Tag: Royal Institution of South Wales
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Swansea’s golden age of innovation
After five years of labour our baby was born last week. It weighed in at a whopping 1.88 kilograms and almost 600 pages. Its many parents are rightly proud of it. You’ll have guessed by now that it’s a big book. Entitled Swansea’s Royal Institution and Wales’s first museum, it will stand for many years…
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Early archaeology in Wales: the ‘Precambrian’ era
The Cambrian Archaeological Association, established in 1847, was the first society devoted to the study of archaeology of Wales. This piece aims to tell the story of archaeology before that date. Archaeology, in the sense of the systematic study of the material remains of prehistoric and early historic times, can hardly be said to have…
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Some nineteenth century Cardiff archaeologists
Nineteenth century Glamorgan saw the birth and rapid growth of an industrial working class. But also significant was the rise to prominence, and eventually to power, of an enlarged middle class. Cardiff, though it failed at first to diversify industrially much beyond coal-exporting, found a role as the chief commercial and administrative centre of south-east…
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Henry de la Beche defends slavery
If you were a financial beneficiary of a Caribbean sugar plantation dependent on slave labour, how would you react to the movement to abolish slavery? Fight the movement aggressively in order to defend your interests? Keep your head down and wait to collect your government compensation? Admit the rightness of the movement’s cause, and ‘disinvest’? …
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Boy in a window
An old, long-abandoned factory in Swansea’s Strand. It has two storeys, a stone wall at its base and a corrugated roof. Below, the windows are boarded or blacked out. Upstairs, where ragged glass hangs in the smashed panes, one window frame’s open. At its base a round-faced young boy, with dark hair and jug ears,…
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Alfred Russel Wallace, Cymru a radicaliaeth
Gan mlynedd ar ôl ei farwolaeth mae’r naturiaethwr o Gymru Alfred Russel Wallace o’r diwedd yn derbyn cydnabyddiaeth yn ein hamser ni am ei orchestion – nid yn unig am fod yn gyd-ddyfeisiwr, gyda Charles Darwin, o’r theori ‘esblygiad trwy ddetholiad naturiol’, ond hefyd am ei waith ar fioddaearyddiaeth a sawl pwnc arall. Dadorchuddiodd David…