[ { "id": "authors:6thvt-cqd80", "collection": "authors", "collection_id": "6thvt-cqd80", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20210325-071256394", "type": "article", "title": "Visiting Vesuvius: Guides, Local Knowledge, Sublime Tourism, and Science, 1760\u20131890", "author": [ { "family_name": "Brewer", "given_name": "John", "clpid": "Brewer-John" } ], "abstract": "This article examines the activities of guides on the volcano Mount Vesuvius in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They worked in a double capacity\u2014as aids to savants seeking to unlock the scientific secrets of the volcano and as the creators of a tourist infrastructure that helped visitors enjoy the sublime experience of a steadily erupting volcano. The essay examines their contribution to scientific knowledge of the volcano and their role in developing sublime tourism, a phenomenon that, despite an earlier existence, burgeoned in the late eighteenth century. It argues that guides were vital to both, but that a long-standing attempt to circumscribe their role as knowledge makers grew more and more effective in the nineteenth century, as mineralogists' concern with specimens (shared by so many visitors and amateurs) gave way to geologists' concern for the interrelations of rocks and strata, and as the Neapolitan state developed scientific institutions, notably the volcanic observatory with its instruments on the slopes of the volcano, that took over functions previously served by the guides. Though the guides\u2014or some of them\u2014were able to profit from the flow of visitors, not least because of their special knowledge and skills, their activities were also transformed as the growth of a state infrastructure of roads and railways pushed them to the margins, and as transnational organizations, like the Thomas Cook travel agency, absorbed their labor.", "doi": "10.1086/712588", "issn": "0022-2801", "publisher": "University of Chicago Press", "publication": "Journal of Modern History", "publication_date": "2021-03", "series_number": "1", "volume": "93", "issue": "1", "pages": "1-33" }, { "id": "authors:ej21g-apc39", "collection": "authors", "collection_id": "ej21g-apc39", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20191114-103323413", "type": "article", "title": "Everyday Life. How the Ordinary became Extraordinary [Book Review]", "author": [ { "family_name": "Brewer", "given_name": "John", "clpid": "Brewer-John" } ], "abstract": "Joseph Amato's Everyday Life is an escalating, high speed survey (in 200 pages!) of everyday life from pre-history to the present. But this, as his extended acknowledgements make clear, is not so much an overview as a lengthy (and polemical) reflection on his life's work as an historian of the local, the material and the everyday, designed to offer \"reasons for studying and writing everyday life\u2026[as] a humane craft\" (240). For Amato, this task is a moral imperative, in which the historian should work \"to secure\u2026home and family in heart and hearth and to save the uniqueness of place as a reservoir of variety in a time when the local, rural and...", "doi": "10.1093/jsh/shx057", "issn": "0022-4529", "publisher": "Oxford University Press", "publication": "Journal of Social History", "publication_date": "2019-03", "series_number": "3", "volume": "52", "issue": "3", "pages": "1017-1019" }, { "id": "authors:cjaam-zk392", "collection": "authors", "collection_id": "cjaam-zk392", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20161114-155944409", "type": "article", "title": "Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire [Book Review]", "author": [ { "family_name": "Brewer", "given_name": "John", "clpid": "Brewer-John" } ], "abstract": "There could hardly be two more different treatments of Ben Franklin than the studies by Carla Mulford and George Goodwin. Mulford's Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire is the fruit of a lifetime's study of the statesman and polymath, a polemically engaged and bold attempt to lend coherence to a famously multifaceted career. Goodwin's Benjamin Franklin in London is altogether more modest. Elegantly written, it serves as an enjoyable introduction to Franklin's time in the imperial metropolis. Replete with anecdote, it is short on analysis, and tends to defer to the scholars on whose researches it often depends, while Mulford's arguments are clearly intended to challenge scholars (though the book is illuminating for nonexperts).", "issn": "0028-7504", "publisher": "New York Review, Inc.", "publication": "New York Review of Books", "publication_date": "2016-11-10", "series_number": "17", "volume": "63", "issue": "17", "pages": "42-43" }, { "id": "authors:9knje-yzm03", "collection": "authors", "collection_id": "9knje-yzm03", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20161114-160357631", "type": "article", "title": "Benjamin Franklin in London [Book Review]", "author": [ { "family_name": "Brewer", "given_name": "John", "clpid": "Brewer-John" } ], "abstract": "There could hardly be two more different treatments of Ben Franklin than the studies by Carla Mulford and George Goodwin. Mulford's Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire is the fruit of a lifetime's study of the statesman and polymath, a polemically engaged and bold attempt to lend coherence to a famously multifaceted career. Goodwin's Benjamin Franklin in London is altogether more modest. Elegantly written, it serves as an enjoyable introduction to Franklin's time in the imperial metropolis. Replete with anecdote, it is short on analysis, and tends to defer to the scholars on whose researches it often depends, while Mulford's arguments are clearly intended to challenge scholars (though the book is illuminating for nonexperts).", "issn": "0028-7504", "publisher": "New York Review, Inc.", "publication": "New York Review of Books", "publication_date": "2016-11-10", "series_number": "17", "volume": "63", "issue": "17", "pages": "42-43" }, { "id": "authors:2a1md-z4518", "collection": "authors", "collection_id": "2a1md-z4518", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20141211-095820790", "type": "article", "title": "Between Distance and Sympathy: Dr John Moore's Philosophical Travel Writing", "author": [ { "family_name": "Brewer", "given_name": "John", "clpid": "Brewer-John" } ], "abstract": "Dr