The 1960s saw the emergence in the Netherlands of a generation of avant-garde musicians (including figures such as Louis Andriessen, Willem Breuker, Reinbert de Leeuw and Misha Mengelberg) who were to gain international standing and influence as composers, performers and teachers, and who had a defining impact upon Dutch musical life. Fundamental to their activities in the sixties was a pronounced commitment to social and political engagement. The lively culture of activism and dissent on the streets of Amsterdam prompted an array of vigorous responses from these musicians, including collaborations with countercultural and protest groups, campaigns and direct action against established musical institutions, new grassroots performing associations, political concerts, polemicising within musical works, and the advocacy of new, more 'democratic' relationships with both performers and audiences. These activities laid the basis for the unique new music scene that emerged in the Netherlands in the 1970s and which has been influential upon performers and composers worldwide. This book is the first sustained scholarly examination of this subject. It presents the Dutch experience as an exemplary case study in the complex and conflictual encounter of the musical avant-garde with the decade's currents of social change. The narrative is structured around a number of the decade's defining topoi: modernisation and 'the new'; anarchy; participation; politics; self-management; and popular music. Dutch avant-garde musicians engaged actively with each of these themes, but in so doing they found themselves faced with distinct and sometimes intractable challenges, caused by the chafing of their political and aesthetic commitments. In charting a broad chronological progress from the commencement of work on Peter Schat's Labyrint in 1961 to the premiere of Louis Andriessen's Volkslied in 1971, this book traces the successive attempts of Dutch avant-garde musicians to reconcile the era's evolving social agendas with their own adventurous musical practice.

From Paris to Stalingrad, the Nazis systematically plundered all manner of art and antiquities. But the first and most valuable treasures they looted were the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire. In "Hitler's Holy Relics, "bestselling author Sidney Kirkpatrick tells the riveting and never-before-told true story of how an American college professor turned Army sleuth recovered these cherished symbols of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich before they could become a rallying point in the creation of a Fourth and equally unholy Reich.
Anticipating the Allied invasion of Nazi Germany, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler had ordered a top-secret bunker carved deep into the bedrock beneath Nurnberg castle. Inside the well-guarded chamber was a specially constructed vault that held the plundered treasures Hitler valued the most: the Spear of Destiny (reputed to have been used to pierce Christ's side while he was on the cross) and the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, ancient artifacts steeped in medieval mysticism and coveted by world rulers from Charlemagne to Napoleon. But as Allied bombers rained devastation upon Nurnberg and the U.S. Seventh Army prepared to invade the city Hitler called "the soul of the Nazi Party," five of the most precious relics, all central to the coronation ceremony of a would-be Holy Roman Emperor, vanished from the vault. Who took them? And why? The mystery remained unsolved for months after the war's end, until the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, ordered Lieutenant Walter Horn, a German-born art historian on leave from U.C. Berkeley, to hunt down the missing treasures.
To accomplish his mission, Horn must revisit the now-rubble-strewn landscape of his youth and delve into the ancient legends and arcane mysticism surrounding the antiquities that Hitler had looted in his quest for world domination. Horn searches for clues in the burnt remains of Himmler's private castle and follows the trail of neo-Nazi "Teutonic Knights" charged with protecting a vast hidden fortune in plundered gold and other treasure. Along the way, Horn has to confront his own demons: how members of his family and former academic colleagues subverted scholarly research to help legitimize Hitler's theories of Aryan supremacy and the Master Race. What Horn discovers on his investigative odyssey is so explosive that his final report will remain secret for decades.
Drawing on unpublished interrogation and intelligence reports, as well as on diaries, letters, journals, and interviews in the United States and Germany, Kirkpatrick tells this riveting and disturbing story with cinematic detail and reveals-- for the first time--how a failed Vienna art student, obsessed with the occult and dreams of his own grandeur, nearly succeeded in creating a Holy Reich rooted in a twisted reinvention of medieval and Church history.

