Author: Mabel Phythian TylecotePublisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN:
Category : Mechanics' institutes
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Book Description
The Mechanics' Institutes of Lancashire & Yorkshire Before 1851
Author: Mabel Phythian TylecotePublisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN:
Category : Mechanics' institutes
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Book Description
The Development of the Mechanics’ Institute Movement in Britain and Beyond
Author: Martyn WalkerPublisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317410920
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 195
Book Description
The Development of the Mechanics’ Institute Movement in Britain and Beyond questions the prevailing view that mechanics’ institutes made little contribution to adult working-class education from their foundation in the 1820s to 1890. The book traces the historical development of several mechanics’ institutes across Britain and reveals that many institutes supported both male and female working-class membership before state intervention at the end of the nineteenth century resulted in the development of further education for all. This book presents evidence to suggest that the movement remained active and continued to expand until the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on historical accounts, Walker describes the developments which shaped the movement and emphasises the institutes’ provision for scientific and technical education. He also considers the impact that the British movement had on the overseas development of mechanics’ institutes – particularly in Canada, America, Australia and New Zealand. The book concludes with a discussion of the legacy of the movement and its contribution to twentieth-century adult education. The Development of the Mechanics’ Institute Movement advances the argument that the movement made a substantial contribution to adult education for the working classes and provided a firm foundation for further education in Britain and beyond. It will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of education, history and sociology, as well as the philosophy of education, technical and vocational education, and post-compulsory education.
Algorithmic Modernity
Author: Morgan G. AmesPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197502423
Category : Algorithms
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Book Description
"The rhetoric of algorithmic neutrality is more alive than ever-why? This volume explores key moments in the historical emergence of algorithmic practices and in the constitution of their credibility and authority since 1500. If algorithms are historical objects and their associated meanings and values are situated and contingent-and if we are to push back against rhetorical claims of otherwise-then the genealogical investigation this book offers is essential to understand the power of the algorithm. The fact that algorithms create the conditions for many of our encounters with social reality contrasts starkly with their relative invisibility. More than other artifacts, algorithms are easily black-boxed. Rather than contingent and modifiable, they are widely seen as obvious and unproblematic-without context and without history. As an antidote, this volume keeps a clear focus on the emergence and continuous reconstitution of algorithmic practices alongside the ascendance of modernity. Its essays highlight the trajectory of an algorithmic modernity, one characterized by attitudes and practices that are best emblematized by the modernist aesthetic and inhuman efficacy of the algorithm. The volume moves from early modern algorithmic practices, centered on heuristics for arithmetic operations, emphasizing ruptures, shifts, and variations across times and cultures. By the age of Enlightenment, the term algorithm had come to signify any process of systematic calculation that could be carried out mechanically, but its meaning and implications are still distant from those familiar to us . It's in the nineteenth and twentieth century that the meaning of algorithm is sharpened through a new discipline and by adding sets of specific conditions-such as the condition of finiteness-which acquire new and crucial significance in the age of digital computing. Throughout, the connection between algorithms and modernity is one of our central concerns. Through detailed historical reconstructions of specific moments, thinkers, and cultural phenomena over the last five hundred years, these essays lead us to the definitions of algorithm most legible today and to the pervasiveness of both algorithmic procedures and rhetoric. This volume contributes a multi-faceted exploration of the genealogies of algorithms, of algorithmic thinking, and of the distinctly modernist faith in algorithms as neutral tools that merely illuminate the natural and social world"--
The Emergence of Stability in the Industrial City
Author: Martin HewittPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351890743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331
Book Description
The rapid eclipse of Chartism, and the relative tranquility of the period 1848-67 has been one of the most enduring puzzles of nineteenth-century British history. This book takes a fresh look at this conundrum, treating the period between the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 as a coherent whole for the first time. It suggests that previous depictions of 1848 as a watershed in British history have both exaggerated the nature of the transitions which occurred at mid-century, and have over-estimated both the collapse of radical attitudes and the fading of working-class resentment. The experiences of the Manchester working class show that poverty, unemployment and hardship persisted through the mid-Victorian boom. While some workers may have taken advantage of economic opportunities and the various movements of social and moral reform promoted by the middle class to acquire respectability, in general, attempts at middle-class ’moral imperialism’ brought only marginal changes to popular culture and attitudes. Instead, it is argued, the roots of the radical collapse and of political stability lie elsewhere: in the initial failure of radical leaders to sustain a firm consensus on effective strategies of reform, and in changes in the political culture of the mid-century city which closed off spaces in which independent working-class politics could continue to function. In the context of the most important industrial city of the era, this study provides a wide-ranging analysis of the complex forces which forged the uneasy compromise on which mid-nineteenth century stability rested.
