Browsing by Subject "Great Britain"
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Item "The Abhorred Name of Turk": Muslims and the Politics of Identity in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads(2016-11) Sisneros, KatieFrom historiographies to dramas, captivity narratives to mercantile ledgers, Anglo-Muslim studies has been in pursuit of an overall conceptualization the uniquely insular English population had of the Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire. But to approach an understanding of what the English thought of the Turk, one must necessarily consider the broad range of socio-political and economic conditions of the various echelons of English society. This dissertation explores a popular literature that - although a significant number of these texts exist that deals with the crucial relationship between Christians and Muslims - has heretofore never been considered as a whole in the context of how they represent the Muslim Turk. Broadside ballads, consumed widely and across the social and economic spectrum, were more accessible to and often indeed written expressly for the poor population of England who were largely illiterate and had little to no expendable time or income, and the Turk was a favored metaphor in broadside ballad literature throughout the seventeenth century. I argue that the function of the term “Turk” in seventeenth century broadside ballads depended so much on (and whose fluctuation was so closely attuned to) local politics that the term was largely stripped of any meaning, functioning simply as an “enemy” against which the English compared themselves and defined proper “Englishness.” My dissertation moves from the early decades of the century and the drama and discourse around piracy, through the tumultuous English Civil Wars and Interregnum, and through the Exclusion Crisis and the invasion of Vienna by Ottoman forces in order to trace the evolution of the presence of the Turk in popular broadside ballad. My research shows that Muslims performed a crucial function in the construction of the English identity, and no body of literature illustrates how closely the term “Turk” was linked to “not English” as clearly as the popular broadside ballad.Item Aristocrats and Professionals: Country-House Science in Late-Victorian Britain(2004-12) Opitz, Donald LukeThe historiography of late-Victorian and Edwardian science has overwhelmingly emphasized the importance of new institutional arrangements and the professional growth of the scientific disciplines, largely owing to the initiatives of the British middle-class and the increasing support of research by the British government. While historians consistently acknowledged the agency of gentlemen of science and domestic sites for research in the background to these developments, few have analyzed the tenacity and influence of the individuals, their activities, and the domestic social contexts in which they worked beyond the mid-nineteenth century. This dissertation considers the status of country-house science and "professionalization" from roughly 1850 to 1920. I argue that, enabled by a familial social infrastructure, an extensive aristocratic network--consisting of the Balfour, Campbell, Cavendish, Darwin, Gascoyne-Cecil, Parsons, and Strutt families--contributed to the intellectual and professional advancement of scientific fields in ways that applied, generally, politically-Conservative, yet liberally intellectual, theistic beliefs. Their perspectives, which contrasted with agnosticism, scientific naturalism, and middle-class professionalism, emphasized the respectability of the amateur study of nature at home as a means for personal atonement and the promotion of social good--an outlook consistent with the evangelical, aristocratic values in which their society came of age. Country-house science thus provided a model for the study of science at home as well as within purpose-built sites; it was a distinct vision and an enterprise that, amid social hierarchies governed by class and gender, encouraged broad participation within a dynamic intellectual milieu.Item Home telework, travel behavior, and land-use patterns: A path analysis of British single-worker households(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2018) de Abreu e Silva, João; Melo, Patricia C.This work analyzes the effects of home-based teleworking on the number of trips and weekly miles travelled by mode and purpose for one-worker households in Great Britain using data from the National Travel Survey for the period between 2005 and 2012. Two path analysis models are developed, one considering weekly trips and travel distances by mode and the other weekly trips and travel distances by purpose. Both models consider teleworking frequency in the context of home and workplace land-use characteristics, commuting distance, car ownership levels and weekly trips and travel distances. This framework allows us to explicitly model endogenous relations in the chains of decisions relating these variables. The results suggest that home-based teleworking is a strategy used by people to cope with long and costly commutes. Workers living in less transit accessible areas and with longer commutes tend to work from home more frequently. The main conclusions relating to teleworking frequency point to the fact that it increases weekly miles travelled, particularly by car, while it does not reduce commuting distances travelled. These results suggest that home-based teleworking is not an effective travel demand management strategy, particularly because it seems to increase car use. The overall main result is that teleworkers travel more by more polluting transport modes.