Archief nummers

The rise of the ‘national disaster’. A conceptual history.In the early nineteenth century the concept of ‘national disaster’ makes its appearance in Dutch periodicals, marking a rich variety of events, developments and ideas as disastrous for the wellbeing and integrity of the nation. This article shows how the concept of ‘national disaster’ is rooted in changes in the meaning and use of the concept of ‘disaster’. Guided by a computational analysis of Dutch newspaper discourse in the period between 1750 and 1850, the article demonstrates how the concept of ‘disaster’ was increasingly used in political discourse from the early nineteenth century onwards. The politicization of the concept of disaster, and its application to ideas about the public sphere and national territory led to the emergence of the ‘national disaster’.

Super-regional solidarity in city and village disasters in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic.The historiography of disasters is quite unanimous that the higher authorities in the Dutch Republic had little interest in alleviating local distress. The explanation for this lack of supra-regional solidarity is usually found in the institutional inability of the administratively fragmented Dutch Republic: only after the emergence of a central (nation)state in 1795 did disaster relief become modernized. Most disaster research concerned floods; this article examines city and village disasters. Analysing the policies of the higher authorities on the structural aid to victims, it will show that supra-regional solidarity and aid was not only possible but also frequent in the Dutch Republic. Based on urban disaster policies, this article will suggest some alternative explanations for the lack of supra-regional support in flood disasters.

Homely relics. The Leiden gunpowder disaster (1807) in public and private collections.On January 12, 1807 part of Leiden’s inner city was devastated by the explosion of an inland boat loaded with gunpowder. About 160 people – mostly women and children – were killed, some 2000 injured. Survivors kept mementoes of their loved ones and of the event itself. Over time, many of these ‘secular relics’ were acquired by museums, others are still with the heirs of their original owners. The article discusses how the Dutch word ‘relic’ lost its religious connotation and how the private provenance of objects relating to the gunpowder disaster differs from the public veneration for national relics of Dutch history and art. The term ‘homely relics’ is proposed as a new subcategory of the ‘secular relics’ defined by Wim Vroom in 1997.

In favor of…. Charity publications in the nineteenth century.In Dutch history, charity publications were almost entirely a 19th century phenomenon. In this article I provide an overview of this phenomenon. The first publication that I have been able to trace is from 1784, the most recent one from 1930. However there are some predecessors of charity publications. The few studies that have been published about charity literature emphasize their national message. Occasions for charity publications were many and varied. Even so, flood disasters prevail. The most varied genres could be employed for the purpose: theater plays, poetry, sermons, essays, etc. However, poems are in the majority, and it is they in the first place that become the object of criticism. From midcentury onward critical comments become ever fiercer, in particular concerning their quantity and their countless platitudes. What makes the phenomenon typically nineteenth century is the shared mentality behind it. To help out in the case of disasters or poverty was not yet a public matter but rested with privately undertaken initiatives.

Thunderstorms. A disaster, a dvine punishment, or a sublime spectacle?.Thunderstorms often had disastrous consequences in former times, especially when gun powder magazines were struck. After the invention and implementation of Franklin’s lightning rod, the interpretation of these disasters as divine punishments seemed less obvious. Technology and science changed relations between the concepts of God, nature, and man. Very generally speaking, a religion of fear gave way to a religion of love. Nature was considered less a menace than a friend, a shift subtly foreshadowing the Romantic period. Put in more safe life conditions, man tended to hold more optimistic views of himself and dared to play artistically even with dangerous, sublime subjects such as thunderstorms.

Singing about fires, shipwrecks and major international catastrophes between 1755 and 1918. Local, national and international solidarity.This article focuses on Dutch songs about three different kind of disasters in the period 1755-1918: fires (which occurred in Dutch villages and cities), ship wrecks (both in the Netherlands and abroad) and other foreign catastrophes, such as the earthquake on Martinique (1839) or the floods in Mexico (1888). This popular genre is an important source to understand how people coped with disasters in the past. They were not only used to spread the news, but also to make sense of the events by offering moral and religious lessons. This article investigates how these different types of disaster songs could shape a shared sense of community on the local, national and international level. While songs about fires were often directed at the local community, ballads about shipwrecks appealed to the imagined Dutch community. Songs about big disasters in foreign places, sometimes aimed at raising international solidarity, but they were more often used to strengthen communal feelings at the national level.

