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Books > History > World history > From 1900
"Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan" examines how the
performing arts, and the performing body specifically, have shaped
and been shaped by the political and historical conditions
experienced in Japan during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods.
This study of original and secondary materials from the fields of
theatre, dance, performance art, film and poetry probes the
interrelationship that exists between the body and the
nation-state. Important artistic works, such as Ankoku Butoh (dance
of darkness) and its subsequent re-interpretation by a leading
political performance company Gekidan Kaitaisha (theatre of
deconstruction), are analysed using ethnographic, historical and
theoretical modes. This approach reveals the nuanced and prolonged
effects of military, cultural and political occupation in Japan
over a duration of dramatic change."Cultural Responses to
Occupation in Japan" explores issues of discrimination,
marginality, trauma, memory and the mediation of history in a
ground-breaking work that will be of great significance to anyone
interested in the symbiosis of culture and conflict.""
First friends, then bitter enemies, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon
shared a rivalry that had a dramatic impact on American history.
One would become the most dashing figure of the post-World War II
era, the other would live into his eighties, haunted and consumed
by the rivalry. In Kennedy and Nixon, Christopher Matthews offers a
surprising look at these two political giants, offering a stunning
portrait that will change the way we think about both of them.
Starting as congressmen in the class of 1946, the two men developed
a friendship and admiration for each other that would last for more
than a decade. But what drove history was the enmity between these
two towering figures whose 1960 presidential contest would set the
nation's bitter course for years to come. Matthews shows how the
early fondness between the two men (Kennedy told a trusted friend
that if he didn't receive the Democratic nomination in 1960, he
would vote for Nixon) degenerated into distrust and paranoia, the
same emotions that, in the early 1970's, ravaged the nation.
Christopher Mattew's revealing book sheds light on this complicated
relationship and the role that it played in shaping America's
history.
The peasantry accounted for the large majority of the Russian
population during the Imperialist and Stalinist periods - it is,
for the most part, how people lived. Peasants in Russia from
Serfdom to Stalin provides a comprehensive, realistic examination
of peasant life in Russia during both these eras and the legacy
this left in the post-Soviet era. The book paints a full picture of
peasant involvement in commerce and local political life and,
through Boris Gorshkov's original ecology paradigm for
understanding peasant life, offers new perspectives on the Russian
peasantry under serfdom and the emancipation. Incorporating recent
scholarship, including Russian and non-Russian texts, along with
classic studies, Gorshkov explores the complex interrelationships
between the physical environment, peasant economic and social
practices, culture, state policies and lord-peasant relations. He
goes on to analyze peasant economic activities, including
agriculture and livestock, social activities and the functioning of
peasant social and political institutions within the context of
these interrelationships. Further reading lists, study questions,
tables, maps, primary source extracts and images are also included
to support and enhance the text wherever possible. Peasants in
Russia from Serfdom to Stalin is the crucial survey of a key topic
in modern Russian history for students and scholars alike.
The Rarefied Air of the Modern examines technology, modern
identity, and history-making in Peru by telling the story of the
surprising success of Peruvian pilots in European aviation
competitions in 1910, and how their achievements generated great
optimism that this new technology could lift the country out of its
self-perceived backwardness. Though poor infrastructure, economic
woes, a dearth of technical expertise, and a ghastly number of
pilot deaths slowed the project after the first flights over Lima
in 1911, the image of intrepid Peruvian pilots inspired a new sense
of national possibility. Airplanes seemed to embody not just
technological progress but enlightened rationality, capitalist
enterprise, and nation-state aggrandizement. By 1928, three
commercial lines were transporting passengers, mail, and
merchandise from Lima to other parts of the country and South
America. This exploration of the fitful development of Peruvian
aviation illuminates how a Eurocentric modernizing vision has
served as a powerful organizing force in regions with ambivalent
relationships to the West. More broadly, it underscores the
important role that technology plays in larger, complex historical
processes. Even as politicians, businessmen, military officials,
journalists, and ruling oligarchs felt a special kinship with
Peru's aviation project, diverse socioeconomic groups engaged
aviation to challenge power asymmetries and historical silences
rooted in Peru's postcolonial past. Most observers at the time
considered airplanes a "universal" technology that performed the
same function in Europe, the United States, and Peru. In reality,
how Peruvians mobilized and understood airplanes reflected
culturally specific values and historical concerns.
