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Social Science History: Time line for the history of society, science and social science

A time line from before writing began to the present, linked to Andrew Roberts' book Social Science History and to other resources, including extracts and works of authors and the timelines for crime - America - mental health - sunrise - earthcore and local London .

But why? The timeline began because social scientists need history. It was a resource for a foundation course in social sciences at Middlesex University.

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Main Chronological Headings

Quick jump to: Begining - Africa - Sumeria - Egypt - China - Greece - Christ - Bible - Islam - 700   900   1000   1100   1200   1300   1400   1500   1600   1700   1800   1900   2000  

In the begining - photosynthesis - worms - Haeckel's links - ichthyostega - coal - one land mass - reptiles - extinctions - dung - Tethys - chalk and flowers - soft rock - beautiful world - fur and skin - eolithic - hominid - 4 million - southern apes - 3 million - glacials - Prehistory (through archeology and myth) - mammoth - who are you calling a savage? - bone - stone tools - 2 million - erectus - naked - Mortillet's classification - first migration - 1 million - team GB - Piltdown fraud - fire - sewing - cave bear - sapiens - world migration - prehistoric imagination in Africa - ochre paint - creeping cold - 100,000 - continuous clothing - religion   music - art in Indonesia and Europe (stone and pigment)   dog - fired clay - pots - reindeer - textiles - clothing remains - who are you calling a barbarian? - Tell es-Sultan - cattle (auroch tamed) - lead - wood - History - gold - copper - mercury - bronze - tin - silver - who are you calling civilised? - Pyramids and maths on tablets - 2500BC Chinese civilisation - law - slavery - cedar - sulphur and salt - 1700BC Scandinavian ships - iron - 1400BC monotheism - Ancient Greece - coins - 368BC Plato's Republic - Birth of Christ - materials of medicine - a map of the heavens - 200: a critical turning - 376: Völkerwanderung

4th Century
5th Century
6th Century
Indian mathematics
571: Birth of Muhammad
Medieval Europe

7th Century
spoken and written

8th Century
751. Empires meet. sugar. paper.
793: Viking ships

9th Century
820: al-jabr - 868: woodblock printing

10th Century
987: books of all nations in Arabic

11th Century
a critical turning
Ibn al-Haytham
1066 and 1086
Omar Khayyám
universities

12th Century
Euclid rediscovered
a Common Law for England - Jews in England
1157: Royal protection for foreign traders
1199 size of London

13th Century
1206: Mongolian Empire - Silk Road
1225: Thomas Aquinas
coal by sea

14th Century
1324: new music
1336: cargo boats
Renaissance
1344: geometrical perspective
1358: Hanseatic League
Geoffrey Chaucer

15th Century
Slavery and social science
Printing
1492: Columbus hears about cannibals

16th Century
Paracelsus - alchemy and experiment
new knowledge contrasted with schools
1517: individual judgement: bible over church
1528: map of the universe
1538: weddings, christenings, buryings
1544: map of the world
1557: arithmetical signs and algebra
1577: state of nature theory
1593: God's gift of reason
1597: The music of the spheres and a great herbal
a triangular run

17th Century
1601 - 1603 - 1607 - 1607 - 1609 - 1610: by God called gods
1611 Authorised Bible - 1613 - 1614 - 1618 - 1620 - 1621 - 1623 - 1625 - 1628 - 1629 - 1632 - 1635 - 1637 - 1640 -
1642: English Civil War
1646: King contained - 1649: King beheaded
1651: Hobbes' Leviathan
Louis 14: "l'etat c'est moi"
1660: Restoration and Royal Society
1662: Bills of mortatlity - 1666: Fire
1686: Newton's mathematical physics
Vauban on geometry and war
1688 Bloodless English revolution
Locke's politics and theory of science.
1697: balance of trade figures

18th Century
Coffee houses and newspapers
1713: Probability
1729: English translation of Newton's Mathematical Principles
1734: The Koran for Christians
1740: David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature
1748: Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws
1750: Time changes
1759: British Museum
1761 Transit of Venus
1762: Rousseau's The Social Contract and Emile
Steam and Machine
1764: Beccaria's Essay on Crimes and Punishment
1768: Priestley's principles of government and 1774 dephlogisticated air
1769 Another transit of Venus
Life giving air
1776: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Bentham's A Fragment on Government
1787: Federalist Papers
1789: French Revolution
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
French Constitution of 1789
1790-1799 Scotland's happiness, statistics and improvement
French Constitution of 1791
Rights of woman
France at War
French King Guillotined
French Constitution of 1793
1795 Speenhamland
metric system adopted in France
Institut National des Sciences et Arts
1798: Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population

19th Century
1801: First British census
1805: Children's Books
1806: the decomposition of matter into its elements by electricity
1812: Owen's Essays on the Formation of Human Character
1815: End of war - A new start for geology
1816: A new start for museums and archaeology
1819: Idyllic country villages and a Manchester massacre
1820: James Mill's Essay on Government
1822: Utilitarian Society
1827: London University
1831: The spirit of the age
1833: Statistical Societies formed
1834: New Poor Law
1835: An ordinary guy
1839: Speed annihilates distance as sociology is born
Hungry Forties
Womens' Rights Movement
1841: Feuerbach - anthropology and humanism
1841 British census with names
the steamship and the railway and the thoughts that shake mankind
1842: Women and children in coal mines
1843: The birth of anthropology
1843: Superphosphates and classic field experiments
1844: The Claims of Labour and Vestiges of Creation
1848: All Things Bright and Beautiful - Principles of Political Economy - and The Communist Manifesto
1848 Revolutions
1850: History of "the social movement"
1851: The Enfranchisement of Women and the first of the great exhibitions
1853: Crimean War
1854 Sydenham geology display
1857: Association for the Promotion of Social Science
1859: The Origin of Species
1861: History of the family
1862: Les Misérables
1863: Emancipation of United States slaves
1865: London sewerage system
1869: The Subjection of Women
1869: Nature launched wreathed in poetry
1870: European war and German worker's parties
1871: The Descent of Man
1872: Durkheim's nephew born
1872: The secret of Giuseppe Villella's skull
1874: Mary Paley and economics
1876: L'uomo delinquente
1879: Psychology laboratory
1880: electric light and the experimental method applied to the novel
1883: He has not heard that God is dead
Emile Durkheim and Max Weber
1886: New York and Liverpool: World Cities.
1887: without wires
1887: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft
1889: Life and Labour of the People of London
1890: Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics
1891: Our Baby
1893: Evolution and ethics
La donna delinquente
1895: Recorded sound - London School of Economics and Political Science - Radioactivity
1896: Olympics
1899: International association

20th Century   germs   magic blood and science words  
1900: Freud's Interpretation of Dreams
1901: Measuring poverty and Nobel prizes
Psychological and sociological societies
Sociological Review
1904: Conditioned reflexes
1908: Social Psychology
1910: Linguistics proper
1911: Genes, genotypes and genetics
1911: Galton Chair of Eugenics
1913: Behaviourism and Ecology
1913: Measuring class
1914: First World War
1917: Russian revolution
1919: The ABC of Communism
1920: The New Psychology and its Relation to Life and The Outline of History
1922: Stalin
1923: Political Science and Critical Theory
1925: Nazi theory
1925: The City
1928: USA Sociology
1929: Our Baby's discipline and The Science of Life
Wall Street Crash
1931: death of George Herbert Mead
A National Plan for Britain
The scientific treatment of criminals
1932: an atom split
1933: betrayed by evolution - Nazi Germany - Shelf Appeal - Garbo
1935: Turing's meadow computation
1936: Heavy rain
Mass Observation
1937: Symbolic confrontation
Musée de l'Homme founded in Paris.
1938: The Hitler Menace - nuclear fission
Second World War
1941: National Income and Expenditure
1942: Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, by Franz Neumann
1943: this holocaust
1944: me - Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom
1945: United Nations
1946: Cold War
1949: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex
new international sociology - radioactive time
1950s Anthropocene - 1950
1951: Talcott Parsons'The Social System
A new British Sociological Association
1952
1953: The Institute of Community Studies
1954: "The Complementary Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid" (DNA)
1955: Unsupported mothers - child soldiers
1956: Karl Popper's Science, Conjectures and Refutations article
1956: New Scientist magazine launched
1957: International Geophysical Year
1958: a new sort of political mobilisation
1959: Outline of Human Genetics
1960s: a global village    Goffman    Foucault
computers and statistics
1960: wheels of inclusion
1962: New Society magazine launched - the people's university
1963: sex and sexual abuse
1964: times changing
1965: speaking Russian
1966: criminology for criminals - psychology so far
1967: summer of love     Ethnomethodology
1968: anti-everything
A Statistical Package for the Social Sciences
1969: "a crisis in science today".
1970: sexual politics and a crisis looms in USA Sociology.
1971: Ronald Fletcher's The Making of Sociology and the Open University
1972: anti-Oedipus in France as crisis in sociology hits Britain. Evidence based medicine?
1973: women's studies and peace studies
1974: Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism
1974-1979: The coming (and going) Corporatism
1975: prison and society
1978: chips with everything
the Adam Smith revival
1979: Postmodern?? Condition: Report on Knowledge??
re-structuring society
1980 Enterprise Culture
1981 Communicative action
1984 Education and race
1985: Glasnost
1986 Big bangs and risk
1988 Diana H. Coole's Women in Political Theory
Dependency Culture
Black film, British cinema
1989 Revolutions
1990 The avalanche of post-modernism and a Soviet summer school
1992: Do your own word processing! - EarthSummit
1993: the world wide web
1994: city lights
1995: Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics - citizen science
1996: Manuel Castells' The Information Age and ... Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
1997: human domination
1998: Sociology top ten
1999: Globalised: Anthony Giddens' Reith Lectures

2000: A millennium bug in liquid modernity
2000: Human genome - the most wonderous map
2000/ 2001: Free and democratic encyclopedia
11.9.2001: New international relations
2003: full time mother
2004: A prize for humanities and social science
The will to make poverty history?
2005: False findings
2006: Life after Durkheim?
2007 A social science and humanities pin- up list
2008: trending before the crisis - Pope against gender theory
2009: Global age financial crisis
2010 Royal Society claims 350 years
An arab spring
2011 Laurie Taylor interviews Stuart Hall - Recession mapped
Saving Norway from cultural marxism
2012: Happiness counted
2013: International Year of Statistics
2014: Brain rain(e) on Hendon
27.2.2014 Climate Change - Evidence and Causes
2015 Social science predicts its significance.
2016 Europe, the UK, and the world
2017
2018
2019

Predicting a future
2023 The Closing Speech - 2031 my death - 2032 Britain's last Quaker - after 2060: Newton predicts Christ's return - 2073 Mary Shelley's Social Science utopia

Alphabetical index
of names

Theodor Adorno
Cecil Alexander
Al'Khwarizmi
Louis Althusser
Jane Adams
Stephen Pearl Andrews
Mary Anning
Anon
Thomas Aquinas
Hannah Arendt
Aristotle
Ashurbanipal
Ashley
Mary Astell
Joe Bataan
Babikir Badri
Francis Bacon
Johann Jakob Bachofen
Leo Baekeland
Roland Barthes
Janina Bauman
Zygmunt Bauman
Mary Beard
Cesare Beccaria
Ulrich Beck
Howard Becker
Bede
Clifford Beers
Daniel Bell
Ruth Benedict
Jeremy Bentham
Jacques Bernoulli
Peter Berger
Jacob Berzelius
Oto Bihalji-Merin
William Blackstone
Jean Bodin
William Adrian Bonger
Bono
Blondie Boopadoop
Charles Booth
William Booth
Pierre Bourdieu
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
William Buckland
Ernest Burgess
Edmund Burke
Cyril Burt
Judith Butler
Sebastian Cabot
Georg Cantor
Thomas Carlyle
Alexander Morris Carr-Saunders
Manuel Castells
George Catlin
Judi Chamberlin
Geoffrey Chaucer
Harriette Chick
Frederic Clements
John Cockcroft
Chistopher Columbus
George Combe
Auguste Comte
William Cooke
Diana Coole
Charles Horton Cooley
Carlton Coon
Copernicus
Henry Cowles
Marie Curie
Louis-Jaques-Mandé Daguerre
Robert Dahl
John Dalton
Charles Darwin
Humphry Davy
Simone De Beauvoir
Daniel Defoe
Gilles Deleuze
Geoff Dench
René Descartes
John Dewey
Bartolomeu Dias
Jan van Dijk
Wilhelm Dilthey
Pedanius Dioscorides
Benjamin Disraeli
Mary Douglas
Francis Drake
Emile Durkheim
École normale supérieure
Enfield College of Technology
Albert Einstein
Friedrich Engels
Norbert Elias
Euclid
Leonhard Euler
Michael Faraday
William Farr
Paul Fauconnet
Enrico Ferri
Robert Filmer
Jean Finot
Shulamith Firestone
Ronald Fisher
Walther Flemming
Ronald Fletcher
Henry Ford
Julienne Ford
Michel Foucault
Charles Fourier
Frankfurt School
Paulo Freire
Sigmund Freud
Betty Friedan
Erich Fromm
Galileo
Francis Galton
Raffaele Garofalo
Harold Garfinkel
William Gibson
Anthony Giddens
Morris Ginsberg
David Glass
William Godwin
Erving Goffman
Benjamin Gompertz
Olympe de Gouges
Antonio Gramsci
John Graunt
Robert Greene
Jürgen Habermas
Ernst Haeckel
Stuart Hall
Edmund Halley
Michael Haralambos
David Hartley
David Harvey
Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich Hegel
Heinrich Hertz
Adolf Hitler
Thomas Hobbes
Leonard T. Hobhouse
Richard Hooker
Max Horkheimer
Luke Howard
Joan Hughes
David Hume
ICSU International Council for Science
William James
Inigo Jones
Kathleen Jones
Flavius Josephus
Immanuel Kant
Jomo Kenyatta
John Maynard Keynes
Imam Khomeini
Oskar Kokoschka
Julia Kristeva
Jean Jacques Lacan
Ronald Laing
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Mary Lamb
John Bennet Lawes
Claude Levi-Strauss
Lucien Levy-Bruhl
Carolus Linnaeus
Joseph Lister
London (size)
London Schoool of Economics
London University

Martin Luther
John Locke
Cesare Lombroso
Charles Lyell
Jean-François Lyotard
Thomas B. Macaulay
Niccolò Machiavelli
Bronislaw Malinowski
Thomas Malthus
Henri François Marion
Alfred Marshall
Thomas Marshall
David Martin
Karl Marx
Marcel Mauss
Roderick McKenzie
Marshal McLuhan
George Herbert Mead
Margaret Mead
Gregor Mendel
Charlotte Mew
Juliet Mitchell
Robert King Merton
Ralph Miliband
James Mill
John Stuart Mill
Enid Mills
Oscar Montelius
Charles Montesquieu
Elaine Morgan
Lewis Morgan
William Morris
Max Müller
Franz Carl Müller-Lyer
John Nash
Franz Neumann
Isaac Newton
Barthold Georg Niebuhr
Florence Nightingale
Alexander Ivanovich Oparin
Maureen Orth
George Orwell
Robert Owen
Andrea Palladio
Paracelsus
Robert Park
Talcott Parsons
Ivan Pavlov
Karl Pearson
Lionel Penrose
Frank Pearce
Jean Piaget
Plato
Pond family
Karl Popper
James Cowles Prichard
Joseph Priestley
Proletariat
Ptolemaic Egypt
Ptolemy (astronomer)
Pythagoras
Quetelet
Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Franz Leopold Ranke
Rosalie Rayner
Robert Recorde
David Ricardo
Sheila Rowbotham
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Bertrand Russell
Ernest Rutherford
Alfred Schütz
Mary Seacole
Henri Saint Simon
Jean Paul Sartre
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jimmy Savile
Roger Scruton
Andrew Scull
William Shakespeare
Mary Shelley
Percy Shelley
Irving E Sigel
Georg Simmel
George Eaton Simpson
George Simpson
John Sinclair
Burrhus Skinner
Adam Smith
William Smith
John Snow
Socrates
Pitirim Sorokin
Herbert Spencer
Oswald Spengler
Benjamin Spock
Ed Stephan
Thomas Stevenson
Samuel A. Stouffer
William Sumner
Joseph Swan
Arthur and Edith Tansley
Harriet Taylor
Alfred Tennyson
Christian Jürgensen Thomsen
William Thompson
Alexis de Tocqueville
Ferdinand Tönnies
Peter Townsend
Alan Turing
Edward Burnet Tylor
James Usher
Ludwig Von Bertalanffy
Ernest Walton
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins
James D. Watson
John Watson
Charles Wheatstone
Max Weber
Alfred Wegener
Fay Weldon
H.G. Wells
Betty Westgate
Anna Wheeler
Alfred North Whitehead
Joseph Whitworth
Norbert Wiener
Peter Willmott
Mary Wollstonecraft
Women's Institutes
William Wordsworth
C. Wright Mills
Christopher Wren
Wilhelm Wundt
John Wycliffe
Michael Young
Jock Young


15,000,000,000 (15 billion) years ago The creation of the universe according to Physical Sciences information gateway (psigate) (Launched Manchester September 2001. - last surviving Internet Archive traced is 26.9.2006, but see UK Web Archive)

13,800,000,000 (13.8 billion) years ago The creation of the universe according to present estimates of "big bang" - "Stephen Hawkings and others... estimate between 18 and 11 billion with 13.8 being the closest estimation".

4,540,000,000 (4.54 billion) years ago Formation of planet Earth - Usher's date was 4,004BC - flood geologists have suggested about 8,000BC

4,540,000,000 to 541,000,000 years ago Pre-Cambrian - Before even old Welsh rocks. The earliest 4.06 billion years (4,060,000,000?) of Earth's history. 88% of geologic time. See Wikipedia. Followed by Cambrian - Ordovician - Silurian

Azoic: Having no trace of life or containing no organic remains. (Oxford Engish Dictionary) (Wikipedia)

3,700,000,000 years ago Did life first come into being in a primordial soup of compounds? In 1924 Alexander Ivanovich Oparin argued that it did. (See biological bases - circumstances - primeval swamp).

Archeozoic: end of Azoic to 2,500,000,000 years ago: The era of the earliest living beings on earth.

"More than 3.5 billion years ago, small single-celled organisms acquired the capacity to photosynthesize" "Plants were restricted to the aquatic world until three billion years later, at the end of the Ordovician period" (Miguasha "plant world")

BBC 4 picture cyanobacteria - blue green bacteria - on a stone from a rock pool.
Wikipedia says: Putative fossils are reported from 3,460,000,000 years ago. The reference here is to possible cyanobacteria from the Warrawoona Group in Western Australia. Also dated 3,465,000,000 years ago. (Wikipedia)
about 3,000,000,000 years ago Rock records and fossil evidence of cyanobacteria, photosynthesizing prokaryotic organism. (Wikipedia). - Nature 31.8.2016 "Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures" - Which the BBC re-wrote as "Wavy Greenland rock features 'are oldest fossils'"
See stromatolites

Hamelin Pool stromatolites in Western Australia: Stromatolites which are found to be up to a metre high are believed to be hundreds to thousands of years old as they grow at a maximum of 0.3mm per year.

Wikipedia says: the first uncontroversial evidence for life is found 2,700,000,000 years ago. The reference relates to sulphate and iron reduction as early forms of microbial respiration. It is suggested that analysis of sedimentary pyrite from the Belingwe sedimentary basin in Zimbabwe may provide evidence for bacterial reduction at this date.

2,500,000,000 to 542,000,000 years ago The Proterozoic Eon: the most recent part of the Precambrian Supereon. (Wikipedia)

Proterozoic: Age of animalculae, jelly fish, green scum and the like. In water "there was probably as rich and abundant and active a life of infusoria and the like as one finds in a drop of ditchwater today". Life in the early paleozoic had a "general resemblance", to ditchwater life on a larger scale. (H.G. Wells)  

starting about 2.500,000,000 years ago, sedimentary rocks affected by higher amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere, appear red, as though rusted.

Mesoproterozoic from 1,600,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 years ago. (Wikipedia). May correspond to Schenk's Upper Pre-Cambrian

Schenk, p.12: Amoeba [Wikipedia], Volvox algae [Wikipedia], Actinotrocha, Sponges [Wikipedia], Radiolarians [Wikipedia].

The amoeba has no hard part, but some single cell organisms produce microscopic skeletons or shells. Foraminifer's calcite creates limestone and chalk. The silica of Radiolaria forms chert. Particular importance attaches to Phytoplankton, such as diatoms, which photosynthesise much of the worlds oxygen and are the microscopic plants at the base of the oceanic food chain.

Schenk, p.12: Seaweed, Algae-colonies, Flagellate algae.
about 1.300,000,000 years ago early seaweed formed. (BBC 4). Molecular clock methods indicate that red and green algae arose around 1,500,000,000 years ago, and the secondary symbiosis that eventually led to the chromists occurred around 1,300,000,000 years ago during the late Mesoproterzoic era, after the earth's transition to a more highly oxygenated atmosphere with an ozone screen. Fossil evidence is consistent with these gene-based estimates. Schiel and Foster 2015, chapter one "Introduction to Giant Kelp forests worldwide"

Wikipedia says: cells with nuclei certainly existed by 1,200,000,000 years ago. The reference relates to Multicellular filaments from arctic Canada identified as a red algae Bangiomorpha pubescens. "In all but detail, this fossil is indistinguishable from modern Bangia" (Butterfield 2000), which consists of hair-like filament of dark red cells which dry as dark skeins flat against inter-tidal rocks. See seaweeds of Alaska

Schenk, p.12: Sponges, Seaweed, Giant seaweed, Coral.

Neoproterozoic from 1,000,000,000 to 541,000,000 years ago. (Wikipedia)

Cryogenian Period from about 720,000,000 to 635,000,000 years ago Cryo (cold) and Genesis (birth). - It was cold. (Wikipedia)

about 700,000,000 years ago Fossils of multicellular organisms. When oxygen levels became high enough, a powerful ozone screen started to form in the upper atmosphere. (Stephen J. Mojzsis). The only fossils from all but the last 100 million years or so of Precambrian time represent single-celled life forms (541,000,000 plus 100,000,000 = 541,000,000 years ago) Summary of the life on earth

Ediacaran Period from about 635,000,000 to 542,000,000 years ago Name reflects Ediacaran biota.   (Wikipedia). Wikipedia says: It took almost 4,000,000,000 years from the formation of the Earth for the Ediacaran fossils to first appear, 655,000,000 years ago.

"The Record of the Rocks... begins in the midst of the game... The curtain rises on a drama in the sea that has already begun, and has been going on for some time". (H.G. Wells)   600,000,000 years ago First traceable fossils dated to this time. (psigate) [Edgeworth David (1928 and before) analysed pre-Cambrian rocks in Australia and found traces of micro- biological material] - See also primordial soup - Cambrian - Old Red Sandstone - seed ferns - hominid - Piltdown geology - Noah - word and theory

Schenk, p.12: Brachiopods [Bivalves Wikipedia]. Various forms of Annelidae [worms. Wikipedia].

Also page 15 "Inhabitants of the pre-Cambrian sea: Algae, flagellate algae, volvox algae, sponges, flat worms, brachiopoda, echinoderms and molluscs. All plant and animal life was present only in the oceans."

The soft bodies of worms would not have been preserved as fossils - See Darwin on worms - but traces of (sea) worms are found in Cambrian rocks.


Giovanni Arduino (1759) divided geologic time into Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. Jules Desnoyers (1829) added the term Quaternary. GeoWhen Database suggests the Primary and Secondary are rough analogs of the Paleozoic and Mesozoic. and these more modern terms have taken their place. By contrast, the term "Tertiary" has survived and is still in common use today.

Paleozoic (ancient life) Era includes the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, and Permian. During most of the Paleozoic, continents like Gondwana and Laurentia were coalescing to become Pangea

Rocks (and fossils) of the Welsh periods (Cambrian - Ordovician - Silurian) are similar: hard sandstones, shales, slates, grits and (Ordovician and Silurian) limestones Early Paleozoic: Before the appearance of any vertebrate animals. Age of sea scorpions and trilobites. (H.G. Wells)

Now thought there were early vertebrates (without jaws) in the Cambrian. Jawed vertebrates became common in the Devonian. (Wikipedia)

541,000,000 to 485,400,000 years ago Cambrian (Welsh) Period, including the "Cambrian explosion" of fossil remains. Trilobites. Picture of Paradoxides Bohemicus from the Cambrian period from J. E. Taylor's Geological Stories 1873. Trilobites lived in the sea. All life in Cambrian times seems to have lived in water. The Burgess Shale contains the best record we have of Cambrian animal fossils.

505,000,000 years ago Fossil jellyfish

Roderick Murchison's The Silurian System published in 1839, included a lower Silurian, now called Ordovician. What we now call Silurian was his upper Silurian. It topped the Cambrian and underlay the Old Red Sandstone.
In 1849 one could buy a hand coloured engraving called "The Antidiluvian World. Illustrations of the animals, reptiles, birds, fishes, trees, plants etc which existed in different epochs prior to the creation of man, and whose remains are found entombed in the various strata. From the discoveries of Buckland, Cuvier, Mantell, Lyell etc", Drawn and engraved by John Emslie. London, Published by James Reynolds 174 Strand, 20t.10.1849. This showed life beginning with the Silurian system, which it described as "a marine deposit of vast extent containing abundance of marine organic remains. 1. Encrinites and marine plants 2. Trilobites 3. Marine shells. 4 Lizards" [too early]. In 1835, William Kirby in On Power of God in Creation of Animals 2. xiii. 10 referred to "plant-like animals .. which, from a supposed resemblance..to the blossom of a liliaceous plant have been denominated Encrinites".

485,000,000 to 444,000,000 years ago The Ordovician period. (Ordovices were a Welsh tribe). Nautiloids. Fossils include earliest fish, but of types very different from modern ones.

Deposits that made Westmorland Green slate formed around 450 million years ago. Grains being deposited in water led to patterning. About 50 million years later, the material was altered by heat and pressure (metamorphosed) to slate, during mountain-building. (Kirk and Cook)

470,000,000 years ago mid-Ordovivian

470,000,000 years ago First evidence of plants on land. Cryptospores - possible affinity with today's liverworts. (BBC News 18.9.2003). But see Wikipedia: evolutionary history of plants. "At the end of the Ordovician period... signs of the "tentative presence" of plants on land. After many more millions of years, they resembled patches of moss a few centimeters high. But things changed in the Devonian Period. (Miguasha plants)

Richard Cowen's Chapter Eight: Leaving the Water - images - curent page

470,000,000 to 248,000,000 years ago Eurypterids, otherwise known as sea scorpions. (Wikipedia)


Late Ordovician survivals and extinctions: There were no land animals and extinctions were confined to water life. There were two distinct extinctions roughly a million years apart. The first of these began about 443 million years ago. Together, these extinctions may have removed about 85 percent of species of marine animals. All of the major animal groups of the Ordovician oceans survived, including trilobites, brachiopods, corals, crinoids and graptolites, but each lost important members. Widespread families of trilobites disappeared and graptolites came close to total extinction. (Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History).

A walk to the Ordovician/Silurian boundary in the Southern Highlands of Scotland.

The Ordovician/Silurian boundary was agreed in 1985 at the base of the Parakidograptus acuminatus Biozone (a group of concurrent graptolite species) in a boundary stratotype at Charles Lapworth's [Wikipedia] classic locality of Dob's Linn [Wikipedia] in the Southern Uplands of Scotland. Graptolites (rock writing) are thought to be horny skeletons of small creatures. Some are pictured here from the Observers Book of Geology, Their many different forms have enabled beds of ancient rock to be identified.
The earliest graptolites appear in Cambrian rocks and the last in Carboniferous


443,000,000 to 416,000,000 years ago Silurian period. (Silures a Welsh tribe). Sea Scorpions. Fossils include earliest land animals and forerunners of ammonites. See Pneumodesmus.

"When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to distant futurity." (Charles Darwin)

Taylor's "Story of a piece of limestone" concerns only Silurian limestone.

Later Paleozoic: Age of fishes, amphibia and swamp forests . (H.G. Wells)

From primal swamp to speaking humans: Ernst Haeckel said (1903) that the Pithecoiden (monkey) theory of human evolution requires tracing our animal ancestors before monkeys. He began to do this in 1866 in the General Morphology. Silurian fish are followed by Devonian Lurchfische," [lungfish] "the Carboniferous amphibians, the Permian reptiles and in the Mesozoic the first mammals. Mammals appear again in the Triassic as monotremes [egg layers], then in the Jurassic as marsupials [nurturing babies in pouches], and the Cretaceous The oldest placental mammals, in the Tertiary period (Eocene), include our lowest primate ancestors, including lemurs, the first catarrhines the Monkey (Cynopitheken), and later the great apes (anthropomorphic). From a branch of the apes, speechless ape-man (Pithecanthropus alalus) arose in the Pliocene, leading, finally, to the speaking person. (source)

The Old Red Sandstone [see Wikipedia] of Scotland is very thick and contains many fossils, particularly of the Devonian fishes. Lungfish first appeared in the Early Devonian. - Taylor's "Story of a piece of sandstone" - Miquasha (Canada): "The Devonian is known as the "Age of Fishes" in reference to their evolutionary explosion during this period". - The earliest rock in the 1854 Sydenham display is Old Red Sandstone, but it does not feature animal life until the New Red Sandstone, treating the Devonian and Carboniferous as ages of rocks and economic minerals.

408,000,000 to 359.200,000 years ago Devonian period. Primitive fish. Some life left the water.
Primeval swamp?
Ichthyostega (Wikipedia) Greek ikhthus: fish - stegi: roof
Labyrinthodontia (Greek, "maze-toothed") is an extinct amphibian subclass, of which the order Ichthyostegalia is the earliset example, and the earliest landliving vertebrates. (Wikipedia) - G. Paselk pictures four legged "protoamphibians", Acanthostega and Icthyostega, lungfish (Dipterus) and a placoderm (Bothriolepis), with early trees, Archeaosigillaria [see Devonian Times on lycopsids] and Archaeopteris in the background.

Amphibian: an animal living in both water and on land. Reptile originally meant a creeping animal, and included amphibians. The 1854 Sydenham display is based on islands in water from which life emerges (see photo by Warren), which is relevant both to the biblical origin of life and to evolutionary theories. The Sydenham display also links water to the steam which drove the industrial revolution.

about 419,2000,000 to 393,300,000 years ago Early Devonian

The vegetation of the early Devonian consisted primarily of small plants, the tallest being only a meter tall. By the end of the Devonian, ferns, horsetails and seed plants had also appeared, producing the first trees and the first forests. University of California Museum of Paleontology. See University of Aberdeen on Rhynie Chert

about 393,300,000 to 382,700,000 years ago Middle Devonian

Ferns first appear in the fossil record

382,700,000 to 358,900,000 years ago Late Devonian

382,700,000 to 372.200,000 years ago Frasnian age of the Late Devonian

Late Devonian So called "seed ferns". Wikipedia: Pteridospermatophyta. See Marie Stopes

Late Devonian forests of large plants left many fossils in the Old Red Sandstone, mostly resembling ferns [Wikipedia], club-mosses [Wikipedia] and horsetails [Wikipedia], but the size of trees. These forests of flowerless trees, but with greater variety, flourished even more in the Carboniferous period. Similar plants lived throughout the rest of the Paleozoic and well into the Mesozoic. (Observers Book of Geology and Wikipedia Timeline of plant evolution

The coastal cliffs at Miguasha, Quebec, Canada, are Upper Devonian strata of alternating layers of sandstone and shale deposited between 375,000,000 and 350,000,000 years ago. OR (source) The Escuminac formation is now attributed to the middle part of the Frasnian Age. This corresponds to an approximate age of 380,000,000 years ago.

Archaeopteris was the main component of the earliest forests until its extinction around the Devonian/Carboniferous boundary. Archaeopteris grew up to seven metres (23 feet) tall, with a trunk of lignin and cellulose and branches supporting fern-like fronds extending horizontally to capture sunlight.

The first picture shows a large frond from Archaeopteris halliana in the Escuminac Formation in the Miguasha Museum. The Canadian stamp was issued in 1991.
"The earth's atmosphere was changing rapidly, going from perhaps 10 percent to 1 percent CO2 and from about 5 percent to 20 percent oxygen over a 50- million year period in the (late) Devonian period. All plants were responsible for the transformation, but Archaeopteris was important because it made up 90 percent of the forests during the last 15 million years when these changes accelerated" ... "It was the first plant to produce an extensive root system, so had a profound impact on soil chemistry". (Science Daily summary "Archaeopteris is the earliest known modern tree," by Brigitte Meyer-Berthaud, Stephen E. Scheckler, and Jobst Wendt. Nature 22.4.1999.
See Devonian Times archaeopteris and plants and soils and "The Tree That Changed the World" by John Perlin, Pacific Standard 29.3.2010.

Old Red Sandstone of Kiltorean, County Kilkenny, Ireland. Taylor 1873 writes of fine-grained greenish sandstones deposited in freshwater in which land plant fossils are well preserved. "Among the most attractive of these" tree-fern once called Cyelopteris (Round-leaved Fern), re named Palasopteris Hibernicus (Primitive Irish Fern). This was later renamed Archaeopteris Hibernicus. It was the "monarch of the primeval forests" whose "graceful fronds bent over the clear waters of a lake".

372,200,000 to 358,900 years ago Famennian age of the Late Devonian


359,000,000 years ago End of the Devonian period - Start of the Carboniferous period: In latter half of the Devonian, there are three important extinctions separated by about 10 million years. About 375 million years ago, towards the end of a time interval called the Givetian. The end-Frasnian extinction (the largest) about 375 million years ago. The about 365 million years ago during the Famennian.

The end-Frasnian extinction was most pronounced in tropical environments, particularly in the reefs of the shallow seas. Reef building sponges called stromatoporoids and corals suffered losses and stromatoporoids finally disappeared in the third extinction near the end of the Devonian. Brachiopods associated with reefs also became extinct. Groups of trilobites disappeared at each of the three extinctions and very few survived into the following Carboniferous Period. (Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History)


359.200,000 to 299,000,000 years ago   Carboniferous period.

By carboniferous [carbon bearing] soils, Richard Kirwan in 1799 meant the "various sorts of earth or stone among or under which coal is usually found". William Daniel Conybeare and William Phillips (1822, page vii) proposed to consider all rocks in an ascending order with a group including "not only the great coal-deposit itself, but those of the limestone and sandstone also on which it reposes" as the "medial" [middle] order. They said "the epithet carboniferous is of obvious application to this series".

Henry Shaler Williams (1891) proposed Pennine System as the name for the Carboniferous. This was not adopted, but his division into Mississippian, for the Early Carboniferous and Pennsylvanian, for the Late Carboniferous, was (in the USA).

Giant insects. [Large] Brachiopods.

Taylor's "Story of a piece of coal" focuses on coal formation, but includes a section on the carboniferous limestone. It lists (but does not discuss) the intervening millstone grit. It mentions the following periods to indicate how long ago coal was formed: Carboniferous followed by Permian, Triassic, Liassic, Oolitic, Cretaceous (or chalk), Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene ... Illustrations of a section of Calamite (tree-like horsetail) [Wikipedia] - Branches, and fruit (Lepidostrobus) of Lepidodendron (scale-trees) [Wikipedia] - Bark of Sigillaria Groe seri [Wikipedia] - "Fossil Fern (Neuropteris)" (a seed fern) [Wikipedia] - Portion of Fossil Tree Fern (Pecopteris arborescens) on Coal Shale [Wikipedia] - Annularia. A Fossil Plant allied to the Calamites - [Wikipedia] -

358,900,000 to 323.200,000 years ago Early Carboniferous or Mississippian (USA) - noted for limestones (calcite). See Late Carboniferous

Palaeos - Humboldt

# 363,000,000 to 325,000,000 years ago: Deposition of mountain or carboniferous limestones of England and Wales. The 1854 Sydenham display shows the carboniferous deposits sandwiched between the Old Red Sandstone and the New Red Sandstone.

Rocks deposited during the Carboniferous period (350 - 290 million years ago) underlie almost all of the Peak National Park and probably two thirds of the remainder of Derbyshire.

359,200,000 - 326,400,000 years ago Dinantian series or epoch from the Lower Carboniferous system in Europe

326,400,000 to 313,400,000 years ago Namurian stage in the regional stratigraphy of northwest Europe
#

Chatsworth House - Where Paxton built a greenhouse: Carboniferous limestone (green)

Clay Cross: Hill Tupton Rock - Sandstone (not marked) over Pennine Lower Coal Measures (brown).

Matlock: Carboniferous limestone (green), near to millstone grit (buff). The limestone continues under the grit and the coal measures.

Mawe 1802 (sections 2 and 3), followed by Ward (1818) (page 10), says the order to the strata explored by the Derbyshire miners is: Argillaceous (clayey) Grit, in which coal and iron are found - Silicious Grit, providing stone for building and millstones - Shale - then lime-stone and toadstone alternately. The veins of metallic ores appeared in the limestone. Three strata of toadstone had been found, and the limestone under the third was as far as miners had reached. (About 300 yards underground). The Bonsall map project describes the "shallow tropical sea surrounded by coral reefs" in which the limestones were laid down and how "subterranean volcanoes erupted spasmodically through the sea floor, covering the limestones with ash and lava" which formed the toadstone.
# Igneous intrusions in the limestone (red: basalt, greenstone?) are the source of minerals, particularly lead. Bonsall area igneous rocks includes a stone comprising basalt and dolerite, locally referred to as toadstones. A complex of mine and natural cavern near Matlock Bath inspired the mine and cavern feature in the limestone at the 1854 Sydenham display
Rutland and Great Masson (now part of Heights of Abraham) are well known public caverns in Matlock Bath. Others are, or were, Victoria - Devonshire - Flour Spar - Speedwell - Cumberland - Fern - High Tor. (See History, Topography, and Directory of Derbyshire   offline by Bulmer and Company 1895 page 428 following, and Ward Lock's Matlock and Dovedale pages 11-16 - Derbyshire Cave Association Register - offline Masson Cavern complex)

[See Ann Andrews Lead Mining in Matlock and Matlock Bath - Peak District Mines Historical Society - The most common source of lead is Galena (lead sulfide) formed as pockets or veins in carbonate rock into which the mineral bearing fluid rock has intruded. Galena can contain minor amounts of antimony, arsenic, bismuth, cadmium, copper, silver, and zinc See Lead ore and mines.

Water flowing through limestone is responsible for creating its natural caves and also for their features of dripstone, stalactites (water icicles) and stalagmites. Encountering impermeable strata (such as toadstone) it forms underground lakes in the limestone which overflow to the surface as natural springs (a resurgence). To reach lower layers, miners drained water from their mines through artificial tunnels (sloughs), thus adding artificial springs. The thermal (hot) springs come from water in the Carboniferous Limestone in structural settings that allow meteoric water (rainfall etc) to descend low enough for it to be heated by the geothermal gradient (earth heat), and then return to the surface without a significant fall in temperature. [See 1780]. The original natural thermal resurgences at Matlock Bath were greatly modified by mining activities, but according to a contributor to the Mine Exploration Forum, all the springs at Matlock Bath seem to originate from Bacon Rake or the Bonsall Fault in the Ball Eye area.

See Matlock Bath and Crystal Palace

The main Early Carboniferous plants were the Equisetales (Horse-tails), Sphenophyllales (scrambling plants), Lycopodiales (Club mosses), Lepidodendrales (scale trees), Filicales (Ferns), Medullosales (previously included in the "seed ferns", an artificial assemblage of a number of early gymnosperm groups) and the Cordaitales. These continued to dominate throughout the Carboniferous period. [Wikipedia]


323.200,000 to 298.900,000 years ago Late Carboniferous or Pennsylvanian (USA) - noted for coal (fossilised carbon)

Plate 22 in Observers Book of Geology includes a depiction by Eli Marsden Wilson (1935) in the Natural History Museum, which it titles "A primeval swamp of the chief coal-forming period". The picture used here comes from Edwin J. Houston's The Elements of Physical Geography Philadelphia 1891, which says "The continents during this age consisted mainly of large, flat, marshy areas, covered with luxuriant vegetation."

Gymnosperms [Wikipedia] originated in the late Carboniferous period, replacing the lycopsid [Wikipedia] rainforests of the tropical region. Taylor says coniferous flora grew "abundantly" during the Liassic.


Alfred Wegener proposed that from the late carboniferous, all continents were stuck together as one big land mass, surrounded by just one ocean. (300,000,000 to 175,000,000 years ago) We can see this in his diagrams (below). Instead of giving the original continent a name, he uses German composite words, beginning ur, that just mean original. Der Urkontinent is the original continent, which is surrounded by einen großen Urozean (a large original ocean). Der karbonischen Urkontinentalmasse is the original continental mass in the carboniferous period. The Urkontinent was later called Pangea (all- earth). (See Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane 1920 - Alfred Wegener - and Wikipedia)

#
Lage der Kontinentalschollen für die Karbonzeit (ohne Rücksicht auf Wasserbedeckung) - Location of continental floes for the Carboniferous period (without regard to water cover)

Pangea existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. It assembled about 300 million years ago, was intact until about 200 million years ago. and began to break apart about 175 million years ago.
# The 1922 and 1929 editions of Wegener's book contain a map of the world at three time periods: Late Carboniferous (Jung Karbon: this picture) - Eocene - and Quaternary.
The shading shows land and sea at the time, with white land, dotted shallow lake and shade: deep sea. Outlines of today's continents and some rivers ae superimposed.


# 298,900,000 to 252,170,000 years ago Permian. Named after the Perm district in Russia. In Britain includes dolomite limestones running south from Durham. (Observers Book of Geology [Wikipedia]

Primitive reptiles, such as Pelycosaur and Cotylosaur, illustrated in this picture from H.G. Wells' The Outline of History 1920. Emerged in the late Carboniferous. Flourished in the Permian.

In Greek sauros is a lizard. From this came saurian - applied to lizard-like creatures, including crocodiles, ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurs in water, pterosaurs in the air, and dinosaurs like megalosaurus and brontosaurus

about 251,000,000 years ago: Permian extinction (worst in history) wiped out more than 90 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of land animals. (National Geographic) - See Wikipedia Permian-Triassic extinction event

(Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History)

# Graph attempting to represent extinction events based on replacement of certain marine fossils. . (Wikimedia commons).

The Permian-Triassic (P - Tr) extinction is at the centre.

The table below is from D. M. Raup and J. J. Sepkoski's "Mass extinctions in the marine fossil record", published in Science in April 1982. (online - offline)

Raup and Sepkoski say that "five mass extinctions are clearly defined". They occured "near the ends of geologic periods", which reflects the fact that the periods were originally defined, in the first half of the 19th century, using major changes in the fossils records.
# Late Ordovician (Ashgillian)

Late Devonian (Givetian-Frasnian)

Late Permian (Guadalupian-Dzhulfian)

Late Triassic (Norian)

Late Cretaceous (Maestrichtian)


Mesozoic (Middle) Era includes the Triassic - Jurassic - and Cretaceous ages. It has been associated with conifers and reptiles. In the 1854 Sydenham display, the Triassic represents the Primary part of geological history, the Secondary starts with the Jurassic.

252,170,000 to 201,300,000 years ago Triassic (So named because it has three divisons in Germany)

In England Bunter (bright coloured) Sandstone and above it Keuper Marl. Forming north-west Midlands and including Cheshire salt beds. Formed in desert conditions. Almost completely without fossils.

Taylor's "Story of a piece of rock-salt". New Red Sandstone or Trias

# The Primary Island of the 1854 Sydenham display is based on the New Red Sandstone. It is here that its prehistoric animals begin. According to Owen (1854) its animals are Batrachia, [Wikipedia], from the Greek word for a frog, now represented by "frogs, toads, and newts, or water-salamanders". [See amphibians]

"But, at the period of the deposition of the new red sandstone, in the present counties of Warwick and Cheshire, the shores of the ancient sea, which were then formed by that sandy deposit, were trodden by reptiles, having the essential bony characters of the Batrachia, but combining these with other bony characters of crocodiles and lizards ; and exhibiting both under a bulk which is made manifest by the restoration of the largest known species".

The models include Labyrinthodon salamandroides, the Salamander-like Labyrinthodon - Labyrinthodon pachygnathus, the Thick-jawed Labyrinthodon - and Dicynodon lacerticeps, or Lizard-headed Dicynodon. See Simon Jackson on Labyrinthodon and Dicynodon - photo by Warren - Wikipedia: Dicynodon

"The largest and most remarkable kind of fish discovered in our strata ... on account of its resemblance to the crocodile or lizard family .. termed the ichthyosaurus, or lizard-fish... But our noblest fossil animal is the crocodile... the specimen" [a Teleosaurus] ... in the Whitby Museum, being the finest ... in our own country, or any other". (Young and Bird 1828 under "Fishes and Amphibia")
# 237,000,000 to 228,000,000 years ago Carnian or Karnian stage [Wikipedia] at the start of the Late Triassic epoch. Archosaurs [Wikipedia] , ancestors of birds and crocodiles, became the dominant faunas. Phytosaurs [Wikipedia] first appear during the Carnian. With many other large crurotarsan [Wikipedia] reptiles, they disappear at the end of the Triassic
Picture (signed by the author), page 188 Water Reptiles of the Past and Present by Samuel Wendell Williston. Published 1914 by The University of Chicago Press in Chicago. (Internet Archive - offline). See Teleosaurus.

230,000,000 years ago "The first dinosaurs appeared about 230 million years ago and for the next 160 million years, the Earth belonged to these ancient reptiles" Natural History Museum.

208,000,000 years ago Asteroid impact in what is now Quebec, Canada, created crater 70 kilometres in diameter and wiped out many species (psigate)

about 205,000,000 years ago First appearance of Plesiosaurs in the latest Triassic Period (possibly Rhaetian stage), They became especially common during the Jurassic Period and continued until the the end of the Cretaceous Period. They had a worldwide oceanic distribution. Elasmosaurus is a Plesiosaur from the late Cretaceous.
# This one was discovered in Kansas. - See Oceans of Kansas

Pterosaurs (meaning "winged lizard") were flying reptiles that existed from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous. [Wikipedia]. See Dimorphodon - Stonesfield Slate - 1828 - 1854 - 1866 #
"a flying reptile or dragon, called Pterodactyle, from the Greek words pteron, a wing, and dactylos, a finger; because the wings are mainly supported by the outer finger, enormously lengthened and of proportionate strength, I which, nevertheless, answers to the little finger of the human hand. The wings consisted of folds of skin, like the leather wings of the bat; and the Pterodactyles were covered with scales, not with feathers: the head, though somewhat resembling in shape that of a bird, and supported on a long and slender neck, was provided with long jaws, armed with teeth."
(Owen 1854)

The p being silent gives words pronounced something like terror soars and terror dactyle. See strange creatures and replica project


Late Triassic survivals and extinctions (about 201 million years ago): All major groups of marine invertebrates survived, but most suffered losses. Brachiopods, shelled cephalopods, sponges and corals were particularly hard hit. On land, casualties included the phytosaurs. (Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History)


201,300,000 to 145,000,000 years ago Jurassic. More dinosaurs.

Jurassic from the Jura Mountains on the borders of France and Switzerland.

about 200,000,000 years ago After 100,000,000 years the world still consisted of one continent, Pangea, surrounded by one ocean.

# The Tethys sea developed between Laurasia (north america, europe and asia) and Gondwana (africa southwards) during the Jurassic Period
The picture shows the Tethys according to Leopold Kober in 1922. Kober thought it was a sea that ran in a syncline between the two great land masses. Eduard Suess wrote in Natural science: a monthly review of scientific progress in 1893: "Modern geology permits us to follow the first outlines of the history of a great ocean which once stretched across part of Eurasia. The folded and crumpled deposits of this ocean stand forth to heaven in Thibet, Himalaya, and the Alps. This ocean we designate by the name 'Tethys', after the sister and consort of Oceanus." (Oxford English Dictionary)

# The ancestors of our fir trees and the monkey puzzle tree. (Observers Book of Geology and Wikipedia Timeline of plant evolution. Picture clip from J. E. Taylor's Geological Stories 1873: "Ideal landscape of the Oolitic period". "Fern and gymnosperm floras from both polar regions ... wide distribution of fern genera whose modern relatives are intolerant of cold" (Hallam 1982)

Jurassic Park: a 1993 USA film in which re-created dinosaurs escape from a theme park.

English Heritage's A Building Stone Atlas of Dorset - (offline) - British Geological Survey begins with the Lias Group and works upwards to Heathstones in the Lower Tertiary. The best known of the Dorset building stones are the Purbeck Marble and Portland limestones

Lower Jurassic beds called Lias (quarrymen's layers) in England running between Whitby on the coats of Yorkshire and Lyme Regis in Dorset, consisting of alternate beds of limestone and shale. Owen 1854: The Lias "forms the base of the oolite, or immediately underlies that division of secondary rocks". But see Wikipedia - Gateway - Engineering Geology of British Rocks and Soils - Lias Group 2012 online offline

# "Imagine well-watered and gently undulating lands teeming with plants and animals, drained by large rivers turbid with mud and sand, and discharging their burden of sediment, organic debris, and soluble salts into an open but not very deep sea in which life abounded. Such is the picture of the lias" (Wills 1929 p.134 and Figure 51 on p.126). For the figure, Wills references [Émile] Haug - [Theodor] Arldt - and [Dudley] Stamp [Introduction to Stratigraphy 1923?]

Taylor's "What the piece of jet had to say". "Where jet occurs: Lias beds". "As a fossil pitch or gum, I am related to the peculiar coniferous flora which grew so abundantly, although in comparatively few species, during the Liassic epoch". (Taylor, p.129).

See Lulworth forest and Hanover Point. Jet was popular after 1861 when Queen Victoria wore it following the death of Prince Albert. [Wikipedia]

#

Richard and Mary Anning's Ichthyosaurus (Temnodontosaurus platyodon) was discovered in the Lias beds at Lyme Regis in 1811 and 1812. The body (but not the head) of the Anning's find is lost. (Wikipedia)
# This drawing of a Ichthyosaurus (fish lizard) is from J. E. Taylor's Geological Stories 1873)
# Coprolites (copro=dung and lithos=stone) or fossil faeces from Lias at Lyme Regis. 1828 picture. Associated with Saurians, especially Ichthyosaurus. See Cambridge Greensands - 866 - 1606 - Anning - 1822 - 1828 - 1842 - 1843 - 1845 - 1861 - 1872 - 2013. Buckland named "fossil faeces ... evidently derived from Ichthyosauri" Ichthyosauro-coprus.

Since Buckland, coprolite sometimes just means rounded lumps of fossilised material. (See Wimpole coprolites)


Dimorphodon [Wikipedia] was a medium-sized pterosaur from the early Jurassic Period first discovered by Mary Anning in 1828. The 1854 Sydenham display featured Pterodactyles from the Ooolite and one from a chalk pit in the Cretaceous

199,600 to 140,000,000 years ago Fossil remains of Steneosaurus [Wikipedia] range from the early Jurassic through the early Cretaceous.
Steneosaurus bollensis (previously Teleosaurus chapmani Konig) fossils are found within Europe, including Germany, France and England. The Whitby crocodiles are regared as such Teleosaurs. See Crocodile. Thalattosuchia or sea crocodiles [Wikipedia],

190,800,000 to 182,700,000 years ago Pliensbachian in lower Jurassic. Cleveland ironstone. Jurassic ironstone deposits stretch in a broad arc from North East England through Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Rutland and into Oxfordshire. See Wealden ironstone

182,700,000 to 174,100,000 years ago Toarcian in lower Jurassic. Includes Alum shales of the Cleveland basin.

about 175,000,000 years ago Middle Jurassic.

Lower Oolite: Inferior oolite - Fuller's earth - Great oolite and Stonesfield slate - Cornbrash and forest marble. - Middle Oolite: Oxford clay and Coral rag - Upper Oolite: Portland stone and Kimmeridge clay

about 168,300,000 years ago to 166.100,000 years ago Bathonian stage of the Middle Jurassic, named after Bath. Lee's Quarry, Taynton Down, Oxfordshire is the type section for the Taynton Limestone Formation. Part of the Great Oolite Group. Sites of four mines around the village of Stonesfield Village, Oxfordshire, are the type-locality of Stonesfield Slates, probably developed at the base of the Taynton Formation.
The Stonesfield "slates" are limestones, originally deposited in a shallow sea. William Buckland obtained fossil bones from the quarries which later composed Megalosaurus, shown here dominating the Oolitic island at the centre of the 1854 Sydenham display. To the right flew "Pterodactyles of the Ooolite", Buckland's Pterodactyle, found "pretty abundantly" at Stonesfield.

Pangea began to rift from the Tethys Ocean in the east to the Pacific in the west. One rift resulted in the North Atlantic Ocean.

#
brontosaurus the thunder lizard - stegosaurus covered lizard - pterodactylus the winged finger - camptosaurus flexible lizard - diplodocus double beam - tyrannosaurus tyrant lizard - trachodon rough tooth - triceratops three horned face - archaeopteryx ancient wing - Pictures from H.G. Wells' The Outline of History 1920
#

about 161,000,000 million years ago Upper Jurassic. Contains many beds of limestone of the type called Oolite

Taylor's "What the piece of Purbeck Marble had to say". Includes "flying reptiles" and "stonesfield slates".

between about 152,100,000 and 145,000,000 years ago The Tithonian age, named after Tithonus, the lover who chased Eos (dawn). It is the last age of the Jurassic, chasing the Cretaceous. Includes the the lithographic limestones of Solenhofen, Bavaria, which was used for fine printing plates and which also preserves detailed fossils. Portland stone (Dorset) underlies Purbeck Marble.

[Cambridgeshire] At the end of the Jurassic, about 145,000,000 years ago, the land was gradually sinking and a series of clays were being deposited. See Gault - Upper Cretaceous - Cambridge Greensands

around 145,800,000 years ago The "fossil forest" at Lulworth Cove. "This forest was dominated by conifers, tree-ferns and cycads". (walk site) - See Ian West's the fossil forest: Part 1: the ledge and strata and Part 2: the Purbeck fossil trees. In 1983, Jane Francis named the dominant tree (conifer) Protocupressinoxylon purbeckensis (Early cypress-wood from the Purbecks) in an article now online. The reconsruction (right) is from the article. #
See New occurrences of the wood Protocupressinoxylon purbeckensis Francis..., Marc Philippe and others 2009.


145,500,000 to 66,000,000 years ago Cretaceous. Last dinosaurs.

Although cretaceous means chalk, the lower cretaceous does not include chalk. In Britain it comprises the Wealden Beds, the Lower Greensand and the lower part of Blue Gault Clay.

Strata near Swanage, Dorset: Portland rock, Purbeck deposits, Wealden, and Cretaceous beds.

See Ian West's Swanage Bay and Ballard Cliff geology.

"Darwin's "abominable mystery" asked how did the world's flora go from no flowering plants at the beginning of the Cretaceous to modern ones by the time of the Dakota Group, 40 million years later".

around 140,000,000 to 125,000,000 years ago   Wealden Supergroup

# 1 Cainozoic - 2 Chalk - 3 Gault - 4 Lower Greensand

5 Weald clay and 6 Weald sands = Wealden group

Generalised section across the Weal in south-east England, crossing the escarpments (downs) in the north, but following the Ouse valley in the south. From (Wills 1929 p.200). See Portsmouth Symposium 2000 for relation to Isle of Wight and Dorset. Also see Bucks Geology Group

The "Pine Raft" at Hanover Point near Brook consists of gymnosperm tree remains that can be seen at low tide. They come from a Wealden plant bed. The tree remains are either compressed or in solid uncompressed form ... Examples ... impregnated by calcite at a very early stage ... have avoided compaction. (Ian West's Brightstone Bay) - See 1825 and BBC The Petrified Forest which says "the wood has been converted into a substance resembling the mineral Jet". See [Brightstone is also known as Brixton and is probably where Mantell found his cottage garden Iguanodon toe bone]

about 139,800,000 to 132,900,000 years ago Valanginian stage of the Lower Cretaceous includes Wadhurst Clay Formation. Clay ironstone nodules occur in the Wadhurst Clay and Ashdown Sand of the Kent and Sussex Weald. [See extraordinary book of doors for detailed strata] See Jurassic ironstone. Wealden ironstone was the basis of Wealden iron. See Research Group

Swanage (Dorset): The upper part of the Wealden, as seen very completely in the Northern Cliffs of Swanage Bay [Punfield Cove], exposes about 700 feet of clays frequently red or purple, less frequently blue, greenish, or very pale, alternating with sandstones of different tints, mostly soft and fine- grained, but sometimes hardened by irony impregnation, or modified by admixture of pebbles. One band contains much lignite. In the upper part of this series, above every red or purple bed, are alternations of sandstone and pale shale. In one of the shale-beds is a course of small nodules of pyritous ironstone. John Phillips 1859 - See Buckland 1829

Valanginian stage of the Lower Cretaceous includes Cuckfield Stone Bed. In 1822, Mary Ann and Gideon Mantell [Wikipedia] found dinosaur remains, including the original Iguanodon [Wikipedia] teeth, in quarries in the Whiteman's Green area [around TQ 300 255]. See Gateway to the Earth and dinosaurs

# At the 1854 exhibition, a Pterodactyl dominates the chalk and two Iguanodon dominate the Wealden deposits. ... "remains of the Iguanodon have been principally found ... in the Weald of Kent and Sussex: Horsham in Sussex; Maidstone in Kent; and the Isle of Wight"   (Owen 1854)
# Eli Marsden Wilson's 1935- "Idealized Landscape of the Wealden Lake" showing Iguanodon (iguana tooth), Cetiosaurus (whale lizard) and Polacanthus (many spiked), (from the Natural History Museum, London, has the title "Mesozoic scene with great reptiles" in the Observers Book of Geology. The Natural History Museum website Image ID: 004324 describes it as "Scene from the Wealden times, during the Cretacous period".
Fossil bones of an Iguanodon from the Wealden Beds of the Isle of Wight (Observers Geology Plate 23)

about 125,000,000 to 113,000,000 years ago Aptian stage of the Lower Cretaceous. Main period of lower greensand deposits.

about 120,000,000 to 90,000,000 years ago Mid-Cretaceous Period "one period in the geologic past that stands out as distinctly warmer than today, particularly at high latitudes" (NOAA)

[Cambridgeshire] about 113,000,000 to 110,000,000 years ago Gault Clay deposited (reaching about 45 metres near Cambridge). From about 110,000,000 years ago: a local upward movement of the sea-bed caused sea erosion of the Upper Gault. Heavier material, including fossils, was rolled around and re-deposited , mixing fossils of different ages, and coating them in a hard phosphate, sand and phosphatic nodules formed the Cambridge Greensand.

100,500,000 to 66,000,000 years ago. Upper Cretaceous [Chalk] See Dakota Group in North America.

Taylor's "Story of a piece of chalk". In Britain the upper cretaceous comprises the upper part of the Gault, the Upper Greensand, and the whole of the chalk. Place in strate in Cambridgeshire: Topsoil, Chalk, Chalk Marl, Upper [Cambridge] Greensand, "Coprolite", Gault, Lower Greensand. Picture below is a sketch of a pit excavating phosphatic nodules at Horningsea, four miles north of Cambridge, about 1874. The average depth of working the nodule bed was about twelve feet but, as the undulations in the gault show, this was very varied.
# "On the Relations of the Cambridge Gault and Greensand" by A. J. Jukes-Browne, of the Geological Survey of England. Read 13.1.1875.
Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society xxxi, p.260, [Internet Archive] - (offline)

about 100,500,000 to 93,900,000 years ago Cenomanian age began the Upper Cretaceous. [Cambridgeshire] Cambridge Greensands with phosphatic nodules.

Cambridge Greensands: "Glauconitic marl: Thin but distinctive condensed basement bed of pale greenish grey marl rich in phosphatic nodules (so called "coprolites") at base. Much dark green glauconite as sand-sized grains, disseminated or concentrated in pods and layers giving a sandy texture and hence name "greensand"." (Gateway to Earth). The nodule beds are on average 25cm thick but, where hollows in the Gault occur, local depths of over a metre could accumulate. Fossilised dung relatively scarce. Fossils at core of nodules include many small sea creatures particularly bivalve molluscs (like Terebratula), brachiopods, ammonites and belemnites. Larger fossils include many fish and reptiles such as ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs and some (often poorly preserved) dinosaurs. (Wimpole coprolites 2015)

"The fossil beds were found at the base of both the Lower and Upper Cambridgeshire Greensand". (O'Connor)

100,000,000 to 650,000,000 years ago. The Chalk Sea. Culver Cliff, Isle of Wight was photographed in 1956, when I was twelve and it not yet a milion years old. "Chalk is made from billions of tiny shells of plankton which lived in the clear warm waters" (Isle of Wight Geological History) #
#
The chalk ridge running along the centre of the island, from the Needles (by Alum Bay) on the west to Culver on the east, has younger rocks to the north and older ones to the south. The map is from Isle of Wight Local Geodiversity Action Plan. The Isle of Wight Philosophical Society founded a museum in Newport in 1819 (or later) that has evolved into today's Dinosaur Isle

about 83,600,000 to 72,100,000 years ago Campanian age of the Late Cretaceous, when the Plesiosaur Elasmosaurus swam in the Dakota inland sea

Fossils of flowering plants first become abundant in the chalk. Those of the earlier Tertiary including types (in Britain) characteristic of a tropical climate. (Observers Book of Geology and Wikipedia Timeline of plant evolution) - Charles Darwin sought an explanation for what appeared to be an abrupt origin and highly accelerated rate of diversification of flowering plants in the mid-Cretaceous. (Friedman 2008)
From 1853 fossils of the leaves of flowering plants were collected from Cretacious rocks in the Dakota Formation in the USA mid- west.
# Recently a few fossils of actual flowers have been added to the leaf collections. This picture, from The Abominable Mystery of The First Flowers: Clues from Nebraska and Kansas by M. R. Bolick and R. K. Pabian of the University of Nebraska (1994) shows a fossil flower from Rose Creek, Nebraska, with petals and stamens. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/museumprogram/13

about 75,000,000 years ago According to Ron Hubbard, science fiction writer and founder of the scientologists, Xenu, ruler of a Galactic Confederation of 76 planets, transported billions of his charges in spaceships to Teegeeack (Earth), placed them near volcanoes and killed them by exploding hydrogen bombs, Their "thetans" (souls) later inhabited the bodies of humans, causing the dysfuntions that scientology claims to be able to repair.

about 72,100,000 to 66,000,000 to years ago Maastrichtian age ends Late Cretaceous

None of the reptile "monsters are found in the rocks later than the Chalk" (Observers Geology, p.132)


Tertiary (third) period: former term (still much used) for the geological period from 66,000,000 years ago to the Quaternary. Cenozoic (recent life). Ceno from Greek kainos, meaning new or recent. Also used in -cene at end of epochs: Paleo (old) - Eo (dawn) - Oligo (small) - Mio (less) - Plio (more) - Pleisto (most) - Holo (whole) - Anthropo (human)

Age of mammals, including primitive horses and hominids. Following the Cretaceous extinction of dinosaurs, the Eocene epochs - Paleocene - Eocene - Oligocene - Miocene - and Pliocene - have been described as chapters in the mammals rise to dominance. Most recent geological materials are soft sediments like sands and clays.


66,000,000 years ago extinction of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous epoch. Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event . Psigate said 65,000,000 years ago "Impact at Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, created crater almost 200 kilometres across, caused global devastation and possible extinction of dinosaurs, along with an estimated 85% of all life". Another source: Dinosaurs (and 90% of all species) wiped out after a meteorite. defined by a "golden spike" in sediments around the world iridium dispersed from the meteorite.

Extinction (vertebrates) of dinosaurs and flying pterosaurs, the mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs of the oceans. (Marine invertebrates) ammonites, groups of cephalopods and some bivalves, such as the reef-building rudists and some relatives of modern oysters. (Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History) - Most groups of organisms survived. Soon after the end of the Cretaceous, there was a tremendous diversification of insects, mammals, birds, and flowering plants on land, and of fishes, corals, and molluscs in the ocean. (Richard Cowen).


# 56,000,000 to 33,900,000 years ago Eocene Epoch. Plate 21 in Observers Book of Geology includes this depiction by Eli Marsden Wilson (1935) in the Natural History Museum, which it titles "Eocene landscape, London clay period".

A world that was essentially ice-free

# Wegener's Eozän: Eocene

In the early Eocene, there were land connections between Antarctica and Australia, North America and Europe through Greenland, and probably between North America and Asia through the Bering Strait.

About
60,000,000 to 55,000,000 years ago, Laurasia split when North America/Greenland and Eurasia separated, opening the Norwegian Sea. See Tethys. In the mid-Eocene, Australia and Antarctica separated. New ocean currents cooled the world towards the end of the Eocene. (source).

about 45,000,000 years ago during the early to mid Eocene Palaeotherium species living in the tropical forests covering Europe. (Wikipedia)

34,000,000 years ago Antarctic ice sheet began to form around this time (psigate)


Tropical forest to temperate grassland. Enter the beautiful world

33,900,000 to 23,000,000 years ago Oligocene: a transition from the tropical Eocene more temperate climates. Grasslands expanded world-wide and tropical forests receded to the equatorial belt.

During the Oligocene and Miocene the Alpine chain of mountains was formed, replacing the western end of the Tethys.

28,100,000 years ago Upper Oligocene (Chattian) - (Wikipedia) - Abbe Bourgeois announced in 1867 that he had discovered man-made tools in an assemblage of chipped flints in the bed of upper Oligocene age near Thenay. Similar finds were made elsewhere in Europe in 1872 and 1877 in upper Miocene beds. The human origin of these "eoliths" was disputed.

25,000,000 years ago hominoids (apes) diverged from the Old World monkeys according to Wikipedia. The Greek word pithecoid (ape like) was much used in 19th century evolutionary theory. A 1900 Dictionary defines an ape as a four limbed animal with teeth of the same number of form as humans and without either tails or cheek-pouches, and Pithecoid as pertaining to apes, or resembling an ape, or ape-like.

#
"Divergence among great apes, a small ape, and an Old World monkey with respect to humans", figure one from an article in Nature 469, 529-533 (27.1.2011)

Rather than call this Middle Tertiary "in 1833 I proposed the name of Miocene, selecting the 'faluns' of the valley of the Loire in France as my example or type". "No British strata have a distinct claim to be regarded as Miocene". (Charles Lyell)
# 23,030,000 to 5,332,000 years ago Miocene era - (Wikipedia

"If the Creator made this world especially for man, then there was one period paricularly adapted to man's wants. The world never experienced a more beautiful period. That period was the Miocene, and by all manner of logical reasoning it was the time when man should have appeared" Mastodon, Mammoth, and Man by John Patterson MacLean 1878 page 67

Picture of Miocene mammals from The Prehistoric World: or, Vanished Races by Emory Adams Allen 1885.

Taylor's "Story of a piece of lignite"

Whilst accepting the authenticity of the flint tools found by l'abbé Bourgeois at Thenay, Albert Gaudry did not admit the existence of humans in the Miocene epoch. Sommeone suggested Dryopithecus cracked the stones. (Histoire) - See Mortillet.

In 1856 Éduard Lartet described fossil jaw fragments and a piece of humerus from a "très-grand Singe de la tribu des Simiens" [Simian] "ou Singes supérieurs", which had been discovered by Monsieur Fontan, of Saint-Gaudens (Haute-Caronne), a [zealous] naturaliste. He named the monkey whose bones these were, Dryopithecus fontani [See below]. They were found in a strata of marly clays (banc d'argile marneuse) from the Miocene being exploited at the base of the plateau on which Saint-Gaudens is built,
# at the start of the plaine de Valentine that stretches to the foothills of the Pyrenees.
Fontan recovered from the same site, bones of Macrotherium, Rhinoceros, Dicrocerus elegans, apparently identical to species of the same genera previously found at Sansan. These mammals belong essentially, Lartet said, to "nos terrains tertiaires moyens (miocènes)", as we also find their remains in the faluns of Touraine. - See Lartout "Note sur un grand singe fossile qui se rattache au groupe des singes supérieurs" in Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences Paris, Band 43, 1856, pages 219-223. (offline)

The fossils were not (as Lyell states) found in lignite deposits, but Lartet refers to trunks of oak, chestnut and pine in lignite in the lowest foothills of the Pyrenees, which he thinks are the same age as fossils a Saint-Gaudens and Sansan, because he has collected some remains of mammals belonging to the same period. Lartet concluded on the evidence he had that this monkey, of very great size, mainly ate fruit, and lived usually in trees, as Gibbons of the present time. He said he took the name Dryopithecus from [Greek] Dryos (tree, oak) and pithekos (monkey). So Lyell is correct in linking the name to oaks found in lignite. Monsieur Fontan, after who the full name Dryopithecus fontani comes, is named as Urbaine Fontan in the Journal de Toulouse. He may also be "A. Fontan, docteur-médecin", who is mentioned elsewhere.

The Journal de Toulouse carried to reports of the discovery (the second correctin the first) on 3.8.1856 and 5.8.1856. Fontan is reported as saying the find is the more interesting as Cuvier had not managed to find such a fossil. Flourens "went even further, this unexpected result gives him hope that one will soon find fossil men". (3.8.1856 - Third page)

Plate and notes (adapted) provided with Lartet's note

#

1. A series of teeth from "une négresse du Gabon"

2. The same series from an adult Chimpanzee - 3. Orang from Borneo - 4. Gibbon from Siamang - 5. Gorilla

7, 8, and 9 are Dryopithecus. 7 shows shows three views of jaw fragments with teeth and 8 how they fot in to the whole jaw. 8 shows the humerus (upper arm) bone (not to scale)

10 and 11 are the teeth and jaw of Pliopithecus antiquus that Lartet discovered at Sansan in 1837.

6 is a gorilla's jaw (not to scale)

Lartet says the Siamang, "placed by Zoologists in general in the last row of the tribe of the Simians or higher apes, nevertheless, provide by their skeleton, a sum of characters approaching the human type much greater than one can find in Orang or even in the chimpanzee".

13,000,000 years ago divergence between humans and orang-utangs (between 12 and 15 million years ago).

more than 7,000,000 years ago divergence between the two existing beavers: castor canadensis (north america) and castor fiber (europe and asia).

7,000,000 years ago divergence between humans and gorillas (between 6 and 8 million years ago).

6,230,000 years ago The the red deer (cervus elaphus) and Indian spotted deer (axis axis) last shared a common ancestor. However, they remain completely interfertile. ("Neanderthals and modern humans: an example of a mammalian syngameon?" by T. W. Holliday 2006)

6,000,000 years ago divergence between humans and chimpanzees (between 5 and 7 million years ago). Common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans. Skin on face and hands of baby chimpanzees darkens after exposure to the sun. The rest of the body is protected by hair (fur)) and remains pale.

"Six million years are said to separate human beings from other great apes" (Tomasello 1999, p.2);

5,300,000 years ago appearance of Ursus minimus (the Auvergne bear). (Wikipedia). It is thought to have been the ancestor of Ursus etruscus. Etruscus became a larger bear. Radiating across Europe and Asia, it gave rise cave bears in Europe and brown bears in Asia. See A Review of Bear Evolution by Bruce Mclellan and David C. Reiner, 1992/1994.


Geological periods of hominids # Pliocene

Early Pleistocene

Middle Pleistocene

Late Pleistocene

Holocene

Anthropocene

Archaeological

Paleolithic

Middle

Upper

Mesolithic

Neolithic

Pliocene means "more recent". The shelly sand-banks of East Anglia known as crag were formed in the Pliocene. Pleistocene was "was originally regarded as ... the period in which man, as tool-using animal, first made his appearance and ... evolved". But the case was made in "recent years" (1929) that tool-users existed in the "Pliocene or even earlier". (Wills 1929 p.209).

# 5,333,000 to 2,580,000 years ago Pliocene geological epoch. Eolithic means dawn of stone and the term eolith was used for flints that might have been hand wrought, but might be natural. This one is said to resemble a musk ox on the left and a bear on the right. (Larousse Prehistoric)

#
# Nature 29.3.1924 contained a report dating eoliths that could have been tools to "at least, an early phase of the Pliocene period".
Rushton Hall (1928/1930) wrote "Out of the mists of Antiquity appear the earliest known people, to whom the name the people of the dawn or eolithic period has been given" (p.40). "Piltdown may be the remains of a Dawn Period man" (page 57). His Dawn Man developed in River Drift Man, another possibility for placing Piltdown Man. The pictures are of Piltdown Man and an eolith from Rushton Hall.

Ardipithecus ramidus 4,400,000 years ago Earliest known hominid [human, not ape] fossils dated to this time (psigate) -

Ardipithecus ramidus, named September 1994, found in Ethiopia by research team headed by Tim White.

The so called southern apes

4,000,000 years ago to 2,000,000 years ago Australopithecus genus in Africa. Named by Raymond A. Dart (1893-1988) in 1925 from Latin australis "southern" and Greek pithekos "ape". Wikipedia: Australopithecus

about 3,900,000 years ago Equus caballus, the modern horse, , diverged from the lineage it shares with zebras and asses, according to molecular data. The fossil suggests a divergence at least 2 millions years ago.

about 3,600,000 years ago A woolly rhinoceros in the Himalayas lived there during a general world period of warmth. they migrated from there to northern Asia and Europe when the Ice Age began. The woolly rhinoceros co-existed with woolly mammoths in the Pleistocene. Successively named Rhinocerotis antiquitatis - Gryphus antiquitatus - Rhinocerotis tichorhini and Coelodonta antiquitatis.

European land mammals

Lindsay and others in 1980 wrote of "three major dispersal events of large mammals during the Pliocene" at 3,700,000 years ago - then 2,600,000 years ago - then 1,900,000 years ago.

3,600,000 to 3,000,000 years ago or earlier Start of Villafranchian fauna. (Wikipedia) -

Villafranchian: The land-mammal stage that spans the upper Pliocene and lower Pleistocene 3,600,000 to 1,200,000 years ago (Oxford: A Dictionary of Zoology by Michael Allaby 2009). Villafranchian: An age that is dated at base at approximately 3,000,000 years ago. It lasted approximately 2,000,000 years and therefore crosses the Late Pliocene/Early Pleistocene boundary. (Oxford: A Dictionary of Plant Sciences by Michael Allaby 2006)

Leptobos event. Early Villafranchian starts with appearance of a primitive bovid of the genus of Leptobos in Italy. Leptobos existed only during the Late Pliocene to Early Pleistocene, thus it is a diagnostic taxon for the Villafranchian-Nihewanian land mammal ages of Europe and China

The Etruscan rhinoceros (Stephanorhinus etruscus) was the European rhino from the early Pleistocene. It was succeeded the Steppe Rhino (Stephanorhinus hemitoechus) in the middle Pleistocene.

Elephant-Equus (elephant horse) event. somewhere between 3,000,000 and 2,000,000 years ago. It starts with the appeance of Equus (real horse) and Mammuthus meridionalis. "We now report new data that limit the time of Equus' dispersal and into Europe to the 2,600,000 years ago dispersal event". (Lindsay and others)

Equus was derived from a species of the single-toed horse Pliohippus, known only from North America.

Begining of middle Villafranchian coincides with Gauss/Matuyama magnetic transgresson and onset of Quaternary (Pleistocene) 2,580,000 years ago.

See Tiglian

The Wolf event, may fall near 1,700,000 years ago. The late Villafranchian starts with the appearance of Canis etruscus (Etrurian wolf)

end Villafranchian event

Followed by Galerian Mammal Age and Aurelian Mammal Age (350,000 to 13,000 years ago).

3,300,000 years ago Lomekwi 3 site tools in Kenya discovered 2015. Proposal to call the Lomekwian technology as older and distinct from Oldowan.

"Oldest stone tools pre-date earliest humans" (BBC) - Wikipedia: stone age - stone tools - Article from Nature 21.5.2015 - Article from Science 14.4. 2015

See modes.

3,300,000 years ago hominin (human-like primate) called "Lucy" discovered in Ethiopia in 1974     BBC 4.3.2015 - Wikipedia - Google doodle archive. Jablonski 2012 infers skin and fur similar to chimpanzees as activities would not "built up excess heat as the result of prolonged activity".

2,800,000 years ago Ethiopian jaw bone. BBC 4.3.2015 "'First human' discovered in Ethiopia"

# Wegener's Alt-Quartär: early Quaternary

The major land masses were about where they are today.

Quaternary Period current period of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale. Includes two epochs: the Pleistocene to 11,700 years ago - and the Holocene to today. Quaternary glaciation.
2,600,000 to 11,700 years ago Pleistocene [From Greek for most recent. Term introduced by Lyell in 1839 for ice age deposits after the Pliocene]. Current ice age with permanent ice sheets in Antarctica and perhaps Greenland, and fluctuating ice sheets elsewhere. The ice across much of Russia preserved remains of Pleistocene mammals such as this mammoth from near Moscow whose mounted bones are diplayed in the entrance hall to the Orlov Museum of Paleontology. The Woolly Rhinoceros also roamed Siberia. See Édouard Lartet's age of. Mammoth

# furry coat or sweaty skin

a case of bi-polar - hot then cold - cold then hot

Glacials and interglacials:

North Germany: Pre-Tiglian - Tiglian - Alpine region (Donau = Danube): Biber (Wikipedia) - Biber/Danube - Danube (Wikipedia) - Danube/Gunz (Wikipedia)

MIS 62 - Günz - MS 22 - Cromerian (Piltdowns) MIS 15 MIS 14 MIS 13 - Mindel MIS 12 - Holstein MIS 11 (Swanscombes) - Riss MIS 10 (Bilzingslebens) MIS 8 MIS 6 - Eem (hippos) MIS 5 - Wurm - MIS 2 - Holocene (farmers) MIS 1 .

Mammoth: and rhinoceros - ivory carving - prehistoric art - Aurignacian - mammoths in art - Dolni Vestonice - cave bear and other extinctions - eburnien - reindeer - mammoth extinct -


The first cool period at the junction of the Pliocene and the Pleistocene was the pre-Tiglian. - the Pre tiglian cold stage can be dated between about 2,500,000 and 2,300,000 years ago -

The Tiglian was about 2,000,000 years ago - The Tiglian interglacial phase ends in the Olduvai magnetic event about 1,700 years ago - 1,700,000 to 1,200,000 million years ago Donau-Günz or Tiglian interglacial. Tiglian derived from Tegelen in the Netherlands (Wikipedia). "A classical Villafranchian locality".

#
Part of a sketch of what the Tegelen landscape may have looked like, made by Dubois (1904?). From "A century of research on the classical locality of Tegelen (province of Limburg, The Netherlands)" by Lars W. Van Den Hoek Ostende and John De Vos

Noted for its deer. Dubois wrote about a species of Eucladoceros (bush- antlered deer) Eucladoceros tegulensis, later called Eucladoceros, and Cervus rhenanus Dubois, 1904 (named after him), the small deer of Venlo, remains of which are found primarily in Tegelen.

Elephants, rhinoceroses, a wild pig species and possibly even tapirs - a landscape of riverine woodlands and swamps ("Origins and development of grassland communities in northwestern Europe" by Herbert H. T. Prins 1998)

#
Paleolithic (Old stone age) See stone and bone.

Paleo = old   lithos = stone. The three ages, Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic, were named in relation to the type of stone tools that survived in archaeological sites. The Paleolithic is divided into Lower, Middle and Upper.

Paeolithic savagery (Gordon Childe)

[Strepean?] - Chellean - Abbevillian (Wikipedia) - Oldowan (Wikipedia).
See Mortillet classification

2,600,000 to 2,550,000 years ago Mode one - Oldowan - stone tools. Picture above from Wikipedia of a "simple chopping-tool". Tools made by knocking flakes off a core stone (pebble core) with a hammerstone. Core and flake tools made.

# World prehistory: a new outline, by Grahame Clark. 1969, page 31.

"Archaeology studies human history from the development of the first stone tools.." (Wikipedia). It is one of the main ways in which social theorists have tried to access pre-history (the human story before writing). Another major way has been through speculation on the content of myths. Artefacts, like stone tools, can be dated in a way that inferences from myths can not. On the other hand, myths may give access to the mind in a way that artifacts do not.

See Sweden

Lower Paleolithic

The first homo - Latin for human

2,350,000 years ago upper jaw from Hadar, Ethiopia, oldest fossil attributed to the genus Homo before 2015 jaw

"Man alone has become a biped" (Charles Darwin) - After Lucy.

2,000,000 years ago (or later) Upright human: Homo erectus: "the fossil record between ... Lucy ... and Homo erectus (with its relatively large brain and humanlike body proportions) two million years ago is sparse". ((BBC 4.3.2015) - Wikipedia

"Compared with its australopithecine forebears-who were four feet tall with ape-sized brains and no stone tools - Homo was larger physically, had a larger brain, and made stone tools." (Tomasello 1999)

# From Stepping out: a computer simulation of hominid dispersal from Africa (2002) by Steven Mithen and Melissa Reed
Map based on hominids leaving Africa about 2 million years ago. They get to the far east in 100,000 years, but take over 1,000,000 years to get to west Europe. Why? - Read about
Wushan Man and Indonesia's top five hominid fossil sites - Norfolk footprints and Boxgrove tibia

1,800,000 years ago Hippopotamus antiquus, the European hippopotamus appeared. (Wikipedia)

1,800,000 years ago "Early human migrations began when Homo erectus first migrated out of Africa over the Levantine corridor and Horn of Africa to Eurasia about 1.8 million years ago". (Wikipedia in an earlier incarnation) - Two major dispersals of hominins out of Africa occurred. That of homo erectus began around 1,800,000 years ago. That of homo sapiens began around 80,000 years ago. (Jablonski 2012)

about 1,750,000 years ago The Olduvai child: OH 7 and Zinjanthropus: OH 5

MIS 62 - 1.750,000 years ago: end of the Tiglian

Acheulean about 1,600,000 to 200,000 years ago

Acheulean artifacts from Africa date to 1,600,000 years ago. The oldest sites in India are slightly younger. In Europe [See Mortillet classification], the earliest Acheulean tools appear just after 800,000 years ago, as homo erectus moved north out of Africa. (anthromuseum.missouri). But the classical French Acheulean is much later.

Mode two tools: Large bifacial cutting tools made from flakes and cores such as Acheulean handaxes, cleavers and picks.

about 1,500,000 years ago Turkana Boy or Nariokotome Boy (WT-15000) discovered in Kenya August 1984. 108 bones (view bones): almost all the scull and most of the rest of the skeleton. The most complete early hominid found. Structure suggests a physically very activ biped and Jablonski 2012 deduces that early hominids had lost body hair and increased sweat glands by the time he "traversed the woodland grassland" of the Lake Turkana Basin. Homo erectus preferred to homo ergaster

1,500,000 years ago Attirampakkam, south India, Acheulean site. See Antiquity - Indi-Uni - Science - Indian Acheulean. Also see earlier dating.

# 1,400,000 years ago Acheulean - Mode two tools. The picture, from Wikipedia, is of an Acheulean handaxe from Zamora in Spain.

From Saint-Acheul, a suburb of Amiens where the first tools from this period were found in 1859. Wikipedia: Acheulean

The start of Antroparkbaby in the European Acheulean is based on the Bilzingsleben site of early palaeolithic human remains in Thuringia, Germany, dated about 370,000 years ago. Also Shoningen and Stránská .

The four levels of Antroparkbaby are Acheulean, which it associates with homo erectus - Mousterian (Neanderthal) - Gravettian - and Magdalenian (both homo sapiens)

about 1,250.000 to 700,000 years ago The Mid-Pleistocene Transition or revolution. A period during which the dominant periodicity of Earth's climate (glacial-interglacial) cycles inexplicably changed from 41,000 years to 100,000 years

1,200,000 to 700,000 years ago Günz glaciation (Alps). Britain's corresponding Beestonian Stage consists of alternating glacial and interglacial phases. The Beestonian Stage and Marine Isotope Stage 22 ended about 866,000 years ago. (Wikipedia). H.G. Wells calls the "first glacial age"

MIS 22 - 1,030,000 years ago, marking the end of the Bavelian period in Europe. The Leerdam interglacial is located at MIS23 and the Bavelian at MIS25 by Wll Roebroeks and Thijs Van Kolfschoten. They include both in the Bavelian complex. This complex precedes the Cromerian complex.

Antoine in began a chart of regional sequancies with Leerdam followed by the aluvial Somme terrace "Ferme de Grace" (MIS22). The road to Ferme de Grace is in the Renancourt district of Amiens.

Gabriel de Mortillet's classification
# 1,200,000 years ago Zuzana Balàkovà on Antoparkbaby imagines homo erectus entering Europe from the north coast of Africa aross the straights of Gibralter.

Conceptualising pre-historic human time in Europe

In arranging geological strata Alexander Brongniart (1770-1847) proposed that each stratum could be defined by the presence of one or more specific fossils of animals or plants, which he called a fossile caractéristique. In prehistoric archaeology, Mortillet spoke, instead, of a fossile-directeur, which served the same function. The Fossile- directeur was a tool made by humans rather than a biological remain.

En 1861, [Édouard Lartet] propose une chronologie du Quaternaire fondée sur les espèces successives de grands mammifères dominants, à partir desquelles il pensait pouvoir dater les industries lithiques paléolithiques: l'âge de l'ours des cavernes, l'âge de l'éléphant (mammouth) et du rhinocéros laineux, l'âge du renne et l'âge de l'auroch.

Lartet suggested four ages or periods based on associated fauna, to which Felix Garrigou added an earlier Hippopotamus period:

The Hippopotamus period
The Cave Bear period
The Woolly Mammoth and Rhinoceros period
The Reindeer period
The Aurochs or Bison period

In Mortillet's scheme Hippopotamus became Chellean, most of Cave Bear and Mammoth became Mousterian, although some late finds were put in a separate Aurignacian. Reindeer was divided into Solutrean and Magdalenian, and Robenhausian was added for the Neolithic period. (Oscar Abadía 2002)

Names of some periods of the paleolithic as classified by Gabriel de Mortillet. "Mortillet's most successful idea was to define time- periods by their typical stone tools which acted like the fossile directeurs of the geologists". (Aggsbach's Paleolithic Blog)

Tertiary

#  
See eoliths and pre-mode tools

Thenaisienne - Eolithique. Stones "étonnée par le feu". (shaped, cracked into shape, using fire). Named after Thenay in Loire et Cher where, from 1860, Abbé Bourgeois collected objects from Upper Oligocene beds that he suggested to the Congress of Paris in 1867 were man-made. Possible Tertiary man.

Picture 2 is an example shaped by fire. Picture 5 is an example with its edge (bottom) retouched by chipping.

See mode one tools

See Piltdown often considered before Chellean.

Quaternary

Chelléen (Chellean). Term suggested by Ernest d'Acy in 1878, employed by Mortillet in 1883. Named after site at Chelles (Seine-et-Marne, France) (Wikipedia). Henri Breuil proposed replacing by Abbevillien in reference to sites on the haute terrasse de la Somme at Abbeville (Wikipedia), where tools coexist with the fossils of animals from a hot climate such as Elephas antiquus.
# The characteristic tool is often called an axe, but is a hand tool to cut, drill, trim and do everything. Mortillet calls it a coup-de-poing (blow of the fist - punch) or knuckle-fist. The word bifacial was substituted following André Vayson (1920).

Acheuléen (Acheulean), named after a site at Saint-Acheul near Amiens (Somme). A transitonal period with a cooler climate, still dominated by the coup- de-poing, which is refined. The mammoth replaces the elephant as the climate cools

Wikipedia: Acheulean tools are classified as mode two, meaning they are more advanced than the (usually earlier) mode one tools of the Clactonian or Oldowan/Abbevillian [Mortillet's Thenaisienne] industries but lacking the sophistication of the (usually later) mode three tools of the Middle Palaeolithic, exemplified by the Mousterian (below)

See tools

Moustérien (Mousterian). Named after a site at the l'abri supérieur du Moustier à Peyzac-le-Moustier (Dordogne) discovered by Édouard Lartet in 1860. Associated with the great bear of the caves. The Acheulean and Mousterian were both very long periods during which large fluvial (river) alluvium deposits of gravel, sands and silts formed. Their deposits are much more abundant than chelleennes alluvium. The industry gradually changed and eventually was completely transformed. The general purpose tool, though persisting, was increasingly replaced by specialist forms such as the blade, the tip and the scraper.
# Mousterian flint tools in transition to Solutrean

113: a flint pointe.

109 and 110: Two sides of one flint pointe.

116: A double scraper.

111 and 112: two sides of a very large scraper. Lanceolate shape. Montillet notes the care and skill that has gone into shaping each side and comments that "this remarkable instrument approaches solutrean".

114 and 115: two sides of one tool. 114 shows "passage" from a ponte to a scaper. A pointe has been retouched along the length of one side (bottom) "forming a very beautiful scraper". 115 shows a Conchoidal fracture (percusion chonchoid) in the corner.

See mode three tools

Aurignacian

# Solutréen (Solutrean) after a site discovered au pied de la Roche de Solutré (Saône-et-Loire) par Henry Testot-Ferry en 1866, which Mortillet visited at his invitation. First part associated with mammoths, second with reindeer. Tool remains include two types of pointes, which, although not abundant, are characteristic. One type is laurel leaf shaped, the other willow leaf with a side notch. Artistic retouching on both faces, at both ends and at the perimeter, distinguishes them from Mousterian pointes. They were made to be emmanchées (mounted, on wood, for example). Later authors agree that the Solutrean represents the pinnacle of working flint and produced arrowheads of a perfection rarely equalled afterwards.

See mode four tools

Magdalénien (Magdalenian). The name of the site of la Madeleine (Dordogne) discovered by Édouard Lartet in 1863. Humans lived in caves for the most part. Asociated with reindeer throughout. Characterised especially by development of instruments in bone and antler. It develops naturally from the Solutrean. Bone objects begin to appear at the end of the Solutrean and finely worked flint pointes are sometimes found in the early Magdalenian. But the use of bone harms the development of flint objects, which are less beautiful.

A dagger carved from reindeer antler. The handle is carved as a reindeer From Laugerie-Basse (Dordogne) (Wikipedia). Museum of Saint-Germain.

#

[Mesolithic] Term not used on Mortillet's plans. Instead, he added Tourassien to the end of the old stone age and Tardenoisien to the start of the new stone age.

# Tourassien (1872? 1894?) Wikipedia. Term fell into disuse in favour of the Azilien [terme tombé en désuétude au profit d'Azilien]. (Wikipedia)

At the end of the Paleolithic a warmer climate forced reindeer north. Without this "animal heaven" the human populations of Western Europe lived in much more difficult times and (stone) industry declined. The shelter beyond Tourasse, close to Saint-Martory (Haute-Garonne) provides a good set of tools, characterised by harpoons.


Temps actuels = current time

"Sous le nom de temps actuels, on comprend tous ceux qui se sont trouvés dans des conditions de géographie physique, d'hydrographie, de climatologie, de flore et de faune à peu pràs semblables … celles de nos jours." (Ascribed to Mortillet - Seems to be an extract from the second edition (Paris 1895) of Alcide Railliet's Traité de zoologie médicale et agricole. Alcide Railliet says that the Neolithic period contains only one time: the Robenhausian. The "gap" between Quaternary and current time is explained by the change from a cold dry climate to a temperate one, which led to the reindeer moving north, followed by the humans who hunted them. The space they left is eventually filled by a new people, bringing their own tools.


Current - Tardenoisien (1897) (Wikipedia) - named after natural French region of Tardenois Wikipedia. Characterised by small flints with geometric shapes. #

After geologic time came the current time, but at the beginning, and for a long time, we are still in the stone age. At this point we call it Neolithic or the new stone age. I begins with an industry characterised by flint instruments which are very small and have geometric shapes. They are in abundance in the Tardenois, Department of the Aisne.

Néolithique (Neolithic)
Period of Pierre polie (polished stone), because it generally polished the most common instrument, the axe. Mortillet counts Tardenoisien and Robenhausian as the two neolithic epochs. He just has one plate for Tardenoisien, but many for Robenhausian.

Robenhausienne (Robenhausian) named after a Swiss Lake Resort, the palafitte of Robenhausen (Wikipedia) on small partly desiccated Lake Pfäffikon, in the canton of Zurich. This important station provided many and interesting information on industry, customs and habits of the men in the end the period of the stone polished. The polishing of stone took especially great development to the robenhausienne time.

Plates with a diverse range of tools. The first plate being hammers or firing pins, "the first of all the tools,.absolutely essential for trimming stone".

# Mortillet says that ("primitive") Pottery, for general use, appeared for the first time in Europe during the Robenhausian, having been completely lacking during the Quaternary. The fist pots ("vases") are crude. (Perhaps?) incompletely fired. Only the surface is reddened by the fire. The interior of the pottery is coloured brown by the charcoal or black of smoke. It is usually mixed with angular fragments of rocks or shells. This mixture intended to give consistency to the clay and to prevent splitting during drying and while cooking. These bottoms of these first pots are rounded, without a flattened foot. To stand upright they would have to be pressed into earth, sand or ash. Side nipples suggest suspension by cords.

Âge; du bronze (bronze age)

Morgienne

Larnaudienne

Âge; du fer (iron age)

Hallstattienne

Marnienne

Lugdnnienne

Chompdolienne

Wabennienne

# Mortillet 1883 Le Préhistorioue - Antiquité de L'Homme p.21

A basic binary division is made between "temps geologiques" (geological time) and "temps actuelles" (current time). In geological time is Tertiary and Quaternary, until the start of the Neolithic in current time, which is marked by the polishing of stone tools.

It was considered possible that hunter humans had simply been replaced by other humans who tilled the soil. It has been suggested (seriously?) that a gap between the two might have marked Noah's flood. The search for an alternative, develomental, process led to the two-stage theory becoming a three stage one with a Mesolithic (middle) stage. See Wikipedia

Mortillet's research gap - the missing middle

Mortillet: 16.4.1874 at la Société d'Anthropologie,

Toute la discussion, je crois, repose sur un malentendu. Entre l'époque paléolithique ou des cavernes et l'époque néolithique ou de la pierre polie, il existe un hiatus; mais cet hiatus n'est qu'une simple lacune dans nos connaissances. Il ne représente'pas une véritable lacune dans le temps et dans l'industrie. Certainement l'époque paléolithique a dû se rattacher et se souder à l'époque néolithique; mais nous n'avons pas encore découvert le point de contact. Entre les deux époques, il n'y a pas eu une période où l'Europe était inhabitable; seulement, les restes de l'époque de transition ou de passage n'ont pas encore été trouvés et reconnus. C'est ce qui constitue l'hiatus que nous constatons. Je le répéte, cet hiatus n'est pas réel un existe que dans le résultai de nos études et de nos recherches actuelles. Je devais une explication parce que je suis le principal propagateur de l'idée de l'hiatus. J'ai signalé le fait pour stimuler les recherches et les investigations.

The entire discussion, I believe, is based on a misunderstanding. Between the Paleolithic era or the caves and the time Neolithic or polished stone, there is a hiatus; but this hiatus is just a simple gap in our knowledge. It is not a real gap in time and in the industry. Certainly the Paleolithic era has had to be connected and merge in the Neolithic, but we have yet to discover the point of contact. Between the two eras, there has not been a period where Europe was uninhabitable; only the remains of the epoch of transition or passage have not yet been found and recognized. That is the gap we see. I repeat, this hiatus is not a real one, but exists only in the results of our studies and our current research. I owe this explanation because I am the main propagator of the idea of the hiatus. I pointed out the fact to stimulate research and investigations.


Mesolithic - needed or not needed?

Phillipe Salmon argued for a Campignian Culture (name from Campigny, Seine Inferieure - Wikipedia)) starting before the Robenhausian (1882? 1891?). The Tourassien (later Azilian) may have been suggested in 1894 and the Tardenoisien in 1897. The Tourassien and Tardenoisien industries were collated to form the Mesolithic period, which remained a controversial concept until after the second world war. From the marxist approach of modes of production, the transition from the old stone age to the new was a transition from savagery to barbarism, and a transitional stage was not needed. Gordon Childe wrote that cultivating the soil "was the first step in the neolithic revolution, and suffices to distinguish barbarism from savagery" (1942, p.43)

#




Musée préhistorique by Gabriel and Adrien de Mortillet. 1903 edition. The major change from the 1883 chart is two transitional epochs between the old and new stone ages.



1,000,000 years ago

about 1,000,000 to 900,000 years ago The "end- Villafranchian" event. A practically total rejuvenation of the fauna of Eurasia, along with new types of adaptation, and changes in climate and vegetation. May have been triggered by tectonic movements in the mountain belts of central and southern Asia. Major reorganization of large-mammal communities within the interval from about 920,000 to 750,000 years ago, which is from the early to middle Galerian mammal age. The bear Ursus dolinensis and the bison, a more evolved form than Bison (Eobison), are taxa typical of the beginning of the Galerian mammal age. Above beds with upper Villafranchian fossils in East Anglia is the Cromer Forest Bed. Early Cromerian and early Galerian may be the same.

Carleton S Coon says his The History of Man begins about 700,000 years ago "at the beginning of the ice age". But he also writes of the "Pleistocene or age of ice" between one million years and 10,000 years ago (8,000BC). His phase one of human history lasted over 650,000 years - over 90% of the time. It was the period of homo erectus (Java, Peking, Olduvai erectus) and Rhodesian that evolved into homo sapiens. , Heidelberg, Swanscombe, Steinheim. Also Neanderthal. See phase 2 and phase 3.

Choppers and flake tools (including scrapers) occur at a number of sites before 1,000,000 years ago. (Gilligan 3.2010) - Scrapers are possibly an indication of work on hides for clothing.

# 1,000,000 to 700,000 years ago Date range for Pithecanthropus erectus (ape-human that stands upright) - Java Man - a fossil skullcap, femur and a tooth discovered by geologist Eugène Dubois in 1891. (Jeremy Norman) - See ape and Haeckel.

See 1900 reconstruction - 1914 reconstruction - by Louis Mascré - Link to display at Natural Science Museum, Leiden - Indonesia

1,000,000 years ago "members of the genus Homo living in Africa ... from which all modern humans evolved ... probably had mostly naked and darkly pigmented skin" (Jablonski 2012)


# Happisburgh - first known settlement in northern Europe

970,000 to 936,000 years ago a prominent warm stage in Britain.

866,000-814,000 years ago a prominent warm stage in Britain. years ago".

Happisburgh: "Site 3 probably dates to one of the prominent warm stages (i.e. those most likely to have supported deciduous forest and other thermophilous plants)". (British Museum) - See British Archaeology January/February 2006

About 80 flint tools

Footprints - Research article: "Hominin Footprints from Early Pleistocene Deposits at Happisburgh, UK" 7.2.2014.


Dates for Cromer Forest Bed: 780,000 to 450,000 years ago? (Wikipedia). Link for West Runton (mammoth and rhino) - See Galerian


The three levels of the Thames Terraces: (gravels black)
# Boyn Gravels (100 feet) contain Chellean and Acheulean tools. 44 feet thick at Swanscombe.

Taplow Gravels (50 feet) contain Mousterian tools.

Flood Plain Gravels (F.P.) are ones younger than the Taplow ones.

The Thames gravels were used to date the Piltdown gravels. As a "missing link" between monkey and man, Piltdown was considered as buried in Boyn level gravels. The gravels he was alleged to have been found in were, in fact, at the younger Taplow level. See Piltdown geology.

The diagram is based on one by Henry Dewey and taken from Wills 1929 p.241.

