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Civic identity and public space, focussing on Belfast, and bringing together the work of a historian and two social scientists, offers a new perspective on the sometimes lethal conflicts over parades, flags and other issues that continue to disrupt political life in Northern Ireland. The first part of the book shows how these disputes had their origins in the changes that took place during the nineteenth century in the character of urban living, creating new forms of public space whose regulation was from the start a matter of contention and debate. Later chapters show how the establishment of a new Northern Ireland state, with Belfast as its capital, saw unionism and Protestantism achieve a near-complete monopoly of public space. In more recent decades, this monopoly has broken down, partly as a result of political violence, but also through the influence of new ideas of human rights and of a more positive vision of political and cultural diversity. Today policy makers and politicians struggle to devise a strategy for the management of public space in a divided city, while endeavouring to promote a new sense of civic identity that will transcend long-standing political and sectarian divisions.
This chapter explores the ways in which adapted guild buildings shaped the experiences, identities, and behaviours of artisans and broader groups of urban inhabitants. It also considers how the performance of particular artisanal and civic activities impacted upon the meanings and significance of certain spaces. Notions of belonging, status, and hierarchy were articulated and experienced through institutional architectures. Further, conceptions of relative ‘secrecy’ and ‘openness’ were enacted and reinforced through the use and appropriation of company halls. This examination of the manifold ways in which built environments shaped guild communities, and how the users of company halls appropriated them, considers specific spaces such as galleries, parlours, kitchens, halls, assay houses, and domestic sites, as well as particular activities and cultural practices, like material testing and feasting. These highly ritualised activities derived significance from their performance in certain spaces, and in turn shaped the meanings and import of the rooms in which they were enacted. As artisanal company halls were expanded and beautified from the mid-sixteenth century, their users and visitors became increasingly conscious of how access, movement, and placement within these institutional spaces reflected upon personal and collective identities. Through their spatial organisation and ritualised uses, livery halls ordered bodies relationally according to social, gender, and generational differences. Privileged access to particular chambers, and witnessing of protected or ‘secret’ guild practices, signified and produced artisanal status. Additionally, proximity and contact with the treasured material apparatus of feasting rites worked to bolster status and hierarchies within the artisanal or mercantile guild.
The Arch of Trajan in Ancona and civic identity in the Italian Quattrocento from Ciriaco d’Ancona to the death of Matthias Corvinus1 2 Francesco Benelli This essay focuses on the Arch of Trajan in Ancona in the fifteenth century, when it began to be considered a civic and political symbol of the city that could provide Ancona with an imperial lineage. This new identity emerged out of Ancona’s rivalry with Venice, the city’s most important commercial competitor. In this context local ancient architecture is framed by a new local identity as well as by the
This book explores how issues of power, form and subjectivity feature at the core of all serious thinking about the media, including appreciations of their creativity as well as anxiety about the risks they pose. Drawing widely on an interdisciplinary literature, the author connects his exposition to examples from film, television, radio, photography, painting, web practice, music and writing in order to bring in topics as diverse as reporting the war in Afghanistan, the televising of football, documentary portrayals of 9/11, reality television, the diversity of taste in the arts and the construction of civic identity. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, three big chapters on each of the key notions provide an interconnected discussion of the media activities opened up for exploration and the debates they have provoked. The second part presents examples, arguments and analysis drawing on the author's previous work around the core themes, with notes placing them in the context of the whole book. The book brings together concepts both from Social Studies and the Arts and Humanities, addressing a readership wider than the sub-specialisms of media research. It refreshes ideas about why the media matter, and how understanding them better remains a key aim of cultural inquiry and a continuing requirement for public policy.
This book offers a ground-breaking perspective on how imperial culture was disseminated. It draws on a consistent set of themes that influenced urban life between 1870 and 1939, in addressing the impact of imperialism on popular culture of the British society. The book identifies the important synergies that grew between a new civic culture and the wider imperial project. It explores the local and imperial nexus and whether imperial wars in the far reaches of the British Empire were translated into tangible localised issues. The book examines the role of volunteerism, patriotism and citizen-soldier relationships through two important conflicts, the Boer War and First World War. Drawing on a rich seam of primary sources from Portsmouth, Coventry and Leeds, case studies are considered against an extensive analysis of seminal and current historiography. The evidence drawn suggests that differing social, political and cultural contexts helped determine both a community's civic identity and, significantly, its engagement with national and imperial perspectives. University and religious settlements such as the High Anglican Oxford House, Toynbee Hall and the Oxford House Movement run by Anglo-Catholic slum priests exposed men to a life of service towards their imperial mission. The schooling experience of working-class children in these cities focused on curriculum, physical exercise, and extra-curricular activities. The ebb and flow of imperial enthusiasm was shaped through a fusion of local patriotism and a broader imperial identity. Imperial culture was neither generic nor unimportant but was instead multi-layered and recast to capture the concerns of a locality.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, museums in Europe and North America were at their largest and most powerful. New buildings were bigger; objects flooded into them, and more people visited them than ever before. The Manchester Museum is an ideal candidate for understanding cultures of display in twentieth-century Britain. It is a treasure trove of some four million priceless objects that are irreplaceable and unique. Like many large European collections, the origins of the Manchester Museum are to be found in a private cabinet: that of John Leigh Philips. This book traces the fate of his cabinet from his death in 1814. The establishment of the Manchester Natural History Society (MNHS) allowed naturalists to carve out a space in Manchester's cultural landscape. The Manchester Museum's development was profoundly affected by the history of the University in which it operated. In January 1868, the Natural History Society formally dissolved, and an interim commission took control of its collections; the Manchester Geological Society transferred its collections the following year. The new collection was to be purely scientific, comprising geology, zoology and botany, with no place for some of the more exotic specimens of the Society. The objects in the collection became part of Manchester's civic identity, bringing with them traces of science, empire and the exotic. Other museological changes were afoot in the 1990s. Natural history collections became key sites for public engagement with environmental issues and biodiversity and more recently as sites for exhibiting art.
class, this book has explored why men volunteered for two imperial wars during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The civic platform alone, however, was insufficient in encouraging popular local patriotism as working-class communities were also developing their own urban identity. The Boer War came during a time in which working people began to carve out a civic identity through sporting teams and to take
politically in collaboration with other cities in Britain and the empire'. 4 By investigating, as far as we can, the ebb and flow of daily life in Portsmouth, Coventry and Leeds, this book endeavours to identify the diffusion of and engagement with imperial values within the three communities. The late Victorian era proved a critical period for urban elites' attempts in establishing a sense of civic identity
of working-class welfare. Yet it is hard to believe that even a more broadly based vision of improvement could have done much to promote a sense of shared civic identity in a city so bitterly divided along lines of religious and political allegiance. It was only late in the nineteenth century, and in many cases with a degree of reluctance, that the city’s elite gave their support to the annual rituals of the Orange Order. But long before that the ruthless maintenance of one-party rule at city level, blatant discrimination in the distribution of municipal employment
, 190 • erika kuijpers & judith pollmann • the collective memory of the Revolt did not comprise the people’s suffering under the yoke of the repressive military regime of the 1570s and 80s. Instead public memory culture in the South celebrated the victory of the true Catholic religion and the people’s loyalty to their natural king. Peter Arnade’s argument that the experiences of war encouraged the strengthening of civic identities is quite correct, but this only applied in cities that also had something to celebrate, not those that experienced sacks. The existence