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A riveting account of
a forgotten holocaust: the slaughter of over one hundred thousand
Ukrainian Jews in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. In the
Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining
moment of the twentieth century. 'Exhaustive, clearly written,
deeply researched' - The Times 'A meticulous, original and deeply
affecting historical account' - Philippe Sands, author of East West
Street Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were
murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed
the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of
separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors
with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah
scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely
forgotten today, these pogroms - ethnic riots - dominated headlines
and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that
six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty
years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon
long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly
discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders,
acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how
this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the
Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers,
and governmental officials, he explains how so many different
groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was
an acceptable response to their various problems.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, field artillery was a
small, separate, unsupported branch of the U.S. Army. By the end of
World War I, it had become the 'King of Battle,' a critical
component of American military might. Million-Dollar Barrage tracks
this transformation. Offering a detailed account of how American
artillery crews trained, changed, adapted, and fought between 1907
and 1923, Justin G. Prince tells the story of the development of
modern American field artillery - a tale stretching from the period
when field artillery became an independent organization to when it
became an equal branch of the U.S. Army. The field artillery
entered the Great War as a relatively new branch. It separated from
the Coast Artillery in 1907 and established a dedicated training
school, the School of Fire at Fort Sill, in 1911. Prince describes
the challenges this presented as issues of doctrine, technology,
weapons development, and combat training intersected with the
problems of a peacetime army with no good industrial base. His
account, which draws on a wealth of sources, ranges from debates
about U.S. artillery practices relative to those of Europe, to
discussions of the training, equipping, and performance of the
field artillery branch during the war. Prince follows the field
artillery from its plunge into combat in April 1917 as an
unprepared organization to its emergence that November as an
effective fighting force, with the Meuse-Argonne Offensive proving
the pivotal point in the branch's fortunes. Million-Dollar Barrage
provides an unprecedented analysis of the ascendance of field
artillery as a key factor in the nation's military dominance.
International Organizations play a pivotal role on the modern
global stage and have done, this book argues, since the beginning
of the 20th century. This volume offers the first historical
exploration into the formative years of international public
administrations, covering the birth of the League of Nations and
the emergence of the second generation that still shape
international politics today such as the UN, NATO and OECD.
Centring on Europe, where the multilaterization of international
relations played out more intensely in the mid-20th century than in
other parts of the world, it demonstrates a broad range of
historiographical and methodological approaches to institutions in
international history. The book argues that after several 'turns'
(cultural, linguistic, material, transnational), international
history is now better equipped to restate its core questions of
policy and power with a view to their institutional dimensions.
Making use of new approaches in the field, this book develops an
understanding of the specific powers and roles of
IO-administrations by delving into their institutional make-up.
Mieczyslaw Weinberg left his family behind and fled his native
Poland in September 1939. He reached the Soviet Union, where he
become one of the most celebrated composers. He counted
Shostakovich among his close friends and produced a prolific output
of works. Yet he remained mindful of the nation that he had left.
This book examines how Weinberg's works written in Soviet Russia
compare with those of his Polish contemporaries; how one composer
split from his national tradition and how he created a style that
embraced the music of a new homeland, while those composers in his
native land surged ahead in a more experimental vein. The points of
contact between them are enlightening for both sides. This study
provides an overview of Weinberg's music through his string
quartets, analysing them alongside Polish composers. Composers
featured include Bacewicz, Meyer, Lutoslawski, Panufnik,
Penderecki, Gorecki, and a younger generation, including Szymanski
and Knapik.
In this analysis of the life of Arnost Frischer, an influential
Jewish nationalist activist, Jan Lanicek reflects upon how the
Jewish community in Czechoslovakia dealt with the challenges that
arose from their volatile relationship with the state authorities
in the first half of the 20th century. The Jews in the Bohemian
Lands experienced several political regimes in the period from 1918
to the late 1940s: the Habsburg Empire, the first democratic
Czechoslovak republic, the post-Munich authoritarian Czecho-Slovak
republic, the Nazi regime, renewed Czechoslovak democracy and the
Communist regime. Frischer's involvement in local and central
politics affords us invaluable insights into the relations and
negotiations between the Jewish activists and these diverse
political authorities in the Bohemian Lands. Vital coverage is also
given to the relatively under-researched subject of the Jewish
responses to the Nazi persecution and the attempts of the exiled
Jewish leadership to alleviate the plight of the Jews in occupied
Europe. The case study of Frischer and Czechoslovakia provides an
important paradigm for understanding modern Jewish politics in
Europe in the first half of the 20th century, making this a book of
great significance to all students and scholars interested in
Jewish history and Modern European history.