Looking at the monarch. Nationalism and the representation of Orange monarchs after disasters in the nineteenth century.The nineteenth-century Dutch monarchs from the House of Orange often played a proactive role in the aftermath of major catastrophes, such as storm surges, river floods and destructive explosions. Authors repeatedly praised their commitment afterwards and characterised them as symbols of the nation. In this article I demonstrate that the discourse through which monarchs were celebrated should quintessentially be understood as manifestations of nationalism, that is: these discourses cultivated a national sense of unity and thus popularised a the notion of the Netherlands as a national community. As it turns out, authors commonly cultivated a conservative notion of national community, concentrated around conformist concepts such as unity, hierarchy and moderation.

Empathy or sensationalism? The shipping disaster of the ‘Berlin’ in 1907 and its aftermath.In the early morning of February 21, 1907, during a fierce storm, the ferry ‘Berlin’ crashed on the pier of Hook van Holland. With 128 victims, it still is the largest maritime disaster off the Dutch coast in peacetime. Due to the enormous interest of the population, the media and the Dutch royal house, it became a major media disaster in Dutch history. How did that happen? The disaster occurred at a time when a new era was dawning by the dissemination of many new forms of media, such as film, photography and illustrated magazines. In addition, there was the special attention paid by Prince Hendrik, Queen Wilhelmina’s husband. His arrival in Hook van Holland was unprecedented, because he not only came to watch the rescue attempts, but also actively contributed to it. That made the disaster one with two faces; on the one hand, that of the lower class with the population of Hook of Holland and the brave saviors and, on the other hand, one of the upper class because of the attention paid to Prince Hendrik. All this ensured that the disaster was experienced intensely, more intensely than before.

Beset by ice. The Dutch literary resonance of unfortunate whaling voyages in the catastrophic year 1777/78.The Greenland whaling catastrophe of the year 1777 resulted in seventeen voyage descriptions, written in five languages over a period of 40 years. Travelogues in Dutch, German and Danish reflect the international character of the eighteenth-century whaling trade. As for the Dutch literary setting, there appear to be great differences in style and processing between printed journals written by surviving seamen and descriptions written by or in collaboration with more or less professional authors.

The colonial space revisited. The cultural and political experience of Indonesian natural disasters in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.This contribution analyses the colonial space that encompassed The Netherlands and Indonesia through the lens of historical disasters. In the past as much as in the present, Indonesia’s geophysical circumstances made the region vulnerable to volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunami’s. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century such disasters confronted its victims, the other inhabitants of the archipelago and Dutch authorities with considerable challenges. Organizing relief and reconstructing the affected places and societies, prompted societal and governmental responses in colonial Indonesia as well as in The Netherlands. This article centres around two case studies: the eruption of Mount Awu on Sangihe Besar in 1856, and the earthquake that struck West Sumatra in 1926. We show that cultural and political interpretations of these disasters varied considerably between Dutch and Indonesian actors. By building on new insights from the fields of New Imperial History and Disaster Studies, we understand these divergences as the results of the differences in interests, worldviews and political realities faced by those who engaged with disasters in the Netherlands East Indies. On the one hand, Dutch actors tended to frame disasters as joint experiences that bound together motherland and its colony through charity and aid in a single humanitarian space. Yet their decidedly colonial lens led the Dutch to view disasters mainly through their own interests in the archipelago, thereby obscuring the multi-layered nature of local disaster responses. We therefore foreground local disaster responses to expose the limits of colonial disaster interpretations and thereby emphasise the fragmented nature of the colonial space.

‘Save our poor people from the vulcano poets’. The literary reception of the Krakatoa disaster of 1883 in the Netherlands and Indonesia.On August 27, 1883, the volcano Krakatau in the Dutch East Indies erupted and collapsed, causing the deaths of tens of thousands, mainly as a result of devastating tsunamis. The Krakatau eruption was one of the first disasters to take place beyond the Dutch boundaries that received so much attention in the Netherlands. Because the Indies were a Dutch colony, a response of the motherland was rather logical. In many places, charity activities were organized to raise money for the victims. This article focuses on the Dutch and Indonesian literary reactions on the Krakatau disaster. For this purpose, two scholars work together: one specialized in Dutch Literary Studies and the other one in Indonesian Languages and Cultures. In the first part of the article several Dutch charity publications are analysed; the second part focuses on Indonesian sources (in Javanese and Malay). How and to what extend did the reactions in the Netherlands and Indonesia differ?

