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Books > History > World history > From 1900
With the spread of manga (Japanese comics) and anime (Japanese
cartoons) around the world, many have adopted the Japanese term
'otaku' to identify fans of such media. The connection to manga and
anime may seem straightforward, but, when taken for granted, often
serves to obscure the debates within and around media fandom in
Japan since the term 'otaku' appeared in the niche publication
Manga Burikko in 1983. Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan
disrupts the naturalization and trivialization of 'otaku' by
examining the historical contingency of the term as a way to
identify and contain problematic youth, consumers and fan cultures
in Japan. Its chapters, many translated from Japanese and available
in English for the first time - and with a foreword by Otsuka Eiji,
former editor of Manga Burikko - explore key moments in the
evolving discourse of 'otaku' in Japan. Rather than presenting a
smooth, triumphant narrative of the transition of a subculture to
the mainstream, the edited volume repositions 'otaku' in specific
historical, social and economic contexts, providing new insights
into the significance of the 'otaku' phenomenon in Japan and the
world. By going back to original Japanese documents, translating
key contributions by Japanese scholars and offering sustained
analysis of these documents and scholars, Debating Otaku in
Contemporary Japan provides alternative histories of and approaches
to 'otaku'. For all students and scholars of contemporary Japan and
the history of Japanese fan and consumer cultures, this volume will
be a foundation for understanding how 'otaku', at different places
and times and to different people, is meaningful.
This study examines the role of modern sports in constructing
national identities and the way leaders have exploited sports to
achieve domestic and foreign policy goals. The book focuses on the
development of national sporting cultures in Great Britain and the
United States, the particular processes by which the rest of Europe
and the world adopted or rejected their games, and the impact of
sports on domestic politics and foreign affairs. Teams competing in
international sporting events provide people a shared national
experience and a means to differentiate "us" from "them."
Particular attention is paid to the transnational influences on the
construction of sporting communities, and why some areas resisted
dominant sporting cultures while others adopted them and changed
them to fit their particular political or societal needs. A
recurrent theme of the book is that as much as they try,
politicians have been frustrated in their attempts to achieve
political ends through sport. The book provides a basis for
understanding the political, economic, social, and diplomatic
contexts in which these games were played, and to present issues
that spur further discussion and research.
The disastrous Buffalo Creek Treaty of 1838 called for the Senecas'
removal to Kansas (then part of the Indian Territory). From this
low point, the Seneca Nation of Indians, which today occupies three
reservations in western New York, sought to rebound. Beginning with
events leading to the Seneca Revolution in 1848, which transformed
the nation's government from a council of chiefs to an elected
system, Laurence M. Hauptman traces Seneca history through the New
Deal. Based on the author's nearly fifty years of archival
research, interviews, and applied work, Coming Full Circle shows
that Seneca leaders in these years learned valuable lessons and
adapted to change, thereby preparing the nation to meet the
challenges it would face in the post-World War II era, including
major land loss and threats of termination. Instead of emphasizing
American Indian decline, Hauptman stresses that the Senecas were
actors in their own history and demonstrated cultural and political
resilience. Both Native belief, in the form of the Good Message of
Handsome Lake, and Christianity were major forces in Seneca life;
women continued to play important social and economic roles despite
the demise of clan matrons' right to nominate the chiefs; and
Senecas became involved in national and international competition
in long-distance running and in lacrosse. The Seneca Nation also
achieved noteworthy political successes in this period. The Senecas
resisted allotment, and thus saved their reservations from breakup
and sale. They recruited powerful allies, including attorneys,
congressmen, journalists, and religious leaders. They saved their
Oil Spring Reservation, winning a U.S. Supreme Court case against
New York State on the issue of taxation and won remuneration in
their Kansas Claims case. These efforts laid the groundwork for the
Senecas' postwar endeavor to seek compensation before the Indian
Claims Commission and pursuit of a series of land claims and tax
lawsuits against New York State.
The Federal Theatre Project in the American South introduces the
people and projects that shaped the regional identity of the
Federal Theatre Project. When college theatre director Hallie
Flanagan became head of this New Deal era jobs program in 1935, she
envisioned a national theatre comprised of a network of theatres
across the country. A regional approach was more than
organizational; it was a conceptual model for a national art.
