The Spirit of Bacon: Science and Self-Perception in the Hudson's Bay Company, 1830-1870

This article considers in terms of its larger historical context the participation by officers of the Hudson's Bay Company in the social networks of Victorian science, mainly in the collection of specimens of natural history in the vast northwestern territories of North America. While such specimens were solicited by outsiders from British and American scientific institutions, a common cultural heritage gave meaning and value to the cooperative efforts of both scientists and collectors. A sketch of this heritage, in which the writings of Sir Francis Bacon, the voyages of Captain James Cook, the example of Alexander von Humboldt, the scholarship of the Scottish Enlightenment and other factors were alloyed to form the matrix of Victorian scientific activity, forms the focus of the discussion of both the Company's policies and individual initiatives.Cet article analyse la participation de membres de la Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson à la collecte de spécimens de l’histoire naturelle des territoires d’Amérique du Nord. A travers ces activités, ces collectionneurs devenaient membres des réseaux sociaux de la science victorienne. Bien que les demandes provenaient d’institutions autres que britanniques et américaines, le sens et la valeur des efforts coopératifs des scientifiques et des collectionneurs originaient d’un héritage culturel commun. Cet héritage, qui comprend, entre autres, les écrits de Sir Francis Bacon, les voyages du Capitaine Cook et de Alexander von Humboldt et la philosophie écossaise des Lumières, forme la matrice de l’activité scientifique de l’ère victorienne. C’est dans cet environnement intellectuel qui prirent forme les politiques de la Compagnie et les activités de ses membres

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationAt the end of the nineteenth century, many literary narratives of the American West repeated historical assumptions and genre tropes while material objects from the West indexed commodity flows and a national fetish for ethnography. Writers like John Wesley Powell, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, Owen Wister, and Mary Austin turned from plots and props to techniques of material assemblage to depict the diverse relations and dynamic tensions of the West. These writers engage in a practice of salvage, in which they separate materials from prior contexts of production or sentiment and combine them in new associations. Their salvage work appears as assemblages-scrapbooks, taxidermy animals, clothes, and weavings-and extends the methods and materials of these assemblages to the structures of their texts. Each work's composition foregrounds the incongruities of its elements, and each text becomes a borderland, or selvage, in which conflicts remain unresolved. The assemblages expose readers to "affective regionality," the feelings of "contingency, precarity, vulnerability," that occur between geographic places and rhetorical explanations. Each text, then, presents the writer's experience of "westness," of the fantastic and real, speculated and remembered, vast and intimate American West

Being Cherokee in a White World: Ethnic Identity in a Post-Removal American Indian Enclave

