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Books > History > European history > From 1900 > General
The surveillance of immigrants and potential terrorists preoccupies leaders throughout the industrialized world. Yet these concerns are hardly new. Policing Paris examines a critical moment in the history of immigration control and political surveillance. Drawing on massive police archives and other materials, Clifford Rosenberg shows how in the years after the Great War the French police, terrified by the Bolshevik Revolution and the specter of immigrant criminality, became the first major force anywhere systematically to enforce distinctions of citizenship and national origins. As the French capital emerged as a haven for refugees, dissidents, and workers from throughout Europe and across the Mediterranean in the 1920s, police officers raided immigrant neighborhoods to scare illegal aliens into registering with authorities and arrested those whose papers were not in order. The police began to concentrate on colonial workers from North Africa, tracking these workers with a special police brigade and segregating them in their own hospital when they fell ill. Transformed by their enforcement, legal categories that had existed for hundreds of years began to matter as never before. They determined whether or not families could remain together and whether people could keep their jobs or were forced to flee. During World War II, identity controls marked out entire populations for physical destruction. The treatment of foreigners during the Third Republic, Rosenberg contends, shaped the subsequent treatment of Jews by Vichy. At the same time, however, he argues that the new methods of identification pioneered between the wars are more directly relevant to the present day. They created forms of inclusion and inequality that remain pervasive, as industrial welfare states around the world find themselves compelled to provide benefits to their own citizens and recruit foreign nationals to satisfy their labor needs.
All revolutionary regimes seek to legitimize themselves through foundation narratives that, told and retold, become constituent parts of the social fabric, erasing or pushing aside alternative histories. Frederick C. Corney draws on a wide range of sources--archives, published works, films--to explore the potent foundation narrative of Russia's Great October Socialist Revolution. He shows that even as it fought a bloody civil war with the forces that sought to displace it, the Bolshevik regime set about creating a new historical genealogy of which the October Revolution was the only possible culmination. This new narrative was forged through a complex process that included the sacralization of October through ritualized celebrations, its institutionalization in museums and professional institutes devoted to its study, and ambitious campaigns to persuade the masses that their lives were an inextricable part of this historical process By the late 1920s, the Bolshevik regime had transformed its representation of what had occurred in 1917 into a new orthodoxy, the October Revolution. Corney investigates efforts to convey the dramatic essence of 1917 as a Bolshevik story through the increasingly elaborate anniversary celebrations of 1918, 1919, and 1920. He also describes how official commissions during the 1920s sought to institutionalize this new foundation narrative as history and memory. In the book's final chapter, the author assesses the state of the October narrative at its tenth anniversary, paying particular attention to the versions presented in the celebratory films by Eisenstein and Pudovkin. A brief epilogue assesses October's fate in the years since the collapse of the SovietUnion.
Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a region Bolsheviks saw as primitive and backward. The Soviets focused on women and the family in an effort to forge a new, "liberated" social order.This unveiling campaign, however, took place in the context of a half-century of Russian colonization and the long-standing suspicion of rural Muslim peasants toward an urban, colonial state. Widespread resistance to the idea of unveiling quickly appeared and developed into a broader anti-Soviet animosity among Uzbeks of both sexes. Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over indigenous practices of veiling and seclusion. New local and national identities coalesced around these very practices that had been placed under attack. Veils became powerful anticolonial symbols for the Uzbek nation as well as important markers of Muslim propriety. Bolshevik leaders, who had seen this campaign as an excellent way to enlist allies while proving their own European credentials as enlightened reformers, thus inadvertently strengthened the seclusion of Uzbek women precisely the reverse of what they set out to do. Northrop's fascinating and evocative book shows both the fluidity of Central Asian cultural practices and the real limits that existed on Stalinist authority, even during the ostensibly totalitarian 1930s."
In most countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fall of communism opened up the possibility for individuals to acquire land. Based on Katherine Verdery's extensive fieldwork between 1990 and 2001, The Vanishing Hectare explores the importance of land and land ownership to the people of one Transylvanian community, Aurel Vlaicu. Verdery traces how collectivized land was transformed into private property, how land was valued, what the new owners were able to do with it, and what it signified to each of the different groups vying for land rights. Verdery tells this story about transforming socialist property forms in a global context, showing the fruitfulness of conceptualizing property as a political symbol, as a complex of social relations among people and things, and as a process of assigning value. This book is a window on rural life after socialism but it also provides a framework for assessing the neo-liberal economic policies that have prevailed elsewhere, such as in Latin America. Verdery shows how the trajectory of property after socialism was deeply conditioned by the forms property took in socialism itself; this is in contrast to the image of a "tabula rasa" that governed much thinking about post-socialist property reform.