Flanagan was part of the little theatre movement that had already
developed a new American drama drawn from the distinctive heritage
of each region and which they believed would, collectively,
illustrate a national identity. The Federal Theatre plan relied on
a successful regional model - the folk drama program at the
University of North Carolina, led by Frederick Koch and Paul Green.
Through a unique partnership of public university, private
philanthropy and community participation, Koch had developed a
successful playwriting program and extension service that built
community theatres throughout the state. North Carolina, along with
the rest of the Southern region, seemed an unpromising place for
government theatre. Racial segregation and conservative politics
limited the Federal Theatre's ability to experiment with new ideas
in the region. Yet in North Carolina, the Project thrived. Amateur
drama units became vibrant community theatres where whites and
African Americans worked together. Project personnel launched The
Lost Colony, one of the first so-called outdoor historical dramas
that would become its own movement. The Federal Theatre sent
unemployed dramatists, including future novelist Betty Smith, to
the university to work with Koch and Green. They joined other
playwrights, including African American writer Zora Neale Hurston,
who came to North Carolina because of their own interest in folk
drama. Their experience, told in this book, is a backdrop for each
successive generation's debates over government, cultural
expression, art and identity in the American nation.
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Poudre Canyon
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Barbara Fleming, Malcolm Mcneill
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Discovery Miles 6 860
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When Italian forces landed on the shores of Libya in 1911, many in
Italy hailed it as an opportunity to embrace a Catholic national
identity through imperial expansion. After decades of acrimony
between an intransigent Church and the Italian state, enthusiasm
for the imperial adventure helped incorporate Catholic interests in
a new era of mass politics. Others among Italian imperialists -
military officers and civil administrators - were more concerned
with the challenges of governing a Muslim society, one in which the
Sufi brotherhood of the Sanusiyya seemed dominant. Eileen Ryan
illustrates what Italian imperialists thought would be the best
methods to govern in Muslim North Africa and in turn highlights the
contentious connection between religious and political authority in
Italy. Telling this story requires an unraveling of the history of
the Sanusiyya. During the fall of Qaddafi, Libyan protestors took
up the flag of the Libyan Kingdom of Idris al-Sanusi, signaling an
opportunity to reexamine Libya's colonial past. After decades of
historiography discounting the influence of Sanusi elites in Libyan
nationalism, the end of this regime opened up the possibility of
reinterpreting the importance of religion, resistance, and Sanusi
elites in Libya's colonial history. Religion as Resistance provides
new perspectives on the history of collaboration between the
Italian state and Idris al-Sanusi and questions the dichotomy
between resistance and collaboration in the colonial world.
The Reagan era is usually seen as an era of unheralded prosperity,
and as a high-watermark of Republican success. President Ronald
Reagan's belief in "Reaganomics", his media-friendly sound-bites
and "can do" personality have come to define the era. However, this
was also a time of domestic protest and unrest. Under Reagan the US
was directly involved in the revolutions which were sweeping the
Central Americas- El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala -and in
Nicaragua Reagan armed the Contras who fought the Sandinistas. This
book seeks to show how the left within the US reacted and protested
against these events. The Nation, Verso Books and the Guardian
exploded in popularity, riding high on the back of popular
anti-interventionist sentiment in America, while the film-maker
Oliver Stone led a group of directors making films with a radical
left-wing message. The author shows how the1980s in America were a
formative cultural period for the anti-Reaganites as well as the
Reaganites, and in doing so charts a new history.