Symbols and Things
Author: Kevin LambertPublisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988410
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 301
Book Description
In the steam-powered mechanical age of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the work of late Georgian and early Victorian mathematicians depended on far more than the properties of number. British mathematicians came to rely on industrialized paper and pen manufacture, railways and mail, and the print industries of the book, disciplinary journal, magazine, and newspaper. Though not always physically present with one another, the characters central to this book—from George Green to William Rowan Hamilton—relied heavily on communication technologies as they developed their theories in consort with colleagues. The letters they exchanged, together with the equations, diagrams, tables, or pictures that filled their manuscripts and publications, were all tangible traces of abstract ideas that extended mathematicians into their social and material environment. Each chapter of this book explores a thing, or assembling of things, mathematicians needed to do their work—whether a textbook, museum, journal, library, diagram, notebook, or letter—all characteristic of the mid-nineteenth-century British taskscape, but also representative of great change to a discipline brought about by an industrialized world in motion.
The Making of the English Working Class
Author: Edward Palmer ThompsonPublisher: IICA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 866
Book Description
This account of artisan and working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, adds an important dimension to our understanding of the nineteenth century. E.P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and re-creates the whole life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation and who yet created a culture and political consciousness of great vitality.
The Concept of Popular Education
Author: Harold SilverPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113503074X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 291
Book Description
Originally published 1965. This reprints the 1977 edition which included a new introduction. From the starting point of "popular" charity education, the book traces the dynamic of ideological and social change from the 1790s to the 1830s in terms of attitudes to education and analyzes the range of contemporary opinions on popular education. It also examines some of the channels through which ideas about education were disseminated and became common currency in popular movements.
Science in Victorian Manchester
Author: William T. GoldenPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351491881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
The evolution of an urban scientific community under the pressures of conceptual and social change is the main focus of this book. Manchester was Victorian Britain's leading industrial city. In order to describe and analyze the transformation of science in the eighteenth century, Robert Kargon closely examines Manchester through successive stages. In so doing, he traces the evolution of science from an activity pursued by gentlemen-amateurs to a highly specialized profession.At the end of this process, the author shows, a major trans formation in our understanding of the nature of science can be discerned: scientific knowledge, it was realized, could be produced. Science was no longer regarded primarily as the di vine design rendered into laws of nature, but rather as a method, or instrument, to be applied to novel areas of human endeavor. Science had become on the one hand enterprise, and on the other expertise. In each chapter, Kargon relates the changing conception of science and its social role to the birth, growth, and character of the city's scientific institutions.The contours of the scientific community-its interests, concerns, and approaches to what it came to see as critical problem---were shaped by its civic environment. Its character, in turn, responded to the development of the disciplines represented within it. As the sciences increased in specialization and complexity during the course of the nineteenth century, they placed new stress upon the community, affecting the composition of its membership and the nature of its leading institutions. The scientific frontier reacted upon Manchester just as Manchester acted upon it. Now available in paperback, this classic work in history includes a new introduction by the author.
Before the Public Library
Author: Mark TowseyPublisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004348670
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433
Book Description
Before the Public Library explores the emergence of community-based lending libraries in the Atlantic World before the advent of the Public Library movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Essays by eighteen scholars from a range of disciplines seek to place, for the first time, community libraries within an Atlantic context over a two-century period. Taking a comparative approach, this volume shows that community libraries played an important – and largely unrecognized – role in shaping Atlantic social networks, political and religious movements, scientific and geographic knowledge, and economic enterprise. Libraries had a distinct role to play in shaping modern identities through the acquisition and circulation of specific kinds of texts, the fostering of sociability, and the building of community-based institutions.
Communities of Science in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Author: Juliana AdelmanPublisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981696
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
The nineteenth century was an important period for both the proliferation of "popular" science and for the demarcation of a group of professionals that we now term scientists. Of course for Ireland, largely in contrast to the rest of Britain, the prominence of Catholicism posed various philosophical questions regarding research. Adelman's study examines the practical educational impact of the growth of science in these communities, and the impact of this on the country's economy; the role of museums and exhibitions in spreading scientific knowledge; and the role that science had to play in Ireland's turbulent political context. Adelman challenges historians to reassess the relationship between science and society, showing that the unique situation in Victorian Ireland can nonetheless have important implications for wider European interpretations of the development of this relationship during a period of significant change.