866,000 to 478,000 years ago or 700,000 to 650,000 years ago: an interglacial period - Called Günz- Mindel - Pre-Illinoian - or Cromerian. Called third interglacial if dating backwards, but H.G. Wells calls the "first interglacial period"
Chellean (Abbevillian) culture in France. The fossil locality of Chilhac three is known for a rich Villafranchian fauna (Boeuf 1983) ...... thought to represent the earliest stage named Chellean (De Mortillet 1883). See Wikipedia. Possible fauna: Etruscan rhinoceros - Hippopotamus - Primitive horse - Sabre tooth tiger - Broad nosed rhinoceros - Straight tusked elephant - Giant beaver - Short faced hyena - Deer - Bison - Wild Cattle.

"With extreme cold glacial times following the Cromerian, the European Hippopotamus moved out of Britain, never to return. It would be another 250,000 years before a hippopotamus were to waddle into Britain again." (Jan Freedman)

Cromerian interglacials starting 563,000 years ago (MIS15) - 533,000 years ago (MIS14) - 478,000 years ago (MIS13)

"Prior to the Cromerian age the fossils are African" "Australopithecus" - Then "hominids are found in Asia and Europe as well - the volcanic strata of Java and the fossil beds near Peking and Heidelberg being good examples. These fossils have recently been grouped as Homo erectus". (Larousse Prehistoric 1957-1962).

Piltdown Man in context 1912 - 1953 - 1954
# A 1934 Encyclopedia says that the Piltdown remains "are usually attributed to the third inter-glacial period, but may be considerably older"

The section from table 28 of The Earliest Englishman (1948) shows Piltdown Man as the earliest "species of man in western Europe".

The "earliest Englishman" was a fraud. Swanscombe woman is genuine.

Other finds were said to "show that the following animals lived in this part of the Wealden country when Piltdown Man was here: Giant Elephant (probably
Elephas antiquus). Horse (Equus caballus). Hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius). Red Deer (Cervus elaphus). Beaver (Castor fiber). To these may be added the following from Eastbourne:- Small-horned Rhinoceros (Rhinoceros hemitarchus *). Giant Irish Deer (Megaceros hibernicus ). Bison (Bison priscus). The country must have been well wooded, and watered by rivers which were often bounded by swamps. The climate could not have been very different from that of the present day, only perhaps with heavier rain. It was indeed a truly mild episode in the Great Ice Age, and the occurrence of the hippopotamus with the giant forest elephant confirms the supposition that this was the earliest break in the Arctic record. The Piltdown gravel is therefore shown to belong to the early part of the Pleistocene period." (pages 35-36)

* Stephanorhinus hemitoechus - Dicerorhinus hemitoechus - Rhinoceros hemitoechus

The geology of Piltdown, in the Weald of East Sussex: The area is one of "Tunbridge Wells Sand" from the cretaceous period. However, in places, there are shallow surface deposits of gravel. These deposits were not shown on the geological maps until after the first world war. Workman repairing roads excavated them, however, and are said to have provided Charles Dawson with his first scull fragment in 1908.
The strata at Piltdown.

1. 35 centimeters (14 inches) of surface soil

2. A few centimters to a meter (3.3 feet) of pale yellow gravel

3. 50 centimeters (20 inches) of dark gravel in which fossil were "found"

4. 25 centimeters (10 inches) of gravel without fossils

5. Tunbridge Wells Sand (Cretaceous)

Francis H. Edmunds mapped the Piltdown gravel in 1925. He found it correlated with the Thames Taplow gravels, much younger than the Swanscombe terrace deposits.

Leonard Wills' 1929 list of recognised "cultural stages" begins with the Lower Paleolithic or river-drift race. Another source tells us river drift included the Piltdown skull and the Trinil and Heidelberg remains. It was related to the Strepean, Chellean and Acheulean ages. "Chellean man lived in the open in a warm, probably interglacial climate" (Wills 1929 p.248).

River man was followed by Middle Paleolithic or older cave man - Upper Paleolithic or newer cave man - and then Post-Glacial man.

Another account has some Piltdown men (I)Eoanthropus (Eolithic culture) about 1,000,000 years ago probably living in "the valley of the early post-Pliocene Thames". An Ice Age started and then men of the Old Stone Age appeared in the lower part of the valley at least 500,000 years ago. These included both "Chellean and Acheulean Paleolithic cultures". The use of stone tools probably began about 500,000 years ago. Chellean man developed stone tools for about 200,000 years.


about 781,000 to 126,000 years ago (655.000 years): Middle Pleistocene or Ionian stage. See Mid Pleistocene Transition

"toolmakers graduated from the chopping tools to... a handaxe, made of quartzite or flint" (Coon, p.75).

During cold periods towards the end of the Middle Pleistocene, proliferation of scraper tools in the "cooler climatic zones occupied by hominins, facilitated the manufacture of simple clothing. (See below) (Gilligan 1.2010 and 3.2010)

about 750,000 years ago A date for Peking Man (BBC - Wikipedia: Peking Man - Zhoukoudian caves - "a tool-maker, killed and devoured his fellow beings and even knew the use of fire" ( Schenk, G. 1961, p.75)

Creationist criticism on Jesus, dinosaurs and more" includes criticism of the fire hypothesis and the cannibalism claim

MIS 17 - 712,000 years ago

# about 700,000 years ago

Nature 15.12.2005. The scraper on the cover was one of 32 worked flints found in "a clearly datable stratigraphic context" in the "Cromer Forest-bed Formation" at Pakefield, Suffolk, in Britain. Nature summary - BBC - The Guardian

MIS 16 - 676,000 years ago

MIS 15 - 621,000 years ago
# The Somme valley in northern France is developed on an Upper Cretaceous Chalk bedrock (continuous with that under the Thames) and has has terrace system in its middle part (about 70 km long). Between Amiens and Abbeville, ten stepped alluvial formations (nappes alluviales) have been described.
Map extract from Pleistocene fluvial terraces from northern France (Seine, Yonne, Somme): synthesis, and new results from interglacial deposits, by Antoine and others 2007.
# In the area of Amiens, the river terraces tiered system of Somme includes ten fossil alluvial the oldest (the highest) was set up there more than a million years. Numbered from the most recent to the oldest,

The upper terrace (Nappe de Grâce) weathered to red on the surface, may be attributed to the Older Mindel phase. These deposits are generally decalcified, with little wildlife, except at Abbeville.

Table from Le système de terrasses du Bassin de la Somme... by Pierre Antoine. Quaternaire Année 1993 Volume 4 Numéro 1 pp. 3-16. See also his thesis: Les terrasses quaternaires du bassin de la somme. ... Thèse, Université des Sciences et Techniques de Lille Flandres-Artois, 1989. (offline) - and Paléoenvironnements pléistocènes et peuplements paléolithiques dans le bassin de la Somme 2003.

in Abbeville (Carrière Carpentier), where mammal assemblages show that calcareous fluvial deposits have been deposited in an interglacial environment. On the basis of terrace stratigraphy, ESR-quartz dating, and biostratigraphic data, these fluvial deposits are allocated to MIS 15. Handaxes discovered at the base of the slope deposits, directly overlying the fluvial sequence, can be, as a first hypothesis, allocated to MIS 14. They are thus due to Homo heidelbergensis according to the age of the eponymous Mauer site in Germany. Consequently, in the state of knowledge, the "Rue du Manège" and Carrière Carpentier findings represent the oldest in situ evidence of the hominid occupation in the terrace record of Northern France. Dating the earliest human occupation of Western Europe: New evidence from the fluvial terrace system of the Somme basin (Northern France) by Pierre Antoine, Emmanuelle Stoetzel and others 2015.

about 600,000 years ago The Heidelberg jaw discovered in 1907.

about 600,000 years ago First human settlements at Stránská Rock, Brno, Moravia. Further settlements between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago. (Wikiedia) See Bohunician.

MIS 14 - 563,000 years ago

550,000 years ago Possible date for earliest Somme valley Acheulean remains (see below)


MIS 13 - 533,000 years ago

About 500,000 years ago 2003 estimate of earliest known Acheulean localities from South Asia. Persisted in peninsular India until about 125,000 years ago (possibly longer), before yielding to Middle Paleolithic flake-dominated assemblages. Parth R. Chauhan 2003

About 500,000 years ago Flints and a hominid tibia from Eartham Pit. Boxgrove, Sussex in Britain.

500,000 to 450,000 years ago Earliest human occupation in Somme Valley according to Antoine 2003 who says they already represented well developed Acheulean industries (about the start of MIS 12 according to modern excavations)


478,000 to 424,000 years ago Mindel glaciation - Anglian in UK - MIS 12 - "The Anglian Stage and Marine Oxygen Isotope Stage 12 started about 478,000 years ago and ended about 424,000 years ago." The most extreme ice age during the last 2 million years. In Britain the ice sheet reached Hornchurch in north-east London" (Wikipedia). Equated with the Elster glaciation of northern Germany, but dates given are very different. H.G. Wells calls the "second glacial age"

Quarry of Menchecourt at Abbeville (where Boucher de Perthes recovered antediluvian antiquities.

In the Somme terraces system in situ Acheulean settlements where dated to early MIS 12 at about 450,000 years ago in the 1990s, but new field discoveries allow to increase significantly the age of the oldest human occupation (Early Middle Pleistocene). The first one (Amiens "Rue du Manège" 2007) is dated at about 550,000 years ago using ESR and terrace stratigraphy. (Antoine, Stoetzel and others 2015).

The Abbevillian type site is on the 150-foot [45.72 meters] terrace of the River Somme. Tools found there are rough chipped bifacial handaxes made during the Elsterian Stage of the Pleistocene Ice Age, which covered central Europe between 478,000 and 424,000 years ago. (Wikipedia). See Mortillet

The Carrière de Menchecourt à Abbeville (Quarry of Menchecourt at Abbeville), Rue de Haut 80100 Abbeville, France, in the grounds of what was the Maison du Temple à Abbeville (House of the Templers at Abbeville) was made an historical monument on 1.12.1983. (See also)

See Chelles

Marcel-Jérôme Rigollot inspected the Abbeville finds and Menchecourt quarry in 1853, and made similar finds at Saint-Acheul in 1854. See Mortillet

See Jardin archéologique de Saint- Acheul - Archeological Travel - Le-Musee-Boucher-de-Perthes



424,000 to 374,000 years ago [Marine Isotope Stage 11] or 300,000 to 250,000 years ago: an interglacial period - Called , Mindel-Riss, Pre-Illinoian, Holstein and Hoxnian. Called second interglacial if dating backwards and by H.G. Wells.

Boyn Hill Thames Terrace deposits . Sand and gravel deposits underneath Swanscombe were laid down between 425,000 and 350,000BC by an ancient course of the Thames, (Swanscombe Heritage Park) - Swanscombe woman and Steinheim (man?)

Swanscombe Animals: lion, straight tusked elephant - rhinoceroses - giant deer - mice - bats - water voles - reptiles - fish - molluscs - A climate slightly warmer than the present day.

MIS 11 424,000 years ago - Hoxnian Stage in Britain.

"Differentiating the two interglacials MIS 11 and 9 is not always possible, as they were short and sometimes shared common climatic and environmental features. MIS 10 is also considered to be short and is not always preserved in the sedimentological record." (Aggsbach's Paleolithic Blog)

The Clactonian is the name given to an industry of European flint tool manufacture that dates to the early part of the Hoxnian interglacial.

a tufa deposit located at the top of a Middle Pleistocene fluvial sequence... correlation of the Saint-Acheul assemblage with malacofaunas recovered in other MIS 11 tufa deposits from the Somme and Seine valleys.... reappraisal of these French molluscan assemblages shows that they are similar to British malacofaunas of Hoxnian age. These new results strengthen the uniqueness and biostratigraphical value of the 'Lyrodiscus assemblage'. (N. Limondin-Lozouet and P. Antoine 2006, "A new Lyrodiscus (Mollusca, Gastropoda) assemblage from Saint-Acheul (Somme Valley): a reappraisal of MIS 11 malacofaunas from northern France". Boreas, 35: pp 622-633). See also - and


400,000 years ago Common ancestors of neanderthal humans and homo erectus began separation. Neanderthal developed in Europe and homo erectus in Africa.

The picture shows a racial depiction of the separation in a 1950s Children's Encyclopedia. The separation of "ape men" from "true men" is shown as equivalent to, or greater than, that separating humans from gorillas and chimpanzees. True men then divide into two distinct lines - black (negro - negroid - australoid) and white (european - mongoloid). This distinction is shown as equivalent to that between orang-utangs and gorillas.

#
A group of individuals that actually or potentially interbreed in nature is considered the same species, however different appearances. See early human gene exchange.

about 400,000 years ago scullcap discovered in Olduvai Gorge by Lewis Leakey in 1960. Coon classifies as homo erectus.

400,000? years ago First use of fire See trees.

about 400,000 years ago Swanscombe woman lived and died in Kent, Britain. Charcoal may indicate fire. Before the Boxgrove tibia, her remains were the earliest in what became Britain. See Britain an island. She lived during the MIS 11 interglacial, near the start of the Aurelian mammal age.

Argued to have a lower Clactonian strata below an Acheulean culture. One of the richest Pleistocene vertebrate localities in Britain, and by far the richest locality attributable to the Hoxnian Interglacial.

About 400,000 to 380,000 years ago Wooden spears made of spruce of from an ancient lakeshore hunting ground. Found in a coal mine in Shöningen, near Hanover, Germany in 1997.
#

374,000 years ago: MIS 10

about 370,000 years ago Bilzingsleben site in Germany. In the 1970s Dietrich Mania excavated "three round ground plans of dwellings with hearths by their entrances". (Antropark). He "found large stones arranged in a circular manner. He thought that it probably was a base for a dwelling. However, ring-center analysis showed that the site was an open air site. C. Gamble proposed that humans congregated at the site around the fire". Stone chopping tools of small size, mainly flint. Numerous bone tools include hoes, scrapers, point and gougers. Some hoes made of antler or ivory. Some wooden artefacts preserved. (Wikipedia)

Sewing The burin, a stone chisel that could shape bone, was rare before the Upper Paleolithic. Instead of bone awls, the Antropark website suggests, people made holes in leather using wooden awls made of dry yew and sewed with sinews. "Another possibility was to cut narrow stripes and to make small holes in those parts of leather one wanted to join using a minor flake. The holes were cleaned using a sharp piece of wood. The stripes were then pushed through the holes and parts of leather were sewn together in this way."

Antropark reconstructions. People said to be homo erectus - Acheulean tool industry.

350,000 to 250,000 years ago Steinheim skull

# In 1999, Ireland celebrated four extinct residents: the brown bear (not cave bear), the mammoth, the wolf and the Irish elk. The stamps and the animals are discussed on paleophilatelie.eu. Megaloceros, the Irish elk, represents the Quaternay in the 1854 Sydenham display

350,000 to 13,000 years ago Aurelian Mammal Age. (after Via Aurelia, north east of Rome). Start indicated by the Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus), the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus), and grey wolf (Canis lupus). Few "archaic carnivores survived the transition to the Aurelian ELMA, roughly around the beginning of MIS 9" about 333,000 years ago. (Steven Churchill 2014). MIS 9 - 337,000 years ago. Informally called the Purfleet Interglacial Wikipedia). See GeoEssex

300,000 years ago "Cave bears inhabited caves in Europe throughout the Pleistocene, from about 300,000 to 15,000 BC, disappearing by the end of the last ice age. Their population seems to have diminished upon the arrival of Cro-magnon in Europe" "Most cave bears seem to have died off well before the Weichselian glaciation". (Cave Bears) - See cave Chauvet and Édouard Lartet's age of

Middle Paleolithic 300,000 to 30,000 years ago

300,000 years ago In the mont Châlat area of Chelles a settlement of people whose flint tools were discovered in 1874. Near Lauchonia sylva (forest) and the river Marne. See flint biface in Musée départemental de Préhistoire d'île-de-France, Nemours, from the collection of local prehistorian Edmond Edmee Doigneau (23.9.1825-4.5.1891). See Mortillet

300,000 to 125,000 years ago Rhodesian man - See 1921 and 1950s reconstruction and Heidelberg.


250,000 to 120,000 years ago Riss glaciation

Penultimate Ice Age. H.G. Wells calls the "third glacial age"

Early blade tools in Europe date from the penultimate ice age

The Riss is paralleled by MIS 6, 8 and 10, which would therefore place it about 350,000 and 120,000 years ago (Wikipedia)

MIS 8: Somme level three: Argoeuves. 300,000 to 250,000 years ago lavalloisian


250,000 to 200,000 years ago First "true" Neanderthals (Whatever that means)

# "Most of the Mousterian as well as the upper Paleolithic cultures seem to have coincided with one of the Glacial episodes when man dwelt chiefly in caves" (Wills 1929 p.248). "The cave bears were old tenants with long existing rights. But the Mousterian hunters had... the courage of despair. They must be housed or perish" (Rushton Hall 1928/1930 p.80)

220,000 to 40,000 years ago Mousterian on Antroparkbaby. Mode three tools. Based on Molodova - Ukraine. Tool culture named after Le Moustier. Associated primarily with Homo neanderthalensis. Wikipedia dates Mousterian from 160,000 years ago - See Mortillet classification

# Mode three tools: Flake tools struck from prepared cores, with an overlapping sequence of flake removal (sometimes referred to as façonnage) system - including the Levallois technology, See Archaic Human Culture by Dennis O'Neil and Making Flint Tools by Don Hitchcock.

The picture, from Noël-Hume (1953), shows a core culture axe at the top and then a flake point. Technology moved its emphasis from fashioning cores to fashioning flakes.

sapiens: the wise, discerning, thinking

200,000 years ago "It is most likely that modern Homo sapiens born 200,000 thousand years ago, somewhere in Eastern (Central) Africa" (Dates in the history of biology) (I have assumed it means 200,000)

The first anatomically modern human fossils date back 195,000 years. Geneticists argue that almost all living men gained their Y chromosome from a common male ancestor living between 140,000 and 60,000 years ago. (New Scientist)

"Since the earliest appearance of modern humans more than 150,000 years ago during the Pleistocene (Ice Age), people had always relied on hunting herds of wild animals, fishing, and gathering wild plants to feed themselves... All human groups during the Paleolithic ("Old Stone") period during the Ice Age were nomadic hunters and gatherers." (Gil Stein)

190,000 to 50,000 years ago Range of stone tools discovered alongside homo floresiensis the dragon island Flores in Indonesia. (Wikipedia)

From about 180,000 to about 60,000 years ago: no evidence of human occupation in Britain, Wikipedia: Prehistoric Britain

160,000 years ago


Between 130,000 and 114,000 years ago, the ice retreated during the Eemian interglacial - and then advanced again to create the glacial that most people know as "the ice age". (New Scientist 24.5.2010).     Riss- Würm. Corresponds to Marine Isotope Stage 5e. Called first interglacial if dating backwards, but H.G. Wells calls the "third interglacial period" The Taplow Terrace dates to the rise of the sea in this interglacial.
# At the peak, Northern Hemisphere winters were generally warmer and wetter than now. The hippopotamus was distributed as far north as the rivers Rhine and Thames. (Wikipedia) - and further north:

Bones from a hippopotamus, and some from rhinoceros and elephant, were dug up in Derby in 1895. They are now in the Derybshire Museum's new nature gallery

121,000 years ago ± 4000 years: uranium-thorium dating of Calcite deposits overlying the bone-bearing sediments in the Kirkdale Cave.

MIS 5: 130,000 to 71,000 years ago.
MIS 5e - 123,000 years ago. (Eemian or Ipswichian)
MIS 5d - 109,000 years ago.
MIS 5c - 96,000 years ago.
MIS 5b - 87,000 years ago.
MIS 5a - 82,000 years ago.

According to Unwritten History, Dawn man developed into river drift man. River drift man began in the warmer climates that supported rhinoceros, hippopotamus and straight tusked elephants in Britain. In the succeeding cold period, river drift man developed into cave man

A large number of sites in Britain are attributed to Marine Isotope Stage 5e, mainly on the basis of hippopotumus remains. None show signs of humans. See Nick Ashton

In Britain Elephas (Palaeoloxodon) antiquus is often found in association with remains of hippopotamus in early Last Interglacial deposits (OIS substage 5e), about 125,000 years old. (Natural History Museum)

Harry William Whanslaw's picture (1934) shows "river-drift men" hunting the "straight-tusked elephant of prehistoric time". A specimen from Upnor, near Chatham, Kent, was mounted at the Bitish Museum of Natural History in 1926.

#

about 126,000 to 11,700 years ago Late Pleistocene or Tarantian geological stage. Strata start with sediments laid down at the start of the Eemian interglacial and include the subsequent ice age. Archaeological remains include scrapers, blades, awls and adornment. Industries with blades and awls accompany humans into colder zones. Signs of modern human behaviour. (Gilligan 3.2010)


125,000 years ago

Modern humans, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa up to 200,000 years ago and reached the Near East around 125,000 years ago.
#
An attempt to depict migrations from Madison Coonan's website
From the Near East, these populations spread east to South Asia by 50,000 years ago, and on to Australia by 40,000 years ago, when for the first time H. sapiens reached territory never reached by H. erectus.
H. sapiens reached Europe around 40,000 years ago, eventually replacing the Neanderthal population. East Asia was reached by 30,000 years ago. (Wikipedia)

110,000 to 12,000 years ago - The last glacial period - Weichselian glaciation. Frequently just called the Ice Age. H.G. Wells calls the "fourth and last glacial period"
last 100,000 years of the Pleistocene
See maximum.

100,000 years ago Noam Chomsky's date for the chance mutation that he considers made the sudden appearance of language possible.

100,000 years ago Blombos Cave, South Africa, tools for making ochre paint. (BBC) - Wikipedia Blombos Cave

100,000 to 90,000 years ago With the last Ice Age, there developed the more-or-less continuous use of clothing. This was partly because cold promoted the replacement of simple clothing (draped loosely over the body) by complex clothing (shaped to fit body and limbs). This acquired psychosocial functions that have helped to maintain its continuing use up to the present. (Gilligan 1.2010 and 3.2010)

80,000 years ago "Climate Change May Have Spurred Early Human Migration"

70,000 years ago A possible date for the "Python Cave" evidence of ritual in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana that some suggest is the first evidence of religion. (National Geographic report). Bone tools in Blombos Cave, South Africa, indicate "modern" behaviour in humans. (National Geographic report)

# Modern humans began living above the tropics more than 60,000 years ago.
Jablonski 2012 relates this, and later movement, to survival value from light skin.

#LaChapelle1908 about 60,000 years ago The old man of La Chapelle buried. the first relatively complete Neanderthal skeleton unearthed in France.

The picture is a Musée de l'Homme de Neandertal reconstruction of the grave. The bones were visually reassembled as a skeleton, which gave the basis for an artist's impression.


50,000 to 10,000 years ago Upper Paleolithic (Wikipedia)

"Blades became the favored technology... although they are occasionally found in earlier periods" (Wikipedia blade). Stone burins (French for engraving tools) or chisels were developed for carving ivory, bone and antler into spears, harpoons, throwers, and portable art like figurines. See Gravettian pictures

See Epipaleolithic and Mesolithic

Around 50,000BC years ago, Carleton S Coon "places the emergence of Homo sapiens ... equipped with weapons and clothes ... spread across the earth, accompanied by his new ally, the dog. (blurb). See phase 2. blade - burin - harpoon head - needle - fur garment - spear-thrower - bow .   See polished stone axe


There seems to be more ideology than science in the distinction between "homo sapiens" and "homo neanderthalensis". [See common ancestor and age of true Neanderthal and La Chapelle and exit]

about 48,000 years ago Bohunician "artifact assemblages". Named after Brno. Arguably first presence of Homo sapiens in Europe.

about 45,000 years ago Age of fossilised skull of Homo neanderthalensis discovered at Le Moustier, France, in 1908. The site consists of two rock shelters. - Wikipedia. It has given its name to the Mousterian tool culture.

about 45,000 to 40,000 years ago: 5,000 years of possible Neanderthal and "modern" human co-existence. See Nature 21.8.2014

45,000 to 43,000 years ago "Modern humans' ancestors first reached Europe". Dated remains in Italy and Britain. "Into this environment came the dog". Wikipedia article on dog. Dog like skull 36,000 years ago, remains near humans 17,000 to 16,000 years ago. Wolf or dog drawing 19,000 years ago . Also later estimates.

The European Music Archaeology Project (EMAP) "travelled in time" from about 40,000 B.C. to the great classical civilisations. Rupert Till's "Soundgate app" modelled sound and sight of the Altamira cave - Stonehenge and the Paphos Theatre in Cyprus. See Songs of the Caves - initial report

about 40,000 years ago Age of Feldhofer 1 or Neanderthal 1 discovered in the Neandertal valley in Germany in August 1856 (See 1858). Wikipedia: Neanderthal 1

# Modern humans began living above 50 degrees north about 40,000 years ago.
Jablonski 2012

Prehistoric imagination, art and craft

# Maxime Aubert of Griffith University, Australia, looks at Indonesian Cave Art on the island of Sulawesi. He has dated art in this group to 40,000 years ago leading to it being described as the world's oldest cave art - See Matthew MacEgan - Nature - National Geographic - BBC dating the region -

Ice Age art arrival of the modern mind (2013 exhibition at the British Museum) "Ice Age art was created between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago and many of the pieces are made of mammoth ivory and reindeer antler

Édouard Piette (1827-1906) used the term glyptic for the period of carved figures. In the eburnien (ivory) period he decided (from analysis of carved figures) that two races existed: a hairy and a hairless race or a fat (steatopygous) race and a not fat (asteatogenous) race. The fat race became associated with the idea of people of African appearance (but hairy) living in Europe, and producing fat Venuses, who were dominated by another race - less hairy and thinner, Cro-Magnons.

Between 38,000 and 29,000 years ago Aurignacian
Named after the
cave of Aurignac

Mode four tools: "Punch struck blades with steep retouch" (Clark). A core stone is prepared from which blades are struck and then retouched into various specialized forms such as scrapers, burins, backed blades and points. See pictures

about 40,000 years ago Löwenmensch figurine - 1939: "Im Hohlensteinmassiv wurde die Figur des Löwenmenschen gefunden. Die Höhle ist im hinteren Teil verschlossen". (Art News 2013

The photograph is from the website of fahrrad-tour.de/ (Cycle tours Germany). It shows The figure of the lion human, an ivory carving from the tusk of a mammoth displayed in the Museum of Ulm. The same page shows caves where figures have been discovered. - Cycle tour guide archive)

37,000 to 29,000 years ago Radiocarbon dating of cave bear remains from cave Chauvet. - About 36,000 years ago Cave paintings of the cave Chauvet. (Wikipedia). Include cave bears. (picture) - See New Scientist 2011

#

40,000 to 35,000 years ago Venus of Hohle Fels figurine. Discovered in 2008 in the Hohle Fels cave in Germany. The figurine is tiny (6 centimetres). A nearby discovery was a 20 centimetre long vulture's bone flute with four holes and a V- shaped mouthpiece. See Divje Bab eflute

36,000 years ago Goyet Cave, Samson River Valley, Belgium Dog-like skull

36,000 years ago A date for the Man of Spy - Homme de Spy - Mens van Spy. Discovered 1886. See Espace de l'Homme de Spy

About 35,000 years ago, Carleton S Coon begins his "second phase of history" "the skilled hunter and healer", when "man covers the face of the earth". Ending "about 7000BC with the invention of agricuture". See 50,000BC and phase 3


# "thirty or thirty-five thousand years ago as the climate grew warmer" a "more intelligent" race "ousted the Neanderthalers from their caves ... they hunted the same food; they probably made war upon their grisly predecessors and killed them off" (H.G. Wells 1922. Drawing inspiration from Rutot and Mascré).

Rutot called the new race Paleolithic and argued that it enslaved the Neandethals.

The end of the Mousterian has now been pushed back to about 40,000 years ago. See co-existence.

35,000 to 11,500 years ago mammoths in prehistoric art

around 35,000 years ago The development of the needle. See sewing - 22,000 years ago - clothing remains - manufacture - needle lost - needlework 1840 - sewing machine 1917 -

About 35,000 years ago First human occupation of the Grotte d'Aurignac (Cave of Aurignac). Remains also show occupation by wild animals: 10 herbivores include horse (Equus caballus), aurochs (Bos primigenius/Bison europceus), rhinoceros (Rhinoceros tichorhinus), mammoth, stag (Cervus elaphus), elk (Megaceros hibernicus), roebuck (Cervus capreolus), reindeer (Cervus/Rangifer tarandus), and pig (Sus scrofa). Carnivores included cave-bear (Ursus spelceus), brown bear (Ursus arctos?), badger (Meles taxus), polecat (Putorius vulgaris), cave hyaena (crocuta spelae), cave- lion (Felis spelcea), wild cat (Felis catus ferus), wolf (Canis lupus), and fox (Canis vulpis). The oldest layer of the cave is later than the Acheulean (1,700,000 to 300,000 years ago), but before the Solutrean (approximately 22,000 to 17,000 before present), thus defining a new prehistoric culture, the Aurignacian (approximately 39,000 to 28,000 before present), the first culture of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe.

34,000 to 24,000 years ago "With the exception of dwarfed island descendants in the Mediterranean, the expansion of cold grasslands and the contraction of forests drove Palaeoloxodon to extinction" in Europe. (National Geographic - Wikipedia)

About 30,000 years ago, modern homo sapiens entirely replaced earlier man-like forms. Weapons and tools of flint and bone survive along with female carved stone figures with exaggerated sexual features, suggesting fertility symbols and magical ceremonies.

Mentone caves. "Grimaldi Man" "The three best-known skeletons (4,5,6) may have been burials from an early Upper Paleolithic (Aurignacian or Gravettian) level into a sterile layer that may represent an interstadial period. This last level immediately succeeds the latest Mousterian horizon in the cave." (source)

A 1934 Encyclopedia contrasts the "Grimalid Race" remains, which are of "a Negroid type" with "Cro-magnon remains" at a higher level in the Mentone caves.

Growth of the ice sheets to their maximum positions occurred between 33,000 and 26,500 years ago. (Peter Clark and others Science 7.8.2009). MIS 2: 29,000 years ago (near Last Glacial Maximum)

30,000 years ago Gravettian on Antroparkbaby, which calls it "the biggest and the longest continued civilisation of the modern man". Based on Pavlovian culture. Probably Dolni Vestonice

# 29,000 to 22,000 years ago: Gravettian toolmaking culture Named after La Gravette in the Dordogne region of France. (Don's maps). Toolmaking culture most closely associated with Venus figurines.

Above: Four views of the same blade (lame) in the Muséum de Toulouse. The blade is 5.6 centimeters (2.2. inches) long. It was found in a Gravettian strata at Brassempouy

Right: Four views of one burin, 5.9 centmeters (2.33 inches) long. (Wikipedia)

#

29,000 to 25,000 years ago. Pavlovian culture [a variant of the Gravettian] existed in the region of Moravia, northern Austria and southern Poland. See Antropark - archive

28,000 years ago age of Cro-Magnon cave people: Louis Lartet Lartet discovered the first five skeletons in the Abri de Cro-Magnon in March 1868. "These Cro-magnon humans were soon identified as a new prehistoric human race distinct from the Neanderthal fossils discovered in Germany in 1856". (source). A 1934 Encyclopedia focuses on the Mentone caves (Italy) rather than France, contrasting Cromagnon with Grimaldi man:
"It ws not until the opening-up of the Mentone caves that our direct ancestors were found... early representatives of Homo sapiens... named the Cro-magnon Race".
and saying "These men men were the pre-historic artists and mystics", speaking the possibilities of "a great beyond" in the "cults of nutrition, death and motherhood" revealed by cave drawings.

A 1952 Pictorial Encyclopedia mentions cave painting and tools and says:
# Peking - Piltdown - Neanderthal - Cromagnon. "... only homo sapiens, able to adapt... survived"

Nearly all ice sheets were at their Last Glacial Maximum positions from 26,500 to 20,000 to 19,000 years ago

26,000 years ago

The mammoth hunter of Dolni Vestonice

# Head carved from mammoth ivory showing a person with an asymmetrical face, found in Dolni Vestonice, Southern Moravia. It is a face:

"finely strung, lively, sympathetic and also suffering, a being which stood facing the world devout, pure and humble. This picture...has all the characteristics of human elevation. Everything points to the Ice Age hunter having depicted himself". ( Schenk, G. 1961 , p.127)

First thought to depict a man, it is now known as Venus XV and the consensus seems to be that it depicts the woman who made the ceramic figures from Dolni Vestonice]

about 25,000 years ago La Dame à la capuche (lady in a hood) carved in ivory. Discovered in 1894 in La grotte du Pape at Brassempouy in France by Édouard Piette. Also known as the Venus of Brassempouy. Acquisition number MAN 47 019. Maximum dimension 3.6 centimetres (1.4 inches).

See Randall White (2006) "The Women of Brassempouy" - Karen Jennett (2008) "Female Figurines of the Upper Paleolithic" - "The Venus Cult" (based on The Urantia Book)

#

# about 25,000 years ago Venus of Laussel discovered in 1911 in the Grand Abri de Laussel, Dordogne, France

A photograph of the original, which is in the Musée d'Aquitaine, Bordeaux, and clay reconstruction of 1914.

about 24,000 years ago European "cave bear" (Ursus spelaeus) became extinct.

Wikipedia on Pleistocene extinctions: - Across Eurasia, the straight-tusked elephant became extinct between 100,000-50,000 years ago. The hippopotamus, interglacial rhinoceros (Stephanorhinus), cave bear (Ursus spelaeus), and heavy-bodied Asian antelope (Spirocerus) died out between 50,000- 16,000 years ago. The spotted hyena, woolly rhinoceros and mammoths died out between 16,000- 11,500 years ago. The musk ox died out later, as did the giant deer (Megaloceros) with the last pocket having survived until about 7,700 years ago in western Siberia. A pocket of mammoths survived on Wrangel Island until 4,500 years ago. - See Édouard Lartet

about 22,300 years ago Kostenki I (Polyakov site) prehistoric settlement in the watershed of the river Don in central Russia. Excavation begun by I. S. Polyakov in 1879. See "Palaeolithic Art from the Danube to Lake Baikal" by Väino Poikalainen in Folklore volume 18 2001 and Kostenki Paleolithic site on the Don River

Flint points from Kostenki-I have use-wear traces of hide-working at their tips indicating they were used as awls. (Gilligan 3.2010)

22,000 to 17,000 years ago: Solutrean

a mammoth and racing animal [reindeer] time (eburnien and tarandien) ... a horse, mammoth and racing animal time (liquidien, eburnien and tarandien) ... a Solutrien and Magdalenian time ... or a mild weather open sky and cold cave living time... Von H. Behlen in Haiger. (1907?) "Der diluviale (paläolithische) Mensch in Europa". [The diluvial (Paleolithic) humans in Europe]. (Internet Library). Ebur: Latin ivory. Reindeer in Latin: rene, onis, or tarendus

Eyed needles from the Solutrean (dating to MIS 2) at Grotte de Jouclas. France (Gilligan 3.2010). Marine Isotope 2 began 29,000 years ago near the Last Glacial Maximum. (Wikipedia)

22,000 years ago

# The Venus of Willendorf was found in Austria in 1908. It is thought to be a carving of a woman, without facial features, fat, with pendulous breasts and a huge, perhaps pregnant, belly. Many figures with similar characteristics have been found from Russia to France

Interpretations of Stone Age Art

Wikipedia - Christopher Witcombe


20,000 to 19,000 years ago start of the Northern Hemisphere deglaciation. (Source of an abrupt rise in sea level)

20,000 years ago

20,000 years ago to about 10,500 years ago Epipaleolithic or Levant Mesolithic. The Levant is the eastern end of the Mediterranean: modern Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. See The Mesolithic (EpiPaleolithic) of the Levant The "most diagnostic archaeological feature" of the mesolithic "was a chipped stone industry characterised by microlithic tools". [Mode five tools]. See microlith technology. Levant Mesolithic sites were first discovered in Palestine. The earliest group of these sites was called Kebaran. ( (Wikipedia)). The second phase was called Natufian.

See European Mesolithic for pictures of tools including a microlith.

Mode five tools: Retouched microliths and other retouched components of composite tools - Middle Stone Age toolkits included points, which could be hafted on to shafts to make spears; stone awls, which could have been used to perforate hides; and scrapers that were useful in preparing hide, wood, and other materials. (Smithsonian) - But see Bilzingsleben and Late Pleistocene - Kostenki one

19,400 years ago Ohalo village of six circular brushwood huts on the shore of the sea of Galilee in Palestine. Wikipedia - Ohalo to   Jericho

19,000 years ago wolf-like canid drawing, Font-de-Gaume, France.

By radiocarbon analysis charcoal and bone proteins associated with pottery fragments in strata at Yuchanyan Cave, Hunan Province, China, it has been possible to "securely date" the pottery to "18,300 to 17,500" years ago. The cave was occupied from around 18,000 to 14,000 years ago. (Elisabetta Boaretto and others, 1.6.2009). Pottery "may be the oldest known to science". (BBC News 1.6.2009). "The Yuchanyan pot is oldest known clay vessel". History of "firing clay and making figurines" is "twice as long as vessel making". See ceramic objects from Dolni Vestonice. Anthropology.net. See clay and settlements and Robenhausian.

18,000 years ago

17,000 years ago is 15,000 BC

17,000 to 12,000 years ago Darren Brewer's events in science and history begins between 15,000 and 10,000 BC with the world warming up from the ice age and people painting in caves. This corresponds with the five thousand year Âge du renne (age of the reindeer). Name given to the final phase of the European Upper Paleolithic by Édouard Lartet in 1861. It was later renamed the Magdalenian. The Magdalenian on Antroparkbaby is based on the cave of Altamira which was occupied (used?) from 22,000 to 13,000 years before the present. (Museo de Altamira) - See settlements

Stone burin (chisel) characteristic of the Upper Paleolithic (especially Magdalenian) in the Old World and of some Early Lithic and Mesolithic cultures of the New World. Most stratified finds of spear-throwers (Europe) come from the Magdalenian.

# Fragment of engraved reindeer metatarsal decorated on one surface with two reindeer, one of which is now incomplete. Length: 7.1 centimetres. Width: 3.3 centimetres. Thickness: 2 centimetres. Stored in the British Museum where the acquisition notes say "exacavated by both Christy and Lartet in 1863".

about 17,000 years ago (15,000BC) Cave paintings at Lascaux, near Montignac, south west France. Charging bulls. Discovered by three teenagers searching their lost dog in 1940. Opened to the public in 1948. Closed 1963. Reproduction paintings now on view in the International Centre of Parietal Art at Montignac.

16,945 years ago Eliseevich-I site, Bryansk Region, Russian Plain, Russia: "Ice-age dogs"

16,000 years ago

about 15,000 years ago (13,000BC) Cave art Trois Frères, Ariège, France. (French Wikipedia). Dieu cornu (horned god) or Sorcier (sorcerer) or chaman (shaman). In animal skins and stag antlers. Upper wall above the entrance to the 20,000-25,000 year-old grand gallery. #
# Petit Sorcier a l'Arc Musical (Little sorcerer with musical bow), amongst animals in 285 cm wide panel on right hand wall of Sanctuary.
The two human figures in Trois Frères, are wearing animal skins as a form of
clothing.
# In this picture, the little sorcerer is rotated from vertical to horizontal to show it as a person disguised in animal skins stalking prey.

See discussion by Simona Petru, Documenta Praehistorica 39 (2012), "Man, animal or both - Problems in the interpretation of early symbolic behaviour"

13,500 to 11,100BC Hamburg culture a Late Upper Paleolithic culture of reindeer hunters in northwestern Europe. Finds from this culture in Scandinavia have been excavated since the early 1980s.

MIS 1 - 14,000 years ago: end of the Younger Dryas marks the start of the Holocene, continuing to the present.

14,000 to 15,000 years ago start of the deglaciation of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. (Source of an abrupt rise in sea level)

about 14,500 years ago (12,500BC) to 11,500 years ago (9,500BC) Natufian culture in the Levant sedentary hunter-gatherers. - Wikipedia

about 12,000 to 9,000BC Azilien cultural period. Mortillet's Tourassien.

about 12,000 to 8,000 years ago - 10,000 to 6,000BC
Flood geology locates Noah's flood.
Fossil evidence: On "the highest mountains" "shells, skeletons of fish and sea monsters" have been found, showing the sea once covered them. Animals are found "far from their native areas": Elephants in England. Crocodiles in Germany. (Edwin Rice 1893). Coder and Howe's The Bible, Science and Creation (1966, page 63) says "flood geology" dates creation to about 10,000 years ago "and relates most of the geological strata and fossil beds to the Flood"
The flood has been located (about 1870) between the old and new stone ages. The New Bible Dictionary (Douglas 1962, page 429) relates much "evidence of a serious flood" to the Ice Age and suggests a world wide flood might have been caused by "release of water" at the end of that about "10,000BC"

12,000 years ago (12,000BP) is 10,000 BC

About 10,000BC End of last glacial period (ice-age), beginning of Holocene (recent), or present period with ice at the north and south and on mountains. [About 11,700 years ago End of the Pleistocene, start of the Holocene]. Holocene defined by boundary between two ice layers in a core taken from Greenland and now stored in Denmark.

On one system, interglacials are numbered backwards from the Holocene (1) and glacials also backwards.

Spindle whorls. Thermal basis for greater use of woven fabrics in post- glacial climates. Production of fibres for textiles a prominent feature of early agriculture. (Gilligan 3.2010)

David Lee's science timeline begins about 10,000 BC, when wolves were probably domesticated. [Darren Brewer "dog domesticated" about 12,000 BC

12,600 years ago (10,600 BC) to 10,300 years ago (8,300BC) Period when the Baltic was a large freshwater, inland, lake. The Baltic Ice Lake. (See evolution of Baltic) "Finds of bone implements (axes, harpoons, fishing tackle), as well as of very primitive flint implements... These ... bone age people evidently lived by hunting and fishing". (Hallendorff and Schuck p.2) See Hamburg culture - bone - Baltic sea - 7000BC Middle stone age - Ertebølle culture - Meilgård midden - Megalit graves - Alvastra - single graves - bronze - iron

"Until recently, the last woolly mammoths were generally assumed to have vanished from Europe and southern Siberia about 12,000 years ago", (Wikipedia)

Jodey Bateman's (2002) Jericho history begins with Natufian camp fires around 11,000BC. Around 11,000 to 10,000BC: Levant warm spell in which Natufians occupied much of the Middle East. "At places like Jericho they left the charcoal of their campfires and the distinctive tools of stone and animal bone that they used". They deserted the Jericho site during "a brief cold spell" from about 10,000BC to 9,800BC. (Bateman 2002)

10,200BC Neolithic (new stone age) in some parts of the Middle East (See Wikipedia) - Europe.

Neolithic barbarianism (Gordon Childe)

10,000BC - 12,000 years ago

# Tell es-Sultan:

In Arabic, a tell is a tall hill.

In Midle East Archaeology, a tell is a mound formed by the accumulated remains of ancient settlements.

Jericho: Earliest permanent settlement at Tell es- Sultan
(Wikipedia) dated between 10,000 and 9.000 BC. "The earliest remains date back to the Natufian period, 10th-8th millennia BC" (UNESCO) - See Ohalo to Jericho - Bateman - town - wall - Cipola - second settlement - 5500BC - bronze age Jericho - Jericho and Ai destroyed - Canaanites - end of bronze age town - Joshua - Hiel - Judea - end - Herod's Jericho

"The round pit-houses in Natufian settlements at Jericho and Abu Hureyra are some of the world's earliest known villages." (Gil Stein)

10,000 to 5,000BC: Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age in Europe. See Levant - (Wikipedia)

# Mesolithic tools from Britain. [Mode five].

from Noël-Hume (1953)

Core axe known as a Thames pick. Small blade known as "microlith" used collectively mounted on wood in spears, and harpoons and a borer.

"The oldest clothing remains in the world in the Middle East dated to around 9,500 years ago" . But we have evidence of the kinds of tools required to make fitted garments - primitive hide-scraping and cutting devices and needles. Until the last cold period, 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals did not bother with specialised cutting and sewing technologies." Ian Gilligan. The Australian National University, See ochre - sewing - 50,000BC - Trois Frères art - Spanish art

9,000BC - 11,000 years ago

Agricultural revolution - "In the archaeological record barbarism began less than ten thousand years ago with the Neolithic Age of archaeologists" Gordon Childe 1950

8,500BC? "The town of Jericho", covering about 6 acres, preceded the wall by about 500 years". It contained round mud-brick houses, without street planning. (Wikipedia)

8,300 to 7,500 BC Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) - cultivation of wheat and barley.

As the the Baltic ceased to be a lake the "climate became less severe and the vegetation less stunted". From this time onwards the "shores of southern Scandinavia yield numerous traces of early man. In particular, the 'kitchen-middens'" "The implements now in use were generally made of flint". (Hallendorff and Schuck p.2)

Eighth millennium BC

8,000BC - 10,000 years ago

Rock Art of the Mediterranean Basin on the Iberian Peninsula (Wikipedia). "According to UNESCO, the oldest art ... is from 8000BC, and the most recent examples from around 3500BC"

# "The bow seems to have been invented near the transition from the Upper Paleolithic to the Mesolithic, roughly 10,000 years ago". (Wikipedia). See Valltorta

From 10,000 to 6500BC Valencian cave art. Scene of hunting of deer with bows and arrows. Wall painting in Cueva de los Caballos in the Valley of Valltorta, Castell in Eastern Spain

Other pictures from this area/period show people wearing clothes.

About 8,500BC Initial domestication of taurine cattle from local wild ox (aurochs) in the Near East. About "80 female aurochs were initially domesticated". An initial breeding phase lasted some 1.5 millennia in an area between the Levant, central Anatolia and western Iran. Domestic cattle started to appear in western Anatolia and southeastern Europe by 6,800BC, in southern Italy by 6,500BC and Central Europe by 6,000BC. (Ruth Bollongino and others 1.9.2012) - See also Mario Melletti: First cattle with short horns appeared in Mesopotamia about 3000BC and was the most common form in Europe from about 1000BC.

"By the 8th millennium BC, Jericho became a big fortified town surrounded by a stone wall supported by a massive round tower. These are the earliest urban fortifications known in the world, later several times replaced" (UNESCO)

About 8,000BC Star Carr in north Yorkshire, England. Post- holes of a round-house structure. About 7,600BC Howick house, Northumberland, England. Similar to Star Carr.

7,500 to 5,700 BC Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia. A city of mudbrick houses crammed together without streets between. Most entered through holes in their roofs. Wikipedia - Cast lead beads dating from about 6,500 BC. Earliest metal smelted. See Moses metal list. Galena is one of the easiest ores to smelt. It can simply be placed in a fire and then lead can be recovered from under the ashes when the fire goes out. Archaeologists have found evidence that lead was smelted as early as 6,500 BC in what is now Turkey. Small amounts of silver were refined from lead by the Romans about 2000 years ago. See lead UK - Rutland 1470 - Rutland 1810 - Pb 1814 - Rutland 1844 - Crystal Palace 1854 - Thomas Legge - lead poisoning 1904 - lead poisoning 1912 - lead paint ban 1921 - lead paint 1930-1955 - lead in hair 1977 - lead in gardens - lead paint ban 1992

7,500 to 6,000 BC Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) - domestication of sheep and goats, cattle and pigs. about 6,800BC Second settlement at Jericho: rectilinear (straight-sided) mudbricks buildings on stone foundations. "Square adobe houses". At Jericho from shortly after 7,500BC to shortly before 7,000BC. Wall paintings show dances wearing masks. Seashells (traded?) carved for necklaces and to make eyes in the skulls of their dead. "Left Tell es Sultan shortly before 7,000 BC and the mound which had been building up for almost 1,000 years was deserted for 1,500 years" (Bateman 2002).

Seventh millennium BC

About 9,000BP (7,000BC) insolation peak of Holocene. Separated by some 115,000 years from the Eemian insolation peak at 125,000BP. Suggests insolation maxima at about 240,000BP and 355,000BP.

7,000BC Indus Valley: Mehrgarh precursor to the Indus Valley Civilization.

Remains of an ancient farming village at Jericho have been carbon-dated to around 7,000 BC. The same excavations uncovered materials pre-dating agriculture which have been carbon-dated 800 years earlier (Carlo Cipola 1962, pp 18-19)

7,000BC The climate in Scandinavia was warming as it moved from the Boreal to the Atlantic period. Reindeer and their hunters had migrated to northern Scandinavia, and forests had established. Wikipedia Nordic Stone Age (Mesolithic)

Between 6,430 and 6,120BC Calibrated carbon dating of an underwater oak tree bole at the foot of the underwater cliff at Bouldnor in the Isle of Wight. Mesolithic remains recovered from this underwater site include string (6,220-5,980BC), worked wood (6,240-6000BC), flint tools and flakes, and burnt (cooked?) hazel nuts. There is an imaginative re-construction of this as a "Mesolithic Village" at CosmOnline.

Sixth millennium BC

About 6,000BC Rising sea level cuts Britain off from Europe. About 5,000BC Rising sea level submerges Bouldnor Cliff

By 6,000BC, Carleton S Coon 's "third phase of history" had begun. This included "eight distinct ages comparable to the Paleolithic and Mesolithic. These were the Neolithic, Bronze, Iron, Gunpowder, Coke, Oil, Hydroelectric and First Atomic ages."

About 6,000 to 4,000BC Neolithic or New Stone Age in Europe. [See Middle East] Marked by the adoption of agriculture, the development of pottery, polished stone tools and larger, more complex settlements. "European Neolithization ~6000-4000 BC represents a pivotal change in human history when farming spread and the mobile style of life of the hunter-foragers was superseded by the agrarian culture". (Tegel)

6,000BC or earlier: beans, lentils, peas, and chickpeas believed to have become part of the eastern Mediterranean diet.

about 5500 to 45005BC Linearbandkeramik flourished in Europe. (Wikipedia). "Longhouses, pottery and stone tools". The longhouses have left "only ground-plans in the soil". (Tegel)

about 5400BC The Sumerian settlement of Eridu (Eridug) founded on a site that was then close to the Persian Gulf near the mouth of the Euphrates River. It appears to be the earliest settlement in the region. The Sumerian King List begins by saying that "After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridug. In Eridug, Alulim became king; he ruled for 28800 years." Sumerian was the first language to be written. No related languages are now known. It died out as a spoken language about 2000BC

Enki, the god of wisdom, was the patron god of Eridu. Sumerians believed that he created civilisation by bringing humanity's skills together in a cohesive world order. Sumerian language, writing and culture continued after their passing, in Mesopotamia, under the Akkadians and Assyrians. Assyrians belied that Enki gave his people metal working skills. (Haidar, D. 2011). See also Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Godesses

5500BC Pit-house dwellers at Jericho made pottery storage jars for grain. A new people came who built houses of stone and adobe. The pithouse people (unusual for Jericho or the Middle East) lived peacefully in the same village with the house builders. Gradually everyone in the community came to live in houses. The site was deserted again in 4000BC approximately. (Bateman 2002)

about 5300BC to 3950BC Ertebølle culture of southern Scandinavia. The last hunter-gatherer culture of the Stone Age? Preceded by Kongemose culture and followed by Funnelbeaker culture. (Wikipedia). The shell bank at Meilgaard was discovered in 1850.

5206 to 5098BC Date given to oak timbers in excavation near Leipzig, Germany, by Willy Tegel and Dietrich Hakelberg. See "Early Neolithic Water Wells Reveal the World's Oldest Wood Architecture"

From prehistoric to historic times: Time and space Narrative

Fifth millennium BC

5000BC to 4000BC Millennium between pre-history and (recorded) history. History is story told by human beings about human beings, and our first written records come from Sumerian (southern Mesopotamia) and Egyptian cultures in the fourth millennium 19th century historians were inclined to start written history much later, at the end of the second millenium BC.

antiquity is the (long) period before the middle ages. Sometimes classical antiquity is used for the period of ancient Greece and Rome. Christian antiquity refers to the early centuries of the Christian church.

about 5000BC In Ensisheim, France, a 50-year-old man died. His skull, excavated in "had two holes" that Sandra Pichler (and others) 1997 say "were clearly the result of surgery, not violence". (offline)

4700BC Possible beginning of Sumerian calendar.

4600BC to 4200BC Varna Cemetry (Bulgaria). Some of the world's oldest gold jewellery hanging on skeletons. See silver and coins.


4500BC Meilgård midden-settlement. In east of the coastal forest of Nederskov on the
Djursland peninsula in Denmark. Just north of Meilgård castle. "Land covered debris" from a settlement of the Ertebølekultur about 4500BC. (Panoramio - fortidsmindeguide)

Worsaae (quoted Gräslund, p.36) described artifacts found in association with shell banks like this as

"rough-hewn flint axes, chisels, arrows, flint cores, nodules and flint flakes made of deer antlers and a great many bodkins and implements made of bone"

4228BC Possible introduction of Egyptian calendar.

By 4000BC the Sumerians could melt copper - and so extract the metal from its ore. (Haidar, D. 2011). Copper Age also called Eneolithic and Chalcolithic: Late 5th millennium BC in the Middle East and the Caucasus for about 1,000 years to the Early Bronze Age. The transition from the European Copper Age to Bronze Age Europe occurs about the same time, between the late 5th and the late 3rd millennia BC. (Wikipedia)

Evidence of human use of the Spaccasasso cave in Southern Tuscany, Grosseto, Italy, from Late Neolithic to the Copper Age, the Early and Middle Bronze Age, and Late Antiquity (5th and 6th centuries B.C.). The cave and the calcareous rock face is characterised by thermal action, which deposits mercury sulphide in the limestone rock and results in cinnabar veins. Cinnabar minerals were mined in different phases of the site's occupation. Copper age mining remains include a large fireplace used to heat the rock face. Above this are copper age funerary remains. (Federico Poggiali and others 2015). See also The Prehistoric Quarry of La Pietra ... Copper Age Lithic Workshops and the Production of Bifacial Points in Central Italy by Adriana Moroni and others 2016.


Fourth millennium BC

4004 BC was the creation of the world in Usher's chronology       See above.

Days of creation: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 -
Adam and Eve in more detail

"If the Creator made this world especially for man..."

Quran: thy Lord said to the angels: "I am about to create man from clay". Adam is considered the first of the prophets in Islam. Others include Ibrahim (Abraham) - Musa (Moses) - Daud (David) - Sulayman (Solomon) - Isa (Jesus) - and Muhammad

4000BC
Sumerian writing on clay tablets using picture signs. See Eridu - 2400BC - library.

Hypothetical reconstruction of neolithic village of Aichbühl on the Federsee in Wuertemburg - later neolithic 4400BC to 3500BC - Gordon Childe 1950
Foundations of 25 buildings discovered in peat wetland by Robert Rudolf Schmidt in 1930. About 20 two-room houses with walls of split wooden posts. A much larger central building probably used for community acrivities. Other buildings possibly for storage. A hunting community with wheat and barley fields and livestock. Small polished stone hatchets and bone tools found. Hearths and clay ovens in the houses. Unpainted pottery. (Britannica)

"In prehistoric Europe the largest neolithic village yet known, Barkaer in Jutland, comprised 52 small, one-roomed dwellings, but 16 to 30 houses was a more normal figure; so the average local group in neolithic times would average 200 to 400 members". (Gordon Childe 1950)

3800BC
"Babylonian"
[Sumerian] "census (for taxation purposes)" - Start of Ed Stephan's demography timeline and [Ireland's] the census through history an [UK] census-taking in the ancient world [Does anyone know the evidence?]

about 3500BC Limestone tablet engraved with pictographic writing Kish, Mesopotamia. Contains pictographs of heads, feet, hands, numbers and threshing-boards. Now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Photographed by José-Manuel Benito.

The cuneiform (wedge shaped) writing of
Sumeria (now Iraq) starts about 3400BC. It is the earliest form of writing known that does not use pictures. The early stages of Egyptian hieroglyphics date from about 3200BC

Metallurgists dealt with copper for [over a thousand years before] bronze, an alloy of tin and copper, was discovered. The Bronze Age in Mesopotamia started around 3300BC and it denoted that bronze tools, decorations and weapons were commonly used and owned items. The transition from the Copper to the Bronze Age was simplified because the melting temperature of bronze is less than copper, between 1084øC and 232øC 449.4øF) depending on the percent of tin, so new techniques to cast and forge bronze were not required. (Haidar, D. 2011)

See Wikipedia on tin sources and trade - See Sweden - Bunhill tin.
Brass in the 1611 Bible may refer to copper or bronze. See Moses metal list and brass/bronze and Bristol brass and Bunhill.

about 3600 to 2900BC Megalithic tombs in Sweden. The oldest megalithic tomb in Europe was built in Brittany around 4800BC. A few other countries in Europe have tombs to the beginning of bronze age, around 1500BC. Skegried”sen is a well-preserved stone chamber tomb surrounded by seventeen stones, dated 3000 to 2500BC. Wikipedia: Megalitgrav - Megalith. See Alvastra and single graves

about 3500BC New village on Tell es-Sultan now over 20 feet high is first of the bronze age. Walled with a tower. Pottery styles show contact with Sumeria and Egypt. Early village unplanned, with rubbish discarded between houses. In "later Early Bronze layers" laid out in a grid and rubbish discarded outside wall. Deforestation for construction or firewood. (Bateman 2002)

Sometime between 3400BC and 3100BC: Death of Ötzi, the Tyrolean Iceman. Wikipedia

About 3100BC. Reign of Narmer in Egypt. The Narmer Palette (left) was discovered by James E. Quibell in 1898 in Hierakonpolis. On it, Narmer displaying the insignia of both Upper and Lower Egypt, giving rise to the theory that he unified the two kingdoms and was the founder of the first dynasty.

Narmer is sometimes identified with Menes.

See:
5000BC - calendar - hieroglyphics - Narmer - papyrus - geometry - Old Kingdom - Middle Kingdom - Thebes library - New Kingdom - Eighteenth Dynasty 1549-1292 - Amenhotep 4 - Nineteenth Dynasty 1292-1189 - Ramesses 2 - Twenty-sixth Dynasty 672-525 - Amasis - Ptolemaic (Hellenistic) - Argead Dynasty 332-305 - Ptolemaic Kingdom 305-30BC - Cleopatra

Papyrus, depicted on the Narmer Palette, is a plant that grew in the river Nile from which a writing material, also called papyrus, was made.

about 3100BC end of the Late Ubaid period in Mesopotamia. A setlement from this period lay under the Ur flood deposit disovered by the archaeologist Leonard Woolley and announced in In 1929. Wooley believed the 3.75 meter (12 foot) thick clay deposit had been laid down by the Great Flood. Jona Lendering writes "It is likely... the event ... behind the myth... can be dated to the end of Early Dynastic I period". (2,750BC?)


Third millennium BC

See Wikipedia article on Ancient History which has table from different parts of the world from 3000BC

About 3000BC Alvastra pile dwelling constructed in the Dags Mosse mire, Alvastra, Östergötland, Sweden. Swedish stone age. See Sweden graves

About 3000BC Silver first mined in Anatolia (Turkey) - source. See gold - Moses metal list - Shalmaneser - coins - Edmund - Spain.

3000BC: Five thousand years ago, the Egyptians began the invention of practical geometry. The waters of the river Nile overflowed every year and wiped out the land boundaries. Perhaps geometry was invented because it was necessary to reconstruct the fields for taxation purposes and to tell people where to plant their seeds.

One of the geometrical rules discovered was the 3,4,5 Rule for constructing right angles. It may have been discovered by people laying out fields, or perhaps by builders or architects. This way of making right angles was used as a trick of the trade. It was not known why the rule works, but it does, and it was used to make temples and pyramids.

Cities = civilisation (!?)

Urban revolution. "About 5,000 years ago irrigation cultivation (combined with stock- breeding and fishing) in the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates and the Indus had begun to yield a social surplus, large enough to support a number of resident specialists who were themselves released from food-production. Water-transport, supplemented in Mesopotamia and the Indus valley by wheeled vehicles and even in Egypt by pack animals, made it easy to gather food stuffs at a few centres... Thus arose the first cities - units of settlement ten times as great as any known neolithic village." (Gordon Childe 1950)

about 2900BC Eridu (in southern Mesopotamia), argued to be the oldest city in the world has been said to have become a substantial city of mudbrick and reed houses covering 20 to 25 acres. Eridu is south of the (later) city of Ur. This are "was the birthplace of cities and of civilisation about 5,000 years ago and home to the Sumerians and the later Babylonians". (Stuart Campbell, Manchester archeologist. See below)

about 2800BCE Swedish-Norwegian Battle Axe culture appeared. It is known from about 3000 graves. Wikipedia Corded Ware culture. Associated with single graves. See Sweden graves

"the stone-chamber tombs and the passage graves consitently yield smoothly shaped, finished and sharp-edged flint artefacts and, in addition, neat stone hammers, amber ornaments and earthenware pots, several of which have quite tasteful shapes and decorations" (Worsaae quoted (Gräslund, p.36)."

Old Kingdom of Egypt

The first pyramid of Egypt. The Pyramid of Djzosèr built at Saqqara in Egypt around 2630-2611 BC. Said to have been designed by Imhotep, who may be the first architect whose name we know, and who was defied 2.000 years later as a god of medicine and healing. The picture is taken from the Wikipedia website. Clicking on it will take you to more information
The pyramids in the Egyptian deserts are monumental tombs for the rulers of ancient Egypt, who were believed to be gods.

The Great Pyramids at Gizah were erected about 2650BC. One of these, the grave of Cheops, is built of stone blocks averaging 2.5 tons in weight. The pyramid, 481 feet high, is of great geometrical accuracy.

The way the pyramids were built and the mathematical calculations involved are subjects of much speculation.

Jewellery From the old kingdom onwards, much archaeological and textual evidence of expeditions in search of copper, gold, turquoise, malachite and other gemstones. (source)

about 2600 to 2400BC Early Dynastic Three period in Mesopotamia - Royal Tombs. A stratum from this period lay on top of the Ur flood deposit

"In China a complex civilisation flourished from about 2500BC which developed its own independent outlook on the world" (Colin Ronan, The Atlas of Scientific Discovery, 1983, page 12).

pottery - Xia Dynasty 2100-1600 BC - Shang Dynasty 1600-1046 BC - Zhou Dynasty 1045-256 BC - [Hundred Schools of Thought including Confucius] - Qin Dynasty 221-206 BC - [compass] - Han Dynasty 206BC-220AD - [paper - Census AD2] - Three kingdoms - Jin Dynasty 265-420 - Southern and Northern Dynasties 420-589 - Sui Dynasty 581-618 - Tang Dynasty 618-907 - printing - gunpowder? - Liao Dynasty 907-1125 - Song Dynasty 960-1279 - [ gunpowder formula - Zhu Xi] - Yuan Dynasty 1271-1368 - [Wenxian Tongkao] - Ming Dynasty 1368-1644 - Qing Dynasty 1644-1911 - [Transit of Venus - Edouard Biot] - Republic of China 1912-1949 - [Liang and Tao] - People's Republic of China 1945 - [sociology - women - stamps]

"The Wen-tong-hian-kao" [Wenxian Tongkao] "... contains a section entitled Hou-keou-men ... which presents various population counts made in China since the reign of the first dynasties until year 1223 of the Christian era." (Edouard Biot 1836)

2400BC Sumerian baked clay tablets with arithmetic . There is a large body of mathematical tablets dating back to the old Babylonian period (1800 to 1500BC).

2348BC "The Second Age of the World" "When Noah was 601 years old, on the 1st day of the 1st month (Friday, October 23rd), the 1st day of the new post-flood world, the surface of the earth was now all dry. Noah took off the covering of the ark". (Usher) refering to Genesis 8:13. See 1736 "evidences of the Deluge" and flood geology. See Epic of Gilgamesh and Ur flood. Picture described as "Various animals entering the Ark built by Noah because of the great flood".
From the early nineteenth century (see
1849, for example) the term antediluvian (before the deluge), sometimes lost specific reference to a flood and referred to long extinct beings only known as fossils.

2286BC One of the classical dates for the foundation of the city of Babylon, originally a small semitic, Akkadian speaking city. See Old Babylonian Period - Hammurabi - Ninevah falls - and Nebuchadnezzar

about 2300 to 2200BC Jericho and Ai (the largest town in the area) destroyed. Invaders broke the walls of Jericho with fires. (Bateman 2002)

2200BC Approximate date for the erection of the standing stones at Stonehenge. The earlier earthbank and ditch have been dated about 3100BC

2015BC Word Siqlu, as a unit of weight, in use in Mesopotamia. The Hebrew term shekel derives from this.


Ur-Nammu, founder of Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur. See ... reconstructing the Ur-Nammu Stela by Jeanny Vorys Canby. Possible dates for Ur-Nammu: 2112BC to 2095BC.

The Legal Code of Ur-Nammu, written on tablets in the Sumerian language about 2100BC to 2050BC. Fragments are on display in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. The lugal (big man, or king) ruled a society divided into two classes: lu (free) and slave (male, arad; female geme). (Wikipedia)

about 2100BC in the Third Dynasty of Ur, Early Sumarian poems. Surviving copies of the complete Epic of Gilgamesh date from the 18th to 10th centuries BC. In these the Cedar Forest, the realm of the gods, is desecrated by Gilgamesh by cutting down cedars for timber. See Jan Oosthoek wood in world history.

Some argue that the Sumerian language, as a mother tongue, had died out by the end of the third millennium.


Second millennium BC

"Old Babylonian Period" used for south Mesopotamia from about 2000BC to 1600BC. Initially a number of (city?) states dominating the region: Isin, Larsa, Eshnunna and, from 1894BC, Babylon.

Middle bronze age in Middle East: 2100 to 1550BC

Excavation of Tell Khaiber, 20 kilometres from Ur

about 2000BC "We provisionally date the site to around 2,000 BC, the time of the sack of the city and the fall of the last Sumerian royal dynasty." Stuart Campbell, (April 2013) ,Manchester archeologist excavating at Tell Khaiber, 20km from Ur, "the last capital of the Sumerian royal dynasties". - Web page of Ur Region Archaeology Project

The naked lady features on the 2013 Report

The Jewish book of Genesis say that Abraham came from "Ur of the Chaldees" (Genesis 11:31)

around 2000BC Middle bronze age Jericho (Canaanite) had stone walls six to nine feet thick on ridges of packed earth. The main street, about six and a half feet wide, was built in stair steps to the top of the mound and there was a small ditch alongside the street to catch rain water and keep the area from flooding. In the Middle Bronze, about 200 settlements on the highland ridges including Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus (Shechem). (Bateman 2002)

2000BC Time that Cadmus would have introduced the original (Phoenician) alphabet to Greece if the speculations of Herodotus were correct. See Hobbes on the invention of letters.

about 2000BC The Lavagnone plough (Italy), made of wood, claimed to be the world's oldest surviving plough.

"You might as reasonably expect to understand the nature of the adult man by watching him for an hour.. as to suppose that you can fathom humanity by studying the last four thousand years of its evolution" (Herbert Spencer quoted by Paul Hirst, 1976, p.32)

1921BC Usher's Third Age of the World. Start of 430 years which Abraham and his posterity spent in foreign lands.

about 1850BC The "Petrie Papyri", from Kahun and Gurob, (named after Flinders Petrie who discovered them in 1889). "Principally of the Middle Kingdom" They include literary, medical and vetinary papyri and mathematical fragments. The three pages of medical text are all gynaecological and include a brief passage that suggests crocodile dung and/or honey to prevent child-birth. I think this is the bit with the crocodile:

1812BC to 1637BC (175 years). Traditional Jewish dates for the life of Abraham. "He lived, an hundred threescore and fifteen years". A Christian term for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and other revered rulers of families (tribes) in the Bible is the Patriarchs. The same term is used for high ranking bishops in the church. See Die Familie (1912). In Jewish tradition "Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, known as the Patriarchs, are both the physical and spiritual ancestors of Judaism". The word "Jew" is derived from Y'hudah (Judah), the fourth son of Jacob.

Abraham's "family" or "household" was large. At one time he formed an army of 318 "trained servants, born in his own house". He was "rich" in cattle, silver and gold. All male members of his household (slave or free) had to be circumcised.

Abraham was accompanied on his journey out of Ur by his nephew, Lot. Lot's adventures in relation to Sodom and Gomorrah are part of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures. These sinful cities were destroyed by "fire and brimstone", brimstone being sulphur. See gunpowder - brimstone - Paracelsus - sulphuric acid - Wesley - sulphate - manure - phenothiazine - child labour - antibiotic - trace methods - surplus.   When Lot's wife turned to look back, she became a pillar of salt.

1800BC

1792BC to 1750BC Reign of Hammurabi, who extended the rule of Babylonia throughout Mesopotamia

Code of Hammurabi - Babylonian law code.

1700BC to 1100BC Possible date range for the (oral) composition of the Rigveda. - See artificial limb

Sweden: Bronze age ahips

"The stone age was followed by the bronze age, which lasted from about 1800BC to 600BC" (Hallendorff and Schuck p.5). Johan Ling: BA Bronze Age 1700BC to 500BC.

about 1700BC to 500BC. Rock Art (Hällristningar - Cliff-drawings) in Uppland, Sweden includes some 2000 ship pictures. Drawings, dates and text on these ships based on Johan Ling Rock Art and Seascapes in Upland 2013.

Early Bronze Age 1700BC to 1100BC

Period one 200 years to 1500BC - Period two 200 years to 1300BC - Period three 200 years to 1100BC -

Late Bronze Age 1100BC to 500BC

Period four 200 years to 900BC - Period five 200 years to 700BC - Period six 200 years to 500BC

Ling suggests that the rock art at Bogösa indicates a meeting ground in a maritime space for a wide area that was, at the time, penetrated by the sea. (p.96)

Metres above sea-level of lowest images from succeding periods (ordered by type of ship): Period one: 25 metres. Period two: 22 metres. Period three: 19-20 metres. Period four to five: 18 metres.

Scandinavian boat drawings have been interpreted as skin boats, planked boats, dugouts and rafts.

1670BC According to Lenormant, a royal library was established at Thebes in Egypt. See Amasis

1650BC The Hyksos (Shepherd Kings) ruled northern Egypt. (Wikipedia)

1600BC

about 1550BC (stratigraphical dating by Kenyon). about 1573BC (later carbon dating): Destruction of the Bronze Age Jericho.

1500BC Domestication of silk worm in China. [I think this is far too late a date]. See silk road and rayon.

Meteoric iron had long been known, but not their relation to iron ores used for pigments The Hittites (greater Armenia) found out how to smelt iron ore between 1500BC and 1200BC and the practice spread to the rest of the Near East after their empire fell in 1180BC. The subsequent period is called the Iron Age. Bronze had not replaced stone tools in many trades, but iron was cheap enough to be used (for example) for ploughs. It was democratic rather than an aristocratic metal! (Wikipedia and Forbes and Dijksterhus) See Sweden

1500BC to 1300BC: Sweden bronze two.
All images with inturned prows and horizontal or slightly upturned keel extensions were 24 metes or more above sea level. (Ling page 81)

1500BC to 1300BC: Baal with Thunderbolt. (Wikipedia). Drawing (1960) by Gillian Potter from a photograph of the limestone stele in Musée du Louvre, excavated (1932) from Ras Shamra, Ugarit.

Baal meant lord, master, owner or husband in Semitic languages. It was also applied to Gods. The plural was Baalim. Baalim might own specific areas, being the Gods of specific peoples.

The Jews also called God lord and believed he had a special relationship to them. However, they (eventually) believed in only one God (monotheism) who is master of all, and they believed that graven images should not be made of him. [See ten commandments]

See Amenhotep 4

1400BC Possible date for Jews settling in what became Israel. Traditionally, the ten commandments and the rest of the Torah (Five books of "law" or Pentateuch) is conceived to have been received by Moses before this. The Tabernacle, a portable shrine said to have been created by Moses to contain the law, eventually became part of the Temple

"the gold, and the silver, the brass, the iron, the tin, and the lead" (Numbers 31:22) - chariots of iron

It is possible that the earliest of the Jewish psalms (sacred songs - hymns) is Psalm 90 and that this was composed about 1400BC. Psalms continued to be composed until a time after the exile (Psalm 137, after 538BC)

1446BC Suggested date for fall of Jericho to forces under Joshua (Hoshea), who God told to "march around the city... with seven priests carrying seven trumpets of rams' horns before the Ark". When they heard the sound of the trumpet all the people were to shout "and the wall of the city will fall down flat". "Cursed... be the man that ... Jericho. At the cost of his first-born shall he lay its foundation, and at the cost of his youngest son shall he set up its gates." (Joshua 6:26 RSV).

1380BC to 1050BC Approximate period covered by the Jewish book of Judges. "In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes". See John Locke on justice in a state of nature.

1300BC Suggested date for the (mythical) journey of the ship Argo in which Jason and the other Argonauts sought the Golden Fleece. Vase painting (480-470BC) in British Museum shows 4 oarsman, but 6 oars. Suggested there were 12 men, 6 oars each side, 3 men to a bench.

1300BC to 1100BC: Bronze three

1348/1346BC Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep 4th raised Aten (the Sun) to the status of supreme God. This, and the "Great Hymn to the Aten" have been considered as origins of monotheism (belief in one God). Amenhotep's chief wife was Nefertiti.

about 1279 to 1213BC Ramesses 2nd. The Ramesseum in Thebes is the 'mortuary temple' of this Egyptian king. The Petrie Papyri were found beneath this.

Iron age in the middle east sometimes dated from about 1200BC, with the diffusion of iron technology following the collapse of the Hittite Empire (centred in what is now Turkey)

1194BC to 1184BC Dates of possible conflict behind the stories of a "Trojan War". Roughly corresponds with archaeological evidence for burning of Troy 7.

1107BC The start of Deborah's forty years of judging Israel according to traditional Jewish chronology. She died in 1067BC. The Song of Deborah may date to as early as the 12th century BC and is perhaps the earliest sample of Hebrew poetry.

1100BC

1100BC to 900BC: Bronze four. In periods four and five more elaborate "depictions of humans" (Ling, page 87)

*********

First millennium BC from 1000BC

1050BC Conventional date for start of Phoenician alphabet which was spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, Aramaic and Greek alphabets developed from this.

about 1046BC Zhou Dynasty in China - Wikipedia

Julius Wellhausen (1885) proposed four documentary sources for the Jewish Bible: Yahwist (J) written about 950BC in Judah - Elohist (E) written about 850BC in Israel - Deuteronomist (D) written about 600BC in Jerusalem - Priestly written about 500BC by Kohanim (Jewish priests) in exile in Babylon. See Wikipedia Documentary hypothesis

911BC to 891BC Adad-nirari 2, King of Assyria begins to found the Neo-Assyrian Empire. A large increase in the use of iron for tools and weapons took place from the neo-Assyrian period onwards.

about 900BC Late iron age Levant: separate Kingdoms of Israel (north, centered on Ephraim's territory, capital Samaria) and Judah (south, capital Jerusalem). Jericho was in Israel. Around 850BC, Hiel is said to have rebuilt the walls. "In Ahab's time, Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho. He laid its foundations at the cost of his firstborn son Abiram, and he set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub, in accordance with the word of the LORD spoken by Joshua son of Nun" (1 Kings 16:34)

900BC to 700BC: Bronze five - Sweden

India See Rigveda

"During the time between 800 and 200 BCE the Shramana-movement formed, from which originated Jainism and Buddhism. In the same period the first Upanishads were written." (Wikipedia)

ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME "Freeman and slave"
See slavery and social science

Engels in 1884 spoke of this period as entering "the field of written history", which coincided with the advent of the "patriarchal family" and a period where "comparative jurisprudence can give valuable help". The history of writing is much older, but picture and cuneiform scripts were only re-deciphered in the 19th cenury.

Bronze relief from the Balawat Gates (in the British Museum) dated to the Shalmaneser 3. It shows a six wheeled Assyrian battering ram with a metal tip. The metal tip may well have been of iron. See (Haidar, D. 2011)

859BC to 824BC Shalmaneser 3 king of Assyria.

853BC 853BC Battle of Qarqar

825BC Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser 3 was erected in Nimrud. It was excavated in 1845 and is now in the British Museum. It includes this bas relief of tribute from Jehu, king of Israel.
"The tribute of Jehu, son of Omri: I received from him silver, gold, a golden bowl, a golden vase with pointed bottom, golden tumblers, golden buckets, tin, a staff for a king [and] spears."

850BC: Date assigned to Homer by Herodotus. Stories recited as poems transmitted culture. See Wikipedia on Odyssey.

800BC - 480BC Archaic period in Greece. Rise of the polis (city states)

8th century BC (800BC-701BC)

776 BC First Olympiad: The olympic games were held every four years and became the standard measure by which Greek and Roman historians dated time. See Olympics

770 to 221 BC "Hundred Schools of Thought" of Chinese philosophy includes Confucius

The hundred years from 750BC to 650BC includes the first four writing prophets of the Jews: Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah. The Iliad and The Odyssey were being written. The skills that led to the Parthenon originated. Zoroaster was born. the Upanishads appeared, Hinduism blossomed (prior to Buddhism) and the movement arose in China that led to Confucius and the Taoism of Lao-tse. (from a book blurb)

Lupa di Roma The She-Wolf with Romulus and Remus illustrates the founding myth of Rome. Their father was the god of war, Mars. Abandoned, they were reared by a she wolf. Romulus murdered Remus before founding Rome. The 1929 stamp shows the bronze in the Capitoline Museum
21.4.753 BC A traditional date for the foundation of Rome
The oldest
gentes claimed to have originated before the foundation of Rome. - Roman Kingdom 753 to 509 BC - Roman Republic 509 to 27 BC - Roman Empire 27 BC to AD 476. Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, is said to have called together one hundred elders to form a senate to advise him. [consulere senatum: calling together the old]. The institution continued beyond the fall of the empire in AD 476.



755BC to 745BC Ashur-nirari 5 king of Assyria. Followed, 745BC to 727BC, by his son, Tiglath-Pileser 3.

740BC "The year King Uzziah died" (Judea). Start of the teaching of Isaiah the first of the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible.

727BC to 722BC Shalmaneser 5, son of Tiglath-Pileser 3, king of Assyria.

Hoshea was the last king of Israel. 722BC is the usual date for the fall of Samaria (capital of Israel) to the Assyrians. Much of the population of Israel is said to have been moved, but a Jewish diaspora was not created as they did not retain their identity as Jews. Many from Israel fled to Judea and pats of Israel, including Jericho, were incorporated into Judea. The religious reforms of Hezekiah (716-697BC) and Josiah followed.

7th century BC (700BC-601BC)


Brandskogship - Boglösa 109. Photo: Hallendorff and Schuck
700BC?. This ship from Brandskog is the largest. Some have argued that it post-dates the Swedish bronze age

Ling (p.66) says the out turned prows ending in horses heads are typical of period five (900BC to 700BC)

The image was discovered in September 1925.


The oldest surviving royal library in the world is that of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria 668 to around 630BC (British Museum) -

K.8538 is a circular clay tablet representing the night sky of 3.1.650BC/4.1.650BC over Nineveh. May show the seven wandering stars (planets), now known as Moon, Sun, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mercury and Mars.


Coins developed independently in Anatolia and Greece, India and China around the 7th and 6th centuries BC, spreading rapidly in the 6th and 5th centuries through Greece and Persia... See trade . The British Museum describes the coin illustrated as a Lydian (western Anatolia) 1/6 stater made of electrum (an alloy of gold and silver) between about 650 and 600BC.

641 to 609BC Josiah king of Judea is credited with overseeing the "Deuteronomic" revision of the Jewish Bible. [See 2 Kings 22] The last chapter of the final Bible outlines Jewish history from the death of Josiah to the promised restoration of the Temple under Cyrus .

612BC Battle of Ninevah led to the destruction of what was at the time the world's largest city. In 626BC Babylon replaced Nineveh as the seat of the Mesopotamian Empire.

6th century BC (600BC-501BC)

597 - 587 BC Nebuchadnezzar 2nd, King of the Babylonians, conquered the Jews and took many into exile in Babylon. They included an elite "skilful in all wisdom, and cunning in knowledge, and understanding science" who were to serve amongst the "wise men of Babylon". One of these was Daniel. See Diaspora

Tisha B'Av, 586BC On Sunday 9th Av, Nebuchadnezzar's forces set the Temple on fire and destroyed it. Some people date Ezekial's vision of a future Temple to 573BC.
Jericho was destroyed by the Babylonians. This was probably the end of settlements on Tell es-Sultan

The book of Daniel (Chapter 4) says that Nebuchadnezzar lost his reason and ate grass for many years. See mental health timeline

569-525 BC Amasis, a common man, was Pharaoh in Egypt. He allowed the Greeks (previously excluded for bad behaviour) to enter Egypt to trade, but not to study in the Royal Library. His golden foot-pan trick gave Aristotle an illustration, used in his comparison of state and family politics

551 to 479 BC Confucius

About 550 to 330 BC The Achaemenid Empire or First Persian Empire [Iran] under Cyrus the Great (Reigned 559 to 530BC). Darius 1st (Reigned from 522BC) and subsequent Kings owed religious allegiance to Ahura Mazda.

Ahuramazda has granted unto me this empire. Ahuramazda brought me help, until I gained this empire; by the grace of Ahuramazda do I hold this empire.

Map of the Persian Empire about 500BC drawn by William Robert Shepherd 1923

Cyrus promised to restore the Temple. [See Chronicles] 536BC Return of some Jews to Jerusalem, followed by the construction of the second Temple, which lasted until 70AD

509BC Roman Republic established "patrician and plebeian"
See theory of social class

Early years of the Roman Republic Burgess and Locke (1945) (p.20) say the patriarch of the Roman family in this period was a "very close approximation" to "absolute power" in the Large Patriarchal Family. They say that "Among the Greeks the power of the head of the house was less absolute, since it was considered a trust to be administered for the welfare of the family. In the Hebrew patriarchal family the power of the father was limited by the Mosaic Law" See Die Familie (1912)

In Greek philosophy the nature of " reason " is explored. Human thought consciously sought to define what reason is and to use it as the key to understanding the world. The Greek philosophers were drawn on by later thinkers in the Arabic and European worlds. They include Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Euclid.


PYTHAGORAS Pythgoras's theorem

Pythagoras, who died about 500BC, founded the Pythagorean School of thinkers. They created mathematical ways of representing and analysing musical harmony, and theories explaining sight mechanically: thinking of light as an emission of particles travelling in straight lines between the eye and the object seen. Mathematics, experiment, theory, aesthetics and religious speculation were all part of the Pythagorean imagination. They established the relationship of harmonious sound between families of notes produced by striking metal bars of different lengths, and the numbers that relate the lengths to the notes. Pythagorus also believed in the harmony of nature: See
Derek Antrobus, 7.2002 Philosophy of diet - or philosophy of life?

5th century BC (500BC-401BC) Possibly in this century that the Hebrew Book of Job was written with its description of mining and its image of Leviathan - See 1651. The Priestly texts are usually related to the reading of the law by Ezra.

Swedish iron age: Pre-Roman Iron Age 500 to 100BC - Roman Iron Age 100BC to 376AD (See Thomsen) - Germanic Iron Age (See Völkerwanderung and Vendel period) 376AD to Viking Age

484BC to 425BC Life of the Greek historian Herodotus

about 480BC Triremes, war ships with three banks of oars. Pictured on vase of Argo. See Replicas of the world

480BC to 404BC So called "golden age" of Athens.

447BC to 438BC Construction of the Parthenon.

Before 469BC Socrates (philosopher) born in Athens, Greece

451BC In Rome the laws were inscribed on tablets. These were the foundation of Roman jurisprudence. (The science of law). The Ten Commandments of the Jews, another source of jurisprudence, were also originally inscribed on tables of stone. 449BC Traditional date for completion of the "Law of the Twelve Tables" (Latin: Leges Duodecim Tabularum which were posted in the Roman Forum so all Romans could read and know them. (See Wikipedia)

445/444B In the 20th year of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, Nehemiah was cup-bearer to the king. The reading of the Law by Ezra.

431BC Start of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta) [Thucydides Book 2]

429BC Pericles (leader of the democracy in Athens) died of fever during a long war between Athens and Sparta. Political turmoil followed his death.

427BC
Plato (philosopher) born

404BC Athens surrendered to Sparta. Government of the thirty tyrants came to power in Athens.
403BC Restoration of democracy in Athens.

4th century BC (400BC-301BC)

399BC Socrates tried for misleading the Athenian youth with his philosophy. Sentenced to death.

PLATO'S ACADEMY

386BC Plato, a pupil of Socrates, established the Academy - the first university - where he taught for the rest of his life. See later academies

Socrates, Plato
and
Aristotle in Raphael's School of Athens Plato argued that:
  • truth and reason are external.
  • we must govern our personal and social lives using reason.
  • humans can reason to external truth.
  • 384BC Aristotle (philosopher and naturalist) born.

    363BC Aristotle studied under Plato.

    347BC Plato died. Following Plato's death, Aristotle left Athens.
    342BC Aristotle tutor to Alexander, who became the Emperor Alexander. Strabo wrote that Aristotle was "the first man, so far as I know, to have collected books and to have taught the kings in Egypt how to arrange a library".

    335BC Aristotle returned to Athens, where he opened a school called the Lyceum. Most of his writings were composed during the following thirteen years.

    331BC onwards Alexander destroyed the power of Persia, and established an empire which stretched from Macedonia to Egypt, and to the Indus.

    322BC Aristotle died. He bequeathed his library and the school (Lyceum) to Theophrastus (about 371BC to 287BC)

    323BC Alexander died. His empire was divided between the Antigonids, who controlled Greece, the Seleucids, who ruled most of Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia, and the Ptolemies, who ruled Egypt.

    Ptolemy 1st, one of Alexander's generals, ruled Egypt from 323 to 283BC. His son, Ptolemy 2nd, ruled from 309 to 246BC. During this time, a library was established at Alexandria. [See Berti and Costa 2009]. The library was part of the Musaeum (Greek mouseion = seat of the Muses).

    3rd century BC (300BC-201BC)

    EUCLID'S GEOMETRY

    About 300BC Euclid taught in Alexandria, Egypt. Building on the practical geometry of the Egyptians, Euclid laid the foundations of theoretical geometry
    Read: Euclid's axioms

    ARCHIMEDES - born about 287BC - died 212Bc
    (Wikipedia)

    221BC Qin Dynasty in China - Wikipedia

    Chinese compasses: "The compass was probably invented in the Qin Dynasty (221-206BC) by Chinese fortune-tellers who used the lodestones to construct their fortune telling boards" (source) - Other sources say this was in the 4th century BC:

    206BC Han Dynasty in China - Wikipedia

    2nd century BC (200BC-101BC)

    Chinese paper 2nd century BC - Wikipedia: history of paper

    The Dead Sea Scrolls are probably a library of the Essenes, mainly from the period from about 200BC to 68AD, although some date back to the third century BC. (See Jewish Virtual Library)

    167BC Judas Maccabeus led a Jewish revolt that led to the restoration of the Temple of Jerusalem in 165BC. - miracle of light celebrated at Hanukkah - [Extracts from the first book of Maccabees - link to book another]. The Maccabees founded the Hasmonean dynasty, which ruled from 164BC to 63BC. From 129BC to 63BC, Judea was independent. Roman rule began in 63BC. In 104BC Judah Aristobulus I was the first "Hasmonean" to declare himself a king. The Hasmonean's built the winter palace which was part of the new Jericho (Herod's) at Tulul Abu el-'Alayiq (destroyed 70AD)

    101BC "Defeat of the Cimbri". Defeat of Celts by Germans and Romans in the next century is argued by Hallendorff and Schuck (p.7) to have led to the Roman Empire extending "as far as Germanic territory on the Rhine" (see 58BC) and Roman culture penetrating Scandinavia in the "Roman iron age".

    *********


    1st century BC (100BC-1BC)

    69 BC Cleopatra, the last great queen of Egypt, born in Alexandria. Died 12.8.30 BC (aged 39)

    58BC to 51BC Conquest of Gaul (France and north west Europe) by the Roman proconsul Julius Caesar (13.7.100BC - 15.3.44 BC). See 1929 stamps

    Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic War) ascribed to Julius Caesar, describes the north-west European tribes the Roman legions fought. A source of images of Druids practising human sacrifice. It is also the source of the statement (6.19) that, amongst the Gauls, "Husbands have power of life and death over their wives as well as over their children". [See John Stuart Mill 1869]

    February 44BC Julius Caesar, constitutional dictator of Rome, declared himself dictator for life and, shortly afterwards (15.3.44 BC), was assassinated. See Neumann's dictatorship types

    Augustus. See 1929 stamps

    31BC The Age of Augustus, from 31BC to 14AD, is taken as the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. The empire may have included a larger percentage of the world's population than any other, before or since. Its survival was dependent on trade. Roads it built survive today. Its engineers also constructed long tunnels and bridges, including aqueducts. The arithmetic of its trade and commerce was calculated using counting boards and hand abaci. See problems of arithmetic with Roman Numbers


    BIRTH OF CHRIST

    AD1 Alleged date of the birth of Jesus Christ - celebrated at Christmas - Calendar dates back from here (BC: Before Christ) and forward from here. Time and space

    Centuries are also numbered backwards and forwards from here.

    SO:

    1600 AD to 1699 AD is the 17th century AD not the 16th century
    1900 AD to 1999 AD is the 20th century AD not the 19th century
    2000 AD to 2099 AD is the 21st century AD not the 20th century

    The system of numbering things at equal intervals (years in this case) from an arbitrary starting point (the birth of Christ in this case) with items being counted backwards and forwards from the starting point, is called an Interval Scale.

    The birth of Jesus took place in Bethlehem (instead of Nazareth) because the Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus, ordered people throughout his empire to go to their family home to be counted for taxation. This is an example of political arithmetic, state arithmetic, or statistics.

    AD2 First "tolerably accurate census of the Chinese empire" (under the Han dynasty) although Chinese census counts "go back to back to the second millennium BC" "There was little pretence of scholarly interest in the numbers... the emperor was interested in revenue" (Hollingsworth T. H. 1969 pp 65-66 and 67)

    18.9.14 AD Tiberius the Roman Emperor

    Strabo's Geography was finished within the reign of Tiberius. Strabo died in 23AD

    37-41 Reign of the Roman Emperor Caligula who banished or murdered most of his relatives, executed large numbers of people, confiscated property and, for entertainment, had people tortured and killed whilst he was eating. He made himself a God. A Jewish philosopher, Philo Judaeus, went to Rome to plead with Caligula for the lives of Jews who had refused to worship him as God. Philo is remembered as a theorist who fused Greek and Jewish thought. Caligula was assassinated and is remembered by many social theorists as an example of an undesirable ruler. They read about him in the works of Philo.

    about 40 to 90AD Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician who compiled five volumes about the (largely herbal) materials of medicine in Greek. Translated into Latin as De Materia Medica.

    24.1.41 to 13.10.54 Reign of the Roman Emperor Claudius, builder of aqueducts, roads and canals, who put Judea under direct rule and expanded the Empire north to Britain.

    43 AD Romans invaded Britain - Iron industry already established (Wealden iron). Lead was also (probably) mined. (Peak). Lime used for building mortar (Mendips). - See Wikipedia Mining in Roman Britain and 1854 Sydenham display

    50 AD Romans founded Colonia on the Rhine. The library, for an estimated 20,000 scrolls, was built between 150AD and 200AD.

    13.10.54 to 9.6.68 Reign of the Roman Emperor Nero

    19.7.64 to 25.7.64 The Great Fire of Rome

    1.7.69 to 24.6.79 Reign of the Roman Emperor Vespasian

    Tisha B'Av, 70AD: 4.8.70 The Roman army destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. After this the oral tradition of the rabbis began to be written in what became the Talmud. See Talmud Yerushalmi and Talmud Bavli

    75 to 99AD The period of Josephus writing.

    90 to 168AD Claudius Ptolemaeus or Ptolemy: Astronomer and geographer who lived in Alexandria and compiled a large compendium of astronomy, with the earth as the centre of the universe. His compendium was called the Almagest when translated into Arabic.

    around 98AD De Origine et situ Germanorum (On the Origin and Situation of the Germanic Peoples) by the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus.

    Tacitus wrote about the Baltic tribes of Suioneso [Swedes?], north of the Germans, who were powerful in ships. Their naval craft had bow and stern constructed alike, equally well suited for landing, The oars were not fastened along the sides, but left free and they did not use sails. Hallendorff and Schuck p.8). See Viking ships
    Stone with engraved ship from the Roman iron age of the type described by Tacitus. Found in Uppland. Hallendorff and Schuck p.15)

    About 110AD Suggested date for the Targum of Onkelos (born about 35AD, died 120AD). The Targum Onkelos was written down between this date and the 4th century AD. The Targum Onkelos uses the word Shekhinah for the presence of God. See Polyglotta.

    Tisha B'Av, 135AD The Fall of Betar. End of the revolt of the Jews against the Romans led by Simon bar Kokhba. See Diaspora

    170AD to 180AD Note "to myself" of the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. "I ... have seen the nature of ... him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity,.. we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth." (Meditations Book one) - See organism

    The two centuries from 200AD to 400AD are a critical turning point in the Saint-Simonian system of history between the epoch with polytheist ideas and a society based on slavery, and that with "theological" ideas and a feudal organisation of society.

    About 251 to 356AD Anthony (or Antony) one of the earliest of the desert fathers, from whom developed monasticism.

    306 to 337 Constantine Emperor of the Roman Empire. He rebuilt Byzantium, which was renamed Constantinopolis (Constantinople), which became the new capital of the Empire, tolerated Christianity and other religions, and promoted Christianity throughout the empire. He called the First Council of Nicaea in 325 at which the leaders of Christianity agreed unifying beliefs: the Nicene Creed, which was amended and extended in 381.

    about 350AD Traditionally, the Talmud known as the Talmud Yerushalmi (Jerusalem Talmud) was thought to have been redacted (made into one book) by Rav Muna and Rav Yossi in the Land of Israel.

    376? Death of Ermanaric, king who ruled the Goths when their realm may have stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south and as far eastwards as the Ural Mountains.

    376 Start of first war between Visigoths and Rome. Völkerwanderung (German), age of the folk-wanderings, (Hallendorff and Schuck), barbarian invasions (of Roman Empire), migration period Wikipedia. Leading to Viking Age.

    The "Scandinavian people ... seem to have learnt the art of sailing during the period of the folk-wanderings" (Hallendorff and Schuck), page 15.

    393-397 AD Synods of the Christian Church decided which books would form the Christian Bible. This is composed of an "Old Testament" (the Hebrew Bible) and a "New Testament" (books about Jesus and the early Christians). The whole is arranged in approximate chronological order, giving a history of the material world from its beginning (Genesis) to future end (Revelation) [See 1611]

    405 AD Jerome completed his translation (commenced in 382) of the Bible from Hebrew and Arabic into Latin: the language common to educated christendom. It became known as the versio vulgata or Vulgate [external link   another ]

    Oldest surviving Targum dates from the fifth century, but Aramaic translations came about after the return from exile. See Onkelos

    Mythologiae (mythologies), a book accredited to the the Christian writer Fulgentius, re-told classic Greek stories of the Gods, and tried to explain them in Christian terms. - [early 5th century AD]

    410 Sack of Rome by Alaric 1

    De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii ("On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury") by Martianus Minneus Felix Capella, in which the seven female servants of Philologiae (word-love) are Grammar, who cuts out errors with her knife, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy and (musical) Harmony. Architecture and Medicine, were present but kept silent, because they are earthly rather than heavenly arts.

    420 to 650 Occupation of village at what is West Stow, Suffolk. The modern reconstruction uses wood and thatch. Most houses are partially sunk in the ground. Noël-Hume (1953) (Archaeology in Britain p.86) suggested "walls of wattle and daub, puddled clay floors, and ... roofs covered with thatch or turf" as common building materials, and a "single, window-less room with a hearth in the middle and a hole in the roof to allow smoke to escape".
    See
    Autopsy of a sunken house and The History of West Stow Manor, West Stow Heath and Anglo-Saxon Village Site - internet archive

    about 429 Germanus of Auxerre (in Gaul) visited Britain to combat the Palagian heresy. Bede's account tells of a journey accompanied by miracles, through which some scenes of ordinary life show through. A "large fire" was "lit in the middle of the house". It threw up sparks and, the house and neighbouring houses, being thatched, caught alight, but the house in which Germanus lay was untouched.

    429 Conquest of North Africa by the Vandals

    4.9.476 Romulus Augustus, last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, deposed by Odoacer, a Germanic [Teutonic] chieftain

    From this period to the early 13th century, Constantinople [capital of he Eastern Empire] was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe.

    476 to about 800 The European "dark ages" were so called because historians considered they were a time of ignorance and lack of progress (Webster's dictionary 1960). [In the mid-1960s I attended adult education classes about this being a mistake]

    "Among our Teutonic forefathers the village community was apparently the chief sphere of sympathy and mutual aid for the commons all through the 'dark' and middle ages" (Charles Cooley 1909)

    A graph with a broader world-view

    The graph is taken from "One Thousand Years of Missing History" by Salim Al-Hassani

    The Talmud Bavli (Babylonian Talmud) was finished in the late fifth century using document from the third to fifth centuries.

    INDIAN MATHEMATICS

    Brahmagupta `Bhillamalacarya' (589-668) Rajasthan (India). His textbook Brahmasphutasiddhanta is sometimes considered the first textbook "to treat zero as a number in its own right." It also treated negative numbers. Brahmagupta was also among the first to express equations with symbols rather than words. [See Great Mathematicians - Wikipedia - and Weber's Introduction to The Protestant Ethic... ]


    The legendary King Arthur of medieval romances is said to have led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders before his death at the Battle of Camlann about 542.

    "The Chronicles of Arthur relate how King Arthur, with the help of a Cornish carpenter, invented... the miraculous Round Table at which his knights would never come to blows... "no knight will be able to raise combat, for there the highly placed will be on the same level as the lowly"." (Mauss p.81)

    597 Augustine (of Canterbury) arrived in Kent to try to convert the inhabitants to Christianity. St Martin's Church, Canterbury, is said to have been the private chapel of Bertha, the Queen of Kent, before 597. The oldest surviving Anglo-Saxon church may be the Chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall built between 660 and 662

    EUROPEAN CIVILISATION

    "lord and serf" - "guild-masters and journeyman" -
    See feudal and feudalism

    There is well established division of European history into antiquity or the Classical Period (ancient Greece and the Roman Empire), which comes to an end about the 5th century AD, the Middle Ages or Medieval Period, which stretches from there to about the 15th century, and then Modern Civilisation. [External Link]. This last period may be what present day theorists mean by modernity.

    Foucault: Middle Ages

    External link to Fordham University's Internet Medieval Sourcebook

    James Richards (2001) of Gordon University, Georgia, maintains that European culture has a "core of recurring basic ideas, values, beliefs, and aspirations" - archive

    BIRTH OF MUHAMMAD

    ARABIC CIVILISATION empire   weblinks

    26.4.571 is one date given for the birth of the prophet Muhammad

    About 570 to 632 Muhammad. The Quran, the revelations of God to Muhammad from 610 to 632, was compiled into a single book shortly after Muhammad's death. It is the primary source of Shariah law. A translation into English was made in 1734.

    11.12.630 Muhammad's army conquers Mecca, which becomes the holy city of Islam

    Pages of the Quran discovered in a Birmingham archive are written on goat or sheep skin that has been carbon dated between 568 and 645, with a probability of more than 95%.