Johannes Franck. A career in the margins.Johannes Franck (1854-1914) was the first professor extraordinarius (1886) and in 1912 a professor of Dutch and Low German in the German empire. In this article I describe his career largely until 1886 by embedding him within the scientific community of his time. Subsequently, I show how anti-Semitism prevented him from becoming a professor of German studies and discuss the policy of appointments in Prussia. To conclude, I argue that these aspects and the difference in scientific cultures between the Netherlands and the German Empire was partly responsible for the fact that he had a marginal position in between two scientific communities.

A linguist as international entrepreneur. M. J. de Goeje and the Annals of al-Tabari.Modern-day scientists and humanities scholars are often expected to possess personality traits, skills, and virtues typically associated with entrepreneurs. These include (but are not limited to) a willingness to take risks, the ability to lead a diverse team of collaborators, and a flexible mindset. The roots of the ideal of the entrepreneurial scholar, however, are older. In this article, I investigate the realization of Michael Jan de Goeje’s al-Tabari edition in the last decades of the nineteenth century. To finance this ambitious endeavour and to successfully gather and manage a team of scholarly and non-scholarly collaborators, De Goeje needed to possess all the traits, skills, and virtues mentioned above. This case study demonstrates how an entrepreneurial spirit could be an asset for ambitious nineteenth-century scholars. At the same time, it illustrates one of the ways in which seemingly modern ideals of scholarship build on existing ones.

‘To live a double life’. The academic life of Paul Fredericq around 1900.In this article I analyse the diary of the historian Paul Fredericq following the concept of ‘academic life’, a term coined by Johan Huizinga and further explored by Klaas van Berkel. It calls for the study of the university that goes beyond the institutional, perceiving the university as a living community with multiple interactions with society. Personal documents such as the diary of Fredericq prove to be excellent sources to this informal, anthropological view on the university. The diary reveals how the ‘personal’ life and the ‘university’ life of Fredericq intertwined and how his research and teaching was mixed up with engagements in the Flemish Movement, liberal politics and cultural world. In his diary he spoke about a double life, namely this combination of being a scientist and being a public figure. To conclude, this article discusses Fredericq as a case of the responses and concerns of universities around 1900 to the growing extra-curricular activities of the academic community.

‘There are no societal prospects for this study in the Netherlands’. Musicology in Utrecht, 1930-1940.Musicology became a fully-fledged academic study in the Netherlands in 1930 when both the Chair in Musicology and the Institute for Music History were founded at Utrecht University. Using sources such as archives, newspapers, personal memories of old studies in letters, and a talk on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the institute, this article describes the history of musicology Utrecht, its curriculum and what the first professor in musicology Albert Smijers expected of his students in the first decade of the institute’s existence.

The art of the projected image. The optical lantern as a didactic instrument in the Art History lectures of Willem Vogelsang (1875-1954).The optical lantern was the central medium through which Art History professor Willem Vogelsang (1875-1954) taught his students ‘how to see’. As the first ordinarius in Art History in the Netherlands, Vogelsang focused on creating the right educational setting to turn his students into professional art historians. In his lectures the optical lantern and its projected images functioned as a didactic instrument to make his students (visually) understand compositional and stylistic differences and similarities within and between artworks. The lantern allowed Vogelsang to visually open up the world of art history to a whole new generation of art historians.

The ‘God of the Peasants’ on stage. Willem Bilderdijk’s tragedy Floris de Vijfde (1808).This article focuses on Willem Bilderdijk’s play Floris de Vijfde (Floris V), which he wrote in 1808 for King Louis Napoleon. This play is studied form different perspectives in order to get a complete picture of the content, context, function and reception of this work. It offers new biographical information on Bilderdijk’s life in the context of the Kingdom of Holland and focuses on Bilderdijk’s ideas on theatre in relation to Floris de Vijfde and on his ideas about national history. Furthermore, attention is paid to the political context in which the piece was written and to the political function that it fulfilled. Finally, this article presents an extensive overview of the reception and nachleben of the play in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.

Great expectations. Elections and the consitutional reform of 1848.This article explores the causes of the low turnout at the Dutch elections in the years following the constitutional reform of 1848. The liberal reformers had hoped for an increased participation of Dutch voters after the introduction of direct suffrage, but were soon to be disappointed when after a promising start, the turnout dropped well below fifty percent. Drawing on Pierre Rosanvallon’s notions on political citizenship, this article tries to explain the low turnout.

