153 research outputs found
Chapter II-2 - Edward S. Morse grows up
In which teenage Edward S. Morse of Salem, Massachusetts, begins a
life-long love affair with shells, leaves home for Boston, studies with
Louis Agassiz at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, and
becomes the world's leading authority on brachiopods (by proving
conclusively that these tiny creatures are not mollusks, but worms),
and how these same brachiopods lead him, at the age of thirty-nine, to
Japan
Learning from those "imitative" Japanese : Edward S. Morse and the civilization of the Mikado's empire
Already in the twelfth century, men canvassed different views on
the ways in which they thought lordship ought to be exercised. They
used their picture of how an idealised "Good Lord" -- a familiar label
in later times -- comported himself to assess the treatment they
actually received from their lords. This Good Lordship had both
Positive and Negative aspects: the "good lord" maintained his vassals
in their honours and renounced his right to revoke grants afterwards.
One excellent way to study the pursuit of this double ideal is through
the language of charters, more particularly through the warranty
clauses by which Good Lordship was often implemented. The
transformation of warranty into its familiar Common-Law shape reflects
corresponding and complex changes in both lord-vassal relations and the
role of the King and his justice.
Warranty actually began as a security device, designed to keep men
to their word, and is found used in this sense over wide areas of sub-
Carolingian Europe. It was probably imported to England by the French,
and can be seen in twelfth-century charters progressively superseding
other forms of words to become the classic "guarantee" of Good
Lordship. In this manner it came by 1200 to be virtually equated with
the lordship it had originally been used to enforce. Warranty was
lordship seen from the vassal's point of view, that is, tenant-right.
Despite this origin in very personal relations, warranty probably
always created between the parties' heirs some kind of obligation,
which sharpened and was made infinitely more clear-cut with the
emergence of full legal inheritance rights. Warranty swelled to full
tenant-right, a full guarantee of the Right to Good Lordship.
As the heir's claim grew into an enforceable right of inheritance
through increasing access to remedies by royal justice, and because
such justice tended to strict construction, warranty became a
contractual addition to which claimants had to prove their entitlement.
The narrative of legal change from 1150 argues for gradual evolution
but also suggests 1153-4 as the decisive turning-point in this
development.
Detailed (sometimes technical) examination of evidence for some
relevant cases, royal writs concerning warranty and the turning-point
of 1153-4 is reserved for three appendixes
Chapter IV-1 - Griffis in Tokyo
In which William E. Griffis spends more than two years in Tokyo, teaching science, promoting Christian activities, and writing on Japan
for American publications, and how his sister Maggie comes to live with him, and how during those two years he keeps longing for the
traditional Japan that he is helping to destroy, the Japan he so precipitously fled from in Fukui
Chapter I - Landing in Japan
In which our three heroes -- William E. Griffis, missionary;
Edward S. Morse, scientist; and Lafcadio Hearn, writer -- find during
their first weeks in Japan that this Asian country lives up to some of
their preconceptions, violates others, and altogether proves to be a
more complicated, perplexing, challenging, and interesting place than
they had imagined
History in images / history in words : reflections on the possibility of really putting history on film (or what a historian begins to think about when people start turning his books into movies)
This was supposed to be easy. A chance to bring together all my thoughts on film and
history. To make my inchoate notions coherent. To force myself to see what it is I have
been thinking. But it has not been easy--more like attempting to pick up water and hold it
in your hand. The ideas will not cohere. They change between the thinking and the writing
of them. They slip away. They refuse to blend into a whole. Is it me? Is it the subject? I
won't even bother with that one. The point is to say only what I can. Which means refusing
to make artificial sense of ideas that will not make sense. Which means refusing to bridge
the gaps in my knowledge. Which means refusing to make connections where connections do
not yet (in my mind) exist. Which means abandoning the idea of an essay and doing no more
than sharing some of my reflections and the ideas I have wrestled with during the months I
have been attempting to write this piece. Which means there will be no linear development,
no attempt at closure, no final answers to the questions posed by the elusive problem of can
we represent history on film
Morse at Enoshima and Tokyo
In which our hero sets up a marine laboratory at Enoshima in the
summer of 1877 and then, in the fall, takes up his position as first
professor of Zoology at the Imperial University in Tokyo. And how he
excavates the kitchen middens at Omori and introduces archeology to
Japan; and how he brings his family to live there for two years; and
how he begins to collect pottery; and how he learns how to waste
(enjoy?) time; and how he leaves in 1879 with many interests and ideas
that were not his just three years before
Chapter II-1- William E. Griffis grows up
In which William E. Griffis is born in Philadelphia, grows to
young manhood, becomes a twice-born Christian, serves briefly in the
Civil War, attends Rutgers College, plays football, travels to Europe,
begins theological seminary, gets engaged and, when the engagement is
broken, jumps at the opportunity of becoming (for a handsome salary) a
chemistry teacher (and crypto-missionary) in feudal Japan
Hearn from Leucadia to Martinique
The heart-rending story of an orphan with parents, and the many
crooked and cruel twists of fate he suffers in the first forty years of
life as he goes from a privileged childhood to a poverty-stricken
manhood. From Greece, the story moves to Ireland, France and England,
thence to Cincinnati where our hero becomes a sensationalist
newspaperman and marries a black woman; thence to New Orleans for a
decade of literary editing and finally to Martinique, that promised
tropical land, where he finds it much easier to make love than work
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