    See The Quran: The long journey into British life

    622AD is the first year of the Hijri era used in the Islamic lunar calendar. It marks the year that Muhammad and his followers moved from Mecca to Yathrib (later Medina).

    The works of the Greeks and Egyptians originally reached Christian Europe via the translations of scholars living in muslim countries. See 8th century


    At about the time that Muhammad was born, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms were emerging in England (external link: Anglo-Saxon Origins: The Reality of the Myth by Malcolm Todd) - archive

    Iron helmet from ship burial ground at Vendel in Uppland, Sweden. "Vendel Period" is a term used for about 550 to the Viking Age.

    Early Germanic law codes were oral compilations of custom. Under contact with Rome, and literate civilisation, these laws began to be set down from the 7th century on. (Medieval Sourcebook)

    618 Tang Dynasty in China - Wikipedia

    657 A monastery was founded at Streanohealh by King Oswiu of Northumbria. 664 Synod of "Whitby" established the Roman date of Easter in Northumbria. about 680 death of Caedmon, who gave birth to English poetry. Between 867 and 870 monestry destroyed in a series of raids by Vikings. See geology - alum - crocodile - museum

    673 to 735 The Venerable Bede of Jarrow. Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (AD 731) was the first history to use the AD dating system. Written in Latin - Five Old English manuscript translations survive from the tenth and eleventh centuries. Bede's World), a theme park in Jarrow, closed from 12.2.2016 for lack of funds. Internet archive.

    Sometime in the 8th century AD The Vespasian Psalter. Latin to which an Old English translation was added in the ninth century. Old English cirican, which developed into church used: Latin "In medio ecclesiae laudabo te" translated as "in midle cirican ic hergo oe". (Psalm 22:22 translated "in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee" in 1611). See 597 and 900

    30.4.711 Islamic leader Tariq ibn-Ziyad landed at Gibraltar and by the end of the campaign most of the Iberian Peninsula was under Islamic rule. An Islamic presence continued until 1492 when Muhammad 12th surrendered Granada.

    10.10.732 The Battle of Tours or Poitiers (Christian) or Battle of Court of the Martyrs (Muslim) held Muslim advances and helped lay the foundations of the Christian Carolingian Empire.

    751 Battle of Talas between Abbasid caliphate and Tang dynasty. The Abbasids obtained the secret of papermaking from Chinese prisoners. See Wikipedia Islam during the Tang dynasty

    It is also suggested that the Abbasid army brought back sugar cane from northern India. See Sicily and Spain - Cyprus - Madeira islands - Hispaniola - Jamaica

    762 Abbasid caliphate established its capital at Baghdad

    Charlemagne (Charles the Great) was king of the Franks from 768 to 814

    793 to 1066. The Viking Age [See Sweden ships and iron]. wicingsceaoa is found in Anglo-Saxon glossaries from the 8th century. vikingr in Old Norse and Icelandic from the late 10th cent. Hallendorff and Schuck (page 14) define Vikings as "daring pirates and traders" sailing in "large bands" from Norway, Sweden and Denmark "to gain riches ... by peaceful barter or force of arms".
    "The Viking ship was perhaps the greatest technical and artistic achievement of the European dark ages. These fast ships had the strength to survive ocean crossings while having a draft of as little as 50cm (20 inches), allowing navigation in very shallow water". (William R. Short at Hurstwic, Massachussets.) - See Norman ship

    8.6.793 Vikings destroyed the abbey on Lindisfarne in Northumberland

    Chinese gunpowder 9th century AD? - Wikipedia - See 1044

    Under slave the Oxford English Dictionary says that the Slavonic peoples were reduced to a servile state by conquest during the 9th century.

    809 to 877 Hunain ibn Ishaq who directed the translation of numerous texts from Greek to Arabic at Baghdad

    About 820 al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa'l- muqabala (later translated into Latin as Hisab al-jabr w'al- muqabala written by Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (780 to 850). "Al'Khwarizmi was an Islamic mathematician who wrote on Hindu-Arabic numerals and was among the first to use zero as a place holder in positional base notation." The word algorithm derives from his name and the word algebra from the title of the book. (See St Andrew's biography)

    859 The University of Al-Karaouine or Al-Qarawiyyin founded at Fes in Morocco.


    From Jeff Israel's map showing pre-colonial cultures of Africa

    The Sankofa bird recovers history
    The Ghana Empire or Wagadou Empire in West Africa existed from before about 830 until about 1235)

    The history of hourglass shaped talking drums can be traced back to the Ghana Empire. [See electric telegraph]

    The Akan have roots in ancient Ghana. They may have migrated from the Sahara into the forested region around the 11th century

    865 Mmycel heathen here (great heathen army) of Scandinavans invaded the four Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex.

    866 Vikings captured Jorvik (York) and held it until 954. During this time that human coprolite formed. See Wikipedia - BBC - Wall Street Journal 12.10.1992
    Microscope slides reveal that thee York coprolite came from someone who mainly ate meat and bread and who was infested with worms.

    868 "the 'Diamond Sutra' is the world's earliest complete survival of a dated printed book". (British Library)

    Woodblock printing made the written word available to many more people during the Tang Dynasty (618 to 907) in China

    Wikipedia: History of printing in East Asia

    20.11.869 Death of Edmund, King of East Anglia, who became "Saint Edmund the Martyr". Killed by the Great Heathen Army. Greenstead Church booklet published about 1950: "the heathen Danes invaded... demanded that the young King, Edmund, should deny the Christian Faith. When he stoutly refused he was tied to a tree, shot with arrows and afterwards beheaded... The body of the martyred King was enshrined at Bedriceworth, modern Bury St Edmunds, and was greatly revered".
    See coins - 985 - 1003 - 1214 - Saint George

    23.4.871 - 26.10.899 Reign of Alfred of Wessex.
    877AD "This year came the Danish army into Exeter from Wareham; whilst the navy sailed west about, until they met with a great mist at sea, and there perished one hundred and twenty ships at Swanwich." (Anglo Saxon Chronicle). The Chronicle was begun in Alfred's reign (about 890- 892) and one copy continued to be updated to 1154.
    Memorial on Swanage front "In commemoration of a great naval battle fought with the Danes -in Swanage Bay by Alfred the Great. AD 877". "Erected by John Mowlem. AD 1862". John Mowlem was a builder who recycled London materials in Swanage. Alfred
    appears to have launched attacks on ships close to land, but not from Swanage. The four cannon balls that top the monument come from the Crimean War. See 1260

    before 899 to 910 or later Copper and silver coins minted with the Latin inscription Sce Eadmund Rex. Sce is taken to be an abbreviation for sanctus: saint. Rex is king.

    By 900 sugar cane was grown in Arab Sicily with irrigation that used underground tunnels (qanats). The irrigation also enabled cultivation of oranges, lemons, and pistachio. Carmen Trillo dates the introduction of "monsoon plants" to southern Spain to the same period.

    900 Approximate date for the Viking ships (used as graves) excavated in Norway at Tune in 1867, Gokstad in 1880 and Osberg in 1904

    From about 900 an English parish church was often built by the manorial lord, generally close to his house. Most would probably have been built of wood (timber), like that at Greensted in Essex whose timbers have been dated between 1063 and and 1108 (Researching the history of churches)

    907 Liao Dynasty in China - Wikipedia

    960 Song Dynasty in China - Wikipedia - Issued banknotes - established a permanent standing navy - first known use of gunpowder - discernment of true north using a compass.

    970 Abbot Brithnod of Ely, was "skilled at planting gardens and orchards."

    985 Abbo of Fleury's Life of St Edmund told the (mythical?) story of Edmund's martyrdom. See St Edmundsbury Chronicle

    987/988 Abu'l-Faraj Muhammad bin Is'haq al-Nadim's Kitab al-Fihrist "an Index of the books of all nations, Arabs and non-Arabs alike, which are extant in the Arabic language and script, on every branch of knowledge; comprising information as to their compilers and the classes of their authors, together with the genealogies of those persons, the dates of their birth, the length of their lives, the times of their death, the places to which they belonged, their merits and their faults, since the beginning or every science that has been invented down to the present epoch : namely, the year 377 of the Hijra."

    "lord and serf"
    See feudal - 1066 - and medieval
    Feudalism? Marc Bloch's Feudal Society covers the period (roughly) from the middle of the ninth century to the first decades of the 13th in western and central Europe. He divides the period into a first and second feudal age, separated by "profound and widespread changes" towards the middle of the eleventh century

    The High Middle Ages was the period of European history around the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries. The High Middle Ages were preceded by the Early Middle Ages and followed by the Late Middle Ages, which by convention end around 1500. (Wikipedia)

    The two centuries from 1000 to 1200 are a critical turning point in the Saint-Simonian system of history between the epoch with "theological" ideas and a feudal organisation of society and that with positive, scientific ideas and an industrial social organisation.

    Kalmar County Museum (Kalmar Läns Museum) in Sweden has a "Meet the Middle Ages" website that describes life in the 11th and 12th centuries.

    About 990 to 1050 Guido d'Arezzo (Guido Aretino) lived. Guido was an Italian monk trying to find ways of improving the teaching of monks to sing the Gregorian Chants that were a large part of their religious duty. He used a system of recording music as writing by arranging symbols for notes on either side of a line (later lines) so that, if you understood the notation you could sing the music. As music became writing it became possible to compose on paper instead of having to work as a group developing and transmitting it. Writing music created a system of concepts for the analysis and manipulation of a sphere of deep sensual experience believed to be sacred. It was part of the development of rational analysis out of religious tradition in Europe.

    1003 to 1013 Danish conquest of England under Sweyn Forkbeard. Saint Edmund's remains were moved from Bury St Edmunds to London for safekeeping in 1010. On the way back in 1013 they may have rested in a Saxon timber church at Greensted. The timber nave wall of the present church may be the oldest surviving wooden church in the world, but counting the rings gives a date after 1053.

    about 1008 Olof Skötkonung, he first Christian king of Sweden, baptised.

    Sweyn Forkbeard's son became King Cnut [Canute] of England, by conquest, in 1016. He went on to be "king of Denmark, England, Norway, and parts of Sweden". He established Benedictine monks at Bury St Edmunds in 1020.

    1021 Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics in Iraq.

    1044 Zeng Gongliang recorded three formulae for gunpowder in his The Collection of the Most Important Military Techniques, Each was based on saltpetre (potassium nitrate), sulphur and charcoal. Joseph Needham identified these as the earliest formulae for what we now know as gunpowder. The formula for gunpowder reached the Arab world in the 12th Century and Europe in the 14th century (source)

    1066 Norman conquest of England

    ["A Norman Ship" drawing by C.H.B. Quennell. In ships like this the last succesful invaders crossed the channel]

    See French - Latin - Old English

    A new society "knit together by the firm organisation of the
    feudal system" (Quennell 1948, vol. 1, pp 1-2)

    "After the Norman conquest" [both] "Viking raids and also peaceful emigration" [to England] "ceased" (Hallendorff and Schuck p.29)

    1073 to 1076 Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum (Deeds of the Bishops of Hamburg) written by Adam of Bremen. It includes an account the pagan temple at Uppsala, the images of three gods: Thor, Odin and Frö, and human sacrifices.

    1086 " William 1st commissioned a detailed inventory of all the land and property in England and Wales. The results of this first major statistical enumeration were set out in the Domesday Book" - First entry UK Statistical System Timeline archive

    1088 Convenience date for the foundation of the University of Bologna, Italy - the first in Europe. See L'Antico Studio di Bologna But where is it? by Mary Tolaro Noyes, January 1996 and Wikipedia article on universities
    See Paris and Oxford - 13th century - 14th century - 15th century

    Late 11th century on: European translations from Arabic into Latin of Greek authors, including the anatomist, Galen

    1095 Pope Urban 2nd called upon all Christians to join a war against the Turks. First of the Christian Crusades against the Muslims that ended in the late 13th century. See Wikipedia articles on Crusades.

    1048-1131 Omar Khayyám - Persian philosopher - Author of Al-jabr wal mugabalah of Omar Khayyam, a Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra - and of the poems known as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

    "towards the 12th century Carolingian script was replaced by a heavier, more pointed Gothic style. One of the reasons for this was that quill pens began to be cut at an angle, making it easier to produce these shapes." [External Link] . The term gothic (German) was used in the 17th century to distinguish this style of writing from the (French) Carolingian. Gothic then was applied to the architecture of the period.

    About 1120 Euclid rediscovered

    1130-1200 Life of Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi), Chinese neo- Confucian philosopher who wrote:
    "I have seen on high mountains conchs and oyster shells, often embedded in the rocks. These rocks in ancient times were earth and mud, and the conchs and .and oysters lived in water, Subsequently everything that was at the bottom came to be at the top, and what was originally soft became solid and hard"
    See William Smith 1815

    A Common Law for England: Henry 2nd (ruled 1154-1189) established royal courts at Westminster and divided England into circuits, over which his judges travelled and tried the more important civil and criminal cases in county courts. The judges did not impose a law from above, but brought together the traditional law they found in the different parts of the country to create one law that was common for the whole nation. To establish what the law of a district was, the traditional practice of trial by a jury of local people was revived. See law and crime time line

    Jews were encouraged by Henry 2nd to settle in England's towns. They were a source of finance and taxation until 1290.

    1157 Henry 2nd of England "to his justiciars, sheriffs, and all his officials in England, greeting. I command you to guard, maintain, and protect all the men and citizens of Cologne as if they were my own subjects and friends, and all their goods, merchandise, and possessions. You shall not permit them to suffer any loss or damage in their house in London, which is called their gildhall, or in their goods, or merchandise, or anything else that belongs to them, because they are faithful to me, and they are in my ward and protection. They shall have complete protection, and they shall pay only their customary tolls, and you shall not exact new tolls from them." (source)

    Before 1170? The University of Paris developed out of the Cathedral schools of Notre Dame. The short history of Oxford University says it (Oxford) developed rapidly after 1167, when Henry 2nd "banned English students from attending the University of Paris".

    1175 Ptolemy rediscovered

    Friday 2.10.1187 Fall of Jerusalem to Salah ad-Din

    1189 English king Richard 1st succeeded Henry 2nd. Time of "legal memory".

    16.3.1190 The entire Jewish community of York (about 150) died in attacks on the Royal Castle at York, where they had taken refuge.

    about 1199 Peter of Blois, archdeacon of London, stated in a letter to Pope Innocent 3rd that the City of London contained 120 parish churches and 40,000 inhabitants. (About the size of Ramsgate, Kent, in 2011). Charles Creighton in 1891 suggested that the population of London from Richard 1st to Henry 7th (about 300 years) varied between about forty to fifty thousand. See 1532 - 1602 - 1724 - 1801 - 1931 - 1945

    Mongolian peace? Genghis Khan established the Mongol Empire in 1206. It rapidly expanded by invasion and by 1300 stretched from Korea to Central Europe. Political stability re-established " silk road" trade between east and west. - 1260 - 1271 Yuan Dynasty - 1275 on: Japan resists - 1300: Marco Polo's book - 1347: plague - 1368: Ming Dynasty (end of Mongols) - 1453 (end of silk road) - 1488 sea route.

    Wikipedia timeline of the Mongol Empire

    The Early English Period in architecture was the 13th century according to Panoyre and Ryan 1958 or the reign of Richard 1st to 1307 according to the originator of the term Thomas Rickman

    "guild-masters and journeyman" - " Towns were growing rapidly... banded together in gilds [guilds] craftsmen and merchants grew powerful" (Quennell 1948, vol. 1, pp 68-2). In a craft guild, a worker started as an apprentice (unpaid trainee), might become a journeyman (paid by the day), and finally might become a master.

    Universities founded at Cambridge (1209) - Salamanca (1218) - Padua (1222) - Naples (1224) - Toulouse (1229) - Siena (1240) - Montpellier (1289) - Lisbon (1290)

    15.6.1215 King John signed the document later called Magna Charta at Runnymede, near Windsor. In 2014, barons are said to have met at Bury St Edmunds. This led to the town adopting Sacrarium Regis, Cunabula Legis "'Shrine of a King, Cradle of the Law" as its motto, possibly in 1849.

    22.12.1216 Ordo Praedicatorum (Order of Preachers), which became known as the Dominican Order or Black Friars, founded in France by a Spanish priest, Dominic de Guzman. Aquinas was a Dominican Friar.

    1220 Start of the building of the (new) Salisbury Cathedral - the one we now have. It took about hundred years to build. [external link]. The Norman Westminster Abbey was replaced in the middle of the 13th century. The oldest parts of the present building date from this period. [external link]

    about 1225: Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu.
    Groweth sed, and bloweth med, And springeth the wude nu

    1225 to 1274 Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas created a synthesis between Christian theology and Aristotelianism. He asserted that political power is natural, as hierarchic relations already exist among the angels in heaven.

    1253 A reference to "Secole lan' extra Neugat' in suburbio London" in connection with a Charter of Henry 3rd is one of the clues that suggests coal was brought from north-east England to London by boat in the thirteenth century. See Marco Polo

    3.9.1260 In the battle of Ain Jalut (Galilee) the Muslim Mamluks checked the westward movement of the Mongols. Explosive hand cannons were used frighten the Mongol horses and cavalry.

    1264

    "To the Sheriffs of London, 23 July, 1264 Contrabreve to purvey for the King in the City of London without delay and without fail a boat- load of sea-coal and four millstones for the King's mills in Windsor Castle and convey them thither by water for delivery to the constable of the castle."

    1266 Henry 3rd of England granted the Lübeck and Hamburg Hansa (merchant guild) a charter for operations in England, and the Cologne Hansa joined them in 1282 to form the most powerful Hanseatic colony in London. (Wikipedia)

    about 1270 Hasan al-Rammah described the purification of gunpowder in his Book of Military Horsemanship and Ingenious War Devices

    1271 Yuan Dynasty in China - Wikipedia - Established by the Mongolian leader Kublai Khan.

    1271 Last of the Christian Crusades against the Muslims.

    ["A Thirteenth Century Ship" drawing by C.H.B. Quennell. In ships like this Christians sailed to fight what they regarded as holy wars against Islam. The drawing is based on the Dover seal of 1284]

    By 1291 muslims had re-captured all the territory in Syria held by the Crusaders

    This is a war ship with castles at each end from which bowmen would shoot arrows. Quennell comments on the influence of tall Mediterranean ship design on
    northern ship design allowing archers to shoot down on lower ships. The steering is still by rowers rather than rudders.

    Early English parish chirch from Panoyre and Ryan 1958

    about 1275 "Holy church is a house of prayer, born of heaven Christ does it call, to worship therein our saviour".

    1275 to 1293 Composition of Mōko Shūrai Ekotoba, illustrated Japanese scrolls of battles with Mongolian invaders.

    In this the Mongols are believed to be using Chinese gunpowder bombs

    Lübeck's seal of the year 1280, depicted in Ernst Wallis Illustrated verldshistoria, published in Stockholm in 1882, page 333. From about 1200, Germans colonising conquered Baltic territories left from the north German port of Lübeck. It became the central Hanseatic trading city. The ship on its seal has similar features to Swedish boats 2,000 years before.

    1290 Edward 1st's Edict of Expulsion expelled all Jews from England. Jews did not return until 1657.

    1291 Fall of Crusader city of Acre to Muslims. End of Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099 -1291). Cyprus became an important Latin Centre. There is a record of the export of sugar from Cyprus (to Pisa, Italy) in 1301. Sugar was Cyprus' most profitable agricultural export from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. (Fergus Murray)

    1297 The metrical chronicle of Robert of Gloucester spoke of roses springing "of the brer". Brers (briars) were thorny tangles of wild roses, blackberries and similar plants.

    1299 Osman I declared himself Sultan. His territories became known as the Ottoman Empire. Centred in what we now know as Turkey, The (Islamic) Ottoman Empire established itself in Asia, Europe and Africa. Constantinople, the capital of the (Christian) Byzantine Empire, was captured by the Ottoman Empire in 1453

    1245-1322 Life of Ma Duanlin 1245-1322, Chinese writer who wrote the Wenxian Tongkao [Wen-tong-hian-kao]

    Universities founded at Rome in 1303 - Prague in 1348 (external link) - Krakow in 1364 (external link) - Vienna in 1365 (external link) - Heidelberg in 1386 (external link) - Erfurt in 1379 - Cologne in 1388 (external link)

    about 1300 Livres des merveilles du monde (Book of the Marvels of the World, also known as The Travels of Marco Polo.

    "31. - Stones which are burnt instead of Wood. ... throughout the whole province of Cathay," [China] "there are a kind of black stones cut from the mountains in veins, which burn like logs. They maintain the fire better than wood. If you put them on in the evening, they will preserve it the whole night, and will be found burning in the morning. Throughout the whole of Cathay this fuel is used. They have also wood indeed ; but the stones are much less expensive."

    1300 onwards Brimstone (burn stone) appears in English in the phrase "fire and brimstone". After Old French "feu et soufre", modelled on Latin "ignis et sulphur" for Hebrew of Bible. Brimstone, identified with sulphur, is the fuel of hell fire.

    Edward 2nd ruled England from 1307 to 1327


    Illustration of Reeve and Serfs in August calendar of a Psalter (now known as Queen Mary's) produced about 1310-1320 and now in the British Library.

    1324 Pope John 22nd issued the papal bull Docta sanctorum partum (Teachings of the Holy Fathers) condemning "a new school" who "trying to measure time, invent new notes"... "losing sight of the foundations of the antiphonary and the gradual" "under the multitude of notes" they "obscurate the modest ascents and fallouts of plain chant". (French Wikipedia)

    1327 Edward 3rd king of England aged 14, following his father being deposed.

    1336 Wreck of Kogge (Cog) in Flevopolder at Nijkerk. This has been reconstructed as the Kamper Kogge. Cogs were cargo ships operating from about 1200 to 1450, mainly in the Baltic and North Sea for the Hanseatic League. They could carry heavy cargoes of cloth, salt, fish, butter, wine, furs, grain, wax, beer, copper, iron, oil, flax and similar goods. (Twitter)

    1337 Conflict between Edward 3rd of England and Philip 6th of France over feudal rights in France led to the start of the "hundred years' war"

    1339 Confirmation of Hanse privileges in England and crown jewels of England pawned to Cologne merchant.

    1340 Edward 3rd of England asserted his claim to be king of France. 24.6.1340 Naval batlte of Sluys in which the English navy largely consisted of converted mercantile cogs. (Wikipedia)

    Europe: The Renaissance (cultural rebirth) is generally regarded as beginning in Florence, Italy, in the early 14th century. However, some historians speak of an earlier renaissance in France.

    "The civilisation of Greece and Rome, which ever since the fourteenth century obtained so powerful a hold on Italian life, as the source and basis of culture, as the object and ideal of existence, partly also as an avowed reaction against preceding tendencies - this civilisation had long been exerting a partial influence on medieval Europe, even beyond the boundaries of Italy. The culture of which Charles the Great was a representative, in the face of the barbarism of the seventh and eighth centuries, essentially a Renaissance, and could appear under no other form. Just as in the Romanesque architecture of the North, beside the general outlines inherited from antiquity, remarkable direct imitations of the antique also occur, so to monastic scholarship had not only gradually absorbed an immense mass of materials from Roman writers, but the style of it, from the days of Eginhard onward, shows traces of conscious imitations." (Burckhardt, J. 1960 pp 176 and 178. See also p.5.)

    Renaissance Oxford English Dictionary: Mid 19th century term for "The revival of art and literature under the influence of classical models between the 14th and 16th centuries, begun in Italy; the period of this movement". Penguin Encyclopedia: In Italy "from the death of Giotto 1337 that of Michelangelo 1564". See High Renaissance and Rinascita.

    1341

    Easter Sunday 8.4.1341 Francesco Petrarca's speech receiving a crown of laurel in Rome: "there was an age that was happier for poets, an age when they were held in the highest honour, first in Greece and then in Italy, and especially when Caesar Augustus held imperial sway, under whom there flourished excellent poets: Virgil, Varius, Ovid, Horace, and many others."

    1344 Date on this painting (The Annunciation) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti originally displayed in the Palazzo Pubblico (town hall) of the republic of Siena, Tuscany, central Italy. The traditional gold background gives a flat feeling that contrasts with the diagonals on the floor which use geometrical perspective to create depth.

    1347-1350 Black Death (Bubonic Plague) in Europe. "In England it reached a peak in July 1349"... "between a third and a half of the population died, the total falling from about 4.7 million to about 2 million, with a consequential severe shortage of labour." (Michael Warren). Further outbreaks (England) in 1361-1362, 1369, 1379-1383, 1389-1393, and during first half of the 15th century.
    ["A Fourteenth Century Ship" drawing by
    C.H.B. Quennell. In ships like this rats and fleas brought the bubonic plague] - "Europe's plagues came from China". "Plague would have reached Europe across the Silk Road".

    Lars Bruzelius (2000) writes of the "most intense development of the sailing ship" beginning when perpendicular square sails (common in northern Europe) were readopted in the Mediterranean in the mid-14th Century, in place of triangular sails. Carvel (flush, even planking) hulls replaced the northern clinker (overlapping planking) hulls.

    1349 English "Ordinance of Labourers"

    before 1350 Edward third of England founded St George's College, Windsor, attached to the chapel of St Edward the Confessor. The Order of the Garter was founded and the chapel became St George's Chapel. Part of the process by which St George became patron saint of England, displacing St Edmund

    1356 Delegates of the Hanseatic towns met in Lübeck. Taken as the formal foundation of the Hanseatic League, which made Lübeck its administrative headquarters in 1358. (Chronology - Rainer Postel - Wikipedia - Die Hanse today - Commerce)

    Ornamental gardens and civilisation

    "The creation of ornamental gardens indicates a degree of civilisation and a settled economy.... Such conditions had obtained in China long before the Christian era and also for a long time in Persia, whence they spread to Turkey about A.D. 1360." Richard Gorer The Growth of Gardens 1978, page 38.

    1362 The English Statute of Pleading required English as the language of the courts

    1362 Piers Plowman by William Langland published. New versions were published in 1377 and 1392.

    1368 Ming Dynasty in China, followed the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. - Wikipedia

    Mental Health 1377 Bethlem

    1377 - 1379 and 1381: Poll taxes (tax per person) levied in England. Imagery drawn on in 1990.

    1381 Peasants' revolt in England - See Wikipedia

    1384? Completion of the translation of the Vulgate into English now known as the Wycliffe Bible. Wycliffe Bibles are the most common manuscript literature in Middle English. Over 250 of them survive. Those who believed that the Bible could be interpreted directly by lay people, without the intervention of the church, became known as lollards.

    1387 Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400) started writing The Canterbury Tales. The East Midland dialect he wrote in became the basis from which standard English evolved.

    Before the age of printing
    Rhymers like Geoffrey Chaucer
    Were needed to preserve in public verse
    The life of the people.
    Whilst in the monasteries
    Chorister's memory preserved
    Plain song, whose metrical rhythm
    Underpinned the mathematics still to come.
    And in ways like this, modern science
    Was made possible by medieval poetry.


    Although she was the daughter of a town Mayor, Margery Kempe (about 1373-1438) was unable to read and write, but heard many sermons, and books read. When she came to write her book, she dictated it.

    1389 Death of Baha-ud-Din Naqshband Bukhari (born 1318), founder of the Sufi Muslim order known as the Naqshbandi.

    1397 Foundation of the Medici Bank in Florence, Italy.

    *********









      From Robin Rowles:

    "I am puzzled as to why you think that from AD1 (alleged year of birth of Jesus called the Christ) to AD99 is a century. At best it is 99 years and were Jesus to have been born in December AD1 as we celebrate it (unlikely), it is nearer 98 years. Why is the (eg) seventeenth century so called? Because it ends with 1700 so that is what it is! Mind you, this is a common mistake, after all the entire world celebrated the millennium a year early so you are not alone!"









































































































    Schools.

    A schoolman is a teacher in any of the universities of medieval Europe - a medieval scholastic - someone versed in the traditional philosophy and theology of medieval scholasticism. The terms were developed in the 16th and 17th centuries to distinguish old knowledge from new knowledge.

    Scholasticism by Joseph Rickaby, Oxford, 1908

    Wikipedia article on scholasticism

    John Stuart Mill on importance of

    The ancient regime in France ended with the French Revolution in 1789. It is the revolutionaries term for the social and political order they abolished. But when did it begin? Wikipedia dates it from the 15th century. Others date it from 1610 France

    15TH CENTURY

    Mental Health 1409 Spain

    Universities founded at Leipzig in 1409 (external link) - St Andrews (1413) - Rostock (1419) - Leuven (1425) - Bordeaux (1441) - Barcelona (1450) - Glasgow (1451) - Greifswald (1456) - Bratislava (1465) - Uppsala (1477) - Copenhagen (1479) - Aberdeen (1495)

    1413-1415 Margery Kempe's pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
    She sailed from Norfolk to the continent in the Autumn of 1413 and followed the Rhine River to Switzerland, and then followed paths over the Alps to Italy, arriving in Venice in January 1414 and spent thirteen weeks, leaving in April 1414.
    She travelled from Venice to the Holy Land by sailing in a galley (a ship moved mainly by oars) probably to Jaffa, arriving in May. On a mule or donkey she travelled through Ramlah to Jerusalem and visited Bethlehem. Returning to Italy she stayed in Assisi before going to Rome, where she arrived in September 1414. Leaving Rome in Easter 1415, she travelled home though Middelburg (in today's Netherlands), and sailed from Zealand to England (probably Yarmouth) on a two day voyage in a small ship in mid-May 1415. (Sources 1 - 2)

    Friday, 25.10.1415 Battle of Agincourt. In Shakespeare's Henry 5th 1598, the king's 'once more unto the breach' speech concludes "Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'"

    Ocean trade: the age of exploration

    1418 - 1419 A Portuguese expedition along the coast of Africa was blown into the open ocean and discovered the Madeira Islands.

    Ancient civilisations, like that of Greece were made possible by slavery. In western Europe this method of production gave way to feudal relations and then to free labour. But, as free labour developed in Europe, Europe developed slave labour abroad. From the 15th century, a system of colonial slavery was developed by the European powers. Transporting slaves from Africa to America began in the 16th century. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the theoretical analysis of slavery played an important part in the development of social science. In the 18th and early 19th century, these theoretical developments, in their turn, played an important part in undermining the colonial slavery that Europe had established throughout her colonies.
    Colonial slavery index 15th century: 1433 (Guinea) - 1447 (Pope) - 1455 - 1492 (Columbus) - 16th century:   22.1.1510 transalantic - mid century: negro and adventurers - 1562 John Hawkins - 1580 Mexico - triangular run - 17th century: 1607 Virginia - 1619 - 1627 Barbados - 1697 Bristol - 18th century: Rhode Island triangular - 1746 Bristol brass - 1791 - 1793 - 1794 - 19th century: 1802 - 1833 - 2.7.1839 - 1840 - 1863 -

    1422 to 1509 Paston family letters

    Burgess and Locke (1945) (p.20) say these give a "clear picture" of "the small patriarchal family of medieval society" in which " marriage was arranged by parents with stress upon economic rather than romantic considerations". See Die Familie (1912)

    1425 Portuguese introduced the cultivation of sugar to the Madeira islands. Expansion of the plantations began in 1445. At some time, African slaves were used.

    1433 Gil Eanes joined the service of Infante Henrique of Portugal, Duke of Viseu (died 3.11.1460. Later known as Henry the Navigator). Eanes brought slaves to Portugal from the Canary Islands. In 1434 he succeeded in sailing beyond Cape Bojador on the coast of the Western Sahara. By 1462 , the Portuguese had explored the coast of Africa as far as present-day Sierra Leone. The west African coast was known as Guiné

    1436 Four hundred years before Pugin's Contrasts.

    1447 to 1455: Pope Nicholas 5th authorised the Portuguese, and others, to make war on muslims and pagans, and to make them slaves. He applauded the trade in negroes, and hoped that it would end in their conversion.

    About 1450 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press (but see China) - Which is probably why the middle of the 15th century is the most popular date for starting "modern history" (see above) - Another suggested start is towards the end of the sixtenth century - - Although the Penguin Dictionary of Modern History starts in 1789 (and finishes in 1945!)
    See Diamond Sutra - printed Euclid - English New Testament - printed Herbals - Copernicus - London 1635 - Beccaria: Printing enables human rights

    2.4.1453-29.5.1453 Siege and fall of Constantinople: The Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror ended the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire after more than a thousand years by capturing the capital, Constantinople Consequent closure of the traditional overland route from Western Europe to the Far East. "An exodus of Greek people and works of art and literature into the Italian city-states" (Spark Notes).

    8,1.1455: Bull Romanus Pontifex of Pope Nicholas 5:

    "many Guineamen and other negroes, taken by force, and some by barter of unprohibited articles, or by other lawful contract of purchase, have been sent to the said kingdoms. A large number of these have been converted to the Catholic faith"

    In 1456 a comet appeared sufficiently brilliant for Pope Calixtus third to issue a declaration against "the Devil, the Turk and the comet". (Story possibly untrue). Detailed observations were made by Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli in Florence from 8.6.1456 to 8.7.1456. Not available to Halley, they were rediscovered in 1864 and allowed Giovanni Celoria to establish the comet's 1456 orbit with great precision. (Perihelion: 9.6.1456)

    1470/1471 Rentals (only copies now exist) of lead mines [meers=measures claimed] in Neustalls [Nestus] part owned by Henry Vernon, an ancestor of the Duke of Rutland. (Barnatt and Rieuwerts The Upper Nestus Pipes... Summer 1998) offline)

    1471 Pope Sixtus 4th donated bronze statues of symbolic significance to the People of Rome: The She-Wolf, the Spinarius (boy with thorn), the Camillus and the colossal head of Constantine, with hand and globe. The Capitoline Museums trace their history back to this. The museums are mainly from and about Rome.

    1476 William Caxton established a printing press at Westmenster in England where he first printed an edition of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

    1476 Fioretti di Santo Francesco d'Ascesi (Little Flowers of Saint Francis of Assisi) printed in Vicenza in the north of Italy. In this, St Francis preaches to birds and negotiates peace with a wolf. Francis of Assisi lived about 1181 to 1226 and became a saint in 1226.

    The first printed edition of Euclid was a translation from arabic into latin in 1482

    22.8.1485 Battle of Bosworth Field. Richard 3rd, last of the Plantagenets, replaced by Henry 7th, first of the English Tudor monarchs. A skeleton believed to be that of Richard 3rd was disinterred in Leicester in September 2012. Richard's identity was "proved" by his mitochondrial DNA, handed down in an unbroken chain through the female line from his sister to two living relatives.
    Death and Humility: Richard 3rd and the Historical Desecration of Corpses by Sarah Bond. "Accounts of the battle do hint at degradation of his body".

    1488 The rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias was a significant step in establishing a sea route, round Africa, from Europe to India and the far east.

    1492 Christopher Columbus's first voyage to America. He visited Haiti. America

    On behalf of Spain, Columbus made four voyages to America

    ["Ship of the time of Christopher Columbus" drawing by
    C.H.B. Quennell, who argues that the "development of trade meant a corresponding improvement in ships" (p.186). Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria, was about 93 feet long and 25 feet broad.]

    23.11.1492 "The Indians aboard call this Bohio and say it is very large and has people there with one eye in the forehead, as well as others they call cannibals, of whom they show great fear. When they saw I was taking that course, they were too afraid to talk. They say that the cannibals eat people and are well armed" [Log entry of Christopher Columbus translated by Robert H. Fuson 1992. p.115 source]

    1493 Pope Alexander 6th apportioned the non-European world west of the Azores to Spain, that east of the Azores to Portugal. Broadly, this meant Africa and Asia for Portugal and the Americas for Spain. The shape of South America, however, resulted in Portugal claiming what became Brazil. The grant was conditional on their converting the natives to Christianity.

    Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto (1848) that "Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way". An earlier passage, however, also includes the opening of the Indian and Chinese markets.

    1494 ship of fools


    source
    Part of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestry, dyed with weld (yellow), madder (red), and woad (blue). Dating from between 1495 and 1505

    Bethlem 2015 "The earliest recorded uses of colour by man were from pigments from plant extracts".

    *********





    16TH CENTURY

    The transport of Africans to the West Indies, as slaves, began early in the 16th century.

    Early in the 16th century, Paracelsus (1493-1541) studied alchemy and chemistry at Basel University and learned the properties of metals and minerals in mines. His unorthodox mystical theories lost him the position of town physician of Basel (1526-1528), but through empirical experiment in pursuit of his dreams he made new chemical compounds and changed medicine and pharmacy. (See mental health history). Paracelsus sought to analyse matter into three elements: sulphur, the principle of colour and combustibility; mercury, the principle of liquidity, and salt, the principle of incorruptibility and consistency.

    High Renaissance 1500 to 1527: "to which belong Michelangelo's earlier works, Raphael's Roman works, and most of Leonardo de Vinci's works" (Penguin Encyclopedia)

    22.4.1500 A Portuguese fleet landed in what became Brazil. It then crossed the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and India.

    22.1.1510 Ferdinand of Spain authorises 50 African slaves to be sent to Santo Domingo. The start of the systematic trans-Atlantic transportation. Until 1530 slaves were shipped from Europe.

    1512 Portugal discovers the Moluccas (Spice islands) in the East Indies, the source of cloves, nutmeg and mace. See 1555.

    1513 Niccolò Machiavelli's manuscript De Principatibus (About Principalities) circulating. Published in 1532 as Il Principe (The Prince)

    1517 The publication of Luther's ninety-five theses became the official launch of protestant christianity. The Bible was given priority over the church as the source of authority. The scope for religious disagreements multiplied as more and more people were able to read it for themselves. The movement for the reform of the Catholic (universal) church and the breakaway of protestant and reformed churches is called The Reformation.

    1518: Royal College of Physicians founded

    1519 Ferdinand Magellan sailed from Spain with a fleet of five carracks - large ships with plenty of room for crew, provisions and a return cargo. One ship returned in 1522, having circled the world

    1521-1530 97% of precious metal imports to Spain from America was gold, only 3% silver. Thereafter, 90% plus was silver. Most treasure before 1530 came from Hispaniola, Porto Rica and Cuba. After 1530 treasure came from the mainland of South America (Tierra Firme) and (less so) North America (New Spain) (Earl J. Hamilton 1929)

    1525 William Tyndale's The New Testament in English printed in Germany and shipped into England against official hostility

    1525 An anonymous herbal, an English translation of an unknown manuscript, published by the London printer, Richard Banckes, was the first English printed herbal. It was small, without illustrations, and therefore relatively cheap.

    about 1525 An alphabetical list of herbs 'necessary for a garden' compiled for Thomas Fromond (Surrey landowner, died 1543. Alphabetical list followed by groups of plants for specific purposes and by plants for a pleasure garden. First clear indication of gardens solely for pleasure in Britain. Amongst the plants were "Rosers" (Harvey 1989)

    1528 Copernicus finished a book arguing that the earth goes round the sun, not the sun round the earth. The first printed copy was in 1543 (see Galileo)

    1530: Juan de la Barrera of Seville transported slaves directly from Africa to the New World - See 1510.

    26.8.1531 Perihelion of a comet that had appeared in the sky above the earth. Peter Apian had observed that the comet's tail was always oriented into the direction away from the sun.

    November 1532 Bills of mortality were produced intermittently in the several parishes of the City of London during outbreaks of plague. The first bill of mortality is believed to date from November 1532. Working with the data that is available from this date, Charles Creighton in 1891 made to following estimates of the growth in London's population: 1532-1535: 62,400 1563: 93,276 1580: 123,034 1593-1595: 152,478 1605: 224,275 1622: 272,207 1634: 339,824 1661: 460,000

    Creighton (p.481) says the earlies figures (1532 and 1535) were produced to see if London was safe for King Henry 8th and his court.

    England breaks from Rome

    November 1534 Act of Supremacy established Henry 8th as head of the Church of England

    1534 - 1543 Travels around England of John Leland. "The advent of the first English antiquary... may, if we wish, be taken for a sign that the Middle Ages were indeed passing away and becoming matter for retrospect". (Trevelyan, G.M. 1942 p.99)

    1535 Coverdale's Bible. Ecclesiasticus 39:13 calls on people to flourish (flower) "as the rose garden", sing a song of praise.

    1536 Latin publication of John Calvin's Institution of the Christian religion: embracing almost the whole sum of piety and whatever is necessary to know the doctrine of salvation. French translation in 1541. Weber says that "the gracious and kindly father of the New Testament... dominates the first books of the Institutio Christiana, and behind him the Deus absconditus as an arbitrary despot"

    29.9.1538 Parish registers for every church ordered to be kept in England, recording "the day and year of every wedding, christening and burying".

    1544

    Sebastian Cabot's map of the world

    1546 Large silver deposits discovered in Zacatecas (Mexico) and Potos (Bolivia).

    1548 According to Edward Step in 1903: "The Oriental Plane is popularly supposed to have been introduced to England from the Levant by Francis Bacon, but if Loudon's statement that it was "in British gardens before 1548" rests on good evidence, Bacon's claim is dismissed, for he was not "introduced" until 1561."

    Step in 1903 suggests the oriental (eastern) and occidental (western) planes could be treated as "two varieties of one species". The form then (1903) familiar in London, known as the "Maple-leaved Plane" being a variety of the eastern whose leaves approached the form of the western. In the 1941 revision the London Plane is presented as a hybrid of the eastern and western appearing in 1670.

    Division of labour and manufacture: "That co-operation which is based on division of labour, assumes its typical form in manufacture, and is the prevalent characteristic form of the capitalist process of production throughout the manufacturing period properly so called. That period, roughly speaking, extends from the middle of the 16th to the last third of the 18th century". (Marx 1867 chapter 16). One of Marx's main examples is the division of labour in the manufacture of needles. (Compare Adam Smith and pins). See also Communist Manifesto

    1550 Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostri (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects) by Giorgio Vasari published in Florence. He wrote of a rinascita (rebirth) in the arts, and used the word Goth to describe a barbaric German style. [Go back to 376 - Gothic and 1436.

    1555 Richard Eden's The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India..., being translations from Spanish, published. Speaks of the conflict between Portugal and Spain over the "trade of Spices". Later in the century, people also began to write about "commerce".

    1557 "Because no two things can be more equal" than two parallel line segments of the same length, Robert Recorde used the sign = for equals (As in 2+3=5). Recorde wrote all his mathematics texts in English, using clear and simple expressions. O'Connor and Robertson say that "Recorde virtually established the English school of mathematics and first introduced algebra into England". However, the = symbol was not widely used until the eighteenth century (See Euler in 1765, whe explains terms such as +, - and =)

    1558 Elizabeth 1st queen of England and Wales from 1558 to 1604, in succession to Mary. Elizabethan domestic architecture might use brick or stone or timber frames according to local materials. In London, narrow, timber framed houses commonly overhung the streets with each story wider than the one beneath.
    1559 The earliest surviving map of London depicts the crowded city and its suburbs just outside the wall.

    11.11.1563 Council of Trent doctrines on matrimony and celibacy.

    In the second half of the sixteenth century the words negro and niger entered the English language. Niger meant black in Latin. From it derived Negro as black in Spanish and Portuguese. In the 15th century this had come to mean black people, especially African people from south of the Sahara. Due to colonial slavery, negro was also used for slaves, as when a writer in 1589 writes of "Spaniards, with their servants and Negroes".

    From the mid-sixteenth century, the Portuguese attempt to monopolise the trade in African slaves and the Spanish attempt to possess all of America (apart from Brazil) - see 1493 - were challenged by French, English, Dutch, Danish and Swedish adventurers.

    1562 Commotion when a needle is lost. This tool was precious. "Until far on in the sixteenth century, there was not a needle to be had but of foreign manufacture" (Stone 1840)

    "A lytle thing with an hole in the end, as bright as any syller,
    Small, longe, sharpe at the poynt, and straight as any pyller."
    [ Gammer Gurton's Needle

    1562 to 1568 The slaving adventures of John Hawkins started English participation in the slave trade.

    from 1565 Galeón de Manila across the Pacific. from 1566 Flota de Indias Spanish West Indies Fleet across the Atlantic.

    1566 to 1568 Start of "the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain" - The Dutch Revolt or Eighty Years War - To 1648

    Adler von Lübeck (Eagle of Lübeck), a galleon, was the world's largest ship when launched in March 1566. The flagship of the Hanseatic League , it could carry 1,000 men and had 138 cannons to protect the Baltic trade.

    1570 I quattro libri dell'architettura (The Four Books of Architecture) published in Venice by Andrea Palladio (1508-1580).

    Palladio derived laws of architectural proportion for the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. He set out the principles for buildings in the "classical era" which has been dated as between 1620 and 1800 in England.

    According to Zygmunt Bauman and Timothy May, "It was roughly towards the end of the sixteenth century that in parts of western Europe" a picture of the social world as naturally ordered "began to fall apart". (Bauman, Z. and May, T. 2001 p.117) - See nature and culture. Before this time, they say, is "often referred to as 'pre-modern'. The modern period "established itself in the western world approximately three centuries ago" (1700), so the 17th century is their century of transition.

    In th history of social theory, we could relate the transition between "pictures of the social world" to the publication of Bodin's Six Livres de la Republique.

    1577 Jean Bodin published Six Livres de la Republique, the first major systematic treatment of politics since Aristotle. He argued that property and the family form the basis of society. His arguments from the material world (in contrast to Aquinas who argues from theology) make him a founder of the philosophical approach to social theory known as state of nature theory.

    Marx and Engels argued that one of the qualifications required by science is that its theories should start from material premises rather than theological ones. In this sense, Bodin is one of the earliest founders of social science.

    13.12.1577 Start of pirateering journey that was to become Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the world. Plymouth - San Julian (South America) - Strait of Magellan - Mocha Island - coast of California (17.6.1579) - Moluccas - Cape of Good Hope - Sierra Leone (22.7.1580) - Plymouth (26.9.1580). Brought back a cargo of spices and captured Spanish treasures. Although Drake's journey was hailed as a circumnavigation of the globe, the details were made a state secret, for fear of Spain.


    1578 There is a series of tables showing weekly christenings and burials (from plague and other causes) in London for the five years from 1578 to 1582. Creighton (p.479) says "everyone was christened in church under Elizabeth, and there were no Dissenters' burial grounds".

    1579 The Shepheardes Calender with twelve pastoral poems, one to each month, by Edmund Spenser. Woodcut for May. In the woodcuts, astrological signs represent heaven above the earth. See 1597 and 1632.

    1580 to 1640 Indigenous populations in Mexico declining due to new infectious diseases. Africans brought to Spanish colonies in deals with the Portuguese, who controlled the African slave market. See "The black people 'erased from history'" and Afro-Mexicans

    1584 to 1604: Long war between England and Spain. June to September 1588: Spanish Armada

    1588
    Robert
    Filmer (author of Patriarcha) and Thomas Hobbes (author of Leviathan) born

    1593 to 1597 Richard Hooker published the first five volumes of his
    Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. These argued that the Bible is not the only guide to truth that God has provided, because God has established the universe according to laws and provided human beings with reason by which they can discover those laws. Three other volumes were published after Hooker's death. Locke's arguments in his Two Treatises of Government, and elsewhere, have strong similarities with Hooker's.

    1592: Bernard Ericks of Holland taking part in the slave trade.

    1594: L'Espérance of La Rochelle, France, taking part in the slave trade.

    1596
    31.3.1596
    Rene Descartes born

    1597 William Shakespeare, in Merchant of Venice describes the music that the heavenly spheres create as they circle the earth. See Copernicus

    1597 John Gerard's (1545 - 1611 or 1612)'s Great Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes. Enlarged and revised by Thomas Johnson (Died 1644, probably aged under 44) in 1633 (also re-published 1636).

    1598 In Catholic France, Henry 4th enacted the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed religious liberties to the Protestants. He was assassinated by a Catholic in 1610. France

    1598 James 6 of Scotland (James 1 of England) published The True Law of Free Monarchies. Theories from this and other writings of the king were used by Filmer.

    1598 First publication of John Stow's A Survey of London - See mental health timeline

    1599

    In his play, As You Like It, William Shakespeare said that the whole social world is a stage on which the same people play different parts at different times. This is the basic idea of role theory, later developed by social scientists. The same passage defines the "seven ages of man".

    In Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar, Cassius says "Men at some time were masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves that we are underlings."


    John Donne "To his mistress going to bed", sometime late 16th century

    "In this love's hallowed temple, this soft bed.
    "... thou, Angel, bring'st with thee
    "A heaven like
    Mahomet's Paradise;

    "License my roving hands, and let them go
    "Before, behind, between, above, below.
    "O my America! my new-found-land,

    The late 16th century is a possible beginning for the triangular trade or run with slaves as the middle run. The first leg of the run was of manufactured goods (see Bristol 1746) from European ports to the west coast of Africa, to be bartered for slaves and other produce. Then, with slaves packed in the cargo holds, across the Atlantic (the Middle Passage - where some cargo died) to colonies in the Caribbean and on mainland America. Slave were there auctioned and mainly became plantation workers. The ships returned to their European home with goods like cotton, sugar, coffee and tobacco.

    *********

    17TH CENTURY
    See Social Science History, chapter two:
    Hobbes, Filmer and Locke:
    17th Century Models for a Science of Society

    about 1600 First alum mines in England opened, based on alum-stone at Belman Bank, Guisborough. See Tees wildlife - East Yorkshire Coast Geology - Whitby walk (7: Alum) - Wikipedia and Whitby

    1600 William Gilbert in De Magnete coined the word "electrica" for "quae attrahunt eadem ratione vt electrum" (that which attracts in the same manner as amber). His word referred only to the property of attracting lightweight objects, which we now call static electricity. As the science of electricity developed, so the word took on expanded meaning.

    1601 Elizabethan Poor Law under which each parish was responsible for looking after its own poor.

    1603 Death of Elizabeth 1. James 6 of Scotland became James 1 of England

    Brick replacing timber: English Heritage describe brick buildings being built in 17th century London as small groups of two or three in streets, yards, and alleys, and as ribbon development along the main raods. They were not just houses, but workshops, offices, shops, and taverns, each with a rear private space used either as a garden or as a backyard for trade or washing. Few survive. See 1666

    The stars and human history: See Shepheardes Calender - Shakespeare - 1607 comet - 1611 Bible

    1603 Christopher Heydon's A Defence of Judicial Astrology argued, against John Chamber's A Treatise Against Judicial Astrology (1601), that astrology is a valid science, supported by experience. Natural astrology argued that the position of the stars influenced nature, judicial astrology that they influenced individuals and society. Astrology adopted the idea of crises:

    "When the moon comes to the 22 of Gemini, she shall there begin to work a dangerous crisis, or alteration .. so preventing her ordinary working" (Heydon)

    1603 Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice includes the phrase "making the beast with two backs"

    1604/1605 Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well. Critics have never been sure if it ends well or badly. It includes a weaving analogy

    "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and
    ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our
    faults whipped them not; and our crimes would
    despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues."

    Shakespeare's Macbeth, cannot be dated precisely, but appears to many to be celebrating King James's ancestors and the Stuart accession to the throne in 1603. Some have suggested their are allusions to the Gunpowder plot. (Wikipedia)

    The character of Lady Macbeth was used by Lombroso in 1876 as evidence for his conclusion that "violent women far exceed men in their ferocity and cruelly".

    1606 An essay of the meanes how to make our travailes, into forraine countries, the more profitable and honourable, by Thomas Palmer, divided the "fuitfullness of the soil" into things that live and move on the surface (plants and animals) - "things as are hid in the wombe and veines of the earth" "mines of mettals and fossiles" - and the "plentie of rivers and ports". See Noah - fossils 1736 - William Smith - census fossils - vestiges of creation - Coprolite - Mortillet

    Johannes Kepler recorded his observations of a comet at Prague from 26.9.1607 to 26.10.1607 and Christian Longmontanus at Malmo and Copenhagen from 1.10.1607 to 26.10.1607. (Perihelion: 27.10.1607 at at 2ø 16' Aquarius). These observations were later used by William Halley.

    The summer of 1607 by Able Grimmer of Antwerp

    1609 Comentarios Reales de los Incas by Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616) published in Lisbon. Garcilaso de la Vega was the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman and his book is based on stories he had been told by his Inca relatives.

    21.3.1610 Speech to Parliament in which King James said "kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called gods". (external link)

    14.5.1610 Francois Ravaillac assasinated Henry 4th of France. Henry's widow initially acted as Regent for their son, Louis 13th. Under the guidance of his minister, Cardinal Richelieu, Henry 13th consolidated his royal power. An "absolute monarchy" was established in France in his reign and that of his son, Louis 14th. France

    1611 Official (King James or Authorised) version of the Bible in English published. [See 393] The Bible story is largely chronological - beginning with the genesis of the world and ending with divine revelation of its end. It provided the framework for many historical explanations of nature and society. Usher gave it precise dates. For generations this book, more then any other, provided the English speaking peoples with poetry, history, religion, politics, ethics, names, imagery and visions, as well as a framework for natural and social science. Its downfall as the basis of science in the 19th century was a cultural cataclysm. However, the Bible, critically read, continued to be a major source of material for emerging social sciences such as anthropology.

    The Westminster Confession (1647/1648) effectively, although only for a short time, set the Bible up against the King: Which was not what James had intended!

    In the first book (Matthew, chapter 2) of the Christian part of the Bible, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem is marked by "wise men from the east" who have "seen his star". Bethlehem as the birth place is corroborated by Jewish "priests and scribes" by reference to the "prophets".

    1613 Francisco de Suarez, a Spanish Catholic theologian, published Defensio Fidei Catholicae, criticising James 1st's theory of the divine right of kings. Saurez's book was burned in London.

    1613 Samuel Purchas in Purchas his pilgrimage; or, Relations of the world and the religions observed in all ages and places discovered transmitted knowledge of the lazy animal to the English saying, "There is a deformed beast of such slow pace, that in fifteen days it will scarce go a stones cast. It liveth on the leaves of trees, on which it is two days in climbing, and as many in descending, neither shouts nor blows forcing her to amend her pace. The Spaniards call it (of the contrary) the light dog. The Portugals Sloth. The Indians, Hay. Some have written that it lives of air: and seldom or never have it been seen eating". (Second edition, enlarged 1614 Chapter 4: America: Brazil, page 835) (Internet Archive) offline)

    1614 In France, the Queen Regent called the States General (a representative body like the English parliament) together in an effort to counter the power of the nobility. It was dismissed in 1615, and did not meet again until 1789 France

    1618 Start of the thirty years war that concluded with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648

    1618 Company of Adventurers of London Trading to the Ports of Africa granted a charter. Developed into the Company of Merchants Trading to Guinea in 1631. Known as the Guinea Company/)

    Inigo Jones finished the Queen's House in Greenwich, England, in 1619

    Picture from Panoyre and Ryan 1958 p.118, who date the "buildings of the classical era" (in Britain) from 1620 to 1800

    1620 Francis Bacon published Novum Organum, one of the works in which he publicised his new method of gaining knowledge (science) by a process of induction.

    Francis Bacon was the Lord Chancellor of England from 1617 to 1621. On 16.6.1620 he and others recommended that the Attorney General, Henry Yelverton, should be tried in the Star-chamber on the ground of having officially passed a charter to the city of London containing unauthorised provisions. "James 1 was always in want of money, and not over nice in his methods of raising it" (Edward O'Donoghue 1914)

    1621 Oxford Physic Garden founded by Henry Danvers, Earl of Danby, See 1632. Renamed the Oxford Botanic Garden in 1840.

    12.9.1621 A light display in the sky witnessed by Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) led them to use the term aurora borealis: northern light or northern dawn. The next one so far south was in 1716.

    1623 Probably after this date that Hobbes translated several of Bacon's essays into Latin and took down his thoughts as Bacon dictated them.

    See Social Science History, chapter one:
    John Stuart Mill and his problems with Francis Bacon

    1623 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions by John Donne: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." (Meditation 17)

    1624 Njinga Mbandi (born 1581) took power and became queen of Ndongo and Matamba. She "defined much of the history of seventeenth- century Angola". Her tactics in warfare and espionage, her diplomatic skills, her ability to forge numerous strategic alliances, and her knowledge of trade and religious issues served her well in tenaciously resisting Portugal's colonialist aspirations until her death in 1663" (UNESCO "Women in African History: An E-Learning Tool", launched 12.11.2013)

    1625 Charles 1st succeded James 1st. See Richard Cust The Personality and Political Style of Charles 1. "His reform of the royal court ... introduced a style of ritual similar to Louis 14th's Versailles in an attempt to create an ideal society for his subjects to emulate" [That is, the dramaturgical procedures of the English court preceded those of the French]

    1625 De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace) by Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) published. "He wrote this volume while the Thirty Years' War raged around him in the hope that rational human beings might be able to agree to legal limits on war's destruction."

    1628

    17.3.1628 Benjamin Rudyerd in the English House of Commons: "This is the crisis of Parliaments: we shall know by this if parliaments live or die. If we persevere, the King to draw one way, the parliament another, the Commonwealth must sink in the midst."

    1629

    Charles 1st decided to rule without Parliament. Parliament was not recalled until 1640

    1629 John Parkinson's Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris Or A garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English air will permit to be nursed up. With a kitchen garden of all manner of herbs, roots and fruits, for meat or sauce used with us, and an orchard of all sort of fruitbearing trees and shrubs fit for our land. Together with the right ordering, planting and preserving of them and their uses and virtues Collected by John Parkinson Apothecary of London.

    1632

    In Italy Galileo published his A Dialogue on the Two Principal Systems of the World-Ptolemaic and Copernican.   See Ptolemy and Copernicus. Notes on Hobbes and Galileo and Hobbes on Deductions from simple axioms

    The Latin edition (engraving left) was published in 1635, making the book international. In the engraving, Aristotle discusses with Ptolemy (holding an earth centred universe) and Copernicus (whose earth circles the sun)

    If Copernicus was right, where is heaven?

    1632 Inscription on the new gate to the Oxford Physic Garden "Gloriae Dei optimi maximi Honori Caroli I. Regis in Usum Academiae et Reipublicae Henricus Comes Danby, Anno 1632". [To the glory of God and the greatest honour of King Charles I Henry Earl of Danby for the use of both the University and the state in the year 1632]. (source)

    1632 John Locke (author of Two Treatises of Government) born

    1633 In Johnson's edition of Gerard's Herbal he describes two small plants of the American or Western (Occidental) Plane growing in John Tradescant's garden in Lambeth. (Louden 1836). It has been inferred that Tradescant (the younger?) brought seed to England about 1630. See 1670

    1635

    In 1635 there were twenty two master printers of London - Some licensed, some not survivors' history

    31.7.1635 Royal proclamation "For settling of the letter Office of England and Scotland". Origin of the public post office in Britain.

    1637 In France, René Descartes published Discourse de la méthod, a slim book in which he argued reason as the foundation of knowledge and the source of certainty. He also reviewed his previous argument that the body is a machine which, in humans, but not animals, is directed by the soul.

    1640

    November 1640 Hobbes left England to live in Paris because he thought parliament might arrest him as a supporter of the king's powers against parliament.

    1642

    Isaac
    Newton born

    ENGLISH CIVIL WAR

    Saint Simon refers to "the two English revolutions of the 17th century". One I take to be the civil war and the other the bloodless revolution of 1688 [See revolution]

    November 1642 English civil war began between Charles 1st and parliament over the power of each. [See Hobbes, Filmer and Locke]

    1643 Filmer arrested by Parliamentary forces and kept for several months in Leeds Castle, Kent. It is not clear how much of 1643-1647 he was imprisoned, but he was at liberty in 1647

    In 1644 the seven General Baptist churches issued the London Confession which said that men must be allowed to obey their own conscience and understanding. At this time, George Fox (Quaker) was "in great trouble" and desperately seeking spiritual help. In 1647, however, Fox began preaching under the conviction of the "inner light". The civil war, and the republican Commonwealth that followed it, were a period of intense religious ferment, individual thought and social disorder. Knowledge by the inner inspiration of God was known as "enthusiasm". Locke's Essay on Understanding (1690) sought to establish science as a common knowledge that could control the divisiveness of enthusiasm.

    1644 Qing Dynasty in China

    1645

    19.2.1645 New Model Army Ordinance. "The scoutmaster-general ... was responsible for reconnaissance and collecting intelligence on enemy movements".

    1646 In Paris Hobbes became mathematical tutor to the exiled Prince of Wales (later Charles 2nd)

    May 1646 King Charles 1st surrenders himself to the Scottish Covenanters, who ally with the English Parliament in the summer. He is still King - But from now on he is a king under duress. From June 1646 he was held by the army. He is still free enough (in prison on the Isle of Wight) to initiate a new civil war by a concluding a military alliance with the Scottish Covenanters that threatened the English Parliament - 1647/1648. (See Open University Civil War Timeline) - archive

    1647/1648 The Westminster Confession: An official document (no longer official in England after 1660) specifying the Bible as a foundation of belief superior to (though not, presumably, contradicted by) nature. [External link to Michael Marlow's introduction]

    1648 Filmer published political pamphlets in support of absolute monarchy and the divine right of king's

    30.1.1648 End of the war between Spain and the Netherlands. Treaty of Münster signed 15.5.1648 (first of the Peace of Westphalia treaties). Karl Marx referred to "the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain" as the "only model" for the English revolution of 1648. The revolt had begun in 1566/1568. [See revolution]

    May to October 1648 Peace of Westphalia - It is argued that the peace treaties recognised the territorial integrity of nation states.

    LIVING WITHOUT A MONARCH

    17.8.1648 - 19.8.1648 Battle of Preston (Lancashire). The New Model Army under Oliver Cromwell defeated the Royalists and Scots commanded by the Duke of Hamilton. End of the Second English Civil War.

    6.12.1648 Begining of "Pride's Purge" removing members of Parliament sympathetic to King Charles and leading to the declaration of a republic. Karl Marx refers to an "English revolution of 1648" in which "the bourgeoisie was allied with the modern aristocracy against the monarchy, the feudal aristocracy and the established church." [See revolution]. The purged parliament is known as the Rump Parliament.

    30.1.1649 Execution of Charles 1st.

    From a German engraving published in 1649.
    Abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords in England. Commonwealth established. Under the Commonwealth Filmer lost some of his property as a result of his loyalty to the king

    The Interregnum (period between reigns) was a republican period in the England, Ireland and Scotland, ending with the restoration of Charles 2nd in 1660

    1650 Rene Descartes died

    Between 1650 and 1654, James Usher's Annales Veteris at Novi Testamenti (years of the old and new testaments) dated the events in the Bible. The creation was fixed as taking place in 4,004 BC. Usher's dates were not only printed in the margins of many Bibles, but were accepted as scientific for a long time. See 2 - 3 -

    April 1651 Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan or The Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil published in London (Hobbes still in France). It distressed some of his previous supporters because it defended absolute rule, but not necessarily monarchical rule.

    Lecture notes on Hobbes
    Social Science History, chapter two: Hobbes, Filmer and Locke
    Extracts from Leviathan
    Hobbes weblinks

    Louise 14th and absolutism France
    7.9.1651 Procession to mark the formal ending of the minority of Louis 14 of France. Hobbes watched the procession from his window. From 1661, when he threw his chief minister into prison, until his death in 1715, Louis 14 ruled personally. "L'etat c'est moi" (I am the state), he said.
    See his system of power and Wollstonecraft's comments

    imitation materials Roland Barthes (1955): "the first vestimentary postiches date back to the rise of capitalism". Postiche (false) can be used for a hairpiece. Louis 14 used hairpieces to supplement his thinning hair, before having his head completely shaved and wearing a wig.

    End of 1651 Hobbes returned to England

    1652

    Quaker disturbances in north-east England. George Fox and others drawing people out of the national church and setting up an alternative organisation.

    1652 - 1674 Anglo-Dutch Wars

    1653

    20.4.1653 Oliver Cromwell, Commander in Chief of the Parliamentary Army, dissolved Parliament.

    30.5.1653 Sir Robert Filmer died

    16.12.1653 Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector under a constitution that combined his rule with a Parliament. First volume of Biblia Sacra Polyglotta published. It hadthe support of Cromwell.

    1654 Community care under the Old Poor Law

    1657 Sixth volume of Biblia Sacra Polyglotta. The six volumes included texts in Latin, ancient Greek, Arabic, Chaldean, Hebrew, Ethiopian, Persian, Samaritan and Syriac. Italian Wikipedia. Included Onkelos Targum.

    1658 The Annals of the World by James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh. Church of Ireland. London. Printed by E. Tyler, for F. Crook, and G. Bedell. 1658 Available online.


    RESTORATION and ROYAL SOCIETY

    1660 Restoration of English monarchy under Charles 2nd, who attempted to unify the country around a common religion. Charles landed at Dover on 25.5.1660 (Pepys). From then to 1662 there was a period attempting to include moderate puritans (not baptists, ranters and quakers) in the established church.

    " In the reign of Charles II. a degree of licentiousness was deemed the characteristic of a liberal education. It was connected, according to the notions of those times, with generosity, sincerity, magnanimity, loyalty, and proved that the person who acted in this manner, was a gentleman, and not a puritan" Smith, A. 1759

    Mary McIntosh (1968) says "there was no homosexual role, with its associated preclusion of heterosexual activity and justificatory belief systems" before this. The homosexual role "did not emerge in England until towards the end of the late 17th century."

    28.11.1660 Meeting that decided to start a "College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning" which led to the "The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge" (the Royal Society). John Locke became a member 26.11.1668. Isaac Newton became a member 11.1.1672. Thomas Hobbes did not become a member.

    External link to Royal Society web:. This includes a history of the Society and (via library and archives) information on its members.

    Trailblazing timeline 1650-2005 To celebrate the 350th anniversary in 2010 - Articles published by the Royal Society. - See Philosophical Transactions

    18.12.1660 Charles 2nd granted a charter to The Company of the Royal Adventurers into Africa.

    1661

    1.1.1661 to 4.1.1661 Venner's Rising.

    1662

    19.5.1662 Act of Uniformity requiring the use of the Book of Common Prayer and an oath of allegiance.

    Act of Settlement said one acquired a right to relief in a parish by being born there, married there or serving an apprenticeship there. Adam Smith later (1776) criticized this Act for interfering with the mobility of labour.

    Ed Stephan's A Sociology Timeline begins with the birth of John Graunt on 20.4.1620. In 1662 Graunt published his Observations on the Bills of Mortality which drew social conclusions from the tables of London deaths (See words). The time line concludes with Ed Stephan's own The Division of Territory in Society in 1995.

    "We have (though perhaps too much at Random) determined the number of the inhabitants of London to be about 384,000"

    1662: Simon Patrick in Brief account of the new sect of Latitude Men, together with some reflections on the New Philosophy argues that the mechanical idea of the world will mend a clock, but the scholastic will not. A fashionable version of the mechanical philosophy is that everything is the result of the inter-action of atoms. There was a hope (soon to be disappointed) that microscopes would reveal this. - See external link Atomism in the 17th century

    1662 Anonymous publication of The Port Royal Logic: La logique, ou l'art de penser (logic or the art of thinking), by Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) and Pierre Nicole (1623-1695) of the Jansenist convent of Port Royal just outside Paris. Written in everyday French, and translated into everyday English and other modern languages, it popularised "the art of using reason well in the acquisition of the knowledge of things". (See Mill A System of Logic)

    29.1.1663 Death of Robert Sanderson who is said to have planted the London Plane trees at Buckden Towers in Cambridgeshire.

    12.10.1663 Abbortive plot "to re-establish a gospel ministry and magistracy; to restore the Long Parliament; to relieve themselves from the excise and all subsidies and to reform all orders and degrees of men, especially the lawyers and clergy" did not storm Leeds in Yorkshire. Distancing Quakers from the plotters, Francis Howgill said of one of them, Reginald Fawcett "has been disowned by us these six years, nor do I believe he hath pretended to come among us these two years".

    1663 Shecinah: or, A demonstration of the divine presence in the places of religious worship by John Stillingfleet, rector of Beckingham, Lincolnshire (died 1687) defended the church against the Quakers.

    February 1665 Announcement at an ordinary meeting of the Royal Society of the publication of Philosophical Transactions, which the society claims as the "world's first and longest-running journal of science".

    Philosophical Transactions was initially a project of Henry Oldenburg (born about 1619, died 5.9.1677) who was secretary to the Royal Society and its foreign correspondent. The early journal consisted of letter-excerpts, reviews and summaries of recently-published books, and accounts of observations and experiments from European natural philosophers (scientists). After his death it continued to be produced by a succession of individual proprietors until 1752, when the Royal Society took over financial responsibility for it.

    See Royal Society events to mark 350th anniversary and Philosophical Transactions: 350 years of publishing at the Royal Society (1665 - 2015) and 350 year birthday


    Sunday 2.9.1666 for five days: Fire of London.
    Bethlem rebuilt. and Quakers re-located. - See St Paul's 1697

    Brick was widely adopted as a London building material after the great fire. See Plough Court. - five ways the fire changed London

    Fire insurance: Nicholas Barbon's "Fire Office" established in 1667. Sun Fire Office established in 1710. See insurance history.

    15.12.1666 three ships come sailing in

    1667 First edition of John Milton's book long poem Paradise Lost in which he sought to "justify the ways of God to men". See text.

    About 1670 Henry and Flood (1919) suggest the possible origin of the London Plane tree in the Oxford Physic Garden as a hybrid between the Oriental and Occidental Plane. See Platantus. But see Buckden Planes - The Ely Plane is consistent with this date.

    about 1670 Maypole song

    1672-1678 Franco-Dutch War

    1673 The first of the letters from Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632- 1723) to the Royal Society, in which he described what he saw through his single lens magnifier (microscope). Amongst the small living things he looked at were sperm, blood cells, bacteria, algae (spirogyra) and protozoa (vorticella). See external link

    1676

    9.10.1676 From Leeuwenhoek: "In the year 1675 I discovered living creatures in rain water, which had stood but few days in a new earthen pot... those little animals appearing to me ten thousand times less than those called water fleas... which may be perceived in the water with the naked eye. The first sort by me discovered ... I.. observed to consist of ... clear globules... When these animalcula or living atoms did move, they put forth two little horns, continually moving themselves... " [Animalcula: diminutive of animal. Little animal. Wikipedia and Gilbert and Sullivan.

    1679 Thomas Hobbes died.

    1680 Patriarcha by Sir Robert Filmer (died 1653) published. This supported absolute divine right of kings.

    1680 Possible date for planting of the Ely Plane. The Plane at Barn Elms (In the Ranalagh Club grounds in 1919) was considered by Henry and Flood to be the same size and so they suggested the same date. It is known to have existed in the mid-eighteenth century.

    22.1.1680 Locke bought a copy of Patriarcha. It was probably at this period that Locke wrote the first treatise on Government (published 1689/1680), criticising Filmer. If so he would have kept it secret for fear of the king's police.

    March 1680 London Penny Post introduced by William Dockwra. (Link to British Postal Museum and Archive). The service used coffee houses and similar places as collecting points. "... the coffee houses in their golden age between 1680 and 1730" (Habermas, J. 1962/1989 p.32).

    1681

    Nehemiah Grew Musæum regalis societatis; or, A catalogue and description of the natural and artificial rarities belonging to the Royal Society and preserved at Gresham Colledge 1st edition. "The Sloath" [is] "An Animal of so slow a motion, that he will be three or four days, at least, in climbing up and coming down a Tree".

    1682

    Between 26.8.1682 and 10.9.1682 Edmund Halley observed the comet which was later to be named after him. (Perihelion: 15.9.1682 at 2ø 53' Aquarius), and noticed how similar its path was to the recorded movements of comets seen in 1531 and 1607.

    Late November 1682 Notices in London Gazette the (private) Penny Post having been closed as unlawful, government officers would take it over, employing the same staff and using the same receiving houses, from Monday 11.12.1682.

    Summer 1683 For his safety, Locke left England to live in Holland.

    7.12.1683 Algernon Sidney beheaded for High Treason, partly as a consequence of a book he had written (not published) criticising
    Filmer's Patriarcha



    1685 James 2nd English king. He tried to enforce Catholic toleration.

    1686 First edition, in Latin, of Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (English translation 1729). See also 1713, 1723, 1740.


    1689
    Geometry and war "The New Method of Fortification as Practised by Monsieur de Vauban, Engineer-General of France and New Treatise of Geometry were published in English in 1691. They translated a book published in French in Amsterdam in 1689.

    For a "perfect" understanding of fortifications, it was necessary to learn geometry, and the gentleman on the frontispiece (left) are pointing to geometric designs.

    The Preface to my (1762) edition says the book is designed for people "addicted to the study of this part of the Mathematics, who have not the leisure or opportunity to read over the vast systems of voluminous writers... It contains... all that is requsite for the theory and practice of a good soldier".

    November/December 1688 Glorious Revolution: William and Mary (protestants) were invited to become king and queen by the English parliament. James 2nd fled to France.   -   Constitutional monarchy - The monarch having been selected by parliament, under conditions laid down by parliament, Divine Right ceased to be the legitimating argument for monarchy. Legitimacy could be built on the consensual grounds of theorists such as John Locke. This secular (non-religious) base reduced the need for all loyal subjects to be members of the established church.

    "... after the Revolution the glory of the Court grew dim... Patronage was sought elsewhere, in the lobbies of Parliament, in the ante- chambers of Ministers, in the country houses of the... aristocracy - finally in an appeal to the educated public". (Trevelyan, G.M. 1942 p.338)

    1689 Bill of Rights and Act of Toleration

    1689/90 John Locke's Two Treatises of Government published. They were probably first drafted in 1679/1680. The Two Treatises has 1690 on its cover, but it and his Letter on Toleration were both in print by the autumn of 1689. Both were published anonymously.

    1690 Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding published. This work he signed.

    1693 Locke's Thoughts Concerning Education published

    January 1693 Edmund Halley's "An estimate of the degrees of the mortality of mankind, drawn from curious tables of the births and funerals at the city of Breslaw; with an attempt to ascertain the price of annuities upon lives" published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London

    1694

    Mary Astell's A serious proposal to the ladies, for the advancement of their true and greatest interest. By a lover of her sex. Part 1. London:

    "The Incapacity, if there be any, is acquired not natural; and none of their follies are so necessary, but that they might avoid them if they pleased themselves."

    27.9.1694 Royal Charter establishing "The Governor and Company of the Bank of England", with the exclusive right to issue bank notes in England and Wales, in exchange for a loan of £1.2 million to the government.

    1696

    Gregory King's manuscript Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England, 1696, was not published until 1801.
    King proposed using the number of houses (where available) to estimate the population. There were 6,790 houses in Norwich City. He calculated a population of 28,546. This was calculated by multiplying by 4.2. [almost!] A local population census in 1673 had recorded 28,881 residents then living in the city. Using figures like this, historians have concluded that Norwich was the second largest city in England after London.

    about 1698 "warm springs" at Matlock, Derbyshire first noticed by Rev Fern of Matlock and Mr Heyward of Cromford. They passed to a George Wragg who built a few small rooms adjoining to the bath. Smith and Penel of Nottingham bought it and built stables and made a coach road to Matlock Bridge in 1702, shortly afterwards the road was continued down the valley towards Cromford, and a passage blasted through the rock near Cromford opening communication with the southern part of Derbyshire. (Ron McKeown) - The original (Old Bath) spring had it source 100 feet above the river Derwent and (early 20th century) discharged about 10,000 gallons an hour into the swimming bath of the then Royal Hotel. The average temperature of the water is 68 derees farenheit (20 degrees celsius). By 1802 three springs had been discovered. The second supplied the New Bath and the third [Fountain] Bath. The Thermal Pool of the present Matlock Bath Aquarium is said to be fed with 20 degrees celsius water from a spring around 2,000 feet below ground at a rate of 600,000 gallons a day. See 1734 - 1787 - 1810 - 1818 - 1842 - 1844 - Peak District Information - brief history -

    1697 Britain began to keep records of the gap between its imports and its exports (the "balance of trade"). When nations kept figures from year to year (time series) in economics, weather or whatever, it made possible the production of graphs like the following which shows the British balance of trade from 1697 to 1925. Click on the picture to read the article by James Galbraith from which the graph comes.

    See also economic cycles - UK balance of payments crisis 1947 - and peaks and troughs of USA economic cycles

    1697 to 1807 Bristol (as well as London) part of the slave trade.

    2.12.1697 Christopher Wren's new St Paul's Cathedral, in the City of London, consecrated - a classical construction replacing the medieval old St Paul's destroyed by fire thirty two years before. The design for the dome was not agreed until 1697 and not completed until 1710.

    1699 Seed of a sweet scented pea sent from Sicily to England and Amsterdam. It had a small, two coloured (purple and maroon) flower, but a strong scent. Later named Lathyrus odoratus. The sweet pea self- fertilises and this led Francis Galton, in 1875 to select it for his experiments on hereditary transmission.

    *********


    18TH CENTURY

    Historical roots of the Public Sphere (Öffentlichkeit)

      "A public sphere that functioned in the political realm arose first in Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century" (Habermas, J. 1962/1989 p.57).

      "The clubs, salons and coffee-houses (there were 3000 [coffee-houses] in London in the early 1700s) supported by the growing and increasingly free press formed a critical forum, in which gentlemen independent of the court and other political institutions could get together on a basis of relative equality and discuss the great events of the day" ( Outhwaite, W. 1994 on Habermas, J. 1962).
    See Winchester Journalism on "Courants"

    1700 Mosaize historie der Hebreeuwse kerke (four volumes) by Willem Goeree (1635-1711), Dutch bookseller and theologian. Goeree beieved in God's two books: the Bible and Nature, using history, physics and geology to explian Bible stories.

    1700 Leonard Plukenet's Almagesti botanici mantissa published in London. On page 153 this contains what is thought to be the earliest written description of what we now know as the London Plane tree: "Platantus orientalis et occidentalis miedliam faciem obtinens, Amnericanus, globulis grandioribus, foliis splenidenitibus atris." [See Oxford Physic Garden

    1701 Thomas Bray founded The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which was later abbreviated to Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

    1702 Queen Anne succeded King William as the ruler of Britain. She gave her name to a style of architecture which was to last. Picture from Panoyre and Ryan 1958 p.123, who argue that the style fitted the "classical way of building to the ordinary well-to-do gentleman's home"
    It might also be said to adapt classical principles to British rain, as the roof slopes but hips instead of gables meant a horizontal eave line could be preserved all round the building. Mathematical proportion is kept with more comfort and curvaciousness. Style and convenience suited the new "sash" windows whose "ingenious mechanism", Panoyre and Ryan say, "shows clearly the new scientific approach". These spread to domestic building for all classes in the following two centuries.


    26.11.1703 Midnight: start of the Great Storm in southern Britain. It lasted until 6am [??]. Between 8,000 and 15,000 people were killed, a fifth of the Royal Navy's seaman drowned. Thirteen navy ships were lost, as well as merchant ships. Thousands of building were damaged or destroyed, millions of trees lost and the Eddystone Lighthouse swept away.

    19.1.1704 Day of fasting in repentance for the sins of the nation that had provoked the late storm. (Declared by Queen Anne)

    28.10.1704 Death of John Locke.


    About 1705 Birth of
    Ukawsaw Gronniosaw

    1705 Edmund Halley in Synopsis Astronomia Cometicae argued that comet sightings of 1456, 1531, 1607, and 1682 were of the same comet. He predicted it would be seen again in 1758. When it was, the comet became generally known as Halley's Comet. See 1910 - 1986.

    1706

    22.7.1706 Treaty of Union between England and Scotland leading to Acts of Union (1706 and 1707) which established a common Parliament of Great Britain in London.

    30.3.1707 Death of Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (Born May 1633) Maréchal de France and Commissaire général des fortifications from 1678 to 1703.

    Watts hymns 1707 Isaac Watts Hymns and Spiritual Songs" in three books: 1 - "Collected from the Scriptures"; 2 - "Composed on Divine Subjects"; 3 - "Prepared for the Lord's Supper" re-wrote the Jewish psalms from a Christian perspective, providing a new sung theology for the established anglican and disenting churches.

    1708

    The 1708 Parochial Libraries Act (England and Wales) sought to preserve libraries that had been established for the use of parish clergy.

    1710

    John Arbuthnot's "An Argument for Divine Providence, taken from the Constant Regularity observed in the Births of both Sexes" (external text) published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society for 1710. "... perhaps the first application of probability to social statistics and includes the first formal test of significance. In this paper Arbuthnot claims to demonstrate that divine providence, not chance, governs the sex ratio at birth." (J J O'Connor and E F Robertson)

    1710 The dome of St Paul's completed.

    This is England's only classical cathedral. It speaks of proportion and reason as well as grandeur and adoration and was the tallest building in the City.

    See maths in the city

    1710 Company of London Insurers took over the Exchange House Fire Office, established by Charles Povey in 1708. Povey's company used the Sun symbol as its firemark and was commonly known as the Sun Fire Office. In 1710 it formally became a partnership with that name. A separate department for "country" (outside London) policies was set up in 1793. Sun Life Assurance Society was founded in 1810 (as part of the Sun Fire Office) to provide life insurance. First foreign agency started 1836. Its first major overseas market was in Germany. Business outside Europe in 1863, with an agency at Smyrna in Turkey . Subsequent expansion to India, the Far East, China, Australasia, the United States, South Africa, the West Indies, South America and Canada. Became Sun Insurance Office Ltd in 1891, In 1959 merged with the Alliance Insurance Company in the Sun Alliance Group. Since 1996 part of the Royal and Sun Alliance Group plc. (Records at the Metropolitan Archives) original Sun Fire Office log
    Original logo from The Early Days of the Sun Fire Office by Edward Baumer

    1711
    David
    Hume born

    1711 -1712 Daily London journal The Spectator sought "to bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses".

    1712 Jean Jacques Rousseau (author of The Social Contract) born

    1713 Second edition of Newton's Principles contained Roger Cotes' Preface trying to show how Newton's practice was consistent with the new ( Baconian) inductive science.

    1713 Posthumous publication of Ars conjectandi (Art of Conjecturing) by Jacques Bernoulli (1655-1705), said by some to represent the "beginning of the mathematical theory of probability". A Bernoulli trial is an experiment like tossing a coin in which there are two possible outcomes. The probability of the different outcomes in a series of trials is calculated. In coin tossing, the "binomial" probability of all heads in one toss is 0.5., in two tosses 0.25, in three tosses 0.125, and so on. See Probability

    1714 First of the Georges succeded Queen Anne as the ruler of Britain. The term Georgian is applied to architecture over a long period.

    Pictures from Panoyre and Ryan 1958
    The development of terraced houses conserves space in towns
    867 to 869 High Road, Tottenham are, according to English Heritage, early eighteenth century houses. They are constructed of red brick.

    1.9.1715 Louis 15th (aged 5) King of France. Died 10.5.1774. The term Rococo "usually covers the kind of ornament, style and design associated with Louis 15th's reign and the beginning of that of Louis 16". (1835 Dictionary of the French Academy) [See Habermas]

    6.3.1715, and for three nights: Northern lights (aurora borealis) visible in London, and in Europe from Prussia to Italy. The last aurora to be seen so far south was in 1621.
    1719 Daniel Defoe, author of the account of the Great Storm of 1703, published his most famous work, the story of Robinson Crusoe. See 1722 - 1724 - 1870

    1720

    August 1720 Peak of prices in shares on the London before they fell. The burst of this "South Sea" bubble coincided with the end of the "Mississippi" bubble in Paris towards the end of the year and led to collapse in Amsterdam as well. Foucault calls this the "disaster of 1720" (Foucault The Order of Things)

    1722 A Journal of the Plague Year being observations or memorials of the most remarkable occurrences, as well public as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London. Never made public before Signed H.F. Now attributed to Daniel Defoe.

    1723

    27.2.1723 David Hume, aged 12, started at Edinburgh University. He did not take a degree, but for two or three years was exposed to the new philosophy particularly that of Sir Isaac Newton.

    1724

    1724 First publication of Logic, or The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry After Truth With a Variety of Rules to Guard Against Error in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, as well as in the Sciences by Isaac Watts

    1724Immanuel Kant, author of the Critiques of Pure and Practical Reason, born.

    Between 1724 and 1727, Daniel Defoe published A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain, divided into circuits or journies. "When a survey is demanded of Queen Anne's England and its everyday life, our thoughts turn to Daniel Defoe, riding solitary and observant through the countryside" (Trevelyan, G.M. 1942 p.293) [But note that the journeys were through Great Britain and so included Scotland.]

    "London was, in Defoe's day, the only town in England that could be reckoned large by modern standards. Bristol and Norwich, which came next to it in population, had in the 1720s probably no more than 30,000 inhabitants." Greater London possibly half a million. (Cole. Persons and Periods p63)


    1726

    Westwood Trust established by London Quakers for "the putting out to Apprentice such two poor Friends sons within the limits of the Monthly Meeting as are not entitled to any allowances of that sort" - See 1958

    1726 William Rufus Chetwood's The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Robert Boyle (London) contains the sentence "There may be about 20,000 Whites (or I should say Portuguese, for they are none of the whitest,) and about treble that number of slaves." [White distinguishing people by skin colour. Oxford English Dictionary entries go back to 1604]. See 1737


    1727 Isaac Newton died

    1728

    1729 English translation of Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World (Published, in Latin, in 1686)

    1730 to 1740 Possibly about here that the continental word bronze was introduced into English to distinguish copper and tin alloys from the modern brass that used a zinc compound. Johnson's dictionary (1755) says brass is a "yellow metal made of copper and lapis calaminaris" [copper and zinc oxide]

    1734: The Koran: Commonly called the Alkoran of Mohammed An English translation, directly from arabic, by George Sales, a London lawyer, who included a long Preliminary Discourse explaining the history and context of Mohammed. Served for centuries its declared purpose of making the Koran (Quran) available to christians. My copy (Frederick Warne 1889), first bought for the Seafarers' Education Service, then joined the small library of Herbert Henry Moss, a primitive methodist, from whom I would borrow it in the late 1950s.

    1734 Peter Shaw's (published) Chemical Lectures distinguished between "Analytical Chemistry, or, the art of analysing vegetable, animal and mineral substances, and resolving them into different parts or principles" ("Resolution of Bodies") and "Synthetic Chemistry, or, the art of recomposing bodies".

    1734 "A significant moment in the history of tourism" when a new bath house was erected at Matlock Bath and, soon afterwards the Old Bath Hotel opened there.

    1735

    The Table of the Animal Kingdom (Regnum Animale) in Carolus Linnaeus's first edition (1735) of Systema Naturae (System of Nature) includes "Homo" (Latin: man) in "Anthropomorphia" (Latin: of human form) along with "Simia" (Latin: ape or monkey) and "Bradypus" (Latin: sloths). There are two Bradypes: Uanau being Bradypus Didactylus (two-toed) and Ai, Bradypus Tridactylus (three-toed)

    Homo is divided into European, American, Asian and African. In the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758) Linnaeus introduced the term Homo sapiens (sapiens Latin: wise). The full title of System of Nature (in English) is "System of nature through the three kingdoms of nature, according to classes, orders, genera and species, with characters, differences, synonyms, places". [See Race] - See Linnaeus and the New Classification

    America
    1736

    Publication of Matthew Hale's History of the Pleas of the Crown (1736), vol. 1, ch. 58, p. 629: "But the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract." [See domestic violence]

    1736

    Joshua Ward's Great Vitriol Works in Twickenham produced sulphuric acid on a commercial scale using a process discovered in the seventeenth century by Johann Glauber in which sulphur is burned together with saltpetre (potassium nitrate), in the presence of steam. As the saltpetre decomposes, it oxidises the sulphur to sulphur trioxide, which combines with water to produce sulphuric acid.

    1737

    John Atkins published A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West Indies 1723-35 in which he wrote "I am persuaded the black and white Race have, ab origine, sprung from different-coloured first Parents" (p.39).

    1737 In Carolina, John Wesley published A Collection of Psalms and Hymns

    1739

    11.11.1739 John Wesley preached for the first time in his new London headquarters, the Foundery Chapel. Hymns and Sacred Poems published, including reference to Shecinah.

    1740 David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. Hume attempted to be the Newton of Social Science.

    See Social Science History, chapter three:
    What is science?:
    The Ideas of Locke, Hume and Wollstonecraft

    Extracts from Hume: on the origin of our ideas and on virtue and vice

    31.5.1740 to 17.8.1786 Reign of Friedrich 2nd of Prussia (Frederick the Great), who modernized the state bureaucracy and promoted religious tolerance

    1741 The Garden of the Soul, or, A manual of spiritual exercises and instructions for Christians, who living in the world, aspire to devotion by Richard Challoner, a Roman Catholic Bishop who had returned to London in 1730 and ministered to catholics in secret. In English, it was a favourite text (revised from time to time) until the mid twentieth century. Challoner's revision of the Douai Bible, published in 1752, and became the standard Catholic bible translation used in England. See Joan Hughes 1948.

    1744 Oranges and Lemons - bells of London

    1745

    1745: First edition of John Mason's Self-knowledge, a treatise shewing the nature and benefit of that important science and the way to attain it. (Google books) "One of the most popular works of moral advice and self-help of its time... By 1836 it had gone through more than twenty editions... in Britain and America, and had been translated into Welsh and several European languages". (Alan Ruston, DNB)

    16.8.1745 Charles Edward Stuart landed in Scotland beginning the Jacobite rising against the Hanovarians. March south ended at Derby on 4.12.1745, where the decision was made to retreat to Scotland. London was preparing for an invasion and even the Quakers assisted in preparations for defence.

    1746

    "The old order ends"
    16.4.1746 Defeat of the Stuart army, under Charles Edward, by the Hanovarian army at the Battle of Culloden Moor. "No individual soldier in the Stuart Army has a grave... grey tombstones have written upon them that here is the grave of the MacDonalds, here is the grave of the Mackintoshes, and so forth". (Cole and Postgate 1949, chapter one) [The photograph below was taken by Kirsty Smith 15.10.2004]
    Time and space
    "The confict between this very ancient society and the modern society which was challenging it" was settled after Cullloden. "In the language of Marxian economistss", Charles Edward had marched "with a feudal army into into a bourgeois society" (Cole and Postgate 1949, chapter one). See also George Carnegie

    1746 Abury [Avebury], a Temple of the British Druids: and some others described; wherein is a more particular account of the first and patriarchal religion; and of the peopling the British Islands ... By William Stukeley. His Stonehenge, a temple restored to the British Druids was published in 1740 - External link to Earth Mysteries website archive

    1746 Champion's Brass Works established at Warmley, near Bristol, by the Quaker industrialist, William Champion (1709-1789). It closed in 1768, and in 1769 an inventory of what was in the factory was made. This shows that everything produced was for the African trade - probably to be exchanged for slaves. (Dalrymple and Horton 14.12.2003)

    See John P. Birchall - Bristol museums - Paul Townsend

    1747

    September 1747 Engraving "The Engine to Raise Water by Fire" The Universal Magazine, volume 1, August 1747 (London, John Hinton), pp 163-165. [An engraving of Newcomen's Atmospheric Engine] (external link)

    1748

    In The Spirit of the Laws, Charles Secondat "Baron de Montesquieu" (l689-l755) explored natural and human laws in a way that enabled people to analyse society as a whole, in relation to its parts, in relation to its history and in relation to its environment. [Montesquieu's satirical Lettres persanes (Persian Letters) was written in 1721]

    Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) published L'homme machine. Translated into English as Man a Machine (external link) in 1749 - See Foucault

    Eulogy on La Mettrie by Frederick 2nd (the "Great"), King of Prussia (external link)

    1749 First volume of The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particuliŠre, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), published. Thirty six volumes were published during his life and continued in eight more volumes after his death by his colleagues. Completed 1804.


    Jeremy
    Bentham, (author of A Fragment on Government ) born
    Olympe de Gouges (author of Declaration of the Rights of Woman) born Marie Gouze

    1750s "Until the 1750s the Polyanthus, due to the dominance of the red gene, consisted only of red, and dull muddy or sepia flowers. At this date a new variation occurred, one which sparked off the interest of the workers in the industrial towns and became one of the most popular of flowers. Today this flower, the 'Gold-Laced Polyanthus' has almost disappeared, though due to the tenacity of an American hybridist a new strain has been introduced. The interest in the Gold Lace Polyanthus was immense, and remained so for almost a century, however by the early 1870s they had been discarded and virtually died out." John S. Harrison 1976, who speaks of "an immense following especially in the industrial areas of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands" and suggests "the anomic workers drawn into the infant conurbations by the necessity of work, gained solace from their abject misery either by indulging in gin drinking, or by creating tiny gardens of plants which represented the freshness, freedom and beauty they had forsaken in search of a living."


    1750
    Jean Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts.

    16.1.1750 A vivid red arch of light in the night sky, sending up wavering streams, visible throughout Britain. The "remarkable Aurora Borealis" "seems to have drawn as much attention, as that in 1716". 23.1.1750 Fiery clouds seen over Dublin and Oxford. 1.2.1750 "A prodigious tempest of thunder and lightning, with wind, rain and hail" on Bristol "overwhelming the inhabitants with consternation". 8.2.1750 London earthquake, felt in Bristol also. 8.3.1750 another, more violent, earthquake, which, being a month after the first, led to predictions (not fulfilled) of third on 8.4.1750.
    "Little philosophers, who see a little, and but very little into natural causes, may think they see enough to account for what happens, without calling in the aid and assistance of a special providence; not considering, that God who made all things, never put any thing out of his own power, but has all nature under command to serve his purposes in the government of the world." (Thomas Sherlock. A Letter from the Lord Bishop of London, to the Clergy and People of London and Westminster; On Occasion of the Late Earthquakes)

    See also See Methodist Hymns

    British Act of 1750 "for Regulating the Commencement of the Year; and for Correcting the Calendar now in Use" Time and space

    In England and Wales the day after 24.3.1750 was 25.3.1751 because, until the Act of 1750 changed this, the new year began on 25 March (Lady Day). Under the Act of 1750, the day after 31.12.1751 was 1.1.1752. So 1751 was a short year - 25 March to 31 December. See 1752

    1751 Experiments and observations on electricity: made at Philadelphia in America, by Mr. Benjamin Franklin, and communicated in several letters to Mr. P. [Peter] Collinson of London, F.R.S.. Peter Collinson was a merchant, born a Quaker, who traded with Philadelphia. America

    1751 First volume of Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres. Encyclopaedia or a systematic Dictionary of the sciences, arts and trades, by a society of men of letters. Put in order and published by M Diderot. The mathematical part by M. d'Alembert,

    The full set (17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates) was published between 1751 and 1772. It contained 74,000 articles written by more than 130 authors

    1752

    September 1752 Under the Act of 1750, Britain and her dominions "in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America" switched from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar. Eleven days were omitted from the calendar and the day after 2.9.1752 was 14.9.1752.

    1753 The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart by Robert Wood

    1754

    22.3.1754 Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce founded in London by William Shipley [Wikipedia] and others, who "sought to promote economic, scientific and artistic progress by publicising new techniques and granting monetary and honorary awards to inventors and artists of promise". (National Archive - Green Plaque - RSA website)

    1755

    Micromégas by Voltaire, a short novel telling the story of inhabitants of the star Sirius (the brightest star in the night sky) and the planet Saturn to earth.

    Rousseau's A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.
    Published in Amsterdam
    The cover engraving associates liberty with equality. Liberty - Equality
    lower than the brutes

    15.4.1755 First edition of A Dictionary of the English Language: in which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers. To which are prefixed, a history of the language, and an English grammar. by Samuel Johnson

    Saturday 1.11.1755 The Lisbon earthquake. See Wikipedia

    1756

    William Godwin born. He was to develop a political philosophy to formalise and show the foundations of radical ones like Rousseau's preceding his.

    29.1.1756 Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia elected a Fellow of the Royal Society as the one "who first suggested the experiments to prove the analogy between lightning and electricity". Peter Collinson was one of those who proposed him America

    18.5.1756 Declaration or war between Britain and France. Official start of the global "seven years war". Spain and Portugal in war from 1762.

    1757

    14.3.1757 Execution of Admiral John Byng

    1758

    Tenth edition of Linnaeus's Systema Naturae - See Wikipedia

    5.1.1758 Drawing of the "skeleton of an allegator" in the Allom Rock near Whitby, Yorkshire described in communications in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society from William Chapman, read 4.5.1758, and from John Wooler, read 23.11.1758. (online - offline 1 - 2). The fossil in 1758 was incomplete but was said to have been washed by the sea for ten years previous and parts may have been removed by "curious persons". This specimen of the Whitby crocodile may have given to the British Museum in 1781. If so, it was missing by 1842. (Penny Cyclopaedia 1842). Fortunately, other specimens were found.

    A comet that was sighted late in 1758 and, passed perihelion (closest distance to the Sun) on 13.3.1759 was named in Edmund Halley's honour. [Astronomers took considerable effort to find the comet's predicted return. The comet was eventually found by the German amateur astronomer Johann Georg Palitzsch on the night of 26.12.1758-27.12.1758. It was traced by a number of astronomers up to June 1759.

    1759

    Voltaire's Candide, ou l'Optimisme; traduit de l'Allemand de M. le Docteur Ralph Candide's optimism was qualified by (amongst other things) the Lisbon earthquake - the seven year's war - and the execution of Admiral Byng

    Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments

    15.1.1759 The, new, "British Museum", in Montague House, opened to the public, complete with reading room, manuscripts, natural history specimens, old coins and medals, prints and drawings, and exhibits of strange objects from other cultures. museum history

    1759 Hymns on the expected invasion 1759. Published by Strahan in London. Anonymous. Written by Charles Wesley . 12 pages. With: Wesley, C. "Hymns to be used on the Thanksgiving-Day, Nov. 29, 1759 and after it": 36 pages.

    1760

    The General Subscription Library at Warrington established "without any distinction of sects or parties". See Leeds Library.

    1761

    6.6.1761 Transit of Venus -

    "Despite the fact that this transit took place during the latter half of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), a worldwide conflict involving the major powers of the time and their colonies, it was observed by many astronomers from around sixty locations ranging from China to England and from South Africa to Norway as part of the world's first multinational scientific collaboration" (external link)

    1761 Bridgewater Canal opened to transport coal from Worsley to Manchester. See Bridgewater Foundry

    1762

    4.1.1762 Britain declared war against Spain. Part of seven years war. Portugal later joined on Britain's side. See America (Florida).

    1762 Rousseau's The Social Contract and Emile. The controversial content of Emile made life in France uncomfortable for him. In 1766 and 1767 he lived in England as the guest of David Hume. He died in France in 1778. In 1794 the remains of Rousseau and Voltaire were moved to the Pantheon in Paris.

    Engraving for Epinglier (pin) article in 1762 volume of Diderot's Encyclopédie

    1762 "The New Method of Fortification as Practised by Monsieur de Vauban, Engineer-General of France. Together with a New Treatise of Geometry. The sixth edition, Carefully revised and corrected by the Original. To which are now added, A Treatise of Military Orders, and The Art of Gunnery, or Throwing of Bombs, Balls, etc to hit any Object assigned. The whole work illustrated with thirty-two Copper Plates Published London by C. Hitch and L. Hawes, in Paternoster Row [and others] 213 pages. This is a translation by Abel Swall of late seventeenth century texts. The main part, on Geometry and Fortificatiosn, having been published in English in 1691. My copy belonged to William Fergusone who was an Ensign in the 24th Regiment.

