Cities develop around industry, markets and transport links. Dublin in the nineteenth century was similar, but additionally the north-west of the city developed around the expansion of a complex of institutional buildings for the reception, confinement and welfare of the poor and sick. This article argues that these institutions were implicit in the development of the modern city in the same way as industry and commerce. The physical development of the buildings altered and defined both the streetscape and, over time, the social identities and historical communities in the locale, in the same way that industrial development defined urban areas.

Between 1845 and 1850, the Congo coast became the most important source of slaves for the coffee growing areas in the Brazilian Empire. This essay develops a new methodology to understand the making of the ‘nations’ of 290 Africans found on the slave ship Jovem Maria, which boarded slaves in the Congo river and was captured by the Brazilian Navy near Rio de Janeiro in 1850. A close reading of such ‘nations’ reveals a complex overlapping between languages and forms of identification that alters the historian's use of concepts such as ‘ethnolinguistic group’ and ‘Bantu-based lingua franca’ in the Atlantic world. Building on recent developments in Central African linguistics, the article develops a social history of African languages in the Atlantic that foregrounds how recaptives negotiated commonalities and boundaries in the diaspora by drawing on a political vocabulary indigenous to their nineteenth-century homes in Central Africa.

We used fossil Chironomidae assemblages and the transfer function approach to reconstruct summer air temperatures over the past 300 years from a High Arctic lake in Hornsund, Svalbard. Our aims were to compare reconstructed summer temperatures with observed (last 100 years) seasonal temperatures, to determine a potential climate warming break point in the temperature series and to assess the significance and rate of the climate warming trend at the study site. The reconstructed temperatures were consistent with a previous proxy record from Svalbard and showed good correlation with the meteorological observations from Bjørnøya and Longyearbyen. From the current palaeoclimate record, we found a significant climate warming threshold in the 1930s, after which the temperatures rapidly increased. We also found that the climate warming trend was strong and statistically significant. Compared with the reconstructed Little Ice Age temperatures in late eighteenth century cooling culmination, the present day summer temperatures are >4°C higher and the temperature increase since the 1930s has been 0.5°C per decade. These results highlight the exceptionally rapid recent warming of southern Svalbard and add invaluable information on the seasonality of High Arctic climate change and Arctic amplification.

Dans l’objectif de contraster deux sous-genres du roman contemporain, l’article analyse les réalisations lexicales, syntaxiques, sémantiques et discursives de 8 constructions lexico-syntaxiques (CLS) dans un corpus français constitué de romans historiques (HIST) et de romans de littérature blanche (GEN) postérieurs à 1950. Ces unités phraséologiques récurrentes ont été repérées grâce à la technique des ALR développée dans le Lexicoscope, un outil de linguistique de corpus créé pour fouiller des textes. Les 8 CLS retenues pour cette étude interviennent dans (ou initient) une interaction verbale. Notre propos est de démontrer que ces CLS représentent bien des motifs qui occupent des fonctions discursives (FD) précises dans chaque genre sous-romanesque qu’elles permettent de mieux définir. Nous verrons ainsi que ces motifs de l’interaction verbale peuvent occuper des FD narrative, descriptive et pragmatique dans HIST et GEN mais que seule la FD cognitive est représentée dans GEN.

The composition of the political elites in sixteenth-century Ghent, one of the political and economic centres of the county of Flanders, changed from a relatively open elite group that included representatives from the craft guilds into a compact, aristocratic class. This article analyses the reasons for this transformation. First, the number of office-holders in the city council declined and power was increasingly concentrated in the hands of a smaller political elite because of interventions in the urban political framework by the Habsburg authorities in the wake of a fiscal rebellion (1537–40) and a Calvinist takeover of power (1578–84). Secondly, the once dominant position of the craft guilds on Ghent's two benches of aldermen was weakened by institutional reforms, a Catholic backlash against Calvinism and an economic recession. Thirdly, the growing wealth gap between rulers and the ruled, coupled with an influx of noblemen into Ghent City Council, gave urban politics a more aristocratic character. Consequently, a series of interconnected changes gave rise to a trend towards oligarchy and aristocracy on the city's benches of aldermen.

Shortly before finishing his studies with Arnold Schoenberg, Roberto Gerhard composed Andantino, a short piece in which he used for the first time a compositional technique for the systematic circulation of all pitch classes in both the melodic and the harmonic dimensions of the music. He modelled this technique on the tri-tetrachordal procedure in Schoenberg's Prelude from the Suite for Piano, Op. 25 but, unlike his teacher, Gerhard treated the tetrachords as internally unordered pitch-class collections. This decision was possibly encouraged by his exposure from the mid-1920s onwards to Josef Matthias Hauer's writings on ‘trope theory’. Although rarely discussed by scholars, Andantino occupies a special place in Gerhard's creative output for being his first attempt at ‘twelve-tone composition’ and foreshadowing the permutation techniques that would become a distinctive feature of his later serial compositions. This article analyses Andantino within the context of the early history of twelve-tone music and theory.

This article provides a comparative analysis of four large towns in the Southern Low Countries between c. 1350 and c. 1550. Combining the data on Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp – each of which is discussed in greater detail in the articles in this special section – with recent research on Bruges, the authors argue against the historiographical trend in which the political history of late medieval towns is supposedly dominated by a trend towards oligarchy. Rather than a closure of the ruling class, the four towns show a high turnover in the social composition of the political elite, and a consistent trend towards aristocracy, in which an increasingly large number of aldermen enjoyed noble status. The intensity of these trends differed from town to town, and was tied to different institutional configurations as well as different economic and political developments in each of the four towns.