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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900 > General
Landscape, politics and history: the Italian mountains as a crucible of national and natural identity. This book is part of a wider current in environmental history, that explores the links between nature and nation. It uncovers how Italian identity and mountains have constituted one another. It argues that state regimes since unification in 1861 have made mountains into national symbols and resources, thereby affecting mountain communities and ecosystems. The nationalisation of Italian mountains has been a story of military conquest and resistance, ecological and social transformation, expropriating resources and imposing meanings. The wind of 'big' history was rolling through the Alps and the Apennines: State building and national identities, totalitarianism and democracy, economic development and environmental protection, scientific knowledge and vernacular practices are the substance of this book. The book starts with the revaluation of mountains as the repository of the last Italian wilderness and chronicles the discovery/ invention of mountains as wild, primitive, and rebellious places needing to be tamed. War World I permanently transformed mountain landscapes and people, nationalising both. When the Fascists came to power, the process of politicisation of mountains reached its acme; the regime constructed and exploited mountains both rhetorically and materially, on one hand celebrating ruralism and rural people and, on the other, giving mountain natural resources to large hydro-electric corporations. Having been the sanctuary of Resistance against the Nazi-Fascist occupation, the Italian mountains were emptied by the economic boom of the 1960s; only recently have the green of natural parks and the white of the ski resorts become the distinctive colors of the new, tourist-oriented Italian mountains.
For many people, urbanization and the growth of big cities promised
new lives, employment opportunities and increased prosperity. And
in the long run this fundamental process of social change witnessed
the spread of a new urban way of life. In the short run, however,
the rapid urbanization of German society brought a range of
pressing social, political and environmental concerns. Rapidly
expanding cities meant overcrowding, sickness, pollution and
growing inequality between the rich and poor. While some of these
problems were largely overcome in the course of the twentieth
century, German cities faced new challenges due to the Nazi
dictatorship, the bombing of World War II, and the interventions of
city planners in both the GDR and the Federal Republic.
Australia's Prime Minister and premier diplomat in the 1930/1940s, this new biography presents him as a consistent internationalist and places him in a global context. Stanley Melbourne Bruce was at the centre of Imperial politics for more than two decades from the early 1920s until the end of the Second World War. This new biography presents Bruce as a consistent internationalist. Educated in Melbourne and Cambridge, Bruce, as a businessman, was alive to the importance of international commerce, and particularly Anglo-Australian trade. This lay at the core of his internationalism, which took the form in the 1920s of encouraging the political and economic integration of the British Empire. Bruce's punitive treatment of militant Australian trade unionists and his upholding of constitutionalism and law and order in the 1920s was part of an effort to defend one form of internationalism, commitment to the British Empire, against the competing international ideology of communism. While continuing to support a unified British Empire acting as a progressive force in world affairs, Bruce championed stronger international collaboration through the League of Nations and the United Nations and through cooperation between the Empire and the United States.
Grand Tours is a chronicle of the American visits of five charismatic pianists--Leopold de Meyer, Henri Herz, Sigismund Thalberg, Anton Rubenstein, and Hans von Bulow--during the late nineteenth century. Performing Beethoven and Chopin in gold-rush era California, these pianists introduced many Americans to the delights of the concert hall. With humor and insight, Lott describes the clash between the flamboyant, elegant, European pianists and American audiences more accustomed to circuses and rodeos than these "serious" entertainments. Lott also explores the creative and sometimes outlandish publicity techniques of managers seeking to capitalize on rich but uncharted American markets. The tours, which included almost a thousand concerts in more than one hundred cities in America and Canada, illustrate the rigors of the performing life, the wide range of nineteenth-century audiences and their gradual transformation from boisterous participators to respectful listeners, and the establishment of the piano recital as it exists today. With the colorful personalities of the pianists, the juxtaposition of high art and unsophisticated audiences, and the predilection of Americans to treat even the most serious subjects with humor, the book is illuminating and entertaining. The text is illustrated with ads, newspaper clippings, and correspondence that bring to life this collision of cultures.
From the 1920s and 1930s, when American cinema depicted the South as a demi-paradise populated by wealthy landowners, glamorous belles, and happy slaves, through later, more realistic depictions of the region in films based on works by Erskine Caldwell, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Robert Penn Warren, Hollywood's view of the South has been as ever-changing as the place itself. This comprehensive reference guide to Southern films offers credits, plot descriptions, and analyses of how the stereotypes and characterizations in each film contribute to our understanding of a most contentious American time and place. Organized by subjects including Economic Conditions, Plantation Life, The Ku Klux Klan, and The New Politics, "Hollywood's Image of the South" seeks to coin a new genre by describing its conventions and attitudes. Even so, the Southern film crosses all known generic boundaries, including the comedy, the women's film, the "noir," and many others. This invaluable guide to an under-recognized category of American cinema illustrates how much there is to learn about a time and place from watching the movies that aim to capture it.
