While serving in the New York Assembly in 1787, Alexander Hamilton identified a problematic clause in New York's constitution. Remarking on an act for settling intestate estates, Hamilton asked, “The question is what is meant in the constitution, by this phrase ‘the common law’?” He went on to describe an important distinction in his legal and constitutional thought:

The connections between science and civic culture in the Victorian period have been extensively, and intensively, investigated over the past several decades. Limited attention, however, has been paid to Irish urban contexts. Roman Catholic attitudes towards science in the nineteenth century have also been neglected beyond a rather restricted set of thinkers and topics. This paper is offered as a contribution to addressing these lacunae, and examines in detail the complexities involved in Catholic engagement with science in Victorian Belfast. The political and civic geographies of Catholic involvement in scientific discussions in a divided town are uncovered through an examination of five episodes in the unfolding history of Belfast's intellectual culture. The paper stresses the importance of attending to the particularities of local politics and scientific debate for understanding the complex realities of Catholic appropriations of science in a period and urban context profoundly shaped by competing political and religious factions. It also reflects more generally on how the Belfast story supplements and challenges scholarship on the historical relations between Catholicism and science.

During the period of Fascism, a variety of discourses and representations were attached to colonial landscapes and to their uses. African nature was the subject of diverse rhetorical strategies, which ranged from the persistence of visions of wilderness as the locus of adventure to the domesticating manipulations of an incipient tourist industry aiming to familiarise the Italian public with relatively tame forms of the exotic. Contrasting images of bareness and productivity, primitivism and modernisation, resistance to change and dramatic transformation found their way into accounts of colonial territories ranging from scientific and pseudo-scientific reports to children's literature, from guidebooks to travel accounts, all of which were sustained not just by written texts but also by iconographic representations. This article will look at the specific example of accounts of Italian Somalia in order to explore Fascist discourses regarding colonial nature and its appropriation. Documents examined will include early guidebooks to the colonies, a small selection of travel accounts aimed at the general public, as well as the works of a number of geographers and geologists who were among the most active polygraphs of the period, and whose writings addressed a wide range of Italian readers.

In 1761, George III commissioned a large group of philosophical instruments from the London instrument-maker George Adams. The purchase sprang from a complex plan of moral education devised for Prince George in the late 1750s by the third Earl of Bute. Bute's plan applied the philosophy of Frances Hutcheson, who placed ‘the culture of the heart’ at the foundation of moral education. To complement this affective development, Bute also acted on seventeenth-century arguments for the value of experimental philosophy and geometry as exercises that habituated the student to recognizing truth, and to pursuing it through long and difficult chains of reasoning. The instruments required for such exercise thus became tools for manipulating moral subjectivity. By the 1730s there was a variety of established modes in which the Newtonian philosophy might be used to argue for the legitimacy of Hanoverian rule. The education of George III represents a less recognized iteration of this relationship, concerned not with public apologetics, but rather with the transformation of an ‘indolent’ youth into a virtuous monarch.

While vacation colonies, camps for children and young people, well-equipped beaches and playgrounds, and the first national parks were conceived in Italy during the Liberal period, it was not until the late 1920s/1930s that they were created and transformed by the Fascist regime. This article will analyse the purposes of the use of the environment and protected areas by Fascist organisations during the Fascist regime by different social groups and classes. It will try to answer several questions: how did Fascist mass organisations (youth organisations such as the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) and Gioventò Italiana del Littorio (GIL), leisure organisations like the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND), sports associations) relate to environmental space? Which popular activities were conceived for open-air, urban and national parks? How did the relationship between outdoor leisure and the environment develop in the ‘new’ middle class in the 1930s? How did Fascism conceive of the relationship between human beings and nature? The Nazi regime and the US New Deal were the strongest models at that time in terms of the politics of land conservation and leisure time. Did Fascism look to those experiments; did Fascism find its own modern ‘conservative’ relationship with the environment? This article will try to answer some of these questions, mindful of the lack of studies on Italy in comparison with the expanding historiography on the German and American cases.