The royal inauguration’s ‘new clothes’? The representation and reception of power at the inauguration of William III after the constitutional reform of 1848.In recent years, historians have shown how royal rituals were a major site for legitimating and contesting power in Europe’s long nineteenth century. This article calls for attention to cases with a more ambiguous political meaning and function. It analyses how the Dutch King William III’s 1849 inauguration ceremony represented the new political order following the far-reaching 1848 constitutional reform. The ceremony was planned surprisingly hastily without much attention to political events and lacked symbolical value, especially compared to other countries. Although the tradition of inauguration was organized and perceived as a ritual of political transition, it ultimately had little long-term political impact.

Three-dimensional news. The Amsterdam wax museum as a competitor of the illustrated newspaper, 1882-1919.The nineteenth-century wax museum can be viewed as a contemporary mass medium that showed people scenes from the news. The Nederlandsch Panopticum was the first of its kind in the Netherlands, located in Amsterdam between 1882 and 1919. As an informative visual medium, the Panopticum had to compete with other media, like the illustrated newspaper, for the attention of the public. At the same time, the wax museum also depended on photographs published in these same papers: wax models were often, and in the course of time almost exclusively, modelled after photos. This reciprocal relationship can be seen as an example of ‘intermediality’. In the end, the wax museum lost ground, foremost, to the new mass medium of the time, cinema, which took over both as an urban attraction and as a popular visual medium.

A popular aristocrat. Arthur van Schendel and the reading public in the 1930s.In Dutch literary culture of the first half of the twentieth century, intellectual elite and general public were not only separate, but even opposite categories. ‘Highbrow’ and ‘middlebrow’ held polarized positions in matters of cultural hierarchy and literary taste, which led to fierce debates. Strikingly, one author was able to bridge this gap: Arthur van Schendel (1874-1946) appealed both ends of the spectrum and thus had an exceptional, connecting role in the cultural divides of the Interbelluminterwar period. This article analyses the responses to Van Schendels so-called ‘Dutch novels’ in order to find out what made Arthur van Schendel highly valued by leading professionals as well as loved by the reading audience.

Importing texts from abroad. Editors’ reuse of foreign historical texts in Dutch periodicals, 1780-1860.This article explores the ways in which the editors of five Dutch history journals and three magazines for general circulation copied historical texts from abroad, between 1780 and 1860. By comparing original texts with reprinted versions, we show that the editors’ work involved not only ‘passive’ duplication (reprinting in full), but also more active forms of intervention, from the selection of text fragments to their translation, modification or critical review. These varied editorial practices point to a broader creative process through which historical knowledge was tailored to an emerging and nationally-oriented academic audience. Editors here assumed the role of mediators, gatekeepers even in the sense that their judgment determined the very choice of texts. At a time when the study of history was evolving at both the national and international level, and when the relationship between actors making up the disciplinary field was also in flux, editors thus became influential figures.

Expertise in case files. The practice of forensic psychiatry in the Netherlands, 1811-1930.Research on the history of Dutch forensic psychiatry has hardly taken into account how psychiatrists functioned in practice. This article, based on 485 court cases of (child)murder, rape and arson, provides an inventory of the role of psychiatrists in the courtroom. It distinguishes between three regimes of knowledge: a first regime in the first half of the nineteenth century, when there is much overlap between lay and expert knowledge on the mind; the second from ca. 1880, when increasingly reference is made to scientific concepts and reports became standardized; and a third regime around 1920, when an emphasis on scientific methods found its way into the reports. An analysis of verdicts shows that the judges often agreed with the expert reports. The relationship between the judges and psychiatrists can be qualified as one in which judges accorded room for experts, who, however, remained subservient to the judiciary.

True religion and stern morality. A thematic-historical analysis of the sermons of Chief Rabbi Tobias Tal (1847-1898).The process of integration of the Jewish community in modern Dutch society was accompanied by a change of Jewish homiletics in both content and form. This article presents the case of the Dutch Chief Rabbi Tobias Tal with the aim of showing how Jewish homiletics changed in the second half of the nineteenthcentury. Based on an analysis of his sermons, this article argues that Tal successfullycombined liberal-protestant ideals and homiletical forms with old Jewish thoughts.

The Netherlands through Colombian eyes. The novel Una holandesa en América (1888) by Soledad Acosta de Samper.In 1888, Soledad Acosta de Samper, a well-known writer and journalist in Colombia’s capital Bogotá, published the novel Una holandesa en América. This article presents an imagological analysis of how the Dutch and the Netherlands are representedin her novel, and discusses Acosta’s possible intentions in writing thisbook as well as her reasons for choosing a Dutch protagonist. It argues that the images of the Dutch were meant to serve as examples for Acosta’s Colombian audiencein a period in which the country was still engaged in nation building after gaining independence from Spain in 1819.