    Economic cycles Jevons calculated that, between 1763 and 1878, commerical crises went in cycles with about 10.4. years between each. The crises were 1763 - 1772-1773 - 1783 - 1793 - 1804-1805 - 1815 - 1825 - 1836-1839 - 1847 - 1857 - 1866 - 1878
    Industrial revolution
    Steam Steam came to power the machines that were developing fast (particularly in textile industries of England and Scotland), creating factories where people worked to the rhythm of the machine. Piston steam engines had been used to pump water since the end of the 17th century. In 1763 James Watt repaired a model of a steam engine designed by Thomas Newcombe. In the 1760s, Watt created more powerful engines by condensing the steam in a vessel separate from the cylinder. These made steam engines an alternative to water wheels, and moved industry from the side of highland streams to lowland coal-fields. In 1780s America and Britain, steam was first used to power paddle boats. The first rail- running steam carriages appeared in the first years of the 19th century. The revolutionary impact of steam became clear to everyone in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s as a network of railways was constructed, affecting every aspect of people's lives. Tennyson explained it to masses of English speaking readers six years before Marx and Engels explained it to small groups of revolutionaries in Europe.

    23.12.1763 "An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances. By the late Rev. Mr. Bayes, communicated by Mr. Price, in a letter to John Canton, M. A. and F. R. S." read to the Royal Society.

    10.2.1763 Treaty of Paris concluding the seven year war

    1764

    Beccaria's Essay on Crimes and Punishment

    About 1765 Leonhard Euler's Elements of Algebra

    1766 England and Wales Precipitation (EWP) series begins. Figures now given in millimetres.

    1768

    Joseph Priestley's Essay on the First Principles of Government

    "The good and happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members of any state, is the great standard by which everything relating to that state must finally be determined".

    1768 Leeds Library was founded.

    August 1768 Start of the scientific expedition of the Endeavour, commanded by James Cook, around the world via Polynesia and Australia.

    10.6.1768 Royal Academy of Arts founded by King George 3rd. It excluded engravers. Raymond Williams relates this to the development of a distinction between artist and artisan.

    1769

    3.6.1769 Transit of Venus (external link)

    1770 Georg Friedrich Hegel born

    The phrase sciences morales et politiques was introduced into France about 1770. It is a term representing what we might now call the social sciences. See 1795 (Porter and Ross 9.2003)

    1771 Robert Owen born

    1771 John Wesley's Sermons on Several Occasions contains his sermon "Of Hell", arguing for the reality of eternal fire as divine punishment: "during the present laws of nature, the element of fire does dissolve and consume whatever is thrown into it. But ... The present laws of nature are not immutable..." (external link). Wesley's sermons are full of references to "the lake of fire burning with brimstone,"

    Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des Russischen Reichs (Journey through various provinces of the Russian Empire), by the German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas, was published in three volumes between 1771 and 1776.

    Pallas found mammoth and rhinoceros preserved in the Siberian ice, including ones with their hairy hides preserved. These beasts became known as "woolly".

    Bones of rhinos, hippos and elephants had been found in Germany and other parts of Europe. In Russia, Pallas was also shown such bones. He was inclined to explain these as remains of tropical animals washed north by Noah's flood. The ice finds were actual carcasses and their overcoat suggested they were natives of the cold. (See John J. McKay)

    1772 David Ricardo born

    22.6.1772 Lord Mansfield that "no master ever was allowed here (England) to take a slave by force to be sold abroad because he deserted from his service" - James Somerset freed. (significance)

    1772 Ottobah Cugoano brought to England from the island of Grenada by an merchant. Freed following the Somerset case, he learned to read and write and was baptised as John Stewart. He became a servant of the fashionable artists Richard and Maria Cosway.

    1772? Pageant: James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw's life narrative
    A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars In the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, As related by Himself. Bath. Price Six-Pence. (Born about 1705 - died 1775). This narrative is classified as one of Christian redemption. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw was befriended by George Whitefield.

    "It is a generally received opinion, in England, that the natives of Africa go entirely unclothed; but this supposition is very unjust: they have a kind of dress so as to appear decent, though it is very slight and thin."

    1773 James Mill born

    1774 Louis 16th king of France.

    Medical inspection of London madhouses introduced

    Joseph Priestley isolated oxygen - dephlogisticated air
    from which everything except its
    life giving properties has been removed.

    1775

    1.1.1775 "An Account of Further Discoveries in Air. By the Rev. Joseph Priestley, LL.D. F. R. S. in Letters to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. and the Rev. Dr. Price, F. R. S." published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This announced the discovery of a "dephlogiscated air" (later called oxygen) which was five or six times better than common air for breathing or burning.

    28.9.1775 Death and burial in Chester of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw "a blackman" - aged 70.

    1775 The thesis of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) De Generis Humani Varietati Nativa (Göttingen) divided the human species into five races, the American, Caucasian, Ethiopian, Malay, and Mongolian, on the basis of skin colour and conformation of the head. (Oxford English Dictionary). It was published as a book (still in Latin) in 1795 - See Wikipedia.

    1776 Britain's American colonies declared themselves independent.

    David Hume died

    Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Jeremy Bentham's A Fragment on Government were both published in 1776

    Lecture notes on Smith
    Extracts from Wealth of Nations
    Smith weblinks
    Adam Smith revival (late 20th century)
    Lecture notes on Bentham
    Extracts from Bentham
    Brief note on Bentham - Dictionary on Utilitarianism
    Radicals, Socialists and Early Feminists
    Bentham weblinks
    crime and
deviancy
timeline Bentham's
Panopticon
plans
    Surveillance
    See Social Science History, chapter five on
    the theories that Smith, Bentham, Malthus and Owen made and
    chapter one John Stuart Mill and his problems with Francis Bacon

    "Adam Smith is supposed to have brought to light the process of the increasing division of labour, Ricardo the role played by capital, and J-B. Say some of the fundamental laws of the market economy. From this moment on, political economy is supposed to have begun to exist with its own proper object and its own inner coherence." (Foucault The Order of Things)

    1778 France, Britain's traditional enemy, entered the war of independence on America's side. America
    Death of
    Rousseau.

    1780

    Luigi Galvani observed electrical current passing from a generator to a frog's leg. See Wikipedia on Luigi Galvani   Galvanic cell   Galvanism . See Frankenstein introduction

    1780 A notably dry year by the EWP series. A very dry summer (British Weather). Cold springs in Derbyshire dried up or were much diminished, but at both Matlock and Buxton the warm springs suffered no observable decrease. of their water. From this, Erasmus Darwin concluded that the sources of the warm springs were much deeper than the cold ones. "The water must first have been raised in the form of steam from those greater depths".

    1781 The Iron Bridge crossing the River Severn in Shropshire, England was made of cast iron.

    Shown here on the front of Asa Brigg's 1979 book of industrial revolution images - linking to the Crystal Palace, which was made of glass plate set in a framework of cast iron.

    1781 Immanuel Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason attempted to salvage the philosophy of science by arguing that whilst reason alone cannot establish the truth of what is, categories provided by the mind are needed for us to order our experiences. In The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) he argued that pure reason is practical when it comes to morality. Reason alone establishes what ought to be, as distinct from what is. His third major book, Critique of Judgement (1790) argued that beauty is the perfect compatibility of the forms with which we perceive with what we perceive.

    26.4.1781 William Herschel reported an observation of what he though was a comet. Later identified as a planet and later named Uranus. (Wikipedia)

    28.5.1783 Transactions of the Society, Instituted at London, for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce 1783 to 1843 available online.

    May and August 1783 "Great Fogg", a dust and ash haze from volcanic eruptions in Iceland (Eldeyjar) and Japan (Asama Yama) produced unusual skies in the northern hemisphere. A fiery meteor flashed across western European skies during the early evening of 18.8.1783. These events stirred the imagination of eleven year old Luke Howard. Convinced, later, that God had given form to everything, he classified the forms of clouds.

    3.9.1783 The American war of Independence was concluded by the Treaty of Versailles America


    Irish and Africans in Britain. The three main English ports in which Irish immigrants settled were London, Liverpool and Manchester. In the 1790s, Manchester's Irish population was around 5,000. source. The black population of London was increased considerably when soldiers who fought on the side of the British in the American Revolutionary War arrived.


    1784 Immanuel Kant's What is Enlightenment? - See Social Science History and dictionary and listen to Guy Watson in the cabbage field: "pre-enlightenment, our inability to explain natural phenomenon led to mysticism"

    Robert Alun Jones' Timeline on Durkheim (archive) begins with the appointment of Emile Durkheim's great-grandfather, Simon Simon Durkheim, as rabbi in Mutzig (Alsace) in 1784

    18.5.1784 Edict of the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph (Giuseppe) 2nd attempting to replace Latin with German as the administrative language of the empire (cancelled 28.1.1790). In this, Joseph points to the example of France, England and Russia and says the use of "Latin in public business" is prohibited among all enlightened peoples" except Hungary, [Croatia and Slavonia], the Grand Duchy of Transylvania and Poland. The reform triggered linguistic and ethnic strife in Hungary and Galicia. (See Votruba, M. 2010?)

    Bristol 10.9.1784 Letter from John Wesley, addressed "To Dr. Coke, Mr. Asbury, and our Brethren in North America", appointing Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury "joint superintendents over our brethren in North America". According to Leslie Griffiths (10.4.2016) "Nothing got Wesley into deeper trouble than these ordinations ".

    1785 A narrative of the Lord's wonderful dealings with John Marrant, a black (online), which was followed in 1790 by A Journal of the Rev. John Marrant, from August the 18th, 1785, to the 16th of March, 1790.

    28.7.1785 Jeremy Bentham left Brighton to visit his younger brother, Samuel, in Russia

    1786 An essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, particularly the African, translated from a Latin Dissertation, which was honoured with the first prize in the University of Cambridge, for the year 1785, by Thomas Clarkson, published in London

    1786 Animalcula infusoria fluvia tilia et marina by Otto Frederik Müller

    1787: Early one morning

    1787: Thoughts and sentiments on the evil and wicked traffic of the slavery and commerce of the human species, humbly submitted to the inhabitants of Great-Britain "by Ottobah Cugoano, A Native of Africa" London. 1787

    22.5.1787 Society for the Abolition of the British Slave Trade formed in London.
    17.9.1787 The Constitution of the United States adopted. America

    The Federalist Papers, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, established an independent tradition of political analysis in the USA.

    1787 The Simpson family opened a third bath at Matlock Bathy in 1786. They also laid out and planted a zig-zag path on the south-facing flank of Masson Hill and in 1787 advertised "walks to the Heights of Abraham". (Historic England)

    A language for chemistry provided by books like Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau Method of chymical nomenclature, proposed by Messrs. de Morveau, Lavoisier, Bertholet, and de Fourcroy. To which is added, A new system of chymical characters adapted to the nomenclature by Mess. Hassenfratz and Adet ; translated from the French and the new chymical names added to the genius of the English language by James St. John 1788. New words entering English at this time include nitrate for the salt of nitric acid and sulphate for a salt of sulphuric acid.

    See Joan Martin trace methods

    1788 The cost of the American war overstrained the resources of the French King (Louis 16th) and was a reason for his calling the States General together in August 1788. This was the French representative body (like Parliament in England). But it had not met since 1614. The King hoped that it would enable him to raise new taxes.

    Cowper's
    The Morning Dream, A Ballad was composed and used in the campaign against slavery in 1788.

    February 1788 A society called the Friends of the Negro formed in Paris to campaign for the abolition of the French slave trade. Its members included people (like Brissot, Mirabeau, Petion, Condorcet and Abbe Gregoire) who were to become leading figures in the early years of the French revolution.

    *********

    click on Stanley Morse's
Copper to visit Crimtim: The
timeline for crime and deviancy

    click on Stanley Morse's Copper to visit Crimtim: The timeline for crime and deviancy


    1789 The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by himself. Author: Olaudah Equiano, (1745-1797). Published London. (Gutenberg text).

    Other publications by people of African descent include UkawsawGronniosaw (1772?) - Phillis Wheatley (Aldgate 1773) - John Marrant (1785) - Ottobah Cugoano (London 1787)

    FRENCH REVOLUTION
    End of the ancient regime in France

    1789: Year of the Revolution. The States General met in May 1789. It had three parts: the first estate (clergy), second estate (nobles) and third estate (others). When it last met, 175 years before, the third estate had been overshadowed by the other two. Now the feelings of the representatives were very different. In February a pamphlet by Abbe Sieyes called What is the Third Estate? argued it was the whole nation. In other words, members of the Third Estate were claiming to represent the whole of France. The three estates sat apart, but the third estate argued that there should be only one assembly. On June 17th they took the law into their own hands and renamed themselves the National Assembly. On June 20th they resolved to go on meeting (even if the king dissolved them) "until the constitution of the realm is established" (tennis court oath). On June 27th they won: the king ordered the first and second estates to join the third.

    Karl Marx argued that in the French revolution of 1789. "the bourgeoisie was allied with the people against the monarchy, the aristocracy and the established church." [See revolution]

    14.7.1789 Fall of the Bastille. The Paris masses captured the state prison: an event that remains the symbol of the revolution and the date of the national holiday. [See Breton festivities 1909]

    17.7.1789 The beginning of the Peasants' revolt. In the countryside people began burning the records on which their lords based their claims for "feudal" dues.

    July 1789 White people from Haiti asked for representation in the French Assembly proportional to the population of Haiti, which consisted mostly of slaves. Issue of race, slavery and rights of man began to be linked in the debates of the French Assembly. America

    4.8.1789: Begining of a series of decrees abolishing feudal rights and privileges. 11.8.1789: "The National Assembly totally abolishes the feudal system"

    26.8.1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

    "As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end." (Foucault, 1970)

    September 1789 Discovery of Uranium by the German chemist Martin Klaproth. (Uranium's Scientific History 1789 - 1939) - Named after Uranus - The radioactive properties of uranium were discovered in 1896 by Henri Becquerel.

    5.10.1789 The Insurrection of the Women. Women marched from Paris to the King's palace at Versailles to complain about the lack of bread. On the 6th October they marched back to Paris - bringing the King and Queen with them. - [This event offends Burke]

    22.10.1789 People of mixed race from Haiti (not slaves) came to the French Assembly to ask it to recognise their rights as men.

    November 1789 Widespread persecution of people of mixed race began in Haiti.

    4.11.1789 In London, Richard Price delivered a Discourse on the Love of our Country to the "Revolution Society" (formed to commemorate 1688). The society sent a congratulatory letter to the National Assembly. In January 1790 Edmund Burke read a pamphlet containing the discourse, the letter and a reply from the president of the Assembly. This stimulated Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (November 1790). Mary Wollstonecraft published a reply, A Vindication of the Rights of Man, in December 1790. Tom Paine's two part reply, The Rights of Man, was published in 1791 and 1792.

    FRENCH CONSTITUTION OF 22.12.1789: This gave the vote on the basis of taxation. Citoyens actifs were involved in direct and indirect elections to local councils and the National Assembly. Citoyens passifs had civic rights (freedom of expression etc), but no political rights. The Assembly had 745 deputies for France (colonial deputies were added later) and these represented départements according to area, population and revenue.

    December 1789
    In Paris, a play by Olympe de Gouges that attacked slavery was hissed off the stage after three performances.

    14.12.1789 Count Charles de Lameth told the National Assembly of France that although he owned many slaves in Haiti, I would prefer to lose all I possess there rather than violate the principles that justice and humanity have consecrated. I declare myself both for the admission of half- castes into the administrative assemblies and for the liberty of the blacks!


    1791 In Scotland, John Sinclair sent questionnaires to parishes about their geography and natural history - population - production, - plus some miscellaneous questions. In 1796 he sent "statistical missionaries" to follow up the completion of the questionnaires. Between 1791 and 1799 he published The Statistical Account of Scotland.: Drawn up from the communications of the ministers of the different parishes. By Sir John Sinclair bart. Edinburgh : W. Creech in 21 volumes.

    He thought this would form an account of "the quantum of happiness" of the communities of Scotland and also be a "means of future improvement".

    Sinclair's questions (queries) - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 -


    14.7.1790 William Wordsworth arrived in France
    "Among sequestered villages we walked
    And found benevolence and blessedness
    Spread like a fragrance everywhere...
    Unhoused beneath the evening star we saw
    Dances of liberty

    21.10.1790 Vincent Oge led an unsuccessful insurrection on Haiti. News of his brutal execution drew the attention of French people to the island.

    Bentham's
    Panopticon
    plans
    Bentham's
Panopticon
plans

    Spring 1791 Debates on a proposed Constitution for the French colonies. The Assembly heard evidence from people of mixed race.

    15.5.1791 Resolved by the Assembly that every mulatto whose parents were both free should have a vote.

    21.6.1791 Louis 16 attempted to leave France. He was stopped at Varennes and brought back to Paris. The king's flight led to popular protests calling for a new head to the executive.

    16.7.1791 Massacre of Champ de Mars: a meeting in Paris calling, in effect, for the king's abdication, was dispersed by the National Guard. About 60 petitioners were killed and 200 arrested.

    22.8.1791 Uprising of the slaves in Haiti. Toussaint L'Ouverture joined the uprising after about a month. As a result of the slave uprising the supply of sugar to France was cut off, leading to food riots in Paris in January 1792.

    Some historians wish to make 23rd August "Slavery Remembrance Day" - See weblinks Wilberforce No Way! - UNESCO - Petition

    24.9.1791 The decree of 15.5.1791, which gave a vote to some people of colour, was rescinded by the Constituent Assembly.


    FRENCH CONSTITUTION OF 1791
    Social Science History links: pars
    76; 81; 83;

    September 1791: French Constitution of 1791 adopted. This gave a vote to men with a minimum of income/property.

    Olympe de Gouges published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman, dated 14.9.1791   in French   in English   Social Science History   (weblinks)

    Talleyrand proposed a system of state education in France that would be confined to boys. This appears to have been the spur for Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written in three months and published January 1792.   See Social Science History   (weblinks). The first chapter is about being human and how we know what is right and true. See Social Science History - What is science?

    25.9.1791 French Penal Code

    October 1791 Meeting of Legislative Assembly. Brissot agitated for war.

    November 1791 Commissioners arrived in Haiti to restore order. Slave leaders tried to bargain their freedom for the re-enslavement of their followers. When the white colonial government refused the bargain, Toussaint L'Ouverture resolved to fight for complete liberty for all.

    January 1792
    Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman published. On 14.1.1792 Talleyrand arrived in London on an unsuccessful diplomatic mission. Whilst in London he called on Mary Wollstonecraft.

    March 1792 The Paris Commune opened its galleries to the public, which made it more exposed to popular pressure.

    20.3.1792 to 23.3.1792 Formation of a new French ministry led by Brissot. On 24.3.1792 the Legislative Assembly, by a large majority, passed a decree giving full political rights to free men of colour in the colonies. This became law on 4.4.1792.

    FRANCE AT WAR

    20.4.1792 France declared war on Austria. This led to war with Prussia as well. Once France was at war, the influence of the streets on government became more powerful because of popular fear of traitors within the country.

    10.8.1792 Paris masses stormed Tuileries and imprisoned the royal family.

    Early September 1792 The election of the Convention, by almost universal male suffrage, took place at the same time as the defeat of the French army at Verdun and at the same time that crowds massacred over 1,000 prisoners in Paris.

    18.9.1792 Three commissioners from France arrived in Haiti to enforce the decree of 4.4.1792

    21.9.1792 Meeting of Convention which (on 22.9.1792) abolished the monarchy and established the Republic. The Republican calendar started Year One here.

    Early October 1792 News of the imprisonment of the king reached Haiti, where the French fell out over it. On 12.10.1792 the Commissioners dissolved the Colonial Assembly and assumed full control over the colony. Haiti was becoming increasingly split by internal war and, secretly, the British government began to consider taking it over.

    December 1792. Mary Wollstonecraft moved to France to experience for herself the revolutionary civilisation. At the time she went political forces in France were moving against the people she sympathised with (The "Girondins") many of whom went to the guillotine whilst she was there. She returned to England in 1795.

    19.11.1792 A decree of the Convention offered help to all peoples wishing to recover their liberties.


    1792 Ambulator... a Tour Round London described the ornaments on the gothic orchestra in the Grove at Vauxhall Gardens as "plastic, a composition something like plaster of Paris, but known only to the ingenious architect who designed and built this beautiful object". Something plastic (mouldable) could be shaped when wet, but set hard when it dried. Synthetic plastics were developed from the nineteenth century onwards. See polymer - cellulose - Parkesine - polyvinyl acetate - Bakelite - shelf appeal - PVC - polystyrene - polythene - vinyl - plastic toys - polythene pipes - Plastic House - 1976 - Anthropocene 2016


    FRENCH KING GUILLOTINED

    21.1.1793 Execution of Louis 16th.

    1.2.1793 France declared war on Great Britain. War with Spain followed in March and also civil war (the revolt of the Vendee from March to December 1793). Spain invaded Haiti early in the war. At first, Toussaint L'Ouverture and other black leaders fought for Spain against the French Republicans and in defence of the kings.

    Spring 1793 to summer 1794 Period known as the reign of terror in France. The Oxford English Dictionary dates it from March 1793 to July 1794. It is in relation to this that the word "terrorism" was formed. In a 1900 Dictionary "terrorism" is still defined as "A system of government by terror".

    May/June 1793 Paris insurrection and downfall of the Girondins. Rule of the Jacobins.

    FRENCH CONSTITUTION OF 1793

    June 1793 French Constitution of 1793 adopted. This gave the vote to every adult male, apart from domestic servants, but it was never put into practice. [Social Science History link: par. 93]

    19.6.1793-20.6.1793 In Haiti the Republican French Commissioners quashed a revolt of the poor whites by sending armed free coloureds and slaves into the capital, Le Cap, which was destroyed in the fighting. For many colonists the destruction of Le Cap symbolised the end of white supremacy, and a mass migration followed. The main slave armies, however, were still fighting for the Spanish in defence of the kings.

    30.7.1793 A French Commissioner reported from Haiti that The slaves remaining in the party of kings march in company with a great number of white emigres

    29.8.1793 To secure some support from the slave armies, Sonthonax, a French Commissioner, declared the abolition of slavery in Haiti, but the slave armies continued to fight against him.

    3.9.1793 White Royalists in Haiti asked for British intervention. An army left Jamaica (a British slave colony) and landed in Haiti on 19.9.1793.

    16.10.1793 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, guillotined in Paris

    31.10.1793 Brissot and twenty other Girondins guillotined in Paris

    3.11.1793 Olympe de Gouges guillotined in Paris

    8.11.1793 Madame Roland guillotined in Paris

    December 1793 In the cause of the kings, Toussaint's slave army occupied central Haiti after a series of victories.

    1794

    4.2.1794 Slavery abolished in French colonies.

    30.2.1794 French celebrated the emancipation of slaves in the Temple of Reason.

    Early May 1794 News of the abolition of slavery by France reached Toussaint in Haiti and on 6.5.1794 he and his army deserted the Spanish to join the French.

    July 27/28 1794: Fall of Robespierre and Jacobins. End of the reign of terror in France.

    1794 École normale supérieure established in Paris. "it was intended to provide the Republic with a new body of teachers, trained in the critical spirit and secular values of the Enlightenment" (Wikipedia)

    1794 The École centrale des travaux publics [Central school of public works] founded in Paris. Renamed "École polytechnique" [School of many arts] in 1794. In London, the Royal Polytechnic opened in Regent Street in 1838


    SPEENHAMLAND

    1795 In England the parish of Speenhamland, in Berkshire, adopted a system of paying workers an allowance from public funds, on top of their wages, graduated according to the price of bread. Similar schemes were adopted by many other parishes. One of the consequences of welfare policies like these was that the money paid out on Poor Law soared.

    7.4.1795 Metric system of measurement adopted in France
    External link: Important dates in the history of the modern metric system

    25.10.1795 The Convention adopted a resolution establishing the Institut National des Sciences et Arts, which became the Institut de France in 1995. (website). This had three parts (classes), the second of which was the Classe des Sciences Morales et Politiques (see above). This covered the analysis of sensations and thoughts, ethics, social science and legislation, political economy, history and geography. The first class was the Classe des Sciences Mathématiques et Physiques and the third the Classe de Littérature et Beaux-Arts (External links: 1 - 2 - 3

    The Classe des Sciences Mathématiques et Physiques ceased to exist in a reorganisation of 1803, but was revived as l'Académie Royale des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1832. It ceased to be Royal between 1848 and 1850

    20.3.1796 Mulattoes in Haiti, led by Vilate, revolted against the French General Laveaux. Toussaint rescued Laveaux and crushed the rebels.

    1.4.1796 Toussaint was proclaimed Lieutenant Governor

    1792 Mary Wollstonecraft Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark   [on jellyfish]

    "Sometimes, to take up my oar once more, when the sea was calm, I was amused by disturbing the innumerable young star fish which floated just below the surface; I had never observed them before, for they have not a hard shell like those which I have seen on the seashore. They look like thickened water with a white edge, and four purple circles, of different forms, were in the middle, over an incredible number of fibres or white lines. Touching them, the cloudy substance would turn or close, first on one side, then on the other, very gracefully, but when I took one of them up in the ladle, with which I heaved the water out of the boat, it appeared only a colourless jelly."

    In Forces of Nature: Natural(-izing) Gender and Gender(-ing) Nature in the Discourses of Western Culture (2009) Bernadette H. Hyner and Precious McKenzie Stearns suggest a move was taking place towards seeing "creatures as the jelly fish as closest to the mysteries of the origin of life"

    1797 Napoleon Bonaparte given command of the French army against England.

    1797 English Bank Restriction Act suspended the convertibility of Bank of England banknotes into gold, to halt a flight of capital due to the war. Originally for six weeks, suspension lasted twenty four years. (French Wikipedia)

    1797 Baron Hume's Criminal Law of Scotland first published in which he wrote "the husband... cannot himself commit a rape on his own wife, who has surrendered her person to him" [See domestic violence]

    10.9.1797 Mary Wollstonecraft died.

    1798 Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population contained the law that population increases much faster than subsistence unless checked by famine, war or vice (birth control). This was Malthus's refutation of the idea of people like Wollstonecraft and her husband, William Godwin that an unlimited improvement in the human condition was possible. It became very popular as a refutation of the philosophy behind the French Revolution.

    9-10 November 1799 Coup d'etat of 18 Brumaire. Napoleon Bonaparte, hitherto a military leader, became, by conspiracy and a "wiff of grapeshot" fired to disperse a crowd, the political and military leader of France. Under a new constitution he was First Consul of France. See 1804, 1806, 1815,

           

    *********


       
    19TH CENTURY

    1800-1828 Robert Owen ran a model factory community at New Lanark in Scotland, demonstrating, he thought, that people respond to good treatment by becoming good people. This was a refutation in practice of Malthusian pessimism.

    Extracts from Owen   Radicals, Socialists and Early Feminists discusses Owen and Bentham in relation to Thompson and Wheeler. Social Science History, chapter five on the theories that Smith, Bentham, Malthus and Owen made discusses Owen in relation to the poor law.   Lecture notes   Owen weblinks

    Possibly at the turn of the century that this house was built by Quakers to guard the new entrance to their main London graveyard. It became known as the "caretaker's cottage"

    A hipped roof, oriel sash windows and symetrical proportion show the Queen Anne style as a standard of restrained middle-class domestic architecture.

    Monday 10.3.1801: First British Census
    The 1801 census recorded the number of people in each parish, the inhabited and uninhabited houses, and classified occupations into agriculture, manufacturing, commerce and handicrafts.
    Population of England and Wales: 8,893,000; Scotland: 1,608,000

    The censuses of 1801, 1811, 1821 and 1831 were purely numerical. Names were first recorded in 1841. See 1851 - 1861 - 1871 - 1881 - 1891 - 1901 - 1911 - 1921 - 1931 - [There was no census in 1941] - See 1951 - 1961 - 1971 - 1981 - 1991 - 2001 - 2011 -

    See index history of statistics - Vision of Britain - Karen Berry's history

    " London had nearly 900,000 inhabitants, more than ten times the population of its nearest rival in England, Manchester-Salford. Already there were were 123,000 people living in the five outer parishes of Kensington, Chelses, St Marylebone, Paddington and St Pancras, which a hundred before had been semi-rural villages with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants between them. By the year of the Great Exhibition, the population of the present area of the County of London had risen to 2,363,341." (R.S.R. Fitter 1945 p.63)

    October 1801 Having established the preliminaries of peace with the British, Bonaparte began preparation for a military expedition to Haiti to restore white rule. War between French forces and Toussaint.

    March 1802 to April 1803 Peace of Amiens

    1.5.1802 Toussaint surrendered to the French and retired to private life on his estates.

    About 7.6.1802 Toussaint arrested and taken on board a frigate waiting in harbour at Le Cap to go to France.

    July 1802 News arrived in Haiti that the French had restored slavery in Guadeloupe. Bonaparte formally restored all the mulatto discriminations of the Old Regime.

    24.8.1802 Toussaint imprisoned in Fort-de-Joux in the Jura mountains

    October 1802 Armies of Mulattos and ex-slaves rebelled against the French in Haiti

    1802 The Mineralogy of Derbyshire: With a Description of the Most Interesting Mines in the North of England, in Scotland, and in Wales by John Mawe

    1803

    Second edition of Malthus on population

    April 1803 Resumed war between Britain and France



    Autumn 1803 French forced to evacuate Haiti by the black led armies

    1804
    Immanuel Kant died

    1.1.1804 First ever black republic established. Called Haiti as it had been before European conquest.

    7.3.1804 The British and Foreign Bible Society formed in London at a meeting of members of both the Church of England and dissenting denominations. It sought to make cheap (1611) bibles available in Britain and other countries "without note or comment". The society was concerned about "recent attempts which have been made on the part of Infidelity to discredit the evidence, vilify the character, and destroy the influence of Christianity".

    21.3.1804 The French civil code promulgated. Became the Napoleon Code in 1807.

    "My true glory will not result from the forty battles that I have won. These will fade away because of Waterloo. My true glory will reside in my Civil Code, which will never be forgotten. It is my Civil Code, which will live eternally" (Bonaparte on Sainte-Hélène. See Catherine Delplanque)

    May 1804 Napoleon became Emperor.

    8.10.1804 The black leader of Haiti, Dessalines, crowned himself emperor as Jean Jacques 1st.

    1805 Thomas Malthus became the first Professor of Political Economy

    The Little Woman and the Pedlar In 1805 Mary Jane Godwin and William Godwin opened M.J. Godwin & Co. Juvenile Library, a bookshop and publisher of mainly children's books. They were joining a growing market. Their significant contribution, along with Mary and Charles Lamb, was to publish books that fed children's delight in fiction and imagination.

    1805 Collection at Lund University (Sweden) divided into natural things, which became the foundation for the Zoological and Botanical Museums; and ethnographic and archaeological artefacts, which became the foundation of the Historical Museum. Lund was "the centre of gravity in scientific archaeology in Sweden" until the middle of the 19th century. (Gräslund, p.14). See Bror Emil Hildebrand

    1806

    1806 A portraiture of Quakerism : as taken from a view of the moral education, discipline, peculiar customs, religious principles, political and civil oeconomy and character of the Society of Friends by Thomas Clarkson published in London.

    20.5.1806 John Stuart Mill, co-author of the future of the labouring classes, born. (early life) Harriet Taylor was born 10.10.1807 (life and ideas).

    Napoleon enters Berlin October 1806, Napoleon won the battle of Jena against the Prussians. Hegel described him as "the soul of the world"

    The picture (1810) by French artist Charles Meynier of Napoleon's entry in Berlin is described by Rene Girard as the symbolic beginning of the Franco-German enmity - See symbolic end

    20.11.1806 Humphry Davy's Bakerian lecture to the Royal Society in which he described the decomposition of matter into its elements by electricity. The Institut de France awarded him a prize of 3000 francs for the most important research in electricity that year.

    1807

    22.5.1807 Oldsagskommissionen (The Antiquities Commission) established in Denmark. Members of the (University) library commission were begining to organise a collection of antiquities in the roof of Trinitatis Church, Copenhagen. They were allowed to start a collection rune stones at the Round Tower. These were steps towards a future "Nazionalmuseum". (See Thomsen). Det Kongelige Museum for Nordiske Oldsager opened to the public in 1817.
    In 1832 the museum moved to Christiansborg Palace and later moved it to the Prince's Palace. The Nationalmuseet, incorporating the collections, was established by Royal Decree of 28.12.1892.

    25.3.1807 British Parliament prohibited slave trade. (1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act became law) - National Archives weblink - Wikipedia

    4.6.1807 Demonstration of gas light in Pall Mall.
    In Thomas Rowlandson's cartoon (from which the pictures are taken), a gentleman explains that coal is steamed, producing tar or paint for the outside of houses, and then the smoke is passed through, removing its substance and then burns "as you see".
    A Quaker comments that it is all vanity: "what is this to the inward light?" and a lady of the night (possibly a brothel keeper) and her male colleague complain that lighting streets will put them out of business. "Not a dark corner to be got for love or money."

    1808: John Dalton (another Quaker) published A New System of Chemical Philosophy argued that all matter consists of a range of elemental atoms (indivisible particles) each of which has a distinct atomic weight.

    The chemical combination of different atoms in different proportions producing substances qualitatively different from each other - although the constituent atoms remain the same. The experimental power of this theory (related to the calculation of weights) laid the foundations of modern chemistry - And put an end to any idea that qualities can only be explained as a result of the merging of constituent qualities. (external link)   a precise and beautiful theory

    1808 Charles Fourier Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales - (Theory of the Four Movements and General Destinies) "As a general thesis: Social progress and historic changes occur by virtue of the progress of women toward liberty, and decadence of the social order occurs as the result of a decrease in the liberty of women." (external source - See Engels and Marx 1845 - Compare with John Stuart Mill)

    1809 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's Philosophie zoologique, ou exposition des considérations relatives à l'histoire naturelle des animaux. (Zoological Philosophy. An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals) - One of the books in which Lamarck set out his theory of evolution. - External link to extracts in English

    1810

    12.2.1810 French Code pénal de 1810

    9.6.1810 [London and Westminster Chartered] Gas Light and Coke Company established to supply gas to the Cities of London and Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, and the adjacent precincts and suburbs. On 31.12.1813 Westminster Bridge was lit by gas; the old oil-lamps were removed from St. Margaret's parish, Westminster and gas lanterns substituted. General lighting of London with gas began on Christmas-day, 1814. By 1815 30 miles of gas main had been laid in London. (See Grace's guide)

    1810 Sun Life Assurance Society founded as part of the Sun Fire Office to provide life insurance. It became part of Friends Life in 2010.

    1810 Great Rutland Cavern - at Matlock Bath opened to the public as a tourist attraction. Developed from part of the Nestus Mine, which has written records from the 15th century. The Duke of Rutland owned mineral rights in the area. The Great Masson Cavern was opened in 1844. Rutland remained (1920s) the largest of the Matlock caverns open to the public, it had room for a thousand people and was "extremely rich in fossils and minerals". At some stage, after 1838, it was gas lit. Its "Roman Hall" claimed to show traces of Roman lead mining.

    March 1811: Percy Byshee Shelley, a young aristocrat, expelled from Oxford University for publishing a pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism and challenging the clergy to debate it with him. In the following years he distributed pamphlets to the working class calling for revolution in the cause of liberty, equality and justice.

    Monday 27.5.1811: Second British Census
    Population of England and Wales: 10,165,000; Scotland: 1,806,000
    Owen in 1815 notes proportions employed in trade and agriculture

    The first two volumes of Barthold Georg Niebuhr's Römische Geschichte (Roman History) were published in Berlin in 1811-1812. The full three volume set was published in Berlin between 1811 and 1832. They were translated into English from 1827 onwards.

    1811 Antiqvitetskommissionen (Antiquities Commission) for Norway established. This was the origin of the Oldsaksamlingen (Antiquities Collection) at the University of Oslo. (Norweigan Wikipedia)

    1811 Joseph Anning found the scull like a crocodile in the rocks at Lyme Regis. In 1811 Mary and Joseph found the rest of the body. In 1814 named Proteosaurus and from 1817 Ichthyosaurus. See 1820 - 1823 - 1828 - Dorset page - Bristol - Torrens

    1812


    1812 to 1814 Robert Owen wrote his four Essays on the Formation of Human Character

    1812 Étienne-Géry Lenglet's Introduction à l'histoire, ou Recherches sur les dernières révolutions du globe et sur les plus anciens peuples connus (Google books   offline) - (Introduction to History, or Research on the recent revolutions in the globe and the oldest known peoples). Révolutions du globe (upheavals of the world?) referred to cataclysmic events that may have structured the earth's geology. These might include Noah's flood, but the theorising is much broader.

    1812 Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupèdes (Researches on quadruped fossil bones), by Georges Cuvier introduced the big beast (extinct) or Megatherium, reconstructed for the Royal Gabinete de Historia Natural [Wikipedia] from bones found in 1787 by Father Manuel Torres, the parish priest of Lujin, near Buenos Aires in Argentina. [See prehistoric Argentinian mammals]
    Mega = great or big. Therium = beast. Cuvier identified the beast as a prehistoric sloth. Megatherium was followed by Megalosaurus, the big reptile (dinosaur) and Megaloceros, the big horned animal. In the 1854 Sydenham display, Megalosaurus dominated the secondary island, Megatherium the tertiary island and Megaloceros the quaternary island.

    1813

    1813 First edition of James Cowles Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Man

    1813 Essay on the Theory of the Earth translated from, the French of M. Cuvier, by Robert Kerr with Mineralogical Notes, and an Account of Cuvier's Geological Discoveries, by Professor Jameson. Edinburgh. Cuvier text is a translation of the Discours preliminaire . . . from Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles . . . Paris .. Second edition (1815) online.

    End of the Napoleonic Wars

    April 1814: Napoleon abdicated

    Restoration of monarchies throughout continental Europe. Louis 18th King of France.

    18.6.1814 The Czar of Russia and King of Prussia, Britain's allies against Napoleon, were received at the Guildhall in London. A reenactment, called 'End of the Great War', concluded the history of London and Empire in the 1911 Pageant of London. "The world believed that the war had come to an end". [See 1910 and First World War]

    July 1814 Mary Shelley elopes: She journeys through France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland

    Humphry Davy patented the miners' safety lamp

    1814 Jacob Berzelius' "Essay on the Cause of Chemical Proportions, and on Some Circumstances Related to Them; together with a Short and Easy Method of Expressing Them" in the Annals of Philosophy laid the basis of using letter, or letter combinations, derived from Latin names, as chemical symbols. For example, Pb from Plumbum for lead. See Peter van der Krogt

    1814 First edition of The Matlock, Buxton and Castleton Guide, containing concise accounts of these and other remarkable places and objects, chiefly in the northern parts of the interesting County of Derby, by Rev. Richard Ward who was the Anglican minister at Cromford from before 1799 to 1839 and lived in Matlock (See Oakhill). Second edition 1818. Sixth edition 1825. In 1818 the three caverns near Matlock Bath are Rutland, Cumberland, and Fluor. By 1825, Devonshire and one at the base of High Tor had been discovered. Devonshire, like Great Masson discovered later, was a natural cavern.(See John Mawe 1828).

    1815 Napoleon returned, but was defeated at Waterloo (18.6.1815).

    See:
    Marco d'Eramo After Waterloo - offline
    notes on Wellington's surgeon, John Hume
    Honeymoon trips and lakeland bonfire

    The journey from London to Paris was calculated (Observer, 18.8.1816) to take 73 hours, consisting of 12 hours to Dover, an average of seven hours waiting at Dover, six hours crossing the channel and then 48 hours to Paris.

    Marx identified the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815 with the class victory of landed capital.

    1815 Corn Law. During the Napoleonic Wars farmers flourished because corn from abroad could not undercut their prices. Once the war was over foreign corn could come in and bring down the price of corn. To protect the rents of the landed aristocracy Parliament passed the Corn Law (repealed 1846) which put taxes on imported corn. This rise in the price of the people's staple food coincided with a period of widespread poverty and unemployment, following the end of the war. The cost of poor relief soared, leading to a movement to reform the Poor Laws

    1815 William Smith's map A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland was the first geological map to identify the layers of rock based on the fossil they contained rather than on their composition. (external link) - See Zhu Xi

    18.8.1816 The Observer reported a project in which a balloon the shape of a dolphin, powered by steam and with wings that would act as rudders would "carry the nobility and gentry to Paris, and subsequently elsewhere" in ten hours or less. [I do not know what happened]. Balloons for flight, carrying humans, had been demonstrated in France in 1783, and used by Napoleon as military observation platforms.

    1816 Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (29.12.1788 - 21.5.1865) appointed head of the antiquarian collections which developed into the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. He classified exhibits by the three age system: stone age - bronze age - iron age. (See 1824-1825). Work developed in Sweden by Bror Emil Hildebrand and Oscar Montelius. From written sources it was long clear that ancient Rome belonged to the iron age. From classical sources, Thomsen concluded that the iron age in Scandinavian countries began about the time of the birth of Christ. See 1849

    1817 Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation published. People, like Malthus and Ricardo, who wanted to abolish any form of poor relief were known as the Abolitionists. They argued that poor relief perverted the market, undermined incentive, reduced the mobility of labour and encouraged overpopulation. Such arguments were at the strongest about 1817. Between 1817 and 1834, when the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed, they were modified considerably.

    Wealth and Poverty: Malthus and Ricardo

    Major writings of Saint Simon L'Industrie (1817), L'Organisateur (1819), Du Systeme Industriel (1821), Catechisme des Industriels (1823), and Nouveau Christianisme (1825).


    1818
    1818

    Chapter 18: Victor Frankenstein and Henry Clerval travel from London to Scotland, avoiding "the great road to Edinburgh" in order to visit Windsor, Oxford, Matlock, and the Cumberland lakes. The country around the village of Matlock "resembles, to a greater degree, the scenery of Switzerland; but everything is on a lower scale, and the green hills want the crown of distant white Alps ... We visited the wondrous cave, and the little cabinets of natural history, where the curiosities are disposed in the same manner as in the collections at Servox and Chamounix. ... From Derby, still journeying northward, we passed two months in Cumberland and Westmoreland. I could now almost fancy mr self among the Swiss mountains.

    Karl Marx, joint author of The Communist Manifesto was born in Germany in 1818; Friedrich Engels in 1820.

    1819 Our Village sketches by Mary Mitford in The Lady's Magazine. Idyllic pictures of an English village, its cottages and gardens and village green. Book form 1824 - 1826 - 1828 - 1830 - 1832. John Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery was published in 1820 and his The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems in 1821.

    1819 Adam Sedgwick (1785- 1873), newly appointed Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge and John Stevens Henslow (1796-1861) , newly graduated, went on a geological walking tour of the Isle of Wight, during which they conceived a project to institute a society in Cambridge "as a point of concourse for scientific communication". On their return they founded the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Henslow became Professor of mineralogy in 1822 and of Botany in 1825, combining this with being a vicar from 1832. From 1837 he was Rector of Hitcham in Suffolk, where he lived from 1839. See 1842. An account that the Isle of Wight Philosophical Society was founded in 1810 and established a collection in 1819 is referenced to work by Jackson in the 1940s. The Isle of Wight Tourist, and Companion at Cowes (1830) by "Philo Vectis" says the society was formed about 1822. Martin Munt (2008) says "Collecting of geological specimens for museum collections is documented as early as 1825". A history was provided as part of the Portsmouth Symposium's field excursion to the Isle of Wight on Saturday 2.9.2000.

    16.8.1819 Peterloo. Troops fired on demonstrators in Manchester. (External Link- Spartacus schoolnet)

    The Times, 10.10.1819 page 4.

    1819 Act for the Resumption of Cash Payments led to bank notes being convertible to gold from 1.5.1821. Convertibility had been suspended in 1797. It was fully resumed over a period of three years (1821- 1824)

    JAMES MILL'S ESSAY ON GOVERNMENT

    1820
    James Mill's Essay on Government first published in the supplement to the Encyclopedia Brittanica. See 1825

    1820 Trial and acquital of Saint Simon

    the owl of Minerva 25.6.1820 The owl of Minerva does not fly until the evening - Hegel argues that we only understand history after it has happened.

    1821 London sale of Anning fossils raised up to £400, which rescued the family.

    Monday 28.5.1821: Third British Census
    Population of England and Wales: 12,000,000; Scotland: 2,092,000

    1821 Discovery of Kirkdale Cave [Wikipedia] - 1822 "Account of an Assemblage of Fossil Teeth and Bones of Elephant, Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, Bear, Tiger, and Hyaena, and Sixteen Other Animals; Discovered in a Cave at Kirkdale, Yorkshire, in the Year 1821: With a Comparative View of Five Similar Caverns in Various Parts of England, and Others on the Continent" by William Buckland. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Volume. 112 (1822), pp. 171-236. Available online - (offline) - "many small balls of the solid calcareous excrement of an animal that had fed on bones". Discussion - Buckland: See Anning - 1823 - 1825 - 1828 - 1829 - 1845

    1822 John Stuart Mill and his friends formed a Utilitarian Society (broken up 1826). Utilitarianism was the dominant theory of Social Science in nineteenth century Britain. It was challenged by the French Sociologist, Emile Durkheim, in the 1890s.

    July 1822 Lyell wrote to Mantell with details of the "anticlinal axis and order of superposition of the strata at Sandown Bay" and their correspondence with the wealden and cretaceous systems of Sussex and Surrey with "a section from Culver Cliff to Shanklin Down" and a "suite of specimens". (Mantell 1847)

    1823

    David Ricardo died

    About 1823 John Stuart Mill allegedly arrested distributing birth control leaflets to working class women. [I heard he was dropping them into the "areas" of rich people's houses, where the servant girls would pick them up.] See 1886 - 1934 - 1950s - 1957 - 1961 - 1964 - 1987 - 2008

    See Whitby and Lyme lias and Oxford oolite

    1823 Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society in with the prime purpose to setup a Museum. George Young (1777 1848), a Presbyterian minister, and John Bird (1768-1829: artist), two members, published A geological survey of the Yorkshire coast : describing the strata and fossils occurring between the Humber and the Tees, from the German ocean to the plain of York in 1822 (online offline), with a substantial revision in 1828 (online offline). John Bird became the museum's first curator. (website) Among the specimens was Teleosaurus chapmani catalogue

    A second Whitby crocodile like fossil was found in the lias between Staiths and Runswick in 1791, and better skeleton in the alum-shale of the lias at Saltwick in 1824. This was eighteen feet long and became one of the best known exhibits in the museum.
    The drawing "Teleosaurus Chapmanni: Crocodilian remains from the Lias at Whitby", of the specimen discovered in 1824, is from Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise (1835), plate 25, but based on John Bird's drawing in the 1828 edition of the Geological Survey (Plate 16. Two page spread. Hand coloured). Buckland's notes say this appears to be the same species as that presented to the Royal Society in 1758, and so Mr. Konig [of the British Museum] "has applied to it the name of Teleosaurus Chapmanni".
    10.12.1823 Mary Anning discovered a fossil with a "remarkable long neck and a small head", not resembling an Ichthyosaurus. 26.12.1823 Letter with sketch suggests it is a Plesiosaurus (nearer to a saurus). Plesiosaurus was 9 feet long, but its head was only 4 to 5 inches long. Plesiosaurus and Ichthyosaurus appear to do battle in sketch for the 1854 exhibition
    On 20.2.1824 a Geological Society meeting heard a report on this find and one from William Buckland on his Megalosaurus. The three images below, from the Oxford Museum of Natural History, show Megalosaurus developing from a waddler to a runner.

    1824

    German historian Franz Leopold Ranke (21.12.1795 -23.5.1886) wrote that rather than "judging the past" would seek "only to show what actually happened" (wie es eigentlich gewesen)

    1824 Comte and Saint-Simon fell out over the way Comte's Systeme de Politique Positive was to be presented in Saint- Simon's Catechism Des Industriels

    Finance capital, insurance, statistics and economic cycles Early in 1824 the Alliance British and Foreign Life and Fire Assurance Company was founded with four banker presidents: Moses Montefiore, Nathan Rothschild, Samuel Gurney and Francis Baring (link to another member of the family) and one MP: John Irving. In part, formed to take advantage of the mathematical abilities and knowledge of probability theory of Benjamin Gompertz (1779-1865), the company's actuary. Thomas Fowell Buxton, M.P. was one of the auditors. On 24.6.1824 the company secured an Act of Parliament breaking a monopoly on marine assurance and allowing the Alliance Marine Insurance Company to be formed with Gompertz as chief manager. The formation of the Alliance has been described as "an initial event in a speculative mania as exciting as the South Sea Bubble" - leading to the crash in December 1825. The work of Benjamin Gompertz was important in the development of statistics - See also external link and Wikipedia

    Charles Babbage (1791-1871) thought of the idea of a machine considerably more complex than an abacus to calculate and print mathematical tables in 1812. He wanted to eliminate the inaccuracies of hand calculations by large numbers of human "computers". Cogs would be more reliable. He began his first machine in 1824 and it was put together in 1832 by Joseph Clement, a skilled toolmaker and draughtsman. It was a decimal digital machine - the value of a number represented by the positions of toothed wheels marked with decimal numbers.

    about 1824-1825 Organisation of Antiquities in Copenhagen on his three-age- system, by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen completed. The system was described in 1836

    1825

    1825 Michael Faraday isolated and identified benzene from the oily residue derived from the production of illuminating gas. He called it bicarburet of hydrogen. In 1836, the French chemist Auguste Laurent named it phéne. This is the word root of phenol and phenyl. [See phenothiazine]. Phenol is also known as carbolic acid.

    1825 James Mill's Essay on Government (1820) distributed in a free edition with other essays. William Thompson's Appeal on Behalf of Women written in collaboration with Anna Wheeler criticised this essay. . Thompson and Wheeler were Irish Owenites who developed socialist theories from Benthamism. See Radicals, Socialists and Early Feminists and Thompson and Wheeler weblinks

    December 1825: Two Lombard Street (London) banks failed with consequent failures of country banks. Over one hundred banks failed in a few weeks. The bank crisis was stabilised by greater reliance on gold, but this was the start of the first world wide economic depression.
    "From the time of the resumption of cash payments by the Act of 1819, and especially since the commercial crisis of 1825, the favourite explanation of every rise or fall of prices has been 'the currency;'" (Mill, J.S. 1848 book three, chapter 8 "Of the value of money, as dependent on demand and supply".

    1825 Reverend Gerard Smith recovered fragments of fossil bones of reptiles from Sandown Bay on the east of the Isle of Wight. In 1829 James Vine found many near Brook Point on the south-west coast, at the other end of the same iron-stone strata. They were numerous at "Bull-face Ledge", where "the iron-stone is abundantly loaded with prostrate trunks of fossil trees". (fossils sent to the collection of the Geological Society of London). In 1834 John Smith, of Yaverland Farm, near Sandown,collected several large vertebrae of the Iguanodon, portions of two thigh bones, and many fragments of smaller bones, which were presented to the Oxford Museum. (Buckland 1829 and Mantell 1847)

    1826 Benjamin Disraeli's Vivian Grey explored the relation of birth, wealth and intellect to power, stating that "to enter into high society, a man must either have blood, a million, or a genius". Vivian Grey regrets that he is not the "son of a millionaire, or a noble". The word millionaire had entered English from French in the late 18th century. Here it is associated with the new rich finacial and industrial classes. See also Marx and Engels 1848 paragraph 1.9 and cotton millionaires in 1850.

    Sometime in 1826: "Breast-feeding mother" by Willem Bartel van der Kooi (1768-1836), a Dutch artist famous for pictures of family and childhood. The mother is a Frisian woman from the countryside.

    23.1.1826 "The Last Man by the author of Frankenstein published

    John Stuart Mill's melancholy winter of 1826/1827. Autobiography paragraphs 5.2c - 5.6

    9.4.1827 was the end of the Liverpool Tory Government (The only English government to last longer than Mrs Thatcher's).

    30.4.1827 A foundation stone laid in Gower Street of what became London University, the first "godless" university in England. Although many who supported it were very religious, the University was founded on the principle that religious tests would not be required of staff or students. For the first time, dissenters and jews (in particular) could study for a degree without travelling to Scotland or continental Europe. (external link) - The first academic sessions started in October 1828 - On 28.11.1836 the university, renamed University College, was united with King's College as the University of London. King's College was a rival university founded by the established church. The North London Hospital was opened opposite the university in 1834. It became University College Hospital in 1837. See 1840s - 1846 - 1869 - 1871 - 1878

    Michael Farady succeeded Humphry Davy in the chair of Chemistry at the Royal Institution. He published the first edition of Chemical Manipulation

    August 1827 First edition of Popular Lectures on the Study of Natural History and the Sciences, Vegetable Physiology, Zoology, the Animal and Vegetable Poisons: And on the Human Faculties, Mental and Corporeal, as Delivered Before the Isle of Wight Philosophical Society edited by William Lempnere (a vice-President). A second edition was published in 1830. The curators of the museum were Delabere [Pritchett] Blaine, author of the Encyclopiedia of Field Sports, who died in the Isle of Wight on 1.4.1845, aged 74 and Rev Edmund Kell (born 18.1.1799, died 17.1.1874) Unitarian Minister at Newport since 1823. The Society met monthly during the winter season, when a lecture was usually delivered at the Townhall by one of the members upon any subject of natural history, or of general literature. It was linked to the Portsmouth Philosophical Society. See 1847.


    1828 John Stuart Mill established contacts with Saint-Simonians at the London Debating Society.

    26.10.1829 Death of John Mawe (born 1764) minerologist owner of a "Free Museum" at Matlock Bath. See Wikipedia. The second edition of The Panorama of Matlock and its environs: with the tour of the Peak was published in 1828. The Matlock Tourist in 1838 says Mawe wrote this. The Panorama says the Devonshire Cavern "on the Heights of Abraham, (Mount Parnassus)" was "discovered about four years ago" (page 18). "It is visited by every curious resident; and, on comparison with the others, is greatly preferred, being a natural cavern, and of very great extent, and presenting an ininite number of 'water icicles', (a most appropriate local term,) some of which line the sides, and others are pendant from the roof" "The Proprietor" had "been at considerable expense" to provide easy access and "driving a gallery through it to the open air".

    winter 1828 Mary Anning discovered the first British example of a "flying dragon" or Pterodactylus, which caught the public's imagination more than any other of her finds. Dimorphodon macronyx (Buckland, 1829) PV R 1034 - Two articles by William Buckland in Transactions of the Geological Society of London, followed one another: "On the discovery of a new species of pterodactyle in the lias at Lyme Regis" and "On the Discovery of Coprolites, or Fossil Faeces, in the Lias at Lyme Regis, and in other Formations" in 1829. (In series 2, volume 3, 1835, see pages 217-240 and plates at end). (offline)

    "In the same blue lias formation at Lyme Regis, in which so many specimens of Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus have been discovered by Miss Mary Anning-, she has recently found the skeleton of an unknown species of that most rare and curious of all reptiles, the Pterodactyle, an extinct genus, which has yet been recognized only in the upper Jura limestone beds of Aichstedt and Solenhofen, in the lithographic stone, which is nearly coeval with the chalk of England"

    Buckland thought the Pterodactyle might be able to fly, swim, creep, or climb, or suspend itself from trees. He compared it to Milton's description of the devil: "The Fiend, O'er bog, or steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way. And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies." Paradise Lost, Book 2. line 947. #

    1829

    1829 Thomas Babington Macaulay's review of James Mill's Essay on Government criticised it for using deduction rather than induction.

    1829 John Stuart Mill read Comte for the first time.

    1829 Robert Owen returned to England to find he is a guru of the labour movement.

    May 1829: The British Association for Promoting Cooperative Knowledge founded in London.

    4.12.1829 William Buckland read a paper "On the discovery of Fossil Bones of the Iguanodon, in the Iron Sand of the Wealden Formation in the Isle of Wight, and in the Isle of Purbeck" Finds (by local fossil collectors) helped to connect "the geological structure of ... parts of the Isle of Wight and Isle of Purbeck ... with the Weald of Sussex and Kent".
    Two views (drawings) of Metacarpal bone of Iguanadon from Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight. The vision of Iguanadon was initially deduced from such pieces. Mantell used the proportions of eight different fossil bones compared with those of "the recent Iguana" to calculate prehistoric Iguanadon's as 70 feet long (including 52.5 feet of tail) and 14.5. feet in body circumference.
    Mantell, in 1847, noted that "the largest toe-hone of the Iguanodon now in my possession was obtained from a row of stones placed round the flower-plot of a cottage near Brixton". Swanage, in Dorset, is located where iron-sand divides the Purbeck limestone to the south, from the greensand and chalk of Ballard Down to the north. From Swanage bay. a Rev. F.O. Bartlett and Colonel White had collected bones of fossils for Bartlett's museum, including ones from Iguanodon, Plesiosaurus, crocodiles, and possibly Megalosaurus. Washed from cliffs, the fossils had been rolled up and down the beach and partially eroded.

    1830

    July 1830: Revolution in France - Marx identified the revolution of 1830 with the class victory of finance capital. [See revolution]

    Eugène Delacroix's painting "Liberty leading the people" shows her bare-breasted, possibly symbolising that she breast feeds the people.

    1830-1842: Auguste Comte's Cours de Philosophie Positive (six volumes), published. The first volume is believed to have only been published (1830) in Brussels, probably due to the revolution. It was re- published in Paris later. Volume two was published in 1835 - volume three in 1838 - volume four in 1839, volume five in 1841, volume six in 1842.

    1830 Volume one of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, Being an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface, by reference to causes now in operation with plates, illustrations and maps. Volume two in 1832. Volume three in 1833

    5.7.1830 Start of French invasion of Algiers. "The invasion marked the end of several centuries of Ottoman rule in Algeria and the beginning of French Algeria" (Wikipedia). This is considered te beginning of the second French Empire. The occupation of French Indo-China took place under Napoleon 3rd. See Roland Barthes the signification.

    9.8.1830 Louise Philippe proclaimed king of France. On 16.8.1830 ex-king Charles 10th left for exile in England.

    what about the workers? 28.8.1830 First threshing machine destroyed in the "Swing Riots" in England.

    15.9.1830 Railway opened between the port of Liverpool and the cotton town of Manchester.

    George Stephenson (9.6.1781 - 12.8.1848) constructed the line and his son Robert Stephenson (16.10.1803 - 12.10.1859) designed and built the steam locomotives.

    The painting (a detail) of open carriages on the first day was painted by A.B. Clayton in 1830 (Wikimedia Commons)

    Charles Tayleur and Company at Newton Le Willows opened in 1832 to produce girders for bridges, switches and crossings, and other ironwork following the opening of the railway. Robert Stephenson was a partner for a few years. Became The Vulcan Foundry Company in (or by) 1847. [See mythology Vulcan]

    See 1854 - 1899 - and Festivalof Britain 1951 and Vulcan 1951 - before 1960.

    15.11.1830 was the end of the Wellington Tory Government in the United Kingdom. 17.11.1830 was the start or Grey's Whig Government.

    1830: Royal Geographic Society founded. It incorporated the African Society (founded in 1788), in 1831. From 1830 to 1840 it met in the rooms of the Horticultural Society. [external link to history]. The National Geographic Society of the United States was founded in 1888.

    1830 At Lund, Bror Emil Hildebrand arranged exhibits according to Christian Jürgensen Thomsen's three age system. He did the same at Stockholm between 1831 and 1837. Rudolf Keyser applied the system in Christiania (Oslo), Norway, between 1833 and 1836. So, by the time Thomsen published his guide to the system in 1836, it was already known and accepted in Scandinavia. (Gräslund, p.20).

    what about the workers? 1831

    James Clark Ross reached the magnetic north pole in 1831
    1831 to 1836 Charles Darwin's voyage on the Beagle
    In 1831, Patrick Matthew (1790-1874) published a book on On Naval Timber and Arboriculture (Edinburgh and London) the appendix to which outlined the idea of evolution by natural selection.
    1831 to 1834: Eduard Rüppell travelled to Ethiopia where he encountered the gelada monkeys and from which he brought back precious manuscripts of Ethiopian Christianity.
    Monday 30.5.1831: Fourth British Census
    Population of England and Wales: 13,897,000; Scotland: 2,364,000

    See the formation of statistical societies in 1833

    September 1831 British Association for the Advancement of Science founded. A brief (pdf) history on the British Association's website implied that an objective was to make science more open, and less elitist. The focus of the Association's activities was its Annual Meeting "which was an important forum for major scientific announcements and debate". - There is now a web brief history. (archive)

    Major scientific announcements the brief history lists are "Joule's experiments on the mechanical equivalent of heat in the 1840s, Bessemer's steel process (1856), the discovery of the first of the inert gases, argon, by Rayleigh and Ramsay (1894), the first public demonstration of wireless transmission over a few hundred yards by Sir Oliver Lodge (1894), and J. J. Thomson's discovery of the electron (1899)." It also mentions the debate on Darwin's theory in 1860. As can be seen, the emphasis is on the natural sciences, and the new statistical section (1835) was told not to be political.

    The Spirit of the Age

    Georg Friedrich Hegel, the philosopher of history as the development of ideas, died in Germany in 1831.

    German "idealism" and French "positivism" provided English speakers with alternative approaches to social science to utilitarianism.

    John Stuart Mill's articles on the Spirit of the Age (1831) showed the influence of Saint-Simon in his explanation of the way different ideas fit different periods of history. Mill was a utilitarian arguing that there is a cultural difference in what gives pleasure. He adapted utilitarianism to the philosophy of history.

    Thomas Carlyle argued against utilitarianism in a fiction called Sartor Resartus (Latin for "clothes maker repaired"), which he wrote in 1831 (published later). This argued for a social science based on the analysis of symbols. Clothes are typical social symbols. We are naturally naked, but in society we use clothes to convey meaning to one another. Although the movement of planets may be described on the model of a machine, Carlyle said social science requires the analysis of meanings. Religion had provided this, but, like old clothes, it no longer fits. The times require new clothes. Utilitarianism will not do, because it removes the significance of symbolic meanings, reducing them all to degrees of pain and pleasure in an effort to imitate the machine model used by physics.

    what about the workers? 1832

    1832 Michael Faraday (England) Joseph Henry (USA) reported their separate conversion of electricity into magnetism and back into electricity.
    Faraday sent a current through a coil of wires, creating a magnetic field which induced a momentary current in a second coil.
    This discovery of electromagnetic induction led to the development of electric motors, generators and dynamos.

    1832 Friends Provident Institution founded, on the proposal of Samuel Tuke and Joseph Rowntree, "to provide the security of life assurance" to Quakers. Office above a sweet shop in Bradford. See online history.

    1.2.1832 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws appointed. It reported in 1834

    14.4.1832 Robert Owen's penny paper The Crisis began publication. "It is now evident to every one who observes passing events .., that a momentous Crisis is at hand".

    June 1832 Insurrection républicaine à Paris en juin 1832 - Wikipedia

    6.6.1832 Jeremy Bentham died. He left his body to medical science and you can still visit his corpse at the University of London.

    30.6.1832 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge announced planned publication of a Penny Cyclopaedia. When it commenced (1833?) there were six penny numbers per month. On 13.11.1833 these were offered bound together in cloth at 7/6d as Volume 1 - A to Andes. Price and numbers later increased but the same publication plan continued until completion in 1843/1844. (See article by James Carlile Open Court 1919)

    In 1832 a Whig Government passed a Parliamentary Reform Act (Royal Assent 7.6.1832). This did not add many voters, but it spread the vote more evenly over the country. There was a marked shift in the balance of power from the landed aristocracy to the urban middle classes.

    what about the workers? 1833

    Emancipation of Slaves: In August 1833, the British Parliament passed an Act prohibiting slavery in British colonies. This Act came into force on Friday 1.8.1834, which was treated as a day of celebration by the people of Britain. As in France in 1794, the common people of the slave-owning country identified with the freedom of the slaves. This is how the novel John Halifax, Gentleman (D.M. Craik, 1856) described the celebrations:

      "what a soft, gray, summer morning it was, and how it broke out into brightness; how everywhere bells were ringing, club fraternities walking with bands and banners, school-children having feasts and work-people holidays."

    Slave owners and compensation (examples): see Dr Thomas Turner and Robert Gordon

    1833 The Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius coined the term polymer (many parts), originally for a compound with a formula that was a multiple of another. (A definition still used in dictionaries). It has evolved into a word for a compound with a large number of similar units bonded together, with special reference to plastics, resins and rubbers formed of such organic compounds. See nylon.

    1833 A Topographical Dictionary of Great Britain and Ireland: ..., Volume 1 Compiled by John Gorton. "Bristol, until eclipsed by Liverpool, was the principal port on the western coast of England. Its lead-branch of foreign commerce is with West Indies, which it supplies with every sort of article necessary to the black and white population; and receives back vast quantities of rum, cotton, sugar, and other West India produce in return. Sugar is the most important article,"

    Franz Bopp's Comparative Grammar was published in Berlin in six part in 1833, 1835, 1842, 1847, 1849 and 1852. The full title being Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litauischen, Gotischen und Deutschen (Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic and German). It is the comparative study of languages that is thought of as the origin of scientific as distinct from literary philology and linguistics.

    May 1833 "Joseph Whitworth, Tool-Maker from London" established in Manchester. Whitworth produced the machine tools which made the development of railways and steamships possible. "He is best remembered for his promotion of true plane surfaces and the Whitworth screw thread. His promotion of standard measures and interchangeability brought about an engineering revolution". (Whitworth Society)

    Statistical Societies formed

    Members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, meeting at Cambridge in the summer of 1833, formed a statistical section. - See history on website of the Royal Statistical Society). The Belgian mathematician Quetelet was invited and presented a paper on the relationship between the statistics of crime and age in France and Belgium to a small private meeting which included Thomas Malthus and Charles Babbage. Crime statistics were figures that European states had only recently begun to generate. State generated numbers opened a bright new window through which society could be looked at scientifically. Babbage proposed a statistical section of the British Association (section F) and this was agreed on the condition that it was non-political.

    Manchester Statistical Society was established before the end of 1833.

    1833 In volume three of Principles of Geology, Charles Lyell compared the fossil record in succesive strata of rocks to the records in a succesion of registers left by census officials:

    "Let the mortality of the population of a large country represent the successive extinction of species, and the births of new individuals the introduction of new species. While these fluctuations are gradually taking place everywhere, suppose commissioners to be appointed to visit each province of the country in succession, taking an exact account of the number, names, and individual peculiarities of all the inhabitants, and leaving in each district a register containing a record of this information. If, after the completion of one census, another is immediately made after the same plan, and then another, there will, at last, be a series of statistical documents in each province. When these are arranged in chronological order, the contents of those which stand next to each other will differ according to the length of the intervals of time between the taking of each census." (Lyell, C. 1833, p.32)

    what about the workers? 1834

    The Statistical Society of London, which had been projected at
    Cambridge, was established in the spring of 1834, and

    "since that time the pursuit of this science has extended very rapidly". Journal of the Statistical Society of London, Vol.1, no.1 May 1838 p.4

    The decision to found was made at a meeting at Babbage's house on 21.2.1834 and the society held its first meeting within two weeks, setting down its aims as 'the collection and classification of all facts illustrative of the present condition and prospects of society, especially as it exists in the British Dominions'. The Council was elected at a meeting on 3.5.1834. (Archive)


    9.4.1834 Start of the second revolt of the canuts and la semaine sanglante (week of blood) in France. (external link)



    1834 POOR LAW

    1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. By this Act a Poor Law Commission was created to regulate the poor law centrally. Under its influence local authorities were encourage to build workhouses and to refuse poor people any welfare payments unless they left their home and lived in the workhouse. The Act was hated by the working class who called workhouses the English "Bastilles". To erect some workhouses the government had to provide an army guard. Malthusianism was blamed for the New Poor Law. So evil were its motives thought to be that many thought they would be poisoned in the workhouse to control population.

    See Social Science History, chapter five:
    Social Science and the 1834 Poor Law
    The Theories that Smith, Bentham, Malthus and Owen made

    England's Poor Law Commissioners and the Trade in Pauper Lunacy 1834-1847
    and
    Mental Health, for the effect of the Act on the growth of asylums.

    The Bridgewater Treatises On the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God As Manifested in the Creation - published in volumes between 1833 and 1836

    1833 Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man - John Kidd (1775-1851), On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Physical Condition of Man: Principally with Reference to the Supply of His Wants and the Exercise of His Intellectual Faculties - 3 William Whewell (1794-1866), Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology Internet Archive offline - Charles Bell (1774-1842), The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments in Evincing Design

    1834 Peter Roget (1779-1869) Animal and Vegetable Physiology: Considered with Reference to Natural Theology - William Prout (1785-1850) Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion: Considered with Reference to Natural Theology

    1835 William Kirby (1759-1850) On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation of Animals and in Their History, Habits and Instincts

    1836 6. William Buckland (1784-1856) Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology online Internet Archive plates offline plates

    what about the workers? 1835

    The first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America published in French. The second volume was published in 1840. John Stuart Mill wrote a review in The Edinburgh Review, vol 72, 1840. Tocqueville's Recollections were written in 1850/1851. His The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution was published in 1856. He died in 1859

    1835 Adolphe Quetelet published his conception of the qualities of an average person as the central values of measurements grouped in "curve of possibility" - which we now call a "normal curve".
    This bell shaped picture drawn by Quetelet illustrates a distribution according to laws of probability. Quetelet showed that the distribution of naturally occurring features, such as the heights of adult men, approximated to the same shape. So, there would be very few very short men (left), large numbers of medium height men (around the central axis) and very few very tall men. Hidden in this picture was the possibility of measuring normality and abnormality (deviance) "scientifically". This external link illustrates the relation between the normal curve and probability - archive

    Farr in "Mortality of lunatics" has the idea of a natural death rate as something distinct from the (statistically) normal death rate - without using these words

    1835 Roderick Impey Murchison and Adam Sedgwick's "On the Silurian and Cambrian Systems, Exhibiting the Order in which the Older Sedimentary Strata Succeed each other in England and Wales" since described as the germ of the modern geological time scale.

    what about the workers? 1836

    James Mill died

    1836 The post of Registrar General (births, deaths and marriages) for England and Wales created by the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act. Registration began in 1837. William Farr was appointed (first) Superintendent of the Statistical Department in 1838. The Registrar General was responsible the census in England and Wales from 1841,

    1836 Contrasts by Augustus Welby Pugin published. Asserted that only a Roman Catholic Society could produce a truly Gothic style.

    Bridgewater Foundry built beside the Bridgewater Canal and the Liverpool to Manchester Railway. The foundry had a railway running through it which moved the heavy engineering goods it made from one point to another as they were worked on.

    1836 Edouard Biot (1803-1850) [in French] "The Population of China and its Variations since the year 2400 BC, until the thirteenth century AD"

    1836 Christian Jürgensen Thomsen's Ledetraad til nordisch Oldkyndighed. Published in English as Guide to Northern Archaeology in 1848

    what about the workers? 1837

    1837 A Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire: Exhibiting its extent, physical capacities, population, industry, and civil and religious institutions by John Ramsay McCulloch assisted by numerous contributors, published in two volumes under the superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. (Read online). The chapter on "Vital statistics, or, The statistics of health, sickness, diseases, and death" was written by Wiliam Farr. ["Vital Statistics" means "life statistics"]

    1837 to 1839 Thomas Carlyle's two volume The French Revolution established him amongst the chief writers of the day.

    February 1837 Digging began on the Clay Cross Tunnel in Derbyshire, to enable the Leeds to Derby railway to pass under Clay Cross Hill. It was was completed in August 1839. Coal and iron deposits discovered during the digging were the basis of the rapid expansion of Clay Cross as a mining town. Its geology inspired the coal formation feature at the 1854 Sydenham display. (History - Domesday - Clay Cross walk

    May 1837 William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented their electric telegraph which used a battery to send an electric current down five wires to five needles which pointed to letters and numbers on a panel. It was first used by the Great Western Railway. [See drum telegraph]

    1.7.1837 Registration of births, deaths and marriages in England and Wales required by law. - External link to General Register Office

    Poor Law Commission decide to extend the law to the north. Opposition spread faster than the Commissioners. An Anti-Poor law campaign and a campaign to control factory working hours merged with the campaign for the Charter. The Charter called for a vote for every adult male. Chartists believed that if the working class could gain control of Parliament they would gain control of the welfare system and of the economy. Tied to the Charter was a plan to bring it about. A large demonstration would present a monster petition to Parliament asking that all men should have a vote. They would wait outside Parliament and when the petition was rejected they would declare themselves a National Convention -a kind of People's Parliament which would take over from the official Parliament - To enforce their will they would call a sacred month or national strike of the working classes. The use of the word "Convention" was seen as deliberate reference to the French Revolution. The idea of the "sacred month" was common amongst the Owenites.

    Aborigines' Protection Society (London) founded in the aftermath of British emancipation of slaves. The Ethnological Society of London was founded in 1843

    20.6.1837 Victoria became Queeen on the death of her uncle, William 4th.

    French Wikipedia (in English) The Victorian era (L'époque victorienne) in the United Kingdom marks the height of the British industrial revolution and the British Empire. Queen Victoria reigned for 1837 to 1901, but some historians prefer to start the Victorian period at the Reform Act of 1832. The Victorian era is preceded by the Georgian and followed by the Edwardian era. - See also German Wikipedia - Victorian America - 1865

    A young portrait of Victoria was used from her first coins of 1838 until 1887 for gold and silver coins, but continued in use until as late as 1895 on some bronze coins.

    Victorian (and subsequent) pennies were legal currency in the United Kingdom until 1971. The early Victorian ones were worn very thin by over a century of use.


    Isambard Kingdom Brunel (9.4.1806 - 15.9.1859) designed the first steamship purpose-built for regularly scheduled trans-Atlantic crossings. The ship was part of a project that would link London, England to New York in the USA. This was completed on 30.6.1841 when the Great Western Railway from Paddington to Bristol opened.
    The Falmouth Art Gallery has this wood engraving by W. Serjent

    "The Great Western Steam Ship of Bristol"

    19.7.1837:
    Listen to the news on the day the Great Western Steamship (archive - new) was launched at Bristol. It left on its first voyage for America in 1838. There is also a feature on the lunacy commission described in the news bulletin.

    Hegel died in 1831.

    The Doktorklub, later renamed Die Freien of Young Hegelians met in Berlin in the late 1830s and early 1840s

    This cartoon of Die Freien is by Engels. I do not have a date.

    what about the workers? 1838

    1838 The Principles of General and Comparative Physiology by William Benjamin Carpenter. Developed in different formats over many years. 1846 A Manual of Physiology, including physiological anatomy Second edition 1851 [Internet Archive] refers to "green scum, which floats upon ponds, ditches... which consists of the cells of a minute Cryptogamic Plant". [Cryptogram = non-flowering. We would now call the green scum green algae]. He considered the chemical processes triggered in this by light, uniting carbon and hydrogen and releasing oxygen. Carpenter carried out microscopical studies of the Foraminifera, minute shelled creatures found in surface waters and oceanic (and geological) deposits. In the 1860s he was involved in the debate over 'dawn life' fossils Eozoon canadense.

    Objective statistics In an 1820 paper to the Royal Society, Benjamin Gompertz criticised life assurance societies for selecting mortality tables that they hoped would be favourable to them, rather than seeking objectivity. In 1838 he was a member of a committee formed by seventeen assurance offices to pool information in the search for reliable statistics.

    1838 William Ewart Gladstone The State in its Relations with the Church "We have no fear for the Church of England in her competition with the denominational bodies around her."

    1838 Anselme Payen, a French chemist, isolated cellulose from plant matter and determined its chemical formula. The purest natural form of cellulose is cotton fibre. Explosive "gun cotton" was made by treating cotton with nitric acid. This "nitrocellulose" formed the basis of early synthetic plastics from 1862. Registered as Celluloid in 1870. Celluloid film became the basis of home photography (1889) and cinema (1895). Cellulose from wood (mainly) was the basis of the artificial fibre industry that came to be known as rayon (1900).

    One spring morning 1838 A mirror image of Boulevard du Temple, Paris at "huit heure du matin" (8 a.m.) captured by Louis-Jaques-Mandé Daguerre using a light-sensitised silver plate. The plate was exposed in a camera for about ten minutes to take the picture. Moving objects were not recorded but a shoe-shiner and his customer were still enough to be immortalised.
    See
    photograph - photo 1856 - cabinet cards 1863 - street scene 1865 - film 1895 - film 1900 - photo 1905 - passing life 1909 - forgotten grief 1916 - working class families 1920s - Picture Post

    September 1838 The London to Birmingham Railway opened. The first main line in the world. [See steam and commerce] the train from
London

    In October 1838, Charles Darwin read Malthus on Population. This eventually led to his theory of evolution by natural selection.

    23.11.1838 A "Natural-History Society" established in Warrington, which "is already in possession of a Phrenological Society".

    1838 Charles Lyell The Elements of Geology - Originally planned as volume four of Principles

    1838 The Matlock Tourist, or guide through the Peak produced, in connection with the Centre Museum of J. Valence and Benjamin Bryan of the Devonshire Cavern. Of the caverns of Matlock the guide says "so rich and rare an assemblage of Minerals, Fossils, Ores, Stalactites, and Crystals, in an almost ininite variety of formation, is not to be met with in any other part of the kingdom". Rutland, at this time, used candles to illuminate its roof. Bengal lights (blue flares) were used in Devonshire.

    what about the workers? 1839
    In volume four of Cours de Philosophie Positive, Auguste Comte coined the word Sociologie. In 1843, this entered English as Sociology.

    The speed of the train may annihilate distance: The first volume of The Quarterly Review (January-March) for 1839 started with an article in which the author suggested the current speed of possibly 30 miles per hour might increase to sixty or even a hundred.

    "It will be evident that the first effect of this increasing series is the gradual annihilation, approaching almost to the final extinction, of that space and of those distances which have hitherto been supposed unalterably to separate the various nations of the globe; and that in proportion as this shall be effected, the centralisation, whether for weal or woe, of the human family, must be accomplished. For instance, supposing that railroads, even at our present simmering rate of travelling, were to be suddenly established all over England, the whole population of the country would, speaking metaphorically, at once advance en masse, and place their chairs nearer to the fireside of their metropolis by two-thirds of the time which now separates them from it; they would also sit nearer to one another by two-thirds of the time which now respectively alienates them. If the rate were to be again sufficiently accelerated, this process would be repeated ; our harbours, our dock-yards, our towns, the whole of our rural population, would again not only draw nearer to each other by twothirds, but all would proportionally approach the national hearth. As distances were thus annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it were, shrivel in size until it became not much bigger than one immense city, and yet by a sort of miracle every man's field would be found not only where it always was, but as large as ever it was!"

    7.5.1839 First presentation of the Charter to Parliament.

    12.5.1839 La Société des saisons launched an usuccesful republican revolt against the July monarchy (French Wikipedia)

    9.7.1839 Completion of thirteen miles of electric telegraph between the Paddington and West Drayton stations of the Great Western Railway.

    10.9.1839: John Frederick William Herschel to William Henry Fox Talbot: I have not tried Daguerre's process - But I yesterday succeeded in producing a photograph on glass ... The process ... consists in depositing on the glass a perfectly uniform film of Muriate of Silver - dry (by subsidence from water) - drying it - then washing it with Nitrate to render it sensitive... When placed glass foremost in the focus of a Camera This takes the image with much greater sharpness than paper." See also Fox Talbot's paper based salt print method.

    what about the workers? Hungry Forties
    The Hungry Forties; life under the Bread Tax was the title chosen by Jane Unwin, in 1904, for a collection of documents from the 1840s. The term caught on as the British labour movement of the early twentieth century recounted to itself the struggles of its predecessors, and British communists studied the Communist Manifesto and tried to relate it to the decade that gave birth to it.

    The "hungry forties", when a large part of the Irish peasantry starved to death and the condition of the English workers was also miserable, had a strong effect on the ideas about society of people of many different political persuasions.

    But the date 1840 is artificial, the period really begins in the 1830s. The 1830s and 1840s were a period of rapid industrial development, social distress and the emergence of open class conflict. A period when Britain came nearer to revolution than at any other time in recent history.

    It was also a period when people were thinking about how society is structured and how society changes. There was a great deal of political and theoretical discussion, not only about class, but also about how we should think about men, women and children and their position in society.

    what about the workers? 1840

    1840: "In all ages woman may lament the ungallant silence of the historian" . The art of needle-work from the earliest ages : including some notices of the ancient historical tapestries by Mrs Elizabeth Stone, edited by Mary Margaret Stanley Egerton, Countess of Wilton. London: Henry Colburn 1840. ix and 405 pages. 1841 edition available at Project Gutenberg

    12.6.1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention opened in London. Its decision not to recognise women delegates (from America) sparked the women's rights movement. America

    December 1840 An article by Lord Ashley in the Tory Quarterly Review, discussed the employment of children in factories, and argued that society and the family in Britain were being destroyed by the industrial revolution. The way to restore a healthy society was for the rich to concern themselves with the welfare of the poor.

    Brief note on Ashley
    Ashley's writings
    Ashley in the 1830s and 1840s
    Ashley as a Lunacy Commissioner

    what about the workers? 1841

    1841 Ludwig Feuerbach, in The Essence of Christianity argued that Christianity is a necessary phase of human culture whose essence is to understand human potenial in a heavenly rather than an earthly form.

    Feuerbach's earth-centred (rather than heaven-centred) view of religion has been described as anthropological and as humanist

    1841 A Huntley and a Palmer (both Quakers) became partners in biscuit making in Reading. This advertisement is before 1846. (See Reading Museum). Huntley had sold biscuits to travellers on (horse drawn) coaches since 1822. Tins to preserve them were manufactured by one of his sons from 1832. The square shape of the tins had to be modified when they were sent by the new trains. More about biscuits

    1841 Statistical Society resolves to collect lunatic asylum statistics. 15.4.1841 William Farr's "Report on the Mortality of Lunatics". (See also Mental Health History timeline for 1841). William Far also produced an English life table predicting the life spans of 100,000 people born alive in 1841. The longest lived women was predicted to die in 1945 - when I was one year old.

    23.2.1841 The Chemical Society of London held its first meeting. In 1980, the Chemical Society merged with the Royal Institute of Chemistry, Faraday Society and the Society for Analytical Chemistry to become the Royal Society of Chemistry.

    15.4.1841 Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain founded by leading London chemists and druggists "for the protection of their general interests and the advancement of the art and science of Pharmacy." Proposed by William Allen, who became its first President.

    Sunday 6.6.1841/Monday 7.6.1841: Fifth British Census
    This recorded names for the first time. People over 15 years old had their age recorded to the lowest term of five. The place a person was born in was partially recorded: Y for born in the same county, N for not. S for Scotland, I for Irelend. For the first time, householders could complete their own forms if they were able to. (Census layout - external)
    Population of England and Wales: 15,914,000; Scotland: 2,620,000

    Suicide statistics: Emile Durkheim's table of "Stability of suicide in the principal European countries (absolute figures)" has time series starting in 1841 for France, Prussia, Saxony and Denmark, in 1844 Bavaria, and in 1857 for England.

    Chesnais (2003) says that "some countries have time series stretching back to the 18th century and in some cases, point observations dating as far back as the 13th century". However, to "To ensure coverage of a sufficient range of countries" he uses data starting between 1845 and 1855.

    July 1841 Following on the Crocodilia, Richard Owen introduced the Dinosaurians (fearfully great lizards) in his "Report on British fossil reptiles" to the British Association in Plymouth. There were, he said, similarities in the "gigantic Dinosaur to the crocodilian structure". "Owen used three genera to define the dinosaurs: the carnivorous Megalosaurus, the herviborous Iguanodon and armoured Hylaeosaurus" (Wikipedia).

    September 1841 (London) Voice of Jacob launched by Jacob Franklin. October 1841 Jewish Chronicle launched by Isaac Valentine. The two papers merged in a complicated history.

    what about the workers? 1842 No gloomier year


    Poems by Alfred Tennyson published. One that was soon popular (Locksley Hall), celebrates science and the march of mind and industry as the spirit of the age in Europe and contrasts it with the savagery of dusky races. (The words are Tennyson's, not mine).
      "Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
      With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;

      When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
      Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be -

      In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind.

    Tennyson dreams of having children with a "savage woman" so that they are supple-sinewed, leaping brooks rather than poring over books, but recoils. "I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time - Let the people spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay."

    Compare with Barry Cornwall

    The poet recognises mind in women as well as men: "Women is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match'd with mine are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine". In 1847 Tennyson published a poem in which a royal princess founds a women's university. She falls from the chastity of thought when she falls in love, but the dominant image is that European men and women are both to be engaged in the adventures of science and thought.

    But the march of mind and the march of hunger are in competition. In the immediate present "all things here are out of joint, science moves, but slowly slowly, creeping on from point to point: Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher". (Quotations all from Locksley Hall)



    May 1842 Second presentation of the Charter to Parliament.

    May 1842 John Bennet Lawes, of Rothampsted, applied for a patent for "chemically decomposing for purposes of manure by means of sulphuric acid of Bones, or Bone Ash or Apatite or Phosphorite or any other substances containing phosphoric acid". (Patent 9353, granted November 1842).

    sometime 1842 Fossils thought to be coprolites (fossilised dung) discovered at Felixstow, on the Suffolk coast, by John Stevens Henslow, rector of Hitcham, leading to the development of extraction for phosphatic fertiliser. See 1843 - 1845 - 1861 - 1872. See Friends of Darwin - O'Connor 1993 - Berridge Eve 2004

    1842 The railway from Derby opening as far as Ambergate made day trips from Midlands' industrial towns to Matlock Bath in the Peak District possible. From Ambergate, visitors were taken in boats along the canal to Cromford. They then walked a mile to Matlock Bath. Many factories organised excursions on the annual works holiday. Sometimes parties of as many as 500 people. (Fact Sheet)

    7.6.1842 Lord Ashley introduced a bill intended to ban women and children from working in coal mines.

    10.8.1842 Coal Mines Act became law.

    Summer 1842 Plug riots. English workers, striking for the Charter, roamed the Midlands and North of England setting light to rich men's houses and pulling out the plugs of factory boilers. Parliament thought that the revolution was upon them.

    1842 Volume 24 of the Penny Cyclopaedia (Taiwan to Titlarks) included a long article on Teleosaurus that starts "Since the article Crocodile was written" Owen's Report on British Fossil Reptiles has covered a "family of extinct crocodilians" divided into two genera: Teleosaurus and Stensosaurus.

    what about the workers? 1843

    Blackwood's Magazine volume 53, p.397 "These are to constitute a new science, to be called Social Ethics, or Sociology" - First use recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary.

    1843 The Zoologist - A popular miscellany of natural history a monthly magazine edited by Edward Newman founded. Newman was editor in chief until his death in 1876.

    February 1843

    Ethnological Society of London founded by members of the Aborigines' Protection Society. To be "a centre and depository for the collection and systematisation of all observations made on human races". Divided over racialist issues from early days, it split into an Ethnological Society and an Anthropological Society in 1863. Merging in 1870, it became The Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1871. (Royal from 1907). Now The Royal Anthropological Institute (Link goes directly to its website)

    29.3.1843 Colchester railway station opened. This was the then eastern terminus of the Eastern Counties Railway from London (Shoreditch/Bishopsgate) passing through Stratford, Romford, Brentwood, and Chelmsford.

    Spring 1843 A System of Logic, by John Stuart Mill, published. Mill defended deductive theory against induction, and induction against deduction, arguing that science needs both. He suggested how psychology (the study of mind) could become a science of experiment and observation, and discussed the foundations of a science of society (sociology). The argumant of the book is outlined under John Stuart Mill defends deductive theory in Social Science History, chapter one:
    John Stuart Mill and his problems with Francis Bacon

    1.7.1843 Gardeners Chronicle Advertisements for Guano and for J.Lawes's Patent Manures. Deptford Creek factory, opened 1843, later moved to Barking Creek. Initial phosphate production from bones, but Lawes' patent gave him a monopoly of manufacture from the new coprolite.

    Autumn 1843 John Bennet Lawes and Joseph Henry Gilbert established the Broadbalk experiment on Lawes' Rothamsted Estate in Berkshire. This was the first of the long- term "classic experiments", and it still exists today. A winter-wheat crop was first sown in the autumn of 1843. A control strip has received no fertiliser or manure since 1843. Other strips have received farmyard manure or inorganic fertiliser. Lawes was the pioneer of artificial fertilisers having established the manufacture of superphosphate at his factory in Deptford, England in 1842. See 1919

    Rothamsted Experimental Station
    1986 Institute of Arable Crops Research: See Long Ashton Research Station
    1999 Rothamsted Research


    October 1843 Henslow had "called attention to the occurrence of phosphate of lime in pebbly beds of the red crag at Felixstow, in Suffolk; these nodules, though extremely hard, presented external indications of an animal origin, and yielded, upon analysis, 56 per cent. of phosphate of lime...

    In 1843 Edward Packard made a bone-based superphosphate at Snape in Suffolk, and shortly after used local coprolites, ground in a mill, as a base. In 1847 he took over an old flourmill on the quay at Ipswich, first grinding coprolites, later treating them with acid, but the fumes were unpopular, so in 1851 he moved to a site between the navigation and the railway at Brantham. (bagseals and O'Connor).

    Christmas 1843

    The Song of the Shirt Surrounded by comic characters, a poem about the misery of a dressmaker appeared in the Christmas number of Punch, or the London Charivari on 16.12.1843.

    19.12.1843 A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens published as an (expensive) gift book. Scrooge is visited by the spirit of the past, of prisons, workhouses and asylums - and the humanity within them. Then by the spirit of the present: a jolly one with food and drink. Finally, the spirit of things to be calls on him to change his selfish ways. (Wikipedia)

    20.12.1843. Completion of the Penny Cyclopaedia of the society for the difussion of useful knowledge (Volume 27, 10/6d bound in cloth. Wales to Zygophylacea) London: Charles Knight. Begun 1833. Copies at Hathi Trust

    what about the workers? 1844

    1844 A natural cavern at Matlock Bath opened to the public, called Great Masson. (See Devonshire). Owned by Greatorex family in the 19th century. Entered by 400 yards of an "old Roman lead mine". The natural cavern had been discovered "in following a vein of lead". Sides and roof covered with fossilshells and encrusted with crystals of dog-tooth and flour spar. See also Rutland mine.

    21.12.1844 The Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society opened a shop "selling pure food at fair prices and honest weights and measures". (Link to museum)

    what about the workers? 1845

    1845 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (external link - archive)

    " Fifty years ago, science possessed no facts regarding the origin of organic creatures upon earth ... all was a blank antecedent to the first chapters of what we usually call ancient history". [Since then] "researches in the crust of the earth" [have shown that]... "strata of various thickness were deposited in seas... The remains and traces of plants and animals found in the succession of strata, show that, while these operations were going on, the earth gradually became the theatre of organic being, simple forms appearing first, and more complicated afterwards. A time when there was no life is first seen. We then see life begin, and go on ; but whole ages elapsed before man came to crown the work of nature. "

    1845 Johannes Japetus Steenstrup (1813-1897) On the alternation of generations, or, The propagation and development of animals through alternate generations : a peculiar form of fostering the young in the lower classes of animals. Translated from the German version. [Internet Archive - offline] "I presuppose that my readers are acquainted with the animals vulgarly termed jelly-fishes or sea-nettles and in scientific language Medusa". See Darwin on jelly fishes - Wikipedia jellyfish - Primordial soup.   Thomas Huxley's paper "On the Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of the Medusae" was published in 1849. [Royal Society - offline]

    Tuesday 14.6.1845 at the 15th Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at Cambridge, Section C: Geology and Physical Geography. Paper from Professor Henslow "On Nodules, apparently Coprolitic, from the Red Crag, London Clay, and Greensand" about potential source of phosphate, which occurred near the surface over many square miles in the vicinity of Cambridge in strata never more than a foot thick. Buckland doubted the coprolitic origin of the nodules. (Report in The Atheneum)

    1845 The Claims of Labour. An Essay on the Duties of the Employers to the Employed, published anonymously, argues for a new order of society based on benevolence of employers towards the employed.

    John Stuart Mill's review of The Claims of Labour in the Edinburgh Review argues that a new moral order based on benevolence would undermine the independence and self- determination of working class people

    Summer 1845 Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England

    October 1845 Beginning of the Great Famine in Ireland. Potato blight destroyed three-quarters of the crop.

    what about the workers? 1846

    26.6.1846 Repeal of the Corn Law

    In Dickens' 1838 satire on the Poor Law, Oliver Twist caused a sensation by asking for more food. In 1846 it seemed the satire had come true. It was revealed that in Andover Workhouse the residents were so hungry that they fought over rotten bones. The scandal of Andover led to the replacement of the Poor Law Commissioners, in 1847, by a Poor Law Board responsible directly to Parliament and, under new management, the poor law became the centre of a remarkably extensive pauper welfare state. Poor law hospitals laid the foundations for the National Health Service - and many are still in use.

    12.8.1846 Term "folklore" suggested for the culture and traditions of ordinary people

    Winter 1846/1847: John Stuart Mill laid aside work on the Principles of Political Economy to campaign for land reform in Ireland.

    what about the workers? 1847

    27.1.1847 Institution of Mechanical Engineers founded at a meeting at the Queen's Hotel, Birmingham. George Stephenson elected first President. The 70 founder members included representatives of nine different railways. The Vulcan Foundry was represented by Edward Tayleur and Henry Dubbs. (Vulcan Magazine Volume 2, Number 4, Winter 1951-1952, p.18)

    9.6.1847 Warrington Council met for the first time. [See rail]. Its first Mayor, William Beamont (1797-1889), became the first chairman of the Museum and Library Committee in 1848.

    July 1847 Poem Song of the Famine in Dublin University Magazine

    November 1847 origins of the Communist Manifesto - In November/December, Marx said that achieving the Charter would make the English working class the "saviour of the whole human race"

    1847 Ridderstolp House

    1847 Tancred; or, The New Crusade, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli, in which Sidonia says that "All is race; there is no other truth". England

    "A Saxon race, protected by an insular position, has stamped its diligent and methodic character on the century. And when a superior race, with a superior idea to work and order, advances, its state will be progressive, and we shall, perhaps, follow the example of the desolate countries... The decay of a race is an inevitable necessity, unless it lives in deserts and never mixes its blood." (Chapter 20)

    1847 Jacques Boucher de Perthes, a French customs official and member of the Société Royale d'Emulation d'Abbeville published Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes. Mémoire sur l'industrie primitive et les arts à leur origine.. Paris: Treuttel et Wurtz, fuelling the debate over the antiquity of humans. From the late 1830s he had collected Roman and Celtic atrtefacs from alluvial deposits on the Somme, near Abbeville. In very deep deposits he found crude stone artefacts from stratigraphic layers that also contained extinct animal bones. He believed these were proof that humans had lived in France at a time when mammoths and rhinoceros still roamed the region, and thus humanity was far older than traditional history and biblical chronology allowed. (From The Study of Prehistoric Artefacts in National Context by Mathew Goodrum 2013). See also Linda Hall Library and Dons maps. Boucher de Perthes; sa vie, ses ouvres, sa correspondance by Alcius Ledieu 1885. (Internet archive - offline)

    Geological excursions round the Isle of Wight, and also along the adjacent coast of Dorsetshire: illustrative of the most interesting geological phenomena, and organic remains by Gideon Algernon Mantell. "In one week, it would be easy for a practical geologist to collect a more instructive series of specimens, than is contained in the Museum of the Scientific Institution of the capital of the Island - Newport". Fossils are "for the most part ... picked up by persons wholly uninstructed as to the characters which alone render such specimens interesting. What the waves cast up on the strand, the fishermen gather together, the casual visitor selects such as please his fancy, and the remainder are thrown away, or employed to pave the footpath, or surround the flower-border, of the cottager's dwelling." (Internet Archive - offline)

    1847-1852 (Three volumes): Studien über die innern Zustände, das Volksleben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russlands by Baron August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) published in Hanover. Described by Frederick Starr (1968) as "the first attempt to bring the Russian commune into the sphere of European social thought". - See Engels footnote

    Mrs Alexander's Hymns for Little Children, first published in 1848, launched All Things Bright and Beautiful, in which the natural and social orders are praised as the creation of God: The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, He made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate. This was written in Ireland.
    See also the speech of Shaftesbury to the Social Science Congress in 1858.

    1848: John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy published with a chapter drafted by Harriet Taylor on the self- determination of the labouring classes - and women

    1848: Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton

    February 1848 The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels published in German, in London

    Saint-Simon had argued that history is moved between different stages by the rise of new classes. Marx and Engels argued that all history is class conflict. The 1848 manifesto was a redraft by Marx of an 1847 draft by Engels called the Principles of Communism,

    See also   1806   1822   1828   1829   1835   1843   1845
    1859 On Liberty
    1861 Representative Government
    1869 Subjection of Women
    1880 Freud and J.S. Mill
    Mill and Taylor on the future of the labouring classes
    Mill and Taylor on Freedom as Self Development
    Mill and Taylor weblinks
    See also
    1845: Engels on England
    1846: German Ideology
    1859: Marx explains how his political economic theories developed.
    1884 Engels' Origin

    The Communist Manifesto
    Principles of Communism
    Marx and Engels: scientific socialism
    Marx and Engels weblinks

    what about the workers? 1848 REVOLUTIONS
    1848 was a year of revolutions in Europe. In
    France the monarchy collapsed and the Second Republic was established. In the German Confederation there were many revolts for constitutional government and a national parliament.
    The Communist Manifesto said that "of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class". [See revolution]

    In England, Wales and France the workers were a significant fraction of radical activity, but no more.

    In Germany, the Manifesto anticipated a radical bourgeoise revolution followed by a proletarian revolution. The proletarian revolution did not happen.

    24.2.1848 Louis Philippe driven out of Paris and the French Republic proclaimed.

    25.2.1848 Armed workers occupied the French Assembly demanding the right to work.

    4.3.1848 Marx arrested by the police (in Brussels) and escorted to the French frontier. Continued to Paris

    13.3.1848 People of Vienna broke the power of Prince Metternich. He fled the country.

    18.3.1848 People of Berlin took arms. King surrendered to them after 18 hours.

    10.4.1848 Chartists gathered on Kennington Common to prepare for a march to Parliament. The marchers were fewer than expected and the presentation of the third, and final, petition ended peacefully.

    April 1848 to May/June 1849: Marx and Engels worked for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne

    May or June 1848. First copies of The Communist Manifesto circulating in Germany.

    3.6.1848 Warrington Museum and Library opened, making Warrington one of the first towns in England to support a public library from the rates. A library established in 1760 united with the museum of the local Natural History Society, which had been founded in 1838. This was achieved under the 1845 Museums Act. The museum and library were first housed in rented premises in Friars Green House. See 1855.

    what about the workers? 1849

    August 1849 Marx settled in London as a political refugee.

    November 1849 Engels arrived in London. From 1849 Engels worked in his father's business in Manchester and supported Marx financially. Between December 1849 and November 1850, a series of articles, by Marx, in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung analysed political events in France from 1848 to 1850 in terms of class struggles.

    A Ladies College opened in Bedford Square,
    close to the British Museum and London University

    1849 Christian Jürgensen Thomsen opened Det Kongelige Etnografiske Museum (the Royal Ethnographical Museum), which became part of the Nationalmuseet (National Museum) in 1892.


    *********


    Germany 1850 Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frankreich von 1789 bis auf unsre Tage (History of the social movement in France from 1789 to the present) by Lorenz von Stein published in Leipzig in three volumes.

    5.3.1850 Opening of the Britannia Bridge, providing a rail crossing that linked Chester to Holyhead, and thus England to the boats for Dublin, Ireland.