John Moore's four-volume account of his Grand Tour in the company of the Duke of Hamilton was one of the most successful European travel books of the late eighteenth century. Moore's text, I argue, is a philosophical travel narrative, an examination of manners, customs and characters, analogous to the philosophical histories of the Scottish Enlightenment. Intended as a critique of the superficial observations of much travel literature, it argues for a greater degree of closeness between the traveler and the native, one based on sympathetic conversation rather than observation, but accompanied by a more distanced analysis, based on conjectural history, of the hidden processes that explain manners and character. Difference should be understood through a combination of sympathy and analysis that makes travel and its accounting valuable.", "doi": "10.1017/S1479244314000237", "issn": "1479-2443", "publisher": "Cambridge University Press", "publication": "Modern Intellectual History", "publication_date": "2014-11", "series_number": "3", "volume": "11", "issue": "3", "pages": "655-675" }, { "id": "authors:80h2m-asy17", "collection": "authors", "collection_id": "80h2m-asy17", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20141203-103145109", "type": "article", "title": "Forum: Closeness and Distance in the Age of Enlightenment Introduction", "author": [ { "family_name": "Brewer", "given_name": "John", "clpid": "Brewer-John" }, { "family_name": "Sebastiani", "given_name": "Silvia", "clpid": "Sebastiani-Silvia" } ], "abstract": "According to Michel de Certeau, distance is the indispensable prerequisite for historical knowledge and the very characteristic of modern historiography. The historian speaks, in the present, about the absent, the dead, as Certeau labels the past, thus emphasizing the performative dimension of historical writing: \"the function of language is to introduce through saying what can no longer be done.\" As a consequence, the heterogeneity of two non-communicating temporalities becomes the challenge to be faced: the present of the historian, as a moment du savoir, is radically separated from the past, which exists only as an objet de savoir, the meaning of which can be restored by an operation of distantiation and contextualization. In Evidence de l'histoire: Ce que voient les historiens, Fran\u00e7ois Hartog takes up the question of history writing and what is visible, or more precisely the modalities historians have employed to narrate the past, opening up the way to a reflection on the boundaries between the visible and the invisible: the mechanisms that have contributed to establish these boundaries over time, and the questions that have legitimized the survey of what has been seen or not seen. But, as Mark Phillips points out, it is the very ubiquity of the trope of distance in historical writings that has paradoxically rendered it almost invisible to historians, so that \"it has become difficult to distinguish between the concept of historical distance and the idea of history itself.\"", "doi": "10.1017/S1479244314000201", "issn": "1479-2443", "publisher": "Cambridge University Press", "publication": "Modern Intellectual History", "publication_date": "2014-11", "series_number": "3", "volume": "11", "issue": "3", "pages": "603-609" }, { "id": "authors:8fsem-dx882", "collection": "authors", "collection_id": "8fsem-dx882", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20140203-080033513", "type": "article", "title": "Notes From the Field - Tradition", "author": [ { "family_name": "Brewer", "given_name": "John", "clpid": "Brewer-John" } ], "abstract": "At Cambridge University in the 1960s, my fellow students and I were implacably hostile to \"tradition.\" We reveled in Quentin\nSkinner's denunciations from the podium of the British conservative philosopher and doyen of the National Review,\nMichael Oakeshott, whose critique of rationality and plaudits for change tempered by practice and tradition struck us as at\nonce hopelessly limited and, in an easily heard echo of Edmund Burke, deeply opposed to any sort of rationally justified\nradical innovation. Oakeshott and Burke were deemed to offer a descriptive and prescriptive account of change as a\nprocess of reverential accretion that we wanted (in somewhat contradictory fashion) both to deny and ignore. It is obvious,\nthen, that we saw \"tradition\" as an unwelcome constraint, mortmain, the suffocating dead hand of our ancestors. This\nwas pretty blind, as well as a sign of the times, because it threatened to inhibit us from addressing properly questions\nabout the processes of artistic, political, and social change. Our case against the invocation of tradition-that it served as\na means of avoiding those very same questions-still appears to me a telling one, though our own position, in retrospect,\nlooks little better.", "issn": "0004-3079", "publisher": "College Art Association", "publication": "Art Bulletin", "publication_date": "2013-12", "series_number": "4", "volume": "95", "issue": "4", "pages": "518-543" }, { "id": "authors:5k1wv-04r50", "collection": "authors", "collection_id": "5k1wv-04r50", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20140306-090728548", "type": "article", "title": "Solar Dance: Van Gogh, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty [Book Review]", "author": [ { "family_name": "Brewer", "given_name": "John", "clpid": "Brewer-John" } ], "abstract": "Modris Eksteins's Solar Dance centers on one of the most famous art forgery cases of\nthe twentieth century, the trial in Weimar Berlin of Otto Wacker, dancer turned art dealer,\nfor the forgery of thirty-four works attributed to Vincent Van Gogh. Wacker's fakes were\nfirst detected in late 1927, when they were to appear in a major exhibition of the painter's\nworks held in collaboration with the famous Cassirer gallery, which had done so\nmuch to make Van Gogh one of the most admired modern painters in Germany. Eventually\nbrought to trial in April 1932, Wacker was found guilty of knowingly passing off\nfakes; his appeal failed, and he was condemned to nineteen months in prison and to pay\na large fine.", "issn": "0022-2801", "publisher": "University of Chicago Press", "publication": "Journal of Modern History", "publication_date": "2013-09", "series_number": "3", "volume": "85", "issue": "3", "pages": "716-718" } ]