History Commons^™

Innovative Representations Of Light, Behaving As Both Particles And Waves, Among The Paintings Of Monet And Renoir, Charles Smith

Charles Kay Smith

Monet and Renoir, friends collaborating in open air about 1865, discovered that sunlight filtering through a canopy of tree leaves does not produce the splotches and dapples that studio artists conventionally represented at the time but circles of light. Sometimes the circles of light punctuating the shade are clear, separate and crisp, as though light is being propagated as particles, but if the pin-hole gaps between leaves are very close together, they will project compound or superimposed circles that look like the waves that Thomas Young saw in his double slit experiment in 1803-4. Newton’s Opticks published in 1704 had …

Projecting Pornography And Mapping Modernity In Mexico City, Ageeth Sluis

Ageeth Sluis

Drawing on Elizabeth Grosz’s and Doreen Massey’s insights that place and gender are mutually constitutive, this article examines the articulation among the embodied city, sexual desire, and changing gender norms in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. At this time, a newly governing revolutionary elite sought to reinvigorate and “civilize” Mexico City through a series of urban reforms and public works, partly in response to their concern over women in public as a social problem. By analyzing depictions of female nudity as conversant with urban landscapes in the banned magazine Vea, the author argues that pornography connected Mexico City to …

Bataclanismo! Or, How Deco Bodies Transformed Postrevolutionary Mexico City, Ageeth Sluis

Ageeth Sluis

In the spring of 1925, Santa Anita's Festival of Flowers seemed to follow its tranquil trend of previous years. The large displays of flowers, the selection of indias bonitas (as the contestants of beauty pageants organized in an attempt to stimulate indigenism were known) and the boat-rides on the Viga Canal, all communicated what residents of neighboring Mexico City had come to expect of the small pueblo in the Federal District since the Porfiriato: the respite of a peaceful pastoral, the link to a colorful past, and the promise that mexicanidad was alive and well in the campo. Unfortunately, wrote …

Living In The Past: Preservation, Interpretation, And Engagement, And The 19th – Early 20th Century Home, Kirsten Jarrett

Kirsten Jarrett

In recent years, boundaries between curated domestic space (typically open to the public, maintained by museum professionals, and supported by government or charitable funding), and privately occupied dwellings, have on occasion been eroded. Each year, usually as part of annual heritage events run by non-profit organisations, a small number of residents permit members of the public to view features of historic interest within their homes. Furthermore, extensive opportunities to share information, images, and data on-line allow residents to ‘virtually’ display historical features within otherwise closed domestic spaces. Adopting approaches from ‘Rescue’, Research, and Public Archaeology, the Living in the Past …

Patrick Scott’S Work For Signa Design Consultants, Mary Ann Bolger

Mary Ann Bolger

This essay examines Patrick Scott’s work as a designer in mid-twentieth century Ireland. It focuses in particular on the work of one of Ireland’s first modern design consultancies, Signa, where Scott was the general design consultant. The paper argues that Signa’s designs provided an early model for a design vocabulary that could be, in the words of the British design critic Herbert Read, both “Irish and contemporary”.

"Heroes In These New Lands" Evolving Colonial Identities At The Spanish Royal Presidio Of Monterey, Jennifer A. Lucido

Jennifer Lucido