Education in Edinburgh in the eighteenth century

This study is an attempt to describe education in Edinburgh in the eighteenth century, a period which saw such a remarkable flowering of the intellectual life of the city that it is impossible for the student of literature or history not to feel curious about the circumstances that helped to produce it. One of the contributing factors was the educational system, and its special significance has not been studied in detail before. Fortunately information about the schools is in existence in official records, books, and newspapers.Many elements combined to create the circumstances in Edinburgh at the end of the century that were favourable to the development of genius. Historians and critics have pointed to the expansion of the city boundaries, the imaginative design of the New Town, the completion of public works like the North and South Bridges and the Royal Exchange, the quickening of interest in drama, art, and music, as all helping to produce an atmosphere congenial to the intellectual growth of men like Henry Mackenzie, Scott, Horner, Jeffrey, and Cockburn, and stimulating to the ordinary men of the day. In previous assessments-, the importance of the educational system of Edinburgh has not been stressed, which is unfortunate, not only because it was different from that of other Scottish and English cities, but also because at the very time when most of these men of genius were young in Edinburgh, 2. the University under the Principalship of William Robertson, one of the distinguished historians of the day, was attracting able men as teachers and students, and the High School, where the ablest boys were trained, was in the charge of a great teacher in its Rector, Alexander Adam..Books have been written on the University, the High School, George Heriot's Hospital, and other schools in Edinburgh, but no attempt has yet been made to give a complete picture of the various kinds of schools that existed in Edinburgh in the eighteenth century. It is the intention of this study to try to provide such a comprehensive view. It will include, for example, information about the Charity and English schoöls, where most of the children learned to read and write; the High Schools of Edinburgh, Canongate, and South Leith; the Hospitals of George Heriot and George Watson, and those for the Merchant Maidens and Trades Maidens associated with the name of Mary Erskine; and the great variety of private schools, private teachers, and boarding schools. There will also be some consideration of the books used in these schools, particularly those written by Edinburgh teachers.Before a detailed study of the schools can be begun, it is necessary to sketch, in outline, something of the background. Accordingly, in this first chapter there will be some consideration of the size and growth of the city in the period under review, and of the Town Council which was responsible for it. Secondly, since the place of the Church of Scotland is of prime importance in any study of Scottish education, some estimate must be given of the powers of the Church in general, and its position in Edinburgh in. particular. Thirdly, something must be said, however briefly, about the special and indeed peculiar place of the University in the city

Medievalism in contemporary opera

This thesis discusses four operas, all written after 1990, that are based on medieval texts: Caritas (1991, by Robert Saxton and Arnold Wesker), The Tale of Januarie (2017, by Julian Philips and Stephen Plaice), L’Amour de loin (2000, by Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf), and Gawain (1991, by Harrison Birtwistle and David Harsent). Each case study is approached as an adaptation of a different medieval literary genre: affective piety, the fabliau, the troubadour lyric, and the chivalric romance. This organizational method provides a point of access into the cultural, critical, and creative reception histories through which texts from the twelfth-to-fourteenth centuries are received by composers, librettists, performers, readers, and audiences today. Through those literary-critical legacies, I approach medievalism in contemporary opera by enacting queer hermeneutics as described by Elizabeth Freeman in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Combining literary, theological, and music-theoretical modes of analysis, this thesis explores two overarching avenues for enquiry: 1. How can we account for the complexities of time in composite works that span several centuries, stage premodern temporalities for post-industrial audiences, and themselves operate within the ambiguities of narrative time? 2. What does it mean to perform and spectate upon medieval texts and lives in the twenty-first century? Can the ephemerality of song connect with the ephemerality of history to stimulate creative forms of historiography? In Freeman’s terms, is this mode of historiography itself a form of ‘close reading’? Reflecting on the surprising prevalence of Cistercian influences surrounding each of these operas’ source-texts, I suggest that medieval spirituality can provide powerful tools with which to approach questions of performance and temporality, as well as the intense modes of love and desire that these opera stage. With a particular emphasis on how medieval writers and queer theorists conceive of secrecy and revelation, I suggest that the way in which song transcends the boundaries between discrete bodies can create a vital link between pre- and postmodern modes of desire, that thrives in the temporal gaps created by historical alterity

On Counterinsurgency: Firepower, Biopower, and the Collateralization of Milliatry Violence

