The year that Willem III died, 1890, was also the first year of the international call for a day to commemorate labour, 1 May. Amsterdam’s various strands of anarchists and Socialists gathered for meetings on May Day 1890, formulating their struggle for the eight-hour day.31 Only four years before, a major riot had broken out […]

A third reading explores an extreme view of wilderness taken by a group of elite men, members of the Boone and Crockett club, who see the frontier experience as an essential ingredient in forming men into American citizens. Receiving an invitation from Theodore Roosevelt to attend a club dinner celebrating the opening of the Hunter’s […]

On the day of the funeral, the full cortege walked from the Capitol to the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue, a street that was then just beginning to take on its current appearance of the country’s civic stage. It was already an imperial way. Since Thomas Jefferson’s second term as president (1805-9), it had served […]

3.2 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Opere varie… vol. 7: Campus Martius. Rome, 1762. Tav. V-X, Ichnographia. Detail of area around Pantheon Although the building had served a variety of functions in its lifetime and had, for some twelve centuries, been a church consecrated as Santa Maria ad Martyres, by Piranesi’s day it was, in the main, […]

One can look at each of the paths followed by the royals, the Catholics, and the Social Democrats as narratives about both group and urban identity. The Catholics fashioned a new ritual that allowed them to proclaim publicly their identity rooted in the medieval city, while careful to do so within prescribed limits so as […]