    December 1850 Napoleon 3rd (President) dissolved the French Assembly and restored universal male suffrage. His total power was then approved by plebiscite. See Neumann's dictatorship types



    1851

    1851 A passenger train waits at Bishopsgate to take passengers to destinations north east of London and in Essex and East Anglia. Main lines terminated at Cambridge, Norwich and Yarmouth and there were trains to Enfield Town, Bishops Stortford, Hertford East, and Wisbech. The name "Bishopsgate" was chosen to stress the connection with the City of London. It was an important development in the history of commuting.

    Lord Ashley became the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

    Natural Sciences and Moral Sciences Triposes established at Cambridge University. The question paper for Natural Sciences (8.3.1851) included comparative anatomy, physiology, chemistry, botany, mineralogy, and geology, but not physics [See Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal 19.3.1851 and 2.4.1851.
    Physics see Cavendish Laboratory 1874

    The moral sciences included politics, philosophy and economics.
    See Mary Paley 1874

    Sunday 30.3.1851/Monday 31.3.1851: Sixth British Census
    From 1851 the exact ages and birthplaces were given, together with marital status and relationship to the householder. The number of blind, deaf and dumb was noted. (Census layout - external) In 1851 there was also a special census of church congregations and accommodation.
    Population of England and Wales: 17,928,000; Scotland: 2,889,000

    1.5.1851 to 15.10.1851 The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations held in Hyde Park, London. Housed in a "crystal palace" of plate glass designed by Joseph Paxton of Derbyshire.

    After the exhibition, the Crystal Palace was moved to south London.

    30.5.1851: Meeting to establish the Central Co-operative Agency, 76 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. Founder Edward Vansittart Neale and Thomas Hughes one of the contributors

    21.4.1851 Marriage of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor
    July 1851 Harriet Taylor's article The Enfranchisement of Women in The Westminster Review America

    May 1852 Museum of Manufactures opened at Marlborough House, transferring to Somerset House in September. Funded from the profits of the Great Exhibition, it covered both applied art and science. Exhibits from the Exhibition were purchased to form the nucleus of the collection. The South Kensington Museum opened on the present site of the Victoria and Albert Museum on 22.6.1857. Premises also host The Patent Office Museum, a collection of machinery which included Puffing Billy and Stephenson's Rocket, was in the same building. (It became formally part of the South Kensington Museum in 1883). In 1862 the Science collections moved to separate buildings on Exhibition Road, and the South Kensington buildings specialised in Art. The Casts Courts were opened in 1873. In 1893 a separate Science Collections director was appointed. In 1909 the museum's art collections were renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Science and Engineering collections named the Science Museum. The Science Museum included medicine from 1976.

    Also funded from the profits of the Great Exhibition was The Science and Art Department, a government body (1853 to 1899) promoting education in art, science, technology and design in Britain and Ireland.

    26.11.1852 The Journal of the Society of Arts (and of the Institutions in Union) Number 1 published. Available online.

    1852 Charles Dickens in Bleak House "As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."

    Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was begining work on his Sydenham Crystal Palace Megalosaurus, illustrated here.

    1853 Karl Knies's Political Economy from the Historical Point of View published in German and Harriet Martineau's English translation of Auguste Comte , published.

    Geoff Bunn's A Chronology of Psychology in Britain 1853-1987 begins with J.D. Morrell's (1816-1891) Elements of Psychology as "the first book published in England to be called psychology. (Hearnshaw, 1964: 21)". The first part of the chronology builds up to the founding of The Psychological Society in 1901. - offline rtf - offline pdf

    1853 First International Statistical Congress held in Brussels. Organisers included L. A. J. Quételet and E. Engel. [2nd 1855 - 3rd 1857 - 4th 1860 - 5th 1862 - 6th 1867 - 7th 1869 - 8th 1872 - 9th and last 1875

    1854 to 1856 Crimean War (Concluded by the Treaty of Paris signed on 30.3.1856, which made the Black Sea neutral territory,)

    27.3.1854 and 28.3.1854 France and Britain declare war on Russia

    A pie chart to make statistics palatable

    Florence Nightingale's polar area graph showing graphically that contagious diseases, such as cholera and typhus (the blue wedges), were the major cause of death in the war. The deaths from wounds are represented by the red inner wedges and the black wedges are deaths from other causes.

    The illustration is misleading in that the wedge shapes give a larger area to the outer part than the inner - over-emphasising deaths from contagious diseases.

    1854 "Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service, Together with a Letter from the Rev. B. Jowett." by Stafford Northcote and Charles Trevelyan. See Civil Service History

    1854 Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark-, Hof-, Dorf-, und Stadtverfassung und der offentlichen Gewalt was the first of a series of books on the early institutions of the Germans by Georg Ludwig von Maurer (1790 - 1872) - Source Wikipedia - See Engels footnote

    The Crystal Palace Sydenham was a fantasy world of historical halls in the glass palace (destroyed by fire 1936) which cascaded downhill outside through gardens and enormous fountains (removed later in the 19th century), the water from which fed a tidal lake which was the setting for an exhibition of the works of creation of God and the British mining industry. This has been partially restored. The first picture below is an (unrealistic) artists preconception highlighting the waters flowing into pre-history beneath a rustic iron bridge.
    In the grounds: "Geology and Inhabitants of the Ancient World. The Extinct Animals Restored". Picture below from Geology and Inhabitants of the Ancient World. Described by Richard Owen 1854. (offline)
    June 1854 The Sydenham Crystal Palace opened by Queen Victoria. (history)
    With prehistoric animals related to British rock strata - getting older from left to right - Chalk: Pterodactyl - Wealden: Iguanodons and Hylaeosaurus - Oolite (Stonesfield Slate): Megalosaurus - (bird-like) Pterodactyl - (in water): Taleosaurus [Teleosaurus], Lias (in water): Plesiosaurus and Ichthyosaurus - New Red Sandstone: Labyrinthodon.

    Illustration from Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins "On Visual Education As Applied to Geology, Illustrated By Diagrams and Models of the Geological Restorations at the Crystal Palace". Journal of the Society of Arts 2 (78): 443-449. Friday 19.5.1854. Available online. Waterhouse writes of "Those vast forms and gigantic beasts which the Almighty Creator designed with fitness to inhabit and precede us in possession of this part of the earth called Great Britain". For possible demonic associations see Buckland and Doré

    Geological time and the minerals of industry set in the tidal lake

    Waterhouse Hawkins' illustration (above) covers the Primary and Secondary Island - from New Red Sandstone: Labyrinthodon to Chalk: Pterodactyl.

    Tertiary Island, includes the giant ground sloth (Megatherium), Palaeotherium, and Anoplotherium.

    Quaternary Island features the Megaloceros family.

    The coal formation and the neighbouring limestone formation were designed by David Ansted, a geology professor, and constructed by James Campbell, an engineer and mineralogist. Looking towards the palace from Joseph Paxton's "rustic iron bridge one saw "water issuing from a spring beneath ... geological strata" demonstrating the relationship between minerology, geology and the industrial revolution in a display inspired by Derbyshire. The other direction gave an overview of the tidal lake and islands. The lake was tidal (rose and fell) because its water fed the fountains. The coal formation is shown as sandwiched between the old red sandstone, and the new red sandstone. It includes "strata of coal, iron, lead, and lime" (mountain limestone and millstone grit) which all helped "the prosperity of our commercial nation". The coal formation used real coal, grit, sandstone and ironstone from Clay Cross and the limestone came from Matlock. A large fissure in the limestone was partly filled with [Derbyshire?] spar, but also gave access to a limestone grotto, with artificial stalactites and stalagmites, and a model of a lead mine, constructed behind the cliff [sealed as a safety measure in 1993]

    See heritage trail - Historic England Crystal Palace Park and Prehistoric animal sculptures, geological formations and lead mine on islands and on land facing the lower lake - Lindsay Bremner's walk - Victorian web - Peter Doyle, "Itinerary 8, The Geological Illustrations of Crystal Palace Park" offline)

    Darren Naish Scientific American 25.8.2016 - "The Victorian 'Geological Illustrations' of Crystal Palace Park" by Peter Doyle and Eric Robinson 1993 Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, 104, 181-194. (offline) - Guides offline: Phillips 1854 - Routledge 1854 - Online: Phillips 1860

    July? 1854 John Lawson began work at the Vulcan Foundry. He retired 8.12.1927 after 73 years and 5 months service. (Vulcan Magazine Volume 2, Number 4, Winter 1951-1952, p.32)

    1854 The following passage in the announced that Marcel Jérôme Rigollot had discovered flint axes near Saint-Acheul that seemed to establsih the existence of human beings before recent geological upheavals. "Il nous lisait un mémoire sur une découverte de haches en silex faite tout récemment dans le terrains diluviens des environs de Saint-Acheul, pour établir, par cette preuve matérialle, le fait de l'existence de l'homme avant les dernières revolutions du globe. Peut-être aura-t-il eu la glorie de dévoiler le premier ce mystère jusqu'à présent demeuré impénétrable." This was seven years after Boucher de Perthes - (Bulletin de la Société des antiquairies de Picardie correspondence offline)

    1855

    Herbert Spencer's Social Statics and the first edition of his Principles of Psychology published

    1855 Second International Statistical Congress held in Paris

    February 1855 Charles Kingsley's dedication to his historical novel Westward Hoe! in which a character anguishes that a woman may be "living in sin".

    Thursday 20.9.1855 More than 2,000 peole gathered, in top hats and bonnets, to see the foundation stone of the new Warrington Museum and Art Gallery laid in Bold Street by William Beamont

    22.12.1855 First meeting of the Metropolitan Board of Works (London, England) which took over the responisbilities of the Metropolitan Buildings Office and Metropolitan Commission of Sewers,

    1856

    March 1856 William Henry Perkin (1838-1907) discovered the first aniline dyestuff while working in his home laboratory in Stepney. The Stepney Historical Trust says he "went on to found science-based industry"

    6.5.1856 Sigmund Freud (author of Interpretation of Dreams) born

    You need to be very still for a long time to have your
    photograph taken. Allen Hastings Fry was about nine years old when he took this photograph of his mother and her school class in Brighton about 1856.

    Photography was a new and exciting way for those who could afford it to look at themselves and society.

    1856 Robert Arthur Reeks (1840-1925), son of George Reeks (1803- 1880) butcher of Cheltenham, described himself as an "artist" when he married in London. By 1861 he is a "photographer)" and soon afterwards established "R. A. Reeks. Portrait and Landscape photographer" in Evesham (Worcestershire). About 1870 he photographed the young French Duc de Guise on a stationary horse, and recorded that he was patronised by the Duc d'Aumale. Forty years later (1899), his son Gambier Reeks (1864-1917) established his photography business in working class Fulham, and became the photographer to Chelsea Football Club.

    1857

    1857 Third International Statistical Congress held in Vienna

    1857 National Association for the Promotion of Social Science founded. This held annual Congresses to discuss issues of social reform and published its proceedings. Isa Craig, a working Scottish poet from Scotland was the secretary until her marriage in 1866. Henry (Lord) Brougham and Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, were frequent leaders of the Congresses. Robert Owen contributed five papers to the first Congress and spoke at the second. In 1866, with Shaftesbury presiding, its topics included the best means of preventing infanticide, education of various groups of working class children and control of their work, public health and housing. The last congress was held in Birmingham in 1884. The Association dissolved itself in 1886

    1857 First edition of History of Civilisation in England by Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862), in which he argued that the regularity of social statistics demonstrates that human behaviour is as predictable as natural phenomena and determined rather than free.

    1857 Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857)

    5.9.1857 Auguste Comte died

    1858

    1858 Article by Hermann Schaaffhausen, "Zur Kenntnis der ältesten Rasseschädel" (Note on the oldest race head or scull?) published, reporting on a fossilised scull discovered in 1856. Schaaffhausen argued that features like prominent bony ridges over the eyes and a sloping forehead meant it belonged to a race of humans that lived in Europe before modern Europeans. In 1864 William King, an Irish professor, named this Homo neanderthalensis.

    1.7.1858 Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace: Three Papers on the Tendency to form Varieties.: 1. Extract from an unpublished work on Species by C. Darwin; 2. Abstract of a Letter from Darwin to Asa Gray; 3. On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type. by Alfred Russel Wallace. First printed in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London Zoology 3 on 20.8.1858 pages 45-50 and then reprinted (pages 6293-6308) in The Zoologist

    9.4.1858 Charter that enabled London University to offer external degrees.

    15.4.1858 Emile Durkheim born in Épinal in Lorraine, north-east France. His older sister (born 1848) had a son, Marcel Mauss, born 1872, who became Durkheim's colleague.

    July 1858 "The Great Stink" in London, England. The Metropolis Management Amendment Act was passed to permit work on a London sewerage scheme by the Metropolitan Board of Works. (source: Cholera and the Thames by Westminster Archives)

    3.11.1858 Death of Harriet Taylor - buried in Avignon
    17.11.1858 Death of Robert Owen

    1859

    1859 John Stuart Mill's On Liberty published   (extracts)

    what about the lunatics?

    1859 Karl Marx's A contribution to the critique of political economy written. It was intended as the first volume of his work on Economics. (extracts)

    1859 Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (first edition) by Samuel Smiles.

    27.2.1859 Albert Midlane wrote "Above the Bright Blue Sky"

    See 1611 - 1809 - 1831 - 1844 - 1838

    November 1859 Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life published. The theory that species develop from another through a long process of evolution became credible when Darwin showed how it could happen. He argued that there was a natural selection of naturally occurring variations through the survival of those best adapted to their circumstances. Social theorists drew different conclusions for society from Darwin's biological ideas. Marx and Engels welcomed the theory because it had a material base and provided a developmental theory for the natural world to match theirs for society. Herbert Spencer, who had developed evolutionary theory independently of Darwin, saw competition as the mechanism through which the fittest members of society are selected. The theory that the fittest should be selected through struggle is known as "Social Darwinism". It has been used by Spencer and his followers to support an unregulated market. Benjamin Kidd, however, argued that the struggle is between societies, and that the strength of a society depends largely on the collective support its members give one another. Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf argued human history is a struggle for survival between biological races of human beings. By the early 20th century, social darwinist theories had become a common "scientific" analysis of society. The joint shocks of the second world war and the revelation of attempted race extermination were followed by a reconstruction of European culture that marginalised such theories. See 1871 - 1872 - 1894 - 1903 - 1913 - 1925 - 1930 - 1933 - 1939 -

    1860

    Herbert Spencer's First Principles published in six parts, between 1860 and 1862. It was about "those highest generalisations now being disclosed by science which are severally true not of one class of phenomena but of all classes of phenomena; and which are thus the keys to all classes of phenomena". Published as one volume in 1862, there were revised editions in 1867, 1875, 1880, 1884, 1900.

    The Anglo-French [Cobden-Chevalier] commercial treaty of 1860 stimulated a series of commercial treaties "binding Europe into the nearest it got to a common market before the late twentieth century" (external link). Durkheim speaks of a "commercial revolution" caused by these treaties.

    9.7.1860 Garibaldi occupied Naples and proclaimed Victor Emmanuel king of a united Italy. Dated 2.9.1868, a marble statue of Italia Turrita, by Rocco Larussa, in the square of Reggio Calabria commemorates the unification. It appears to be the basis of this 1929 stamp designed by Paolo Paschetto. See Lombroso

    16.7.1860 First day of the 4th International Statistical Congress: held in London over six days. (Report from Economist preserved in a New Zealand library) - Proceedings edited by William Farr - Letter from Florence Nightingale read by the Earl of Shaftesbury

    1861

    John Stuart Mill's Considerations on Representative Government published

    Das Mutterrecht: eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur by Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815 - 1887) of Switzerland. Later translaated into English as "Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World"

    March 1861 Third edition of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. This and three other books were reviewed in a 38 page article in The Zoologist written by its editor, Edward Newman. The other three were: Species not Transmutable, nor the Result of Secondary Causes; being a Critical Examination of Mr Darwin's book... by Charles Robert Bree (September 1860). Henry Freke On the Origin of Species by means of Organic Affinity (1861) and Asa Gray's Natural Selection not inconsistent with Natural Theology. Quoting Darwin on the pre- silurian origin of all life, Newman said "these passages pain us". "Darwin leads us by inference to conclude that he considers the human species is genealogically allied to brute life". His theory "makes a kind of sentimental theology do duty for Revelation, which his theory so unequivocally opposes". Does he "consider his theory of the origin of species consistent with the Scriptures?". (Annual edition pages 7609-7610)

    Sunday 7.4.1861/Monday 8.4.1861: Seventh British Census (Census layout - external)
    Population of England and Wales: 20,066,000; Scotland: 3,062,000

    April-June 1861 Max Müller gave nine lectures on "the science of language" at Royal Institution. - In these he referred to Aryans as a "race" - A fuller text than that delivered was published in 1862. (Available on Google Books). - See 1870 - 1888

    1.8.1861

    Robert FitzRoy's first public weather forecast appeared on page 10 of The Times. (source). Daily forecasts were discontinued in May 1866. Storm warnings resumed in 1867, public forecasts in 1879. (source)

    14.12.1861 at Windsor. Sudden death of Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. Victoria withdrew from public life for many years.

    1862

    1862 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo published in Paris.

    1862 Fifth International Statistical Congress held in Berlin

    1.5.1862 to 1.11.1862 International Exhibition in London at which Alexander Parkes exhibited Parkesine, an ivory like material made from cellulose treated with nitric acid and a solvent, often regarded as the first synthetic plastic. The Parkesine Company was formed in 1866 to manufacture the material commercially, followed by Xylonite Company in 1869?, which became BX Plastics. Among the earliest products made from the material were knife handles, imitation coral jewellery, tubes and insulating materials for electric cables.

    1863

    1863 The British Treasury agreed to pay for work filling in the detail of a five feet to the mile skeleton [ordnance] survey of London. This led to the large scale maps of 1870-1873 and 1893-1896.

    1863 Oscar Montelius (9.9.1843 - 4.11.1921) was attached to the Museum of National Antiquities, Stockholm, from 3.2.1863. He was appointed professor in 1888 and served as the museum's director from 1907 to 1913. [The collection of Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien - The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. Collections on Riddarholmen?] See Christian Jürgensen Thomsen and Montelius 1885.

    Windsor and Bridge (London) introduced the 4" X 5 1/2" photo mounted on 4 1/4" x 6 1/2" card stock that became known as cabinet cards. Initially for landscapes they became standard for portraits.

    9.1.1863 First journey on the Paddington to Farringdon underground railway. (Significance article)

    24.2.1863 James Hunt "Introductory Address on the Study of Anthropology", delivered before the newly formed Anthropological Society of London. One of the first actions of the Society (at the end of 1863) was to publish a translation (from German into English) of Theodore Waitz's Anthropologie der Naturvölker [Anthropolgy of natural or primitive people] of 1858 as Introduction to Anthropology - Available from Google Books

    James Hunt: On the Negro's Place in Nature Anthropological Society Available from Google Books

    1864 Herbert Spencer's Principles of Biology published. The sections on plant morphology and physiology in the 1899 revised edition were overseen by Arthur Tansley.

    1864 First International Workingmen's Association established by French and English Labour leaders in London (dissolved 1876). Marx drew up its Inaugural Address - a much more moderate document than the Communist Manifesto

    7.4.1864 Louis Pasteur lectures on germs as the origin of disease

    21.4.1864 Max Weber born

    28.8.1864 The founder of the General German Workers' Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein), Ferdinand Lassalle fought, a duel in Switzerland over his love for Helene von Donniges. He had no hope of reclaiming her, but fought it to defend his honour as a jew, a socialist and a lover. He was wounded, and died on 31.8.1864. He is buried in Poland.

    1865 Trevelyan begins the second half of the Victorian Era. See also La Belle Epoque

    The London street scene of 1865 is actually Quakers gathered in front of their headquarters in Bishopsgate. Head to foot clothing and women's billowing dresses are typical of all classes and even the men's top hats do not have the class implications they acquired.

    1865 August Kekulé published his succesful speculation about the ring structure of benzene (C6H6). Picture from a 1979 East German stamp.

    Lewis Carroll's Alice appeared in 1865 (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and 1871 Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Part of the 1871 dialogue between Humpty Dumpty and Alice is "'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.''The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master- that's all.'"

    8.2.1865 and 8.3.1865 Gregor Mendel's Experiments in Plant Hybridisation read at meetings of the Brünn Natural History Society. They were published, in German, in the proceedings of the society in 1866, but received little attention until 1900. They were translated into English in 1902. See Genetics.

    March 1865 The London sewerage system designed by Joseph Bazalgette was considered complete (although not fully so for another ten years). It was formally opened by Edward, Prince of Wales sometime in 1865. See Grace's Guide

    17.5.1865 International Telegraph Union founded in Paris. It became the International Telecommunication Union in 1934, and in 1947 became a specialised agency of the United Nations. (history)

    August 1865 Joseph Lister, a surgeon at Glasgow Royal Informary, used lint dipped in carbolic acid (phenol) solution to cover a wound. After four days he discovered that no infection had developed. He published his results in The Lancet between March and July 1867.

    The picture shows a modern bottle of phenol from Poland.

    September 1865 At la Sapienzia, a Congrès paléoethnologique international was created at a meeting of the Società Italiana di Scienze Naturali. The prime movers were Giovanni Capellini of Italy and Gabriel de Mortillet of France. The name was changed to Congrès international d'Anthropologie et d'Archéologie préhistoriques in 1867. (Une Breve Histoire de L'union Internationale des Sciences Préhistoriques et Protohistoriques) - See Mortillet's classes - 1869 - 1872 - 1881 - 1883 - 1897 - death and obituary - 1903 -

    1865 Pre-historic Times, as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages (with illustrations), a collection of essays, by John Lubbock (1834-1913) published London. xxiii and 512 pages. [Preface dated February 1865]. Chapter one suggests dividing prehistoric archaeology into four great epochs: paleolithic (old stone), neolithic (new stone - polished stone), bronze and iron. (1872 copy offline)

    1865 John Stuart Mill's Auguste Comte and Positivism published

    from 1865 to 1868 John Stuart Mill was Liberal Member of Parliament for Westminster.

    1866 Prussia's "Seven Weeks War" with Austria and other German states cut old German ties. In 1867, the North German Federation was formed.

    1866 Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm. Now the Statens historiska museum (National Historical Museum). See Oscar Montelius

    1866
    In Gustave Doré's illustrations for the 200th anniversary edition of Milton's Paradise Lost, God's angels have bird like wings and Satan has bat like wings, reminiscent of the reptilian Pterodactyl (Pterosaur). The divine creation of reptiles is hideous in Doré's illustration. Milton had placed the Genesis story in a modern space where the earth circled the sun. Doré added a modern time of dark origins.


    In 1867, John Stuart Mill made a speech in Parliament on: "The Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise".

    1867:  1.2.1867 J.S.Mill gave his Inaugural Address as Rector of St. Andrews University, Scotland, in which he reviewed the whole scope of education, discussing the value of what we now call the Humanities, Mathematics, Natural Science and Social Science. He spoke in favour of psychology as a discipline and drew attention to the role of Scottish thinkers in this area.

    March 1867 George Cruikshank published his "The British Beehive" cartoon.


    Marx completed the manuscript of Das Kapital on 27.3.1867. At 2am in the morning of 16.8.1867 he wrote to Engels the he had "just finished correcting the last sheet (49th) of the book" and thanked Engels for enabling him to complete the "immense labour" of the book. In the third week of September 1867: Volume I of Das Kapital was published in a print run of 1,000 in Hamburg. It was not translated into English until 1887

    29.9.1867 to 5.10.1867 Sixth International Statistical Congress held in Florence

    1868

    The first edition of Alexander von Oettingen's work on moral statistics and social ethics

    1868 Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Natural History of Creation) published in Berlin. Translated into English as The History of Creation in 1876. Haeckel said human evolution had 22 phases. The 21st was a "missing link" halfway between apes and humans, which he named Pithecanthropus alalus (ape man without speech).

    1.1.1868 "On the Probability of a Bone Age" by Gilbert Malcolm Sproat. Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, Volume 6. speculated on "bone" sub-division of the older stone age with "general use of bones and shells" for "fish-hooks, gimlets, arrow-heads, and other instruments".

    1868 In Highgate, "one of the highest parts of London", the Alexandra Orphanage for Infants opened. Taken over in 1906 as an Additional Workhouse for the Shoreditch Poor Law Union (Peter Higginbotham). King Albert's Hospital for Convalescent Belgian Soldiers No. 3, Hazellville Road, Highgate, from 1915-1919 (Lost hospitals). Demolished. Flats (Welby House, Goldie House, and Ritchie House on the Hornsey Rise Estate) built on the site in 1927 by London County Council (became Greater London Council). "By the 1970s the flats had few council tenants left. They were squatted en masse in 1974. By the late 1970s, after the squatters had been evicted, the flats were again let". Passed to Islington Council and in 2008 planning permission was granted to upgrade all three blocks". (Jeremy Worman 2009)


    1869 The twelfth thousand of The Reason Why; domestic science, affording intelligible reasons for the various duties which a housewife has to perform. By the author of "Enquire Within upon Everything" [Robert Kemp Philp] published in London. The first may have been in 1867. One of the first uses of the concept Domestic Science.

    1869 Mortillet proposed a scheme of paleontological and prehistoric classification which was completed at the congress held in Brussels in 1872. 1897

    1869: John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women published. (Written in 1861)

    17.2.1869 Dmitri Mendeleev's "periodic system" of chemical elements, now known as the Periodic Table. (Royal Society history)

    6.9.1869 to 11.9.1869 Seventh International Statistical Congress held in The Hague.


    2000: Nature Reviews. 2001: Human Genome
    4.11.1869 Journal Nature founded

    A WEEKLY ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL OF SCIENCE

    "To the solid ground Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye." -- WORDSWORTH

    2003: Open access challenge - website

    In 1869 the "Eisenach Party" (SAP) [South German Party] was founded by Marx's German followers.

    1870-1871 Franco-Prussian war. The leaders of the Eisenach Party were imprisoned for opposing the war.

    German Unification On 18.1.1871 a German Empire was proclaimed at Versailles with the Prussian king, Wilhelm 1st as Emperor, and Bismarck as Imperial Chancellor. Most German speaking countries of Europe were united in one modern state.

    From 1871 to after 1878 was the period of Kulturkampf - "Conflict of Beliefs" - between Bismarck and the Catholic Church. Prussian Falk Laws of May 1873 completely subordinated the church to state regimentation. From 1878 to 1887, negotiations between Germany and a new pope restored most Catholic rights.

    what about the workers? 18.3.1871 to 28.5.1871 Paris Commune (Short lived proletarian republic). Marx described this as "the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative". [See revolution]

    Late Victorian and La Belle Époque partly correspond to the extended period of peace between 1870 and 1914. In the United States, The Gilded Age was the period roughly from the 1870s to the turn of the twentieth century.

    1870 Excavation of Hohle Fels cave in Jura mountains of Germany yielded remnants of "bears, reindeer, mammoths and horses as well as tools belonging to the Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic. Further excavations during 1958 to 1960, 1977, and 2002" [and since]. See venus and flute. (Wikipedia)

    19.2.1870 Max Müller's Lectures on the Science of Religion began at the Royal Institution.

    1870- In England, a series of Acts between 1870 and 1918 made education free and compulsory for children from five years old to ten, then to eleven, then to fourteen

    1871 Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man: and selection in relation to sex published

    Edward Burnet Tylor's Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom

    8.6.1871 Edward Burnet Tylor, author of "various memoirs on savages and their customs" was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on the proposal of (amongst others) Charles Darwin - Francis Galton - Charles Lyell

    Sunday 2.4.1871/Monday 3.4.1871: Eighth British Census
    From 1871 the census for England and Wales was taken separately from that for Scotland, but on the same date.
    Population of England and Wales: 22,712,000; Scotland: 3,360,000

    The 1871 to 1911 censuses asked if the person was blind, deaf or dumb, "imbecile or idiot" or "lunatic". (See 1870 Act). (Census layout - external)

    1871 William Morris bought the Manor House at Kelmscott. Drawing of eves above the trees by J.W. Mackail.

    1872

    1872: Coprolite extraction for fertiliser in north Cambridgeshire. As a by-product of the industry, fossils and human archaeological remains were recovered by the "fossil-digger" Frederick Pond and supplied to museums.

    1872: Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published. Darwin's study of body language provided a starting point for symbolic interaction sociology. Whist Darwin focused on the expression of emotions, George Herbert Mead interpreted body language as a system of communication (the conversation of gestures) that preceded and allowed the development of symbols and conscious reflection.   (weblink to illustrated copy)

    1872 Eighth International Statistical Congress held in St. Petersburg

    10.5.1872 Marcel Mauss born. See 1925

    22.8.1872 to 30.8.1872 Sixth Congrès international d'anthropologie et d'archéologie préhistoriques held in Brussels. At this, Gabriel de Mortillet presented his "Classification des diverses périodes de l'âge de la pierre" (A good copy at Bodleian Libraries (offline) - just article at europeana) (offline)

    November 1872 Giuseppe Villella died in an Italian prison, Cesare Lombroso performed an autopsy on his body and discovered an abonormality in his skull. He wrote later:

    crime and
deviancy
timeline biological
    positivism
    "The sight of that fossette suddenly appeared to me like a broad plain beneath an infinite horizon, the nature of the criminal was illuminated, he must have reproduced in our day the traits of primitive man going back as far as the carnivores." source

    1873 Geological Stories: A series of autobiographies in chronological order by John Ellor Taylor, "author of Half-hours at the seaside" 301 pages. Stories originally appeared in Science Gossip and other magazines. Contained story of a piece of granite, quartz, slate, [Silurian] limestone, sandstone, coal, rock-salt, jet , Purbeck marble, chalk, clay, lignite, the "crags", a boulder, and a gravelpit, plus a summary and table of rock strata in British islands. (Internet Archive - offline)

    1873 John Stuart Mill died in Avignon and buried with Harriet. His Autobiography was published after his death.

    1873 Henrietta Rowland married Samuel Barnett (a Church of England Curate). They moved to the parish of St Jude's in Whitechapel. In 1884 they established the university settlement at Toynbee Hall. Trusts they established in 1904 bought land which became Hampstead Garden Suburb.

    5.9.1873 Times page 6. "At the Congress of Bologna a cotery of Marxists had tried to impede all progress, but in vain." First example of "marxists" in Oxford English Dictionary. The earlist example of "marxism" is in 1883.

    Herbert Spencer's The Study of Sociology America

    1873 Architectural Courts, now called the Casts Courts, built at South Kensington

    1874

    Mary Paley passed the Cambridge University "Moral Science Tripos" with distinction. She took over, from Alfred Marshall, the lectures to women students on economics, and was then asked to write a textbook on economics. In 1876 she became engaged to marry Alfred Marshall and they worked on the book together. It was published as The Economics of Industry by Alfred and Mary Paley Marshall in 1879. It was from this book that Alfred Marshall eventually developed his Principles of Economics (External source: Valerie Muir 1995)

    1874 The Cavendish Laboratory opened at Cambridge University under James Clerk Maxwell, the first Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics. Physics at Cambridge had meant theoretical physics and been regarded as the province of the mathematicians. The foundation of the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1851 set the scene for the need to build dedicated experimental physics laboratories. (history)

    1874 John Stuart Mill's Autobiography published

    The Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland published the first edition of its Notes and Queries on Anthropology for the Use of Travellers and Residents of Uncivilised Lands in 1874. Edward Burnet Tylor contributed the largest number of sections (18).

    5.10.1874 Popular Science Monthly Volume "The Fossil Man of Mentone" By Theodore Gill. Available on Wikisource

    1875 German social democrats (ADAV and SAP) merged on the basis of The Gotha Programme. This was more Lassallean than Marxist. Marx sent a private criticism and said that he would have to dissociate himself, but he did not - because the press perceived the Gotha Programme as "communist". The party became the SDP in 1890. From 1878 to 1890 the Anti-socialist law prohibited socialist societies, assemblies and pamphlets. But the party was still able to take part in Reichstag elections - where it increased its representation in the (powerless) German national parliament.

    1875 Ninth (last) International Statistical Congress held in Budapest

    The ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published between 1875 and 1889 (finished writing 1888?) in 24 volumes. "It embodied as no other publication of the day the transformation of scholarship wrought by scientific discovery and new critical methods" (Encyclopedia Britannica website). The article on "Evolution in Biology" was written by Thomas Huxley and the article on Anthropology by Edward Burnet Tylor. The editor was Thomas Spencer Baynes (born 24.3.1823, died 31.5.1887), assisted from late 1881 by William Robertson Smith, who had lost his professorship as a result of his articles on the Bible. Robertson Smith had the major responsibility for the concluding twelve volumes of the Encyclopedia (Beginning with "L"?).

    1875 Mason Science College opened in Birmingham with money from a self educated pen-manufacturer Josiah Mason (1795-1881). The college was to have no party politics, no teaching of theology and no provision for "mere literary instruction and education." In opening the college, Thomas Huxley said he would, nevertheless, like the college to provide for the teaching of sociology. The initial courses were physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. Mason Science College became Birmingham University.

    1876

    First edition of Volume One of Herbert Spencer's
    The Principles of Sociology
    "While permanent monogamy was being evolved, the union by law (originally the act of purchase) was regarded as the essential part of marriage and the union by affection as nonessential; and whereas at present the union by law is thought the more important and the union by affection the less important; there will come a time when the union by affection will be held of primary moment." (Quoted Burgess and Locke (1945) p.29
    America

    "Founding [Paris], by Jules Guesde, of the first sociology journal - L'Egalite" (external link) - See Wikipedia Jules Guesde

    1876 Cesare Lombroso's L'uomo delinquente studiato in rapporto alla antropologia, alla medecina legale, ed alle discipline carcerarie published in Milan. crime and
deviancy
timeline biological
    positivism

    By the Royal Titles Act 1876 c. 10, Queen Victoria became Empress of India. She was proclaimed so at a "Delhi Durbar" in 1877. The first (and last) monarch to actually attend his Durbar was George 5th

    1877

    Morgan's Ancient Society published

    America

    1877: Georg Cantor (1845-1918) became Professor of Mathematics at Halle. He laid the foundations of modern set theory, leading to the heady possibility that all rational human thought can be rationally understood by human thought - A possibility that Bertrand Russell, to his own annoyance, proved unproven. (external link).   In his autobiography, Russell reproduces a letter to him from Cantor saying "dear Colleague... I am a Baconian...and am quite an adversary of Old Kant..."   See discussion of relevance to positivism

    1877 Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain Royal Institute of Chemistry from 1885) to provide qualifications for chemists. The Chemical Society was formed in 1841.

    5th, 12th and 19th April 1877 Francis Galton 's three part article "Typical Laws of Hereditary" in Nature (External link to pdf) In this (12.4.1877 page 513, column 2) he says the produce of peas of the same class "deviated normally on either side of their own mean weight". This is an early example of the use of normal as in "normal curve" (See Quetelet above and Math Word at York).

    22.3.1877 Inaugural meeting of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in Queen Square, Bloomsbury. Called by William Morris and other "Pre-Raphaelites". Opposes destruction of the historic fabric of old buildings by architects engaged in 'restorations'. (History website)

    1878

    It was about 1878 that William Stanley Jevons statistically related economic cycles to sunspot activity.

    1878 Jardin Zoologique d'Aclimatation, (opened 1860 in the northern part of the Bois de Boulogne) converted to "l'Acclimatation Anthropologique", a zoo that exhibited humans. Albert Geoffroy Saint- Hilaire (1835-19019), the zoo's director from 1865 to 1893, first organised two ethnological spectacles, one of Nubians and the other of Inuit(Esquimaux). By 1878, a million (non-exhibited) people had visited. Between 1877 and 1912 (when this human zoo closed), approximately thirty ethnological exhibitions were presented at the Jardin zoologique d'acclimatation

    1.5.1878 - 10.11.1878 Exposition Universelle held in Paris to celebrate the recovery of France after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. The temporary (glass) building on the left was the main exhibition in the Champs de Mars, where the Eifel Tower now stands. On the other (north) side of the river Seine is Palais du Trocadéro, where meetings of international organizations could be held during the fair). One popular feature was a human zoo, called a "negro village", composed of 400 "indigenous people".

    The Muséum ethnographique des missions scientifiques (Ethnographic Museum of Scientific Expeditions) (The Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro) was established in a wing of Palais du Trocadéro in 1878. It became the Musée de l'Homme in 1937.

    1878 Mastodon, Mammoth, and Man by John Patterson MacLean (Internet Archive - offline)

    1879 Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola and his eight-year-old daughter María were searching the deep Altamira cave near Santillana in northern Spain when the lamplight picked out images of horned animals on the cavern ceiling. Sautuola and archaeologist Juan Vilanova y Piera from the University of Madrid excavated the cave published "Breves apuntes sobre algunos objetos prehistóricos de la provincia de Santander" (Brief notes about some prehistoric objects in the province of Santander) in 1880 which interpreted the paintings as Paleolithic in origin. (web link)

    1879 In Leipzig, Wilhelm Wundt set up the world's first laboratory of experimental psychology.

    Enrico Morselli's work on suicide was published in Italy in 1879. It was translated into English in 1881 as Suicide. An Essay On Comparative Moral Statistics

    14.3.1879 Albert Einstein born

    22.7.1879 Charles Darwin to Joseph Hooker: The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery... Saporta believes that there was an astonishingly rapid development of the high plants, as soon [as] flower-frequenting insects were developed and favoured intercrossing."

    During the 1880s hundreds of young men the British Civil Service as "Temporary Boy Copyists", replacing the men copyists who had previously copied letters by hand. Typewriters and carbon paper (operated mainly by women) eventually replaced the boy copyists.

    31.12.1879 New York premier of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzanze

    I'm very good at integral and differential calculus;
    I know the scientific names of beings
    animalculous:
    In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
    I am the very model of a modern Major-General.

    1880

    1880 The young Freud translated works by John Stuart Mill into German. In later comments, Freud argued that there are fundamental differences between men and women that Mill had not recognised. This contrast between Mill and Freud is reflected in late 20th century feminist thought in the contrast between those feminists who (like Wollstonecraft and Mill) perceive mind as genderless, and those who believe the male and female minds are different.

    1880: Emile Zola in his essay Le Roman Experimental explains how he applies the experimental method of science to his naturalistic novels. [External links to 1890 text and the Zola pages - See Park (1925) and urban life

    1880 First edition of Henri François Marion's De la Solidarite Morale. See Durkheim 1893

    March 1880-April 1880 UK General Election

    Electric light and energy
    Anglo-American Brush Electric Light Corporation was formed in Lambeth, London to exploit the dynamo invented by Charles Francis Brush in the USA. The dynamos supplied power to arch lamps in the streets. Finance was organised by Joseph Bevan Braithwaite

    29.10.1880 Joseph Swan's development of the incandescent lamp reported in Engineering, which quoted him saying "Electric lighting by incandescence is just as simple as arc lighting is difficult, all that is required is a material which is not a very good conductor of electricity, highly infusible and which can be formed into a wire or lamina, and is neither combustible in air, or if combustible, does not undergo changes in a vacuum". 1886 Ediswan factory at Ponders End

    1881

    1881 Musée préhistorique by Gabriel de Mortillet and his son Adrien de Mortillet made the prehistoric content of the world's museums available in a lavishly illustrated (and therefore expensive) book arranged systematically according to his system of classification. A cheaper edition was issued in 1903. (offline - doc)

    Sunday 3.4.1881/Monday 4.4.1881: Ninth British Census
    This is available online - (Census layout - external)
    Population of England and Wales: 25,974,000; Scotland: 3,736,000

    10.5.1881 to 15.5.1881 International Exhibition of Flour Mill Machinery at the Royal Agricultural Hall, London. "Flour mill machinery, bread making and biscuit making machinery and all kinds of Machinery connected with cereals and farinaceous products" - "From this exhibition can be dated the beginning of mechanical baking in the United Kingdom".

    10.10.1881 The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the action of worms by Charles Darwin. Worms = soil = plants = herbivores = life as we know it.
    See Ulrich Beck on grass and earthworms.

    1882

    Society for Psychical Research founded in London for the scientific investigation of psychic phenomena. These included much more than what we might regard as spritual and ghostly phenomena, and the work included theoretical development as well as attempted empirical tests. Frederic Myers, for example, developed the concept of the subliminal self.

    1882 Walther Flemming's book Zellsubstanz, Kern und Zelltheilung. A coloured dye made the threads in this cell show up, so he called them chromatin (coloured). He watched them duplicate themselves when the cell divided so that each new cell had the same set of threads. So he called such cell-division mitosis from thread. In 1888, Wilhelm von Waldeyer-Hartz called each thread a chromosom. This was translated into English in 1889 as chromosome.

    1883

    1883 August Bernthsen synthesised phenothiazine in a reaction of sulphur with diphenylamine in the course of his studies of the structure of dyes like Lauth's violet and methylene blue. Bernthsen's major achievements are listed as uncovering the constitution of methylene blue as phenothiazine derivative and developing a variety of exciting colours with a phenazine and acridine base. (source - see also)   methylene blue

    methylene blue

    The word entered English with
    M'Gowan's Bernthsen of 1894.

    1883 Danish chemist Johan Kjeldahl developed his method of estimating the protein in food by measuring the percentage of nitrogen Wikipedia. [In use at Government Chemist 1956]

    1883 Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Social Sciences) by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911)

    "The practice of regarding" [the "human sciences"] "as a unity distinct from the natural sciences is rooted in the depth and totality of human selfconsciousness... man finds within his self-consciousness a sovereignty of the will, a responsibility for actions, a capacity for subjecting everything to thought and for resisting, from within the stronghold of his personal freedom, any and every encroachment"
    See dictionary Verstehen, to understand.

    1883 How the Poor Live by George R. Sims - with 60 illustrations by Frederick Barnard (who illustrated Dickens) Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly - External link to text

    14.3.1883 Karl Marx died. At his death, a virtually unknown author in the English speaking world.

    16.10.1883 Pamphlet The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: an inquiry into the condition of the abject poor (Congregational Union) given much publicity by The Pall Mall Gazette External link to editorial and condensed version

    1883-1891 Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra

    "And what doeth the saint in the forest?" asked Zarathustra. The saint answered:

    "I make hymns and sing them; and in making hymns I laugh and weep and mumble: thus do I praise God. With singing, weeping, laughing, and mumbling do I praise the God who is my God."
    When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart:

    "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"

    1883 Bibliothèque des Sciences Contemporaines series (Paris) published Le Préhistorique - Antiquité de L'Homme by Gabriel de Mortillet, Professor of prehistoric anthropology at l'Ecole d'anthropologie de Paris. (Internet Archive - offline)

    Mentone. See also 1874

    Between 1883 and 1895, Louis Alexandre Jullien discovered fifteen figurines at the Balzi Rossi. (Canadian Museum of History)

    The Prehistoric Museum of Balzi Rossi was founded in 1898 on the initiative of Sir Thomas Hanbury, who financed the construction of the said building and the arrangement of the Barma Grande, in order to expose to the public the exceptional Paleolithic remains

    Museo Preistorico dei Balzi Rossi

    A 1934 Encyclopedia relates cromagnon humans to "cave drawing on the walls of the caves at Mentone". "Beside animals are representations of the human female form".

    Upper Paleolithic sites in Italy are mostly in the West and bordering France, including the complex of Balzi Rossi (Grimaldi di Ventimiglia, Imperia), the Arene Candide (Finale Ligure, Savona), the cave of Basura (Savona), (Genovagando)



    1884

    Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State developed by Engels from notes by Marx. The Origin provides an overview of their historical materialism as they left it. Working on the theories of Morgan, they incorporate "Reproduction" into the material base, alongside "Production"

    See also
    1848 Communist Manifesto

    Extracts from Engel's Origin
    Summary of Historical Materialism
    Chart of Engels' overview of history
    Marx and Engels: scientific socialism
    Marx and Engels web links

    At the final meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Edward Vansittart Neale, a cooperator, read a paper "What is the social condition of the working classes in 1884 as compared with 1857, when the first meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science was held in Birmingham; and in what way can the working classes best utilise their savings?"

    8.5.1884 Opening of the International Health Exhibition, London. It was planned to continue for about six months. (Catalogue). Exhibitors included the Rational Dress Society, formed in 1881, which was against any forms of dress that hampered freedom of movement and argued that dress reform was a key element in the emancipation of women (source). In relation to this exhibition, Francis Galton organised a laboratory to measure human statistics.

    1884 Mrs Ewing founded the Parkinson Society to search out and cultivate old garden flowers, to plant waste places with hardy flowers, and to prevent extermination. She was president until her death, when she was succeeded by Professor Daniel Oliver. The society had been disolved by 1900. ( DNB - Mary's Meadow by Juliana Horatia Ewing


    The cartoon is from Die Gartenlaube - Illustrirtes Familienblatt (The Garden Arbor - Illustrated Family Journal). (See Wikipedia. Reproduced here).

    15,11.1884 to 26.2.1885 Berlin Conference of European powers - Kongokonferenz (Congo Conference) - Afrikakonferenz (Africa Conference)

    "The conference sparked a veritable race for colonial possessions". About 10% of Africa was in European hands in 1876. "In 1902 the colonial powers had carved up 90% of the territory of Africa". ( source).

    1885

    "Gottlieb Daimler's invention in 1885 of the internal- combustion motor using petroleum spirit was the first step towards the production of the modern self-propelled road vehicle, the next step being the recognition in 1887 of the advantages of Daimler's system by M. Levassor and his application of that system to the propulsion of a carriage. In the nine years that immediately followed French manufacturers spent large sums of money in experimenting with and developing the motor-car" (1911 Encyclopedia)

    Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury died.

    Raffaele Garofalo (1851-1934) Criminologia: studio sul delitto, sulle sue cause e sui mezzi di repressione, Torino, Fratelli Bocca. A French translation was published in Paris by F. Alcan in 1888.

    1885 The Prehistoric World: or, Vanished Races by Emory Adams Allen (born 1853). Published Nashville, USA. 876 pages. (Internet Archive - offline)

    1885 Oscar Montelius published Om tidsbestämning inom bronsåldern med särskilt avseende på Skandinavien (About the timing of the bronze age with particular regard to Scandinavia), in which he proposed the six part division of the Scandinavian bronze age.

    April? 1885 Postponed jubillee of the Statistical Society of London (founded Spring 1834) established the International Statistical Institute. The first Congress was held in Rome in 1887. The Presidents of the ISI were: From 1885 to 1899 Sir Rawson W. Rawson (U.K.) - From 1899 to 1908 Karl von Inama-Sternegg (Austria) - From 1909 to 1920 Luigi Bodio (Italy) - From 1923 to 1931 Albert Delatour (France) - From 1931 to 1936 Friedrich Zahn (Germany) - From 1936 to 1947 Armand Julin (Belgium) - The next two Presidents were from the USA. (History)

    14.8.1885 Royal Assent to Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (48 and 49 Victoria c.69): "An Act to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes". This raised the age of consent from 13 to 16 and criminalised "gross indecency" between males. See Oscar Wilde 1895. This was the first time that homosexuality as such was made an offence. Anal intercourse of any kind had long been a very serious offence.

    24.11.1885-18.12.1885 UK General Election

    1885-1886 Durkheim in Germany studying German social research and ethical speculation

    EMILE DURKHEIM AND MAX WEBER

    October 1885 to February 1886 Freud in France studying nervous diseases under Charcot, who had developed hypnosis as a treatment for hysteria. His experiences were an important stage in moving from mapping the human brain and nervous system to mapping the human mind. France

    Charcot and Blanche Wittmann
    Asylum despair

    1886

    1886 Rendells contraceptive pessaries made from quinine in cacao-nut butter produced commercially. They may have been distributed free by John Walter Rendell (1844 - 1889?) in Clerkenwell from 1880. See 1934 and 1957

    11.5.1886 Queen Victoria opened the International Exhibition of Navigation, Commerce and Industry in Liverpool (source). In a special feature on 15.5.1886, the Illustrated London News wrote:

    "Liverpool, thanks to modern science and commercial enterprise , to the spirit and intelligence of the townsmen, and to the administration of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, has become a wonder of the world. It is the New York of Europe, a world-city rather than merely British provincial." (See Reviews in History)

    1.7.1886-27.7.1886 UK General Election

    1886 Discovery of human remains in a cave at Spy, reported in 1887 as "La race humaine de Néanderthal ou de Canstadt en Belgique recherches ethnographiques sur des ossements humains, découverts dans des dépôts quaternaires d'une grotte à Spy et détermination de leur âge géologique"

    1886 Mythical Monsters by Charles Gould (4.6.1834 - 15.4.1893) published London. 407 pages. Available in Sacred Texts under "earth mysteries". offline. Argued that "stories ordinarily reputed fabulous" (myths) should be given "consideration due to genuine realities". Chapter four is "The deluge not a myth". Gould suggests that mythological analysis (including Chinese stories) suggests a deluge date similar to the traditional. See 1894.

    1887: In Germany, Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894) proved James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)'s theory that electricity can travel through space in waves by generating and detecting electro-magnetic wave across the length of his laboratory. See 1894 - Atlantic 1915 - BBC 1923 - BBC 1926 - BBC 1927 - Reich Broadcasting Corporation - Hitler's radio - mobiles Southbury - mobiles and poverty

    1887: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft by Ferdinand Tönnies -
    See dictionary

    In 1887 a lectureship of social science was created for Durkheim at the University of Bordeaux.

    1887 First ISI World Statistics Congress held in Rome.

    Karl Marx's Capital (1867). Translated by Samuel Moore & E. Aveling, published by F. Engels, London 1887. Engels edited the translation and wrote a preface. The same year: F. Engels. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, translated by F. K. Wischnewetzky, was published in New York and reprinted in London. Engels added an appendix on "The Working Class Movement in America". Samuel Moore's translation of The Communist Manifesto was published early in 1888.

    1888:

    1888: Max Müller's Biographies of words and the home of the Aryas

    15.6.1888 Wilhelm 2nd German Emperor. See Die wilhelminische Zeit (the Wilhelmine period). Wilhelminism refers to the style of the Emperor who delighted in pompous military parades.


    1889

    1889 Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London was published in 17 volumes between 1889 and 1902. in three series, 'Poverty' (1889), 'Industry' and 'Religious Influences' (1902). Charles Booth (1840-1916), a statistician, spent eighteen years preparing this survey. Amongst those who helped him was his cousin, Beatrice Potter Webb. - External link to Charles Booth Online Archive -

    1889 William Robertson Smith's Lectures on the Religion of the Semites applied anthropological theory to the analysis of the Old Testament. His analysis of sacrifice was an important component of the anthropologies of both Dukrhheim and Freud. James Frazer, in 1900, made an anthropological analysis of the crucifixion of Christ.

    1889 [Ein kurzes Lehrbuch der organischen Chemie] A Text-book of Organic Chemistry by August Bernthsen translated by George M'Gowan [MacGowan] London: Blackie and Son 1889. xvii and 544 pages. A second English edition, revised and extended by author and translator, was published in 1894.

    La Galerie des Machines at l' Exposition Universelle in Paris, which ran from 5.5.1889 to 31.10.1889. The Eiffel Tower was the entrance to the whole exhibition.
    Other major attractions included a negro village displaying 40 people which was associated with a colonial pavilion celebrating the French empire, and a palace of war, a topic which Engineering described as "the most absorbing subject now-a-days, unfortunately, to governments if not to individuals".

    Amongst the machines exhibited were Baker's biscuit maker.

    See
    French Wikipedia - English Wikipedia

    The Library Late 1889 First edition of The Library which was the organ of the Library Association of the United Kingdom. In 1920 it became The Library: Transactions of The Bibliographical Society

    1890 Launch of SS Robin: "Dirty British Coaster" - See Masefield's Cargoes and commerce.

    1890 Ivan Pavolv (1849-1936) appointed professor at St Petersburg Military- Medical Academy, Russia, where he established a laboratory observing the digestion of live animals through a hole in the stomach. He won the Nobel Prize for physiology in 1904.

    1890 Les lois de l'imitation by Jean-Gabriel De Tarde (1843- 1904). Translated into English in 1903 The Laws of Imitation.

    Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics. An introductory volume published. His Economics of Industry (a different book than that published with Mary Paley Marshall in 1879) was published in 1892. Marshall was "Professor of Political Economy" at Cambridge University until 1908. Marshall was one of the four major theorists on whom Talcott Parsons based his The Structure of Social Action

    The Edinburgh College of Cookery and Domestic Science (then in Atholl Crescent) in 1890. Founded in 1875 to improve women's access to higher education and improving the diets of working class families. It Edinburgh College of Domestic Science in 1930. In 1972 it became Queen Margaret College, 1999 Queen Margaret University College, and in January 2007, Queen Margaret University.

    In 1893 National Society's Training School of Cookery was founded in London. It became part of the college of All Saints in 1964, which joined Middlesex Polytechnic in 1978. (Middlesex University from 1992)

    1890 Henry Morton Stanley's In Darkest Africa: or the quest, rescue and retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria, in six volumes, published.

    William Booth's Darkest England and the Way Out was published in 1890. William Booth (1829-1912) was the founder of the Salvation Army, an evangelistic Christian organisation with ideas about the redemption of society. He should not be confused with Charles Booth.

    "For years past the Press has been filled with echoes of the 'Bitter Cry of Outcast London', with pictures of 'Horrible Glasgow', and the like. We have had several volumes describing 'How the Poor Live', and I may therefore assume that all my readers are more or less cognizant of the main outlines of 'Darkest England' (Chapter 5 On the Verge of the Abyss) "

    It was William (not Charles) Booth who wrote of the "submerged tenth". This was his heading for chapter two. However, he used Charles Booth's statistics to support his calculation.

    It is unusual for followers of Karl Marx to speculate about what life will be like after a communist revolution. This, however, is what William Morris did in his 1890 dream novel News from Nowhere summary and discussion

    James George Frazer's The Golden Bough. A Study of Magic and Religion appeared in twelve volumes between 1890 and 1915. The second edition in 1900 analysed the crucifixion of Christ. He published an abridgement in 1922 - Without the most controversial material.

    Edwin Chadwick died

    1891 Our Baby - first edition

    The right of a husband to use force against his wife was first denied by the English courts in 1891.

    January 1891 Karl Pearson appointed Gresham Chair of Geometry. He gave 38 "Gresham" lectures, free and open to the public, between February 1891 and November 1893. The substance of his The Grammar of Science, first published in February 1892, was based on the first two lectures. On 20.11.1891 he introduced the term histogram [not used in the Grammar] to designate a "time-diagram" to be used for historical purposes. On 31.1.1893, he introduced the term standard deviation. See 1911

    April 1891 Charles Creighton's article "The Population of Old London" Blackwood's Magazine). See 1199 - 1532 - 1578


    Sunday 5.6.1891/Monday 6.6.1891: Tenth British Census (Census layout - external)
    Asked about the number of rooms and their occupants in all tenements with fewer than five rooms. Distinguished between employers, employees and the self-employed.
    Population of England and Wales: 29,003,000; Scotland: 4,026,000. In England and Wales, 35% were under 15 and 4% per cent 65 or over.

    1891 Weber's doctoral thesis: A Contribution to the History of Medieval Business Organizations
    See also
    1894/1895 Economics Professor at Freiburg
    1896 Professor at Heidelberg
    1897 Father's death
    1904/1905 The Protestant Ethic...
    1910-1914 Economy and Society
    Lecture notes on Weber
    Brief note on Weber
    Extracts from Weber
    Weber web links
    Social Science History

    1891 Edvard Alexander Westermarck's The Origins of Human Marriage published. See 1903 - 1907

    September 1891 In strata of presumed Pleistocene age near a spot called Trinil in Java, Eugène Dubois found an upper molar tooth during the drying-up of a river-bed. In October 1891 he discovered the roof of a large cranium about a yard away. In August 1892, sixteen yards up the stream he discovered a left femur. Nature 24.1.1895

    The thigh bone indicated the animal had walked upright and Dubois called it Anthropopithecus erectus (Man ape erect). In December 1892 Dubois obtained a Chimpanzee's scull to compare with the cranium roof he had discovered. Convinced that the cranium was more like a human than a chimpanzee, he renamed the find (Pithecanthropus erectus (Ape man erect). The comparison photograph is from Dubois 1894. Information from Through Eugène Dubois' Eyes 2010.

    1892 "The Holy City" lyrics by Frederic Weatherly to the music of Stephen Adams (Michael Maybrick). See 1945

    1892 Durkheim's latin thesis on Montesquieu.

    July 1892 British General Election. Gladstone minority Liberal government with Irish Nationalist support. 4 July to 26 July 1892. Dadabhai Naoroji, the Liberal member for Finsbury Central was the first Asian member of the United Kingdom Parliament. He took his oath of office on his own copy of the Khordeh Avesta.

    1893

    July 1893 First meeting of The Institut International de Sociologie (International Sociological Institute), created by René Worms, held in the building of the Society of Anthropology in Paris. "From more than fifty members and more than twenty associates, approximately twenty were present and nine sent papers. The participating group comprised between 50 and 150 people". (Schuerkens, F.U. 1996). External link to its website (archive) - new website
    Annales de l'Institut International de Sociologie/ Annals of the International Institute of Sociology first published in 1895 after the first world congress,

    In Division of Labour in Society (1893), Durkheim tried to show that societies are real and that the reality of societies lies in something that he calls solidarity. (Click here for Extracts). He also said punishing crime is a way a society defines the way it thinks, reinforcing its solidarity
    See also
    1885 Durkheim in Germany
    1895 Sociological Method
    1897 Suicide
    1901 Lectures on Rousseau
    1912 ... Religious Life
    Lecture notes on Durkheim
    Brief note on Durkheim
    Extracts from Durkheim
    Durkheim web links
    Social Science History
    Parsons and Giddens

    1893 Thomas Huxley's lecture on evolution and ethics (an external link)

    1893 Work began on the Elan Valley Reservoir in South Wales, planned to supply water to Birmingham. Opened on 21.7.1904 by Edward 7th and Queen Alexandra. (history link)

    1893 The People's Dictionary of the Bible: "Popularly describing the persons, events, places, towns, countries, histories, literature, names, customs, natural history, rites, ceremonies, antiquities, and all other such matters referred to in the Holy Scriptures". Edited by Edwin A. Rice. Published London by Simpkin Marshall (not dated) 396 pages. Admits "no name or word about which nothing is known except the mere mention of it in the Bible" (page 5). For example "There is no fact in history better attested independent of the word of God than the flood; and none more universally acknowledged by all nations, accounts of it being in their legends" (page 153).

    1893 La donna delinquente la prostituta e la donna normale by Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero published Torino. Published in English as The Female Offender in 1895. crime and
deviancy
timeline biological
    positivism

    1894

    The discovery of the first of the inert gases, argon, by Rayleigh and Ramsay and the first public demonstration of wireless transmission over a few hundred yards by Sir Oliver Lodge announced at a meeting of the British Association.

    1894 The second edition of M'Gowan's Bernthsen, page 539 said "Nile Blue springs from naphtho- phenoxazine; and the thionine dyes from phen-thiazine." The index to the USA Chemical Abstracts in 1917 includes Phenothiazine.

    1894 Pithecanthropus erectus, eine menschenaehnliche Uebergangsform aus Java (Pithecanthropus erectus, a human-like form of transition from Java.) by Eugène Dubois, 34 pages, published in Batavia. There is a copy in the British Library and in the Internet Library.

    1894 to 1897 Stratigraphic excavation of the La grotte du Pape at Brassempouy uncovered ivory figurines. La Dame à la capuche was recovered in 1894.

    1894 In Germany, Weber became Professor of Economics at Freiburg University in place of Karl Knies.

    In America George Herbert Mead became a lecturer at Chicago University where, before his death in 1931, he developed theories that showed how social interaction by means of symbols could have developed from the conversation of gestures of animals. From 1894 to 1904, John Dewey also lectured at Chicago, where he developed his version of pragmatism.

    Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution (See Darwin) This book contained the idea that "irrational" religion is needed by societies to hold them together. Societies require the subordination of individual self interest to the collective welfare, and the motivation for this is provided by religion.

    November 1894 In France: The conviction for treason of Captain Alfred Dreyfus,

    November 1894 The Library said there was no "novelty about the principle of open access". However, in 1934 the Architectural Review said that most "large libraries in this country" did not allow open access to their shelves. On 30.12.1977 The Times Literary Supplement declared the "long-standing fight about open access" won. It spoke of a "deep-seated fear..in some librarians" of users "having the run of the shelves". (Oxford English Dictionary)

    1895
    Recorded sound Painting of Nipper (1884-1895) looking into a wind-up Edison-Bell cylinder phonograph. Picture painted, after Nipper's death, by by Francis Barraud (1856-1924) in 1898.

    A modified version of the painting, with gramophone discs, was used as the logo of the Gramophone Company on its records from shortly after 1900 and this gave rise to the popular name of the company as His Master's Voice. In 1921 the Gramophone Company opened the first HMV shop in London. See 1924. News on 15.1.2013 said HMV music and film chain to appoint administrator

    Engels died.

    Weber's inaugural address at Freiburg, The National State and Economic Policy, - a confession of belief in imperialist realpolitik and the House of Hohenzollern.

    In Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim argued that if we want to be sociologists we should "treat social facts as things". (Extracts) He also argued that crime is necessary and normal for society.

    Fabians found The London School of Economics and Political Science, which held its first classes in October 1895. In 1900 the School was recognised as a faculty of economics in the newly-constituted University of London and in 1901 the Faculty degrees were announced as the BSc (Econ) and DSc (Econ) - "the first university degrees principally dedicated to the social sciences". It became a major centre for the social sciences in England. By employing staff of diverse political persuasions, it has been as often the centre for conservative as for radical thought. See 1896 - 1903 - 1904 - 1935 - 1951

    25.5.1895 Oscar Wilde and Alfred Taylor found guilty of "gross indecency with men" - an offence created in 1885. See Pearce and Roberts 1973 pp 61-63). They were sentenced to two years hard labour. At the trial a poem "Two Loves" by Lord Alfred Douglas , published in The Chameleon in December 1894 was quoted. It concludes "I am the Love that dare not speak its name."

    July/August 1895 British General Election. Salisbury led a Conservative and Liberal Unionist Government. Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownagree was elected Conservative MP for Bethnal Green. The second Asian to be a UK MP (1895-1906). He supported British rule in India.

    28.12.1895 Auguste and Louis Lumiere gave a public presentation of projected moving pictures. Performances in other cities included London on 20.2.1896. Projection onto a scree was possible because of the use of transparent celluloid film.

    In 1895 Wilhelm Röntgen's discoveries initiated research into X-Rays. In 1896 Henri Becquerel's discoveries initiated the exploration of radioactivity.

    1896

    Weber became Professor at the University of Heidelberg
    Lev Semenovich Vygotsky born

    Durkheim's journal L'Année Sociologique first appeared in 1896 - but the first "volume" was published in 1898. At this time, Chicago and Bordeaux were two of the main centres generating "sociology". See Andrea Nagy. The new London School of Economics became another centre. America

    6.4.1896 First International Olympic Games at Athens.

    See Olympiad - Winter 1936 - 1936 - 1960 - 1968 - 1972 - 7.7.2005 - 2012 - 2015 -

    1897

    Durkheim's Suicide seeks to show that society is so real that it controls acts as (apparently) individual as suicide. (Extracts)


    Weber's father's death was followed by Weber's mental breakdown.

    Ferdinand Tönnies' Der Nietzsche-Kultus. Eine Kritik. Leipzig. An extremely successful book on Nietzsche that influenced Weber.

    1897 Mortillet "Evolution quaternaire de la pierre" Revue de l'Ecole d'Anthropologie, pages 17-26

    1898

    13.1.1898 Émile Zola alleged that "the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus was based on false accusations of espionage and was a misrepresentation of justice."

    First volume of L'Année Sociologique. It continued until 1913. Then the war stopped it. A short lived revival began in 1923-1924. It was published as Annales Sociologique between 1934 and 1942. The first of a third series of L'Année Sociologique appeared in 1949, and has continued since.

    1898 Thomas Morison Legge appointed first medical inspector of factories in the UK at a time of mounting concern about occupational health including lead poisoning. See 1912. In 1921 Legge helped draft the international convention to ban the use of lead paint inside buildings. He resigned as medical factory inspector on 29.11.1926 in protest at the British government's failure to fully implement this. See 1930-1955

    25.9.1898 Death of Gabriel de Mortillet - February 1899 Popular Science Monthly Volume 54 "Sketch of Gabriel de Mortillet"

    1899

    July 1899 Herbert Payne left school, aged 13, and became a joiner at the Vulcan Foundry. He retired 2.11.1951, aged 65, after 52 years and one month of service. (Vulcan Magazine Volume 2, Number 4, Winter 1951-1952, p.32)

    October 1899 Wiesbaden meeting of European and American Academies planned an international association with sections for natural science and "literary science": meaning the scientific study of language, history, philosophy, antiquities, and other subjects not considered "natural sciences". The Royal Society represented Britain for the natural sciences. The British Academy was formed to represent the others. The International Association of Academies first met in Paris in 1900, without British representation of the non-natural sciences. The Association did not survive the first world war, but was replaced by the International Research Council and the International Association of Academies after the war (main source)

    October 1899 First publication of Helen Bannerman's The Story of Little Black Sambo, the best known of "The Dumpy Books for Children".

    Sometime in 1899 Aids to Scouting for N.-C.Os and men by Robert Baden-Powell in Gale and Polden's military series. A revised and enlarged edition was issued in 1906.

    "The British scout ... has to take on the crafty Afghan in his mountains, or the Zulu in the open South African downs, the Burmese in his forests, the Soudanese on the Egyptian deserts."
    13.10.1899 to 17.5.1900 Siege of Mafeking. "It became clear that the English expected the blacks to starve first" (Wikepedia Edward Cecil

    Edward Cecil (under Robert Baden-Powell) formed a "cadet corps". Baden-Powel called them "boy scouts". These (non-fighting) boy soldiers did tasks like delivering mail (under fire) on bicycles. One of them was shown on the local penny stamp.

    *********


     
    20TH CENTURY

    Some new words in the 1900 Dictionary: -   - x-rays - Victorian - valence and valency - ultra-red - ultra-violet - tuberculine - tuberculosis - telepathy - symbiosis - spirillum - sepsis - saccharin (sweetener made from coal-tar "no nutritive value, but apparently harmless" - rubella - referendum - psychometry - prognosis - poundal - pornography - phylum - photogravure - paludal (marsh) fever - oceanography - occultism - neuropathology - neuromuscular - neurasthenia - micro-organism - metazoa - metabolism - menopause - matriarchy - massage - margarine - magazine-rifle - machine- gun - Listerism (antiseptic surgery) - lanoline - laisser-faire - karma - impressionist - hypnosis - glossic (phonetic spelling) - germicide - felicific - eurhythmy - eugenic - eugenics - endoplasm - endoplast - ectoplasm - demography - coulomb - cordite - colonial - colonize - cephalic index (scull measurement "according to which...races.. are called brachycephalic or dolichocephalic) - cardiograph - burette - brontosaurus - boom (economic) - bacteriology - ampere - aluminium - alienism -

    From silk to rayon. About 1900 Courtaulds acquired British rights to the viscose process for making "synthetic silk" from cellulose, and developed the first commercial product in 1905. The name rayon for such products was decided on by a committee formed by the United States Department of Commerce in 1924 or 1926. In 1934 the Daily Express Encyclopedia described "the development of the industry in recent years" as "phenomenal, the world production in 1928 being 350 million lb."

    1900 to 1907 Short "local topical" films made by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon at 40 Northgate, Blackburn, Lancashire showed factory workers leaving work, workers promanading in their Sunday best, football and rugy matches and similar scenes.


    1900
    Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams
    books - extracts
    1880 Freud and John Stuart Mill
    1885 Freud and Charcot
    1913 Totem and Taboo
    1938 Outlining Psychoanalysis
    Freud and society
    Mental Health History Timeline
    Extracts from Interpretation of Dreams
    beautiful baby
    Freud weblinks

    26.2.1900-27.2.1900 UK "Labour Representation Committee" formed at a conference in Farringdon aimed at getting MPs into Parliament who would support labour interests. Renamed the Labour Party 15.2.1906.

    24.3.1900 Royal Charter for Birmingham University (previously Mason Science College). Other "red brick" universities followed at Liverpool Manchester (1903), Leeds (1904), Sheffield (1905) and Bristol (1909) followed. Birmingham University and the Birmingham Settlement in Aston (a neighbourhood response to poverty established in 1899) built strong links. See 1908

    15.4.1900 to 12.11.1900, Exposition Universelle held in Paris "to celebrate the achievements of the past century and to accelerate development into the next" (Wikipedia)

    29.7.1900 Victor Emmanuel (born 11.11.1869) 3rd King of Italy. Italy fought against Germany in the first world war. On 30.10.1922 he appointed Mussolini Prime Minister. Emperor of Ethiopia from 9.5.1936. Italy fought on the side of Germany in the second world war. Victor Emmanuel abdicated on 9.5.1946, and died 28.12.1947. See 1929 stamps

    26.9.1900 to 30.9.1900 Congrès international de l'éducation sociale. Paris. See Durkheim

    September/October 1900 UK General Election

    1901

    "The white population of the empire reached in 1901 a total of over 53,000,000, or something over one-eighth of its entire population, which, including native races, is estimated at about 400,000,000. [...] The population of the empire may therefore be calculated as amounting to something more than one-fourth of the population of the world." (1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica)

    1901 Publication of Seebohm Rowntree's Poverty, A Study of Town Life. 28% of the population of York (England) calculated as living in "absolute poverty". The main reason for this was low wages. The Legacy of Rowntree - Presentation by Jonathan Bradshaw 2013 - offline

    Tuesday 22.1.1901 Death of Queen Victoria at Osborne House. Monday 4.2.1901 Victoria buried beside Albert in the Frogmore Royal Mausoleum at Windsor Home Park. Her body had been bought, in state, across the Solent and on to Windsor.

    Charlotte Mew expresses a nation's grief - Children are named Victoria.

    Sunday 31.3.1901/Monday 1.4.1901: Eleventh British Census
    Population of England and Wales: 32,612,000; Scotland: 4,479,000

    1901 Enrico Ferri's The Positive School of Criminology

    24.10.1901: The Psychological Society founded at University College London. It was renamed the British Psychological Society in 1906. America
    The ten founder members were: Robert Armstrong-Jones (1859-1943) - William Ralph Boyce Gibson (1869-1935) - Sophie Bryant (1850-1922) - Frank Hales (1878-1952) -
    William McDougall - Frederick Mott - W.H.R. Rivers - Alexander Shand (1858-1936) - W.G. Smith - and James Sully.

    1901 to 1902 Durkheim's last Sociology lectures at Bordeaux were on the history of sociology. All that survives of them is his article on Rousseau's Social Contract. This argued that Rousseau bridges the gap between state of nature theory and sociology

    In 1901 Marcel Mauss and Paul Fauconnet provided the article on Sociology for the Grande Encyclopédie

    10.12.1901 The first Nobel Prizes: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. (Nobel website) - Prizewinners include Röntgen (X-rays) - Becquerel and the Curies (Radioactivity) - Pavlov (Digestion) - Rutherford - Cockcroft and Walton - Hahn (Nuclear fission) - Wagner Jauregg (malaria innoculations) - Hess (interbrain coordination) - Moniz (leucotomy)

    1902

    1902 Joseph Lucas Ltd (Birmingham, UK) started making electrical parts including magnetos, alternators, windscreen wipers, horns, lighting, wiring and starter motors for the car industry. Major growth started in 1914 with a contract to supply Morris Motors Limited. Lucas was the principal supplier of such electrical components to British manufacturers until the 1970s.

    Durkheim took over the Science of Education at the Sorbonne.

    La science et l'hypothèse (Science and Hypothesis) by Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) published in Paris.

    William Bateson (1861-1926) Mendel's Principles of Heredity. A defence ... With a translation of Mendel's original papers on hybridisation Cambridge University Press. (external link to English translation of Mendel)

    3.4.1902 Funeral of Cecil Rhodes in Cape Town.

    1902 Rhodes Scholarships, established under the will of Cecil John Rhodes, provided international scholarships at Oxford University for students from the British colonies, the United States, and Germany, because " ... a good understanding between England, Germany and the United States of America will secure the peace of the world ... " No German scholars were chosen from 1914 to 1929, nor from 1940 to 1969.

    "I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. I contend that every acre added to our territory means the birth of more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence."

    8.8.1902 Royal Charter granted to incorporate the "British Academy for the Promotion of Historical, Philosophical, and Philological Studies" - now known as the "British Academy" with the present day objects of the "promotion of the humanities and social sciences". - website - See Royal Society - 1899 - Union Académique Internationale - Academy of Social Sciences - Society Counts

    9.8.1902 Coronation of King Edward 8th and Queen Alexandra - Postponed due to the king's illness. "Thine Empire shall be strong... Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free... Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set"

    October 1902 First commercial publication of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit

    Peter Rabbit may have influenced some of the imagery of Julienne Ford, before she graduated to Swallows and Amazons, Catcher in the Rye and then marxism and sociology

    1903

    1903-1912 An enlarged building for the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College to meet increasing demand. Opened in 1912 as the Royal Technical College, it was Europe's largest single educational complex.

    1903 British Civil Service Typists' Association formed. All typists were (apparently) women. It merged with the Federation of Women Clerks in 1916 to form the Federation of Women Civil Servants.

    1903 An Association to Promote the Higher Education of Working Men founded by Albert Mansbridge and his wife. Renamed the Workers Educational Association in 1905.

    1903 "Despite its high price", the first edition of Musée préhistorique by Mortillet, father and son had sold out, after twenty years. The publishers suggested a new, "slightly shorter", edition at a "much more modest price". Adrien de Mortillet took the opportunity to review the whole book in the light of changing ideas. (Introduction). Despite Guy de Mortillet's influence, none of his work appears to have been translated into English and COPAC lists only one each of the French editions of Musée préhistorique, both at Oxford.

    1903 to 1907, Edvard Alexander Westermarck, first Lecturer in Sociology at London School of Economics. From 1906 to 1918, he was also Professor of Practical Philosophy, University of Helsinki, and from 1907 to 1930, Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics (with Hobhouse).

    May 1903 George Griffith Sidelights on Convict Life

    May 1903 Durkheim and Fauconnet, Révue Philosophique,

    "Sociology exists; it has a history displaying its nature; there is, therefore, no place for efforts to imagine what it is. We can observe it. Though no good purpose is served in disputing in abstracto what the science ought to be, there is on the contrary a real interest in becoming acquainted with the course of its development, in giving an account of the various elements whence it resulted, and of the parts they occupy respectively in the whole structure."


    20.11.1903 Sociological Society formed at the London School of Economics. The original society had an international membership. America
    The society sought to bring together, for debate, all with a scientific approach to society and social issues. Major issues in its early years included selective breeeding, town planning and welfare. Based at the London School of Economics until 1920. See David Evans (1986) and Baudry Rocquin (2006)
    See Francis Galton at the Sociological Society.

    Sociological Papers by F. Galton, E. Westermarck, P. Geddes, E. Durkheim, H.H. Mann and V.V. Branford published by Macmillan (London) for the Sociological Society. (Volume one 1905). There were three volumes covering (I think) sessions October to June 1904-1905, 1905-1906 and 1906- 1907. It then became The Sociological Review It was the "Journal of the Sociological Society" from 1908 to 1930; of the "Institute of Sociology" from 1931 to 1952. From 1953 to 1961 issued by the University College of North Staffordshire; From 1962 to the present by University of Keele.

    10.12.1903 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Antoine Henri Becquerel, Pierre Curie and Marie Curie, née Sklodowska for Becquerel discovery of spontaneous radioactivity and the Curie's "joint researches on the radiation phenomena" discovered by Becquerel. (citation). In 1911, Marie Curie won the prize for Chemistry. See biography

    1903 Edward Step Wayside and Woodland Trees: A pocket guide to the British sylva

    London to become the city of Plane trees

    "The Plane (Platanus orientalis). In spite of the fact that the Plane is an exotic of comparatively recent introduction, it seems in a fair way of being associated in the future with London. It has taken with great kindness to London life, in spite of the drawbacks of smoke, fog, flagstones, and asphalt. Its leaves get thickly coated with soot, which also turns its light-grey bark to black; but as the upper surface of the leaves is smooth and firm, a shower of rain washes them clean, and the rigid outer layer of bark is thrown off by the expansion of the softer bark beneath. This is not thrown off all at once, but in large and small flakes, which leave a smooth yellow patch behind, temporarily free from soot contamination. A variety of trees has been tried for street-planting, but none has stood the trying conditions of London so well as the Plane, and therefore before many years the capital will be the city of Planes."


    1904

    1904 The thermionic valve (See Ambrose Fleming). The valve can only pass an electric signal one way. Consequently, alternating signals from radio waves can be converted into pulsating direct current that can be used to produce sound. Valves can also be used in binary calculations with current flowing counting as one state and not flowing counting as the other state.

    See Transistor

    1904 John Lockhart Gibson A plea for painted railings and painted walls of rooms as the source of lead poisoning amongst Queensland children.

    1904 Gardening for the Million by Alfred Pink (of Dulwich), author of Recipes for the Million published by T. Fisher Unwin, 267 pages in an Art Nouveau Book Design.

    1904 In his Nobel Prize address, Pavlov introduced the idea of the conditioned reflex. (extracts). 20th Century Words records the term in English use from 1906. Pavlov's works appeared in English in 1926

    January 1904. National Training School of Cookery and other Branches of Domestic Economy, London, awarded a Fist-Class Diploma for Laundry Works to Ethel Bird (21 years old). Signed by the Chairman and by Edith Clarke, Lady Superintendent. Certificate was framed by G. Bannister, Practical Carver and Gilder, Looking Glass and Picture Frame Maker, 65 Cross Street (3 doors from Upper Street), Islington, London, N. The certificate depicts science and art at the top, with taste central, supported by small, sight, hearing and touch.

    1904 Charles Spearman suggested a way of measuring a "general intelligence" underlying specific abilities.

    18.7.1904 Patrick Geddes read his first paper on Civics: as Applied Sociology to the Sociological Society. His second paper Civics: as Concrete and Applied Sociology was read on 25.1.1905. The meetings were chaired by Charles Booth and theoretical criticisms received in writing included one from W.I. Thomas of Chicago.

    1904/1905 Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in German. This book by Weber became number 4 in the century's top 10. Economy and Society was number one.


    1904-1905 The first course in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science was taught by Edvard Westermarck in the Session 1904-1905.

    Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse lectured at the London School of Economics from 1904? to 1929. With his colleague, Westermarck, Hobhouse became one of the first two Professors of Sociology in a British University in 1907. Ronald Fletcher says of him that, with the exception of Talcott Parsons:

    "Hobhouse was probably the last scholar to accomplish an entire 'system' of sociology with success"

    Many of his works, such as Mind in Evolution (1901), Morals in Evolution (1906), and Development and Purpose (1913) were about the evolution of societies.

    Morris Ginsberg became his research assistant in 1912. In 1915, Hobhouse, Gerald Clair Wheeler and Ginsberg produced a comprehansive analysis of anthopological reports that correlated the development of material culture and social institutions.


    1905

    Eugenics: its definition, scope and aims by Francis Galton.

    In a letter, William Bateson suggested a need for a word that combined the idea of studying biological heredity and biological variation. The word he suggested was genetics, and this was used in the title of a conference he chaired in 1906.

    1905 Identification chromosomal differences between male and female insects: males having XY and females XX sex chromosomes.

    1905 Binet-Simon Scale for measuring intelligence introduced.

    1905 Criminalité et conditions economiques by William Adrian Bonger, Professor of Law, Amsterdam University, published. It was translated into English and published as Criminality and Economic Conditions by the Political Economy Club in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1915.

    1905 "In 1905 the Department of Social Science was opened at the University of Liverpool. It evolved from a campaign led by a group of intellectual and civic leaders, two key leaders being Eleanor Rathbone and Elizabeth Macadam." (source)

    Sunday 15.1.1905 Sisters of Charity open St. Joseph's Hospice in Hackney.

    photographs
    About 1905, Frederick John Martin, a foreman house painter (worker as distinct from employer) of Britannia Road, Fulham (north of the gas works) took his only son, John May Martin to Gambier Reeks Photographers, 529 Fulham Road (near the new Town Hall) to have this father and son cabinet card taken. Frederick had to travel around for work. Perhaps the cabinet card travelled with him and sat on mantlepieces or by his bedside?

    Picture postcards of views became very popular before and after 1900. Family photographers picked up the idea and the established "cabinet cards" gave way to postcards of people.

    Ron Cosens says "Most cabinet cards had been phased out by 1905/1906 in favour of the cheaper to produce postcard format mounts" (personal email). But maybe cabinet cards remained popular with working class paople?

    Monday 11.9.1905 The new Chelsea Football Club played Hull City at the first home game at Stamford Bridge. They won 5-1. Formed to use the enormous Stamford Bridge Stadium, Chelsea (with Clapton Orient) was the first southern club to join the northern dominated Football League. Gambier Reeks was its official photographer.

    1906

    January/February 1906: UK General Election. Lloyd George Prime minister to 1922

    10.10.1906 Launch of HMS Dreadnought. "All battleships built after 1906 were dreadnoughts" (Oxford Reference Dictionary)


    15.1.1906 Publication by Joseph Dent (1849-1926) of the first fifty titles in Everyman's Library, edited by Ernest Rhys. Volumes 262 and 263 (1907) were William Harvey's The Circulation of the Blood and Francis Galton's Inquiries into Human Faculty. Published Burke in 1910 - Hume in 1911 - Rousseau in 1911 and 1913 - Owen in 1927 - See also Home University Library


    Early 1906 The Bio-Chemical Journal edited by Benjamin Moore and Edward Whitley established. Copyright the Bio-chemical Department, Johnston Laboratories, University of Liverpool. It was to be issued monthly as far as material was available. Online archive 1906-2005. The Biochemical Club (later Biochemical Society) was formed in January 1911. See 5.2.1913.


    1906 Combe lectureship in General and Experimental Psychology and the George Combe laboratory established at Edinburgh University with funding from the Combe Trust. W.G. Smith, the first lecturer, was a student of Wundt. His succesor, James Drever senior, became the first Professor of Psychology in Scotland in 1931. He was succeded by his son, James Drever, junior, who wrote the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology (1952). - external history

    1906 International Conference on Genetics, Royal Horticultural Society, London. The first with this title. Previous conferences had been on "Breeding and Hybridisation". (external link)

    1906 Préjugé des races by Jean Finot (1858- 1922)
    translated into English in the same year by Florence Wade-Evans as
    Race Prejudice [Available online - offline]

    "All condemnations of peoples and races in virtue of an innate superiority or inferiority have in reality failed... A savant who presumes to pronounce a verdict of eternal barbarism against any people deserves to be laughed at."

    Contents: Part 1: The inequality of human beings - Part 2: Towards the unity of the human type Part 3: Anthropo-psychology and anthropo-sociology Part 4: The mysterious or uncertain origins of peoples and race Part 5: Are there peoples condemned to remain eternally inferior to others?

    1907

    Babiker Badri 1907 Babikir Badri established education for women in Sudan

    new English terms recorded: racialism (1907), race relations (1911), racialist (1917), racist (1932), racism (1935). See Sorokin (1928) on the racialist branch of the biological school of sociology

    1907 Charles Edward Walker "It has been held that every hereditary character is represented by a chromosome" - The Essentials of Cytology: an introduction to the study of living matter, page 99.

    1907 Pyx Granite licensed to quarry stone in the Malvern Hills. Several companies, and Malvern Hills Urban District Council, were quarrying the hills by the 1909, particularly for the construction of roads. By 1949 the Observers Book of Geology wrote "a whole range of hills, the Malverns, formed of a hard igneous rock very suitable for road making, is in danger of being bodily quarried away".

    17.12.1907 Inauguration of the Martin White professorships of sociology University of London LSE. " Westermarck and L. T. Hobhouse became the first two professors of sociology at the LSE, Hobhouse spoke on "The roots of modern sociology", and Westermarck on "Sociology as a university study." See 1913.

    1908 The 1908 Old Age Pensions Act was brought in after a long campaign to remove older people from the punitive effects of the Victorian Poor Law. It provided people over 70 with a pension of 5/- a week.

    Sociological Review started 1908. Journal of the Sociological Society replacing Sociological Papers? An early article was by Wilfred Trotter on the herd instinct

    "At one time the infant British sociology movement seemed about to be taken over entirely by eugenists, who even after 1908 were regular contributors to the Sociological Review". (G. R. Searle, 1976 page 11)

    1908 First editions of William McDougall's An Introduction to Social Psychology (October 1908) and Edward Alsworth Ross's Social Psychology: An outline and sourcebook. The phrase had been coined in French: psychologie sociale (1875), German: soziale Psychologie (1879), Italian: psicologia sociale (1880) and English (1880). McDougall's explanation of the concept (page 18) is

    "Social psychology has to show how, given the native propensities and capacities of the human mind, all the complex mental life of societies is shaped by them and in turn reacts upon the course of their development and operation in the individual."

    1908 Cecil Spring Rice wrote a two verse poem which later developed into:

    I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above, Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
    The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test, That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
    The love that never falters, the love that pays the price, The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

    And there's another country, I've heard of long ago, Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
    We may not count her armies, we may not see her King; Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
    And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase, And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

    January 1908 to May 1908 Freud analysed a four/five year old child ("Little Hans") through correspondence with his father and one meeting (on 30.3.1908). "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy" published in 1909.


    Germany was building Dreadnoughts
    24.1.1908 Scouting for Boys, part one, by Baden Powell published. External link: This day in history

    1645 scoutmaster general - 1899 Mafeking - 1915 game of war - September 1909 A rally at the Crystal Palace which 11,000 Scouts attended - 1910 Girl Guides Association formed - 10.8.1914 "The service of Boy Scouts has been placed at the disposal of the Government" - 1918 Imperial Headquarters - July 1929 Birkenhead Jamboree attended by 30,000 Scouts from 71 countries - 1933 Hitler Youth - 1937 tea party - 1939 Reading Mein Kampf - 1949 Bob a Job - 1954 lady at home

    3.8.1908 At La Chapelle-aux-Saints, Paul Bouyssonie retrieved a cranial cap typical of Neanderthals with a pronounced sub-orbital ridge. (Wikipedia). Remains of Neanderthalers were discovered at Le Moustier earlier in 1908, at La Ferrassie in 1909, and at La Quina in 1911. Marcellin Boule (1861-1942), director of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, oversaw the findings at La Chapelle and La Ferrassie. See La Chapelle 1909.

    Tuesday 6.10.1908 One year social studies course started at Birmingham University. Advertised as training for social and philanthropic work. (Ann Davis 2008). See 2003

    1909: French banker Albert Kahn (1860-1940) decided to establish a record of the world in film and colour photographs: Recording, especially, ways of life thought to be disappearing. The "Archives of the Planet" were photographed in fifty countries, between 1909 and 1931.

    1909 Arnold van Gennep's Les rites de passage

    1909 Thomas Henry Craig Stevenson (1870-1932) appointed Superintendent of Statistics in the General Register Office in succession to John Tatham. See class 1913

    Careers and Vocational Training. A guide to the professions and occupations of educated women and girls.. Biennial from 1909 to 1977 Published London. A copy of the 10th edition (about 1940) is available in the Internet Archive - offline

    #La Chapelle 1909 #La Chapelle skeleton 27.2.1909 The Illustrated London News published a reconstruction of the La Chapelle skeleton drawn by Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957), with the aid of Marcellin Boule. On the right, the La Chapelle skeleton model used is compared with that of a modern human. #La Chapelle skeleton
    "Massive, coarse with a long broad lower jaw without chin, with a short bent figure and a barrel shaped chest ... a true Ice Age palaenthropine [ancient human] who never reached the balance and grace of present man." (Schenk 1961, p.85)

    1910

    The Model B was the Wright brothers' most successful aircraft. It was produced from late 1910 to 1914, and during 1911 and 1912, the Wright Company was shipping four Model Bs a month out the factory door. See America

    1910 Trollhättan Electrical Power Station, Sweden - timeline. Construction of the Olidestationen (Olide plant) began in June 1906 and plant was in regular operation by March 1910. Kungliga Vattenfallsstyrelsen (The Royal Waterfalls Board) was formed in 1909. The photograph is from Hallendorff and Schück's History of Sweden (1929).
    Kungliga Vattenfallsstyrelsen, now Vattenfall, is said to have been the world's first state-owned power producer. See
    The Vattenfall story .

    January/February 1910: UK General Election

    6.5.1910 The death of King Edward 7th coincided with a visit from Halley's Comet, which provided George Dangerfield in 1936 with an introduction to his The Strange Death of Liberal England. Dangerfield associated the "death" of liberalism between 1910 and 1914 with the development of violent civil conflict over home rule for Ireland (Tory rebellion), votes for women and industrial relations (the women's and workers' rebellions)

    "For nearly a century men had discovered in cautious phrase, in the respectable gesture, in the considered display of reasonable emotions, a haven against those irrational storms that threaten to sweep through them" (page 135)

    September to October 1910 Lockouts, strikes and riots in South Wales mark the start of the "great labour unrest" of 1910 to 1914.

    28.10.1910 Ferdinand de Saussure's "Brief survey of the history of linguistics" begins his 1910-1911 lecture course which was published in 1916.

    December 1910: UK General Election

    1910-1914 Weber's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society) written. It included Structures of Power, Class, Status, Party and Bureaucracy. (See extracts and Weber's toolbox). It was not published (in German) until 1922. It was partly translated into English in 1947 and 1962, but not completely until 1968. This book by Weber became number 1 in the century's top 10

    123 maths Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell published in two volumes by Cambridge University Press in 1910 and 1913.
    This attempts to demonstrate that mathematics is a development of logic: A way of grouping the world into sets and showing what will be included in, and what excluded from particular sets and how the sets relate to one another. It was an element in what Russell called the "dethronement of mathemetics" from its special status as a source of knowlege in reason rather than empirical observation. Mathematics, Russell wrote

    "is not a-priori knowledge".

    "It is, in fact, merely verbal knowledge. 3 means 2 + 1 and 4 means 3 + 1. Hence it follows (though the proof is long) that 4 means the same as 2 + 2" (Russell, B. 1961 p.p 785-786)

    1911

    1911 An old Tram factory in Trafford Park, Manchester converted to an assembly plant to make the Ford Model T. It employed 60 people. 6,000 cars were produced in 1913, supplying 30% of Britain's market. The first moving assembly line, in 1914, produced 21 cars an hour. In 1919, 41% of British registered cars were Fords. 1931: Dagenham opened. 1962 Halewood opened

    "I have proposed" [1909] "the terms 'gene' and 'genotype'... to be used in the science of genetics. The 'gene' is nothing but a very applicable little word, easily combined with others, and hence it may be useful as an expression for the 'unit-factors', 'elements' or 'allelomorphs' in the gametes, demonstrated by modern Mendelian researches." (W. Johannsen)


    1911 International Association of Chemical Societies met in Paris in 1911 and proposed to work on the standardisation chemical names, atomic weights, formats of publications and other matters. It was succeded by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry in 1919. History link

    4.3.1911 A meeting of 38 committee members the new Biochemistry Society at University College London drew up rules. A "letter from a lady who wished to become an original member" prompted an amendement to the rules that , that "only men be eligible for membership" (carried 17 votes to nine). The decision was reversed on 13.7.1912 (24 votes to seven)

    Sunday 2.4.1911/Monday 3.4.1911: Twelfth British Census
    Population of England and Wales: 36,136,000; Scotland: 4,751,000

    The schedules used from 1911 to provided separate columns for birthplace and nationality; in addition, the particulars obtained enabled foreign residents to be distinguished from visitors. Questions about ethnicity were not asked until 1991, questions about religion were not asked until 2001

    April 1911 Ernest Rutherford wrote "The scattering of alpha and beta particles by matter and the structure of the atom" published in Philosophical Magazine, volume 21 (1911), pages 669-688, reporting the results of an experiment (in Manchester) in which radioactive particles were fired through minutely thin metal foils (notably gold) and detected using screens coated with zinc sulfide (a scintillator). The vast majority of particles passed straight through the foil, but approximately 1 in 8000 were deflected. Rutherford theorised that most of the atom was made up of 'empty space'. His atomic theory described the atom as having a central positive nucleus surrounded by negative orbiting electrons with most of the mass of the atom contained in the small nucleus. (source) - biography at Cambridge

      See "London 1911 : celebrating the imperial" by Susan Finding.

    12.5.1911 Festival of Empire opened at Crystal Palace - See studygroup - Bill Tonkin - Souvenir of the pageant (offline)

    12.5.1911 Victoria Memorial, London, unveiled by her grandsons George 5th of England and Willhelm 2nd of Germany. behind the memorial, the new ceremonial Mall sweeps away to Admiralty Arch.

    22.6.1911 Coronation of George 5th and Queen Mary in London. In December they went to India, where they were proclaimed Emperor and Empress at the Dehli Durbar in Coronation Park on 12.12.1911. The Imperial Crown of India was created for the occasion, and has not been used since.
    Later, the king shot 21 tigers, 8 rhinoceroses and a bear in Nepal. See war memorial and death.

    Wednesday 26.7.1911 to Saturday 29.7.2011 Universal Races Congress held at the University of London. (information) - Papers on inter-racial problems, communicated to the first Universal Races Congress edited by Gustav Spiller. offline

    5.8.1911 "Galton Chair of Eugenics. Professor Karl Pearson, F.R.S., has been appointed to be the first occupant of the Chair of Eugenics established in connexion with the legacy bequeathed for that purpose by the late Sir Francis Galton." (British Medical Journal. 5.8.1911 p.317)

    A nationwide merchant seamen's strike was called on 14.6.1911, leading to strikes in other sectors. A strike committee representing all workers in dispute was chaired by the syndicalist Tom Mann, who had recently returned from Australia.

    Sunday 13.8.1911 Police baton charged a crowd of 85,000 people, who had gathered to hear Tom Mann speak, on St. George's Plateau, in Liverpool.

    The Liverpool strike ended on Thursday 24.8.1911 and troops were officially withdrawn on 28.8.1911

    28.10.1911 Festival of Empire closed at Crystal Palace

    December 1911 Amédée Forestier illustrated the Glastonbury Lake Village in the Illustrated London News. His later illustrations include Piltdown Man, Rhodesian Man, and Nebraskan Man.

    10.12.1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for 1911 to Marie Sklodowska Curie for the discovery of the chemical elements radium and polonium; the determination of the properties of radium, the isolation of radium in its pure metallic state; and her "research into the compounds of this remarkable element." (citation)

    Dawn of hope leaflet dated 28.6.1911(?). This mass-produced leaflet shows Lloyd George offering the worker "national insurance against sickness and disablement" through his bill and calls on people to "support the Liberal Government in their policy of social reform"

    16.12.1911 Royal Assent to the U.K's National Insurance Act which provided the elements of health services and unemployment insurance for insured people, but not for their dependants. Came into effect 15.7.1912


    1911 First ten volumes of "The Home University Library of Modern Knowledge" published under the editorship of Gilbert Murray. A further set of ten volumes were published in the year, and a further set of ten planned.


    1912 In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim argues that human beings have always had a knowledge of the fundamental reality of their societies. This knowledge, however, was not, previously, scientific, but religious. (See extracts and the dance of life)

    1912 Die Familie by Franz Carl Müller-Lyer (1857-1916) München, J. F. Lehmann. English: The Family New York 1931. Outlines three stages in its historic development 1) the tribal stage with the clan, 2) the familial stage with large and then small patriarchal families, 3) the individual era with the a small family of husband, wife and children. See Burgess and Locke (1945) p.25

    1912: Alfred Wegener's theory of Continental Drift
    External Link

    Polyvinyl acetate (PVA): Developed commercially as glue and as part of paint. "The synthesis and patenting of vinyl acetate monomer by Dr Fritz Klatte in 1912, in Germany, provided the foundation for many valuable and now essential plastic products". (source). Polyvinyl alcohol was prepared from polyvinyl acetate and ethanol in 1924. It is used in papermaking, textiles, and a variety of coatings. See Wikipedia and Joan Hughes 1976

    1912 Lead Poisoning and Lead Absorption. The symptoms, pathology and prevention, with special reference to their industrial origin and an account of the principal processes involving risk by Thomas Morison Legge and Kenneth Weldon Goadby. xi and 308 pages. (Internet archive)

    1.1.1912 Republic of China. Hobhouse in 1915, spoke of centuries of a central government of "barbarian invaders" being replaced by one that hovered between despotism and disorder.


    Unemployment insurance stamp 1912
    15.7.1912 UK National Insurance Act came into effect. Unemployment benefit at 7 shillings a week has been estimated at about 22% of average male earnings in manufacturing. By 1979 it was still about 21% of average earnings (manual and non-manual, male and female). By 2008, the renamed jobseeker's allowance had fallen to 10.5% of average earnings. (Jonathan Bradshaw, York University, Letter published in The Guardian, 15.5.2009.)

    28.9.1912 Ulster's Solemn League and Covenant to resist home rule for Ireland "using all means which may be found necessary".


    18.12.1912 Charles Dawson told a meeting of the Geological Society about the discovery of fragments of a skull with features of man and monkey in Piltdown in Sussex. A 1934 Encyclopedia says "in the Piltdown discovery we have a definite human head accompanied by an equally definite simian jaw. However the relic is considered human. It is named Homo Dawsonii. The reconstruction, published in the The Illustrated London News was drawn by Amédée Forestier under the direction of William Plane Pycraft of the museum. In November 1953, The Times published evidence that the skull was a forgery.
    A reconstruction of the Piltdown jaw by William Plane Pycraft, published, with Forestier's picture in The Popular Science Monthly (pages 206- 207) February 1913. See Arthur Smith Woodward
    "Recent discoveries prove that primitive man at a period from
    one hundred thousand to a million years ago was widely spread over Europe and apparently as far as Java, and that different species and perhaps genera may have lived simultaneously in different regions". Heidelberg jaw mentioned. (The Popular Science Monthly)
    See resources at Welcome to the Piltdown Plot! "saved 160 times between October 8, 1999 and June 1, 2016".

    1912 Morris Ginsberg graduated in Philosophy and Sociology at London Schoool of Economics. He became Hobhouse's research assistant,

    1912 William Stern, Die Psychologischen Methoden der Intelligenz- prüfung Leipzig, Translated into English (Baltimore, USA) as Psychological methods of testing intelligence by Guy Montrose Whipple in 1914. The German uses the term Intelligenz-quotient for a child's mental age divided by his or her chronological age (source). See Binet-Simon Scale and I.Q.

