6.3 Heat research Andrew Plummer (c. 1698–1756), the chemistry professor at Edinburgh, suffered a stroke in 1755, and the Town Council appointed Cullen as his conjoint professor without consulting the stricken Plummer. Black, who had covered for Plummer until Cullen arrived, was appointed to Cullen's position at the University of Glasgow. This move also marked a change in the direction of Black's research. He now began to investigate the nature of heat, a central topic in eighteenth-century chemistry.
6.2.1 Magnesia alba After four years with Cullen in Glasgow, Black transferred to Edinburgh to complete his medical studies. He then needed to select a topic for his MD dissertation, one which would involve chemistry, be of topical interest, and also touch upon a medical question. He decided to study the nature of causticity, the corrosive character of alkaline substances, such as quicklime (calcium oxide). He wrote to his father in December 1752 that he had chosen this topic because of a controversy between two
5.3 Hutton's geology: ‘No vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’ Geologists are engaged on the business of reconstructing the earth's past and determining the agents of geological change. The only documentary evidence of the earth's origins and ancient past, and of the agents that had caused change, available to Hutton was the book of Genesis, and he had sceptically put it aside, along with miracles. But what if the processes that are presently observable were to be taken as the key to the past? How far might geological enquiry go with the assumptio
5.3 Addressing the issues Think back over the video evidence so far: what information and examples might you select, and how might you use these to address the issues raised there? You will find the final section of th
Activity 19
4.3 The functions of adinkra Once you’ve watched the video, make a few notes on what you learnt about the functions of adinkra. 3.5 What can we learn? The next activity poses a question that should encourage you to bring together the various observations you made above. What can we learn from who is trained and the way people train to make kente and adinkr 3.3 Training to weave kente Once you’ve watched the video, make a few notes on how the kente weavers train. Learning outcomes At the end of this unit you should: have an awareness of the ways in which meanings and values are assigned to textiles; have an understanding of the changing history of the making of kente and adinkra; be able to discuss the role of the market place in the changing history of kente and adinkra making. Introduction This unit looks at the way meanings and values are assigned to textiles. You will examine how a piece of cloth can define wealth, status, and, in the past, office. References 3.1 Introduction With your initial work on sources and on what it may mean to ‘explore the Classical world’ under your belt, you're now in a good position to start exploring. To lay the foundations for your explorations, you will in this section do some work on ancient times and places. Not least since you will cover a wide range of materials from different periods and locations, it will be important for you to know how they all fit together. 2.4.6 Documents Various texts survive from the ancient world that don't fit into any of the categories above. Most of them are categorised as ‘documentary’. These can be parts of archives, or public commemorations such as tombstones, or inventories, or even shopping lists. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of such material is now lost (after all, even today, a shopping list and many company and government records have a lower hope of long-term survival than a novel). Nonetheless, some of them have surviv 2.4.5 Philosophy This is yet another essentially literary source, so we can be brief. In fact, as in the case of history, its distinction from literature is anything but cut and dried. The only reason we mention it here separately is because we want to make it explicit that almost everything we have said for literature holds for philosophy too. Many varieties of philosophy aim to find absolute truths. In this respect, philosophy is less concerned with particular periods and places than is, for instance, histo 2.2 Collecting and selecting Writers are always on the alert for potential material. A notebook is an essential tool for any writer and has several functions. These range from the jotting down of observations while you’re out and about to an account of daily events, your rants and raves, ideas for poems, single words, clippings from newspapers, responses to books or poems you’ve read, notes from research, all kinds of ‘gathering’. Your notebook is for you, and it needs to contain whatever helps you or fuels your 6.2 A sense of sumptuous hedonism In the sphere of painting, decoration and architecture, Orientalist schemes of decoration, which were all the rage in the eighteenth century among those who sought a more colourful and sumptuous life, attained a particularly florid mode of expression in the early nineteenth century. This was a considerable development from the early Enlightenment Rococo, which had included Oriental subjects with graceful curves and conventional, theatre backdrop landscapes designed to complement elegant gold 5.4 A taste for the grotesque The grotesque was one aspect of this new aesthetic. The antithesis of the sublime and the beautiful, it was defined by Victor Hugo in his Preface to Cromwell:
In the thinking of the moderns … the grotesque plays a massive role. It is everywhere; on the one hand, it creates the deformed and the horrid; on the other, the comic and the farcical. It brings to religion thousands of original superstitious ideas 2.1 Inspiration for the Death of Sardanapalus Plate 1 is a reproduction of Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus, believed to have been completed sometime between November 1827 and January 1828. Click on 'View document to see Eugène Delacroix,The Death of Sardanapalus Introduction In this unit you will be introduced to a variety of Delacroix’s work and see how his paintings relate to the cultural transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism. You will study Delacroix’s early career, his classical background, the development of Romantic ideas and their incorporation into his work. You will have the opportunity to study some of his most important paintings and compare them to works favouring a Neoclassical approach. You will also be able to see how his themes, s Acknowledgements This unit was written by Dr Emma Barker
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce 3.1 The limits of propaganda Although portraits of Napoleon were manufactured on a large scale and distributed widely, they could only act as propaganda for the regime up to a certain point. Given the institutional circumstances sketched out in the introduction to this unit, the most effective way to use art as propaganda was with large-scale history paintings that would attract the attention and excite the interest of a large audience when they were exhibited in the Salon. State patronage for such painting was revived o
Activity 14
Activity 11
Activity 9