Within a few years of 1838, when most members of the Cherokee Nation were forced to emigrate to Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears, a small group of Cherokee families reestablished settlements in and around the Ducktown Basin in the southeastern comer of Tennessee, away from the major Eastern Cherokee remnants in North Carolina. This dissertation reconstructs the history of these Cherokees from 1838 through the 1910s, focusing on the nature of their communities; their economic, social, and religious relationships with local whites; their associations with other Cherokee enclaves and individuals; and their ultimate disappearance from the Basin. Data are drawn from a broad spectrum of primary and secondary sources, and include evidence derived from documentary, oral, ethnohistoric, ethnographic, folkloric, and material sources. Theories of Fredrik Barth (1969) and Edward H. Spicer (1962, 1971, 1972c) on ethnicity and ethnic persistence and Eric Wolf\u27s Europe and the People Without History (1982) provide a framework for interpreting the Ducktown Basin Cherokee experience within the broader contexts of Cherokee, American Indian, local, regional, and national history and culture. Historic and contemporary Indian and non-Indian voices as well as multiple layers of thick description (Geertz 1973) are employed to represent this historically obscured American Indian enclave and to reveal how its members collectively and individually enacted being Cherokee in the course of daily living after the extreme disruptions of Removal. In terms of economic pursuits, material culture in general, and material wealth, the Basin Cherokees differed little from their non-Indian neighbors. Boundaries protecting their sense of Cherokee identity, however, were marked and maintained in several important ways. A central ethnic marker for this post-Removal group was the recreation of and participation in traditional matrilineally-and matrilocally-focused community. Continued use of the Cherokee language, values, and intermediaries were equally important signals of the members\u27 Cherokee-ness, as well as forms of passive resistance against the new non-Indian majority. Maintenance of traditional rivercane basketry by some women connected the group economically and socially with non-Indians, but at the same time produced objects imbued with symbolic links to past lifeways and to contemporary social affiliations: family, locality, and tribe. Economic and social interactions between the Ducktown Basin enclave and non-Indians stand in marked contrast to the experience of other Eastern Cherokee enclaves during the same period. In particular, the discovery of a major copper reserve in 1843 quickly led to national and international industrial speculation and development in the Ducktown Basin. The Cherokees who had reestablished communities in the Basin, and other Cherokees drawn in as peripheral industrial workers during the first copper boom, were profoundly affected by the changing nature of local white society and by shifting perceptions about Indian-ness in America and the South. As the Ducktown Basin\u27s copper industry developed, competition for limited agricultural lands and industrial work intensified. these changes, coupled with local and national tightening of racial boundaries, increased social and racial stratification, and growing racial intolerance eventually caused Cherokee families to withdraw from the Basin. Links maintained with traditionalist Cherokee communities in North Carolina, however, ensured their continued participation in the traditional kinship and social relationships then central to Cherokee community and ethnicity. In this symbolic sense the Ducktown Basin Cherokee enclave continues; as one descendant says, We are all from there

Livelihoods, Wellbeing and the Risk to Life During Volcanic Eruptions

A forensic analysis of fatalities and displacements from recent volcanic eruptions (1986–2015) provides insights into factors that influence actions to protect life in high-risk environments. Unlike many other geophysical hazard events, volcanic eruptions may be prolonged, and of variable intensity. This is reflected in patterns of volcanic fatalities. A global survey reveals that 63% of primary volcanic deaths occur after the first week of activity, with >44% of these deaths associated with citizens returning to an established high-hazard zone. Evacuations during volcanic eruptions are protracted and this allows time for competing pressures to arise. Examination of detailed data from three volcanic crises (La Soufriere, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Soufrière Hills, Montserrat and Tungurahua, Ecuador) suggests that the need to preserve livelihoods plays a strong role in protecting life. A dynamic, associated with pull (e.g., protecting assets, place attachment) and push factors (e.g., poor shelter conditions), can draw evacuees to return during high-risk periods. Similar considerations can restrain people with previous experience of volcanic hazards and displacement, from evacuating. Our global analysis shows that these pressures, when coupled with forecasting uncertainties and the rapid landscape change associated with volcanic eruptions, mean that the physical and social vulnerability of populations change significantly during the course of an eruption. Ongoing risk to life is shaped by hazard experience and action; timescales of hazard escalation and their relationship to warning and action; and the timescales over which evacuation conditions are tolerable to livelihood and asset preservation, and mental and physical wellbeing in shelters

A Critical Analysis Of Actions Taken Upon Historic Musical Instruments Through The Period Of The Early Music Revival From The Beginning Of The 20th Century To The 1990s

This work is a critical analysis of craft internvention upon historic musical instruments. It is centred upon the tension between use and preservation that arose with the conflicting demands of the early music revival for working musical instruments,and of the conservation discipline for the preservation of these artefacts as documents of contemporary instrument-making and musical practices. A framework is developed around three regimens of function, termed Currency, Restitution and Preservation, within which the actions and rationales of craft activity on musical instruments may be characterized. Case studies of nine historic instruments are presented in order to demonstrate the derivation of both the technical and social factors that contributed to their changes in state and status during the period under study. Analysis of the actions taken upon the instruments in their historical and social contexts provides a novel understanding of the relationship between the desire for musical experience, and the need for historical and technical information. The work concludes with a discussion of a strategy for encouraging a balance between musical function and preservation, thus mediating between the conflicting demands