    1913 Mental Deficiency Act and The Board of Control

    University of London. Monographs on sociology. Edited by Professor L. T. Hobhouse and Professor E. A. Westermarck.
    1. Heinrich Oppenheimer The rationale of punishment. (1913)
    2. Bronislaw Malinowski The family among the Australian aborigines: A sociological study (1913)
    3. L. T. Hobhouse, G. C. Wheeler, and M. Ginsberg. The material culture and social institutions of the simpler peoples: an essay in correlation (1915)
    Gerald Clair William Camden Wheeler (1872-1943)
    4. Yükao Liang and Menghe Tao   Village and Town Life in China (1915)

    14.6.1913 London funeral of Emily Wilding Davison (born 11.10.1872) organised by the Women's Social and Political Union. She had died following a collision with the King's horse in the Epsom races when demonstrating on 4.6.1913. Her gravestone in Northumberland say "Deeds not words", which was Women's Social and Political Union slogan

    1913-1914 Freud's Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics applies his psychoanalytic theories to anthropology and the prehistory of human beings.
    Extracts from Totem and Taboo
    Civil and savage - 1906-1919 family images

    Science - art - society Bihalji-Merin in 1938 (p.44) argues that science in the early 20th century was finding a "deeper vision" and this seeing below the surface was matched by a movement in art: "matter in a state of evolution ... the atom ... being broken up ... relativity revolutionised ideas of space and time ... psycho-analysis ... probed into ... psychological spheres and mythical memories ... radium and x-rays [give us] a picture of decay and renewal ... penetrate matter and make it transparent"
    Die Windsbraut by Oskar Kokoschka painted 1913- 1914
    "Confining himself to the range of apparently traditional forms" Kokoschka "delves down by dream-routes to explore hidden strata of existence" (Bihalji-Merin 1938 p.56)

    "in the nineteenth-century ... everything seemed clear or capable of comparison ... This psychological attitude was the result of a long historical process which commenced with the commencement of the bourgeois personality and broke of when its existence was threatened" (Bihalji-Merin 1938 p.42)

    Social Grades: British measurement of the hierarchy of social class began when the Registrar General's Annual Report for 1911 (not published until 1913) included a summary of occupations designed (by Thomas Stevenson) to represent "social grades" (later referred to as "social classes") which were used for the analysis of mortality data and the 1911 Census tables on Fertility of Marriage. The "Registrar General's Social Classes" (RGSC) was re-named "Social Class based on Occupation" in 1990. The scheme of 1913 was substantially modified in 1921. Stevenson explained its reasoning in 1928. OPCS formed 1970. (Rose, SRU 9, 1995). See 2001 census

    The original grades were: 1) Professional - 2) Intermediate - 3) Skilled Manual - 4) Intermediate - 3) Unskilled Manual -

    17.3.1914 Srinivasa Ramanujan, Indian mathematician, sailed from Madras, arriving London (for Cambridge) 14.4.1914. He remained in England through the war, returning to India in 1919 and dying 26.4.1920, aged only 32. (English Wikipedia) - See also Tamil Wikipedia.

    India Postage stamp issued 22.12.1916 to mark Ramanujan's 75th birthday (born 22.12.1887).

    "Farmstead" by Adolf Hitler. Signed and dated 1914. Two watercolours by Hitler, this and "Farm Buildings on the River", were sold at auction in Nuremberg (Nürnberg) in April 2009.

    "this period before the War was ... by far the most contented of my life. ... I did not live to be able to paint, but painted ... to enable myself to go on studying" (Mein Kampf)

    FIRST WORLD WAR. 4 August, Britain declared war on Germany on 4.8.1914, on Austria-Hungary 12.8.1914.
    See
    BBC History Summary - archive
    Current BBC

    August 1914: First world War started
    (The Great War for Civilisation)

    Blockades British blockades of Germany were established in August and November 1914. German blockade of Britain established in February 1915. One of the objects of both was to starve the civilian populations.

    October 1914: Maclean's Magazine (Canada) "Some wars name themselves... This is the Great War." [See end of the Great War in 1814]

    1915: The first major work by Durkheim published in English. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. A study in religious sociology translated by Joseph Ward Swain was published in New York and London. The next major work to be translated was Division of Labour in Society in 1933.

    1915 "Young soldiers can speed up their training by studying for themselves, in the intervals of parade instruction, how to make themselves all-round players in the game of War". Robert Baden Powell.

    Land Army established in Britain.

    11.4.1915 Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp released. "... the flour-white complexion of Charlie Chaplin, the dark vegetation of his eyes, his totem- like countenance". (Roland Barthes)

    31.5.1915 First bombs from Zeppelin airships dropped on London. See Charlotte Mew (below) and Essex

    Charlotte Mew: May and June 1915

    September 1915 First British Women's Institute formed at Llanfair PG on Anglesey, in Wales. British Women's Institute adopted the motto For Home and Country from the Canadian Women's Institute and adapted the Canadian badge.
    In 1916, the twenty four Womens Institutes then formed, linked up with the
    womens land army to help the food deficit by both growing and producing.

    20.10.1915 Human voices are first broadcast across the Atlantic ocean, between Arlington, Virginia and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

    1916 1916 Vilfredo Pareto's Trattato di Sociologia generale published in two volumes, Florence. These were translated into French in 1917 and 1919. Parsons used the French edition. An English translation, The Mind and Society, was not published until 1935. Like Weber and Parsons, Pareto was an economist attempting to create a social model of human action that included more than the rational ("utilitarian", as Parsons called it) search for economic goods.

    1916 Ferdinand de Saussure's (1857-1913) Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics) published after his death. - External link to extract - offline - Wikipedia

    4.3.1916 Death of Franz Marc, a German soldier and artist, during the Battle of Verdun. Marc had painted in 'unnatural' colours, as in his Der Turm der blauen Pferde (The Tower of blue horses) of 1913. In Die 100 Aphorismen - Das zweite Gesicht (The 100 Aphorisms/The Second Sight - or second face) of 1915 he wrote "the fabric of nature's laws conceals something that lies behind it"... "the law of gravity is no more than a foreground law". So in art, he sought the reality behind. The way he painted animals expressed what "they are", how "they themselves regard the world and feel their being". (Quotations from Bihalji-Merin 1938)

    August 1916 - Forgotten grief On a visit to the East End, Queen Mary viewed a street memorial. Memorials listing names of those away fighting and those killed, decorated with flowers and photographs, were created in streets and villages - It was from this life of the people that the stone war memorials that survive sprang. Charlotte Mew's poem The Cenotaph was written before the stone - It is a memory of the forgotten grief of flowers and photographs.

    December 1916: Department of Scientific and Industrial Research established in the United Kingdom. It was abolished by the Science and Technology Act in 1965.

    December 1916: Albert Einstein's Vorwort to Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitästheorie (Relativity: The Special and the General Theory) signed. It was published in German in 1917 and translated into English in 1920. [ External link to German]

    1917

    Dance of death 1917; Dead Man's Hill.
    Etching by Otto Dix published in 1924.

    By the end of October 1914 the whole front in Belgium and France had solidified into lines of trenches. Trench warfare continued until the last weeks of the war. The dead bodies of soldiers rotted on the barbed wire.

    Dix's war paintings consist of "mangled bodies, rotting men spiked on barbed wire, a mould composed of blood and brains and forgotten skulls, from which a new forgetful Spring is already sending up flowers" (Bihalji-Merin 1938, p.90)

    Bakelite Bakelite

    The picture is taken from a 1917 advertisement for "Bakelite ... for Wireless apparatus". Leo Baekeland had made the first public announcement of his invention on 8.2.1909 and in 1910 most of the new material (plastic) was produced for electrical insulators. See American Chemical Society and Grace's Guide

    about 1917 The Workers' Pocket Book. "Specially designed for the use of the Working Man and the Working Woman of to-day - Edited by BEN TILLETT." Charles Letts and Co. In the Preface said that the workers position had altered since even 20 years ago and that that of women workers "has been transformed since the advent of the European War". Workers need to record facts about "State Insurance, Friendly Societies, Trade Unions, Workmens's Compensations Acts, etc". "Scraps of paper get lost, but a pocket note book is generally to hand when required". The Pocket Book had printed notes followed by pages for the owner's notes. My copy was used by Henry Herbert Moss in the 1950s (earlier entries cut out).

    6.4.1917 The United States entered the war     America

    6.2.1917 Jacob Landau founded the Jewish Correspondence Bureau, (later renamed the Jewish Telegraphic Agency) in the Hague. It moved its headquarters from London in 1920 to New York in 1921. Paper from 1924: Jewish Daily Bulletin.   (history)

    16.10.1917 Meeting establishing the National Federation of Women's Institutes (England and Wales). Women's Institutes were first established in Canada in 1897 and in Britain in 1915. They had a rural base. - See Adding Country to Home - WI members entering public life - 1919-1925 by Anne Stamper
    The first report of the National Federation contained a full record of all the cooking and craft contributions of the Women's Institutes - Central to
    the war effort. The National Federation of Women's Institutes magazine Home and Country was first published in 1919 and the annual meeting sang "Jerusalem" from 1924. See history of the Women's Institute and 100 years of campaigning, which list issues including jury service (1921), women police patrols (1922), pollution of the seas (1927), equal pay (1943 and 1954), cancer education (1951), visiting children in hospital (1950), corneal grafting (1952), litter in the countryside (1954), smoking in public places (1964), breast examination (1975), AIDS (1986), fair trade (early 1990s), Earth Summit (2002), last Home and Country (2006), honey bees (2009), inspiring women (2010) , more midwives (2012)

    The National Union of Townswomen's Guilds was formed in 1930.

    "Women's war work". "Woman sewing with a Singer sewing machine". George Grantham Bain Collection: USA Library of Congress. Photograph between 1917 and 1918.
    In Britain, 11 percent of the population had purchased a Singer sewing machine by 1914. With an average household size of 4.4. people, 48 percent of households may have had a Singer sewing machine. See Andrew Godley 2006

    Joan Martin's first encounter with a sewing machine was in the second world war.

    7.11.1917 "October Revolution" (old style calendar) of the Russian "Bolsheviks" under Lenin. Baliktsioglou Christos writes: The Russian Revolution started. This has a wide scientific interest as it was guided by the theories of Karl Marx. Moreover, it is related to the development of the labour movements and revolutions around the world.
    It's the same the whole world over,
    Isn't it a blooming shame?
    It's the rich what gets the pleasure,
    It's the poor what gets the blame.

    Chorus of anonymous song that British soldiers sang in the trenches about the seduction and suicide of a girl who was poor, but honest.

    Friday 6.11.1917 The Jewish Chronicle published a letter from UK Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Walter Rothschild, dated 2.11.1917, including a declaration that "his Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people". The Jewish Chronicle on 3.11.2017 (page 68) wrote "It took a further 31 years, and the Holocaust, for Israel to be born"

    15.11.1917 Durkheim died

    1918:

    1918 The Boy Scouts Associations "Imperial Headquarters" opened at 25 Buckingham Palace Road, London, SW1.

    At Brest-Litovsk, Leon Trotsky, commander of the Soviet Red Army, negotiated peace with Germany, withdrawing Russia from the war. In the course of negotiations, on 14.1.1918, German General Hoffmann complained that the soviet government was supported by force. Trotsky replied that "in a society based on classes every government rests on force. The only difference was that General Hoffmann applied repression to protect big property-owners, whereas we did it in defense of the workers". (From Trotsky's account - External Link). Later in 1918, Max Weber quoted Trotsky in a very long lecture given at Munich University. (Published 1919 as Politics as a Vocation). This contained Weber's definition of the modern state

    6.2.1918 (Royal assent) Britain: Votes for men over 21, women over 30

    28.4.1918 Publication of Lenin's "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government"

    "The possibility of building socialism depends exactly upon our success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet organisation of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism. We must organise in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our own ends."

    Summer 1918 Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The fall of the western countries] published. Revised 1922. Volume two published 1923. Later translated into English as The Decline of the West. Spengler argued that civilisations rise and fall in cycles.

    October 1918 First edition of A History of Everyday Things in England by Marjorie and Charles Quennell.

    23.10.1918 Germany accepted Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" to end the war. Allies apart from USA not involved.

    "In the middle of all of this, Wilson proposed another idea to Britain and France, namely that a structure should be put in place to re-establish international cooperation in science. His proposal was for an International Research Council which would be organised round International Unions for each of the various scientific subjects. These International Unions would operate through National Committees in the countries of the eleven Allied Powers, with these National Committees each supported by its National Academy of Science and National Research Council. The International Unions would have the power to invite neutral countries to join, but not those countries against whom the Allied Powers had fought." source

    11.11.1918 Armistice signed. Firing stopped on all fronts.

    The Kaiser abdicated on 9.11.1918 (external documents) - a republic was proclaimed - In mid December the Berlin Conference of Workers' and Soldiers Councils decided in favour of parliamentary rather than soviet government. A National Assembly was elected on 19.1.1919 (The "Weimer Republic") with the SPD (Social democratic marxists) in control. There was an armed uprising of more radical marxists against the new state. Two leaders of the radical marxists were arrested by the army and killed. German marxists split into "socialists" and "communists" (the KPD - supported by Russia).

    "The flood of mud and debris that the year 1918 brought to the surface of our lives was not caused by the loss of the war, but was only released by it" (Adolf Hitler 18.7.1937)

    1918: Joan and Peter - The Story of an Education by H.G. Wells, in which Oswald says "Old Mother Nature is a half-wit... She's thinking of everything at once... Most of her world is desert with water running to waste. A tropical forest is three-quarters death and decay, and what is alive is either murdering or being murdered. It's only when you come to artificial things, such as a ploughed field, for example, that you get space and health and every blade doing its best." (online)

    14.12.1918: UK General Election

    24.12.1918 A radio broadcast from Moscow called for "communists of all countries" to "rally around the revolutionary Third International." 2.3.1919 to 6.3.1919: Comintern founded at a Moscow Congress to coordinate activities of communist parties world-wide.

    1919

    Punch 1919:
    "Jazz, the Fox-Trot and the Bunny-hug"
    (dances) - Jazz as popular music see Adorno 1936

    America

    # Collaboration of the prehistorian Aimé Rutot (1847-1933) and the sculptor Louis Mascré (1871-1929).

    Not identified yet - Négroide de Laussel (1914) based on Femme à la corne (Woman with the horn) (1911) - Précurseur de l'ere tertiaire - Femme de la race de Neanderthal

    Rutot published Un essai de reconstitution plastique des races humaines primitives. Brussels: Hayez, 1919.

    1919 Isle of Wight Natural History and Archaeological Society founded. website

    The UK Public Libraries Act 1919 removed restrictions on the establishment of public libraries.

    21.2.1919 Assasination of Kurt Eisner, socialist leader of Bavaria - Beacuse he was a jew. See Hitler's commentary

    Home and Country, the title of the Women's Institutes's monthly journal, was the slogan of the movement. It remained the magazine title for almost ninety years.
    The cover photograph of the first edition was a picture of Queen Mary visiting a Women's Institute Exhibition. Some had thought that when the war finished the Institutes would close, but its leaders had said the "WI movement is not a war emergency measure but will be of permanent value in the world of rural regeneration". Home and country had meant food for the nation. Now it meant home and countryside. In
    2002 it meant the world!

    28.6.1919 Treaty of Versailles ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers.

    15.10.1919: Preface to The ABC of Communism by N. Buharin and E. Preobrazhensky describes it is "an elementary textbook of communist knowledge" to be "followed in the party schools" and "used for independent study by every worker or peasant who desires to acquaint himself with the party program."

    18.10.1919 Statute of the Union Académique Internationale, based in Brussels, defined its aims as "to encourage cooperation in the advancement of studies through collaborative research and publications in those branches of learning promoted by the Academies and institutions represented in the IUA - philology, archeology, history, the moral, political and social sciences." (website)

    October/November 1919 First session of the International Labour Conference held in Washington. This is the plenary body of the International Labour Organisation. Its first decision was to admit Germany and Austria as Member States. It went on to adopt conventions and recommendations on: hours of work in industry; unemployment; maternity protection; night work by women and young people; and the minimum age for work in industry. history

    1919 Constitutive Assembly of the International Research Council in Brussels, set up to to oversee cooperation within the scientific community of the Allied nations who had won the war. Preparations were made to set up the International Mathematical Union, also restricted to the victors. See above. In 1931 it was replaced by the International Council of Scientific Unions which had no restrictions on membership.

    William Beveridge was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1919 until 1937, when he was elected Master of University College, Oxford. See 1942

    In 1919 the Partito Nazionale Fascisto was formed in Italy. The fascisti, under Benito Mussolini, controlled Italy from 1922 to 1943. They opposed liberalism and communism, symbolising their social order by the ancient Roman fasces - the bundle of sticks that bound together cannot be snapped. The fascists donated to social theory the concepts of fascism and corporatism and totalitarian. Unlike National Socialism (also described as fascist), Italian fascism was not virulently anti-semitic or racist.


    A B
    B A
    1919 to 1933 Ronald Fisher working at Rothamsted
    The simple "latin square" (left) illustrates the principle of equalising the conditions in an experiment.
    The top, or the left hand side, of the field may be more fertile than the bottom or the right hand side. To avoid this distorting the results, if two seeds are being tested, the field is divided into squares and one seed is sown top-left and bottom-right and the other is sown top-right and bottom-left.
    Left: A 5 x 5 forestry experiment in Beddgelert in Wales, to compare varieties of tree; designed by Ronald Fisher. This was laid out in 1929 and photographed about 1945.

    Source Baily, Cameron and Connelly 2008


    21st century 6 x 6 experiment to compare methods of controlling aphids; conducted by Lesley Smart at Rothamsted Research. Photographed in 2004

    1920s

    The rise of logical positivism Logical positivists sought to divide the world of ideas into the meaningful (science) and the meaningless (metaphysics). They held that "a statement has a meaning if and only if the fact that it is true makes a verifiable difference" (M. Schlick 1932). Only two types of knowledge were accepted: logic (which had to include mathematics) and empirical knowledge. (external link)   See distinction between logical positivism and Comte's positivism and note on Russell's logical analysis and Karl Popper on falsification

    1920

    August 1920 Communist Party of Great Britain formed. Headquarters 16 King Street, Covent Garden where a Communist Bookshop was opened in 1921 (Worker's Bookshop from 1927). As well as being a retail outlet for the party, the bookshop distributed books and magazines from the Soviet Union. The distribution arm was relaunched as Central Books in 1939.

    21.11.1920 or earlier Lenin to the eighth congress: "Communism equals the power of the Soviets plus electrification of the whole country" (Compare Morris on force)

    H.G. Wells' The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind published. George Bernard Shaw suggested (1932) that this and "the host of imitations and supplements that its huge success has called into existence" was the modern alternative to Genesis as an explanation of who we are and where we come from. See also 1929

    1920 Publication in Paris of La Responsabilité, Etude de Sociologie [Responsibility. A sociological study] by Paul Fauconnet, sets out a Durkheian criminology. Fauconnet published Durkheim's L'éducation morale [Moral Education] in 1925

    1920 Theodore Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy New York. Map "Distribution of the primary races" divided the world into white, yellow, black, Amerindian, and brown peoples

    10.1.1920 League of Nations (English) Société des Nations (French) founded with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The League in 1920 did not include the countries defeated in the war , the United States of America, or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Germany joined
    8.9.1926, but withdrew 19.10.1933. The USSR joined 18.9.1934, but was expelled 14.12.1939.

    10.1.1920 Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission came into being.

    Bronze medal cast by Karl Goetz "Die Wacht am Rhein" (The Watch on the Rhine). "Liberte, Égalité, Fraternité" (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) under the image of a black French soldier.
    "Die Schwarze Schande" (The Black Shame). Lorelei, the spirit of the Rhine, is tied to a penis shaped tree capped by a French helmet. The broken lyre of the murmuring Rhine is watched over by the eye of God. Compare Paris Match 1955. See the colour of the French Revolution, Charles Darwin, Cesare Lombroso and Hitler's Mein Kampf, which says "the contamination caused by the influx of negroid blood on the Rhine, in the very heart of Europe, is in accord with the sadist and perverse lust for vengeance on the part of the hereditary enemy [France] of our people" - Rheinland bastards video

    April 1920 Le Play House, 65 Belgrave Road, Westminster, opened as a home for the Sociological Society, which had been based at the London School of Economics. (external link)

    14.6.1920 Weber died of pneumonia [aged 56]

    16.8.1920 Royal assent to the UK's 1920 Seed Act (Seeds?) (cap 54), that came into effect on 1.8.1921 as it was "impossible to get our testing stations into proper order in order to deal with this season". Seeds to be 98% pure. An early example of consumer legislation and also a major cause of the decline in cornfield weeds (wild flowers).

    11.11.1920 Unveiling of the Cenotaph in Whitehall. The architect was Edwin Lutyens, who also designed the All India War Memorial. See forgotten grief.




    Between world wars: Psychoanalytic glimmers

    1921

    12.1.1921 "The woman juror's new sphere" - "The summoning of the first women to serve on the juries at the Central Criminal Court is an event of considerable importance in England's judicial history", Manchester Guardian. The Women's Institute urged eligible women to "accept their full responsibilities as citizens in whatever way they may be called upon to serve their country". Very few women met the qualifying criteria.

    March 1921 Prehistory a Study of Early Cultures in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin by Miles Crawford Burkitt, with a short preface H. Breuil Professor at the Institute of Human Palaeontolocy, Paris. Cambridge (Internet Archive - offline)

    1921 "White Lead (Painting) Convention", drawn up by the International Labour Office in Geneva to ban the indoor use of lead paint, but not ratified by Britain or many other major countries. (See Thomas Legge)

    Sunday 19.6.1921/Monday 20.6.1921: Thirteenth British Census
    Population of England and Wales: 37,932,000; Scotland: 4,882,000

    The census omitted questions about fertility and about handicap and lunacy which had been in the 1911 census; it introduced a new classification of occupations and questions about widows, orphans and other dependants.


    Tom Zwiglaar, a Swiss miner, with the scull he found in 1921 and a reconstruction by Amédée Forestier of Rhodesian Man in The Illustrated London News 19.11.1921, emphasising his striking characteristic "giant" eyebrows, strongly sloping forehead, far protruding from the face of the jaw, but entirely modern body structure. (See Russian blog - archive)

    December 1921 London County Council's Mental and Scholastic Tests by Cyril Burt:

    "If a child's mental age be divided by his chronological age, the quotient will state what fraction of ability the child actually possesses out of the sum total of ability which at his age he should theoretically possess both amounts being measured in terms of years. This fraction may be termed, with Stern, the child's "intelligence quotient," or, more euphoniously perhaps, his "mental ratio."" (page 151)

    "The abbreviated form I.Q. first recorded in 1922, has become much better known than the full version" (20th Century Words Oxford, 1999)

    1922

    1922 12th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica included an article by James Jeans on Relativity.

    Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

    1922 Max Weber's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society) published in German.

    1922 La Mentalite Primitive by Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1857-1939). Translated into English (London and New York) by Lilian A. Clare in 1923 [See Park, R.E. 1925/7 and 1925]

    1922 Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill) by Hans Prinzhorn made comparisons with the art of children, "primitives" and contemporary art. He argued that the patients' art succeeded because of its ability to tap the unconscious. (See Degenerate Art). He provided life stories (lebensläufe) for ten schizophrenia image makers (schizophrenia Bildner), illustrated with samples of the images they made: Karl Brendel [Karl Genzel 1871-1925] - August Klotz [August Klett 1866-1928] - Peter Moog [1871-1930] - August Neter [August Natterer 1868-1933] - Johann Knüpfer [1866-1910] - Victor Orth [Clemens von Oertzen 1853-1919] - Hermann Beil [Behle] - Heinrich Welz [Hyacinth Freiherr von Wieser] - Joseph Sell [Joseph Schneller] - Franz Poll [1864-1920]

    1922 Bronislaw Malinowski published Argonauts of the Western Pacific in which he reported on his participant observation in the Trobriand Islands.

    Alexander Morris Carr-Saunders (1886-1966), an active member of the Eugenics Education Society, London, published The Population Problem. A Study in Human Evolution.

    "The population problem, as he saw it, was the evolution of primitive people with low mental and physical qualities and high reproduction rates... The book was an instant success" (Peder Anker, 2001, page 93)
    Carr-Saunders later paublished Report on Juvenile Employment in Liverpool (1924); Population (1924); Eugenics (1926); A survey of the social structure of England and Wales (1927); Professions: Their Organisation and Place in Society (1928); Standing-Room Only: A Study in Population (BBC Talk) (1930); A Century of Pauperism (1934). He contributed to We Europeans: a survey of 'racial' problems by Julian Huxley and A.C. Haddon (1935) Eugenics in the light of population trends (The Galton lecture to the Eugenics Society 16.2.1935) and similar works. On 20.5.1942 he gave the 12th L.T. Hobhouse memorial lecture, in the Mill Lane lecture rooms Cambridge, on The biological basis of human nature. [See mental health history words: deficient] (external link).

    1922 "British students founded the National Union of Students to maintain links with their European peers".

    February 1922 Publication of the reports of the Committee on National Expenditure chaired by Eric Geddes. Under the consequent cuts to public expenditure the Metropolitan Police women officers were cut from 112 to 20. The National Federation of Women's Institutes passed a resolution calling for their reinstatement. In 1923 fifty officers were re-sworn, with increased powers. "Over the next 26 years Women's Instute members joined a vigorous campaign to increase the number of women police". [See history 1 and 2]

    19.4.1922 Ronald A. Fisher "On the Mathematical Foundations of Theoretical Statistics"

    In the 1920s, Fisher introduced the the P value "as an informal way to judge whether evidence was significant in the sense of worthy of a second look. The idea was to run an experiment, then see if the results were consistent with what random chance might produce. Researchers would first set up a 'null hypothesis' that they wanted to disprove, such as there being no correlation or no difference between two groups. Next, they would play the devil's advocate and, assuming that this null hypothesis was in fact true, calculate the chances of getting results at least as extreme as what was actually observed. This probability was the P value. The smaller it was, suggested Fisher, the greater the likelihood that the straw-man null hypothesis was false." Regina Nuzzo 12.12.2014 See also p-hacking and 13.9.1998

    24.6.1922 G.E. Smith "Hesperopithecus: the ape-man of the western world" The Illustrated London News p. 944, (See Fossil Hominids FAQ)
    Left: The remarkable sketch

    Below: The tooth

    Connection unclear

    Amédée Forestier "has made a remarkable sketch to convey some idea of the possibilities suggested by this discovery. As we know nothing of the creature's form, his reconstruction is merely the expression of an artist's brilliant imaginative genius. But if, as the peculiarities of the tooth suggest, Hesperopithecus was a primitive forerunner of Pithecanthropus, he may have been a creature such as Mr. Forestier has depicted."

    15.11.1922: UK General Election: Lloyd George's coalition defeated. Conservative Government to 1924. The Communist Party candidate, Shapurji Dorabji Saklatvala, was elected as MP for Battersea with Labour Party support. He was the third Asian to serve as a British MP, and the last until 1987.

    1923

    origins of the Frankfurt school and critical theory

    1923 Carl Grünberg founded the marxist -oriented Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. Max Horkheimer led it from 1930. It was retrospectively referred to as the Frankfurt School after the Institute returned to Frankfurt in 1950. In the 21st century a far right belief that the "cultural marxism" of the Frankfurt School was undermining American civilisation transferred to Norway, where it precipitated mass-murder.

    weblinks

    In 1923 Karl Korsch published (in German) Marxism and Philosophy (archive) and Lucaks History and Class Consciousness (archive) [Links are to marxists.org]

    1923 Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga (International Book Company) founded in Moscow to control international trade in Soviet literature.

    1923 George Catlin (1896-1979), the English author of a short study of Thomas Hobbes, appointed to lecture at Cornell University, New York, where he helped to develop political science. He married the English novelist Vera Brittain (1893 - 1970) in 1925, and their children included Shirley Williams (born 27.7.1930) English politician and USA academic. Catlin was supervising a translation of Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method in November 1933 when his student George Simpson published a translation of Division of Labour in Society. The English translation of the Rules, with an introduction by Catlin, was not published until 1938

    8.1.1923 First outside broadcast. On 18.1.1923 The Postmaster-General granted the British Broadcasting Company a licence to broadcast.

    11.1.1923 French occupation of the Ruhr in order to enforce reparations. French forces withdrew on 25.8.1925

    12.7.1923 Indecent assaults on children discussed in a House of Commons debate on the Home Office by Frank Briant (1863 - 1.9.1934), Liberal MP for Lambeth North and superintendent of the Alford House Institute for Workingmen and Lads; the Tory Nancy Astor and Liberal Margaret Wintringham; as well as the Home Secretary William Bridgeman. See paedophile

    6.12.1923: UK General Election

    1924

    Labour saving for the home owner (i.e. up-market) Left: An advertisement from How to Equip a House R.A. Bateman Ltd, Kingsway, London. [Published after 1923, but before October 1926]. Electric lighting preferable where available. Central heating preferable. The "old- fashioned kitchen range... stands condemned" (p.293). "Gas cooking without question is the most generally practised in moderate-sized houses today". (p.301). "The use of electricity for cooking is increasing rapidly". (p.304). The vacuum cleaner is first amongst the labour saving devices for cleaning." "Washing machines" (p.324) were "operated by hand". "Electric irons have become commonplace" (p.336). A "modern water-closet" is of "the simple pedestal type, of glazed impermeable ware" with an S or P shaped bend retaining water to keep sewer gasses out. (p.328)
    Recorded Music. In 1924 Lily Rose was eight and Gertie Hughes about six. In the crowded Kentish Town flat they would lie in bed pretending to be asleep. In the same room, Wilfred Finch (aged 27) was entertained by cousin Amy. Wilf would bring a gramophone to play records to Amy. In the only other room, Grandma Annie and Granddad Albert would sit by the fire. See Wireless 1937

    1924 Simon Marks, owner of Marks and Spencer, made a fact finding visit to the United States followed by a restructuring of his retail business in shops specialising in food (established) and clothes (new), responding to the increasing working-class demand for ready-made clothing. He established direct relations with manufactures and those with Corah and Sons, hosiery and textile manufacturers, Leicester, led to the St Michael brand in 1928. A Textile Laboratory in London was established in 1935, and Merchandise Development and Design Departments (for clothing) in 1936. By 1939 the company was expanding from the underwear it started with to a wide range of ready made clothing for men, women, and children.

    Alexander Ivanovich Oparin's hypothesis that life on earth developed through a gradual chemical evolution of carbon-based molecules in the earth's primordial soup published in The Origin of Life (in Russian) by Moscow Worker (publisher) 1924

    21.1.1924 Vladimir Lenin died.

    April May 1924 Stalin: "The combination of Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism in Party and state work." (See marxist.org)

    May 1924 For the first time massed voices of women sang Jerusalem at the Annual General Meeting of National Federation of Women's Institutes in Queen's Hall, London.
    I will not cease from mental fight,

    Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:

    Till we have built Jerusalem,

    In England's green and pleasant land

    The photograph shows the 1925 AGM in Queens Hall. Each level has "aye" and "no" exits for the delegates to vote by passing through.

    29.10.1924: UK General Election. Minority Labour Government under Ramsay MacDonald - Replaced later the same year by a Conservative Government under Stanley Baldwin (until 1929)

    1924 Harry Elmer Barnes Sociology and Political Theory, a consideration of the sociological basis of politics, New York: Knopf,
    Leonard T. Hobhouse "represents the sociological expression of the Neo-Liberalism of England that has produced..more constructive social legislation than the combined product of earlier English governments."
    America

    Talcott Parsons studied as a post-graduate at London School of Economics from 1924 to 1925. Lecturers at the time included Harold Laski, R.H. Tawney, Morris Ginsberg, L.T. Hobhouse and Bronislaw Malinowski. This was followed by a year at the University of Heidelberg, in Germany, where he studied for a doctorate in The Concept of Capitalism in recent German Literature and read, amongst others, the works of Marx, Sombart and Weber. America

    1924 to 1944 Geologist James Frederick Jackson (1894-1966) working for Isle of Wight Natural History and Archaeological Society reorganised the museum. See obituary

    1925
    First volume of
    Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf argued human history is a struggle for survival between biological races of human beings. Hitler's social theories drew on mainstream sociology, as can be seen by comparing them with the range of theories covered by Pitirim Sorokin. The forged Protocols apart, most elements of Hitler's theory can be found in the mainstream sociological theories reviewed by Sorokin.

    See Darwin - 21.2.1919 - Alfred Rosenberg - 1933 - 1936 - 1939 - 1942 - 24.7.1967 - External links to Wikipedia articles on: Adolf Hitler and Mein_Kampf   other weblinks

    Modern methods of urban transportation and communication- the electric railway, the automobile, the telephone, and the radio - have silently and rapidly changed in recent years the social and industrial organisation of the modern city. (Park, R.E. 1925/1 page 23) America

    Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Paul Rivet (1876-1958) and Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) created the Institut d'Ethnologie Institute of Ethnology at the Sorbonne, dedicated to the memory of Durkheim. Rivet and Mauss were the secretary-generals.

    1925 Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst purchased Dartington Hall (14th century) and estate, near Totnes in Devon, England, and founded the Dartington Hall Trust.

    1925 WAGES: A Mr Brandon was engaged by London Co-op as driver of heavy vehicles at £4.10/- a week. Right through the depression, Co-op wages remained constant - Mates, 3 guineas; One ton drivers, £3.9/-. (See 1937 cost of a valve wireless)

    September 1925 Amateur archaeologist, Einar Kjellén, (26.9.1903 - 15.7.2000) discovered Sweden's "most remarkable bronze age ship image". The Brandskogship - Boglösa 109.

    1926

    1926 13th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica included an article by Albert Einstein on "Space- Time". This was a new topic.

    Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes: An investigation of the physiological activity of the cerebral cortex Translated from Russian into English and edited by G. V. Anrep, published by Oxford University Press

    1926 The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments, a New Translation by James Moffatt begins "This is the story of how the universe was formed" - See 1611 - Genesis - Job.

    Working class family photos: The family album of the Roberts family of Warrington begins in 1926. Edwin Roberts was 7 years old on Saturday 30.10.1926 and "when he was seven or eight" the family got a "Convenience front loading camera", via the magazine John Bull. About 1932, when Edwin was 13, Aunt Alice bought Edwin his own Box Brownie camera. The price of Brownies in 1937-1938 (Army and Navy Stores) was from 5/- to 1 guinea (Catalogue page 984). The Martin family of May Street, Fulham, took their own photographs in 1928. Their surviving earlier photographs were taken by Gambier Reeks in Fulham High Street.

    8.6.1926 to 16.6.1926 Preliminary conference on oil pollution of navigable waters, held in Washington DC, USA. In 1927 Women's Institute "members lobbied for action on pollution in the seas".

    4.5.1926 The British general strike began. Newspapers (apart from one the Government ran) disappeared, but the BBC broadcast five news bulletins daily. "It is not easy to estimate what would have been the effect of the strike if there had been no such thing as wireless communication". (Radio Times)

    15.8.1926 Death of silent-movie star Rudolph Valentino

    "the face of Valentino was causing suicides" (Roland Barthes)

    15.10.1926 Birth of Michel Foucault. See 1934 - 1935 - 1940 - 1961 - 1968 - 1971 - 1975 - 25.6.1984

    25.12.1926 to 7.1.1989 The Shōwa period in Japanese history, corresponding to the reign of Emperor Hirohito

    Creation of the UK General Electricity Board, followed by the construction of the National Grid for Electricity, enabling industry to move off the coalfields. ( external link: Paul Lyons on cooperation in the electricity industry (archive)   See Morris on force)

    1927

    new word 1927: polystyrene. Used as a hard plastic for moulding or, in a light expanded form, for packing and insulation. 1937: First commercial production of polystyrene by IG Farben, Germany

    Ronald Laing born

    1.1.1927 British Broadcasting Corporation established
    See
    1923, 1937, 1953, 1993.

    December 1927 Institute of Sociology formed by the amalgamation of the Sociological Trust, the Sociological Society and the LePlay House.

    1927 Charles Sutherland Elton (1900-1991) Animal Ecology. Elton was a student of Carr-Saunders and Julian Huxley and a friend of Arthur Tansley

    1927 Sir Alexander Morris Carr-Saunders and David Caradog Jones A survey of the social structure of England and Wales as illustrated by statistics. Does not define social structure. Begins with population units, then marital association, housing, urbanisation, distribution of industrial facilities, of occupations, of national income, of social services, "special attention was also given to ... matters such as the breadth of the educational ladder" (source)

    Detached suburban houses spreading along Hercies Road, Hillingdon, linked by the new A40 to central London, 18 miles away, and to Oxford, 40 miles west. They are near the new underground station at Hillingdon, one stop before the end of the Metropolitan and Picadilly lines at Uxbridge.
    The outline of this one has reflections of
    Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. The cladding, I think, is recent. About 1927, Bernard Ralph Allfree, an artist, bought a family home in Hercies Road that he named St Nicholas after the village of his childhood home in Thanet. The 1928 Representation of the People Act gave his wife, Dorothy Maude, a vote, so she is recorded from 1929. The houses were numbered from 1938.

    1928

    Contemporary Sociological Theories by Pitirim Sorokin published in USA. Sorokin, a Russian, taught in the sociology department of Minnesota, USA. He followed the German theorists, George Simmel (1858-1918) and Ferdinand Tönnies (1885-1936) in arguing that sociology should be about the forms of social interaction. He also claimed that it was only valuable as a science in as far as it produced empirical results. His book helped to set the tone for USA Sociology. He established the sociology department at Harvard University in 1931 and was succeeded by Talcott Parsons as head of the department in 1942. Robert King Merton (see crimtim) was one of his students. America


    1928 Ludwig Von Bertalanffy: Kritische Theorie der Formbildung, Borntraeger. Translated into English and adapted by translated and adapted by J. H. Woodger as Modern Theories of Development: An Introduction to Theoretical Biology, Oxford University Press, New York: Harper, 1933
    "We must view the germ as a whole, as a unitary system, which accomplishes the developmental processes on the basis of the conditions which are present in it and depend on the organisation of its material parts."
    Review by H.S. Burr in Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine
    December 1933

    21.2.1928 "The vital statistics of wealth and poverty" By T.H.C. Stevenson, C.B.E., M.D. read before the Royal Statistical Society.


    25.2.1928 Joan Martin [later Hughes] born. Childhood 1928-1939. Brought up on Cow and Gate Milk. Medicated with camphor oil [rubbed in against colds] and syrup of figs swallowed weekly to prevent constipation]. The smell and taste of these make them early memories. Sometimes her grandmother bought her an orange. Her father smoked Players Weights. The 1929 edition of Our Baby contains adverts for several milks and foods, but not Cow and Date. "We owe his life to Nestle's Milk" "Humanised Trufood. Nearest to mother's milk". "Benger's Food for infants, invalids and the aged", "Neaves saves baby's life after 8 other food failed" [etc]


    [See Voice]
    24.3.1928 Charlotte Mew drank half a bottle of disinfectant (Lysol), from which she died.

    27.7.1928 Publication of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, with a commentary by Havelock Ellis. Jonathan Cape.

    19.8.1928 Sunday Express editorial by James Douglas, "A Book That Must Be Suppressed"

    James Douglas wrote that the book suggested "sexual inversion and perversion" was "unavoidable, because they cannot save themselves". He argued tht it was a "self-made debasement". James Douglas and Radclyffe Hall were both devout Christians.

    Family time for the newspaper seller - Saturday evening Music Hall - Sunny Sunday pub crawl

    Changing times: Outside broadcasting - All talking films

    1928-1930 "Dad used to take us the Bedford Music Hall on Saturday night". [Camden High Street - Gracie Fields and Charlie Chaplin appeared at the Bedford in 1912 and Marie Lloyd celebrated her 50th birthday in pantomime there in 1920].
    "On sunny Sundays we had a regular outing with mum and dad in their best clothes escorting us over Hampstead Heath - First we visited the Railway Tavern in Pond Street, then the Freemason's Arms, followed by the Old Bull and Bush" [of Marie Lloyd fame] - Stanley Morse

    "Outside Broadcast Problems" BBC Handbook 1928:

    "The B.B.C. has been the first in the world to exploit Simultaneous Broadcasting to its fullest advantage for a national system, and thanks to the co-operation of the Post Office engineers, it is possible to pick up a programme wherever it may take place within the British Isles and radiate it simultaneous from all distribution centres. Looking ahead still further and assuming that the wireless will supplement the wire line link, there is no reason why a simultaneous broadcast of something of fundamental importance to the whole civilised world should not take place some time in the future". "

    September 1928 The Jazz Singer presented, and Hollywood "all- talkie" The Terror shown at the Piccadilly Theatre, London.

    Followed shortly by The Singing Fool, Fox Movietone Follies, Rio Rita, Broadway, The Broadway Melody, Sunny Side Up, Blackmail (1929 "Britain's All-Talkie Challenge to the World", directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

    In July 1939 The BBC (wireless) presented the first of the summer's 56 seaside concert party broadcasts with the comment "nobody can say the talkies have killed them". The implication might be that talking cinema had replaced music hall.

    Hornsey Rise Estate. Building commenced by London County Council in 1927. Opened 1928. Photograph from Lost Hospitals of London (about 2013) shows "Looking northward along the frontage of the Hornsey Rise Estate in Hazelville Road". Buildings squatted in 1974.

    1929 Our Baby - 180,000 copies - on idiocy
    "Nature is on the side of obedience -
    It is proved that a definite stimulus produces a definite response"

    The Science of Life. A summary of contemporary knowledge about life and its possibilities by H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley and G. P. Wells published in three volumes by Amalgamated Press, 1929-1930.

    The Physiographical Evolution of Britain by Leonard Johnston Wills (born 1884). London : E. Arnold and Co 1929.

    Jean Piaget (1896-1980): 1926/1929 The Child's Conception of the World - 1932 The Moral Judgement of the Child - 1936/1952 The Origins of Intelligence in Children - 1945/1951 Dream and Imitation in Childhood - 1968/1970 Structuralism


    Lupa di Roma - Julius Caesar - Augustus - Italia - Victor Emmanuel 3
    Fascist postage stamps isssued 29.4.1929 tell a story of Italy

    30.5.1929: UK General Election. Minority Labour Government under Ramsay MacDonald. National Government under Ramsay MacDonald from 1931.

    21.6.1929 Death of Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse. Morris Ginsberg was appointed to succeed him in the Martin White chair of sociology.

    1929-1930 The "towering" Stone House rose amongst brick buildings in Bishopsgate. An early example of open plan office space? From 1930 it was the London office of Shanghai based E.D. Sassoon and Company, who set up E.D. Sassoon Banking Company.

    24.10.1929 - Wall Street Crash

    Publication in Vienna and London of Sigmund Freud's Das Unbehagen in der Kultur - Civilization and its Discontents. German edition actually published end of 1929 - although dated 1930. French translation, Malaise dans la civilisation published 1934.

    The highest lead content in paint occurred between 1930 and 1955. See lead paint ban

    1930 Talcott Parsons' translation into English of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

    The first part of Unwritten History by Henry Rushton Hall, "Book one - The age of stone" was published in 1928. Book two "The age of metals" followed in 1930, along with a combined volume (348 pages). All were illustrated by Harry William Whanslaw (December 1883 - 26.3.1965).

    Whanslaw, a puppet theatre pioneer as well as an illustrator, later illustrated many bible books.

    1930 Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the 20th Century provided a possible theoretical structure for the racialist doctrines of the Nazi (Nationalsozialist) party. To replace Christianity, Rosenberg suggested a story of a Nordic race that, through the German state, would subdue inferior races. According to this story, the aristocracy of France, at the time of the French revolution, was nordic. The revolution was an uprising of inferiors who spread the doctrines of liberalism (freedom, equality and universal community). Liberalism developed into marxism, that produced the Russian revolution. The destiny of Germany was to combat the ideas of the French revolution, and to undo their effect. See Nazi theory. See also Nazi-Christian dialogue

    July 1930 Max Horkheimer became Director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. In his inaugural address (1931) he redefined Marx's "historical materialism" as a critique rather than a science and argued for the reintegration of philosophy with social science. (Swingewood, A. 2000, p. 131)

    1.12.1930 First publication of Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome: A story of children on sailing adventures in the English Lake District.

    1931

    February 1931 "A National Plan for Britain" by Max Nicholson published in The Week-End Review. This stimulated the formation of the organisation Political and Economic Planning (PEP) later in the year, with Elmhirst money. Directors included Max Nicholson, Michael Young (1941-1945) and Raymond Goodman.

    "an independent non-party group, consisting of more than a hundred working members who are by vocation industrialists, officers of central and local government, doctors, university teachers, and so forth, and who give part of their spare time... in fact-finding and in suggesting principles and possible advances over a wide range of social and economic activities..." (1939)

    12.2.1931 The All-India War Memorial inaugurated by Viceroy Lord Irwin. The foundation stone had been laid on 10.2.1921. The architect was Edwin Lutyens, who also designed the cenotaph in Whitehall, London. It commemorates 60,000 Indians who died the First World War and 13,516 British officers lost on the North West Frontier.
    Behind the imperious gate stood this imperial statue of king George 5 by Charles Sargeant Jagger.

    The statue has now been moved to Coronation Park. (Photograph by Robert Freidus). Robert Freitas comments that another face of India, Gandhi might be a suitable replacement statue except that "the setting is preposterously grandiose for his unpretentious figure".

    Sunday 26.4.1931 Death of George Herbert Mead in Chicago. After his death students published lectures and articles by him as Mind, Self and Society, from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist (1934) America
    Mead's theories enabled people to analyse our minds and personalities (our "self") as something we we actively create in
    symbolic interaction with others. Mead's theories were made popular by Goffman, and others, in the 1960s.

    Sunday 26.4.1931/Monday 27.4.1931: Fourteenth British Census
    Population of England and Wales: 39,988,000; Scotland: 4,843,000

    There was no census in 1941. The next was in 1951

    "not far short of nine million men, women and children were living within twenty miles of St Paul's Cathedral. In no other area of equal size in the world are as many as 7325 people to the square mile to be found" (R.S.R. Fitter 1945, page 1)

    July 1931 Association for the Scientific Treatment of Criminals. It was renamed the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency in July 1932, and the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency in 1951. Became the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies in 1999. (website history) - See also Child Guidance

    11.7.1931 Fifth Assembly of the International Research Council and the First Assembly of the International Council of Scientific Unions held at Brussels.
    International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) formed.
    (website). "It represents the evolution and expansion of two earlier bodies known as the International Association of Academies (IAA; 1899-1914) and the International Research Council (IRC; 1919-1931)" (source). Became the International Council for Science (but still ICSU) in 1998.

    25.8.1931 Joachim Benemann arrived in the United Kingdom for his first (two months conditional) stay. "After leaving College, in order to gain some insight into the working population's life, he worked in an Italian shipyard, a Russian coalmine, a Scandinavian farm and an English coal mine".

    October 1931 Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi chose to stay in the East End of London at Kingsley Hall, rather than as a government guest, when he took part in British government sponsored talks. See 1947 - 1948

    This is probably how a working class girl in Camden Town (later my mother) learnt who he was and was inspired by him

    "Star, News, Standard!" - "Gandhi swims the Channel".

    Selling newspapers on his pitch in front of the Dominion in Tottenham Court Road, London, Herbert Morse (my mother's step-father) created bizarre news stories to attract attention.

    Cartoon by my uncle, Stanley Morse.

    27.10.1931: UK General Election

    1932

    1932 Der Sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt : eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie (The "sense-clung" structure of the social world: an introduction to "understanding" sociology) by Alfred Schütz (1899-1959) published in Vienna. Tranlated into English as The Phenomenology of the Social World in 1967.

    Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research) published Frankfurt from 1932 to 1941

    July 1932 Reich Broadcasting Corporation established

    Late 1932 In the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge an atom split. Dalton's atom was the smallest element. Rutherford's was a nucleus with electrons spinning round it. "The challenge was to crack open the nucleus." John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton built a particle accelerator which used protons as 'bullets' to shoot at lithium atoms, aiming to split it into two helium atoms. By learning the correct, slow speed to fire the protons, the experiment was successful. archive of source - 1951 Nobel citation. See nuclear fission

    December 1932 George Bernard Shaw's The Adventures of The Black Girl in Her Search for God, designed and engraved by John Farleigh, went through (at least) four reprints in the month of publication. (See Shaw on Pavlov) - John Farleigh archive

    new word 1933: polyvinyl chloride (See vinyl. Abbreviated PVC 1941), a thermoplastic resin used for raincoats, amongst other things. Patented Germany 1913. Plasticised PVC USA 1926 (substitute for rubber). Raw material ethylene dichloride. 1930: first commercial long-playing vinyl record. First production of PVC in UK in 1940. Vymura vinyl wallpaper 1961

    1933 Clarence Crane Brinton's English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: Ernest Benn, 1933) begins its chapter on Herbert Spencer (pp. 226-227)
    "Who now reads Spencer? It is difficult for us to realize how great a stir he made in the world. . . . He was the intimate confidant of a strange and rather unsatisfactory God, whom he called the principle of Evolution. His God has betrayed him. We have evolved beyond Spencer."

    1933-1945 Hitler and the Nazi (Nationalsozialist - National Socialist) party in power in Germany (30.1.1933). The two German marxist parties were made illegal and liberal theories were opposed. Social theorists who had built ideas of human progress on the triumph of reason and democracy were thrown into intellectual crisis by the popular support for the Nazi's. This led to the creation of new social theories, sometimes by synthesising the ideas of Marx and Freud. The Nazi persecution of German (and other) Jews led to many German intellectuals emigrating, and founding new academic traditions of social science in Britain, the United States, or elsewhere. See Nazi theory

    First Volksempfänger (the people's receiver) produced. [External link: Hitler's Radio]

    "Radio went to war on five continents shortly after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. In nine years it has been streamlined from a crude propaganda bludgeon into the most powerful single instrument of political warfare the world has ever known." (Charles, J. Rolo, 1943 Radio Goes to War Faber and Faber.

    17.6.1933 Baldur Benedikt von Schirach, head of the Hitler-Jugend (Hitler Youth), was appointed supreme youth leader in Germany. The Reichsschaft Deutscher Pfadfinder (Reich Association of German Scouts) was banned in June 1934.

    From 1934, Joachim Benemann was building links for the Hitler Youth in the United Kingdom.

    4.7.1933 Formal opening of the Undercliff Walk at Brighton, Sussex, built between 1930 and 1933 to protect the chalk cliffs. It used 13,000 tons of cement. "The concrete facing ... protected them from destruction ... as effectively as would a basalt dyke" (Observer's geology p. 205) - (History link)

    July 1933 "Shelf Appeal . A monthly publication devoted to the planning, designing, manufacturing and display of the package." Creative Journals Limited, Museum Station Buildings, 133 High Holborn, London, W.C.1. [May have been biomonthly at times]. In 1936 and 1938 Creative Journals published a 300 page Package Omnibus "The first encyclopaedia of packaging", - "Includes boxes, bags, bottles and tins" (Wellcome Library catalogue) - and in 1938 a larger Omnibus of marketing and packaging

    See the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture's review of "Bringing You Better Living" (April 2015), which includes two covers. The one on the left is for October 1935 and that on the right for April 1938.

    The review mentions examining typography, illustration and graphics and new materials such as plastics, Bakelite and aluminium.

    1935 brands included Dettol, Lux soap powder, Carter's Little Liver Pills, Gibb's toothpaste, Brylcreem, Rose's lime Juice, Ty-Phoo Tea, Erasmic soap, Cuprinol, Bird's custard, Izal toilet paper, Yardley cosmetics, Player's cigarettes, Eno's Fruit Salt, Wright's Coal Tar Soap, Anchor butter, Nestle's cheese, Lyons' cakes, Tate and Lyle sugar, Lifebuoy soap, Scott's Porage Oats, Terry's chocolates, Steradent denture cleaner, Elastoplast and Band-Aid plasters and Ovaltine. The 1938 Omnibus had 540 illustrations.

    The war changed things. Shelf Appeal ran to April 1942. From then to October 1946 it was replaced by Scope "Magazine for industry", which was supplemented by the Scope year book of industry, trade and finance. However, in 1939, Creative Journals had launched a quarterly called Persuasion - Public relations, propaganda, advertising and publicity, edited by John M. Ryan. This was absorbed by Scope in 1951. Creative Journals Limited was threatened with being struck of the Companies Register in 1950 but in the 1950s it brought out a magazine called Sales Appeal and Packaging Technology and then just Sales Appeal appeared. The company was eventually removed from the register in 1977.

    26.12.1933 Queen Christina first shown in New York. Released 1934 in the rest of the world. Roland Barthes "The Face of Garbo" about 1954. "The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event". In the film the Queen dresses as a man to escape into common life. Snowbound in a hotel she shares the same bed as Spanish envoy Antonio.
    It is not the similar story line to
    Roman Holiday (Hepburn 1953) that attracts Barthes attention, but the different presentation of faces. "Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image..."

    1934

    Karl Popper's Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) published. (See review and external link) Popper accepted much of the programme of logical positivism, but argued that verification of general scientific statements, in the sense of proving them true by testing against experience, was not possible. Good and meaningful science would seek to draw out consequences from its theories which could prove them false. A meaningful or scientific theory is one constructed to make predictions about the empirical world which could prove it wrong. See 1956, 1994 and weblinks

    Lev Semenovich Vygotsky died

    1934 Publication of Sociology by Morris Ginsberg London: Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, Thornton Butterworth. 1934. 260 pages Price 2s. 6d. Chapters: 1) Scope and method of sociology (31 pages) - 2) Society, culture and civilisation (16 pages) - 3) Race and environment (44 pages) - 4) The psychological basis of social life (31 pages) - 5) The growth of societies (30 pages) - 6) Social classes and economic organisation (37 pages) - 7) Aspects of mental development (38 pages) - 8) Conclusion (13 pages). Bibliography divided into: General, Race and environment, Social psychology, Social organisation, Mental development.

    1934 The Daily Express Encyclopedia published in 8 Volumes. "the special interests of our age are largely scientific, economic and technological" and not exclusively "literary or historical". A copy was purchased for Leyton Public Libraries in October 1944. The article on "Anthropology" (Cultural and Physical) draw heavily on the Mentone Caves for their discussion of "modern man".

    January 1934 contraceptive advertisment
    Walter Rendell's sperm killer was available from 1886. Larger advertisements in the 1930s mentioned that it resolved "family problems" and that a booklet on "Hygiene for women" by nurse Drew could be obtained from chemists. The company encouraged chemists to display the booklet on their counters.

    22.2.1934 Committee which formed the nucleus of the National Council for Civil Liberties (UK) first met. 26.2.1934 Arrival of hunger marchers in London watched by observers from the Council. [history - history - history] Campaigned against Sedition (Incitement for Disaffection) Bill of 1934 and Public Order Act of 1936, See 1947 - 1950 and 1.11.1954 - 1975

    25.7.1934 Austrian Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, assassinated by Austrian Nazis. Young Michel Foucault learnt a lesson.

    1935

    1935 Victor Gollancz started the Left Book Club and the first Penguin Books were published.

    In 1934 and 1935 Joachim Benemann worked in the United Kingdom under Otto Bene of the German Embassy. He arranged boys camps for members of the Hitler Youth and English boys. On Wednesday 8.5.1935 the Jewish Daily Bulletin, based on a News Chronicle report, said the first Anglo-German camp had been held at Bryanston School, Dorset, with thirty boys from each country.

    The British "are five young miners, five cigarette factory hands and a number of public school boys".

    One boy reported: "They say there are no class distinctions in Germany now - it doesn't matter whether you are a millionaire or a tramp. They say the worst that happened to the Jews was that some windows were broken".


    Main hall Bryanstone by Ben Brooksbank
    The New Chronicle said Benemann was "a pleasant young German journalist"... "on the Hitler youth movement staff" who had "addressed twenty-three public schools and fifteen factories" and founded what he calls 'slands' at Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham of people wanting to establish better relations. In December 1935 he was in Germany, trying to link the Hitler Youth with the Scouts. In 1936 and 1937 he arranged camps in Germany and the United Kingdom. (MI5)

    June 1935 A meadow at Granchester: Alan Turing tried to envisage a machine that would decide the provability of any mathematical assertion presented to it. His paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (January 1937) laid the mathematical foundations for modern computers that can handle thought patterns much more complex than the arithmetic of Babbage's machines. A "computable number" is any number that can be defined by some rule. So pi () is a computable number even though it can never be calculated. Turing's imaginary machines linked the world of abstract symbols to the material world of metal and glass. Valves and then silicon chips would later sort out thought at speeds beyond the speed of thought. [See hardware and software, monster computers in the 1960s, cold war communications and world wide web]

    17.6.1935 Radio detection (later called RADAR) at Orfordness, Suffolk, of a flying boat 17 miles away. Research was pioneered under the umbrella of the Air Ministry. At the start of World War Two training was given in Technical Colleges before the Air Ministry established its own unts.

    1.7.1935 "FN Ordinary index" (Now FT30 index) started by the Financial News. Based on the share prices of 30 British companies from a wide range of industry it was designed to "test the feel and changing moods of the equity market". The original constituents were:   Associated Portland Cement - Austin Motor - Bass - Bolsover Colliery - Callenders Cables and Construction - Coats (J and P) - Courtaulds - Distillers - Dorman Long - Dunlop Rubber - Electrical and Musical Industries - Fine Spinners and Doublers - General Electric - Guest Keen and Nettlefolds - Harrods - Hawker Siddeley - Imperial Chemical Industries - Imperial Tobacco - International Tea Co Stores - London Brick - Murex - Patons and Baldwins - Pinchin Johnson and Associates - Rolls-Royce - Tate and Lyle - Turner and Newall - United Steel - Vickers - Watney Combe and Reid - Woolworth (FW) - (Financial Times 2006)

    September 1935 The Institute of Sociology and the International Student Service held a series of conferences at King's College, London on the relations between the social sciences (The Social Sciences: Their Relations in Theory and in Teaching), A further series was held in 1936. Rocquin, B. 2006 p. 28)

    3.10 1935 Italy invaded the independent African state of Ethiopia The conquest was complete by May 1936   Foucault remembers  

    "A vigorous press in the Gold Coast and Nigeria meant that the most marked response of Africans in Africa was in West Africa... The West African elite had, until Ethiopia, a considerable residue of faith in the "progressive" aspects of colonialism. But the way Britain appeased Italy over Ethiopia made them loose faith in British "fair play"...Up to now, West African nationalism had tried to work within the trusteeship concept. It was henceforth replaced by a more militant anti-white pan-Africanism" (Mazrui and Tidy 1984 pp 7-8)

    14.11.1935: UK General Election. National Government under Stanley Baldwin.

    "On the Concept of Function in Social Science" (external link to extract) by Radcliffe-Brown. published in American Anthropologist 37: pages 394- 402. It was reprinted in his 1952 collection of essays Structure and Function in Primitive Society See Functionalism. Also look at the entry for Malinowski on the LSE History site

    1936

    1936 John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money

    1936 Rose Garden image in T.S. Eliot's poem "Burnt Norton". "What might have been" (the rose garden of the mind) as well as "what has been" are both somehow part of the present and of reality.

    1936 Theodor Adorno's article "Über Jazz" (On Jazz) published in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung - In 1938 he wrote "To make oneself a jazz expert or hang over the radio all day, one must have much free time and little freedom".

    1936 Methodenlehre der Sozialwissenschaften by Felix Kaufmann (1895 - 1949) published in Vienna. (External link to review by Joseph Mayer) - Methodology of the Social Sciences published by Oxford University Press in London and New York in 1944.

    Sometime in 1936 an "Anglo-German Brotherhood" was formed by Baron von der Ropp at a meeting at Grünheide. (source). This was a (nationalist - völkische - racist) Christian organisation. It is not the same as the (secular political) Anglo-German Fellowship (1935 to 1939), but it may have affiliated to The Link in 1939

    1936 The "London Brick Company" works at Stewartby in Bedfordshire was the largest brickworks in the world. Its "Fletton" or "London" bricks were cheap to make because of properties of the clay used and mass- production methods, and this made it more economical to transport brick by rail than to make it locally. (Alan Cox 1979)

    6.1.1936 Heavy rain and flooding in England 20.1.1936 Death of George 5th announced by John Reith on the BBC outside normal radio news hours. February 1936 First British comic (Mickey Mouse Weekly) in full colour photogravure. 1.3.1936 Edward 8th broadcast his first message to the Empire. 8.3.1936 German troops reoccupied Rhineland.

    3.5.1936 Popular Front alliance of left wing parties won power in France. Léon Blum became President of the Council. [See Barthes]

    First week July The Radio Times "Television Number" was restricted to London: In range of the transmissions from Alexandra Palace which the 300 owners of private sets could receive. 18.7.1936 Start of Spanish Civil War.   Foucault remembers refugees

    1.8.1936: Berlin Olympic Games opened by Hitler. Television pictures were available to the Berlin public in television parlours.   Nazi's and Christians

    The "type of human .. we saw ... during the Olympic games" ... exuded "proud physical strength" (Hitler)

    4.10.1936 Battle of Cable Street when Oswald Mosley (British Fascist) was prevented from marching through the East End. 5.10.1936 Start of Jarrow March. Unemployed led by Ellen Wilkinson MP walked 280 miles from Jarrow to London. It was reported sympathetically on Cinema Newsreels. 16.11.1936 Edward 8th advised Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, that he wished to marry Mrs Simpson after her second divorce.

    30.11.1936 Crystal Palace burnt down. Baird had all his television equipment stored here. Picture postcard of "Crystal Palace Parade, Upper Norwood" posted from Sydenham 3.12.1936 (1d stamp) says "can hardly imagine how desolate it looks with only the two towers standing... [We] were at Committee in Sydenham that evening. Had difficulty getting home as front of Palace blocked. In a taxi had to go round by Dulwich and West Norwood".

    Friday 11.12.1936 Edward 8th's abdication broadcast from Windsor Castle. Accession of George 6th (who stuttered). Christmas 1936 No King's Christmas broadcast.

    Seebohm Rowntree's second York study was made in 1936, although not published until 1941. He wrote that "The economic condition of the workers is better by 30 per cent than in 1899, though working hours are shorter. Housing is immeasurably better, health is better, education is better. Cheap means of transport, the provision of public libraries and cheap books, the wireless, the cinema and other places of entertainment, have placed within the reach of everyone forms of recreation unknown, and some of them unthought of, forty years ago."

    Mass Observation started by Charles Madge (1912 - 17.1.1996) and Tom Harrison (1911- 1976) and Humphrey Jennings (19.8.1907 - 24.9. 1950) early in 1937 in Bolton, Lanashire, England. source. Preceding events included Tom Harrison's response to the abdication crisis of 1936 See biography on Bolton museums' site

    "Mass Observation intends to make use, besides the work of scientists, of the untrained observer, the man in the street. Ideally, it is the observation of everyone by everyone, including themselves... electricity, aeroplanes, radio - are so new that the process of adaptation to them is still going on. It is within the scope of the science of Mass Observation to watch the process taking place" ("Fact" pamphlet. 1937)

    weblink - Wikipedia

    - See 12.5.1937 - 1981 revived

    1937

    Talcott Parsons The Structure of Social Action. A study in social theory with special reference to a group of recent European writers [extracts]. Primarily an integration of the work of Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim and Weber to create a general theory (the action frame of reference) in which socially directed actions of individuals are integrated by the common value system of the society. The Structure of Social Action became number 9 in the century's top 10 America

    1937 Max Horkheimer's essay "Critical and traditional theory" introduced the term critical theory as opposed to traditional positivist science whose goal, he argued, is pure knowledge. Critical theory was committed to emancipation. (Swingewood, A. 2000, p. 131)

    12.5.1937 Coronation of George 6th televised. Seen on the 300 sets then existing around London. See 1927, 1953, 1993. First Mass Observation Day. See weblink. Later in the year Faber published May the Twelfth: Mass Observation Day Surveys

    Another "mass observation" was under way, a "quickened interest in wild life" "perhaps partly" explained by "modern transport, giving quick and easy access to the country" (Forward to Observers Book of British Birds). The first two "Observer" books (birds and wild flowers) were published in 1937. Butterflies, trees and shrubs, and wild animals followed in 1938, freshwater fishes in 1941 and grasses sedges and rushes in 1942. Then came the first one not about nature, airplanes in 1942

    24.5.1937 Daily Herald report, "Nazis must be spyclists" said the Nazi Cyclists Association memers cycling abroad should memorise locations of landmarks, the construction of bridges and the width of streams and the depths of fords. (MI5)
    Joachim Benemann, 27 Mecklenburgh Square, London, WC1 was watched by MI5. He and returned to the United Kingdom 25.1.1937. In June 1937 opening his post was authorised. "Joachim Benemann is a member of the Reichsjugendführung organsation, a branch of the N.S.D.A.P., which directs the activities of the Hitler Jugend. He has been active intermittently in this country for the last three years. His work might prove a source of danger in the event of war..."

    Otto Hermann Eichele of 106 Norfolk Road, London. E8, teacher, In England from 1934 to 1937, Nazi Party number 3710198, joining in 1936 (from England) was leader of the Hitler Youth in the UK. He worked at the German Orphanage and may have left England because they were not happy to support his activities in the Hitler Youth. MI%

    25.5.1937 to 25.11.1937 The Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life) held in Paris. The Musée de l'Homme was founded on this occasion, in succession to the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro. (visit now). Its Director, Paul Rivet, was a prominent anti-fascist. (Victor Serge weblink)
    Two years before the second world war, the exhibition buildings of Nazi Germany (on the left) and the Soviet Union confront on another across the Pont d'Iéna (Jena Bridge). This picture was probably taken from the esplanade between the new Musée de l'Homme and Musée des Monuments Français. The war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Republics was delayed by the non-aggression pact of 23.8.1939.

    June 1937 The "Georgian Group" of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings formed. "In the inter-war period, buildings dating from after 1700 were considered too modern to qualify for statutory protection" (website). It began to function independently in the early 1940s. The Victorian Society was founded in 1958 and the Twentieth Century Society started as the Thirties Society in 1979,

    June 1937 In a textbook on the social sciences, Herbert Blumer coined the term symbolic interactionist for theories developed from Mead. [See Interaction]. Blumer divided social psychology theories into those based on the "doctrine of instincts", those emphasising stimulus and response, and symbolic interactionists. America

    18.7.1937 Opening of Haus der Deutschen Kunst ("House of German Art") in Munich. The inaugural exhibition was the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung ("Great German art exhibition"). Hitler's speech at the opening was broadcast.

    Ivo Saliger (1894-1987): Urteil des Paris (Judgement of Paris) 1939.

    external link "Idealized female nudes... Well-formed, perfect body... the aesthetics of the Nordic people... should symbolize grace, beauty and purity. Aryan men... muscular man figures modelled on classical antiquity.."

    Paris is depicted as a Hitler Youth in shorts, choosing between three healthy examples of Aryan womanhood.

    Catalogues, prints, magazines and postcards spread the messages of the art gallery to all parts of the German population (Haus der Deutschen Kunst):
    Postcards of Richard Heymann's Glückliche Mütter (happy mothers) and F. Staeger - Germanische Urbarmachung in den Ostlanden (Germanic reclamation in the eastlands)

  • GDK Research - research platform for images of the Great German Art Exhibitions 1937-1944 in Munich (German and English)

    19.7.1937 Exhibition of Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party, opens in Munich. It closed 30.11.1937 and then travelled to other cities in Germany and Austria. [Twelve stages: Berlin, Leipzig, Düsseldorf (November 1938?), Salzburg, Hamburg, Stettin, Weimar, Vienna, Frankfurt/Main, Chemnitz, Waldenburg, Halle (April 1941). Some of the artists

    The sculpture on the cover of the guide is Otto Freundlich's "Der neue Mensch" [The New Man] 1912. Made of plaster, about 139 cm high, it is now lost

    In 1938, Penguin Books published Modern German Art by "Peter Thoene", a psudonym for Oto Bihalji-Merin 1904-1993 - See 1938

    WIRELESS. A death at the end of 1937 enabled the Morse family of Kentish Town to replace their cats whiskers wireless with a valve wireless set, using money from a life insurance. This cost about £8 or £9 (See wages). It was cased in a large wooden box with a fretwork front where the loudspeaker was. It was still the family wireless in the 1950s. (External link: "crystal and valve")

    19.11.1937 Robert Baden Powell and (Mrs) Rose Kerr (representing Guides) had tea with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador, Hartmann Lauterbacher, Chief of Staff Hitler Youth, and Joachim Benemann, organiser of the cycling tours.

    1938

    1938 Facing Mount Kenya: The tribal life of Gikuyu, by Jomo Kenyatta, with an introduction by Bronislaw Malinowski, published by Secker and Warburg (London)

    February 1938 William Heinemann (London and Toronto) published Marie Curie by her daughter Eve Curie, translated by Vincent Sheean. Several printings in 1938 included a cheap edition (8s.6d). Reprinted 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1947.

    Marie Curie (born Poland 7.11.1867), died in France on 4.7.1934. Her youngest daughter, Eve (1904-2007), devoted the following years to researching and writing her mother's biography. Wikipedia says it was published simultaneously in France, Britain, Italy, Spain, the United States and other countries.

    Internet Archive - offline

    The first of the 10,000 children to escape to England from Nazi Europe arrived in 1938. Known as the kindertransport refugees. How many more could have been saved? See BBC News in pictures - See holocaust.

    In June 1938 Sigmund Freud and his family fled their home in Vienna to escape the Nazis. They settled in Hampstead, London, where Freud wrote a summary of his theory, An Outline of Psychoanalysis. He died in September 1939.

    Extracts from An Outline of Psychoanalysis
    Freud Museum (Hampstead) web link

    6.7.1938 The President of the The Royal Medico-Psychological Association spoke of a "vast increase of public interest in psychological matters" since 1914-1919 war, "accompanied by the decline in the observance of any form of religion". "The younger generation are no longer looking outwards for their salvation, but are driven deep into their inmost consciousness for a solution of their problems and, finding there what does not give them peace, fly to the psychologist." "Thirty years ago" a patient would promptly answer "Church, Chapel, or Roman Catholic, as the case might be" when asked about his religion. "Now, if we wish to know whether an individual is sociable" we ask about "his reactions to the cinema, or his recreational pursuits".

    "The warm glow of faith has faded and mankind gropes in the darkness, seeking new gods on whom to lean. In some countries reason and science have gone with the wind, and men find myopic comfort in 'thinking with the bloood' or in putting a blind trust in megalomanic leaders."

    8.7.1938 "Exhibition of 20th Century German Art" opened in the New Burlington Galleries, London at the same time as Modern German Art by Peter Thoene (Oto Bihalji-Merin) was published. The text (right) is from the cover of the book. The exhibition was organised by Herbert Read, Roland Penrose and Noel Evelyn Norton.
    In Modern German Art Oto Bihalji-Merin (Peter Thoene) wrote that
    "Never before have generations of artists been placed beyond the pale of the law, nor a whole epoch of art as such proscribed and its representatives threatened with sterilisation because their palettes did not function to the liking of the ruling powers" (p.42) [See Hitler on what should happen to degenerate artists]

    13.7.1938 Jewish physicist Lise Meitner escaped to the Netherlands.

    20.9.1938 First page of a British Communist Party leaflet calling for a united stand of Britain, France and Russia against Hitler's plans for Czechoslovakia.

    "Giving way to Hitler" will not "give us peace" - "It makes world war certain". "If we stand firm, we, the French and the Russians", Hitler will probably not fight "for the superiority of the three of us now is enormous. And if he were mad enough to challenge us, he would certainly be defeated".

    29.9.1928 When Edwin Roberts, a young clerk, turned up for work at the Foreign Office, there were police across the entrance to Downing Street. From the Foreign Office window he saw Neville Chamberlain leave for Munich.

    30.9.1928 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain brings back a worthless "Peace in our Time" (at the cost of Czechoslovakia) from Adolph Hitler in Munich.

    1.10.1938: The German Wehrmacht invaded the Sudetenland

    1.10.1938 The first edition of Picture Post. The same picture was used on the cover of the last edition on 1.6.1957.

    With "photographs of the ordinary lives of ordinary working men and women it was as new, and extraordinary, as when the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century decided to paint ordinary folk, instead of the Holy Family..." (Edward Hulton in the last Picture Post)

    1957: "the success of commercial television has drawn away thousands of people who formerly rejoiced in a fourpenny picture paper" (Edward Hulton in the last Picture Post)

    9/10.11.1938 Kristallnacht (Night of Crystal) - Night of broken glass in Germany. "I thought of myself as a German girl until they broke our windows because we were Jews" (a friend who later lost all her family to the extermination camps).

    British Jews could not travel safely to Germany to assess the situation, but the Friends' Service Council (Quakers) sent a team of six volunteers to Berlin, including Ben Greene

    21.11.1938 A joint Quaker and Jewish delegation persuaded the Home Secretary, Samuel Hoare, to allow unaccompanied children to enter Britain.

    2.12.1938 The first Kindertransport arrived in Harwich, bringing about 200 children from a Jewish orphanage in Berlin which had been destroyed in the Kristallnacht pogrom.

    17.12.1938 Nuclear fission [splitting] of heavy elements by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann. Explained theoretically in January 1939 by Lise Meitner and her nephew, Otto Robert Frisch. Frisch named the process by analogy with biological fission of living cells. The reaction can release large amounts of energy. (Wikipedia)

    1939

    new words 1939: polythene or polyethylene [PE]: a tough, light, translucent plastic. PE could supersede gutta-percha, a natural material, for insulation of submarine cables. ICI began commercial scale production on 1.9.1939. See polythene pipes. history of discovery (1933) and development

    new word 1939: vinyl (short for polyvinyl). Nature "Resins more recently developed, such as vinyl and polystyrene, are slowly making headway". USA Armed Forces distributed vinyl records instead of using shellac. Polyvinyl in household goods from the late 1950s.

    1939 Teach Yourself Household Electricity by Caroline Haslett CBE, Comp.I.E.E. Director of the Electrical Association for Women published.

    The association was the idea of Mrs M.L. Matthews, a member of the Women's Engineering Society and Caroline Haslett was its first Director.

    1939 Norbert Elias' two-volume Über den Prozess der Zivilisation first published. Its republication in 1969 was accompanied by an English translation: The Civilising Process (See Wikipedia). The Civilising Process became number 7 in the century's top 10 - A Sage "Master in Modern Social Thought"

    8.3.1939 Death in Islington of David Gestetner (born 1854) who developed office copying machines, often known as duplicators. These used stencils cut on a typewriter through which ink passed. See Gertie Beckett's memories of the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s the UK market was dominated by Gestetner and Roneo. See duplicator publishing

    April 1939 United Kingdom Minister appointed to coordinate supply (later Minister for Supply). See Hansard on stocks of raw materials 21.9,1939.

    "O mois des floraisons mois des métamorphoses
    Mai qui fut sans nuage et Juin poignardé
    Je n'oublierai jamais les lilas ni les roses
    Ni ceux que le printemps dans les plis a gardés"
    (Louis Aragon in 1941)
    [months of flowering and changing - May without a cloud, June stabbed - I will never forget the lilacs and the roses - or those who the spring for a while enfolded.]

    Saturday 13.5.1939 About 900 Jewish refugees from Germany boarded the ship St Louis in Hamburg, to go to Cuba where they would wait for visas to the USA.

    20.7.1939 Hythe (Kent) bye-election. A safe conservative seat with Liberals in second place. No Labour candidate. John Philby stood for the British People's Party (a splinter group from the British Union of Fascists) on a no war platform, arguing that "no cause whatever is worth the spilling of human blood" and for "protection of the small man against big business". He only received 576 votes. Ben Greene (a Quaker) was the Treasurer of the British People's Party. Philby and Greene were both interred at the start of the war, but then released. John Philby introduced his son, Kim Philby, to the British secret service.

    SECOND WORLD WAR

    23.8.1939 non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union left the way clear for Germany to invade Poland, and delayed the planned Nazi assault on the Soviet Union.

    24.8.1939 United Kingdom Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939

    1939-1945 Second World War

    Friday 1.9.1939 Germany invaded Poland   -   A panic exit from London   -   Saturday 2.9.1939 Conscription of UK men between 18 and 41   -   Sunday 3.9.1939 Britain declared war on Germany after Germany's "blitzkrieg" attack on Poland.

    September 1939 to April 1940 So called "phoney war", "twilight war" or "sitting war" when unexpectedly little happened..

    1.9.1939 United Kingdom Import, Export and Customs Powers (Defence) Act 1939 gave the government powers to control the import and export of goods by orders.

    15.9.1939 George 6th's message in the front of The New Testament - Active Service Edition

    22.9.1939 Petrol rationing in the United Kingdom. The first consumer rationing of the war.

    29.9.1939 National Registration Day. (What it is) - One of the uses was to devise the January 1940 rationing scheme.

    Soon after the outbreak of war, an unexpurgated and illustrated edition of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (in English) was published in London in 18 sixpenny weekly parts by Hutchinson and Hurst and Blackett. Publication continued into 1940. Royalties went to the British Red Cross. The cover said that it was "The blue-print of German imperialism" and "The most widely discussed book of the modern world". Sometime in 1939, Robert Baden Powell "Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf. A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation etc. - and ideals which Hitler does not practise himself."

    December 1939 First edition of the Penguin Special compiled by Walter Theimer: An ABC of International Affairs - The Penguin Political Dictionary


    To the tune of Colonel Bogey

    Hitler has only got one ball
    Göring has two but very small
    Himmler is rather sim'lar
    But Goebbels has no balls at all
    der Führer
    Reichsmarschall
    Reichsführer-SS
    Volksaufklärung und Propaganda


    1940s The asylum inheritance

    1940

    By the begining of 1940 half of those children evacuated and most of the mothers with children under five went back home (to London?) (Golden 1995 p. 35)

    January 1940 British Nylon Spinners registered as a limited company by ICI and Courtaulds. It had the monopoly of nylon production in Britain, which went mainly to supply the material for parachutes. See early 1949 - nylon debate 1950.

    8.1.1940 UK food rationing introduced, putting bacon, butter and sugar under control. Extended during the following two years to meat, tea, margarine, lard, jam, marmalade, cheese, eggs, and milk. The 1939 Register was used to issue every individual with a ration book and register them at their local shops.

    Stanley Morse about his sister Lily Rose.

    April 1940 Daily for two weeks: "Feed the Brute", a 5 minute programme after the 6pm news on BBC Home Service, with Gert and Daisy giving recipes and advice on food with humour, and popular characters. Mass Observation interviewed 300 listeners in London and Lancashire to evaluate the programme. The subsequent The Kitchen Front programme (within two months) began broadcasting at 8.15am, following the 8am news in response to the survey findings. (British Library Social Science blog) "... a means by which the Ministry of Food could communicate ... about rationing schemes, encouraging the use of foods which were more generally-available, and discouraging food waste". See Radio Doctor.

    8.4.1940 to 9.4.1940 Germany invaded Norway. Norway was a major UK source of wood pulp for the United Kingdom's paper industry.

    13.4.1940 New Paper Control Order issued by the Ministry of Supply

    April 1940 UK Wartime Social Survey established by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, to investigate questions of sociological importance. Absorbed into the Ministry of Information's Home Intelligence Division in Spring 1941. In 1946 it became the Social Survey Division of the Central Office of Information.

    March 1940 Calculations about the critical mass needed for an atomic bomb by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls (University of Birmingham) showed the feasibility of an airborne atomic weapon. (Wikipedia) - Leading to the MAUD Committee and Tube Alloys (code name for an atomic bomb project).

    Friday 10.5.1940 Winston Churchill became UK Prime Minister in a coalition government. In his first speech to the House of Commons as prime Minister, he said

    "I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."
    The aim was victory at all costs because
    "without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal."

    10.5.1940 - 22.6.1940: Germany invaded France "Much more than the activities of family life, it was these events concerning the world which are the substance of our memory... Our private life was really threatened" (Michel Foucault)

    26.5.1940 to 4.6.1940 Evacuation from Dunkirk.

    Following the fall of France, the UK sought to reintroduce the evacuation of children. Over 100.000 schoolchildren left London in June 1940, but over half a million remained in September. (Golden 1995 p. 35) - End of June 1940 "closure of local schools" - "In some areas home education was used to fill the gap following the closure of schools in the threatened areas but often older children were roaming the streets" The government decided to reopen schools in the evacuation areas. (Golden 1995 p. 36)

    Wednesday 10.7.1940-31.10.1940 Battle of Britain. German air force attack first on shipping, then airfields, then towns. Meant as a prelude to invasion, but the Germans gave up their invasion plans after Sunday 15.9.1940, and switched to indiscriminate night bombing of the larger cities, especially London.

    Mid August 1940: "There have been no air raids. It's nice and quiet" - "the first civilian bombings on the city and the eastern suburbs of London...occurred on 24 August. The RAF retaliated and bombed civilian areas of Berlin". (Golden 1995 pp 40, 122, 145)

    Saturday 7.9.1940 to 10.5.1941. The Blitz, sustained bombing of London and other British cities - "Then came the terrible night of September 7th"

    Friday 4.10.1940 "The fight for air raid protection must no longer be regarded as a special London issue." Daily Worker.

    16.10.1940 Warsaw Ghetto established.

    1941

    Whit Sunday 1.6.1941 to March 1949 Some form of clothes rationing in Britain. The scheme was announced on Whit Sunday. Monday was a bank holiday, so retailers had two days to prepare. See utility clothing and Make do and Mend

    7.4.1941 An Analysis of the Sources of War Finance and an Estimate of the National Income and Expenditure in 1938 and 1940 published after the UK Budget speech. See the autobiography of Richard Stone

    12.6.1941 Representatives of Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa and of the exiled governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Yugoslavia and of General de Gaulle of France, met at St. James's Palace, London and signed a declaration including the words:

    "The only true basis of enduring peace is the willing cooperation of free peoples in a world in which, relieved of the menace of aggression, all may enjoy economic and social security;

    "It is our intention to work together, and with other free peoples, both in war and peace, to this end."

    Sunday 22.6.1941 Germany attacked the USSR, bringing the USSR into the war on the allies side - and making the British Communist Party patriotic, just in time for one member I knew to join the eighth army.

    July 1941 Reports from the UK MAUD committee on the Use of Uranium as a source of power and the Use of Uranium for a Bomb

    14.8.1941 Churchill and Roosevalt met in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to sign the Atlantic Charter, including the words

    "After the final destruction of Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want."

    "They believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential."

    11.9.1941 The Utility Apparel (Maximum Prices) Order and The Utility Cloth (Maximum Prices) Order

    24.9.1941 The USSR and the nine governments of occupied Europe added their signatures to the Atlantic Charter in London.

    17.11.1941 The Eighth Army crossed the Egyptian frontier into Libya to attack the German Panzer Army Africa.

    Sunday 7.12.1941 Pearl Harbour. Japan and the USA enter the war. - just as Wonder Woman arrives

    29.12.1941 On Roosevalt's suggestion, the phrase United Nations was used instead of "Associated Powers" in the draft of a declaration approved by Churchill and Roosevalt at the White House.

    1942

    From 1942, Service, a quarterly magazine, came out without a shiny cover and with economised content. The "utility garb" lasted until 1951.

    1.1.1942 The Declaration by United Nations, Washington DC: By signing the joint declaration, each of the 26 governments pledged "to employ its full resources, military or economic" in "the struggle for victory over Hitlerism". (source)

    Wednesday 6.5.1942 The Radio Doctor first transmitted by the BBC. Included in The Kitchen Front programme on the Home Service at 8.15am. "It wasn't all roly poly references to bowels and muddy tongues; there was a pretty frank discussion that he chaired about venereal disease and how you could (and couldn't) catch it." Sue MacGregor. BMJ

    Autumn 1942 UK Government support via the Ministry of Information for the "Make do and Mend" scheme.

    2.12.1942 Publication of the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services chaired by William Beveridge. The five giants on the road to reconstruction are Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. [Need for welfare benefits - a health service - education - housing - employment]

    Behemoth. The Structure and Practice of National Socialism by Franz Neumann, attempted a rational analysis of Nazi (Nationalsozialist) ideas and its social system. Neumann wrote from a position sympathetic to both liberalism and marxism. His friend, Herbert Marcuse, in Reason and Revolution. Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941) argued the case for a critical social theory founded on reason, concluding with a chapter on "National Socialism versus Hegel". In The Fear of Freedom, Erich Fromm attempted a critical integration of Marx, Freud and Durkheim to explain National Socialism. America

    A survey carried out in 1942 found that the three most popular activities for British children were (in this order) 1) playing outdoors - 2) going to the cinema - 3) Listening to the radio programme Children's Hour. At this time, it is said, most British families went to the cinema at least once a week.

    The first Observer book that was not about wild life, and the first that was not just British, was the Observers Book of Airplanes, published in 1942 in which "the reader will find most of the common airplanes which are seen day by day or read about in the daily press" When peace returned, the series continued with dogs in 1945, horses and ponies and geology in 1949 - ferns in 1950, and then architecture in 1951

    International library of sociology and social reconstruction editor: Karl Mannheim. Published London, 1942-1962, including Glass 1954 and Tonnies 1887/1955, and continued beyond. See Ford 1969

    1943

    Dames Don't Care by Peter Cheyney
    Published hard cover London, Collins, 1937
    Published White Circle 277, January 1943
    Published White Circle 340m, February 1954 (This cover?)
    Published Pan G352, April 1960, 188pp, 2/6. Cover by Sam Peffer (Pictorial cover)
    Internet archive - In 1946, 1,524,785 copies of Cheyney books were sold worldwide
    The
    Federation of Women's Institutes passed a resolution calling for 'equal pay for equal work' in 1943 and was represented for many years on the Equal Pay Campaign Committee.


    23.3.1943 The Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking in the UK House of Lords said

    "Hitler near the beginning of the war declared that this war must lead to the extermination of either the Jewish or the German people, and it should not be the Germans. He is now putting that threat into effect... Not a single Jew is left in the great Ghetto of Warsaw where, before the mass murders began there were 430,000... There is still in this country, however, a rigid refusal to grant visas...If this rule could be relaxed, some hundreds, and possibly a few thousands, might be enabled to escape from this holocaust." (Hansard)

    See 1938 - 1939 - genocide - Auschwitz 1945 - Adorno 1966 - Celan meets Heidegger 1967 - Janina Bauman 1986 - Zygmunt Bauman 1989 - 27.1.1996 - remembrance day


    April 1943 An electronic counting machine used by British to decode German messages, It read paper tape electronically (registering light through holes) at an enormous rate, but the tape tended to catch alight. In December 1943 "Colossus" the first electro-mechanical computer was installed. It used 1,500 valves to compute.


    last week of July 1943 "Operation Gomorrah" by UK and USA bombers turned Hamburg into an enormous firestorm killing 42,600 civilians and wounding 37,000 and practically destroying the entire city. Bert Morse (one of my uncles) who "helped illuminate the firestormed Hamburg" would never speak of it.


    9.11.1943 Founding document (text) of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration signed in Washington.


    1943 Jean Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (English translation 1958) set out philosophical grounds for human responsibility, confronting claims the our actions are determined by our unconscious, by history or by our race. Sartre, and his colleague, Simone de Beauvoir, developed existentialist thought in a way that would provide new directions for both social theory and mental health theory in the 1960s. Prior to Sartre, existentialism (in Nietzsche and Heidegger) was a philosophy associated with National Socialism rather than against it.

    See Ginny Goudy's article existential criminal

    1944

    3.8.1944 Royal Assent to the UK Education Act that provided free education for all children to the age of 15 (from 1947) in grammar, technical or secondary modern schools. The division of children into three streams at 11 led to this being called the Tripartite System. Most of the Act came into operation on 1.4.1945. The Tripartite system was largely replaced by a system of comprehensive eduction from 1965.

    "We won the war - In 1944". See children of 1949

    6.6.1944 Beginning of the liberation of France

    13.6.1944 Retreating German forces launched the first V1 rocket bomb (flying bomb - buzz bomb) on London.

    25.8.1944 Free French recapture Paris.

    Sunday 17.9.1944 Christians from the "Allied Nations" sang and spoke of "victory" and "peace". By May 1945, they were the "United Nations Witness Team".

    10.11.1944 Public announcement that England had been under rocket attack "for the last few weeks" [it was longer]. The rockets were the V2 bombs that one only heard after they had exploded.

    1944 Friedrich Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, argued that the totalitarianism experienced in Nazi Germany was the end result of economic planning not the final stage of capitalism. The book provided a focus for a revival in free-market thinking that led (eventually) to Thatcherism.

    Roger Scruton born

    Adorno T.W. and Horkheimer, M. 1944 Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosphical Fragments) - Kant in 1784 argued that enlightenment liberates us from authority - but, in reality, the outcome of history was that reason had collapsed under National Socialism -

    "With the extension of the bourgeois commodity economy, the dark horizon of myth is illumined by the sun of calculating reason, beneath whose cold rays the seed of the new barbarism grows to fruition"
    "By 'genocide' we mean the destruction of a nation or ethnic group" - Polish- Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin

    1945

    If the laws of mortality are as reliable as Halley's comet, somewhere the last person (a woman) born in 1841 died in 1945.

    Saturday 27.1.1945 freeing of Auschwitz - by Russian troops.
    One and a half million people died in this extermination camp. Not all died in the gas chambers. Many died of starvation. This 31 year old Polish woman had been in the camp since May 1943. She had weighed about 75 Kilograms but when photographed after liberation she weighed 25 Kilogram.

    10.2.1945 Ernst A. Cassirer " Structuralism in modern linguistics" lecture delivered in New York, a few days before his death (Oxford English Dictionary lists) - External link to Google Books

    12.2.1945 Dresden bombed. Between 25,000 and 50,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed. In remembrance, on Sunday 12.2.1995 children carried crosses with the names of bombed cities including Coventry, Hamburg, Rotterdam and Dresden. Thursday 19.4.1945 Richard Dimbleby's (5 minute) report on entering Belsen broadcast by the BBC. The British public began to believe what had happened in the holocaust. (See zero hour 1945). January 27th became remembrance day in Germany on 27.1.1996 and the world on 27.1.2006

    1.4.1945 Main provisions of the 1944 Education Act (England and Wales) came into operation.

    Tuesday 3.4.1945? William Morse (one of my uncles) was killed by a sniper's bullet. He was buried in Germany.

    8.5.1945 Allied victory in Europe.

    Deutschland 1945 bis 1949 - Alliierte Besatzung - Allied occupation - See Hungerwinter 1947 - children of 1949

    5.7.1945 United Kingdom election. Result announced 26.7.1945 Labour Party in power: - manifestos link (archive) - Wikipedia on Labour Party - mental health

    6.8.1945 Atomic bomb first used against Japan. Hiroshima laid waste.

    9.8.1945 Nagasaki destroyed by the second atomic bomb.

    These were the mighty atoms that gave their name to Osamu Tezuka's best known character: Tetsuwan Atomu

    15.8.1945 End of second world war.

    November 1945 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided to award the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Otto Hahn for the discovery of nuclear fission. His colleagues, Fritz Strassmann (chemist) and Lise Meitner (physicist), were not included. See Crawford, Sime, and Walker 1997 A Nobel tale of postwar injustice - offline

  • *********



    1945 - post-war domestic order:
    United Kingdom: See
    National Archives - opportunities at Enfield
    West Germany: See Wikipedia Wirtschaftswunder
    See Ulrick Beck post-war order
    USA

    1945 - post-war international order:

    24.10.1945 The United Nations founded
    See 1946 - 10.12.1948 - 1990 - 1992 - 2000 - 14.10.2010 - 2011

    George Orwell's Animal Farm in 1945 was followed in 1949 by a book called Nineteen Eighty Four. Animal Farm pictured the defeat of communist ideals of equality and cooperation. "All animals are equal - But some are more equal than others". Nineteen Eighty Four pictured a future society of total surveillance where the official language is newspeak, devised to meet the propaganda needs of Ingsoc (English Socialism). "Do you know the newspeak word goodthinkful?"

    20.11.1945 to 1.10.1946 Main Nuremburg trials. 9.12.1946 to 13.4.1949 Supplementary trials

    Richard Sidney Richmond Fitter's first book: London's Natural History published in the New Naturalist series: "London is the largest aggregation of humans ever recorded in the history of the world..." (Introduction). The editors describe the book as the first known attempt to "to write the history of a great human community, in terms of the animals and plants it has displaced, changed, moved and removed, introduced, dispersed, conserved, lost or forgotten" - "the progressive sterilisation of London is a sad story"

     
    1946

    6.1.1946 First meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations in Methodist Central Hall Westminster, with 51 nations represented. "Bring in the golden years of peace"

    UNESCO: Its Purpose and its Philosophy by Julian Huxley published by the "Preparatory Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation" - external download - offline - "An evolutionary approach provides the link between natural science and human history" - "Our first task must be to clarify the notion of desirable and undesirable directions of evolution"

    First edition of Mary R. Beard's Woman as Force in History. A Study in Traditions and Realities published in USA. Completed in the Summer of 1945, it showed the recognition by communists, democrats and fascists that the support of women was needed for their cause and argued that women always had been a force in history, but one which social theorists had denied. (See Hidden from History)

    First edition of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy

    1946 UK Report of the Committee on the Provision for Social and Economic Research, etc. Chairman, Sir John Clapham

    3.3.1946 to 9.3.1946 All children born in Britain tracked as part of the National Survey of Health and Development: The first of the British cohort studies. See 1958 - 1970 - 2000

    Vespa 98, 1946
    Photo c. Archivio Museo Scienza
    In the spring (March/April) of 1946 Italians saw pictures of the new Vespa (Wasp) motor bike with everything encased and aerodynamic lines. It was launched in the autumn at the International Motor Bike Fair in Milan. 2,500 Vespas were sold in 1947, over 10,000 in 1948, 20,000 in 1949, and over 60,000 in 1950. 100,000 sales are said to have been promoted by the film Roman Holiday in 1953.

    20.4.1946 International Refugee Organization (IRO) founded. Replaced by Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 14.12.1950

    1.5.1946 Alan Nunn May sentenced to ten years hard labour for supplying atomic secrets to the USSR. "After his release, he characterized his passing Uranium isotopes to the Soviet Union as a "contribution ... to the safety of mankind."" (Wikipedia)

    3.5.1946 Speech by Winston Churchill in Fulton, Missouri, USA: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent". The war-time alliance between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom and the United States of America was breaking down. The battle of cultures and long-distance arms (wars in other people's countries) from the late 1940s to the mid 1980s was called the "Cold War"

    2.6.1946 In Pair dadeni or "The cauldron of rebirth", John Cowper Powys asked the transition from 2,000 years of Pisces to 2,000 years of Aquarius could mean the cauldron of rebirth after the cauldron of death. "Astrology has at least the unscientific advantage of being the oldest of the sciences, and its very age gives it ... a poetical advantage". (Wales Volume 6 no 2. offline).

    June 1946 First edition of Penguin Science News - online list of content for all 54 issues to March 1960. See Joan Martin on books in the Autumn of 1946. [New Scientist was lauched in 1956]


    La Société Psychoanalytique de Paris resumed activity after the war. By the 1950s it was falling out with one of its leading members: Jean Jacques Lacan


    From the UK Met Office monthly weather reports: After a mild, dull and very wet November and a stormy early December, A dry, cold spell from 15.12.1946 to 21.12.1946 brought appreciable snow to South East England. See Wellington boots and lisle stockings.   January started with stormy weather. Then it was very mild from 14.1.1947 to 16.1.1947. An anticyclone brought cold weather with heavy frost from 17.1.1947, followed by snow. See the January Wind Rose

    February 1947 Britain like an icy tundra. Also sterling crisis, and all this with rationing! Early 1947 Persistent blizzards. Fuel crisis.

    March 1947 Very cold first half, with snowstorms; unprecedented heavy floods in England and Wales later.

    Hungerwinter 1947 On Monday 31.3.1947, in Krefeld (British Occupied Germany), thousands left work and gathered at a protest rally on the Karlsplatz. Wir Wollen Kohle Wir Wollen Brot (We want coal We want bread). Another poster just said Wir hungern (We are hungry).

    Notice the children sitting in the tree.

    1947

    New word: D.R. Hartree wrote about the hardware of the USA computer ENIAC. In 1960, The Times spoke of "both punched card" (the means used to feed information into a computer) and "computer 'hardware'" continuing to develop rapidly. Software was used for the programs used by a computer from 1960, thus completing the distinction between hardware (the machine) and software (the program). In 2000, Zygmunt Bauman applied the terms to types of society.

    1947 Puzzled People. A study in popular attitudes to religion, ethics, progress and politics in a London borough (called Metrop). Prepared for the Ethical Union by Mass Observation. Published: London : Victor Gollancz. 159 pages.

    January 1947 Simone De Beauvoir begins flying from France to America

    World War two made long runways available, and after the war Pan Am, TWA, Trans Canada Airlines, BOAC, Air France and others acquired larger piston aircraft, which allowed flights over the North Atlantic with intermediate stops (usually in Gander, Newfoundland and/or Shannon, Ireland). To aid aircraft crossing the Atlantic, six nations grouped to divide the Atlantic into ten zones. Each zone had a letter and a vessels station in that zone, providing radio rely, radio navigation beacons, weather reports and coordinated rescues in case an aircraft went down. Wikipedia

    November 1947 Pour Une Morale de L'ambiguïté by Simone De Beauvoir published as a book It had already appeared as instalments in Les Temps Modernes. It was translated rapidly into English as The Ethics of Ambiguity

    The Indian Independence Act 1947 (10 + 11 Geo 6 c. 30) partitioned British India into independent dominions of India and Pakistan. with effect from 15.8.1947.


    Autumn 1947 "if we are to close this much talked-of gap between imports and exports ... we must export our technical skill." (Henry Broadbent)

    "We have a crisis in dollar and sterling unbalance which only more exports can cure." (Stafford Cripps, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, quoted by Henry Judd in New International, Vol.13 No.8, October 1947,



    "... typically, Britain imports slightly more on current account than it exports... Figure 5 shows data for gold and dollar reserves since the Second World War... Each of the troughs indicates one of Britain's periodic balance of payments 'crises'" (Richard Lipsey 1963, p. 336)

    12.2.1947 Christian Dior launched the New Look in Paris. Skirts dropped from knee to near-ankle length and the femininity of women was accentuated. Dior dresses shocked people with the amount of cloth they used and in some areas of Paris women in Dior dresses had them torn off by other women protesting at the conspicuous consumption. (Observer Colour Supplement 28.11.1965) -

    Ready to Wear: "Before the Second World War, fashion was for toffs and clothes were for ordinary people. After it, fashion was available for everybody. What brought about such a change? ...when the war ended and rationing didn't, the women revolted. They saw Dior's New Look with its voluminous floor length skirts and put their foot down. They wanted to be feminine and colourful again and not even the government was going to stop them." (Radio Times 18.5.1999). See 1953

    1948

    1.1.1948 British Transport Commission came into operation. 1.4.1948 Electricity Boards came into operation.

    30.1.1948 Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1947), the non-violent protest leader of the independence movement.

    UK: The gradual abolition of rationing began in April 1948; it was not completed until the abolition of meat and butter rationing in July 1956. Butler and Freeman 1968, p.271

    7.4.1948 World Health Organization (WHO) established with its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
    See
    1948 diseases - 1951 - 1953 - 1968 - 1982 drugs - 1988 - 1990 diseases - 1993 - 2001 ICF - 2001 - 2008 - 2010 statistics -

    13.5.1948 Passage of UK National Assistance Act to "terminate the existing poor law" and "assist persons whose resources, including benefits from national insurance, were insufficient" via a National Assistance Board.


    22.6.1948 Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury with 492 passengers from Jamaica. Symbolically treated as the start of post-war immigration to Britain from the West Indies. See Frank Bangay

    July 1948 UK National Health Service

    July 1948 A solid state alternative to the electronic valve

    Two p-n junctions placed back to back with metal connections to the two p regions and one to the n region. The emitter analogous to the cathode in a thermionic valve, the base to the grid and the collector to the anode.