For centuries the histories of France and Germany have been linked in ways productive and destructive, and each nation's sense of itself has often been shaped by admiration of or hostility toward the other. Harold Mah explores the interweaving paths of German and French cultural identity that emerged in the Enlightenment and continued through the 19th century and into the 20th. formulate stable cultural identities constantly collapsed in the face of other powerful images and the rush of history. In Mah's view, these shifting conceptions of cultural identity are problematic phantasies, internally unstable and prone to falling apart under the pressure of events, only to be replaced by new, equally problematic constructions. Mah offers fresh analyses of a wide range of iconic texts and artworks, including those of Jacques-Louis David, de Stael, Diderot and Rousseau in France and Goethe, Hegel, Herder, Mann, Marx and Nietzsche in Germany. in issues of language, gender, classical revival, politics and modernity. Enlightenment Phantasies presents the shaping of cultural identity in narratives accessible not only to specialists but also to students and all readers concerned with the history of Western culture.
Meet the inspirational woman behind the much-publicized emergency medical evacuations of wounded children from war-torn Sarajevo At the height of the Serbian siege of Sarajevo, Ellen Blackman could no longer bear the televised images of wounded children desperate for medical care. So she set off for Bosnia. There she shared the tragedies and occasional triumphs of a brave people whose world was crumbling around them while a seemingly indifferent world stood by. And despite tremendous bureaucratic and dangerous obstacles, she got the children out.
How do peasants come to think of themselves as members of a nation? The widely accepted argument is that national sentiment originates among intellectuals or urban middle classes, then "trickles down" to the working class and peasants. Keely Stauter-Halsted argues that such models overlook the independent contribution of peasant societies. She explores the complex case of the Polish peasants of Austrian Galicia, from the 1848 emancipation of the serfs to the eve of the First World War. In the years immediately after emancipation, Polish-speaking peasants were more apt to identify with the Austrian Emperor and the Catholic Church than with their Polish lords or the middle classes of the Galician capital, Cracow. Yet by the end of the century, Polish-speaking peasants would cheer, "Long live Poland" and celebrate the centennial of the peasant-fueled insurrection in defense of Polish independence. The explanation for this shift, Stauter-Halsted says, is the symbiosis that developed between peasant elites and upper-class reformers. She reconstructs this difficult, halting process, paying particular attention to public life and conflicts within the rural communities themselves. The author's approach is at once comparative and interdisciplinary, drawing from literature on national identity formation in Latin America, China, and Western Europe. The Nation in the Village combines anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism with economic, social, cultural, and political history.
During the Russian Revolution and Civil War, amateur theater groups sprang up in cities across the country. Workers, peasants, students, soldiers, and sailors provided entertainment ranging from improvisations to gymnastics and from propaganda sketches to the plays of Chekhov. In Revolutionary Acts, Lynn Mally reconstructs the history of the amateur stage in Soviet Russia from 1917 to the height of the Stalinist purges. Her book illustrates in fascinating detail how Soviet culture was transformed during the new regime's first two decades in power. Of all the arts, theater had a special appeal for mass audiences in Russia, and with the coming of the revolution it took on an important role in the dissemination of the new socialist culture. Mally's analysis of amateur theater as a space where performers, their audiences, and the political authorities came into contact enables her to explore whether this culture emerged spontaneously "from below" or was imposed by the revolutionary elite. She shows that by the late 1920s, Soviet leaders had come to distrust the initiatives of the lower classes, and the amateur theaters fell increasingly under the guidance of artistic professionals. Within a few years, state agencies intervened to homogenize repertoire and performance style, and with the institutionalization of Socialist Realist principles, only those works in a unified Soviet canon were presented.
Russians have often been characterized as people with souls rather than selves. Self and Story in Russian History challenges the portrayal of the Russian character as selfless, self-effacing, or self-torturing by exploring the texts through which Russians have defined themselves as private persons and shaped their relation to the cultural community. The stories of self under consideration here reflect the perspectives of men and women from the last two hundred years, ranging from westernized nobles to simple peasants, from such famous people as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Akhmatova, and Nicholas II to lowly religious sectarians. Fifteen distinguished historians and literary scholars situate the narratives of self in their historical context and show how, since the eighteenth century, Russians have used expressive genres -- including diaries, novels, medical case studies, films, letters, and theater -- to make political and moral statements. The first book to examine the narration of self as idea and ideal in Russia, this vital work contemplates the shifting historical manifestations of identity, the strategies of self-creation, and the diversity of narrative forms. Its authors establish that there is a history of the individual in Russian culture roughly analogous to the one associated with the West.