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Riche de ses editeurs scolaires et de ses collections enfantines, le dix-neuvieme siecle a-t-il invente le marche du livre pour enfants? Dans la France du dix-huitieme siecle, de nombreux acteurs s'efforcent deja de separer, au sein de la librairie, les lectures adaptees aux enfants et aux jeunes gens. Les rituels pedagogiques des colleges et des petites ecoles, les strategies commerciales des libraires, les preoccupations des Eglises, les projets et les politiques de reforme scolaire, tous pousses par la fievre educative de la noblesse et de la bourgeoisie, produisent alors d'innombrables bibliotheques enfantines, plurielles et plastiques, avec ou sans murs. Cet ouvrage montre comment, a un ordre des livres domine par les logiques des institutions scolaires et des metiers du livre, se surimpose a partir des annees 1760 une nouvelle categorie, celle du " livre d'education ", qui ne s'identifie plus a un lieu, mais a un projet de lecture, et s'accompagne de l'emergence de nouvelles figures d'auteurs. Alors que les etudes sur la litterature de jeunesse poursuivent partout leur developpement et leur structuration, ce livre dialogue avec les dernieres recherches europeennes sur la question. A l'inverse des travaux litteraires, il part, non des auteurs et des textes, mais des objets et de leurs manipulations. Son originalite est d'apporter un regard historien sur ces questions, en articulant histoire du livre et de la librairie, histoire de l'education, histoire des milieux litteraires et de la condition d'auteur. --- With its wealth of educational publishers and children's collections, did the nineteenth century invent the children's book market? In eighteenth-century France, many people were already trying to separate the literature suitable for children and young people within the bookstore. The pedagogical rituals of colleges and small schools, the commercial strategies of booksellers, the concerns of the churches, the projects and policies of school reform, all driven by the educational fever of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, produced countless children's libraries, plural and plastic, with or without walls. At the beginning of the century, the ordering of books was dominated by the rationale of educational institutions and the book trade: this book shows how a new category emerged from the 1760s onwards, that of the "educational book", which was no longer identified with a place, but with a literacy project, and which was accompanied by the emergence of new authors. As studies on children's literature continue to be developed and shaped in many areas, this book is in dialogue with the latest European research on the subject. In contrast to literary studies, this research does not start from authors and texts, but from objects and their uses. Its originality lies in the fact that it provides a historical perspective on these issues, articulating the history of books and bookshops, the history of education, the history of literary circles and the status of the author.

From the time Catterina Vizzani, a young Roman woman, began wooing the woman she was attracted to, she did so dressed as a man. Fleeing Rome to avoid a potential trial for sexual misdeeds, she became Giovanni Bordoni, transitioning and becoming a male in spirit, deed, and body, through what was the most complete physical change possible in the eighteenth century. This volume features Giovanni Bianchi's 1744 Italian account of Vizzani/Bordoni, published for the first time together with a modern English translation, making available to an English-speaking audience the objective, scientific exploration of gender conducted by Bianchi. John Cleland's well-known, albeit fanciful, 1751 version of the story has also been reproduced here, shedding light on the divergent sexual politics driving Bianchi's Italian original and Cleland's greatly embellished English translation. Through a close examination of Bianchi's work as anatomical practitioner and scholar, Clorinda Donato traces the development of his advocacy for tolerance of all sexual orientations. Several chapters address the medical and philosophical inquiry into sexual preference, reproduction, sexual identity, and gender fluidity which Enlightenment anatomists from Holland to Italy engaged with in their research concerning the relationship between the mind and the reproductive organs. Meanwhile, it is the social implications of gender ambiguity which may be analysed in Cleland's condemnation of women who "pass" as men. Drawing on the biographies produced by Bianchi and Cleland, the volume reflects on the motivation of each author to tell the story of Vizzani/Bordoni either as a narration of empowerment or a cautionary tale within the European context of evolving sexual opinions, some based on scientific research, others based on social practice and cultural norms.

Almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, today more often than ever, global media and intellectuals rely on the concept of homo sovieticus to explain Russia's authoritarian ills. Homo sovieticus - or the Soviet man - is understood to be a double-thinking, suspicious and fearful conformist with no morality, an innate obedience to authority and no public demands; they have been forged in the fires of the totalitarian conditions in which they find themselves. But where did this concept come from? What analytical and ideological pillars does it stand on? What is at stake in using this term today? The Afterlife of the 'Soviet Man' addresses all these questions and even explains why - at least in its contemporary usage - this concept should be abandoned altogether.