Geoff Eley's magnum opus, this book analyses the role the Left has played in establishing democracy in modern Europe. Eley looks at socialist, labour, feminist, Communist, and other organisations in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. He considers how the Left has been a part of key moments of change in European history, including the rise of industrialisation, the World Wars, the Cold War, student uprisings in 1968, and the overturn of Communist governments in Eastern Europe.
The Development of Austro-Hungarian Sarajevo, 1878-1918 charts the urban history of Sarajevo in this period within the context of other modernising central-European cities. It gives detailed consideration to elements of change and continuity in the development of the urban fabric, as well as the economic, social and cultural life of the city. The book also explores how far changes were the work of the occupying Austro-Hungarian administration and the influx of immigrants from elsewhere, and suggests that the local elites from all confessions took an active role in the redevelopment of their city, building an integrated 'Sarajevan' version of urban modernity at a middle-class level. Case studies of particular buildings and their owners, and maps illustrating the chronological development of the city during the period, are used throughout the book to highlight aspects of the aforementioned themes. The built environment forms a major source of evidence, together with material from a range of other sources, including census records, directories, newspapers, government documents, planning records and postcards. These sources are also used to augment observations and arguments put forward in this important study for all students and scholars of modern Central and Eastern Europe.
The essays in this book demonstrate the breadth and vitality of American intellectual history. Their core theme is the diversity of both American intellectual life and of the frameworks that we must use to make sense of that diversity. The Worlds of American Intellectual History has at its heart studies of American thinkers. Yet it follows these thinkers and their ideas as they have crossed national, institutional, and intellectual boundaries. The volume explores ways in which American ideas have circulated in different cultures. It also examines the multiple sites-from social movements, museums, and courtrooms to popular and scholarly books and periodicals-in which people have articulated and deployed ideas within and beyond the borders of the United States. At these cultural frontiers, the authors demonstrate, multiple interactions have occurred - some friendly and mutually enriching, others laden with tension, misunderstandings, and conflict. The same holds for other kinds of borders, such as those within and between scholarly disciplines, or between American history and the histories of other cultures. The richness of contemporary American intellectual history springs from the variety of worlds with which it must engage. Intellectual historians have always relished being able to move back and forth between close readings of particular texts and efforts to make sense of broader cultural dispositions. That range is on display in this volume, which includes essays by scholars as fully at home in the disciplines of philosophy, literature, economics, sociology, political science, education, science, religion, and law as they are in history. It includes essays by prominent historians of European thought, attuned to the transatlantic conversations in which Europeans and Americans have been engaged since the seventeenth century, and American historians whose work has carried them not only to different regions in North America but across the North Atlantic to Europe, across the South Atlantic to Africa, and across the Pacific to South Asia.
Solomon Northup's riveting memoir written in 1853 and now an award winning major motion picture. Mr. Northup recounts his powerful life story of being born a free man in New York, kidnapped and forced into slavery for twelve years and then freed and reunited with his wife and children. 12 YEARS A SLAVE: NARRATIVE OF SOLOMON NORTHUP, A CITIZEN OF NEW-YORK, KIDNAPPED IN WASHINGTON CITY IN 1841 AND RESCUED IN 1853, FROM A COTTON PLANTATION NEAR THE RED RIVER IN LOUISIANA. "A moving, vital testament to one of slavery's many thousands gone who retained his humanity in the depths of degradation. It is also a chilling insight into the peculiar institution." -Saturday Review
Greenbaum examines the use of use of myth as a means of social control and examines the corporate mythology of the Gilded Age. Progressive politicians led the opposition to these myths, arguing that government was not to be used to enrich corporations, but to reduce their economic and political power and to increase equity. The progressive challenge redirected government to serve the larger commonwealth and, thus, transformed ordinary lives. Gilded Age mythology, resurrected in the 1980s, restored corporate domination and economic inequity. Through his extensive analysis of the lives of six prominent Progressives, Greenbaum seeks to contravene contemporary mythology. He begins with George Norris of Nebraska, a Republican Congressman and Senator from 1906 until 1942; William E. Borah, Republican of Idaho, who served in the Senate from 1906 until his death in 1940; and Hiram Johnson, who was Republican Governor of California, Progressive Vice Presidential candidate in 1912, and Senator from 1916 until his demise in 1945. These chapters are followed by an examination of William Gibbs McAdoo, a New York business promoter, who was Wilson's Secretary of the Treasury, the leading candidate for the 1924 Democratic Presidential nomination, and Senator from California from 1932 until 1938; Bainbridge Colby, a New York legislator, who supported Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and was Wilson's last Secretary of State; and Edward P. Costigan, Colorado Republican, who became the Progressive appointee to the Tariff Commission and Democratic Senator from 1930 through 1936. The volume concludes with an analysis of the progressive impulse and contrasts progressive views with resurrected Gilded Age mythology, the new ideas of the 1980s. An important study for scholars, students, and other researchers interested in progressivism and the role of government in American socioeconomic life and intelligent readers interested in ideas.