Socialist Women and the Great War: Protest, Revolution and
Commemoration, an open access book, is the first transnational
study of left-wing women and socialist revolution during the First
World War and its aftermath. Through a discussion of the key themes
related to women and revolution, such as anti-militarism and
violence, democracy and citizenship, and experience and
life-writing, this book sheds new and necessary light on the
everyday lives of socialist women in the early 20th century. The
participants of the 1918-1919 revolutions in Europe, and the
accompanying outbreaks of social unrest elsewhere in the world,
have typically been portrayed as war-weary soldiers and suited
committee delegates-in other words, as men. Exceptions like Rosa
Luxemburg exist, but ordinary women are often cast as passive
recipients of the vote. This is not true; rather, women were
pivotal actors in the making, imagining, and remembering of the
social and political upheavals of this time. From wartime strikes,
to revolutionary violence, to issues of suffrage, this book reveals
how women constructed their own revolutionary selves in order to
bring about lasting social change and provides a fresh comparative
approach to women's socialist activism. As such, this is a vitally
important resource for all postgraduates and advanced
undergraduates interested in gender studies, international
relations, and the history and legacy of World War I. The ebook
editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND
4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by
Knowledge Unlatched.
Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, a city that he loved, Jonathan
Foster was forced to come to grips with its reputation for racial
violence. In so doing, he began to question how other cities dealt
with similar kinds of stigmas that resulted from behavior and
events that fell outside accepted norms. He wanted to know how such
stigmas changed over time and how they affected a city's reputation
and residents. Those questions led to this examination of the role
of stigma and history in three very different cities: Birmingham,
San Francisco, and Las Vegas. In the era of civil rights,
Birmingham became known as ""Bombingham,"" a place of constant
reactionary and racist violence. Las Vegas emerged as the nation's
most recognizable Sin City, and San Francisco's tolerance of
homosexuality made it the perceived capital of Gay America. Stigma
Cites shows how cultural and political trends influenced
perceptions of disrepute in these cities, and how, in turn, their
status as sites of vice and violence influenced development
decisions, from Birmingham's efforts to shed its reputation as
racist, to San Francisco's transformation of its stigma into a
point of pride, to Las Vegas's use of gambling to promote tourism
and economic growth. The first work to investigate the important
effects of stigmatized identities on urban places, Foster's
innovative study suggests that reputation, no less than physical
and economic forces, explains how cities develop and why. An
absorbing work of history and urban sociology, the book illuminates
the significance of perceptions in shaping metropolitan history.
Born into poverty in Russian Poland in 1911, Zosa Szajkowski
(Shy-KOV-ski) was a self-made man who managed to make a life for
himself as an intellectual, first as a journalist in 1930s Paris,
and then, after a harrowing escape to New York in 1941, as a
scholar. Although he never taught at a university or even earned a
PhD, Szajkowski became one of the world's foremost experts on the
history of the Jews in modern France, publishing in Yiddish,
English, and Hebrew. His work opened up new ways of thinking about
Jewish emancipation, economic and social modernization, and the
rise of modern anti-Semitism. But beneath Szajkowski's scholarly
success lay a shameful secret. In the aftermath of the Holocaust,
the scholar stole tens of thousands of archival documents related
to French Jewish history from public archives and private synagogue
collections in France and moved them, illicitly, to New York.
There, he used them as the basis for his pathbreaking articles.
Eventually, he sold them, piecemeal, to American and Israeli
research libraries, where they still remain today. Why did this
respectable historian become an archive thief? And why did
librarians in the United States and Israel buy these materials from
him, turning a blind eye to the signs of ownership they bore? These
are the questions that motivate this gripping tale. Throughout, it
is clear that all involved-perpetrator, victims, and buyers-saw
what Szajkowski was doing through the prism of the Holocaust. The
buyers shared a desire to save these precious remnants of the
European Jewish past, left behind on a continent where six million
Jews had just been killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. The
scholars who read Szajkowski's studies, based largely on the
documents he had stolen, saw the treasures as offering an
unparalleled window into the history that led to that catastrophe.
And the Jewish caretakers of many of the institutions Szajkowski
robbed in France saw the losses as a sign of their difficulties
reconstructing their community after the Holocaust, when the
balance of power in the Jewish world was shifting away from Europe
to new centers in America and Israel. Based on painstaking
research, Lisa Leff reconstructs Szajkowski's story in all its
ambiguity by taking us backstage at the archives, revealing the
powerful ideological, economic and scientific forces that made
Holocaust-era Jewish scholars care more deeply than ever before
about preserving the remnants of their past.
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