Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 August 26

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August 26

Who is this?

Please identify the person in this photo. According to the twitter post where I found it, he is an American politician from Missouri. StellarHalo (talk) 05:45, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Jeff Smith (Missouri politician) (?) 2603:6081:1C00:1187:E102:EAF8:DD1:441A (talk) 08:08, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Access to restricted sources, newspaperarchive.com and University of Pennsylvania

I have just posted the following query in the talk page for BULLY BEEF. I would be happy to track track this down myself if I had access to the sources.

The article BULLY BEEF has the following phrase in the opinion of Lord Paget Henry William Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey, died in 1854, but it is still possible the 1862 reference is quoting him.

I've been unable to check the reference, which is an old newspaper, directly The Naval Estimates, Morning Post, 25 February 1862 It might be available on newspaperarchive.com A search also turned up: https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9954970423503681 which requires a login ID

Nor can I locate an explanation of old mahogany. It might be Royal Navy slang.

I keep running up against sources which are not freely accessible so i'd appreciate advice on how to get past this roadblock.

I have replied at Talk:Bully beef#Which Lord Paget?. Please add further comments there, so that we're not double-posting. Alansplodge (talk) 13:17, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Author of question about access to limited sources

Sorry, I forgot the tildes to identify myself Humphrey Tribble (talk) 11:39, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

1990s cultural upheaval

Did the 1990s global cultural upheaval, which included Disney Renaissance, music galore, film proliferation through VHS and similar trends, get it's own overarching name, similar to Roaring Twenties? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 16:33, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Having lived through it - no. It wasn't a cohesive thing; I don't know of anyone referring to a "global cultural upheaval" in the 90s as if the various shifts were part of a greater whole. Matt Deres (talk) 17:09, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Alansplodge (talk) 21:58, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

212.180.235.46 -- The 1920s were a coherent era because they marked the final downfall of Victorian and Edwardian rigid restrictiveness and standards of propriety, so young people uninhibitedly enjoyed themselves, and women in particular wore outfits which would have given Victorian arbiters of good taste and morality the conniption fits. (In the U.S., there was also Prohibition, of course.) I don't really know what's culturally distinctive and significant about the 1990s other than grunge music and everybody wearing lumberjack shirts for 15 minutes. There was the rise of the consumer Internet of course, but people were still experimenting with what it would mean, and the quasi-monopolies of later decades (Amazon, Google, Facebook etc) either did not yet exist, or were not yet quasi-monopolies. However, there's a book The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido by David Friend (ISBN 978-0-446-55629-3) if you want to read it (I'm not too interested in it...) -- AnonMoos (talk) 22:20, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

The original "Naughty Nineties" were the 1890s, although apparently in America, they were the "Gay Nineties". Alansplodge (talk) 22:57, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

You have still not given an actual citation (even a publication of your own) for this thesis that you state as true in such a definitive manner. SamuelRiv (talk) 18:28, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

If the photos of the 1920s Berlin puddle-jumping women which I linked to (wearing clothes which presented a very strong contrast with customary Victorian attire, and doing something which Victorian women basically never did) didn't persuade you, then there's various material at Roaring Twenties#Fashion, and especially Roaring Twenties#Sexuality of women during the 1920s, which you probably could have easily found yourself with a basic search. See also WP:BLUE. AnonMoos (talk) 22:44, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

I stopped replying because all the points were made. You made some good ones. There was nothing I had to say on the matter that I hadn't said. However, it's a far cry from making a rigorous (or even semi-rigorous) survey of nearly a century of cultural shift that you're proclaiming to generalize, and from there teasing out causal and essential elements through quantitative and qualitative means (or however one might do such a study). It's the kind of claim that requires an actual rigorous study, in whatever field of scholarship you choose, preferably several, to lend support. Like I said, even your own work is fine, but just a few links on a discussion page is not a theory. SamuelRiv (talk) 18:15, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Whatever, dude -- I do not have to do any personal research when I merely refer to the accepted conventional wisdom (i.e. the quasi-consensus of those who have much relevant knowledge). If you want to try to overthrow the accepted conventional wisdom, on the other hand, then you'll have to do quite a bit of research, though I'm not encouraged in that respect by your apparent ignorance of the strong discontinuities between the pre-WW1 era and the 1920s in cultural norms, women's fashion, etc. AnonMoos (talk) 23:38, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

P.S. If you want to read other people's voluminous research, then you could look at the first of the Middletown studies, intended to document the "changes in the white population of a typical American city between 1890 and 1925", some of those changes being the fairly wide availability of cars, formal social recognition of the single-couple "date", young women wearing somewhat loose-fitting dresses with hemlines almost to the knee, etc., which made the lives of young people rather different in 1925 from what they had been in 1890... AnonMoos (talk) 11:52, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

There was definitely a marked disruption in the commercial distribution channels for time-based media products intended for mass consumption. The OP's examples fit that pattern. This is somewhat more specific and limited than suggested by "global cultural upheaval".  --Lambiam 20:36, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

There was certainly some cultural (and political) upheaval at the beginning of the 1990s. "I saw the decade in, when it seemed the world would change in the blink of an eye, and if anything then there's your sign of the times" -- Right Here, Right Now (Jesus Jones song)  Card Zero  (talk) 23:30, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

The 1990s were the prime period when Generation X came of age (not born, but became media consumers), with the tail end of the 1990s being when the transition to the Millennials came of age. The end of Gen X and the start of the Millenials; i.e. those being late teens-early 20s in the late 1990s are often called Xennials. --Jayron

I would suggest that absolutely no-one is aware of the future-historical importance of what they are experiencing, being bound up in the actual experience (the original here and now) of the infinite ecstasy of the current moment. Only later is it possible for writers like Douglas Coupland put it into words. MinorProphet (talk) 15:21, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Future historians, which by-and-large are the people with access to the wealth and power necessary to get certification as "Valid Historians", get to decide what is and is not important. Still, these are the terms we have been given by many of those people, Coupland included. --Jayron32 17:55, 31 August 2022 (UTC)