The Rhine Crisis of 1840 and German Nationalism: Chauvinism, Skepticism, and Regional Reception*
The Rhine Crisis began with French imperialism. Aiming to expand its influence to Egypt and the Levant, France lent its support in 1839 to Mehmet Ali, Egypt’s pasha, whose ambition to seek hereditary rule in Egypt and Syria challenged Ottoman suzerainty. After Egyptian-led troops pushed theOttoman army beyond Syria’s border in April 1839, Adolphe Thiers, the French president, envisioned a new sphere of influence in the Orient. He thus played with the fragile equilibrium of the Eastern Question, Western diplomacy’s contest to fill the power vacuum of a reduced Ottoman Empire. The démarche stalled, however, during the opening months of 1840, culminating in dramatic failure on July 15with the London Convention: a four-power treaty ðwithout the consultation of FranceÞ that supported the sultan’s retention of his imperial territories. Isolated and humiliated by this diplomatic loss, Thiers’s government and the Chamber of Deputies sought an honorable retreat through compensation elsewhere and therefore reasserted the claim that France’s frontier extended to the Rhine. The French state thus compounded a diplomatic setback with a political dispute over “natural borders.” In
Irony and Popular Politics in Germany, 1800–1850
Defining irony as an aesthetic trope that constructs distance, difference, and detachment, this essay explores the relationship of irony to political sensationalism in Germany’s evolving popular political culture. Concretely, the essay explores the evolving growth of ironic expression in popular political texts (flysheets, songs, almanacs, calendars, lithographs, and various forms of journalism), all of which encouraged detachment and analytical distance to the social order, spawning in turn critical reflection and partisan engagement. Drawing on the images and popular political texts of the Restoration and Vormarz eras (1800–1848), this essay presents how irony posed enormous problems for censors and their regulation of political discourse. The analysis will particularly focus on the Rhine Crisis of 1840 and the attempted assassination of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia in 1844 as examples of sensationalism that transformed popular political identity. By shifting the representative modalities of political sensation and scandal toward critical citizenship, irony assumes a central role in shaping political modernity.
Household economy and gendered labor in the 17th centurya.d. on Guam
Abstract The gendered division of labor in household economies is well known in documentary accounts of many societies, although archaeological evidence for it is often elusive. Our study compares ethnohistorical accounts of household organization with archaeological patterns at a 17th-century village on the island of Guam in the Marianas archipelago to determine if these different sources of evidence provide similar insights. We investigated archaeological assemblages from two latte (megalithic) buildings to document their economic activities. Unexpected differences in their assemblages revealed that economic activities varied between the two latte buildings. They were domiciles of a single economically integrated household, but their disparate functions likely signaled a gendered division of labor. This study reveals aspects of gendered labor that documentary accounts do not fully describe. Our findings suggest that the assumption that domestic buildings were functionally redundant in traditional societies must be tested on a case-by-case basis.