The first time that there is historical steadfastness of the presence of a photographer in a warlike conflict, as graphic correspondent is in the war of Crimea, in 1854-55. In the successive conflicts armed with importance that happen from this date, 1859 and 1860, with the reunification of Italy and other episodes in the British empire, the photo…[Read more]

This essay traces some of the contexts and media in which “Heracles-Hercules” – as a hero between virtue and hubris – was visible in European societies from the end of the middle ages onwards. It discusses whether this example of the reception, appropriation and transformation of classical myths in the early modern period can be understood as a…[Read more]

For two years, from 1788 to 1790, Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1739-1807) exchanged her familiar surroundings with Rome and Naples. She undertook her furthest and most ambitious journey at the age of almost 49. For the only time the princely widow left Germany or the German territories of the Reich. During her stay, the Duchess…[Read more]

Circular Quay was one of the first points of contact between First Nations people and Europeans, and to this day, it is one of the busiest localities on Sydney Harbour. The quay’s history is rich as it is still a busy transport hub, government administration area and commercial zone. In more recent decades, it’s expanded to include thriving…[Read more]

Taxes and dying. Two certainties in life, and that was certainly the case in colonial Sydney. For more than 150 years Customs House has provided the means of collecting taxes on the movement of goods

Journalist Jeff McGill recently wrote an opinion piece in the Campbel/town Macarthur Advertiser with the heading ‘Nothing “yucky” about fibro cottages’. He continued that ‘Macarthur’s first big housing development was Campbelltown’s St Elmo Estates of the 1950s, guided by Neil McLean, a much-loved developer’.1 The McLean St Elmo land releases were…[Read more]

The period of masonic internationalism in the last third of the 19th and first third of the 20th centuries saw the most visible – and controversial – attempts to organisationally model the “cosmopolitan imperative” of freemasonry. The various freemasonries in Europe saw themselves as links in a world-spanning “chain of brothers” forged by the…[Read more]

In ‘Degeneration’ (1892), Max Nordau included Émile Zola in his theory that fin-de-siècle artists were a danger to society. According to Nordau, the ‘false science’ in Zola’s Naturalist novels would erode social progress in their alleged preoccupation with disease, sexual deviancy and amorality. This article proposes that degeneration is, how…[Read more]

Haussmann’s re-building of Paris in the 1850s and ’60s had created an ordered city. However, the bourgeoisie used the new urban configurations as a weapon against the lower classes. This article describes the spaces of the underground and the overground: the underground is the metaphorical and literal rubbish heap for those in the lower parts of…[Read more]

Freedom of or from religion. Freemasonry as an international testing ground for fundamental societal issues (c. 1850–1930)
In masonic internationalism, key framework parameters of masonic activity were negotiated. They concerned the fundamental societal issue of how religious freedom (freedom to practise religion) and liberty of conscience (…[Read more]

Several documents from Egypt and Ḫatti (especially the Amarna letters and the Egyptian-Hittite correspondence) mention envoys and messengers in charge of diplomatic contacts between the two countries. Cuneiform and hieroglyphic transcriptions of Egyptian names at Ugarit hint at an actual presence (in Ugarit and Karkemish) of officials coming f…[Read more]