    10.12.1948 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations. - Link to United Nations website - Also see 2006 Convention

    1949

    1949 Method of radioactive carbon dating for archaeological remains developed by Willard Frank Libby and his team at Chicago University. [See Wikipedia

    1949 The Observer's Book of [British] Geology, written by I.O. Evans (Idrisyn Oliver Evans 11.11.1894-13.3.1977), an amateur geologist who had suggested the publishers extend their "works on Natural History". He was assisted by Herbert Leader Hawkins, the Professor of Geology at Reading, who wrote a philosophical Foreword explaining that a geologist was an "observer" who "tries to find a meaning". The final section on "human handiwork" discussed ploughed fields, the Elan Valley Reservoir, Malvern road stone, Brighton sea defences and the suggested use of "atomic bombs" to "melt the polar ice-caps".

    1949 First edition of Paris Match (match referring to the game of life rather than sport). Slogan (1949-2008) "Le poids des mots, le choc des photos". (The weight of words, the impact of photographs)

    1949 Simone De Beauvoir's Le deuxième sexe published. Translated into English as The Second Sex in 1953. An existentialist, De Beauvoir believed that human beings are essentially self-determining and free. Her book explores why women are treated (and treat themselves) as "the other", as objects of male attention rather than self-determining beings.

    Robert King Merton's Social Theory and Social Structure. Towards the codification of theory and research published in United States. A revised and enlarged edition with the shorter title Social Theory and Social Structure was published in 1957, and appears to be the best known. Merton argued for middle range theories. Social Theory and Social Structure became number 3 in the century's top 10 crime and
deviancy
timeline
    anomie

    1949 Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté by Claude Lévi Strauss. [English 1969 The Elementary Structures of Kinship.

    The inspiration for the book is L'Essai sur le Don.. by .. Marcel Mauss... - ..."the ground for .. later work" [on mythology and totemism], "and the respect he gained from fellow professionals comes largely from his ... work on kinship... this book is his masterpiece." (Anthony D Buckley's review)

    January February 1949 Talcott Parsons gave the University Lectures in Sociology at the University of London. They formed a rough outline for his book The Social System America

    1949 British Journal of Sociology established by staff at London School of Economics after a failed effort to take over the Sociological Review.

    Early in 1949, Mary Edwards in the USA posted a pair of nylon stockings to Joan Martin in London, "wrapped up in a magazine. These were forbidden imports and the first I had ever seen". 14.3.1949 clothes rationing ended in Britain with immediate effect from 15.4.1949. (Hansard link)

    18.4.1949 to 23.4.1949 Scouts "bob-a-job week". Every Scout urged to earn at least one shilling to raise money for the Scout headquarters.
    From 1950 to 1970 it became an annual event. [See 1954]. Renamed Scout Job Week in 1970 due to impending decimalisation, but by this time there were concerns about he safety of boys going from home to home and the scheme was changing. In 1972 sponsored shoe polishing was introduced, in 1980 sponsored litter clearing. In 1999 it was abolished in favour of other fundraising activities.

    11.5.1949 (Modern) Israel admitted to the United Nations by majority vote. (See ancient Israel and Balfour)

    The kingdom of evil

    17.7.1949 Hansard "I feel that in education in this country as a whole we have tended to conceive practical matters as rather belonging to the kingdom of evil, and in our educational system this has taken the form of tending to be rather mean over technical education in the past." (David Hardman, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Education)

    14.8.1949 First elections to the Bundestag (parliament) of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany - or West Germany) that had been created in zones occupied by the USA, Britain, and France.

    A poster from the archives of the centre-right German Christian Democratic Party (source), which won the largest number of seats in the Federal elections

    1947 Hunger - Not - Elend 1949 Vorwärts! Aufwärts! Der Erfolg der CDU Abbildung: Verelendete - fröhlich spielende Kinder

    1947 Hunger - Emergency - Misery - 1949 Forward! Upward! The success of the CDU - Figures: Sunk into poverty and joyful playing children

    September 1949 In the hard asphalt playground of Campsbourne infants school, north London, big girls (six years old) organised us into gangs to fight or to link arms and march up and down the playground chanting repeatedly that "We won the war - In 1944". Girls all wore cotton dresses and we boys short grey flannel trousers and shirts. Sweets were rationed, and a small square of chocolate was a treat, but we won the war - in 1944, over and over again. So we all knew who our national enemy was: Germany.

    September 1949 International Sociological Association organised at a meeting in Norway in which twenty two countries participated. This called the First World Congress of Sociology in Zurich for September 1950.

    "Sociology was abolished in China from 1952 to 1979. Marxist historical materialism, a branch of philosophy, was the nearest available discipline." (Xiangquan Chang 2013)

    See World Congress of Sociology 1950 - 1953 - 1956 - 1998 top ten - Platt, J. 1998

    From 1949 to 1972 Ralph Miliband was a lecture in Political Science at the London School of Economics. See 1969 - 1979 - 2013


    1950

    1950/1951 to 1971/ 1973 Post-war boom. See Wikipedia

    Gertie Beckett 1981:
    There was no such thing as microprocessors in [the 1950s].
    The thought would have been as remote as putting a man on the moon.

    Thomas Humphrey Marshall Citizenship and Social Class and other essays, published as a collection by Cambridge University Press.

    1950 Institut für Sozialforschung returned to Frankfurt in Germany from its exile in the USA.

    Early in 1950 Joan Martin renewed her applications for jobs in laboratories. Getting into chemistry was difficult, but Joan worked in a dairy laboratory before obtaining work with Permutit in September 1951. She combined work with evening study. Employers really wanted men, and definitly not someone who was "not quite normal".

    23.2.1950 United Kingdom General Election. Labour returned with a slim majority.
    Norman Dodds, MP for Dartford, Kent, delivered the first question to Parliament, on behalf of the Deptford United Nations Association: "Mr. Dodds-to ask the Prime Minister if he is aware of the passionate desire of the people that he should take the initiative in endeavouring to call a conference with the object of finding ways and means of outlawing the hydrogen bomb and atomic weapons."
    Darenth Park Mental Deficiency Institution was in Norman Dodds constituency and this may have been the origin of his interest in mental health reform

    March 1950 Meeting at the home of James Van Allen, in Washington DC, that led to the International Geophysical Year in 1957/1958. This period was selected to coincide with a time of maximum solar activity when the most benefit could be expected by international cooperation in geo-physical observations.

    29.3.1950 Term Mccarthyism coined in a USA cartoon

    Korean War 25.6.1950 to 27.7.1953
    "The Cold War turned hot for the first time"
    (Michael Hickey BBC website)

    America

    20.7.1950 UNESCO Statement by Experts on Race Problems - UNESCO archive - text at Honest Thinking

    20.7.1950 About 24 million pairs of nylon stockings were being sold in the United Kingdom in a year. There was a shortage, which was exploited by "spivs". Stocking machines bought under Marshall Aid were undersupplied by polymer from Imperial Chemical Industries and nylon yarn from the British nylon spinners. The President of the Board of Trade (Harold Wilson) was unable to guarantee adequate supplies for the Festival of Britain and lisle stockings were recommended as an alternative. (Hansard debate on nylon stockings).

    4.9.1950 to 9.9.1950 First World Congress of Sociology held in Zurich, Switzerland. General theme: Sociological Research in its bearing on International Relations."


    1951

    1951 "Women's Institutes ... have a unique and unrivalled opportunity to help in cancer education... doing away with fear and ignorance, obtaining early diagnosis and saving thousands of lives". The consultant physician at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London quoted in 100 years of campaigning . See 1962 - 1964 - Screening (1968) - 1975 - Forrest Report (1986)

    UNESCO 1951 Statement on Race

    1951 The Observer's Book of [British] Architecture, written and illustrated by John Penoyre and Michael Ryan, "describing and indexing the development of building in Britain from Saxon times to the present day". Foreword by F. R. S. Yorke. Number 13 in the series and only the second that was not on natural history. A revised edition in 1958 included an illustrated glossary.

    The Door with Seven Locks By Edgar Wallace
    Published hard cover London, 1926
    This Hodder paperback 1951
    "It was unfortunate that Dick Martin should find a murdered crook in his bureau just when he was thinking of retiring from the Force. But he was a detective by nature and so naturally he couldn't help becoming involved in this curious case".

    Talcott Parsons' The Social System attempted to provided a model for sociology that views society as more than the sum of its individual members, whilst remaining consistent with American ideas of the importance of the individual crime and
deviancy
timeline sick role
    See 1902   1920   1924   1928   1930   1931   1937   1942   1973   Brief note on Parsons
    Extracts from Parsons

    Stuart Hall came to England with his mother in 1951. He studied at Oxford University. "Marxist models were far too mechanical and reductive. (We did not yet have access to Lukacs, Benjamin, Gramsci or Adorno)." "There was no 'black politics' in Britain; post-war migration had only just begun." (Hall 2010)

    January 1951 First edition of The British Road to Socialism adopted by the Communist Party of Great Britain replaces the previous For Soviet Britain - "The path forward for the British people will be to establish a People's Government on the basis of a Parliament truly representative of the people".

    1.1.1951 First national transmission of The Archers (an everyday story of countryfolk) on BBC radio. Centred on the fictional village of Ambridge it brought rural life to a largely urban audience.

    14.1.1951 Frank Bangay born, Wandsworth. See reflections on working class childhood.

    Sunday 8.4.1951/Monday 9.4.1951: Fifteenth British Census
    Population of England and Wales: 43,815,000; Scotland: 5,102,000
    The previous census was in 1931

    April 1951: Ambassador for inter-world peace

    "After a failed outing early in 1951, when graphic novelist and filmmaker Osamu Tezuka" [3.11.1928- 9.2.1989] "first introduced the robot as the peacemaking Ambassador Atom in a Japanese magazine for boys, "Astro Boy" as we know him was launched a year later". (source)

    See Manga and Astro boy 2003

    May 1951 Letter in The Times announcing the formation of the British Sociological Association (external link to website).
    "Social and legislative changes in recent years have made much sharper the need for study and research in sociological fields. In particular, the extension of planning since the war demands an understanding both of the sociological basis of planning and of its impact on society."

    The BSA was based at London School of Economics until 1992, when it moved to Durham.

    Morris Ginsberg was chair from 1951 to 1955 (then President). Raymond Goodman was Secretary from 1951 to 1953

    It soon replaced the Sociological Society, which decided to close in 1955. (external link).

    Thursday 3.5.1951 King George 5th opened the Festival of Britain, which closed on Sunday 30.9.1951. Amongst the 8.5 million visitors was Grahame Smedley (13) with a party from Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, who who travelled over-night via Liverpool in a seven and a half hour train journey (Liverpool to Euston). The morning and evening of Saturday 8.9.1951 was spent exploring London and the afternoon in the exhibition. They arrived home on Sunday morning.
    The Dome of Discovery was too dark and stuffy for Grahame. The son of a Vulcan factory worker, he went alone to the Transport Pavilion. "and the first thing I saw was the Vulcan locomotive" [a Diesel Electric] "at the very front of the Pavilion. Inside the Pavilion there were some model tramcars, a jet motor car, a London tube train and thousands of other things...". The Home and Gardens Exhibition had "lovely planned rooms" and the Education Pavilion "the most modern ways of teaching"... it was the most enjoyable day of my life". (Vulcan Magazine Winter 1951-1952 pages 21-22)
    The Festival of Britain across the Thames from the Embankment on the evening of Saturday 8.9.1951 taken by H. Talbot from the Vulcan factory Lancashire.
    With all that electricity being consumed, it is not suprising that Enfield Technical College Entertainments Association celebrated with a Festival Review

    5.9.1951 The start of commercial computing. Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) took over Bakery Valuations calculations for J. Lyons and Co., (probably) the best known catering and food company in the UK. Later, it took over payroll calculations, the inventory, and so on. In 1956 Lyons started doing the payroll calculations for Ford UK and others.

    25.10.1951 United Kingdom General Election. Conservatives returned to power on a one nation platform that incorporated many Labour values. (manifestos link) (archive)

    Vulcan Foundry retirements: 28.8.1951 aged 65, William Traverse (Plater-Tender Shop) who started April 1900. 12.10.1951 Walter Cooke (Coppersmith) aged 61 who started February 1903. 2.11.1951 Herbert Payne. 2.11.1051 Alfred Andrews (Striker, Boiler Shop) aged 69 who stared September 1907.

    Made in Britain - exported to South America

    The front cover of the Vulcan magazine shows a P.S.11 Class (steam) Locomotive made for the Argentines and a 3,000 Horse Power Electric Locomotive made for Brazil.

    Vulcan also made trains for Britain. My grandfather would take my sister and me to the end of the platform and we would bend down to see the pipes he made in the copper shop.

    1952

    "If we want to use the fallout from nuclear weapons to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch, the 1945 Alamogordo nuclear weapons test marks the start of the nuclear age but lacks a clear radiogenic signature in the global geological record. By comparison, the most pronounced rise in plutonium dispersal commences in 1952 and can provide a practical radiogenic signature for the beginning of the Anthropocene". (Colin Waters and others 2015)

    Communism..
    "far more sinister and far more evil than...Nazism and Fascism..."
    (Billy Graham, London, 20.3.1952)
    America

    Structure and Function in Primitive Society, the collected essays of Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) published. This title and Talcott Parson's argument (1951) that theory must be in structural-functional terms (for the present) are amongst the origins of the concept that there is a school of sociology called structural functionalism

    Carlos Paton Blacker resigned as general secretary of the Eugenics Society, acknowledging (in Eugenics. Galton and after 1952) that efforts to revive the scientific credibility of eugenics, after its association with the race hygiene policies of the Nazis, had failed. (Richard Soloway, Dictionary of National Biography)

    Wednesday 6.2.1952 Death of George 6th, "King of all Britain", The BBC (Wireless) played solemn music all day.

    Antoine Pinay and French gold. Time magazine December
1952
    22.12.1952. Pinay in front of a gold coin.
    8.3.1952 Antoine Pinay became French Prime Minister (to 23.12.1952). Inflation in France was at about 12% a year (It had fallen from about 59% in 1948). Pinay represented himself as the defender of the Franc and the consumer. He introduced a national loan (called emprunt Pinay), backed by gold, as part of the policy against inflation. In the very favourable economic environment at the end of the Korean War, it succeeded and prices fell in France in 1953, for the first time since 1935. [See Roland Barthes]

    11.3.1952 Utility Goods (Revocation) Order, 1952 (S.I., 1952, No. 489). Later Hansard discussion

    24.9.1952 The Corneal Grafting Act became law in Britain, permitting a registered medical practitioner to remove eyes soon after death for graft purposes and legalising the bequest of eyes for graft purposes. At the time it was envisaged that other parts of the body (skin, for example) might be subject to similar arrangements later. The Federation of Women's Institutes joined a campaign to educate the British public about corneal grafting.

    October 1952 "Dormobile" (mobile dormitory) appeared in the Trade Marks Journal. In the 1950s the camper van developed with seats that could make bunk beds, an elevating roof that allowed people to stand upright, a gas stove, sink and cupboards.

    October 1952 Roland Barthes wrote about "Le monde où l'on catche" [The World of Wrestling] in Esprit. Wrestling was popular in France from about 1950 to 1970. In the early 1950s it could be seen at fairs or special occasions such as galas in honour of July 14. It was performed at the Cirque d'Hiver (Winter Circus) in Paris as well as in "the most squalid Parisian halls". Later in the 1950s it was watched on television. (French Wikipedia). This was the earliest article that composed Mythologies in 1957

    November 1952 The Pictorial Encyclopaedia edited by Richard Haddon, Charles Harvey, and E. S. Wolff published in London by Sampson Low, Marston at 15/-. 237 pages. My copy was in use in Leyton Public (Junior) Libraries from August 1956. The illustration shows a tree depicting racial separation between "men" in which a difference between "ape men" and "true men" is shown as equivalent to, or greater than, that separating humans from gorillas and chimpanzees. True men then divide into two distinct lines - black (negro - negroid - australoid) and white (european - mongoloid), shown as equivalent to that separating orang-utangs from gorillas. #

    1953 Britain "How Much is That Doggy in the Window" in the top ten for weeks - Women's papers show women proud to make their own dresses on new sewing machines, dresses with plenty of cloth (after the shortages) and calf length skirts - However, there is the shocking behaviour of a French woman, Bridget Bardot, photographed in a bikini at Cannes - The Archers - "everyday story of country folk" just beginning its eternal run on the BBC - In 1952 all scheduled broadcasting was replaced for a day by solemn music because the family king had died. In 1953 we may visit friends with a television sets to watch the new Queen being crowned, or listen on the wireless and go to the cinema to see the film of the fairy- tale coronation.

    #

    1953 The Institute of Community Studies established in Bethnal Green, London, by Michael Young, Peter Willmott, Peter Townsend and Peter Marris. (See dictionary community). "Our main research focus in the Institute's early years was the smallest institution of all, the family in its nuclear and extended versions." (Peter Willmott 1995). Reports 1957 - 1958 - 1960 - 1961 - 1962 - and later

    Wednesday 4.2.1953 UK Sweet rationing ended.

    # 25.4.1953 "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids. A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid - We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.)..." Letter in Nature from F. H. C. Crick and J. D. Watson

    Read as pdf - html

    April 1954 "The Complementary Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid" by F. H. C. Crick and J. D. Watson published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society - Wikipedia article on DNA - See genetics. - See 1968

    Friday 29.5.1953 Sherpa Tenzing Norkay and Edmund Hilary reached the top of Everest, the world's highest mountain, in an expedition led by John Hunt. The news reached Britain on he day of the coronation, and was headlines in the morning papers.

    2.6.1953 Coronation of Elizabeth 2nd televised. The number of television licences doubled from 1.5 to 3 million in the run- up to the Coronation.
    See 1927, 1937, 1993.

    July 1953 Pierre Poujade organised a tax protest in his town in France. This led to a national movement of small traders and others in a mouvement known as Poujadisme by January 1956.

    20.7.1953 "An employer who makes the stupid statement that 'what we want is a little unemployment', is just as bad, and causes just as much harm, as the Socialist politician or trade union leader who makes rabble-rousing speeches". Edwin Leather - Conservative MP and Trade Union supporter

    24.8.1953 to 31.8.1953 Second World Congress of Sociology held in the University of Liège, in Belgium.

    27.8.1953 Roman Holiday.

    "The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event".

    Trailer. The princess who escapes into common life rides a Vespa wildly around Rome.


    Audrey Hepburn Google Sunday 4.5.2014: Idea or event?

    Autumn 1953 Jacques Lacan began seminars in Paris. His interpretation of Freud attracted participants from outside psychoanalysis. See June 1964

    October 1953

    Albert RN "The War's Most Daring Prioner of War Escape"

    The British inmates of a Prisoner of War camp think they have an informer among them after several escape attempts fail. One of the prisoners makes a dummy which they christen "Albert" and use at roll call in order to foil the German guards.

    From 1955 to 1976 Jack Warner played Dixon of Dock Green in the BBC television series about a fictional Metropolitan Police station in the East End of London.

    21.11.1953 Times (London) "Piltdown Man Forgery - Jaw and Tooth of Modern Ape - "Elaborate Hoax" - From our Museum Correspondent"

    1954

    9.3.1954 Petitions to the House of Commons from Womens Institutes and trade unionists calling for equal pay for equal work. [Photograph and catalogue record]

    Easter 1954 A scout at the door could expect to find a lady at home. In 1981: "door to door canvassing for jobs is no longer practical due to the growth of apartment and flat-dwelling and, with many wives out at work, often there is nobody to answer the door." Scouts News Release "Changing Style of Job Week" 9.4.1981, quoted Mills, S. 2014.

    13.4.1954 League of Empire Loyalists founded at Caxton Hall, London, to oppose moves to dissemble the British Empire.

    26.4.1954 to 21.7.1954 Geneva Conference divided Vietnam into North and South. 18.6.1954 to 23.2.1955 anti-colonial left wing government of Pierre Mendès France withdrew French from Indo- China. He began the processes that led to the independence of Tunisia and Morocco. 1.11.1954 called Toussaint Rouge (Red All-Saints Day) because of liberation attacks on police and army targets in Algeria. Later considered the start of the Algerian War of independence. On 12.11.1954 Pierre Mendès France said

    "One does not compromise when it comes to defending the internal peace of the nation, the unity and integrity of the Republic. The Algerian departments are part of the French Republic. They have been French for a long time, and they are irrevocably French. ... Between them and metropolitan France there can be no conceivable secession."

    See below Diouf salutes the flag.
    See Roland Barthes the signification.

    May? 1954 A resolution of the National Federation of Women's Institutes to "inaugurate a campaign to preserve the countryside against desecration by litter" led to the formation of "Keep Britain Tidy" in 1955.

    See 1933 Shelf Appeal - 1937 "quick and easy access to the country" - 1971 bottles

    September 1954 First World Congress On Surface Active Agents and Detergents held in Paris. Roland Barthes wrote "The first World Detergent Congress ... had the effect of authorising the world to yield to Omo euphoria". [See Housewife in 1976]

    8.12 pm 22.9.1955 First UK Commericial Television advertisement was "tingling fresh toothpaste that does your gums good too. It's tingling fresh. It's fresh as ice. It's Gibbs SR toothpaste"

    Report of the Nature Conservancy, year ended 30.9.1954, p. 25: Piltdown Skull Site: "As a result of the discovery during the year that the Piltdown jaw was not genuine and that none of the "Piltdown" remains could be definitely attributed to the site, the Conservancy decided to revoke the declaration of the Piltdown Skull Site as a National Nature Reserve. Arrangements are being made to hand it back to the Barkham Manor Estate on condition that scientists accredited by the British Museum (Natural History) have access to the site; that the memorial stone is not removed; and that the windows of the trench exposing the gravel in which the bones were alleged to have been found are left intact, in case the gravel should be required for further study." (source)

    22.11.1954 This issue of Elle (number 467) was "anti- cold". As well as features on Winter fashion, Winter coats and Week day fashion, it contained, on pages 62 to 65 an article by Roger Kemp "70 Romancières, 300 romans: Les Femmes de lettres s'imposent." [70 Novelists, 300 novels: women of letters are necessary].

    Elle had started as a weekly magazine on 21.11.1945
    The 1960s slogan was "Si elle lit elle lit Elle"

    "If we are to believe the weekly Elle, which some time ago mustered seventy women novelists on one photograph, the woman of letters is a remarkable zoological species: she brings forth, pellmell, novels and children. We are introduced, for example, to Jacqueline Lenoir (two daughters, one novel); Marina Grey (one son, one novel); Nicole Dutreil (two sons, four novels), etc" (Roland Barthes 23.1.1955)


    1954 Social Mobility in Britain edited by David Victor Glass. David Glass had been a research assistant to William Beveridge and John Rex (1974, pp 1-2) describes him as the "principle representative" of the "Fabian interest in social reform"

    December 1954 Seymour Martin Lipset argued that the "new sociology" had "destroyed a number of hallowed myths". It had established (for example) that social mobility was more or less the same in European countries as it was in the United States.


    Speaking of Western Germany, Ulrich Beck says that, since the mid 1950s

    "the unstable unity of shared life experiences mediated by the market and shaped by status, which Max Weber brought together in the concept of social class, began to break apart. Its different elements (such as material conditions dependent upon specific market opportunities, the effectiveness of tradition and of precapitalist lifestyles, the consciousness of communal bonds and of barriers to mobility, as well as networks of contact) have slowly disintegrated' (Beck, U. 1986/1992 p.96)

    1955

    1955 Birth of Nicholas Weldon, son of Fay. Fay, her sister and her best friend lived in Saffron Walden with babies and no partners. "the normal fate of the unsupported mother, which we three avoided by the skin of our teeth, of being forced to hand the baby over for adoption... was... cruel in the extreme". But people thought of it as "natural and ordinary social justice" ("Things I wish I'd known at 25" Aura May 2000, p.140). See cold linoleum.

    1955 Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition by Derrick Sherwin Bailey of the Church of England's Moral Welfare Council. See Timothy Jones "The End of Sodomy: Derrick Sherwin Bailey and the Emergence of the 'Homosexual' in the Church".

    February 1955 Roland Barthes small mythology essays on childhood included one on toys (Jouets) which criticised their content (prefiguring the world of adults) and material (plastic replacing wooden craftmade toys). With plastic, imitation materials were household goods: "artifice aims at something common, not rare".

    March 1955 Term "New Left" recorded (Oxford English Dictionary) - Later associated with left wing critics of (or within) the Communist Party. (See Reasoner)

    12.4.1955 National Union of Teachers' Conference at Scarborough. David Eccles, the Minister of Education, said

    "But now all is mixed up. The professor mends his car and his wife has no maid. Every year that passes more mothers are as expert with their babies as the professional nannies who, when I was in my pram, ebbed and flowed twice a day in Kensington Gardens. ... In short, we are all coming closer together, in a sense we are all working-class now, and tomorrow we shall be able to enjoy a share of the culture and leisure which used to be the prerogative of the few." (Quoted Hansard 26.4.1955, col. 772)

    18.4.1955 Albert Einstein died
    "Mythologically, Einstein is matter, his power does not spontaneously draw one towards the spiritual, it needs the help of an independent morality, a reminder about the scientist's 'conscience' ... Einstein himself has to some extent been a party to the legend by bequeathing his brain, for the possession of which two hospitals are still fighting as if it were an unusual piece of machinery which it will at last be possible to dismantle." (Roland Barthes June 1955)


    nuclear spectroscopy: "the late forties" to "early sixties" was a "rewarding time in nuclear physics since the nuclear shell model, complemented with the collective properties, was then developed". To a large extent this was "founded on experimental material brought together from nuclear decay studies." See Kai Siegbahn's Nobel lecture, 8.12.1981


    Joan Martin: "The Inverse World".

    27.5.1955 Election victory for Tories under Eden - "It is interesting to contrast the feverish activity of the Conservative Government in the last three months before the General Election with the cuts and economies which took place during the first three months of its period of office" (Alice Bacon, Hansard 26.4.1955)

    June 1955 J. Guerin (Jean Paulhan) wrote in his "Notes" in La Nouvelle revue francaise pages 1118-1119: "Mais peut-être Barthes nous dira-t-il un jour ce qui n'est pas mythe?" "Après tout, peut-être M. Roland Barthes est-il simplement marxiste. Que ne le dit-il?" [But maybe Barthes will one day tell us what is not myth? After all, maybe Mr Roland Barthes is simply marxist. Why not say so?]

    5.6.1955 to 9.6.1955 Billy Graham at the Vel' d'Hiv' in Paris.

    16.6.1955 to 22.6.1955 International symposium "Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth", organised by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and held at the Princeton Inn on the edge of Princton University, New Jersey, USA. (Online history at Princeton University)
    In the mid-1950s, Paul Bigelow Sears and his colleagues were analysing cores of sediment from the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico. The changing pollen contents indicated the changing vegetation in the late Pleistocene when the sediments formed in a lake. This provided an indication of climate change in the ice ages. It was in connection with these studies that Sears wrote (in a paper published in the symposium report) about "a widespread confidence that this impact of man upon environment can continue indefinitely" [A relevant paper]

    June 1955 Diouf, Issa and Santoura were "enfants de troupe" (children training to be soldiers) in the school at Ouagadougou in French West Africa. They were taken to Paris in June 1955 to take part in a military parade.

    In 2006 they were searched for



    LE PETIT DIOUF DE OUAGADOUGOU. (Cover)

    2.7.1955 Paris Match Nø 326: Diouf saluting features on the cover. See Roland Barthes who wrote about this cover in September 1956, "Le mythe, aujourd'hui" [The myth today] See French Wikipedia

    Compare Karl Goetz 1920 and the colour of the French Revolution

    Thursday 22.9.1955 Commercial television started in the United Kingdom. The BBC killed Grace Archer (a wireless character) to distract attention.

    October 1955 "La Nouvelle Citroen": The first press photos of the Citroën DS in Paris Match

    31.10.1955 Princess Margaret of the United Kingdom published a statement that she would not be marrying Group Captain Townsend, "mindful of the Church's teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble".

    Polythene (polyethylene or PE) used for pipes since the early 1950s (Wikipedia). Henry Herbert Moss of Billericay made a note shortly after 1955 "Plastic Pipes - burst proof". "Polythene Piping expands and contracts, thus keeps free of bursts, can be used only for cold water. Fitted in Oldham, Lane. houses 3 years ago - never a burst."


    1956
    Karl Popper's article, Science: Conjectures and Refutations, argued that the origin of science is in imagination, and suggested falsification as the destructive empirical test of theories

    1956 USA: Robert Dahl's A Preface to Democratic Theory published.

    1956 USA: Lewis Coser's The Functions of Social Conflict published.

    1956 Social Class and Educational Opportunity edited by J.E. Floud, A.H. Halsey and F.M. Martin. published, London

    permissive
    1956 C. A. Tonsor in Clearing House 30. v. 289, "I realize that in the face of the permissive tendencies of the age, there is not much respect for rules."

    1.1.1956 French legislative elections. "Some candidates for Parliament adorn their electoral prospectus with a portrait. This presupposes that photography has a power to convert which must be analysed." Photography spirits away politics in favour of a manner of being. "This antithesis is one of the major myths of Poujadism (Poujade on television saying: 'Look at me: I am like you' ". (Roland Barthes February 1956). [This is the only mention of television in Mythologies - See popular culture]

    18.1.1956 Anthony Eden (UK Prime Minister) spoke in Bradford of the world-wide scientific revolution
    "The prizes will not go to the countries with the largest population. Those with the best systems of education will win. Science and technical skill give a dozen men the power to do as much as thousands did fifty years ago. Our scientists are doing brilliant work. But if we are to make full use of what we are learning, we shall need more scientists, engineers and technicians. I am determined that the shortage shall be made good". (Quoted Technical Education 1956 p.4)


    Leslie Greene: "The British Empire is the greatest force for peace that the world has ever known and you are giving it away" "We have not given it away. What has happened is that the people of the Commonwealth are steadily developing towards freedom and self-government"

    January 1956 British Sociological Association conference on "The Present State and Development of Professional Sociology" held at the London School of Economics. The first edition of the Association's Bulletin, in October 1956, featured a report by Asher Tropp "The Present State and Development of Professional Sociology"

    February 1956 Ionel Schein's, Plastic House (Maison tout en plastiques), displayed in Paris at the Salon des Arts Ménagers. March 1956 "Le plastique" was Roland Barthes' "Petite mythologie du mois". Mentions polystyrene, polyvinyl and polyethylene.

    The exhibition was financed by Charbonnages de France (the French Coal industry) and run in collaboration with Elle magazine.

    External links: frac centre - scan of Elle magazine February 1956

    21.2.1956 Harold Macmillan (UK Chancellor of the Exchequer): "The average weekly earnings of men aged 21 and over in manufacturing and certain other industries covered by the regular Ministry of Labour inquiries were £3 9s. in October, 1938. A married man with two children would require weekly earnings of £9 2s. at the present time to provide the same purchasing power, after tax. The actual average earnings in April, 1955, the latest date for which figures are available, were £10 17s. 5d." (Hansard) - "In two days he had earned nearly £3, a man's wage" (David Roxan p. 185 referring to Peter Whitehead's casual wages picking damsons in 1954) - See "never had it so good" 1957

    25.2.1956 Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in which he criticised Joseph Stalin. In June 1956 Le Monde published a French translation of the speech.

    29.2.1956 Publication of Technical Education (Cmnd 9703 - 43 pages) a White Paper on the future of technical education, covering England, Wales and Scotland.

    29.3.1956 House of Commons debate on Higher Technical Education, Tees-side (available online)

    21.6.1956 House of Commons debate on Technical Education (available online)

    "I think there is just a danger that we may campaign for technical education as though it were an international race, like the arms race." (The Minister of Education (Sir David Eccles) in the debate) See International Geophysical Year below.

    19.4.1956 to 27.4.1956 Soviet leaders Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Krushchev on a State visit to the United Kingdom.

    May 1956 Victor Gollancz published Colin Wilson's The Outsider for the first time.

    July 1956: UK abolition of meat and butter rationing. (Last rationing to go)

    5.7.1956 Royal Assent to "An Act to make provision for abating the pollution of the air" 4 and 5 Elizabeth 2, chapter 52. [United Kingdom "Clean Air Act"]. This came into effect over the next ten to fifteen years.

    End of July 1956 First issue of the Reasoner, an anti- Stalinist communist journal, produced by John Saville and Edward P. Thompson. Issue one of the New Reasoner was published in Summer 1957. (external link). The first issue of Universities and Left Review had been published in Spring 1957 by Raphael Samuel, Gabriel Pearson, Charles Taylor and Stuart Hall. The two journals worked together and merged in 1960 as New Left Review (edited by Stuart Hall). Charles Wright Mills wrote a "Letter to the New Left" in New Left Review issue 5.

    22.8.1956 to 29.8.1956 Third World Congress of Sociology held in Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, in the Netherlands. General theme: Problems of social change in the 20th century."

    "The Soviet Union, and the other countries of the Soviet bloc, ... for the first time sent delegations... Their representatives were not sociologists in the strict sense of he word, but they showed themselves very willing to take part in the proceedings" ( Maus, H. 1956/1962 p.165)

    26.10.1956 Red Army troops invade Hungary.

    29.10.1956 Israel invades the Sinai Peninsula and push Egyptian forces back toward the Suez Canal.

    31.10.1956 The United Kingdom and France begin bombing Egypt to force the reopening of the Suez Canal.

    22.11.1956 New Scientist magazine launched. A popular magazine for science and technology. New Society followed in 1962. New Scientist still thrives, New Society has withered away.
    "We are falling rapidly behind USA and USSR in training scientists and technologists. The remedy is a revolution in the secondary school system" A.D.C. Peterson, Headmaster of Dover College "How to break the barrier between science and arts" pp 12-13 New Scientist 22.11.1956

    1957

    Biological death of the Thames In 1957 researchers from London's Natural History Museum said the river Thames was biologically dead because of high levels of industrial and sewage pollution. "By the 1950s the estuary was probably in the worst state it had ever been. Surveys in this decade recorded oxygen levels at below 5% for 52 km and a 20 km stretch of the Thames around the two main outfalls having no measurable oxygen in the water! No fish populations were present for a 69 km stretch from Kew to Gravesend. The Thames was basically lifeless for most of its upper length, save for some hardy worms in the mud banks" Martin Attrill 16.10.2006

    Commercial production of polypropylene began in 1957

    1957 United Kingdom Consumer's Association (publisher's of "Which?") founded by Michael Young

    Family and Kinship in East London by Michael Young and Peter Willmott published (Institute of Community Studies Report 1). It became a Penguin paperback in 1962. Revisited in 2006 - The family life of old people : an inquiry in East London by Peter Townsend (Report 2). See 2006

    Antonio Gramsci's Selected Works in Three Volumes published in Russian in Moscow 1957-1959 The Modern Prince, and Other Writings by Antonio Gramsci, translated with a biographical introduction by Louis Marks, published in London by Lawrence & Wishart 1957. Carl Marzani's The Open Marxism of Antonio Gramsci published in New York 1957. Oeuvres choisies (selected writings) were published in Paris by Editions Sociales in 1959. Gramsci's writings were used to argue that class conflict which Marx and Engels placed at the core of history was as much a struggle for the creation of new ideas as anything else.

    1957 to 1970 "Christian radicalism' in the Church of England". "Radicalism grew in influence from the late 1950s, and burst into the national conversation with John Robinson's 1963 bestseller, Honest to God"... driven by a narrative of epochal transition, which understood British society ... to be undergoing a seismic upheaval, comparable to the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

    February 1957 Roland Barthes' Mythologies published in Paris. The last part of this, "Le mythe, aujourd'hui", is dated September 1956.
    Roland Barthes appeared on French Television discussing Mythologies in "Lectures pour tous" on 29.5.1957 You Tube
    [Lectures pour tous was the premierre literary programme of French television, broadcast on the first channel of RTF and then the ORTF from 27.3.1953 to 8.5.1968.]

    6.3.1957 Independance of Ghana from colonial British rule

    25.3.1957 Treaty of Rome signed by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. This established the European Economic Community on 1.1.1958. This was succeeded by the European Union in 1992.

    May 1957 Percy Report favours community care

    1.6.1957 The last edition of Picture Post used the picture from the cover of the first edition in 1938.

    1957: "the success of commercial television has drawn away thousands of people who formerly rejoiced in a fourpenny picture paper" (Edward Hulton in the last Picture Post)


    On page 38, the paper ran its last advertisement for contraception - or married happiness:

    "Complete fulfilment of 'married happiness' combined with freedom from anxiety need not be a secret. Nor is it just luck that has brought enduring joy to thousands of couples for over sixty years. Theirs has been the uncomplicated plan, which has helped to bring the good things in life to them and their children - so very simply with Rendells"

    "Sold by Boots, Timothy Whites and chemists everywhere, and made by W.J. Rendell Ltd, Hitchin, Herts, who will be pleased to send full explanatory literature in a plain envelope on request."

    20.7.1957 A speech by the United Kingdom Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan included "... most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime - nor indeed in the history of this country." (source). See industrial and agricultural wage 1956

    July 1957 to December 1958: The International Geophysical Year

    Friday 4.10.1957 First Sputnik (Russian satellite) sent into space. The second was sent on 3.11.1957 with a dog on board. The first disintegrated on 4.1.1958. I was thirteen years old and, although I had books that discussed how rockets might be sent into space, I had thought that going into space would prove impossible. See countdown - 1961 - Russian - America 1962 - men on moon 1969 and 2000.

    Friday 11.10.1957 Jodrell Bank radio telescope in operation.

    1958

    Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 - 2009) - Anthropologie structurale ("Structural Anthropology") - See Structuralism

    Widows and their Families, etc. by Peter Marris. (Institute of Community Studies Report 3).


    Good Friday 4.4.1958
    17.2.1958 Inaugural public meeting of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at Central Hall, Westminster, attended by five thousand people. The first Aldermaston March was at Easter 1958. Stuart Hall: "... a new kind of political mobilisation- beyond... the big party battalions - which reflected certain emergent social forces and aspirations characteristic of their time ... one of the first of this type of 'social movement' to appear in post-war politics... like the civil-rights movement at the time, and feminist and sexual questions, ecological and environmental issues, community politics, welfare rights and anti-racist struggles in the 1970s and 1980s- have proved difficult to construct within the organizational agendas of the traditional left." (Hall 2010)

    3.3.1958 to 9.3.1958 All children born in Britain tracked as part of the National Child Development Study: The second of the British cohort studies.

    June 1958 "the old form of indenture of apprentices has largely died out and been replaced by schemes for vocational education" [A Quaker minute] See 1726

    25.8.1958 Racial disturbance in Nottingham when West Indians defended themselves against what they thought were threats from white Teddy Boys. This was followed by attacks by white youths on black people in Notting Hill, London.

    Stuart Hall: "the New Left Club in London became deeply involved in 1958 with the race riots in Notting Hill and with the anti-racist struggles of the period around North Kensington... Rachel Powell, an active club member, unearthed the scandal of 'Rachmanism' and white landlord exploitation in Notting Hill." (Hall 2010)

    28.10.1958 Pope John 23rd succeeded Pius 12th. He died 3.6.1963 and was succeeded by Paul 6th. Pope John called the Second Vatican Council, which lasted from 11.10.1962 to 8.12.1965. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum concilium), on 4.12.1963 sought "fully conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations", one aspect of this was the greater use of vernacular languages in place of Latin. The Council was also important in the development of dialogue between christians and with other faiths. The Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) was made on 28.10.1965. - See Joan Hughes: about 1938: child deaths: Latin mass : sex: mother's death: Rome 1950: Jennifer: 1959 more openness: Christian club- See Civil Service Catholic Guild -

    1959 Charles Wright Mills The Sociological Imagination. This became number 2 in the century's top 10   America

    1959 Ralf Dahrendorf's Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society published.

    Bernard Crick The American Science of Politics: Its origins and conditions

    1959 First edition of Outline of Human Genetics by Lionel Sharples Penrose, Galton Laboratory, University College, London. Heinemann, London. Second edition (with new chapter) 1963.

    "People want to know whether their children are going to be clever or stupid, handsome or ugly, tall or short, healthy or unhealthy, and so on. Traits like these" [as a general rule] "do not segregate in families" [unlike] "relatively simple traits like colour blindness" (page 5)

    1959 Start of Critical Quarterly (External link to history)

    21.1.1959 First duplicated edition of The Billericay Observer - Wynford Grant's newspaper produced by a schoolboy. Link. "It started as one copy passed around neighbours and friends and then became carbon copies, initially sewn together, then stapled. After about a year I got a duplicator and then it really started to develop." This is my earliest memory of the use of office duplicators for community publishing. The next was its use by a group of mental patients in 1963. See the Gestetner Revolution of 1968 and Centerprise in 1970.

    8.12.1959 United Kingdom General Election. Increased Conservative majority - manifestos link (archive) - Wikipedia

    1.12.1959 Antarctic Treaty opened for signature. It came into force on 23.6.1961. The treaty preserves the continent for scientific research and prohibits any kind of military use.

    "The case for the existence" of postmodernism "depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s" ... "this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation)"... "every position on postmodernism in culture ... is also ... [a] stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today". (Fredric Jameson 1991). See USA postwar order

    Cold linoleum and no sex

    "how different life was in the late fifties, early sixties, pre-pill, pre- coil, when the man not the woman was in charge of contraception. When the very word was still almost too rude and explicit to be mentioned, and body parts were a deep mystery to everyone except medical students. There were a few Marie Stopes "birth-control clinics" for women in major cities, but you had to show a wedding ring to get access to them. Men had condoms, but often preferred not to use them. Abortion was frequent, dangerous and illegal...

    How we lived then! The sheer physical discomfort of it... A woman's work was never done and very boring it was, too. Few ate out (a wicked waste) or had the money to do so. Meals were plain and tasteless: garlic and even mushrooms were rare. Spices were meant to be bad for you. Foods were not eaten out of season... Wicked wastes... included taking a taxi, running a deep bath, owning more than two pairs of shoes... Winter meant cold: people wore vests. No central heating, hot-water bottles in every home, cold feet on icy linoleum in the morning, ice inside the windows, not just the outside. A dusty, dirty coal fire (shut the door, please: don't let the heat out!) and smelly paraffin fire to supplement it if you were lucky."

    Fay Weldon in Radio Times 25.11.2000

    1960s Marshal McLuhan popularised the idea that developments in modern media are creating a global village. 1960 "Television gives this quality of simultaneity to events in the global village". See 1915 - 1962 - 1993

    Monster computers (electronic counting machines) were developed during the 1960s. By the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, machines the size of a London bus (*) were processing statistics for social scientists. These large room-filling computers became known as "mainframes", a term originally used for the large cabinets they occupied. By the late 1970s the capacity of these monsters was being reduced into microchips. See Desktop - (*) The exaggerated comparison to a London Bus reflects my awe-infected memory of the Enfield computer.

    Books by Erving Goffman, published in the 1960s, showed how the symbolic interaction theories of George Herbert Mead can be used to analyse everyday life. They included The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 1959, which became number 10 in the century's top 10 - Asylums 1961 - Encounters 1961 - Behaviour in Public Places 1963 - Stigma 1963 and Interaction Ritual 1967. - See 1968 America

    In France, Michel Foucault's Histoire de la Folie (1961) began an excavation of history that was awake to the traditions of philosophy, literature, social science and the creative imagination. Nobody was quite sure what to do with it. - External link: Warren Montag on "Althusser's Reading of Folie et dé raison"

    1960 Ronald Laing The Divided Self: An existential study in sanity and madness

    1960 Family and Class in a London suburb by Peter Willmott and Michael Young. (Institute of Community Studies Report 4).

    Norman Dennis and George Erdos (1992) argue that "the 1960s saw the beginning of a period of rapid and far-reaching change" in social arrangements "controlling who could bring children into the world" - "responsibilities for rearing the children" - "the sources and saliency of sexual pleasure" - and "ensuring so far as possible that each adult had a life-long source of mutual assistance". Under the "pre-1960s system" (they argue) " marriage, realistically, was child-centred, not spouse centred". "To place companionship with one other person at the centre of adulthood... was still regarded (perhaps especially among working-class women) as a sign of an inappropriate translation into real life of romantic notions".

    Herbert Edwin Roberts (second from right, short man, retired from the Vulcan Foundry in, 1960. So this photo taken before then.
    25.8.1960 to 11.9.1960 17th Olympic Games held in Rome.

    18.9.1960 to 25.9.1960 9th Annual International Stoke Mandeville Games, now known as the 1960 Summer Paralympics, held in Rome

    Wednesday 2.11.1960 The Evening News: "Jury Says Yes To The Novel Banned For 32 Years". Lady Chatterley's Lover launched the permissive society.

    Ronald St. Blaize-Molony (2004) argues that "the Swinging Sixties" "properly dates from 1966" (to 1976). "The intellectual chassis carrying that motor of dissent and revolution was the product of then Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, aided and abetted by the then Director General of the BBC - Sir Hugh Carleton Green."

    Hugh Carleton Greene was Director-General of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) from 1960 to 1969,

    1961: Contraceptive Pill available to (some?) married women on the National Health Service. My recollection is that it only became freely available (to married women) slowly during the 1960s. Wikepedia has a history of its availability to single women in the UK.      See contraception

    about 1961 The British Society of Criminology founded. website

    Vinyl wallpapers

    "By 1961 ICI had developed 'Vymura', a paper coated with PVC and printed with specially developed inks. Such papers were no longer limited to kitchen and bath-room, but were promoted for use throughout the house" (Victoria and Albert Museum - In the late 1960s and early 1970s the use of wallpaper boomed and peaked. New "papers" were laminated with paper backing and vinyl, silk, fabric and other surfaces, requiring stronger adhesive than the traditional wheat based ones. Prepasted papers were introduced. The comparative difficulty of removing the new wallpapers contributed to the decline of papering. (source)

    Wednesday 12.4.1961 Major Yuri Gagarin made first flight into space and back. My Russian pen-friend sent me a postcard of him. Yuri Gagarin's reception by Kruschev at Moscow airport was the first event to be filmed by British television. (Panorama). [Not sure what that means, but it was "memorable live" "outside broadcast" by Richard Dimblby, followed by one of "the May Day Parade some days later". See Panorama in the Sixties by David McQueen]

    Sunday 23.4.1961/Monday 24.4.1961: Sixteenth British Census
    Population of England and Wales: 46,196,000; Scotland: 5,184,000

    Family and social change in an African city. A study of rehousing in Lagos by Peter Marris. (Institute of Community Studies Report 5).

    The UK Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 removed the right of automatic entry for Commonwealth Citizens.

    1962

    1962 Jürgen Habermas: The structural transformation of the public sphere - External links: quotations - Douglas Kellner on - Marshall Soules on (archive) - Wikipedia - The Gothic Novel

    Education and the Working Class. Some general themes raised by a study of 88 working-class children in a northern industrial city by Brian Jackson. (Institute of Community Studies Report 6) - Living with Mental Illness. A study in East London by Enid Mills (Report 7).

    7.3.1962 UK Royal College of Physicians press conference launching its report "Smoking and Health", linking smoking to lung cancer. They recommended restriction of tobacco advertising; increased taxation on cigarettes; more restrictions on the sales of cigarettes to children and on smoking in public places and more information on the tar/nicotine content of cigarettes. The National Federation of Women's Institutes passed a resolution to ban smoking in public places in 1964.

    Summer 1962 Kenneth H. Smith and Roger Orman opened a beach bookstall for holidaymakers on Sandbanks in Dorset that sold nothing but books (paperbacks), postcards, cheap classical records and pulp magazines and comics (No beach-goods). It had all books face forward and a stand of material they nick-named the "sin-bin". This included Lady Chatterley's Lover (Penguin) and the (at first unexpurgated) Fanny Hill (Mayflower), Love and Marriage by Dr Eustace Chester and Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis (Pan), Sex and the Single Girl. The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (Unexpurgated) and The Perfumed Garden (Panther). Panther brought out Love in Action - The Sociology of Sex by Fernando Henriques in June 1964 (followed by the rest of the series) and Corgi published Sexual Life in England by Ivan Bloch in 1965.

    11.7.1962 First live television between the United States and Europe via the Telstar satellite.

    4.10.1962 New Society, a popular UK magazine about social science, launched, on the model of New Scientist. . It thrived in the 1960s and 1970s, and withered away in the 1980s. See Wikipedia and "Revisiting New Society" by Mike Savage in Discover Society 1.10.2013.

    5.10.1962 Release of "Love Me Do", the first Beatles record and London premiere of "Dr No", the first Bond film.

    10.12.1962 The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded jointly to Francis Harry Compton Crick, James Dewey Watson and Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

    Between 1962 and 1970, George Brosan and Eric Robinson engineered the rapid expansion of the social sciences at Enfield College of Technology, a small north London college founded in 1901 by the English inventor of the electric light bulb. The idea of "People's Universities" was publicised by Eric Robinson in The New Polytechnics, a Penguin paperback in 1968. At about the same time, the whole side of the main building at Enfield was converted to a room in which technicians maintained a large computer at exactly the right temperature. This computer was shared with local industry. By the 1970s, social scientists outnumbered engineers and Middlesex Polytechnic (now Middlesex University) had an international reputation as a centre for the social sciences and, in particular, criminology.

    1963

    1963 Pierre Bourdieu began his education research in France. See books and below

    The Questionnaire: Question 7: Which are your three favourites among the following singers? Charles Aznavour, Edith Piaf, Luis Mariano, Léo Ferré, Jacques Brel, Petula Clark, Johnny Hallyday, Georges Guétary, Jacques Douai, George Brassens, Françoise Hardy, Gilbert Béaud. [Used in La Distinction 1979]

    1963 Earliest records of complaints to the police about the sexual behaviour of Jimmy Savile. See Top of the Pops 1964 - Broadmoor - autobiography 1974 - Bethlem 1980 photo - exposure 2012 - 26.2.2015 Hospitals - Manchester Trust 2015 - 27.5.2015

    22.1.1963 Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of West Germany, and General de Gaulle, President of France signed the Elysée Treaty "convinced that the reconciliation of the German people and the French people, ending a centuries-old rivalry, constitutes a historic event which profoundly transforms the relations between the two peoples". See Jena 1806


    February1963 Towards a Quaker View of Sex published by The Friends Home Service Committee (Secretary George Gorman) on behalf of a working group on "Homosexuality and Other Problems of Sex."   See online exhibition.

    19.3.1963 Publication of Honest to God by John A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich. Argued to the image of God as "up there" or "out there" was inadequate for the modern world. Robinson was more attracted the image of God as the "groundwork of our being" See "Honest to God - Fifty Years On" by Philip Feakin. - At the Methodist Youth Club I was the tame agnostic on their Any Questions Panel. I was asked if the book did not give me doubts about my agnosticism. I said that the only doubt I had was why John Robinson was an Anglican bishop and I an agnostic, when we appeared to have the same beliefs.

    1963: "Almost overnight it became educated common sense to describe contemporary England as a secular society." (Simon Green 2011 quoted by Sam Brewitt-Taylor (18.6.2013)


    1.10.1963 Harold Wilson to the Labour Party Conference: "We are redefining and we are restating our socialism in terms of the scientific revolution.... The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or outdated methods on either side of industry." [This perspective is reflected in the development of "new polytechnics" from "colleges of technology". See Enfield]

    October 1963 An Introduction to Positive Economics by Richard G. Lipsey, Professor of Economics at the University of Essex. "The student of economic theory needs to ask at every stage what are te relevant magnitudes and quantities in the real world" (p.xii)

    29.11.1963 First Things First manifesto written by Ken Garland. Published with signatures of other designers in 1964. It challenged the idea that commercial advertising should be designers' highest ideal, saying that street signs, books, instructional manuals, industrial photography, films and television features, and scientific and industrial publications provided more useful and lasting forms of communication.

    1964

    Who was to inherit the elite Paris university in the 1960s? - and why?

    1964 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron Les héritiers. Les étudiants et la culture . Translated into English as The Inheritors: French Students and their Relations to Culturein 1979,

    Publication of the research of which La Reproduction (1970) was the theoretical synthesis.

    1964 Joyce Butler (Co-op MP) "founded the Women's Cervical Cancer Control Campaign (later the Women's National Cancer Control Campaign), which united over forty interested organisations". (Dictionary of National Biography)

    1.1.1964 DJs Jimmy Savile and Alan Freeman presented the first "Top of the Pops", which featured (in order) The Rolling Stones with "I Wanna Be Your Man", Dusty Springfield with "I Only Want to Be with You", the Dave Clark Five with "Glad All Over", The Hollies with "Stay", The Swinging Blue Jeans with "Hippy Hippy Shake" and The Beatles with "I Want to Hold Your Hand", that week's number one

    29.11.2011 "Telly legend Sir Jimmy Savile, who brightened the lives of millions, was found dead"

    26.5.1964 Alain Peyrefitte, French Minister of Information: "public opinion... makes the Government responsible for everything which is said or done on R.T.F. [Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française.
    Under the current system, the R.T.F. is the Government in each French dining room. There is a tendency to interpret any information or comments disseminated by R.T.F. as taking a Government position, which reduces the credit and even credibility of programming.
    Regardless of the sincerity of our liberalism, we do not collect the fruits of our efforts at objectivity, which is tainted by suspicion. In reality, I have rarely tasted the benefits of the authority available to me on R.T.F., I have felt all the drawbacks."

    ["Dans le système actuel, la R.T.F. c'est le gouvernement dans la salle à manger de chaque Français." Debate - French National Archives]

    27.7.1964 Royal Charter establishing the UK "Council for National Academic Awards" (CNAA)

    27.7.1964 Brook Advisory Centres Ltd, a non-profit making company, registered to "protect, promote and preserve the sexual and reproductive health of young people by educating them in matters relating to sexual behavior, contraception, sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy." See 1983.

    12.8.1964 to 18.8.1964 UNESCO Expert meeting on the biological aspects of race held in Moscow.18.8.1964 "Proposals on the biological aspects of race" signed in Moscow (external link)

    June 1964 École freudienne de Paris founded by Jacques Lacan.

    Times They Are A-Changing: 15.10.1964 Peter, Paul and Mary's version in the charts for two weeks. 11.3.1965 Ian Campbell Folk Group version in the charts for five weeks. 25.3.1965 Bob Dylan's version in the charts for eleven weeks.

    15.10.1964 United Kingdom General Election. Labour Victory. Harold Wilson Prime Minister. Transforming Britain in "the white hot heat of technology" - manifestos link (archive) - Wikipedia on Labour Party

    A Modern Economy "The aims are simple enough: we want full employment; a faster rate of industrial expansion: a sensible distribution of industry throughout the country; an end to the present chaos in traffic and transport; a brake on rising prices and a solution to our balance of payments problems.

    As the past 13 years have shown, none of these aims will be achieved by leaving the economy to look after itself. They will only be secured by a deliberate and massive effort to modernise the economy; to change its structure and to develop with all possible speed the advanced technology and the new science-based industries with which our future lies. In short, they will only be achieved by socialist planning." (Labour Manifesto)

    1964 Richard Hoggart founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. [See Norma Schulman's intellectual history]. Stuart Hall became Director in 1968.

    1965 to 1976. City of London bomb holes, and their Rosebay willow herb, disappeared beneath the concrete brutalist architecture of the Barbican Estate, which blocked the post-war vision of St Paul's Cathedral.

    1965 Complete Russian Course for Scientists by M. Beresford, University of Manchester, published. "Recent advances made by Soviet science and technology have placed Russian second only to English as a medium of disseminating scientific information" (page xv)

    1965 In France, theoreticians of the Communist Party, including Louis Althusser, thought hard about how to read Marx. Lire Le Capital was translated into English as Reading Capital by Ben Brewster in 1970 and was intensely studied in the mid-1970s.

    1965 Mary Morse's The Unattached (Penguin) popularised the concept of "detached youth" unconnected to youth clubs and similar social institutions.

    Under the direction of Pierre Bourdieu, a group of French sociologists published the results of their surveys into the social uses of photography. Un art moyen. Essais sur les usages sociaux de la photographie was translated into English in 1990 as Photography: A Middle-brow Art.

    January 1965: Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences founded. (Journal website)

    July 1965 Issue of UK Government Circular 10/65 "requesting" the introduction of a "comprehensive" system of education. Comprehensive is not specifically defined but it will be a system that will "end selection at eleven plus and to eliminate separatism in secondary education"

    Friday 13.8.1965 UK National Union of Students set up Endsleigh, an insurance company for students, named after Endsleigh Street in London where the union had its office from 1925 to 1983. Its founder, Mike Naylor, said at the time "It does not matter how long an applicant's hair is, how scruffy their anorak, or how floral the decoration of their car, we shall quote them competitive rates."
    From an 1978 brochure. My family shared accomodation, our income was irregular, and our medical history unhelpful,
    but through Endsleigh we were able to arrange household contents insurance, life assurance and a pension between 1979 and 1984.

    8.11.1965 "An Act to abolish capital punishment in the case of persons convicted in Great Britain of murder ..."

    1965 Department of Education and Science report of the Committee on Social Studies 1964-1965 Cmnd. 2660 107 pages.

    Statutory Instruments 1965 No. 2015: SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH: The Social Science Research Council Order 29.11.1965 - Coming into Operation 1.12.1965.

    The Social Science Research Council is established as a Research Council for purposes of the Science and Technology Act 1965. Objects:

    (a) To encourage and support by any means research in the social sciences by any other person or body.

    (b) Without prejudice to the foregoing paragraph, to provide and operate services for common use in carrying on such research.

    (c) To carry out research in the social sciences.

    (d) To make grants to students for post graduate instruction in the social sciences.

    (e) To provide advice and to disseminate knowledge concerning the social sciences.

    Social Science Research Council esatblished under Michael Young

    23.12.1965 to 30.11.1967 Roy Jenkins UK Home Secretary.

    1966 Two books by Peter Berger (the first written with Thomas Luckmann) used symbolic interactionist theory to make a sociology that felt human because it was centred on the construction of meanings by ordinary human beings, as distinct from social scientists. The first was called The Social Construction of Reality, the other Invitation to Sociology. A Humanistic Perspective. Berger and Luckmann's approach is called phenomenological sociology. The Social Construction of Reality became number 5 in the century's top 10

    Purity and Danger - An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo by Mary Douglas

    1966 Teach Yourself Sociology by Joseph Hayim Abraham "Head of Department of Social Sciences West Ham College of Technology. Abraham dismisses Talcott Parsons in one sentence as having "simply taken over the laws of force in physics, substituted motive for force, and claimed to have discovered the laws of human behaviour!" (p.52)

    7.4.1966 BBC "Frost report" comedy sketch on the British class system.
    I look down on them because I am upper class.

    I look up to him because he is upper class but I look down on him because he is lower class. I am middle class.

    I know my place.

    I get a feeling of superiority over them.

    I get a feeling of inferiority to him but a feeling of superiority over him.

    I get a pain in the back of my neck

    7.5.1966 "Life sentences on couple in moors case", The Times. Ian Brady (Ian Duncan Stewart, born 2.1.1938. Died 15.5.2017) and Myra Hindley (23.7.1942 - 15.11.2002) were convicted on 6.5.1965 at Chester Assizes of the murder of three children in 1964 and 1965. See The Guardian.

    August 1966: Howard Becker's presidential address to the Society for the Study of Social Problems: "Whose Side are We On?" argued that objective neutrality is not possible in sociology:

    "We must always look at the matter from someone's point of view. The scientist who proposes to understand society must, as Mead long ago pointed out, get into the situation enough to have a perspective on it"

    The paper was widely circulated in the 1970s. Becker spoke of a "hierarchy of credibility" favouring the perspectives of those with the highest social rank. Instead, new social scientists in the 1970s often chose to look at the world through the eyes of the deviant or lower ranks. (See Criminology for Criminals). It took less than thirty years for the criminals to become the police. Since the 1990s, or earlier, Becker's ideas have been taught as "research ethics".

    Summer 1966 Frankfurt: Prologue of Negative Dialectics signed by Theodor Adorno. In part three the book contains a section "After Auschwitz"

    October 1966 Guiness withdrew its "crazy clocks" (including the original in Battersea Park), sending them for scrap. (history)

    15.10.1966 Roundhouse, Camden Town opened as an Arts venue with the launch event for International Times -

    (history link - archive)

    Archive of International Times

    Juliet Mitchell's Women: the Longest Revolution (article) published in the November/December 1966 edition of New Left Review

    1966 Scholarship and the history of the behavioural sciences by Robert Young (History Today) reviewed the then histories of psychology.

    1967

    1967 A Sociology of English Religion by David Alfred Martin published by London by S.C.M,

    "The sociological study of religion in this country is still very much in its infancy. So much so, that Dr Martin's book would seem to be the only one of its kind currently available"

    For attitudes an beliefs drew on Puzzled People 1947

    January 1967 UK Social Science Research Council to make a grant of £33,000 to Essex Univesity to establish a SSRC Survey Data Bank.

    A two year feasability study led to an Inventory of Surveys being published in March 1967. Copies were available for purchase from the, Social and Economic Archive Cente, PEP, 12 Upper Belgrave Street, London, SW1. (Source: article by John Madge)

    40 years of the UK Data Archive

    January 1967 First issue of Sociology, the journal of the British Sociological Association.

    1967 In the spring, some Americans declared it would be a summer of love in San Francisco, spreading throughout the world. America

    In Britain paperback poetry books came out with psychedelic covers: "Love, Love, Love" (Corgi). In June 1967, television nearly went global (the communist countries pulled out) with a two hour programme simultaneously broadcast to 24 countries in which the Beatles unveiled a new song largely consisting of the words "All You Need is Love"

    1.7.1967 Article by François Châtelet in which he argued that structuralism did not have intellectual unity. He began the article by quoting Alain Badiou "Dans le monde instantané où les concepts se commercialisent, l'éclectisme est de règle", which, I think, means that in the world of instant soundbites, where concepts have to market themselves, eclecticism is the rule - So one would not expect intellectual unity. He identified Claude Levi-Strauss (reading, scientist, below), Jacques Lacan (crossed arms - psychoanalyst, below) , Roland Barthes (right, unconvinced, below). Michel Foucault (left, explaining, below), and Louis Althuser as different kinds of structuralist. Althuser is not shown on the cartoon by Maurice Henry that concluded the article.

    15.7.1967 to 30.7.1967 Roundhouse Congress (London) on the Dialectics of Liberation. Followed in 1968 by the Anti-University. Stokely Carmichael's talk on "Black Power" at the Congress included the distinction between "individual racism" and "institutional racism".

    24.7.1967 The poet Paul Celan met Martin Heidegger visiting him at Todtnauberg on 25.7.1967 External links The Boston Review - Another link gives the year as 1966. We do not know what the Holocaust survivor discussed with the philosopher who supported Hitler, but John Banville imagines it in a play (Todtnauberg) that also features Hannah Arendt, Gerhart Baumann, Karl Jaspers, Theodor Adorno, Edmund Husserl and Herbert Marcuse

    27.7.1967 Royal Assent for an Act that said (in England and Wales) "a homosexual act in private shall not be an offence provided that the parties consent thereto and have attained the age of twenty-one years".

    1967 Gregory Stone and Harvey Faberman published an article suggesting that Durkheim was moving towards the perspective of symbolic interaction

    1967 Desmond Morris The Naked Ape. A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal

    1967 Harold Garfinkel: Studies in Ethnomethodology
    A Sage "Master in Modern Social Thought"

    1968 "la naissance du lecteur doit être au coût de la mort de l'auteur"
    (the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author)
    Roland Barthes: (1915- 1980)
    A Sage "Master in Modern Social Thought"

    new word 1968: "Desk-top computers for use in homes... may be made possible for by an invention described today" (Daily Telegraph). This may refer to the development of medium scale integrated circuits leading to microchips. Personal desktop computers, cheap enough to use at home, did not arrive until the second half of the 1970s and the 1980s, and were not widely used until the 1990s.

    1968 SPSS "Statistical Package for the Social Sciences" developed by Norman Nie, Tex Hull and Dale Bent at Stanford University. This was used on mainframe (very large) computer systems kept in large air conditioned rooms, such as the one at Enfield College of Technology. Throughout the 1970s most researchers in Britain used variations of the Hollerith Punch Card system to input data. (Uprichard, Burrows and Byrne 2008). SPSS Statistics is now owned by IBM, who rent it to "business, government, research and academic" organisations for use on desktop computers.

    James D. Watson (1928- ) published The Double Helix in 1968 - A very personal and controversial account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. - (Penguin teacher's notes - offline). It became a popular best seller.

    permissive
    1968 Listener "This dreadful dilemma of the puritan in a permissive society"

    1968 Pedagogia do Oprimido by Brazilian writer Paulo Freire (1921-1997). Translated into English as Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1970


    1968 The World Health Organisation in Geneva published Wilson and Jungner Principles and practice of screening for disease. Available online. Recommended trials in screening for cancer of the uterus, glaucoma, mental illness, urinary infections, breast cancer, lung cancer, and high blood pressure. See Womens Institutes: 1951 - 1975

    Betty and her husband, jim, made "cumfies" to fill bras. Breast Cancer Care - Guardian obituary 1968 Betty Westgate, a 49 year old biology teacher, had a biopsy for a lump in the breast and was told she would be having a mastectomy. "When she asked a doctor about the operation, he reacted as though he could not understand her need to know."

    In 1968, breast cancer was not a subject that was discussed, in the wider world or with friends and family. Betty believed in shared support. "She helped to connect women who had a shared experience and she campaigned to make it a topic which could and should be discussed".

    In 1972 she founded Cancer Education Voluntary Service, offering a talk called "Lumps and Bumps" to groups. She founded the Mastectomy Association on 24.12.1973. This became the Breast Care and Mastectomy Association of Great Britain in 1987 and Breast Cancer Care in 1994.


    Paperback versions of Goffman's Asylums and Stigma published as Pelicans by Penguin Books. Cover designs by Briggs and McLaren, the design firm established by Ken Briggs and Ian McLaren, both of whom were signatories to the First Things First manifesto.


    1968 The Maytals (later Toots and Maytals) released "Do the Reggay" in Jamaica and the UK.

    In 1969, Frank Bangay was interested in Progressive Rock, but also "liked the black music of that time, including the Ska/Reggae that came from Jamaica. At the same time I held the prejudice/fear that a lot of people had towards the Caribbean families who were moving into the area that I lived in."

    In the early 1980s, after the Brixton riots, Galaxy FM combined soca and reggae music with black empowerment.


    February 1968: Anti-University started in London. It had collapsed by 1969 but an anti-psychiatry group continued to meet in a member's flat

    10.3.1968 Sunday Times p.52: " Structuralism is a technique for analysing any kind of symbolic system. Its break with the past consists in refusing to take note of the appropriateness of symbols for the things they symbolise." (Oxford English Dictionary) - See 1958

    March 1968 Numéro one of Population and Sociétés

    4.4.1968 Martin Luther King assassinated. America

    20.4.1968 Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech (See Stuart Hall). Ian Birchall 18.12.2013: "one of the lessons of history is that things sometimes change very rapidly and unexpectedly. I remember April 1968 - the Powell speech and workers striking and demonstrating in his support, and how gloomy and depressed we all felt. Then came the French May and seven years leading up to the Portuguese revolution, when revolutionary change did seem on the agenda." (Ian Birchall on 18 December, 2013 at 9:13 pm)

    May 1968: Paris student rising. Thursday 2.5.1968 University of Paris at Nanterre closed. Friday 3.5.1968 Students meet at the Sorbonne to protest.

    Foucault reflects on intellectual influence "The first think that happened after '68 was that Marxism as a dogmatic framework declined and new political, new cultural interests concerning personal life appeared."

    De Beauvoir 1975: Each section of participants was to take its own business in hand.

    Wikipedia - Gestetner Revolution

    August 1968 First Time Out issued (1/-) London. Just a folded listings, not yet a radical magazine.

    Sunday 11.8.1968: Last day of steam on British Rail

    Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia

    1968 Richard Hoggart moved to a post at UNESCO and Stuart Hall became Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Until 1979) - Wikipedia. Norma Schulman speaks of a "turn toward Marxism, roughly coinciding" with the change from Hogart to Hall as Director. "Classical marxist theory was incorporated - progressively modified" by "key concepts (like ideology and hegemony) from neo-Marxists thinkers like Althusser and Gramsci". The "Race and Politics Group" started in autumn 1978.

    1969

    "A recent investigation by the British Sociological Association revealed that the most rapidly expanding sociological specialism is education .... As a first step towards a 'Fairer Society'" it is suggested we see "what will happen to one variable (the class system) when we manipulate another (the educational system." (Ford, J. 1969, p.vii)

    Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel; with Dominique Schnapper published the results of their surveys into the use of European Art Museums by different publics.

    L'amour de l'art. Les musées d' art et leur public was translated into English in 1997 as The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public.

    La Société Post-industrielle: Naissance d'une société by Alain Touraine was published in Paris in 1969. "A new society is developing before our very eyes which is different from all those that have gone before. This society is a post-industrial society in which all social relations are profoundly changed." [It's late]

    1969 The Université de Vincennes à Saint-Denis was founded in 1969 as a direct response to events of May 1968. [See Wikipedia]. Michel Foucault was appointed as head of its philosophy department in December. He suggested the appointment of Gilles Deleuze.

    1969 Corgi paperback edition of The Other Victorians: A study of sexuality and pornography in mid-nineteenth century England by Steven Marcus. This was first published in hardback in 1966 (USA) and 1967 (UK).

    Michel Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité 1 - La Volonté de savoir (1976) is a, in part, a discourse with this book. Foucault presents the Victorians as creating a science of sex and this "will to know" as being the reality underlying the sexual repression and liberation.

    1969 Ralph Miliband's The State in Capitalist Society dedicated to "the memory of C. Wright Mills"

    March 1969 "Fight for Education" edited by Charles Brian Cox and A.E. Dyson (The Black Paper) from right wing critics of the Comprehensive school. It was followed by left wing attack by Julienne Ford in Social Class and the Comprehensive School

    19.4.1969 One-day inaugural meeting of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS) held at the Royal Society. Maurice Wilkins spoke of a "crisis in science today". [Presumably a crisis of social responsibility?]. BSSRS Newssheet ran for 17 issues before enlarging to become Science for People in Autumn 1972. Issue 70 (the last) appeared in the Autumn of 1989. See archive website

    Spring 1969: Sheila Rowbotham's Women's Liberation and the New Politics (Mayday Manifesto pamphlet 4, 2/6) contained the germ of her Hidden from History. 300 Years of Woman's Oppression and the Fight Against It (1973) in its emphasis on "breaking the silence". Hidden from History recognises the previous work of historians such as Mary Beard, but attempts a class conscious analysis of women's history. The publication of Hidden from History was important for the development of women's history studies, much of which took place outside the universities in Workers Educational Association and similar groups.

    1969 Roger Jowell and Gerald Hoinville founded Social and Community Planning Research (SCPR). This started the British Social Attitudes survey, in 1983. (source)

    20.7.1969 Men on the moon. See Wikipedia. The NASA moon landing was considered the "Greatest TV moment" in a 2001 poll.

    1.9.1969: The first "Interface Message Processor" was installed at the University of California, Los Angeles "about" this day. By the end of the year four defense research sites were connected to "ARPANet" (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) and the first email message had been sent from Los Angeles to Stanford. This was all part of the Cold War: the USA Military wanted a bomb-proof communication system. Out of it was born the internet

    1970

    1970 Introducing Sociology published by Penguin. Editors Peter Worsley, Frank Bechhofer, Richard Brown, Margot Jeffreys, Mary McIntosh; and Howard Newby. Subsequent editions (1973, 1977, 1979) sold over half a million copies. Jeffrey Henderson (2013) said that its displaced as an introductory textbook by Anthony Giddens Sociology in the early 1990s. Note Henderson's other comment that Worsley was "highly critical of what he saw as attempts, first emerging in the 1970s, to undermine structural forms of analysis in sociology, including its relation to political economy"

    1970: The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy "Richard M. Titmuss on his social philosophy"

    Titmuss found that both the quality and quantity of blood for transfusion in the United Kingdom, donated freely, were higher than in the United States, where most blood at the time was paid for. The gift relationship could be more efficient than the market. There is a rational case for socialism.

    1970 Carole Pateman Participation and Democratic Theory

    "During the last few years of the 1960s the word 'participation' became part of the popular political vocabulary."

    "... for a democratic polity to exist it is necessary for a participatory society to exist ... in all areas... The most important area is industry." (page 43)

    new terms 1970:

    microprocessor

    word processor and word processing used by the ITEL Corporation in the USA. The Computer History Museum classifies the ITEL Word Processor - Operating manual under "Typewriter, electric" - See minicomputer 1975 and word processing in 1980 and 1992

    permissive
    1970 Germaine Greer "The permissive society has done much to neutraise sexual drives by containing them"

    1970 Graham Ovenden's art photography of "five girls", including "Little Lorraine". The photographs were presented to the Tate by Waddington Galleries through the Institute of Contemporary Prints in 1975. See Graham Ovenden 2009

    1970 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron La Reproduction. [Presenting the theoretical synthesis of research first published in 1964 in the book Les héritiers. Les étudiants et la culture.]

    From empirical work on school reports, the everyday and the University use of language, and on economic and symbolic effects, it builds a general theory of the action of symbolic violence and the social mechanisms that conceal this violence.

    January 1970 Tessa Fothergill (Raga Woods) wrote about "Gingerbread", her mutual support group for unsupported parents in the new magazine Time Out

    27.2.1970 Around 500 women came together for the first UK Women's Liberation Conference which was held at Ruskin College in Oxford. [BBC Woman's Hour item]

    7.3.1970 to 8.3.1970 "Combat Bourgeois Psychology". "Anti-academic conference" at Keele University organised by Keith Paton of 21 Victoria Street, Basford, Stoke-on-Trent. It was hoped that "a later weekend" would "write a pamphlet on academic psychology and its uses in capitalism". (The Black Dwarf 20.2.1970). About 200 people attended and one of the outcomes was the launch of "Red Rat: The Journal of Abnormal Psychology". Keith Paton (8.5.1948 to 3.7.2009) changed his name to Keith Mothersson in the late 1970s. (Peace News obituary) See Politics of Psychology Conference 1971 - Rat Myth and Magic 1972 - British Psychological Society April 1973

    Sunday 5.4.1970 to Saturday 11.4.1970 birth of 17,198 babies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They became the subjects of the third cohort study in Britain (but the first to include Northern Ireland). First known (illogically) as the British Births Survey. Now as the 1970 British Cohort Study. "After the initial birth survey, Northern Irish participants were dropped from the sample".

    7.4.1970 to 10.4.1970 Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association held at the University of Durham on the theme The sociology of education. Papers included one by Pierre Bourdieu on "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction"

    May 1970 UK(?) General Register Office and Government Social Survey Department merged in The Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS), The director of OPCS was also Registrar-General for England and Wales.

    29.5.1970 Royal assent (Great Britain) for "An Act to prevent discrimination, as regards terms and conditions of employment, between men and women." The Act did not come into force until 29.12.1975 (section 9)

    Thursday 18.6.1970 United Kingdom election. Unexpected Conservative Victory under Edward Heath. - manifestos link (archive). Margaret Thatcher, Secretary of State for Education and Science in the new government, attracted the "maximum of political odium" (her words) for removing free- school milk for older children.

    1971

    1971 Mental Health Statistics

    Ronald Fletcher published two volumes of The Making of Sociology, his history of sociological theory. He saw a unity in sociology as a science, in contrast to the dominant spirit of the times which set theory against theory as irreconcilable opposites. It has been argued that the United Kingdom perception of Sociology as dominated by three classic thinkers (Marx, Weber and Durkheim) does not pre-date Anthony Giddens' 1971 Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber. Compare Raymond Aron's Main Currents in Sociological Thought (Penguin paperback 1967)

    Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex argued America

    "that the natural reproductive difference between the sexes led directly to the first division of labour based on sex, which is at the origins of all further division into economic and cultural classes and is possibly even at the root of all caste (discrimination based on sex and other biologically determined characteristics such as race, age, etc)" (Firestone, S. 1970 p. 9)

    Firestone's chart of Engels' overview of history is used to provide a model for her own theory of biological materialism. Her book includes an analogous chart showing the development of "sex" (caste), "class" (production - division of labour) and "culture" according to Engels and her theory.

    permissive
    1971 Daily Telegraph "perhaps it is time... for Parliament to have another look at the whole subject of abortion, family planning and perhaps permissiveness in general"

    "feminism, permissiveness, pornography and environmentalism were transforming the lives of millions" (publisher's blurb for State of Emergency ... Britain 1970-1974/ by Dominic Sandbrook

    January 1971 First 25,000 students enrolled for four multi- disciplinary foundation courses in the arts, social sciences, science or mathematics at the UK's new Open University See history of the OU. From 1979 to 1989, Joan Hughes was able to spend ten years completing a degree in technology and social science subjects.

    12.1.1971 Angry Brigade bombs went off outside the house of Robert Carr, UK Secretary of State for Employment. Robert Carr spoke of an "uncomfortable streak of violence" running throughout the world.

    Thursday 11.2.1971 to Monday 15.2.1971 UK banks closed for decimalisation. Decimal currency: 2p, 1p + ½p introduced. We already had 50p, which had replaced the 10 shilling note; 10p, which had replace the 2 shilling piece; and 5p, which had replaced the shilling. Shops had 18 months to convert and both systems of currency were legal for these 18 months. All our pennies became antiques and we no longer carried 130 years of history in our pockets.

    February 1971 The "environment reporter" of The Times reviewed The Environmental Handbook by John Barr as "a good 40p's worth for all do-it-yourself environmentalists". He quoted its message: "Be as subversive, clever, radical, yet constructive as you possibly can".

    18.3.1971 David Glass elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work as a demographer. "His election would revive a practice that dates from the earliest days of the Society." (Citation)

    Sunday 25.4.1971/Monday 26.4.1971: Seventeenth British Census
    Population of England and Wales: 49,152,000; Scotland: 5,236,000

    The 1971 UK Census was amongst the first data sets to be made available on magnetic data tapes. These had to be mounted on large tape readers. [I think the implication is that the data could be fed into a computer] (Uprichard, Burrows and Byrne 2008)

    The Office for National Statistics' Longitudinal Study of England and Wales drew its first sample from the 1971 census data. (source)

    10.5.1971 a new group calling itself Friends of the Earth left 1,500 non-returnable Schweppes bottles on the front steps of the company's London office in Connaught Place, London, W2 in a protest aimed at promoting recycling.

    A Guardian retrospect says they were "protesting against bottles being dumped in the countryside"

    25.6.1971 - 6.7.1971 Berlin International Film Festival. First showing of W.R. - Misterije organizma (Polish) by Dusan Makavejev, later shown with English sub-titles as WR: Mysteries of the Organism [W.R. being Wilhelm Reich]

    Tuesday 27.9.1971 Politics of Psychology Conference. London School of Economics. "... an attempt to found a movement... an opportunity to learn from each other ... with a view to countering actively the ideology and power of Establishment Psychology". [See Combat Bourgeois Psychology 1970]

    November 1971 Dutch television transmitted a dialogue between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, moderated by Phons Elders. It was one in a series of encounters organised by the International Philosophers Project.

    21.12.1971 La création de Médecins Sans Frontières

    5.10.1971 to 16.12.1971 Trail of nine people connected with the Mangrove Restaurant in Ladbroke Grove and a march on 9.8.1970 protesting against police raids on the restaurant. Events described by Michael La Rose as "the beginning of the Black community's organised response to the problems of the police and courts in Britain."

    October 1971 to May 1972 Murders and bombings by Red Army Faction (Baader Meinhof) in West Germany.

    1972

    1972 Archie Cochrane (1909 - 1988) a British epidemiologist, wrote "Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services" - Start of Cochrane Hierarchy of Evidence. (source) See Pete Fleischmann

    Alvin Gouldner's The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology published in Britain. Some sociology courses adopted it as their main text. Students were expected to evaluate the criticism without any experience of the subject criticised. America

    Women's Report - A Bimonthly Feminist News Magazine 1972 to 1979. 20p a copy. Women's Report Collective, London

    Elaine Morgan (born 1920) The Descent of Woman
    [External link - David Attenborough's radio programmes on the theory]

    1972 Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It is the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia , the second volume of which is A Thousand Plateaus (1980). See David Amery 2013

    new word: environmentalism

    February 1972 UK Power Cuts in miners' strike

    10.4.1972 About 80 people attended a preliminary meeting in Hackney Town Hall about reviving Hackney Workers' Educational Association after "years of inactivity". The WEA had drained away from the inner cities to the suburbs. This new inner city WEA was to be different, with radical political ideas and democratic classes without as clear a division between tutor and class as was normal. "Women's Studies, Hackney people's history, local government legislation, writers' workshops, mental health care and 'alternative strategies' became recurring themes. (10th anniversary leaflet) - See 1978 - 1981 - 1989

    29.6.1972 UK Secretary of State for Social Services, Keith Joseph, gave a speech at a conference organised by the Pre-school Playgroups Association in which he argued that families transmit disadvantage in a "cycle of deprivation", despite the egalitarian influence of the welfare state.

    17.8.1972: mugging

    26.8.1972 to 11,9.1972. Second Berlin Olympics (See first) On 5.9.1972 nine Israeli athletes were taken hostage, and later killed, by Palestinian gunmen.

    21.12.1973 In a New Scientist article (online), Cecil Leonard Boltz (1900 -) describe semi-conductors as the "Invention of the Century". "There has not been a technological invention with such a profound impact on society since Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831. The point-contact transiator and its succesor, the junction transistor, ushered in the communications era that is now re- ordering the lives of millions"

    The first edition of "Rat Myth and Magic: a political critique of psychology" (64 pages at 24p) was published late in 1972. It argued that "psychology is involved in the upholding of power relationships" and also that the "authority of print needs to be challenged" by do it yourself publishing. Nigel Armistead provided the introductory and concluding critique and John Rowan wrote on Humanistic Psychology and Personality. Both were editors of the new "Humpty Dumpty" magazine that aimed to topple Humpty Dumpty from his wall.

    1973

    The New Criminology by Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young, set out a specifically social theory of deviance, developed after an analysis of criminology since the 18th century. Particular attention was paid to the theories of Robert King Merton and Friedrich Engels.

    1973: Daniel Bell's first edition (see 1999) of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. [It's late]. Other works by Daniel Bell include The End of Ideology in 1960 and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism in 1975 America
    See also postmodern (1979) and post Fordism (1988)

    By the 1970s the term women's studies related not to domestic subjects but to reflecting on why women were themselves domestic subjects and how that could be changed

    Women's studies Begining mostly in adult education (outside formal curiculums) with titles like "Families, Society and Women's Lives". "A feature of the first courses we taught, about six years ago, was that material was... scarce... Today" [1979) "... Books, pamphlets and articles have proliferated" ( Bristol Women's Studies Group 1979/1984 pages 6-7)

    The London Feminist History Group began meeting in 1973. (source)

    21.6.1973 First meeting of Virago Press source Picture Virago 1973: (left to right) Harriet Spicer, Carmen Callil, Ursula Owen

    Peace studies

    In 1973, a "Peace Studies" department was established at Bradford University, with the support of Quakers.

    The library of David Hoggett (1929-1975), became the core of the "Commonweal Collection" at Bradford University, after his death.

    1.9.1973 The Centre for Alternative Technology opened in a disused slate quarry in Machynlleth, Powys, mid-Wales, by the eccentric entrepreneur Gerard Morgan-Grenville. (Wikipedia)

    From student revolt to archaeological revolution
       
    1973 John Morton Coles Archaeology by Experiment. February 1973 Student sit-in in support of Faculty Reform at Cambridge University. A proposal to reconstruct an Anglo-Saxon house as part of the protest led, after discussions, to students forming the "West Stow Experimental Archaeology Group", renamed "West Stow Environmental Archaeology Group", to construct the first experimental reconstruction (SFB 21) of the West Stow site

    Source: The History of West Stow Manor, West Stow Heath and Anglo-Saxon Village Site - internet archive

    Thursday 5.4.1973 to Monday 9.4.1973 British Psychological Society conference in Liverpool. Humpty Dumpty refused permission to sell on a stall. The President for that year, psychiatrist Max Hamilton, criticised some behaviour therapists and "unscientific" clinical psychologists, encounter groups and politically-minded critics, using material from Rat Myth and Magic for illustration.

    October 1973: Economic crisis and cuts
    "The majority of historians argue that the first oil crisis and the collapse of the 'Bretton Woods system' in 1973 can be used as the date when a deep structural break marked the end of a "golden age" and the prolonged post-war boom. Eric Hobsbawm pronounces it distinctly: 'The history of the twenty years after 1973 is that of a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis.' Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century. 1914-1991 (London 1994), p. 403. (Source)

    The market value of shares on the London Stock Exchange was shaky from 1973 to 1976. It then rose steadily until 1989. 1984 was the year the
    FTSE index was introduced. (Source: London Stock Exchange Historical Statistics)

    1974

    1974 Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism. A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis [See brief description]

    1974 Approaches to Sociology. An introduction to major trends in British sociology edited by John Rex. Contributions from twelve academics, eleven connected to a "university" and one to a "polytechnic".

    1974 As it happens - Jimmy Savile, O.B.E.: his autobiography

    28.2.1974 United Kingdom General Election. Labour returned to power - manifestos link (archive) - Wikipedia on Labour Party

    25.4.1974 Start of the Portuguese Revolution that ended the dictatorship.

    10.10.1974: New Society "The Coming Corporatism" by R. E. Pahl and Jack Winkler.

    21.11,1974 Birmingham (England) pub bombings, killing 21 people and injuring 182.

    1975

    Minicomputer for hobbyists

    See:

    Computable Numbers 1935

    monster computers 1960s

    Desktop 1968

    Chips with everything 1978

    The Altair 8800 Minicomputer designed by Ed Roberts and sold in large numbers to people practising electronics as a hobby. At first, switches entered code and lights lit as it was played. All one could do with the machine was make programs to make the lights blink. During the year, Bill Gates wrote the first programming language for the machine (BASIC). This was loaded from paper tapes. Michael Shrayer bought and assembled one of these kits and wrote software to use on it. He created a programme that allowed him to use the computer, instead of a typewriter, to write documentation for his first program. This was the first word processor for home computers, and was sold as "Electric Pencil" from December 1976,

    1975 Paradigms and Fairy Tales by Julienne Ford used the idea that theories are like fairy tales ... (more)

    1975 In France, Michel Foucault's Surveiller et Punir: Naisance de la Prison (1975) explored the joint genesis of institutions and social structure in the all seeing eye. This was translated in English in 1977 as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . See surveillance

    1975 "Paedophile Information Exchange" affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties. In 1976 the Council lobbied Parliament for the age of consent to be lowered. See Sheffield 1977.

    1975 The National Federation of Women's Institutes started informing members about the importance of breast examination and lobbying the government to set up screening clinics. After the Forrest report in 1986, a national screening programme was eventually introduced in 1988.

    From 1975 to 1981 David Martin was chair of the newly formed Sociology of Religion Study Group of the British Sociological Association. Its founder was Jim Beckford (Convennor), who succeeded Martin as chair in 1981. Eileen Barker succeeded Jim Beckford.

    6.4.1975 Interviewed on television about The Second Sex by Jean Louis Servan Schreiber for his programme questionnaire, Simone De Beauvoir reveled that many communists spat on the book. An interview with De Beauvoir by John Gerassi was published in Society in January February 1976.

    Academic social theory had become a heated political issue. This advertisement from the September 1975 edition of Spare Rib demonstrates why some commentators were to describe developments in social science as an attack on higher education. It says

    Study Sociology ... the philosophical and historical background to marxism and sociology, the roots of racism and sexism, revolutionary movements and the dynamics of domination in the third world"

    The advertisement was found in the archives of Spare Rib by Emma Dowling in May 2015. It is reproduced without permission.

    1.10.1975 "The End of 6,000 Years of Man-Rule Approaches - What Has Been Accomplished?" The Watchtower. "Since a new Jewish lunar year began in September 1975 a significant point in human history was reached. What was that? According to the Bible's count of time, mankind then completed 6,000 years of existence on earth." [On the basis that Adam was created in the Autumn of 4026BC. Some said the end was due on 5.9.1975] It was not clear if this meant "Christ's millennial Kingdom rule" was due or not. Large numbers of Jehovah's Witnesses had been expecting he end of the world. See Colin Hambrook

    29.12.1975 In Britain, the Equal Pay Act of 1970 came into force. Before this, it was legal to have different pay scales for men and women.

    1976

    National Council for Civil Liberties evidence to the Criminal Law Revision Committee: "Childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage. The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage." (Damian Thompson, The Telegraph 19.10.2012)

    1976 Penguin edition of Ann Oakley's Housewife (1974) published. The cover design, by Paul McAlinden, was based on an Omo packet. The blurb said

    "Roughly 85 per cent of all women in Britain are housewives, who spend between 3000 to 4000 hours a year doing housework... she is always female; usually financially dependent; she is classed as economically non- productive.."

    1976 "Plastics in its great variety of forms becomes the most used type of material in the world" (British Plastics Federation)

    January 1976 Alternative Corporate Plan for the future of Lucas Aerospace (UK) published by workers after Lucas announced loss of thousands of jobs because of industrial restructuring, international competition and technological change. The workers made the case for socially useful production instead of redundancy. Shop stewards started a general campaign for socially useful production. They wanted to "inflame the imaginations of others" and demonstrate the "creative power of 'ordinary people'" (Mike Cooley). Lucas workers organised road-shows, teach-ins, and created a Centre for Alternative Industrial and Technological Systems (CAITS) at North-East London Polytechnic. (See Adrian Smith The Guardian and Socially Useful Production 2014)

    Spring 1976 Radical Statistics newsletter one. "The Radical Statistics Group, usually abbreviated to Radstats, was formed in 1975 as part of the radical science movement associated with the establishment of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS)". - Link to website

    mid-June to the end of August 1986 Hot, dry, sunny weather in the United Kingdom. The summer of 1976. See Met Office

    Summer 1976 Start of the "Grunwick picket line" in which low paid workers, mostly women and mostly Asians, tried to assert a right to be trade union menbers. "These were the heady days of the Communist University of London where you could go on the Grunwick picket line at 6am then give a lecture on semiotics at 10 (what nostalgia!)" (Diana Rose email 19.8.2009) - See wikipedia

    22.11.1976 Royal Assent to the UK Race Relations Act 1976 (cap.74)

    1976 The medical collection of Henry Wellcome was transferred on permanent loan from the Wellcome Trust to the Science Museum. This stimulated the opening of two galleries on the history of medicine, in December 1980 and December 1980. "We changed from a museum of the physical sciences and of technology, to one that also embraced medicine and biomedical research". (museum blog)

    December 1976 The new Museum of London opened as part of the Barbican Estate. Galleries were laid out so that there was only one route through the museum - from the prehistoric period to the modern galleries. See life of Colin Sorensen,

    1977

    A group of right wing (Conservative) social theorists published The Attack on Higher Education. Marxist and Radical Penetration, surveying and criticising the contribution of left wingers to social theory during the 1960s and 1970s. Academic social theory had become a heated political issue. The next decade was to see a move away from socially critical and collectivist theories towards conservative and free market theories.

    There was a revival in the ideas of Adam Smith. The Adam Smith Institute (weblink) was founded in the USA in 1977 and in the United Kingdom in 1981. The ideals identified in Smith's work were "the importance of free markets, fair competition, and limited government". It promoted the 'privatisation' of socially owned assets.

    1977 Terrorism and the Liberal State by Paul Wilkinson, published London. Examples of "terrorism" from activities of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation), IRA (Irish Republican Army), The Angry Brigade (UK), Baader Meinhof (West Germany) and some USSR State activities.

    27.5.1977 release of Sex Pistols single "God save the queen - She ain't no human being - And there's no future -In England's dreaming". Jubilee Bank Holiday Monday was on 6.6.1977

    Summer 1977 First published short story of William Gibson, who later coined the term Cyberspace

    "When I started to write science fiction, the intelligent and informed position on humanity's future was that it wasn't going to have one at all. We've forgotten that a whole lot of smart people used to wake up every day thinking that that day could well be the day the world ended" (William Gibson 2007 [See Ulrich Beck 1986 threat of self-destruction of all life on Earth]

    Monday 19.9.1977 Meeting of the "Paedophile Information Exchange" at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London. 20th Century Words: "paedophile (1951) someone who is sexually attracted to young children. A derivative of paedophilia (1906).... it began to emerge into the public domain in the 1970s...
    See subject index child abuse and dictionary entry for (adult) sex with children
    See indecent assaults on children 1923 - 1983 PIE Interview

    1978

    The UK Social Research Association was founded in 1978 "by social researchers to advance the conduct, development and application of social research". (website)

    When Dave Davies proposed a course on microchips to Hackney Workers Educational Association, in 1978, I and other members did not know what they were. Micro Chips: Silicon Electronics and Society six fortnightly meetings with speakers in October, November and December. Part of the publicity read

    "Microchips, as the new generation of very small computers are called, have recently become a major talking point...What will the impact be on our jobs, the way we do them? Which industries are threatened by the most dramatic changes? What difference will it make to us as consumers? Already we have electronic watches, calculators and TV 'Games', and this is only the start."

    As a social science, Psychology usually argues that it is scientific because its theories are empirically testable. Its roots include John Stuart Mill's speculations that testing is possible and Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory.
    Small "personal" computers, based on the microchips, made it possible to computerise the teaching of experimental psychology. At Middlesex Polytechnic the decision to do this was taken in 1978. They used South West Technical 6800 computers using 6502 (Intel) chips. They had a text editor, which meant you had to put in command lines.

    The first electronic spreadsheets appeared in 1978. Spreadsheets led to computers being adopted widely by business.

    1978 Genetically engineered human insulin (marketed 1982). In genetic engineering genes are moved from one kind of organism into the DNA of another.

    Aya set in the Ivory Coast of 1978. Based on Marguerite Abouet's memories of childhood in Abidjan, where she was born in 1971. Aged twelve, she was sent to study in France. Aya is nineteen.

    "...the story, along with French illustrator Oubrerie's artwork, brings to life an Ivory Coast ... overflowing with vibrant, rich textiles, new words, music, food, and lively characters filled with humor, love, and the hope for a better life." Library Journal. Published (French) 20.11.2005. Became part of the graphic novel series Aya De Yopougon, translated into English as Aya of Yop City

    March and April 1978 BBC Radio 4 broadcast the first six episodes of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "Probably the oddest thing in the universe" is the "Babel fish" which, "if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language". The internet Babel Fish began appearing in people's ears in 2002. Adams created the computer game Bureaucracy in 1987.

    July 1978 UK White Paper "1981 Census of Population" (Cmnd. 7146) said "In order to carry out their responsibilities under the Race Relations Act, and in developing effective social policies, the Government and Local Authorities need to know how the family structure, housing, education, employment and unemployment of the ethnic minorities compare with the conditions of the population as a whole". (quoted by Heather Booth, Radical Statistics February 1979)

    Autumn 1978 Race and Politics Group established at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies under Stuart Hall. After three years research, work from the group was published as The Empire Strikes Back in 1982

    1978 USA Film Blacks Britannica

    1979

    Talcot Parsons died

    1979 Peter Townsend's massive Poverty in the United Kingdom. A Survey of Household Resources and Standards of Living published by Penguin.

    Jean-François Lyotard: La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir Paris. Translated into English in 1984 as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [It's late]
    A Sage "Master in Modern Social Thought"

    Pierre Bourdieu La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, which was translated into English as Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste in 1984. [See dictionary Distinction] This became number 6 in the century's top 10. (But see Cultural Sociology) Power defines taste. "the working-class 'aesthetic' is a dominated 'aesthetic' which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics"

    1.2.1979 Imam Khomeini returned to Iran after the fall of the Shah. Iran became an islamic state under clerical rule

    21.4.1979 "I believe there is a place for corporal punishment....there is a place in law for a good hiding." Cyril Smith (MP from 1972 to 1992) in the Rochdale Observer. See Rochdale Alternative Press - "The Strange Case of Smith the Man" May 1979 . 22.4.1979 "Its not a very friendly gesture, publishing that, all he seems to have done is spank a few bare bottoms." David Steel's Press Office. [In 2014 David Steel said this would have been the Liberal Party Press Office. He also said "We have to remember that this was a different era. Corporal punishment was permitted. It would be totally illegal now, there is no question he would be up for assault now. In those days it went on." (BBC Tuesday 29.4.2014)]

    See 1993/1994

    re-structuring society:   chips   reaganomics   perestroika   global web

    Thatcherism

    3.5.1979 Conservatives won the General Election in the United Kingdom - (manifestos link) (archive) - Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister with an agenda to "role back the frontiers of the state". In 1968, the marxist historian Ralph Miliband had written

    "More than ever before men now live in the shadow of the state. What they want to achieve, individually or in groups, now mainly depends on the state's sanction and support."
    Traditional Conservatives had often been associated with this expansion of the state's influence. But, under Margaret Thatcher, "true Conservatism" was seen as the restriction of collectivism and the encouragement of private enterprise.

    October 1979 "Thatcherism: Breaking out of the Impasse" by Martin Jacques in Marxism Today. This and other articles up to January 1983 formed the core of The Politics of Thatcherism published in 1983.

    A new word emerging: 24.11.1979 Times "... Thatcherism, with its simple monetarist policies" ... Alternatives to... 11.8.1982 "At heart, Thatcherism is a liberal economic reaction to the collectivism and corporatism of the past 40 years."

    November 1979 Endsleigh arranged life assurance with Sun Life for my wife and me. It was a "with profits" policy so our first participation on the fortunes of the stock market. Bonuses rose year by year, peaking in 1989.

    1980

    20th Century Words records the term Enterprise Culture from 1980 An enterprise culture is a free-market economy that encourages financial self-reliance, entrepreneurial activity and risk-taking. [See Enterprise Allowance]

    about 1980 Galaxy FM pirate radio, based in Peckham, South London, UK. See Londons Underground pirates 3.1.2002 - galaxy afiwe about 30.7.2015 - Wikipedia on pirate radio in the UK - Philip Morgan

    January 1980 Michael Haralambos signed the preface to the first edition of Sociology - Themes and Perspectives a textbook aimed at GCE Advanced level students, which he had begun to research in 1975. "At that time there were sociology books for undergraduates, but none specifically targeted at school, sixth-form and further education college students" (Simon Midgley Guardian Education 10.3.1998, p.13

    18.3.1980 Death of Erich Fromm (1900-1980) (external link)

    25.3.1980 Roland Barthes died aged 64. He was born 12.11.1915.

    29.4.1980 House of Commons debate on why there would be no ethnicity question in the 1981 census

    25.8.1980 August Bank Holiday in England Wales and Northern Ireland. UK Government issued 260 copies of Inequalities in Health: Report of a Research Working Group DHSS 1980. A popular abridged edition, edited by Peter Townsend and Nick Davison, was published by Penguin in 1982. The full text of the report was published online in 2005 in connection with a 25 year anniversary conference.

    In December 1980, New Scientist explained that word processors were "computerised typewriters displaying typed words on screens". Some were "stand-alone" machines. Others, like Wordplex, were groups of machines that shared a central control unit. It said that there were 15,000 "screen-based word processors" in Britain. A stand-alone machine from Automatic Electronic Systems (AES) cost £7,000, which was 15 per cent less than a year before.