While in the last twenty years perceptions of Europe have been
subjected to detailed historical scrutiny, American images of the
Old World have been almost wantonly neglected. As a response to
this scholarly desideratum, this pioneering study analyzes
neoconservative images of Europe since the 1970s on the basis of an
extensive collection of sources. With fresh insight into the
evolution of American images of Europe as well as into the history
of U.S. neoconservatism, the book appeals to readers familiar and
new to the subject matters alike. The study explores how, beginning
in the early 1970s, ideas of the United States as an anti-Europe
have permeated neoconservative writing and shaped their self-images
and political agitation. The choice of periodization and
investigated personnel enables the author to refute popular claims
that widespread Euro-critical sentiment in the United Studies
during the early 21st century - considerably ignited by
neoconservatives - was a distinct post-Cold War phenomenon.
Instead, the analysis reveals that the fiery rhetoric in the
context of the Iraq War debates was merely the climax of a
decade-old development.
Through interviews with developers, gamers, and journalists
examining the phenomena of bedroom coding, arcade gaming, and
format wars, mapped onto enquiry into the seminal genres of the
time including driving, shooting, and maze chase, Playback: A
Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames examines how 1980s Britain
has become the culture of work in the 21st century and considers
its meaning to contemporary society. This crucial and timely work
fills a lacuna for students and researchers of sociology, media,
and games studies and will be of interest to employees of the
videogames and media industries. Research into videogames have
never been greater, but exploration of their historic drivers is as
elided as the technology is influential, giving rise to a range of
questions. What were the social and economic conditions that gave
rise to a billion dollar industry? What were the motivations of the
early 'bedroom coders'? What are the legacies of the seminal
videogames of the 1980s and how do they inform the current social,
political and cultural landscape? With a focus on the
characteristics of the UK videogame industry in the 1980s, Wade
explores these questions from perspectives of consumption,
production and leisure, outlining the construction of a habitus
unique to this time.
This book focuses on the social voids that were the result of
occupation, genocide, mass killings, and population movements in
Europe during and after the Second World War. Historians,
sociologists, and anthropologists adopt comparative perspectives on
those who now lived in 'cleansed' borderlands. Its contributors
explore local subjectivities of social change through the concept
of 'No Neighbors' Lands': How does it feel to wear the dress of
your murdered neighbor? How does one get used to friends,
colleagues, and neighbors no longer being part of everyday life?
How is moral, social, and legal order reinstated after one part of
the community participated in the ethnic cleansing of another? How
is order restored psychologically in the wake of neighbors watching
others being slaughtered by external enemies? This book sheds light
on how destroyed European communities, once multi-ethnic and
multi-religious, experienced postwar reconstruction, attempted to
come to terms with what had happened, and negotiated remembrance.
The dispossessed people of Colonial America included thousands of
servants who either voluntarily or involuntarily ended up serving
as agricultural, domestic, skilled, and unskilled laborers in the
northern, middle, and southern British American colonies as well as
British Caribbean colonies. Thousands of people arrived in the
British-American colonies as indentured servants, transported
felons, and kidnapped children forced into bound labor. Others
already in America, such as Indians, freedmen, and poor whites,
placed themselves into the service of others for food, clothing,
shelter, and security; poverty in colonial America was relentless,
and servitude was the voluntary and involuntary means by which the
poor adapted, or tried to adapt, to miserable conditions. From the
1600s to the 1700s, Blacks, Indians, Europeans, Englishmen,
children, and adults alike were indentured, apprenticed,
transported as felons, kidnapped, or served as redemptioners.
Though servitude was more multiracial and multicultural than
slavery, involving people from numerous racial and ethnic
backgrounds, far fewer books have been written about it. This
fascinating new study of servitude in colonial America provides the
first complete overview of the varied lives of the dispossessed in
17th- and 18th-century America, examining colonial American
servitude in all of its forms. Illustrates how a majority of
residents in Colonial America at any given time from 1607 to 1776
were dispossessed of basic freedoms Explains how the dispossessed
Colonial American, deprived of basic rights, generated principles
of freedom and equality that resulted in the American Revolution
Shows that the basic rights of children were ignored in Stuart and
Georgian England, which resulted in their transportation to America
Describes how thousands of inhabitants of Colonial America were
felons reprieved of the death penalty and prisoners of war
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