Women faced conflicting demands under Franco's programme of National Catholicism. State-sponsored economic development created a modern consumer society, yet women were expected to remain passive and private, conforming to 16th-century ideals of Catholic womanhood. Using diverse sources - including oral interviews, magazine advertisements and university archives, Morcillo explores the contradictions between modernization and traditional gender expectations. Using a textured history of major women's organizations from the 1940s through the 1960s it demonstrates that Spanish women successfully negotiated these contradictions, creating a vibrant and meaningful public space for women's social activism. Their very spirituality protected these women from state retribution in their search for "true Catholic womanhood". "True Catholic Womanhood" adds new insights into the gender dynamics of authoritarian states. It should be useful reading for all those interested in modern Spain, Catholicism, European women's history and authoritarian social politics.
During World War II, movements organized to resist Nazi occupation grew throughout Europe. In Greece the resistance movement also involved an unprecedented opportunity for social and political change initiated by the largest organization, the National Liberation Front or EAM. Key leaders envisioned postwar Greece as a popular democracy structured to allow a range of new voices to be heard. Believing gender equality to be one of the hallmarks of modernity, they attempted to expand the category of "national citizen" to include women as well as men. Janet Hart describes, often in the words of the Greek women involved, how lives were transformed by active participation in the resistance against the Nazis and in the anticommunist aftermath of the war. Political action proved exhilarating for women who had grown up in a prewar world of narrowly constricted gender roles. Hart has interviewed many survivors, and their testimony transcends local boundaries to capture the experience of emancipation. New Voices in the Nation explores the historical memory of social transformation, finding in personal narrative a key to new conceptions of societal change. The author places the resistance movement in an international context by examining how the struggle to promote modern political culture among ordinary people took shape on the ground in the course of the battle against conquering Axis forces. Hart uses insights gleaned from former partisans, Italian leader and political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, histories of black consciousness, and her own perceptions as an African American to explore topics of compelling current concern: the relation between gender and political action, the role ofnationalism in the raising of gender-based consciousness, and the ways in which social movements, by challenging the political status quo, may ultimately find themselves targeted as threats to state equilibrium.
The New Germany provides a picture of contemporary Germany from a variety of perspectives, establishing relationships between recent political events and society and cultural life. Contributors include distinguished specialists in German Studies, including John Sandford, Michael Patterson, Karl Koch and Charles Jeffery. Part 1 sets the scene, discussing the demise of East Germany from historical perspective and unification in terms of the social problems that have been provoked. Part 2 covers the new political structure and Germany's role as a European power as well as the social, educational and economic problems generated, especially in the east, by the western takeover of the former GDR. Part 3 is an extensive section devoted to culture and the arts, with studies of the media, literature, theatre, film and language.
Portrays the cultural bohemia of turn-of-the-century Paris who carried the arts into a period of renewal and accomplishment, who laid the ground-work for Dadaism and Surrealism.
In Volume I, E. H. Carr begins with an analysis of the events in Russian history from 1898 to 1917 that shaped the course of the Revolution. He examines the constitutional structure erected by the new government and then turns to the multifarious problems facing the Bolsheviks as they took possession of a rapidly disintegrating Russian empire.
In virtually all sectors of the economy, evidence of stagnation, waste, and mismanagement proliferates. The convergence of these problems is no historical accident. As Marshall Goldman. a leading analyst of the Soviet economy, demonstrates, the Russians continue to adhere to a planning model set forth by Stalin in the 1920s. The chances of a turnaround, therefore, hinge on reform of the system reform that the Soviet leaders fear might trigger unpredictable and uncontrollable forces that have been pent up for sixty-five years."