    1981

    1981 Midnight's Children A novel by Salman Rushdie about Saleem Sinai and the other 1000 babies born in the 'magic' hour after Indian independence on 15.8.1947

    1981 Mass Observation revived (website)

    Sunday 5.4.1981/Monday 6.4.1981: Eighteenth British Census
    Population of England and Wales: 49,634,000; Scotland: 5,180,000

    A proposed question on ethnicity was not included in the 1981 census because of very high nonresponse in the 1979 Test Census, believed to have been due to a fear that the information might be used to deport people. (Bulmer, M. 1986 "A controversial census topic: race and ethnicity in the British Census", Journal of Official Statistics, 2(4): pp 471-480.) See 1991 census

    Saturday 11.4.1981 "Swamp 81" against black crime in Brixton began. Serious riot followed. Start of the "worst civil unrest seen on British streets this century." During the summer the rioting spread to Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. (Quote from 1998 BBC2 Windrush documentaries). - See Jock Young 2011

    Alternatives Early in 1981, Lawrence and Wishart published The Road from Thatcherism - The Alternative Economic Strategy by Sam Aaronovitch (137 pages). In April 1981, "following on from" this, Sheila Rowbotham proposed to the Hackney Workers' Educational Association a series of classes on "Alternatives to Everything". Everything could include day care for children and housing. People were asked to write to Sheila with ideas. The course ran in the autumn and spring of 1981/1982.

    13.11.1981 Conservative Government first announced its " Enterprise Allowance" scheme, which was piloted between January 1982 and July 1983 and fully introduced in 1983. Under the scheme, unemployed people could receive a guaranteed income of £40 a week, for a year, if they produced a basic business plan and funded the first £1000 out of their own funds.

    25.11.1981 Publication of the Scarman Report "into the serious disorder in Brixton on 10-12 April 1981" with recommendations. (Wikipedia)

    Jürgen Habermas' Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (The Theory of Communicative Action) This became number 8 in the century's top 10

    Modelled on Parsons' The Structure of Social Action. Habermas reviews the theories of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Mead, Parsons, Adorno and others and uses aspects of them to present his own theory of action. For Habermas the core of any action is communication and the central problem of contemporary societies is how to create conditions for communicative action. (Arthur W. Frank)

    See Wikipedia article on communicative rationality. Habermas argues that reason is in the quality of our discourse, not a method of finding absolute truth. In 1998, a web page for tolerance of diverse perspectives called itself Dear Habermas.

    Habermas seeks to show how "issues raised by critical theory in the 1930s can be made relevant today under different circumstances"

    Reflections on new social movements An article by Habermas on "New Social Movements", from The Theory of Communicative Action was published in Telos in the Autumn of 1981 and Claus Offe explained what is "new" about them in an interview in 1982

    Computing 1981

    5.3.1981 Launch of Sinclair ZX81 as a low-cost introduction to home computing for the general public.

    Extracts from Peter Rodwell (Editor of Personal Computer World) "Everything You Want to Know About Personal Computers". Written and published Autumn 1981).

    "Many schools now have their own microcomputers... more and more companies are buying them... Like me, you could be a technofreak. A home computer is possibly the most advanced piece of technology you'll ever be able to buy (page 16) 8 .... thousands of people in Britain who have never attended formal computing courses... own their own machines. (page 16) "Computers are good at performing mathematical and logical calculations and at storing, retrieving, and sorting through large quantities of information" (page 40) [BUT] "If you want to store and retrieve extensive amounts of information on each of the 50,000 stamps in your collection, you'll certainly need a very big micro-computer" (page 70) "The biggest use for home computers right now is game-playing" (page 48). "Until... personal computers, there was no way small businesses could buy their own computers... (page 83) "Stock control programs are available.... accounting packages ... [include] keeping track of VAT... a financial modelling package... [allows you]... "play 'what if' speculations" (page 85)... "having computerised the stock control and accounts, you may like to... invest in word processing... (page 86). "this entire book has been written on a word processor." (page 88)

    1982

    Death of Erving Goffman (1922-1982) (external link)

    Early 1982 The Empire Strikes Back - Race and racism in 70s Britain A collection of essays by members of the Race and Politics Group at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies - Including Paul Gilroy (who signed the preface)

    February 1982 Inaugural meeting of the Association of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences held at the Royal Geographical Society. First chair John Eldridge of the British Sociological Association. The Academy of Social Sciences eventually developed from this. The Association has been described as reactive: formed to protect social sciences against impending cuts and criticisms. The Academy was intended to be proactive: a proponent of the social sciences.

    2.4.1982 to 14.6.1982 Falklands war. (Wikipedia) Resurgence of British nationalism.

    About June 1982 First edition of The Salisbury Review, editor Roger Scruton, author of The Meaning of Conservatism

    30.6.1982 House of Lords debate on Lord Rothschild' Report on the Social Science Research Council. [See Social Sciences under Attack in the UK (1981-1983) by Michael Posner]

    4.7.1982 Death of Terrence Higgins, one of the first people to die of an AIDS related disease in the United Kingdom. - external link AIDS in UK

    21.7.1982 Greater London Enterprise Board Limited formed. It became Greater London Enterprise Limited on 4.1.2001 and Newable Limited on 7.10.2016. The Greater London Enterprise Board funded the "London Innovation Network".

    November 1982 Article by Ray Honeyford, a Bradford school headmaster, on race and education in The Times Educational Supplement. See 1984 and 1987

    1983

    Computing 1983

    Programmer Keith Griggs (Xyroth) (Boston, Lincolnshire) set up Xyroth enterprises "to get around the problem that computer companies would happily send out technical info that was needed for programming if you were a company, but not if you were an individual working freelance." Recently (2013) says "has been creating hypertext systems ever since". In August 2000 "this website finally moved online, after many years of work with other hypertext systems".

    About 1983 that James Graves (Zyra) established Felix Computers in Boston. "It was the period in history just after computers were thought to be huge engines with whirring magnetic tape drives, punch cards, and teletypes, programmed by superintelligent boffins, and before the age where computers were thought to be just unhelpful things you move a mouse about on. It was the age of the BBC Computer Literacy project, where the idea was to learn to program a computer." zyra.org.uk was registered 5.7.2000

    1983-1985 The worst famine in Ethiopia's 20th century history

    1983 Letterbox Library was founded in 1983 by Gillian Harris and Ivan Spencer. Living in Hackney and raising a three year old, Gillian found "the children's books we were reading were all about white, nuclear families". Letterbox sought "books featuring strong girls, characters from a range of ethnicities and disabled protagonists" and "issues such as the environment, bullying, loss and bereavement". (Hackney Today 16.4.2018)

    1983 John Tusa interviewed two members of the Paedophile Information Exchange on BBC Newsnight. See How did the pro-paedophile group PIE exist openly for 10 years? BBC News Magazine 27.2.2014

    1983 Barbara Taylor's Eve and the New Jerusalem. Socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century published by Virago

    16.1.1983 Margaret Thatcher's television interview, in which she agrees (with Brian Walden) that "Victorian Values" of self-sufficiency, enterprise and non-reliance on state benefits made Britain great.

    #

    9.6.1983 United Kingdom election. Post-Falklands Conservative Victory under Margaret Thatcher. - manifestos link (archive)

    # January 1983 "The Heat in the Kitchen" by Lynne Segal and "Falklands Fallout" by Eric Hobsbawm in Marxism Today. Last of the articles that formed the core of The Politics of Thatcherism published in 1983.

    Political Science in Africa. A Critical Review A collection of seventeen articles, edited by Yolamu Baronga "..the inception of political science.. in Black African universities coincides with the attainment of independence"

    1984

    Leonard Fagin The Forsaken Families: The effects of unemployment on family life Penguin, 1984.

    1984 Territories
    A 25 minute film by Isaac Julien
    #
    Based on footage of the Notting Hill Carnival.

    "Evokes the creativity of black street culture in the context of the contested space of the inner city."

    Stuart Hall 1988: "Films like Territories... make it perfectly clear that ... the question of the black subject cannot be represented without reference to the dimensions of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity."

    1984 William Gibson's science fiction novel Neuromancer popularised the term Cyberspace that he had coined in 1982. In 2007, he commented that "in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there." #

    "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding." (1984)

    January 1984 Ray Honeyford's "Education and Race - an alternative view" published in The Salisbury Review". The article was re-printed in the Yorkshire Post in March - Resulting, on 15.3.1984, in the formation of "Drummond Parents Action Committee" calling for Honeyford to be dismissed as a headmaster.

    January 1984 The UK Social Science Research Council renamed the Economic and Social Research Council.

    3.1.1984 Start of Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index (FTSE) at 1,000
    #
    # FTSE 1984 to 2000 showing the stock market crash of October 1987 in perspective. (source)

    12.3.1984 to 5.3.1985 National miner's strike in United Kingdom. (Wikipedia) - Some sociologists have suggested its defeat marks the victory of consumerism over producerism.

    25.6.1984 Death of Michel Foucault - Born 15.10.1926 (external link). Foucault is said to have died from an AIDS related disease.

    The DNA profiling technique was first reported in 1984. Monday 10.9.1984. 9.05 am Alec Jeffreys "Eureka moment" with respect to DNA profing.

    October 1984 Debate over "black sections" at UK Labour Party conference. See article by Trevor Phillips in September 1984 Marxism Today - See Stuart Hall 1988 about "the term 'black'" "as a way of referencing the common experience of racism in Britain".

    12.10.1984 Brighton hotel bombing. An IRA attempt to kill the United Kingdom Prime Minister and her cabinet which has been compared to the gunpowder plot of 1605. The five people killed included Anthony Berry MP. Michael Portillo was elected to replace him as MP for Enfield Southgate on 13.12.1984 and served until his iconic defeat in May 1997 - The "Portillo moment". - See Wikipedia.

    # 30.11.1984 North American release of Madonna's Material Girl.

    "You know that we are living in a material world And I am a material girl"

    Stuart Hall 1988: masculinity always constructs femininity as double - simultaneously Madonna and Whore

    The European cover (here) was more sexual and put much less emphasis on wealth than the American.

    New International Inequalities: "The proletariat of the global risk society settles beneath the smokestacks, next to the refineries and chemical factories in the industrial Centres of the Third World." (Ulrich Beck, Risk Society p.41)

    2.12.1984 to 3.12.1984 Bhopal disaster. See Wikipedia
    See Pearce 1987 -

    The "greatest industrial catastrophe in history" (Der Spiegel) quoted by Ulrich Beck

    "While many died in their sleep , thousands more ran through the narrow dark alley ways trying to escape the dense gas cloud which made it difficult to breathe and burned the eyes and lungs. Many fell dead. The survivors suffered extensive lung damage, cardiac damage, blindness, long-term gynaecological problems, pelvic inflammatory diseases, cervical erosion and slow death. Civil authority was virtually nonexistent and few medical facilities were available." (source)

    Posters say "25,000 dead, and still rising". The scale of the disaster dwarfs anything seen in UK working class history. But is the life of the Indian proletariat riskier than that of coal miners in 19th century Lancashire?

    late 1984/early 1985 ICL One Per Desk Computer (known as the OPD) released. It could be connected to a text only network by placing the phone receiver on a modem built into the keyboard. You could send a message and just maybe post to a bulletin board (Mark Roberts email 10.3.2012) (external link)

    5.3.1985 Defeated UK miners marched back to work with pride behind their bands.

    Here the workers from Mardy Colliery in South Wales return, their head held high.

    The memorial in Mardy commemorates the
    solidarity of both working class and family: It is "a tribute to the mighty courage, heroism and pride of the Rhondda miner and his family".

    Glasnost: 11.3.1985: In a speech accepting the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev called for greater openness in public statements, including criticisms of government policy. He used the Russian word "Glasnost" (publicity). In 1986, perestroika (restructuring) was added to glasnost.

    March 1985 Motorola 8000X, the cell-phone that is usually remembered, made available in the UK. (Vodafone timeline) The first mobile phones I remember were being used for business on a train from Gloucestershire to London on 5.11.1986.

    5.5.1985 London Innovation Network leaflet gave as two examples of its work a changing bed for severely handicapped children designed at Middlesex Polytechnic to specifictions by nurses and an idea of Joan Hughes of Hackney for an electronic aid to help deaf people 'hear' the doorbell or telephone which was being developed by Jose de Silva, an electonics engineers at the Polytechnic of North London.

    24.8.1985 Opening ceremony of 13th Summer Universiade in Kobe, Japan. It was at this that Maria Patino was tested and diagnosed male. - (Her account)

    Summer 1985 The Passion of Remembrance was made. (external link). It was completed in 1986. First television transmission may have been 31.10.1986 (8?) "a film that gives a mosaic impression of the different generations of a Black experience... poses some important questions within the drama: What emotions remain in the silences left by the unfinished business of the 60/70s - the continuing business of sex and gender?"

    9.9.1985 to 11.9.1985 Second Handsworth Riot (Wikipedia

    5.10.1985 Death of Cynthia Jarrett during a raid on her home in Thorpe Road, London N15, sparked the Broadwater Farm riots. See Jock Young 2011


    Omar, a Pakistani, asks Johnny, white leader of a racist Punk group, to work with him to establish a laundrette. The film shows their sexual relations.
    16.11.1985 My Beautiful Laundrette first shown in London. Stuart Hall described it as "one of the most riveting and important films produced by a black writer in recent years and precisely for the reason that made it so controversial: its refusal to represent the black experience in Britain as monolithic, self-contained, sexually stabilised and always 'right-on'"

    1986

    9.2.1986 The visit of Halley's Comet was not spectacular as in 1910. However, this visit was observed by space probes. See Astronomical Society of the Pacific

    Big bangs, global change, and risk

    1986 Ulrich Beck's Risikogesellschaft (Risk Society) published. "rapidly went into a second edition after the Chernobyl nuclear accident" ( Outhwaite 12.2009, p.1031.

    "Just as modernisation dissolved the structure of feudal society in the nineteenth century and produced the industrial society, modernisation today is dissolving industrial society and another modernity is coming into being." [Remember this is a German book and that German industrialisation was behind that of England and France]

    26.4.1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the USSR - See Wikipedia. There were 31 immediate deaths, but the United Nations estimated that there would be 30,000 long term deaths worldwide over the next 70 years or so. (Health and Safety Exectutve 1992) p. 44) - See 6.10.1992

    September 1986 The International Council of Scientific Unions launched the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme to provide "the information we need to assess the future of the Earth in the next 100 years". It sought to understand the Earth as an interconnected whole. Its newsletter, Global Change, was launched in May 1989. (issue one offline). It closed at the end of 2015.

    27.10.1986 Big Bang: Deregulation of the London Stock Market. One aspect of this was that trading moved from being conducted face-to-face on a market floor to being performed via computer and telephone from separate dealing rooms.

    November 1986 Breast Cancer Screening. Report to the Health Ministers of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland by a working group chaired by Professor Sir Patrick Forrest published. Available online.

    1986 Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl's Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond, 1939-1945 by Janina Bauman published by Virago. It was also published in German. His wife's retelling of her childhood influenced Zygmunt Bauman's writing on the Holocaust (1989)

    Playing Away is dated 1986. It was reviewed in the New York Times on 13.3.1987 - external link

    The Department of Psychology at Durham University took "an early decision, in 1986, to publicise the advantages of email to students". ( Crook and Webster 1997, p.48). Analysis of use in Crook, C. 1994. A later analysis (1997 or earlier) suggested that the major academic use of email was material sent by tutors to lists of students.

    11.12.1986 BBC reported church criticism of the slogan "Play Safe" in its forthcoming radio campaign about Aids. It was said to condone promiscuity. The National Federation of Women's Institutes says it was "was one of the first organisations to talk about AIDS and used its unrivalled network of local organisations to educate the public and get people talking about the issue. WI members were involved in a government awareness raising campaign, and took up the BBC's challenge to 'Face up to Aids' by organising public meetings."

    1987

    January 1987 UK AIDS leaflet sent to every household in the country: Aids. Don't Die of Ignorance. Backed up by television advertising with the same "tombstone" theme. Condoms became positive as infection prevention rather than contraception.

    12.1.1987 Critical review of Handsworth Songs in The Guardian by Salman Rushdie. "Down at the Metro cinema, in Soho, there's a new documentary starting a three-week run". The first television transmission was 6.7.1987. (video) - Handsworth Songs, a 60 minute film by John Akomfrah, focused on the riots of September and October 1985 in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and in London. Running through it is the idea that the riots were the outcome of a protracted suppression by British society of black presence. It portrays civil disorder as an opening onto a secret history of dissatisfaction that is connected to the national drama of industrial decline. (source)

    6.3.1987 Herald of Free Enterprise sank at Zeebruger. 193 passengers drowned. Instant and continuous coverage on UK television.

    11.6.1987 United Kingdom election. Third Conservative Victory under Margaret Thatcher. - manifestos link (archive). First black and asian Members of Parliament since the 1920s elected: Diane Abbott (Hackney North) was the first black woman MP. Keith Vaz, Bernie Grant and Paul Boateng were also elected. All were Labour Party members.

    June/July 1987 [issue 30, p.x] Jon Turney, science editor of the Times Higher Educational Supplement reported that "The Office of Population Censuses and Surveys is considering substitutes for "social class" as it revises its occupation-based class categorization for the 1991 Census. Sociologists in contact with O.P.C.S. maintain the change is a direct result of ministerial distaste for the "divisive" language of class in official statistics.... A spokeswoman for O.P.C.S. said ministers were aware of the discussion, but the motive for the change was criticism of the existing usage as poorly grounded in sociological theory."" (source)

    September 1987 Twenty two white parents in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, taught their children in a local pub rather than send them to Headfield, the local school, 80% of whose pupils were Asian. They claimed their grounds were cultural, not racist, and were supported by Ray Honeyford and the Bradford Muslim Parents Association, which wanted separate education for muslim children. Stuart Hall, in New Ethnicities (February 1988) said "cultural racism in its Dewsbury form - not only persists but positively flourishes under Thatcherism".

    1.10.1987 Maulana Karenga (USA) spoke in London about the contributions of Black people throughout history at the invitation of Akyaaba Addai Sebbo, coordinator of special events for the Greater London Council. Black history month (October) in the United Kingdom developed from this. (source) - blackhistorymonth.org.uk website first archived 3.12.2001

    19.10.1987: Black Monday: world stock market crashes began in New York

    31.10.1987: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Woman's Own:

    "There is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families"
    You would not expect a Durkheimian sociologist to agree with her (see society) - But some Weberian sociologists said she had correctly understood their position and should restore their funding. (Or words to that effect)

    13.9.1987 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid at the Toronto Film Festival. ( Wikipedia - Screenonline overview)

    1988

    Diana H. Coole's Women in Political Theory. From Ancient Misogyny to Contemporary Feminism. This, and other books at this time, re-explored and revitalised the history of social theory by looking at its concepts of gender.

    Dreaming Rivers - (external link). Miss T., from the Caribbean, dies alone in her one-room apartment. Her family and friends gather at her wake. An "impressionist rendering" of "the past, present and future". "Fragments of a life lived, but only partly remembered." "Three young people discuss the loss of" their mother as a metaphor for their Caribbean identity that is fragmented with the passing of each generation." "..remarkable for its syncretic use of Afro-Caribbean rituals and Christianity, the Creole language, and other Atlanticisms which indicate that Britishness is no longer the terrain of whiteness and Christianity." (Manthia Diawara, Black American Literature Forum) (source)

    20th Century Words records the term Dependency Culture from 1988 (although I think it must be earlier). In a dependency culture people (especially the unemployed and poor) are said to rely on money or services from the state and to be robbed of by this of their motivation to provide for themselves or improve their situation. In America, black people were singled out. In 1992 The Economist wrote "During the boom years of the mid-1980s... conservative works chronicling the growth of a black dependency culture in America's ghettos multiplied". On 20.2.1988 there was a conference in Edinburgh on "Dependency : dependence, independence and interdependence in culture and society" In 1991, a collection of papers, Dependency to Enterprise, from a conference called "From the culture of dependency to the culture of enterprise" was published.


    "the politics of anti-racism has often constructed itself in terms of a contestation of 'multi-ethnicity' or 'multi-culturalism'. On the other hand, as the politics of representation around the black subject shifts, I think we will begin to see a renewed contestation over the meaning of the term 'ethnicity' itself." (Stuart Hall New Ethnicities)

    Early 1988 "'Black', racial equality and Asian identity" by Tariq Modood in New Community (A journal publishied by the Unite Kingdom Commission for Racial Equality:

    "it is foolish to expect a 'rainbow coalition' (as Jesse Jackson calls the non-white political alliance in America) to be successful if it involves asking a partner to this coalition to adopt an identity false to their own being" (page 402) "it is my conviction that what we Asians need at present is to develop and project a public identity which will be readily communicable and be true to our own being and our own sense of worth." (page 403)

    February 1988 Day Conference at the (UK) Institute for Contemporary Arts that led to the publication of Black Film, British Cinema later (December) in the year. The conference focused on The Passion of Remembrance - Playing Away and Handsworth Songs. "The book looks at the relationship between cinema and black people, exploring recoding narratives of race and nation, black independent film, black film in Britain and America, new ethnicities as well as many other subjects" (Bookseller's advert). (See Stuart Hall).

    24.3.1988 Royal Assent to legislation restricting the powers of local authorities in Great Britain. This included (section 28) a "prohibition on promoting homosexuality by teaching or by publishing material" and on "teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." This section was eventually repealed on 18.9.2003.

    25.4.1988 The chemical analysis of lead (Pb) in the leaves of lemon scented balm began Joan Hughes' citizen scientist project on "Lead in Gardens".

    July 1988

    to

    April 1989

    Hackney Workers Educational Association explored the varieties of conservatism, liberalism, socialism and green politics in monthly classes and an Ideas about Politics magazine. See liberalism, utilitarianism and socialism and Morris, Marx and Ruskin,

    The three varieties of Conservatism discussed were

    Ian Gilmour: One nation Conservatism. The Tory "wets"

    Roger Scruton: Conservatism as defence of established culture and society.

    Friedrich Hayek: The economic liberalism "most closely associated with Thatcherism"

    October 1988: British Communist Party journal Marxism Today issue on "New Times" ("A Marxism Today special on Britain in the Nineties") discusses Post-Fordism [It's late]

    Contents at http://www.unz.org/Pub/MarxismToday-1988oct include "Brave New World" by Stuart Hall,

    See Stuart Hall on a "new phase" in cultural politics.

    1989

    1989 First edition of Anthony Giddens' textbook Sociology - See Worsley 1970

    1989 Zygmunt Bauman Modernity and The Holocaust

    David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity - See 1973. Harvey writes about a move from from "Fordism" to "flexible accumulation".

    First edition of Frank Pearce's The Radical Durkheim "too little attention has been paid to developing" Durkheim's concepts "fruitfully". crime and
deviancy
timeline crime

    7.1.1989 Death of Emperor Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa). His state funeral was on 24.2.1989 He was buried in the Imperial mausoleum in Hachiōji, alongside Emperor Taish#333;, his father.

    9.2.1989 Death of Osamu Tezuka. In the year before he died, he summed up his work to a Japanese interviewer:

    "My manga have a wide variety of themes - they are a paean to life, they are antiwar and they are antinuclear, and they advocate the preservation of nature - but ultimately they are all one thing. They are the following appeal to young readers, to think objectively about this fragile Earth: When you grow up, don't forget to look at both Earth and mankind objectively. And always think about what it means to be human" (Schodt 2007, p. 144).

    30.3.1989 Scottish Appeal Judges gave reasons for their legal ruling that a husband should stand trial for the alleged rape of his wife while still living with her. Herald 31.3.1989. Lord Emslie said that in the eighteenth century "A married woman... could be said to have subjected herself to her husband's dominion. She was required to obey him in all things... a wife's freedoms were virtually non-existent... By the second half of the twentieth century, however, the status of a married woman in our law changed quite dramatically. A husband and wife are now for all practical purposes equal partners in marriage ... A wife is not obliged to obey her husband in all things..."

    Computing 1989

    July 1989 All of Middlesex Polytechnic used mainframe computers on one site (Bounds Green). The total storage of the "VAX Cluster" was "approximately 3 Gigabytes" [The disk I am currently (2011) using on a personal computer has 149 Gigabytes]. The University also had microcomputers in "microcomputer rooms". "As microcomputer systems are a relatively new development in computing, new uses are being found for them almost every day. The "most important development" was linking all the computers, via the inter-Campus network and site networks. "It should be possible to transfer data from any computer system, be it mainframe, mini or micro, to any other system" The University sold Lotus 123 (Spreadsheet) - DBase 4 (Data base) - WordPerfect 5.0 (Wordprocessing) - Accu-type (Keyboard training) - T3 (Scientific word- processing) - Quattro (Spreadsheet) - Minitab and SPSS-PC (Statistics) packages. ("Using the Computing Service" Mike Bell. July 1989)

    6.11.1989 WordPerfect Corporation released WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, "the program's most successful version".

    December 1989 My first home computer - bought for my use by Middlesex University. It was a Kaypro with a 80286 processor, 512 Kilobytes of memory, a 20 Megabyte hard disk, and 5.25 inch floppy drive. The Operating system was MSDos (3?) and the only software was WordPerfect for DOS version 5.

    28.10.1989 A debate in the University Library of Manchester on the proposition that "The concept of society is theoretically obsolete" The speakers were Marilyn Strathern (for), John Peel (against), Christina Toren (for) and Jonathan Spencer (against). A report was edited by Tim Ingold.

    9.11.1989 "This ninth of November is a historic day." East Germany "has announced that, starting immediately, its borders are open to everyone." [See Wikipedia]

    Wikipedia: Revolutions of 1989

    1990

    Peter Morea's Personality - An introduction to the theories of psychology took a human look at the theories of Freud, Skinner, Rogers, Fromm, Mead and Kelly.

    Computing 1990

    1.2.1990: Free clipart someone created:

    February 1990 David Harris of New Zealand made the first version of his Pegesus mailer available from from a friend's FTP site in Hawaii. "In the first week... it was downloaded more than 100 times... I found that I was receiving mail from people thanking me for giving them something they couldn't have afforded any other way -- communication".

    Saturday 31.3.1990 "Poll tax" riot in Trafalger Square, London in demonstration against the "Community charge" shortly to come into force. Imagery harking back to 1381.

      1.5.1990 First Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme signed in New York. Sub-titled Concept and Measurement of human development. It used the Human Development Index

    Recession: The British economy grew until the third quarter of 1990. It then went into decline. The end of the recession was officially declared on 26.4.1993. "Economic growth around the world has slowed significantly with the United States and European countries, including the UK, in recession during 1991. Economic recovery is likely to be slow" (John Reeve, Managing Director Sun Life Assurance)

    July to September 1990 Summer School for Soviet Sociologists held at the University of Kent.
    [Soviet] "sociology was in a very poor state, having been banned from the 1930s to the 1950s and repressed in the 1970s and 1980s, during the `period of stagnation'" - On social movements see Sergey Mamay

    28.11.1990 John Major United Kingdom Prime Minister following the resignation of Margaret Thatcher.

    1991

    1991 Jan van Dijk's book De Netwerkmaatschappij (The Network Society). The term was later used by Manuel Castells

    1991 Sandra Harding Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women's lives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press) discusses "socially situated knowledge". Term "standpoint theory" is used to describe such a theory of knowledge. (See Wikipedia).

    Sunday 21.4.1991/Monday 22.4.1991: Nineteenth British Census
    Population of England and Wales: 51,099,000; Scotland: 5,107,000

    The 1991 Censuses in England, Scotland and Wales were the first UK censuses to ask about ethnicity. (Asked about in Northern Ireland as well in 2001). See reports in 1996 and 1997. Published figures for England and Wales were:

    White 46,938,466

    Black Caribbean 499,325
    Black African 209,665
    Black Other 175,493

    Indian 829,966
    Pakistani 455,443
    Bangladeshi 161,626

    Chinese 146,156
    Other Asian 192,857
    Other ethnic group 281,496

    21.7.1991 UK Conservatives adopt language of the French Revolution - Launch of Citizen's Charter

    6.8.1991 Tim Berners-Lee created the worlds first web-page, - An early archive - Visit a replica of the page. See Mosaic.
    "The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents. Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including an executive summary of the project"
    "The project is based on the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone."

    14.11.1991 Preliminary meeting of what became The Association of Denominational Historical Societies and Cognate Libraries. One objective was that the computerisation of catalogues could lead to setting up a combined database. "Which in those days had to be provided by the exchange of disks or purchase of microfiches". By 2004 "internet access" had made "instant availability of bibliographical information" possible (Sue Mills 2004)

    25.12.1991 End of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) - The Soviet flag was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin. See Wikipedia

    23.10.1991 UK Law Lords agreed that "in modern times the supposed marital exemption in rape forms no part of the law of England". [See domestic violence]

    1992

    1992 The Fairtrade Foundation established by CAFOD, Christian Aid, New Consumer, Oxfam, Traidcraft and the World Development Movement. These organisations were later joined by the Women's Institute. (Wikipedia)

    1992 Scientists for Global Responsibility formed in the UK by the merger of Scientists Against Nuclear Arms - Electronics and Computing for Peace - and Psychologists for Peace (PfP), organisations originally set up to campaign to reduce the widespread use of science and technology for military purposes: in particular, the elimination of weapons of mass destruction. With the break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, together with the growing realisation of the threat of climate change, they decided to merge and widen their focus to a general concern about the misuse of science and technology as threatening human life and the wider environment. At roughly the same time, the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science disbanded and many of their members joined Scientists for Global Responsibility.

    7.2.1992 Maastricht Treaty signed. The European Union succeeded the European Economic Community from 1.11.1993.

    28.2.1992 UK Environmental Protection (Controls on Injurious Substances) Regulations 1992 came into force, implementing a European directive banning most lead paints.

    9.4.1992 United Kingdom election. Unexpected Conservative Victory under John Major. Soapboxes and disappointed roses - manifestos link (archive)

      5.6.1992 Convention on Biological Diversity opened for signature at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Rio "Earth Summit"). It came into force on 29.12.1993. See 2002 - 2012

    16.9.1992: Black Wednesday: Financial speculation forced the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

    October 1992: At the newly re-styled Middlesex University all the academic staff were given a personal computer and, at about the same time, they were told they had to do their own word processing work.

    6.10.1992 "Nuclear disaster 'is million-to-one chance'" (The Independent). This appears to be based on a passage of a Health and Safety Executive report that says "in practice, the measures taken for nuclear installations mean that the risk borne on average by members of the public in the vicinity of a plant from its normal operation will generally be no more than 1 in 1 million". Normal operation did not include nuclear disaster (!!). See Risk.

    End of 1992 UK Cochrane Centre established by the National Health Service Research and Development Programme. See Pete Fleischmann

    John Lea: Criminology and postmodernity

    9.2.1993 Television showed CCTV footage of two ten year old boys taking a toddler out of a shopping centre. The toddler was later found dead. But the eye could also be faked. A 1995 commercial video Caught in the Act used CCTV shots for entertainment. One of these, a sex scene in a lift, was staged by actors. Images were everywhere, but which were true?

    Spring 1993 The first issue of the PC Plus Software Guide (602 pages at £4.95)
      covered Word Processing - Spreadsheets - Database Software - Integrated Software - Accounts Software - Desktop Publishing - Graphics Software - Business and Office Software - Computer Aided Design - Communication and Networks - Programming -System Software and Vertical Software.

    March 1993 The first number of Social Research Update: "Analysing Qualitative Data by Computer" by Nigel Fielding, Issue 4 (date uncertain) was "Exploring the Internet" by Nicky Ferguson. Issue 6 (1995?) was "Computer simulation of social processes" by Nigel Gilbert. Issue 20 (Spring 1998) "Finding information on the World Wide Web" by Stuart Peters, Issue 21 (Summer 1998) "Using e-mail as a research tool" by Neil Selwyn and Kate Robson.

    22.4.1993 Mosaic, the first popular browser for the world wide web, was free. An estimated 2 million people were using it after a year.
    See 1927, 1937. 1953. - Scout Report April 1994
    1994 - 1995 - Howies Home Page 1996 - April 1999

    May 1993 UK White Paper: Realising Our Potential - A Strategy for Science, Engineering and Technology published. This lead to the formation of the Government Office for Science and the Technology Foresight programme

    21.10.1993 Royal Assent for the United Kingdom National Lottery Act. See Millennium Awards

    8.10.1993 John Major (UK Prime Minister) argued that "we must go back to basics" at the Conservative Party conference.

    20.12.1993 General Assembly of the United Nations "Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women"

    1993/1994 Phil Powell, Middlesex University: "It does not require government department, or press, or academia to inform you that UK is in some kind of economic crisis" (written lecture to first year social science students). He related this to statistics of unemployment, seen in a long term perspective. This introductory course explicitly critiqued the "back to basics" campaign. This "economic crisis" was about the employment prospects of students, workers, women and ethnic minorities. I cannot see any indication of an economic crisis in share prices.

    1994 The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1994 awarded to John C. Harsanyi, John F. Nash and Reinhard Selten "for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non- cooperative games". (source)

    1994 At Western Washington University (West Coast, USA), Ed Stephan began creating his The Division of Territory in Society as a web document. His, rapidly famous, Timeline of Sociology (archive) "a listing of on-line biographies and books from 1600" was entered on the web in Winter 1996. His demography timeline, modelled on the Sociology Timeline but starting in 3,800BC, was first recoded by the web archive on 6.10.2003. In 1994 Andrew Roberts was still firmly offline.

    Death of Karl Popper (1902-1994): (external link)

    1994: Anthony Giddens Beyond Left and Right, followed by The Third Way: the renewal of social democracy in 1998, The Third Way and its Critics in 2000 and The Global Third Way Debate Polity in 2001

    1994 Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society founded in the USA: (website)

    11.11.1994 Demos limited registered as a charity "to promote education and research for the public benefit in issues of politics, economics, the environment and public policy". It was founded in 1993 by Martin Jacques, the ex-editor of Marxism Today (last issue December 1991), and Geoff Mulgan, who became its first director.

    1,10.1994 to 31.3.1995 Data collected that was used for the visualisation of Earth's city lights on 23.10.2000.

    1995

    1995 Citizen science: A study of people, expertise, and sustainable development by Alan Irwin (1955-) published by Routledge in its Environment and society series.

    See Wikipedia on Citizen Science

    17.3.1995 Internet Public Library opened - First internet archive 19.12.1996

    10.4.1995 UK National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database came into operation. It was tThe world's first national DNA database and remans its largest. Home Secretary Michael Howard called the biggest breakthrough in the fight against crime since fingerprints. ( The Telegraph DNA Datbase timeline

    11.4.1995 to 15.4.1995 Special Session of United Nations Statistical Commission adopted the United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics. - See Canadian video

    August 1995 My new home computer was connected to the internet by a dial up-up account on a separate line from my telephone. On Sunday 10.9.1995 a 6.5 hours phone call cost £18.2 (of a £48.54 bill). Starting 10.24pm. Which either means that I spent half the night on the internet, or (more likely) that I left the connection on when I thought I had turned it off. "Surfing the net" was addictive though. On Sunday 26.11.1995 I was "browsing with Netscape" the websites of clients of a (small) Internet Service Provider. But I also "Visited Paris, Louvre and downloaded Mona Lisa."

    4.9.1995 to 15.9.1995 The Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China, produced the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action

    November-December 1995 Wave of general strikes in France against proposed programme of welfare cutbacks and related issues. "The most disruptive social upheaval France has seen since the student protests of 1968" (Margaret Warner, PBS). The collective Raisons d'Agir (Reasons to Act), and associated publishing house Liber/Raisons d'Agir were established by Pierre Bourdieu at the end of 1995.

    1996 Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences published Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, xv and 105 pages

    "Concerned about the worldwide state of the social sciences - the relations between disciplines, and their relationship with both the humanities and the natural sciences - the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, based in Lisbon, established the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences in 1993.

    The report explores how social science was historically constructed ... why it was divided into a specific set of relatively standard disciplines ... between the late eighteenth century and 1945. ... World developments since 1945 have raised questions about this intellectual division of labour and have reopened the issues of organisational structuring.

    Argued that economics, sociology and political science had taken the natural sciences as a model. This had nurtured three expectations impossible to fulfil in universalist form: prediction, management and quantifiable accuracy. Prediction and management, it argued were premised on quantifiable accuracy. (Quoted Byrne 2015.

    Binghamton University summary - Wikipedia

    1996 Manuel Castells' The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture volume one "The Rise of the Network Society" - (Volumes 2 and 3 were published in 1997) [It's late]

    About 1996, Howard Becker started Howie's Home Page on the world wide web, making his papers available to anyone who wants them, and sharing photographs of Everett Hughes, Alfred Lindesmith and Herbert Blumer.

    1996 Unchained voices : an anthology of black authors in the English-speaking world of the 18th century edited by Vincent Carretta published. The writers are people who move between Africa, the Americas and Europe. Five of them provided the inspiration for an East End of London local history project.

    27.1.1996 First Tag des Gedenkens an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (The Day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism) in Germany German wikipedia) - See 27.1.1945 and 27.1.2006

    March 1996 Journal of Material Culture founded. "Published by SAGE and based in material culture at University College London (managing editors); includes wide ranging interdisciplinary research into material culture broadly conceived." (website)

    "concerned with the relationship between artefacts and social relations irrespective of time and place and aims to systematically explore the linkage between the construction of social identities and the production and use of culture." (2015)

    March 1996 BBC2 Television series Parsons on Class explored the the class lifestyles of three families.

    March 1996 Launch of Sociological Research Online

    1.4.1996 UK Central Statistical Office and Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) and the statistics division of the Department of Employment merged in the Office for National Statistics. in which The director, from 2000, was known as the National Statistician.


    1997: Family Record Centre established at Myddelton Street, Islington
    2000: Statistics Commission and 'National Statistics' established
    2005: Announcement made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer of his intention to legislate for independence in statistics
    2007: Bill introduced in Lords and Royal Assent given [28.7.2007]
    2008: UK Statistics Authority established (Statistics Commission abolished)

    22.4.1996 Middlesex University's first officially approved World Wide Web site.

    May 1996 "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" Social Text: "it is becoming increasingly apparent that physical 'reality'" is fundamentally "a social and linguistic construct" [Please believe me, this is a hoax]

    July 1996: Albert Benschop started SocioSite. The internet gateway to world wide social science, based at the University of Amsterdam.

    4.11.1996 earliest archive of the Social Science Information Gateway

    22.11.1996 earliest archive of the Project Gutenberg website

    December 1996 Dead Sociologists Index established by Larry Ridener then of Baylor College. Earliest archive I know is 3.12.1998.

    21.12.1996 earliest archive of the United Kingdom BBC website

    The Fontana History of the Social Sciences by Roger Smith Review by Nick Crossley

    1997

    Towards a new global age : challenges and opportunities Policy report published Paris by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1997. See Globalisation - See 2009 [It's late]

    1997 Richesse du monde, pauvretés des nations by Daniel Cohen (1953-) published in Paris. Translated into English as The wealth of the world and the poverty of nations in 1998. A defence of globalisation against the charge that international trade between rich and poor nations undermines the welfare state in the rich countries.

    28.2.1997 Geodiversitas by Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (Paris). A quarterly journal devoted to varied aspects of Earth Sciences. This was a new name for the museum's bulletin on Sciences de la Terre, paléontologie, géologie, minéralogie. It also had bulletins on botany and zoology.

    January 1997 The rise of the social entrepreneur by Charles Leadbeater published by Demos. During 1997 "The School for Social Entrepreneurs" was founded by Michael Young

    4.1.1997 earliest archive of the United Nations website

    February 1997 Social Science History by Andrew Roberts first published

    1.5.1997 United Kingdom General Election won by "new" Labour. Prime Minister Tony Blair. New Labour, replacing true Conservatism had a philosophy of freemarkets balanced, or humanised, by the state.

    1997 Election Manifestos (new site). Labour manifesto includs "Labour has taken the lead in proposing action to tackle the problems of stalking and domestic violence" - Wikipedia on Labour Party

    Science magazine's special issue on Human- Dominated Ecosystems. Humankind casting its shadow over the whole planet, with the structure and function of virtually every ecosystem being affected by pervasive human activity. Examines science-led measures to optimize resource management and protect the environment.

    "Kundera's Immortality : the interview society and the invention of the self" article by Paul Atkinson and David Silverman in Qualitative Inquiry volume 3, number 3, pages 304-325. David Silverman: "perhaps we all live in what might be called an interview society, in which interviews seem central to making sense of our lives"

    1998

    Blue Angel
logo of the Dear
Habermas website 2.1.1998: "Dear Habermas" website created. 5.12.1998: new website for Dear Habermas "A Journal of Postmodern Thought By Undergraduates for Undergraduates" at California State University. - an early explanation - today's site - Basic Concepts: Conceptual Links for Focusing Your Work

    12.2.1998 earliest archive for the United Kindom Office of National Statistics website

    26.7.1998 to 1.8.1998 Fourteenth World Congress of Sociology held in Montreal included announcement of the books of the 20th century - archive - most influential on the sociologists. The top authors were Weber, C.W. Mills, Merton, Berger and Luckmann, Bourdieu, Elias, Habermas, Parsons (not The Social System), and Goffman

    Sociocybernetics was formally recognised as a research committee (RC51) at the 1998 World Congress. This was one of the examples, given by John Urry, of a complexity turn in sociology as it incorporated the tools of the complexity sciences. Others included the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, founded in 1998, and Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences (also 1998) by David Byrne [It's late]

    23.8.1998 The International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition first celebrated in Haiti. Celebrated Senegal 23.8.1999. National Museums Liverpool and the black community in Liverpool have held events to commemorate Slavery Remembrance Day since 1999.

    13.9.1998 "Scandal of test flaws that lead to health scares" Daily Telegraph "Many scientific 'breakthroughs" are nothing but mirages based on flawed research". Claimed that Bayesian methods of estimating the probability of a test result being significant are better than frequentist methods and the use of p-values. The statistics behind these claims were critically examined by John Whitehead in a lecture in 13.2.2014, available as a video.

    4.11.1998 (copyright 1999) Learning, Teaching and Researching on the Internet: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists by Stuart Stein, University of West of England, Bristol, published. 352 pages.

    See also Social Research Update

    Andrew Roberts 5.5.1998: "students have to telnet to mainframe computers and send email by typing commands at a prompt". By Autumn 1998 students were able to use Windows 3.1. and Netscape Messenger.

    Late 1998 "In response to the growing body of opinion in favour of prospective registration of controlled trials, Current Controlled Trials Ltd launched the Current Controlled Trials website in late 1998, aiming to increase the availability, and promote the exchange, of information about ongoing randomised controlled trials worldwide". (source). For an example from the site see INTERACT.

    1998-2001 Pierre Bourdieu videoed by Pierre Carles

    1999

    1999: Reflexive Modernisation Research Centre in Munich established. Headed by Ulrich Beck [It's late]

    1999: Peter Childs and Mike Storry published an Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture

    1.1.1999 Eurozone: Euro the currency of eleven European nations. Notes and coins were introduced in 2002.

    Spring 1999: Anthony Giddens gave the the 1999 BBC Reith Lectures from different cities around the world, accompanied by an email collation of views from people around the world. This was called the Runaway World Debate. A major theme was globalisation. The lectures are online: globalisation - risk - tradition - family - democracy

    Giddens weblinks

    March 1999 to June 1999 Kosovo war. NATO attack on Serbia in defence of Kosovans. Described by some as the "first humanitarian war". Wikipedia. Majid KhosraviNik (2009) analysed the representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers during this conflict and the British general election of 2005.

    6.3.1999 First home page created for Andrew Roberts' web site. Also date on Social Science History Timeline. It went online on 13.4.1999. Quakers had a conference about websites in July and James Grant created the "Quakers at Bunhill Fields" website in November.

    Archive copy of home page 19.10.2000

    15.8.1999: Review: "Why Daniel Bell Keeps Getting It Right" of a reissue of The Coming of Post- Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (1973) with a new, 30,000-word foreword by the author

    24.9.1999 United Kingdom Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences incorporated. It developed from the Association of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences and became the Academy of Social Sciences on 5.7.2007. Wikipedia (2010) says its "ambition" is an "Academician of the Social Sciences" should have similar "prestige" to a fellowship of the Royal Society or the British Academy.
    See May 2002 - Great Expectations - Browne 2010 - Campaign for Social Science

     
    The millennium - or was it?
    are we counting correctly - or is the whole world a year or more out?


    The millennium bug - or was it?
    risk society in a digital age

    Having become reliant on computers, the world faced potential disaster if lots of old ones did not recognise the year 2000. - Visit Bugtown UK - 4.1.2000 reflections - ten years after

    21st CENTURY

    2000 Zygmunt Bauman wrote: "From heavy to light modernity. That part of history, now coming to its close, could be dubbed... the era of hardware, or heavy modernity... cumbersome machines... factory walls... ponderous rail engines... To conquer space was the supreme goal... .The seductive lightness of being The insubstantial, instantaneous time of the software world" (Bauman, Z. 2000 Liquid Modernity, pages 113/114 and 118) [It's late]

    2000 Loïc Wacquant launched the international journal Ethnography for "the ethnographic study of social and cultural change. Bridging the chasm between sociology and anthropology" - Publisher's website.

    March 2000 Conclusions of the European Council held in Lisbon "affirm that Europe has indisputably moved into the Knowledge Age".   (Brussels, 30.10.2000 A Memorandum on Lifelong Learning (external pdf)

    March 2000 to September 2003 Nupedia.com, the free encyclopedia of the internet. Wikipedia (free and democratic) began as a complement to it on 15.1.2001

    dot.com bubble about to burst
    10.3.2000 The NASDAQ Composite index peaked at 5,132.52. It fell to 3,227 by 17.4.2000 and in the following 30 months fell 78% from its peak. The decline from this peak signalled the beginning of the dot-com bubble burst.
    Wikipedia

    12.5.2000 Official opening of Tate Modern: as much about recent social theory as modern art?

    May 2000 "The 'Anthropocene'", a short article by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer published in Global Change 41. (offline). Suggested the impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, geology and ecology, made it "more than appropriate" to use the term anthropocene for the "current geological epoch". They suggested the end of the eighteenth century as a start date and related this to the development of steam power. For other suggestions see 2016.

    June 2000 UK Framework for National Statistics operational.

    26.6.2000 PRESIDENT CLINTON ANNOUNCES THE COMPLETION OF THE FIRST SURVEY OF THE ENTIRE HUMAN GENOME - Press release: "Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind." Draft results were published in Nature and Science in January 2001.

    5.7.2000 James Graves' zyra.org.uk went online. By a system of affiliate marketing, the Zyra website made a fortune for James, who went to Panama as a tax exile on 22.12.2012. He died in Panama in October 2012 (aged 52)

    20.7.2000 Royal Assent to UK Terrorism Act 2000 (external link)

      September 2000 United Nations Development Goals to 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger 2: Achieve universal primary education 3: Promote gender equality and empower women 4: Reduce child mortality rates 5: Improve maternal health 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases 7: Ensure environmental sustainability 8: Develop a global partnership for development.

    September 2000 to January 2002 Birth of the 19,517 children in 19,244 families selected through Child Benefit Records who are part of the UK's Millennium Cohort Study - See 1946

    October 2000: Launch of Nature Reviews with Genetics, Neuroscience and Molecular Cell Biology. October 2001: Cancer and Immunology. January 2002: Drug Discovery. 2003: Microbiology. See website

    5.12.2000: Mobile phones on Southbury station

    Clutch an ear,
    Walk along,
    Seriously sing
    Sixties folk song:
    Seriously talk
    Mobile Telephone.
    Set the tone
    Shiver the bone.
    Everyone rapping
    On the station.
    Calling someone.
    Faces tight
    Tensly listen.
    Faces break in
    Smiling thought.
    Nicely caught.
    One to one
    Folk singers with
    Bone vibrators.

    1.4.2001 Same-sex marriage (Dutch: Huwelijk tussen personen van gelijk geslacht[1] or commonly homohuwelijk) became legal in the Netherlands. The first recognition of "gay marriage". - See below, for religious opposition.

    Sunday 29.4.2001/Monday 30.4.2001: Twentieth British Census
    Population of England and Wales: 52,042,000; Scotland: 5,062,000

    In 2001 the Office for National Statistics replaced 'Social Class based on Occupation' (formerly the Registrar General's 'Social Class') and 'Socio- economic Groups' with a new 'Socio-economic Classification' (SEC) for all official statistics and surveys. The new SEC is an occupationally based classification but contains rules to provide coverage for the whole adult population.

    See 1991 Census for 1991/2001 ethnicity comparison

    The 2001 census was the first since 1851 to ask about religion.
    Overal figures for Britain (England, Wales, Scotland) were
    Christian 41,015,000
    No religion 8,596,000
    Religion not stated 4,434,000
    Muslim 1,589,000
    Hindu 558,000
    Sikh 336,000
    Jewish 267,000
    Buddhist 149,000
    Any other religion 159,000

    See 2011

    2.6.2001 First internet archive of "Performativity, Cultural Capital, and the Internet. An Analysis of the Internet as a Proposed Medium for Scholarly Communication. Using Concepts from Lyotard and Bourdieu" by Martin Halbert

    2.7.2001 BBC Analysis "Unreliable Evidence?": "It ought to be a golden age for "relevant" social science. Tony Blair promised more rational, modernised government based on new understanding of "what works". Research budgets have been boosted. Enough, you would have thought, to create a mood of optimism among social enquirers based on a belief they will be listened to in the corridors of power. But is it there?" archive

      11.9.2001 "9.11" Terrorist attack on symbolic buildings in the United States. See Wikipedia
    The attack on the twin towers triggered a change in the whole structure of international relations. See "Living in the world risk society" America

    6.12.2001 Musée de l'Homme end? - first capture - (See 1937)

    2002 Individualisation: Institutionalized individualism and its social and political consequences

    January 2002: Death of Pierre Bourdieu

    3.2.2002 Martin Bright, in The Observer refers to the Angry Brigade as "Britain's only home-grown terrorist group".

    14.2.2002 Budapest, Hungary Budapest Open Access Initiative - This did not refer to open access to physical library shelves, but to "free and unrestricted online availability" to "scholarly journals". Open Access Week started in 2009

    March 2002 After recovering from lows following 11.9.2001, stock market indices started to fall steadily, with dramatic declines in July and September 2002. (Wikipedia)

    Andrew's ISA index In March 2002 I saved £7,000 in stocks and shares. This lost over £1,225 in the next three months and by the end of 2002 was only worth £4,788. From 2003 to 2007 the value rose, passing £7,000 in 2004/2005 and exceeding £10,500 in 2007. By the middle of 2007 the value was falling. In six months from August 2008 to February 2009 it lost over £2,760 and was worth only £5,600. The value began to rise again and was over £7,000 early in 2010. There was a fall in the first half of 2011 when "market volatility" was predicted without a "credible solution to the eurozone crisis". In August 2012 rising value meant it was worth £9,455. The lowest ten year prediction in 2002 was for 5% growth, giving £9,280 on its tenth year.

    Since February 2012 the ISA has risen to £18,340 in August 2018. Rising value was interrupted in the summer of 2015 and resumed in the summer of 2016.

    Late March 2002 Reports of a "Silence Machine" that would exclude unwanted noises whilst allowing all others through, being developed by Selwyn Wright (Wikipedia), an engineer at the University of Huddersfield. (New Scientist)

    May 2002 First Bulletin of the (UK) "Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences" - archive

    28.5.2002 First capture of the History and Policy website "A national platform for scholars to offer informed, accessible and constructive insights from recent historical research to assist policy makers and advisers". HistoryandPolicy

    August 2002 Picture from the front cover of Home and Country Earth Summit special issue. The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development was held in Johannesburg from 26.8.2002 to 4.9.2002. The magazine cover said "the whole world in their hands"

    end of 2002 Babel Fish. With online electronic translation, the internet begins to break down language barriers. The name come from science fiction in 1978.

    2003

    23.2.2003 Death of Robert Merton (1910-2003): (external link)

    March 2003 Great Expectations: The social sciences in Britain Commission on the Social Sciences . 166 pages. London : Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences - link - terms of reference

    The illustration is from publication in 2004

    The original Astro boy stories, begun in 1951, were set in the future when the robot was created in a laboratory at Takadanobaba on 4.7.2003. See "Japan hopes Astroboy's birthday will reignite boom days"

    Frederik L. Schodt, author of "The Astro Boy Essays," says: "It's fascinating to see how Tezuka foresaw some of our problems with artificial intelligence, ecology -- even suicide bombing and terrorism. There are stories that address racial discrimination in the United States and discrimination within Japan. He even had Astro Boy go to Vietnam and protect the villagers from American bombers. It's hard to believe all that's built into a story designed for 10-year-old boys."

    27.10.2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage

    Autumn 2003 A "full time mother" recounted how fellow sociologists were unable to accept her identity. Without an "institutional affiliation" Siew-Peng Lee was "socially excluded" (Network). In 2005 she and others formed Sociologists Outside Academia

    2003 Completion of the Human genome project

    2004

    The term "Web 2" became notable after the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004 - See Wikipedia

    2004 Norway started the "The Holberg International Memorial Prize for outstanding scholarly work in the areas of arts and humanities, social sciences, law or theology" [website] (an archive) - ("I call him wise, he who seeks wisdom, not the fool who thinks he has found it.") (archive) - In November 2004 the first prize was awarded to Julia Kristeva of Paris whose "explorations... on the intersection of language, culture and literature have inspired research across the humanities and the social sciences throughout the world". 2005: Jürgen Habermas (This site) - 2006: Shmuel N. Eisenstadt - 2007: Ronald Dworkin - 2008: Fredric Jameson (This site) - 2009: Ian Hacking - 2010: Natalie Zemon Davis - 2011: Jürgen Kocka - 2012: Manuel Castells (This site) - 2013: Bruno Latour

    February 2004 Making Mathematics Count. The report of Professor Adrian Smith's Inquiry into Post-14 Mathematics Education

    1.5.2004 Eight East European countries joined the European Union: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.

    25.5.2004 Having introduced mobile phones in November 2002, North Korea prohibited their use. They were reintroduced from December 2008. These mobile phones do not have an internet connection or allow international calls. (Kretchun and Kim 2012, Appendix 4 - The Sydney Morning Herald 4.6.2004)

    September 2004

    "We are the first generation that can look extreme poverty in the eye, and say this and mean it - we have the cash, we have the drugs, we have the science. Do we have the will to make poverty history?" Bono

    In 2005 I asked "Can anyone tell me who Bono is?" On 27.7.2011 I found out that my web page has a reader when Eddie McCann, a first year sociology student, told me that Bono is Paul David Hewson (10.5.1960) lead vocalist of the rock band U2 and directed me to Wikipedia (A link to the page I could have read in 2005)

    18.11.2004 Royal Assent for Act establishing Civil Partnerships in the United Kingdom. A civil partnership "is a relationship between two people of the same sex ("civil partners")" which "ends only on death, dissolution or annulment". Like a marriage, but not a marriage.

    2005

    2005 'Girl Picking Apples' painting by Quentin Blake was part of Scope's In the Picture campaign

    11.3.2005 Royal Assent to UK Terrorism Act 2005

    12.4.2005 Terrorism, Crime and the collapse of Civil Liberties: John Lea's address to the Criminology Society at Middlesex University

    mid July 2005 Department of Media, Culture and Sport (England) launched its Taking Part Survey (adults) a weblink. A continuous national survey of a representative cross-section of private households in England. A child survey introduced in January 2006. The survey is commissioned in partnership with Sport England, Arts Council England and English Heritage. (a weblink)

    July 2005 UK Prime Minister Tony Blair chaired the G8 summit of the world's major economies at Gleneagles in Scotland. The two biggest issues discussed were climate change and Africa. 6.7.2005 London awarded the 2012 Olympics. 7.7.2005 A series of bomb attacks on London's transport network killed 52 people and injured 700. 13.7.2005 The Independent "The police's nightmare: home-grown terrorists" (archive) by Kim Sengupta [See Angry Brigade] - "Moments in the Day" A poem by Frank Bangay.

    Bob Geldorf (Evening Standard 27.6.2012, page 15 said that the "four legs" of Africa's growth were the cancelled debt and doubled aid of Gleneagles, massive Chinese investment and the connectivity of mobile phones. See mobiles and poverty - "Did Live 8 and G8 help cut Africa's debt burden?" (Andrew Walker BBC 10.7.2015

    18.8.2005 Hong Kong special stamps featuring the "Four Great Inventions of Ancient China." -

    $1.40 stamp: compass

    $2.40 stamp: printing

    $3 stamp: gunpowder

    $5 stamp: papermaking

    30.8.2005 "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by John P. A. Ioannidis. "Investigators working in any field are likely to resist accepting that the whole field in which they have spent their careers is a 'null field'." [See Hilda Bastion's blog review and May 2013]

    Friday 9.9.2005 Socialist Health Association Conference: The Black Report - 25 Years On held in Manchester. See archive of conference report

    27.10.2005 "Two French youths of Malian and Tunisian descent were electrocuted as they fled the police in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous- Bois. Their deaths sparked nearly three weeks of rioting in 274 towns throughout the Paris region, France, and beyond" source. See Jock Young 2011

    2006

    Crime and Conflict Research Centre launched

    27.1.2006 First International Holocaust Remembrance Day. - (Wikipedia). - Deutsche Welle - See 27.1.1945 and 27.1.1996

    13.2.2006 Publication of The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict by The Young Foundation, re-visits 1957. The authors are Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young (who died in 2002). - Madeleine Bunting Guardiam Review

    30.3.2006 Royal Assent to UK Terrorism Act 2006

    May 2006

    21.6.2006 "Sociology After Durkheim" conference at the University of Surrey. The organisers say that much of sociology has been developed on Durkheim's principle of social objectivity. But, they say, post-structuralists, post modernists and feminists have criticised "received notions of the social and of objectivity". " Latour (2005) repudiates Durkheim's concept of the social as stable and distinctive, and argues for a return to an earlier usage and an emphasis on transient associations. Garfinkel (2002), however, has reworked Durkheim's aphorism as the foundation of ethnomethodology, while eschewing theory. Is there scope for new form of theory, for synthesis and re-evaluation of existing works, or must we accept that sociological theory has, reflexively, persuaded us to stop theorizing?" Copac notice a remaining link. Let us see if we can work out what they mean.

    18.7.2006 to 21.7.2006 First International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences held on the Island of Rhodes in Greece. By 2010, the fifth conference had reached Cambridge (England)

    Monday, 16.10.2006 London's Ecology - How clean is the Thames? Gresham College lecture by Martin Attrill, Professor of Marine Ecology, Plymouth University. See Thames 1957

    Colony collapse disorder "During the months of October, November, and December 2006, an alarming number of honey bee colonies began to die along the East Coast of the United States". (source). In England and Wales, the National Federation of Women's Institutes passed a resolution calling for increased funding for research into honey bee health in 2009, followed by an "SOS for Honey Bees campaign".

    2006 "can be regarded as the break-through year of social media" according to Ahlqvist, Bäck, Halonen and Heinonen (2008). Early applications like Wikipedia and MySpace had gathered significant numbers of users, while Facebook and YouTube had been introduced to the public. The examples represent "different types of applications: Wikipedia collaborative knowledge creation in the form of an open encyclopaedia, MySpace and Facebook social networking, and Flickr and YouTube content sharing of photos, pictures and videos."

    2006 Last edition of Home and Country as Women's Institute magazine. It was replaced by WI Life in 2007. Dissenters thought the Institute had "moved away from both its original aims and its traditional rural focus". Daily Telegraph

    2007

    March 2007 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) (an advisory body of the European Union) established in Vienna (Wikipedia)

    March 2007 British Sociological Association launched Cultural Sociology saying that "in the last two decades or so... cultural processes and artefacts have come to be particularly central in sociological thinking and research". Mentioned linguistic, postmodern and 'cultural' turns and that "Bourdieu's magisterial work of sociology of culture, Distinction, frequently tops polls of the most influential works of sociological analysis"

    June 2007 One of the wettest months on record in Britain. July was wettest on record in England. (Wikipedia 2007 United Kingdom Floods). The unpredictable weather's effect on plants triggered Frank Bangay's thoughts on ecology.

    9.8.2007 International French investment bank BNP Paribas blocked withdrawals from two of its hedge funds - an early sign that banks were refusing to do business with each other.

    October 2007 Equality and Human Rights Commission in Britain etablished from combination of the Equal Opportunities Commission, the Commission for Racial Equality, and the Disability Rights Commission. (external link)

    15.11.2007 William Gibson in the last of three 40th Anniversary Issues of Rolling Stone (One dealing with the future)

    "Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi

    ... In a world of super-ubiquitous computing, you're not gonna know when you're on or when you're off. You're always going to be on, in some sort of blended reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong, and it goes off. And then it's a drag"


    Thomson Reuters' ISI Web of Science
    List of refereces (citatons) from the journal literature it indexed in 2007 to books in the humanities and their authors. This table lists those authors whose books, collectively, were cited 500 or more times in 2007 Times Higher Education 26.3.2009

    1. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Philosophy, sociology, criticism 2,521
    2. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) Sociology 2,465
    3. Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) Philosophy 1,874
    4. Albert Bandura (1925- ) Psychology 1,536
    5. Anthony Giddens (1938- ) Sociology 1,303
    6. Erving Goffman (1922-1982) Sociology 1,066
    7. Jurgen Habermas (1929- ) Philosophy, sociology 1,049
    8. Max Weber (1864-1920) Sociology 971
    9. Judith Butler (1956- ) Philosophy 960
    10. Bruno Latour (1947- ) Sociology, anthropology 944
    11. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Psychoanalysis 903
    12. Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) Philosophy 897
    13. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Philosophy 882
    14. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) Philosophy 874
    15. Noam Chomsky (1928- ) Linguistics, philosophy 812
    16. Ulrich Beck (1944- ) Sociology 733
    17. Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Philosophy 725
    18. David Harvey (1935- ) Geography 723
    19. John Rawls (1921-2002) Philosophy 708
    20. Geert Hofstede (1928- ) Cultural studies 700
    21. Edward W. Said (1935-2003) Criticism 694
    22. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) Sociology 662
    23. Roland Barthes (1915-1980) Criticism, philosophy 631
    24. Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) Anthropology 596
    25. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) Political theory 593
    26. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) Criticism, philosophy 583
    27. Henri Tajfel (1919-1982) Social psychology 583
    28. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Philosophy 583
    29. Barney G. Glaser (1930- ) Sociology 577
    30. George Lakoff (1941- ) Linguistics 577
    31. John Dewey (1859-1952) Philosophy, psychology, education 575
    32. Benedict Anderson (1936- ) International studies 573
    33. Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) Philosophy 566
    34. Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) Psychoanalysis, philosophy, criticism 526
    35. Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) History and philosophy of science 519
    36. Karl Marx (1818-1883) Political theory, economics, sociology 501
    37. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Philosophy 501

    2008

    January 2008: Yvonne Christie: "This UK Black Phenomenon"

    "There are at least two other groups of victimised people whose experience of oppression has left them as confused and overrepresented in prisons and psychiatric institutions, dependent on drugs and alcohol (possibly denial of self too) as Black people here in the UK - the indigenous Americans (Indians) and the aborigines in Australia. Has the time come to explore our psyche and our history side by side?"

    9.1.2008 Simone De Beauvoir's 100th birthday celebrated in Paris with a 1950s picture of her beautiful bottom.

    Florence Montreynaud wrote "My first thought on seeing the magazine was that they would never have considered putting a picture of Sartre's bottom on the front of Le Nouvel Observateur," she said. "Luckily, perhaps. Then my second thought was 'what a fine bottom'. No male philosopher I can think of would have had such a lovely bottom. Mme de Beauvoir had a brilliant mind. She also had a wonderful body. Women win on both counts."

    January 2008 Centre for Disability Research (CeDR) established at Lancaster University under the direction of Carol Thomas and co-director Chris Hatton. A "mad studies stream" flowed from 2014.

    Spring 2008 Publication of Natural Experiments of History, a collection of essays edited by Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson, each of which demonstrates the use of quantitative methods alongside the qualitative methods more often used to study the past. Review - Review

    6.4.2008 Olympic torch left London. Abdur Chowdhury was attempting to create "an algorithm to really figure out what people are talking about". Using Twitter, this highlighted spikes in the use of people, places and nouns. "I start to see Rome, Prague, London, Moscow". "What I realised is that I was watching the Olympic torch runner run through Europe. It was at that moment I realised that trends - this ability to extract what's new and interesting happening in real-time - was going to be a thing." (BBC)

    15.9.2008 The start of the "crisis", but the "recession" started earlier. Francesco Di Bernardo speaks of "The economic crisis" "currently" [2014] "affecting Europe"
    starting with the crash of Lehman Brothers.

    "Widely described as the most disruptive since" 1929, it "has also triggered severe social issues."

    October 2008 Deirdre Fullerton and Elizabeth Burtney Guidelines for Setting Up a C-Card Condom Distribution Scheme For Young People (Final draft of Brook guidelines dealing with English schemes distributing free condoms to young people under 24.)

    14.10.2008 Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association launched at Open Access Day Celebration in London hosted by the Wellcome Trust.

    Restructuring amidst financial turmoil

    9.10.2008. Resolution Limited incorporated in Guernsey. It acquired Friends Provident in November 2009 and AXA Sun Life and Bupa Health Assurance in the autumn of 2010. Its 2010 Annual Report and Accounts is sub-headed "Value driven restructuring in financial services". Became Friends Life Group in May 2014, but Aviva plc (Wikipedia) acquired Friends Life Group Limited in May 2015.

    5.11.2008 Queen Elizabeth 2nd visited the London School of Economics. It was the first visit by a British head of state since George 5th laid a foundation stone in 1920. On this visit, she visited a debate about Africa and climate change and was given a presentation about turmoil on the international markets. She asked: "Why did nobody notice it?" She is estimated to have lost about £25 million in the financial crisis. (Telegraph report)

    December 2008 Pope Benedict 16th criticised gender theory - BBC Report - Guardian - Wikipedia on gender studies - full text - See also 2012 address

    2009

    The Sackcloth Man by Jayasree Kalathil in the Indian series of children's books Different Tales: Stories from Marginal Cultures and Regional Languages. Deepa Sreenivas in The Hindu commented that Indian children's books are usually about "urban, middle-class" and "invariably" about upper caste children. These are the exceptions. They "focus on the lives of Indian children from small town or village communities". Illustrated by Rakhi Peswani.

    2009 Loïc Wacquant Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity

    2009 Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation edited by Daniel Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer. About historical narratives presented to the public in museums, monuments, texts, and festivals around the world.

    31.1.2009 United Kingdom Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, speaks of the "the first financial crisis of the global age". The past offered "no clear map ... to deal with it". However, "This is not like the 1930s. The world can come together" (BBC report) - See USA

    18.3.2009 New Scientist The credit crunch: What happened?

    26.4.2009 "The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity". Leader of UK Conservatives, David Cameron. (online transcript) - See Wikipedia on austerity. See welfare austerity.

    5.5.2009 Launch of This is Survivor Research

    17.6.2009 The Global Financial Crisis - Why Didn't Anybody Notice? British Academy Forum. - archive - archive of letter to the Queen

    September 2009: Launch of BBC Lab UK. The results of the first experiemnt, a clinical trial of "brain testing games", were published in Nature Volume: 465, Pages7 75-778 on 10.6.2010 (online 20.4.2010). The study concluded that improvements in perfomance from practice did not tranfer to other acitivities.

    30.10.2009 Claude Lévi-Strauss died, aged one hundred years. He was born 28.11.1908.

    October 2009 Tate Gallery removed images of pictures by Graham Ovenden from its website.

    10.11.2009 UK conservative opposition leader, David Cameron, outlines how the "big society" will mend the "broken society" by transferring power and responsibility from the "big state" to "community groups, charities, social enterprises and responsible citizens". (analysis) - manifesto - election

    2010

    350th anniversary of the Royal Society - Personal perspectives in the life sciences for the Royal Society's 350th anniversary was published (free online) in December 2009. It includes
    "The social brain: allowing humans to boldly go where no other species has been" by Uta Frith and Chris Frith - video

    1.1.2010 Inspiring women: New logo for the Womens Institute featured in the Daily Telegraph... "the largest women's organisation in Britain, with 205,000 members. In recent years, urban branches have been set up, which have attracted younger women."

    22.1.2010 Mending our "broken society", building a "big society" in UK Conservative Party's draft manifesto. external link - See Community disintegration theory

    1.3.2010 Likestillingsparadokset [The Gender Equality Paradox] shown on Norwegian television. This was the first of a seven part series in which Harald Eia confronted Norwegian social scientists with the evidence for some biological influence on personality. The series was called Hjernevask (Brainwash) [Watch the video] - Consider call for a research space about "the mutual interactions between genetics and identity", and "activities that occur in the body and the social practices of identity in which bodies are situated and constituted".

    19.3.2010 Erotic capital

    8.4.2010 United Kingdom Equality Act (2010) (external link) Major provisions came into force 1.10.2010.

    Late April 2010 Credit rating agencies downgraded Greek bonds to junk status. Danger of "sovereign default".

    6.5.2010 United Kingdom General Election that led to the formation of a Coalition Government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.

    26.5.2010 UK "Coalition government sets out radical welfare reforms"

    25.8.2010 History as research method: The Survivors History Group at the "Qualtiative Methods in Mental Health Research" conference at Nottingham.

    September 2010 Bauman Institute launched (external link). Researching Zygmunt Bauman's sociological work - consumerism and sustainability - globalisation, risk and uncertainty renewing politics and civil society. [It's late]

    September 2010 Sun Life Assurance Society sold to the Friends Life group, ending its use of the sun logo.

    October 2010 The London Geodiversity Action Plan first published

    1.10.2010 Post-truth politics

    11.10.2010 The Equality and Human Rights Commission published How fair Is Britain?, which it claims is "the most comprehensive compilation of evidence on discrimination and disadvantage ever compiled in Britain"

      14.10.2010 United Nations Information Economy Report 2010 focused on "poverty alleviation" (offline).

    Bill Clinton 10.5.2012 "In 2010, a UN report said that wireless technology becoming a common medium has done more to lift people out of poverty than any other technological advance in history. In the poorest countries in the world, every 10 percent increase in cell phone penetration tends to add about 1 percent per year to GDP. It's a stunning thing."

    20.10.2010 First World Statistics Day. The second will be on 20.10.2015
    In Vanuatu (Pacific islands) celebrations included a population clock - an outdoor LED sign which also had other headline statistics on it. Geneva declared itself the "hub of international statistics" with a report from nine organisations based there: the International Labour Organisation, International Telecommunication Union, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, World Health Organisation, World Intellectual Property Organisation, World Meteorological Organisation, and World Trade Organisation,

    "UK social science research is a world leader": Statement from the (UK) Academy of Social Sciences in respect of the "Browne Review proposals" and the UK government Comprehensive Spending Review announcement of 20.10.2010. That copy lost. See Social Space

    9.11.2010 Making the Case for the Social Sciences No. 3 - Sustainability, the Environment and Climate Change. Academy of Social Sciences and the British Psychological Society. Booklet

    Thursday 25.11.2010 UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, speech on wellbeing

    November 2010 Start of six month period in which the UK Office for National Statistics established "measures of well-being". See 2012

    18.12.2010 Suicide start to "arab spring"

    December 2010 Austerity announced as "word of the year" for 2010 by Merriam-Webster


    The growth of internet shopping


    UK Online Retail Statistics - Source: Verdict Research, UK E-Retail, 2011. qouted DBIS 12.2011, page 14


    2011

    January 2011 Rihanna goes Red Hot Cover: British GQ magazine

    20.1.2011 Campaign for Social Science (in he UK) launched at the House of Lords by the Academy of Social Sciences - (Report on Social Science Space) - The Making the Case for the Social Sciences booklets began before the Campaign started: 1: well-being - 2: ageing - 3: sustainability, the environment and climate change - 4: crime - 5: sport and leisure - 6: management - 7: Scotland - 8: longitudinal studies - 9: mental well-being - 10: Wales - Predictions of significance

    26.1.2011 BBC's "Great British Class Survey" launched. [Date of launch of web survey]. See CRESC website - The results were published on 2.4.2013

    26.1.2011 British Sociological Association workshop at Warwick included Doing Historical Sociology with Kristy Warren and Lucy Mayblin - a session with Gurminder K Bhambra and International Historical Sociology with George Lawson. another link

    March 2011 Laurie Taylor interviewed Stuart Hall

    We are not watching you half as much as we said we were:
    British estimate of survillance cameras revised down form 4.2 million cameras to 1.85 million. Evening Standard 3.3.2011 (Headline: "We're watching you: 'Britons caught on CCTV 70 times a day'")

    Friday 11.3.2011 Earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Fourth most powerful in the world since modern record keeping began in 1900. Wikipedia

    27.3.2011 Twenty first British Census

    Office of National Statistics Census page

    56 million residents in England and Wales of whom 86% were White, 8% were Asian/Asian British and 3% were Black/African/Caribbean/Black British. [See mental health

    14.12.2012 Discussion at the Religious Studies Project of
    Religion in the 2011 UK Census - See subject index.

    Monday 23.5.2011 Bankrupt Britain - An atlas of social change by Daniel Dorling and Bethan Thomas published. Mapping the effects of the recession on Britain geographically over the last three years: "in the wake of the 2007 banking crisis, 2008 economic crash and 2009 credit crunch". - Guardian review -

    22.7.2011 Appearing out of nowhere (as it seemed) Anders Behring Breivik (born 13.2.1979) murdered 77 fellow Norweigians in an Oslo bombing, followed by a mass shhoting at a Labour Party Youth Camp. "2083 - A European Declaration of Independence" was a manifesto released immediatelly before that presented political correctness, multiculturalism, cultural marxism (Gramsci mentioned) and the Islamic colonisation of Europe as the enemies to be confronted. See New Statesman article

    27.7.2011 This webpage finds a reader

    1.9.2011 The Class Ceiling

    11.10.2011 First episode of BBC Radio 4's The Life Scientific interviewed Paul Nurse, Nobel prize- winning geneticist and President of the Royal Society.

    October 2011 "Lesbians Seeing Lesbians - Building Community in Early Feminist Photography" at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Presented by co-curator Ilana Eloit (Ilana Eliot

    17.11.2011 Making the Case for the Social Sciences No. 5 - Sport and Leisure. Academy of Social Sciences and the British Psychological Society. Booklet
    [Olympic context]

    13.12.2011 The Portas Review: An independent review into the future of our high streets by Mary Portas.

      17.12.2011 United Nations Decade on Biodiversity launched in Kanazawa, Japan.

    2012

    30.1.2012 PProf puts p-hacking in the Urban Dictionary as "exploiting -perhaps unconsciously - researcher degrees of freedom until p<.05". See P values

    16.4.2012 Aditya Chakrabortty "Economics has failed us ... why aren't political scientists and sociologists offering an alternative view?" The Guardian. On 29.6.2012 BSA News suggested, in the light of "some recent newspaper articles", a special number of Sociology responding to "recent global experiences". This materialised in October 2014 with the opening sentence "why talk about the global economic crisis today"? On 8.10.2012 the BSA was a joint sponsor of a conference at the British Library "Understanding the financial crisis: sociology, political economy and heterodox economics?"   Top academics as The Young Ones in The Guardian Actually do some meaningful work? Us?

    1.4.2012 Start of INTERACT Trial: INvestigation of TExt message Reminders on Adherence to Cardiac Treatment - See report

    Saturday 19.5.2012
    The
    first Unofficial Histories Conference at Bishopsgate Institute, London: "A free public conference to discuss how society produces, presents, and consumes history beyond official and elite versions of the past".

    30.5.2012 "Women's Institute set to debate midwife shortage" Nursing Times (Press Association report).

    18.6.2012 Making the Case for the Social Sciences No. 6 - Management.
    Academy of Social Sciences and the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies. Booklet

    June 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Rio+20). "Future Earth" announced. A consortium based in five countries was established in 2014 to create the Future Earth "distributed hub network". Future Earth was fully operational at the end of 2015.

    25.7.2012 to 12.8.2012 London Olympic Games. Main venue: Stratford. See David Amery on East End.

    3.10.2012 ITV documentary Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile (see Wikipedia

    10.10.2012 Mariage homosexuel, homoparentalité et adoption : ce que l'on oublie souvent de dire: By Gilles Bernheim, the Chief Rabbi of France. This includes translated as

    " marriage is not only the recognition of love. It is the institution that articulates the covenant of man and women with the succession of generations. It is the institution of a family, that is to say a cell which creates a relationship of direct descent between its members. Beyond the common life of two people, marriage organises the life of a community composed of descendants and ascendants. In this sense, it is fundamental in the construction and stability of both individuals and society"

    " le mariage n'est pas uniquement la reconnaissance d'un amour. C'est l'institution qui articule l'alliance de l'homme et de la femme avec la succession des générations. C'est l'institution d'une famille, c'est-à-dire d'une cellule qui crée une relation de filiation directe entre ses membres. Au-delà de la vie commune de deux personnes, il organise la vie d'une Communauté composée de descendants et d'ascendants. En ce sens, c'est un acte fondamental dans la construction et dans la stabilité tant des individus que de la société. "

    October 2012 British Academy position statement Society Counts. Quantitative skills in the social sciences and humanities - (offline copy).

    Thursday 18.10.2012 Sharon Witherspoon listed strengths of UK social science as including an "impressive data infrastructure (with birth cohort studies, longitudinal studies and others), and imaginative qualitative research", but said the UK is "weaker than it should be in quantitative research skills". Guardian Professional

    Friday 19.10.2012 Women in science: Wikipedia workshop at The Royal Society, London. See also The Guardian 25.7.2013

    20.11.2012 Office for National Statistics Measuring National Well-being: Life in the UK

    18.12.2010 Making the Case for the Social Sciences No. 7 - Scotland. Academy of Social Sciences. Booklet

    Friday, 21.12.2012 Pope Benedict 16 gave his Christmas greetings to the Roman curia. In the course of this he referred to a study by the Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, of the philosophy behind the "attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child". Gilles Bernheim criticises Simone De Beauvoir for her claim that On ne naît pas femme: on le devient (One is not born, but rather becomes a woman). - See also 2008 address

    2013

    Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013

    International Year of
Statistics International Year of Statistics.
    Became The World of Statistics in 2014
    See Social Statistics
    Aims to promote the importance of Statistics to the broader scientific community, business and government data users, the media, policy makers, employers, students, and the general public.
    Two representatives of the International Statistical Institute are on the steering committee
    UK participants include The Royal Statistical Society and its Centre for Statistical Education and Radical Statistics - Some USA participants

    2013

    January 2013 Launch of the Social Theory Applied website - Leading to The Journal of Applied Social Theory 2015 - ??

    13.2.2013 First "More then a Number" (another link) series of public lectures run by Lancaster University. This one - video - is about "opinion based medical research" in testing drugs. John Whitehead describes Fisher's P value and the Bayesian approach where an investigator considers the likely outcome before conducting the experiment. This prior knowledge which may be from previous trials or some instinct that a scientist may have is combined with the data from the experiment to provide a result. [See 13.9.1998 and 12.12.2014]

    Saturday 23.2.2013 Inequality and Statistics Conference organised by the Radical Statistics Group in York - Programme and presentations

    March 2013 History not Propaganda website launched.

    2.4.2013 Great British Class Survey results published. (See Savage and Devine). The seven social classes were abstracted from the data by a statistical method called Latent Class Analysis.

    15.4.2013 Danielle Allen: The Art of Association: the formation of egalitarian social capital. Held at the British Library Conference Centre. Annual British Sociological Association/British Library Equality Lecture

    May 2013 "Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience" by Katherine Button, John P. A. Ioannidis and others in Nature Review of Neuroscience

    4.6.2013 Debbie Roberts welcomed people to Engage Visually's new website
    "where we will discuss all things graphic facilitation and graphic recording"

    Link to main website - 14.9.2013 archive. See visual - imagination - generating ideas

    5.6.2013-7.6.2013 The International Conference Statistics and its Interactions with Other Disciplines. Hochiminh City, VietNam.

    10.6.2013 Making the Case for the Social Sciences No. 8 - Longitudinal Studies Academy of Social Sciences - Campaign for Social Science and Sage. Booklet - Launch videos

    Saturday 15.6.2013 - Sunday 16.6.2013
    The
    second Unofficial Histories Conference in John Dalton Building, Manchester Metropolitan University. See Anne Plumb's presentation.

    June 2013 A New Zealand conference on statistics featured (amongst other things) Wiki New Zealand which does (almost) nothing but present statistical information about New Zealand.

    Beginning of October 2013 Launch of Discover Society "a new, online magazine of social research, policy analysis and commentary which has been set up by current BSA President, John Holmwood and former President, Sue Scott. The magazine seeks to restore social research to the heart of public debate and commentary by demonstrating the importance of context and social position"

    October 2013 Special issue of Sociology on "Genetics and the Sociology of Identity". See Christine Hauskeller and others

    October 2013 The Village Against the World: Marinaleda the story of a communist utopia in Spain. Reviews: David Edgar Guardian - Eugene Wolters Critical Theory

    Saturday 5.10.2013 Ralph Miliband shoots to fame in the Daily Mail as "The man who hated Britain" on the same day that Sociology at Middlesex University joined Facebook.

    11.11.2013 and 12.11.2013 impressions from the workshop on the future of the statistical sciences

    14.11.2013 "Reading the Book of Life in Prehistoric Dung", an article about Karen Chin and the study of coprolites . See National Geographic 2003 - Earth Magazine.

    16.11.2013 Jock Young died in New York.

    2014

    In the 1960s, Roland Barthes analysed popular culture through fashion (Barthes 1967), which he claimed conveys meaning through desires. Today, a picture of the Samsung "Galaxy S3" (mobile phone) being the signifier, the signified is the meaning and value given to it that it is 'the best' and 'latest' phone. This creates a sense of fetish this means we need the product, which is the myth. The sense of desire is created through commercialised adverts this creates the sign, the myth is the idea that individuals need the phone. Historically this is a development of capitalism, but it appears to be natural that individuals buy the commodities. (Fawziyah Hussain's essay) [See very modern in 2014]


    Read more
    17.1.2014 Launch of The World of Statistics
    http://www.worldofstatistics.org/
    Successor to the International Year of Statistics (Statistics2013). A global network of more 2,350 organizations worldwide committed to:
  • Increasing public awareness of the power and impact of statistics on all aspects of society
  • Nurturing statistics as a profession, especially among young people
  • Promoting creativity and development in the sciences of probability and statistics
  • 10.2.2014 "The death of the theorist and the emergence of data and algorithms in digital social research" by Ben Williamson. archive - See big data

    12.2.2014 "Scientific method: Statistical errors - P values, the 'gold standard' of statistical validity, are not as reliable as many scientists assume." by Regina Nuzzo in Nature. See P values

    Wednesday 19.2.2014 in C109 at 6pm at Middlesex University, Hendon. The controversial launch of the new Socrimology book club focused on a psychologist. The next meeting (10.4.2014) will focused on Jock Young, a sociologist. It discussed his 1971 classic The Drugtakers - The social meaning of drug abuse

    For the first meeting, the book under discussion was Adrian Raine's "The Anatomy of Violence: The biological roots of crime", published by Penguin last year. Books are chosen to provoke discussion, but have to be relevant to the social sciences.

    Thursday 27.2.2014 "Climate Change Evidence and Causes - An overview from the Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences"

    "Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) absorb heat (infrared radiation) emitted from Earth's surface. Increases in the atmospheric concentrations of these gases cause Earth to warm by trapping more of this heat. Human activities - especially the burning of fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution - have increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations by about 40%, with more than half the increase occurring since 1970. Since 1900, the global average surface temperature has increased by about 0.8 øC (1.4 øF). This has been accompanied by warming of the ocean, a rise in sea level, a strong decline in Arctic sea ice, and many other associated climate effects. Much of this warming has occurred in the last four decades." [See relation to modernisation and reflexive modernisation]

    CO2 variations during the past 1,000 years, obtained from analysis of air trapped in an ice core extracted from Antarctica (red squares). Modern atmospheric measurements from Mauna Loa are superimposed in blue.
    Figure by Eric Wolff, data from Etheridge et al., 1996; MacFarling Meure et al., 2006

    17.3.2014 The first Q-Step conference: "Counting them in: quantitative social science and the links between secondary and higher education". Q-Step is a £19.5 million programme designed to promote a step-change in quantitative social science training in the UK. website. David Willetts said (in reply to Jeff Evans from Middlesex University, that without knowing what questions to ask we do not know what to do with the data. However our problem at the moment is not having enough social scientists with the techniques to process the data. See Byrne 2015

    19.3.2014 Alan Turing Institute to be set up to research big data   (BBC News)

    Wednesday 26.3.2014 Clive Boddy   "Corporate Psychopaths: Who they are, What they do, Why they should be managed"

    Wednesday 16.4.2014 Religious Programming in an Age of Religious Illiteracy: The Case for Religion on TV and Radio - Also Independent 18.10.2013.

    Friday 4.7.2014 Rolf Harris verdict. Reflections of Father Joe Borg at Times of Malta on Saturday. (offline text).

    8.7.2014 to 26.8.2014 (7 weeks) Israel-Gaza conflict (Wikipedia).

    19.7.2014 "Sulphur surplus: Up to our necks in a diabolical element" by Laurence Knight BBC News Magazine

    Thursday 14.8.2014 to Monday 18.8.2014 72nd World Science Fiction Convention ("Worldcon") to be held in London

    15.9.2014 "Bricks turn me on sometimes... I feel a bit funny even writing this down" poem by Hollie Mcnish. ".. "the TV it confuses me... sexiness is explained the same way day after day after day".. "I don't believe what you say".

    1.10.2014 Launch of JSTOR Daily - background article by Joseph Lichterman

    14.10.2014 Credit Suisse' Global Wealth Report for 2014 published.

    Late October 2014 Six years after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy (see USA), a Special Issue of Sociology was devoted to Sociology and the Global Economics Crisis. The first financial crisis of the global age elicited reflections on "crisis" in a primarily marxist special issue. [See the Chakrabortty challenge]

    The lead article, by Emma Dowling and David Harvie, analyses the "Big Society" as political economy and relates it to three aspects of a crisis of global capitalism.

    See Sociology June 2018

    Thursday 6.11.2014 UN Report: A World That Counts: Mobilising The Data Revolution for Sustainable Development
    " Data are the lifeblood of decision-making. Without data, we cannot know how many people are born and at what age they die; how many men, women and children still live in poverty; how many children need educating; how many doctors to train or schools to build; how public money is being spent and to what effect; whether greenhouse gas emissions are increasing or the fish stocks in the ocean are dangerously low; how many people are in what kinds of work, what companies are trading and whether economic activity is expanding."
    "... huge data and knowledge gaps remain about some of the biggest challenges we face, and many people and groups still go uncounted. These gaps limit governments' ability to act and to communicate honestly with the public. Months into the Ebola outbreak, for example, it is still hard to know how many people have died, or where. "

    2.12.2014 'On the Street Where you Live': Bourdieusian analysis of socio-spatial hierarchy - Conference report

    17.12.2014 UK Policy paper: Our plan for growth: science and innovation - Evidence paper

    18.12.2014 Science included discovering the world's oldest cave art amongst its top ten breakthroughs for 2014.

      24.12.2014 United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, regulating the international trade in conventional arms - from small arms to battle tanks, combat aircraft and warships - entered into force.

    2015

    24.2.2015 Launch of a report The Business of People: The Significance of Social Science Over the Next Decade by the Campaign for Social Science. (predicted 25.1.2015) - "social science supplies tools, concepts and models to help us think about and run the state and markets". (read online)

    In Qatar the use of social media is both exceptionally high and advanced. A study of internet users in Qatar examined the usage of emerging social media networks. (Article posted 24.2.2015. Research published December 2014

    12.3.2015 "If you're excited about the upcoming The Nun in the World symposium", thank Carmen Mangion.

    30.3.2015 - 1.4.2015 Journal of Youth Studies conference in Copenhagen, Denmark theme "Contemporary Youth, Contemporary Risks". Signe Ravn and Tea Bengtsson identified neoliberalism, aspiration and NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) as concepts "reappearing again and again". They added comments on social investment. "When concepts cross borders" in Discover Society May 2015.

    April 2015 "Migration and Crisis in Europe" conference at Middlesex University.

    6.4.2015 Pension changes in the UK. (BBC)

    Thursday 7.5.2015 UK General Election with easy to read manifestos - Pre-election polls failed to predict the outright Conservative majority. Nature explains why. Exit polls got it right. Exit polls explained. ukpollingreport.co.uk

    June 2015 to June 2016 Global stock market sell-off. Wikipedia

    Friday 19.6.2015 David Lammy on the need to resurrect evening classes.

    1.7.2015 Mediterranean Crisis 2015 at six months: refugee and migrant numbers highest on record. By UNHCR.

    14.7.2015 Making the Case for the Social Sciences No. 10 - Wales. Academy of Social Sciences and Campaign for Social Science, Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods and Research Institute for Applied Social Sciences at Swansea University. Booklet

    David Byrne attacked the "construction of models of social reality based on linear regression and its derivatives". He argues that, in social science, variables and their effects are "so complex" that a full analysis would not yield straight lines or curves, but would look more like a bowl of spaghetti. He quoted the Gulbenkian Commission with approval. (Network Summer 2015

    Network referred the reader to an article in Sociology by Salvatore Babones for "background". Basically, some people think Q-Step needs more critical thinking.

    Is Q-Step good or bad? According to Byrne, it is good make quantitative methods central to social science, without privileging them over other methods. It is good to make students comfortable with using numbers. It is bad to "generate a kind of social physics dependent on mathematical formulation" and to push "regression methods as a way to understand complex social causation".

    16.7.2015 England's Department of Education consults on revised GCSE and A level reform: content for teaching from September 2017 including Sociology - Psychology - Economics - Business - Geology - Astronomy - Engineering - at GCSE level.

    5pm Saturday 25.7.2015 in Los Angeles, California, USA is 1am Sunday 26.7.2015 in the United Kingdom.
    America
    Opening ceremony of the 14th Special Olympics World Summer Games.

    Monday 31.8.2015 The Royal Society marked the 350th birthday of Philosphical Transactions with two special online editions: one on physical and the other on life sciences.

    20.10.2015 The second World Statistics Day. -- more about

    twitter #StatsDay15

    Logo a smiling face, a globe, a percentage sign = "statistics making it possible to better lives ... globally".

    17.12.2015 Bella Gaia (Beautiful Earth) performed San Francisco, followed by a discussion earth "earth-system scientists" at the end of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, which merged into Future Earth . The website will continue unedited for some years.

    2016

    8.1.2016 "The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene" in Science. The "'Anthropocene' Working Group" of the International Commission on Stratigraphy suggests making 1950 the start of the anthropocene. Other proposals had been an "early Anthropocene" starting when beginning with the spread of agriculture and deforestation; the exchange of species between continental blocks after Columbus and the industrial revolution. The group list as "markers" that humans have left in rock, soil and ice around the world: radioactive fallout, pottery, glass, bricks, concrete, copper alloys, elemental aluminum (only found as an ore in nature), plastics, black carbon and other particles from fossil fuel combustion, high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers and pesticides.

    Wednesday 11.5.2016 All Our Welfare: Towards a participatory social policy by Peter Beresford. Are we walking towards a kinder world?

    3.6.2016 Michael Gove says "people in this country have had enough of experts". (BBC) - Britain does not trust the experts on Brexit (Washington Post) .
    3.6.2016
    John Curtice: "a debate about the kind of society the UK is [and] should be, and in particular [about how] it has been shaped ... globalisation."
    This poster was launched on 16.6.2016 by the United Kingdom Independance Party. It shows the party's leader, Nigel Farage, holding back large numbers of asylum seekers on the southern boarders of the European Union.
    By coincidence, Joe Cox MP, a campaigner for remaining in the Union and for rights of asylum seekers, was assassinated on the same day.
    "My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain" .
    The alternative to death is hope not hate.
    Thursday 23.6.2016 "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? I voted to remain. Counting the cost of exit in heritage - science - science - Middlesex University - social science -
    Mark Easton's social analysis. - Parliament or or prerogative? - Immigrants who voted leave - Leeds - "Leave" and "Remain" are the new tribes. - Open Britain

    27.6.2016 - 28.6.2016 "Political Citizenship and Social Movements" conference at the University of Portsmouth. Keynote speakers Engin Isin and Therese O'Toole. See Médecins Sans Frontières and movement and citizenship


    Nurses and navvies
    Thursday 30.6.2016 to Sunday 3.7.2016 Birkbeck (Thursday) and Queen Mary University of London. 'Feminism and Radical Utopianism, Past and Present (Thursday) and Radical histories and histories of radicalism (three day conference).

    Talks, films, screenings, theatre, song, dance, walks and talks Stands, exhibitions, caucuses, debates

    Find out more. I heard Ilana Eloit - Danny Walkowitz - Carmen Morgan - Timothy Jones - Sam Brewitt- Taylor and others.

    Friday 8.7.2016 Launch of The New European. "The new Pop-Up paper for the 48%". Initially four issues were planned, but it continued on a regular basis. website - Wikipedia

    Wednesday 13.7.2016 Theresa May replaced David Cameron as UK Prime Minister. 'They've made Boris Foreign Secretary?'

    7.8.2016 Representing Egypt, Doaa Elghobashy (shown) and her colleague Nada Meawad played Laura Ludwig and Kira Walkenhorst of Germany in beach volley ball at the Rio Olympics. The German women won 21-12, 21-15. Until the 2012 Olympics all female volleyball players had to wear bikinis or a one-piece swimming costume.

    Saturday 20.8.2016 Launch of Urban Shamanism: A London Poetopographical at the the Poetry Cafe in West London. Amongst other things, Urban Shamanism is situated poetry written from a particular social and georgraphical perspective. Niall McDevitt, one of the four authors in the anthology, argues that William Blake was "the first urban shaman of the first industrial city". (BBC 12.8.2009). A rather different approach to Urban Shamanism is provided by Will Hall (27.7.2014) in Beyond Meds

    27.8.2016 to 4.9.2016 35th International Geological Congress held in Cape Town, South Africa. - University of Leicester Press Release. Most voted for about 1950 as the Base/beginning of the Anthropocene. Ideas about the What the Primary Signal were more diverse, including: plastic: 3, fuel ash particles: 2, carbon dioxide concentration: 3, carbon isotope change: 2, radiocarbon bomb spike: 4, Plutonium fallout: 10, and one vote each for lead, persistent organic pollutants, and technofossils Monday 29.8.2016 Anthropocene: Utility and Definition

    Friday 16.9.2016 and Saturday 17.9.2016 At Friends House, Euston Road, London. A multi-denominational conference on Nonconformist attitudes to war and peace in the long twentieth century will look at divergent resposes to the first world war (in particular) with papers on the second.

    Wednesday 9.11.2016 nrc.next (Netherlands) "Wat gaat hij doen?" (What will he do?)

    2017

    7.2.2017 "Uncertain times - Brexit and its impact on the financial sector" Remarks delivered (in English) by Andreas Dombret at Boston Consulting Group, Frankfurt am Main. "Brexit fits into a certain trend we are seeing towards renationalisation. I strongly believe that this negatively affects the well-being of us all." [The meaning appears to be a trend towards nation-centred and away from inter-national policies]

    Friday 21.4.2017 In The Evening Standard Tony Blair forecast a clear Conservative victory in 8.6.2017 United Kingdom election, but suggested "organisations that want to keep open the right of people to change their minds on Brexit ... mobilise voters to demand from candidates a clear statement of ... whether they would refuse to support a deal that substantially diminishes our access to the single market or a "no deal" outcome".

    Saturday 22.4.2017 World Wide March for Science. "... it isn't OK that leading officials can simply reject evidence-based science... our battle is for more than securing science funding. It is about engaging the public in our research ... and empowering them to be critical and sceptical about science in the media." "... with Brexit and ... some equally concerning decisions regarding ... climate change and child vaccination, politicians do not care about what experts have to say..." Suze Kundu - Materials Chemist, University of Surrey.
    "The March for Science champions robustly funded and publicly communicated science that serves the common good" Facebook - BBC - London website - Forbes Science - Twitter -

    Thursday 25.5.2017 Artificial Intelligence. "Google AI defeats human Go champion" "Google's DeepMind AlphaGo artificial intelligence has defeated the world's number one Go player Ke Jie".

    4.5.2017 UK Local elections (not London): "Labour and Ukip wiped out while Tories gain over 550 new seats" (Daily Telegraph headline). 8.6.2017 UK National elections. Conservatives (Tories) lose 13 seats, Labour gain 30. Conservatives remain in power with support of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.

    Saturday 24.6.2017 "Passions flare as Turkey excludes evolution from textbooks" by Selin Girit, BBC News, Istanbul

    Saturday 15.7.2017 Brexit and the Centre by Tony Blair

    29.12.2017: From the resignation letter of Andrew Adonis: "Brexit is a populist and nationalist spasm worthy of Donald Trump. After the narrow referendum vote, a form of associate membership of the EU might have been attempted without rupturing Britain's key trading and political alliances. Instead, by allying with UKIP and the Tory hard right to wrench Britain out of the key economic and political institutions of modern Europe, you are pursuing a course fraught with danger. Even within Ireland, there are set to be barriers between people and trade. If Brexit happens, taking us back into Europe will become the mission of our children's generation, who will marvel at your acts of destruction... What Britain needs in 2018 is a radically reforming government in the tradition of Attlee, working tirelessly to eradicate social problems while strengthening Britain's international alliances".

    2018

    Friday 18.5.2018: Meghan Markle and her mother, Doria Ragland, arrived at Cliveden House Hotel after meeting the Queen.

    "Ragland's great-great-great-great grandfather worked in the Deep South plantations and was freed after the Abolition in 1865. He then chose a new name to mark his emancipation, calling himself Wisdom." (Harper's BAZAAR UK 11.5.2018)

    Meghan Markle is the first descendant of an African American slave to marry into the royal family of the United Kingdom. Welcome, and good luck!

    late June 2018 Sociology special issue on "Migration and Crisis in Europe", building on "a small conference with the same title" at Middlesex University in April 2015". Revisiting the theme of crisis from 2014.

    Sunday 18.11.2018 "Lest We Forget. A perspective on African Caribbean Family History". A lecture by James Dawkins on tracing his slave family roots through manuscripts about the white slave owner Dawkins family of Jamaica. Also a family tree presentation by Nailah Cumberbatch. 7th Annual Tony Cheesman Lecture, Stratford Library, 3 The Grove, London E15 1EL. 4pm-7pm.

    2019

    If I am still here, I plan to write something. But if not, why not write your own history of science and society? And, if you cannot be best, be better!

    11pm 29.3.2019 United Kingdom due to leave the European Union, with a transition pariod to midnight on 31.12.2020

    With the help of Engage Visually , Paul Curzon and Mary Shelley we now sample possible futures.

    2023

    19.7.2023 The Closing Speech of the last MU Vice Chancellor: "We are now the first truly automated, International, distance learning organisation".

    2031 My predicted death, courtesy of the Office of National Statistics

    2032 Using polynomial trend analysis of Quaker statistics, Bill Chadkirk predicted in 2004 that the Religious Society of Friends in Britain will cease to exist in 2032.

    not before 2060 Newton predicts that Christ will return and establish a global Kingdom of peace. See "Statement on the date 2060" by Stephen D. Snobelen. 2003

    In Mary Shelley's The Last Man, a Republic is peacefully established in Britain in 2073. Not long afterwards, the whole fabric of civilisation on this earth begins to decompose. Taken from an ancient text found abandoned in a cave, The Last Man ends in 2100, "the last year of the world." A devastating worldwide plague has annihilated all of humanity except for one man, who chronicles the world's demise.

    What do you expect to happen?

    *********


    © Andrew Roberts 3.1999 -

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    For example: "(Roberts, A. 3.1999/timeline 1848)"

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