wherein they talked about opera's historical relationship to film. In Kluge's film The Power of Emotions (1983), he describes opera as a power station of emotions. He uses this image to talk about the nineteenth century, while in the first half of the twentieth century film took on the role of mobilizing and connecting the masses. He further explains that opera is a power station of emotions in the rather extreme sense insofar as it vicariously carries out emotional waste removal without actually being the power station. The power is generated elsewhere. Kluge then agrees that the opera is primarily defined through tragedy and fundamentally follows victim logic. When watching opera, the audience mainly watches a victim. In almost every opera one can make out a victim somewhere. This is a ritual in opera. One can also find mourning that comes with sacrifice as well as consolation. In this respect, the original, seventeenth-century operas were cast from the same rigid mold, one that cannot be changed for entertainment's sake.


2020 ◽  
pp. 296-346
Author(s):  
Christopher Hasty

This chapter assesses meter in early-seventeenth-century and twentieth-century music. Specifically, it analyzes compositions by Monteverdi, Schütz, Webern, and Babbitt. Monteverdi's “Ohimè, se tanto amate” from the fourth book of madrigals presents a metrical subtlety rarely encountered in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music. Here the projective field is very mobile, and mensural determinacy is restricted to relatively small measures. Meanwhile, Schütz's concertato motet “Adjoro vos, filiae Jerusalem” from the Symphoniae sacrae, Book I (1629), demonstrates extremely subtle rhythmic detail and great projective contrast used in the service of a compelling larger gesture. Here the repetition of small melodic figures is used for the creation of complex projective fields that serve the continuity of phrases and sections. The chapter then looks at the much smaller measures and much greater ambiguity in some music of the twentieth century.


1983 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin G. Calloway

The prospect of being taken captive by Indians was one of the greatest terrors for pioneers on the American frontier. From seventeenth-century Massachusetts to twentieth-century Hollywood, Indian captivity has been regarded as a fate worse than death, and western frontiersmen advocated saving the last bullet for oneself to prevent it. Whites inhabiting the trans-Mississippi west in the nineteenth century had in fact every reason to dread falling into Indian hands and a good idea of what was in store for them: among the nomadic tribes of the Great Plains, male captives were tortured (before being put to death), female captives were invariably subjected to sexual and physical abuse and generally condemned to a life of drudgery, while captive children might be killed out of hand or taken into the tribe. In the northeastern woodlands, however, the fate in store for whites captured by Indians was by no means so certain. A study of the experiences and narratives of captives on the upper Connecticut River during the era of Indian raids from Canada suggests that to be captured by Indians in northern New England was a terrifying and traumatic experience, but was certainly no guarantee of death, torture, abuse, or even mistreatment.


2015 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 37-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauro Nobili ◽  
Mohamed Shahid Mathee

AbstractThis article advances a new theory about the composition of the chronicle generally referred to as Tārīkh al-fattāsh. The Tārīkh al-fattāsh, allegedly written in the sixteenth-seventeenth century, is one of the most famous chronicles on which scholars have relied for information about West Africa’s pre-colonial history. However, there are still many puzzling issues and unsolved problems associated with this work, as edited by Octave V. Houdas and Maurice Delafosse in the early twentieth century. This analysis uses unexplored manuscripts that were either unknown or unavailable to previous scholars, and advances a new theory on the genesis and authorship of the chronicle: that the edited text in fact conflates two texts, a seventeenth-century chronicle and a nineteenth century one.


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