‘Dying Irish’: eulogising the Irish in Scotland in Glasgow Observer obituaries

The Glasgow Observer newspaper, founded in 1885 by and for the Irish community in Scotland regularly published both lengthy and brief funereal and elegiac obituaries of the Irish in Scotland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They marshal an impressive, emotive and oftentimes contradictory body of evidence and anecdote of immigrant lives of the kind utilised, and as often passed over, by historians of the Irish in Britain. They contain, however, a unique perspective on the march of a migrant people bespoke of their experiences and, perhaps more importantly, the perception of their experiences in passage, in the host society and ultimately in death. Moreover, the changing sense of Victorian sensibilities over the solemnity, purpose and ritual of death into the Edwardian era finds a moot reflection in the key staples of Irish immigrant obsequies with their stress on thrift, endeavour, piety, charity and gratitude. This article explores Glasgow Observer obituaries from the 1880s to the 1920s to see what they say about the immigrants, their lives, work and culture, the Scots, migration itself, the wider relations between Britain and Ireland, and the place where Irish and British attitudes to death meet in this period. It does so by drawing upon recent sociological perspectives on obituaries and their relationship with the formation and articulation of collective memory

Charles Wilkins Short : Kentucky botanist and physician, 1794-1863.

Charles Wilkins Short (1794-1863) participated in the evolution of a scientific community in the United States. His interests in botany began when he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania (M.D. 1815). As a country doctor in western Kentucky (1817-1825), then as professor of materia medica at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky (1825-1838), and the Louisville Medical Institute (later University of Louisville, 1838-1849), and finally in retirement, Short devoted himself\u27to the classification of flora of his native state and region. In 1828 Short co-founded The Transylvania Journal of Medicine and the Associate Sciences, in which he published many of his findings, including a catalogue of Kentucky plants. His most significant contribution to the development of American botany, however, was his extensive correspondence and distribution of plants with naturalists in his country and abroad at a time of increasing scientific specialization and the rise of the professional botanist

One Building, Four Houses: How Identity Influenced the Historic Forms of the William Brinton 1704 House

Built in 1704 by early Chester County Quaker, William Brinton the Younger (1670-1751), the 1704 House underwent four substantial phases of use and modification--a genteel great house (1704-1752), an ornamental farmhouse (1829-1863), a moral rural homestead (1864-1953), and a Colonial Revival house museum (1954-2018). Each of these phases represented a different owner of the structure who modified it to meet their needs and priorities. This thesis examines who these individuals were, how they were influenced by their own conscious values and subconscious social norms, and why and how they adapted the 1704 House as a result. Today, following a 1954 restoration to its circa 1752 form, the house is interpreted mainly as a family shrine to the early Brintons, with little mention of the two intermediate phases. The overall conclusion drawn from this examination of the major historic phases and actors in the history of the building is that to properly understand the modern 1704 House, one must understand it not as a building interrupted in 1752 and rescued in 1954, but as a continuously changing structure with four distinct periods all connected to one uninterrupted thread to the past. Viewing the 1704 House in this way could also serve to help interprets other sites with histories of change over time in a way that unifies their entire past

Americans Collecting Natural History

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Americans established institutions of science that called upon the public to donate materials and further the study of natural history. This thesis examines how resident scholars recruited sailors, merchants, and amateur naturalists to collect objects and accounts of natural history in South America. In turn, we find that the kinds of education and professional training that young doctors received in antebellum Philadelphia gave naval surgeons like William S. W. Ruschenberger the skills and temperament to collect objects that were otherwise considered sacred or taboo. Finally, as medical education in urban Philadelphia divided the labor of medicine between pharmacists and physicians, we find that educators believed that the study of natural history was necessary to clarify the use and nature of therapeutics. Taken together, naturalists in Philadelphia connected concerns of science and trade in such a way that even when conducting business abroad, young Americans would convey curious objects and accounts back to their peers in the North Atlantic. This activity created a diverse network of collectors throughout the Americas, that directed mineral specimens, live plants, novel medicines, and human bones into Philadelphia’s cabinets of natural history

Railroads of West Chester: 1831 to the present

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An annotated Bibliography of Southeastern American Botancial Explorers prior to 1821

This paper lists published sources pertaining to the lives and work of seventy individuals who contributed to early botanical knowledge of the southeastern United States. General sources, primarily biographical compilations and scientific bibliographies, are listed at the beginning of the paper, followed by entries for the individual botanists. Each entry gives name (with any variants), place and year of birth and death, location of manuscripts and plant specimens, citations for published portraits and handwriting samples, and lists any plant or fungal genera which were named for the botanist. Works both by and about each botanist are listed with annotations