This dissertation investigates the most recent cycle of North Atlantic expeditionary warfare by addressing the resuscitation of counterinsurgency warfare with a specific focus on the war in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2014. The project interrogates the lasting aesthetic, epistemological, philosophical, and territorial implications of counterinsurgency, which should be understood as part of wider transformations in military affairs in relation to discourses of adaptation, complexity, and systemic design, and to the repertoire of global contingency and stability operations. Afghanistan served as a counterinsurgency laboratory, and the experiments will shape the conduct of future wars, domestic security practices, and the increasingly indistinct boundary between them. Using work from Michel Foucault and liberal war studies, the project undertakes a genealogy of contemporary population-centred counterinsurgency and interrogates how its conduct is constituted by and as a mixture firepower and biopower. Insofar as this mix employs force with different speeds, doses, and intensities, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency unrestricts and collateralizes violence, which is emblematic of liberal war that kills selectively to secure and make life live in ways amenable to local and global imperatives of liberal rule. Contemporary military counterinsurgents, in conducting operations on the edges of liberal rule's jurisdiction and in recursively influencing the domestic spaces of North Atlantic states, fashion biopoweras custodial power to conduct the conduct of lifeto shape different interventions into the everyday lives of target populations. The 'lesser evil' logic of counterinsurgency is used to frame counterinsurgency as a type of warfare that is comparatively low-intensity and less harmful, and this justification actually lowers the threshold for violence by making increasingly indiscriminate the ways in which its employment damages and envelops populations and communities, thereby allowing counterinsurgents to speculate on the practice of expeditionary warfare and efforts to sustain occupations. Thus, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency is a communicative process, better understood as mobile military media with an atmospheric-environmental register blending acute and ambient measures that are always-already kinetic. The counterinsurgent gaze enframes a world picture where everything can be a force amplifier and everywhere is a possible theatre of operations

The history and social significance of motion pictures in South Africa, 1895-1940

The nineteenth century culminated in a wealth of scientific inventiveness which resulted in a complete and fundamental change in social life within the following fifty years. The more widespread use of telegraphy, the expansion of the telephone service, the increased application of electricity and the invention of the motor car, the sudden appearance and phenomenal development of the cinema, and finally the invention and speedy public utilisation of the aeroplane and the wireless have combined to obliterate (except in trivial instances such as its "naughtiness") appreciation of the atmosphere of the period in which motion pictures first appeared. In South Africa, a remarkable degree of self-reliance was practiced by the populations of comparatively isolated towns during the nineties. Despite the slowness of communication, the laboriousness of travel and the leisurely tempo of life in general, despite every adverse circumstance, people construed out or their immediate surroundings a cultural life far more enterprising than that produced by favourable modern conditions

Casco Bay Weekly : 28 November 1996

https://digitalcommons.portlandlibrary.com/cbw_1996/1048/thumbnail.jp

Aerospace Medicine and Biology. an Annotated Bibliography. 1958-1961 Literature, Volumes VII-X, Part 2

Abstracts on aerospace medicine and biology - bibliography on environmental factors, safety and survival, personnel, pharmacology, toxicology, and life support system

Kailyard, Scottish literary criticism, and the fiction of J. M. Barrie

This thesis argues that the term Kailyard is not a body of literature or cultural discourse, but a critical concept which has helped to construct controlling parameters for the discussion of literature and culture in Scotland. By offering an in-depth reading of the fiction of J.M. Barrie - the writer who is most usually and misleadingly associated with the term - and by tracing the writing career of Ian Maclaren, I argue for the need to reject the term and the critical assumptions it breeds. The introduction maps the various ways Kailyard has been employed in literary and cultural debates and shows how it promotes a critical approach to Scottish culture which focuses on the way individual writers, texts and images represent Scotland. Chapter 1 considers why this critical concern arose by showing how images of national identity and national literary distinctiveness were validated as the meaning of Scotland throughout the nineteenth century. Chapters 2-5 seek to overturn various assumptions bred by the term Kailyard. Chapter 2 discusses the early fiction of J.M. Barrie in the context of late nineteenth-century regionalism, showing how his work does not aim to depict social reality but is deliberately artificial in design. Chapter 3 discusses late Victorian debates over realism in fiction and shows how Barrie and Maclaren appealed to the reading public because of their treatment of established Victorian ideas of sympathy and the sentimental. Chapter 4 discusses Barrie's four longer novels - the works most constrained by the Kailyard term - and chapter 5 reconsiders the relationship between Maclaren's work and debates over popular culture. Chapter 6 analyses the use of the term Kailyard in twentieth-century Scottish cultural criticism. Discussing the criticism of Hugh MacDiarmid, the writing of literary histories and studies of Scottish film, history and politics, I argue for the need to reject the Kailyard term as a critical concept in the discussion of Scottish culture

Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, 1940

https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmc_alumnae/1030/thumbnail.jp

Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, 1940

https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmc_alumnae/1030/thumbnail.jp