In this important new historical study, Maria Kovacs examines the struggle between liberal and anti-Semitic policies among professional groups-doctors, lawyers, engineers-in Hungary from 1867 to 1945. Kovacs's main emphasis is on the interwar period when unemployment, expansion of the welfare system, and competition for state jobs during the Great Depression, combined with crass anti-Semitism on the part of engineers and medical associations, radically altered previously liberal policies of open entry and equal educational opportunity. Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics analyses to what extent these new policies were dictated by authoritarian governments from above and to what extent they originated within the professions themselves. The story ends with the Holocaust, which sealed the fate of those professionals who had become victims of persecution under the German occupation of Hungary.
This volume analyses and compares different forms of nationalism across a range of European countries and regions during the long nineteenth century. It aims to put detailed studies of nationalist politics and thought, which have proliferated over the last ten years or so, into a wider European context. By means of such contextualization, together with new and systematic comparisons, What is a Nation? Europe 1789-1914 reassesses the arguments put forward in the principal works on nationalism as a whole, many of which pre-date the proliferation of case studies in the 1990s and which, as a consequence, make only inadequate reference to the national histories of European states. The study reconsiders whether the distinction between civic and ethnic identities and politics in Europe has been overstated and whether it needs to be replaced altogether by a new set of concepts or types. What is a Nation? explores the relationship between this and other typologies, relating them to complex processes of industrialization, increasing state intervention, secularization, democratization and urbanization. Debates about citizenship, political economy, liberal institutions, socialism, empire, changes in the states system, Darwinism, high and popular culture, Romanticism and Christianity all affected - and were affected by - discussion of nationhood and nationalist politics. The volume investigates the significance of such controversies and institutional changes for the history of modern nationalism, as it was defined in diverse European countries and regions during the long nineteenth century. By placing particular nineteenth-century nationalist movements and nation-building in a broader comparative context, prominent historians of particular European states give an original and authoritative reassessment, designed to appeal to students and academic readers alike, of one of the most contentious topics of the modern period.
This is an interpretative history of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union between 1850 and 1991. During this tumultuous period, the countries of this vast area were transformed from traditional, agrarian societies into modern industrial states. Like China, the Soviet Union underwent this transition under the banner of communism. After introductory chapters on traditional Russian history and lifeways, David Christian discusses how these transformations affected both governments and ordinary citizens, what they gained, what they endured, and why the Communist experiment ultimately failed.
The topic of memory has shot to prominence in recent years,
engaging the attention of academics and a wider public alike. This
is partly due to a spate of anniversaries and commemorations of
events, such as the Holocaust and the Second World War, whose
significance for the present is affirmed even as their meanings
continue to be debated. In Germany and France, contested memories,
representations and commemorations of this period have become
virtually a defining feature of their respective political
cultures. Equally contested are France's memories of a
decolonization process whose legacy still makes its presence felt
in the political landscape. This book uses the concept of 'vectors'
of memory to designate the conduits of that memorial activity, and
examines in detail a range of vectors - historiography, war crimes
trials, novels and films - that have focused public attention and
debate in this era of so-called 'commemorative obsession'. More
than a descriptive summary of such developments, the author
elucidates the identity politics that is being expressed through
these channels. In the course of these investigations, concepts
such as 'sites of memory', 'testimony', and 'trauma' - much invoked
in recent work on 'collective memory' - are critically examined in
a number of historical, juridical and representational contexts.