This book is an archaeological exploration of a conflict landscape encountered by the volunteers of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. A great deal is known about the Brigades in terms of inter-world war geopolitics, their history and make-up, but less is known about the materiality of the landscapes in which they lived, fought, and died. The Spanish Civil War was a relatively static conflict. As in the First World War, it consisted of entrenched Republican government lines facing similarly entrenched Nationalist (rebel) lines, and these ran north to south across Spain. Fighting was intermittent, so the front line soldiers had to settle in, and make what was an attritional war-scape, a place to live in and survive. This research examines one such war-scape as a place of 'settlement', where soldiers lived their daily lives as well as confronting the rigours of war - and these were the volunteers of the International Brigades, both foreign and Spanish, who occupied a section of lines southeast of Zaragoza in Aragon in 1937 and 1938. This research draws, not only on the techniques of landscape archaeology, but also on the writings of international volunteers in Spain - in particular, George Orwell - and it incorporates historical photography as a uniquely analytical, archaeological resource.
From the moment it began in 1936, the Spanish Civil War became the political question of the age. Hitler and Mussolini quickly sent aircraft, troops and supplies to the right-wing generals bent on overthrowing Spain's elected government. Millions of people around the world felt passionately that rapidly advancing fascism must be halted in Spain; if not there, where? More than 35,000 volunteers from dozens of other countries went to help defend the Spanish Republic. Adam Hochschild, the acclaimed author of King Leopold's Ghost, evokes this tumultuous period mainly through the lives of Americans involved in the war. A few are famous, such as Ernest Hemingway, but others are less familiar. They include a nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman, a fiery leftist who came to wartime Spain on her honeymoon; a young man who ran away from his Pennsylvania college and became the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid; and a swashbuckling Texas oilman who covertly violated US law and sold Generalissimo Francisco Franco most of the fuel for his army. Two New York Times reporters, fierce rivals, covered the war from opposite sides, with opposite sympathies. There are Britons in Hochschild's cast of characters as well: one, a London sculptor, fought with the American battalion; another, who had just gone down from Cambridge, joined Franco's army and found himself fighting against the Americans; and a third is someone whose experience of combat in Spain had a profound effect on his life, George Orwell.
The book is dedicated to the extraordinary cardboard by Pablo Picasso depicting his masterpiece - Guernica - the tapestry of which was displayed at the entrance to the UN Security Council room. The cartoon, created eighteen years after the oil painting, arises from an exceptional collaboration - as well as friendship - between Pablo Picasso, Nelson Rockefeller, one of the greatest patrons of the twentieth century, and the artist Jacqueline de la Baume Durrbach, who recreated the painting of Guernica through the ancient art of the tapestry. The book tells the story of cardboard, while offering a critical reading of the painting, which has become a universal symbol of values linked to democracy, freedom and peace. Text in English and Italian.
This book offers an extensive overview of the myriad Republican
forces during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39. The conflict was the
curtain-raiser to World War II, and the major international event
of the 1930s. The study illustrates, textually and visually, how
the Republican forces were initially varied in appearance and
character. Loyal elements of the Spanish army that rejected the
appeal of the rebel generals were supported by a wide range of
volunteer regional units and political militias, and by volunteers
from many other countries.
In early modern Iberia, Moorish clothing was not merely a cultural remnant from the Islamic period, but an artefact that conditioned discourses of nobility and social preeminence. In Moors Dressed as Moors, Javier Irigoyen-Garc a draws on a wide range of sources: archival, legal, literary, and visual documents, as well as tailoring books, equestrian treatises, and festival books to reveal the currency of Moorish clothing in early modern Iberian society. Irigoyen-Garc a's insightful and nuanced analyses of Moorish clothing production and circulation shows that as well as being a sign of status and a marker of nobility, it also served to codify social tensions by deploying apparent Islamophobic discourses. Such luxurious value of clothing also sheds light on how sartorial legislation against the Moriscos was not only a form of cultural repression, but also a way to preclude their full integration into Iberian society. Moors Dressed as Moors challenges the traditional interpretations of the value of Moorish clothing in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain and how it articulated the relationships between Christians and Moriscos.
This monumental book offers a comprehensive history and analysis of Republican political life during the Spanish Civil War. Completed by Burnett Bolloten just before his death in 1987 and first published in English in 1991, The Spanish Civil War is the culmination of fifty years of dedicated and painstaking research and is the most exhaustive study on the subject in any language. It has been regarded as the authoritative political history of the war and an indispensable encyclopedic guide to Republican affairs during the Spanish conflict. This new edition includes a new introduction by Spanish Civil War scholar George Esenwein, an updated bibliography featuring books on the Spanish Civil War published since 1987, and seventy-three photos of the war's participants. |
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