What do you do when an oil industry giant, on whom you have depended for sixteen years to provide your company's largest plant with natural gas, suddenly tries to use federal legislation as a way to increase its price by more than ten times over what the contract calls for? As DODGING THE BULLET recounts, you pull together a coalition of companies in the same bind as yours. And if your opponent has used the personal attorney to a powerful U.S. Senate figure to help draft the legislation that would abrogate their contract with you, you respond by hiring the best-known lobbying law firm in Washington and working side-by-side with them every step of the way. And you soon realize that the battle will involve a series of ups and downs. The story unfolds in 1983-84, a time when fax machines were in their infancy and their were no personal computers, cell phones, iPads or any of the other communications shortcuts we depend on so much today. The lobbying involved old-fashioned shoe leather, face-to-face meetings with members of Congress and their staff, and countless phone calls and strategy sessions. DODGING THE BULLET puts you right in the middle of the fray and shows you what high-level lobbying is really like, and what it is not. For anyone interested in knowing the ins and outs of Congress and the rules of lawmaking, this book is a must read.
Ten songs, from ""Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home"" (1902) to ""You Made Me Love You"" (1913), ignited the development of the classic pop ballad. In this exploration of how the style of the Great American Songbook evolved, Michael G. Garber unveils the complicated, often-hidden origins of these enduring, pioneering works. He riffs on colorful stories that amplify the rising of an American folk art composed by innovators both famous and obscure. Songwriters, and also the publishers, arrangers, and performers, achieved together a collective genius that moved hearts worldwide to song. These classic ballads originated all over the nation-Louisiana, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan-and then the Tin Pan Alley industry, centered in New York, made the tunes unforgettable sensations. From ragtime to bop, cabaret to radio, new styles of music and modes for its dissemination invented and reinvented the intimate, personal American love ballad, creating something both swinging and tender. Rendered by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and a host of others, recordings and movies carried these songs across the globe. Using previously underexamined sources, Garber demonstrates how these songs shaped the music industry and the lives of ordinary Americans. Besides covering famous composers like Irving Berlin, this history also introduces such little-known figures as Maybelle Watson, who had to sue to get credit and royalties for creating the central content of the lyric for ""My Melancholy Baby."" African American Frank Williams contributed to the seminal ""Some of These Days"" but was forgotten for decades. The ten ballads explored here permanently transformed American popular song.
This is a wide-ranging comparative study of relationships between the indigenous leadership of traditional states and colonizing Europeans from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It challenges stereotypes of despotic imperial power in Asian, African, and Pacific colonies and seeks to answer the fundamental question: how were European officials able to govern so many societies over such a long period of time? Colin Newbury examines the politics of pre-colonial state structures, their subversion by merchants and administrators, and the use made of indigenous leaders, and assesses the legacy of these colonial hierarchies.
The yellow press period in American journalism history has produced many powerful and enduring myths-almost none of them true. This study explores these legends, presenting extensive evidence that: The yellow press did not foment-could not have fomented-the Spanish-American War in 1898, contrary of the arguments of many media historians. The famous exchange of telegrams between the artist Frederic Remington and newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst-in which Hearst is said to have vowed to furnish the war with Spain-almost certainly never took place. The readership of the yellow press was not confined to immigrants and people having an uncertain command of English, as many media historians maintain. rather yellow journals were most likely read across the social strata of urban America. The term yellow journalism emerged and took hold during a period of raging competition and intolerance among newspaper editors in New York City-and did not directly result from the rivalry between Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, as most media historians claim. The study also presents the results of a detailed content analysis of seven leading U. S. newspapers at 10 year intervals, from 1899 to 1999. The content analysis-which included the "Denver Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Raleigh News and Observer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, San Francisco Examiner" and "Washington Post"-reveal that some elements characteristic of yellow journalism have been generally adopted by leading U. S. newspapers. This critical assessment encourages a more precise understanding of the history of yellow journalism, appealing to scholars of American journalism, journalism history, and practicing journalists.
Selectively drawing on the vast literature on Gandhi since the 1920s, this bibliography covers his life, political campaigns, philosophy of nonviolence, and strategy of nonviolence, or satyagraha. It also includes assessments of his historical significance and works on the Gandhian movement since 1948. The book sets Gandhi in his historical and political context, including material on his colleagues and contemporaries, the Indian National Congress, and how governments in South Africa, India, and Britain responded to his campaigns. Directed to English-speaking students, the work concentrates on English-language materials. It includes important works published in India, but stresses perceptions of Gandhi and his significance in the West. A particularly useful volume for students, as well as scholars of 20th century Indian history, the volume does not assume prior knowledge. It opens with a short biography of Gandhi, followed by a chronology of his life, and includes a glossary of Indian terms. Entries are carefully annotated to set books and authors in their historical context and to distinguish between scholarly and more personal or partisan assessments of Gandhi. Designed specifically for researchers in the Western English-speaking world, the book emphasizes books and articles published in the West and selective literature published in India from the 1920s to the 1990s.
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