The strife for social improvement that arose in the decades around the turn of the 20th century raised the issue of social conformity in new ways: how were citizens who did not adhere to the rules to be dealt with? This edited collection opens new perspectives on the history of the emerging welfare state by focusing on its margins.

Fabricating Modern Societies: Education, Bodies, and Minds in the Age of Steel, edited by Karin Priem and Frederik Herman, offers new interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives on the history of industrialization and societal transformation in early twentieth-century Luxembourg. The individual chapters focus on how industrialists addressed a large array of challenges related to industrialization, borrowing and mixing ideas originating in domains such as corporate identity formation, mediatization, scientification, technological innovation, mechanization, capitalism, mass production, medicalization, educationalization, artistic production, and social utopia, while competing with other interest groups who pursued their own goals. The book looks at different focus areas of modernity, and analyzes how humans created, mediated, and interacted with the technospheres of modern societies. Contributors: Klaus Dittrich, Irma Hadzalic, Frederik Herman, Enric Novella, Ira Plein, Francoise Poos, Karin Priem, and Angelo Van Gorp.

The history of military mobilization does not fit neatly into national boxes, not even in the modern era. The traditional military history narrative, at least as far as Europe is concerned, sees the French Revolution as an important turning point in the 'nationalization' of military service. The essays in this volume seek to challenge this view by examining largely overlooked aspects of military mobilization from the eighteenth century to the present. Whether as colonial troops, ideological volunteers, mercenaries, adventurers or soldiers who were recruited in prisoner of war camps, men and women have often found themselves fighting for a country other than their own. On numerous occasions, pressing wartime needs have compelled states to turn to transnational recruitment. At the same time, the willingness of individuals to commit to cross-border military service has endured despite the advent of nation-states; a trend that could become more prevalent in the twenty-first century.

The concept of generation is ubiquitous in common parlance and public discourse: it is used to explain family relationships, consumer preferences, political change, and much else besides. But how can generation be used by historians? Do generations 'really' exist, or are they constructed and manipulated by social and cultural elites? In pursuit of answers to these questions, this book ranges from World War I to the baby boomers and from Spain to the Soviet Union.

Journalists often claim that they write the first draft of history, but few historians examine the press in detail when preparing later drafts. This book demonstrates the value of popular newspapers as a historical source by using them to explore the attitudes and identities of inter-war Britain, and in particular the reshaping of femininity and masculinity. It provides a fresh insight into a period of great significance in the making of twentieth century gender identities, when women and men were coming to terms with the upheavals of the Great War, the arrival of democracy, and rapid social change. The book also deepens our understanding of the development of the modern media by showing how newspaper editors, in the fierce competition for readers, developed a template for the popular press that is still influential today.

In Colonial Survey and Native Landscapes in Rural South Africa, 1850 - 1913, Lindsay Frederick Braun explores the technical processes and struggles surrounding the creation and maintenance of boundaries and spaces in South Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The precision of surveyors and other colonial technicians lent these enterprises an illusion of irreproachable objectivity and authority, even though the reality was far messier. Using a wide range of archival and printed materials from survey departments, repositories, and libraries, the author presents two distinct episodes of struggle over lands and livelihoods, one from the Eastern Cape and one from the former northern Transvaal. These cases expose the contingencies, contests, and negotiations that fundamentally shaped these changing South African landscapes.

"Politics and Religion in Modern Japan" addresses crucial religious, socio-political and cultural issues raised by the troubled relationship between religion and the Japanese state from the mid-nineteenth century until the present day. It analyzes political dynamics of both of the two major Japanese religious traditions: the 'red sun' of national Shinto as well as the 'white lotus' of Buddhism. From a richly diverse range of disciplinary perspectives, the authors illuminate the overall history of modern Japanese political religion, while also focusing in depth on certain key moments and issues: the Meiji Restoration, the fascist 1930s, the postwar age of new religions, the Yasukuni Shrine controversy, and two major incidents of religiopolitical violence in late twentieth century Japan. The work will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese politics, religion, history, literature, and culture, as well as to anyone interested in the currently pressing topic of the relation between politics and religion in the modern world.

Ireland, 1919: When Sinn Fein proclaims Dail Eireann the parliament of the independent Irish republic, London declares the new assembly to be illegal, and a vicious guerilla war breaks out between republican and crown forces. Michael Collins, intelligence chief of the Irish Republican Army, creates an elite squad whose role is to assassinate British agents and undercover police. The so-called 'Twelve Apostles' will create violent mayhem, culminating in the events of 'Bloody Sunday' in November 1920. Bestselling historian Tim Pat Coogan not only tells the story of Collins' squad, he also examines the remarkable intelligence network of which it formed a part, and which helped to bring the British government to the negotiating table.

"Reading Shenbao" focuses on three dimensions of Chinese modernity, as reflected through the image of Shanghai urbanites in the "Shenbao"newspaper's readership. The first is nationalism; the second the penetration of consumerism into the middle class of the Chinese urban society; and the third, the emergence of a new concept of citizenship, in which the individual was treated as the basic unit composing the nation.

This book explores the role of cultural heritage in post-conflict reconstruction, whether as a motor for the prolongation of violence or as a resource for building reconciliation. The research was driven by two main goals: first, to understand the post-conflict reconstruction process in terms of cultural heritage, and second, to identify how this process evolves in the medium term and the impact it has on society. The Spanish Civil War (193639) and its subsequent phases of reconstruction provides the primary material for this exploration. In pursuit of the first goal, the book centres on the material practices and rhetorical strategies developed around cultural heritage in post-civil war Spain and the victorious Franco regime's reconstruction. The analysis seeks to capture a discursively complex set of practices that made up the reconstruction and in which a variety of Spanish heritage sites were claimed, rebuilt or restored and represented in various ways as signs of historical narratives, political legitimacy and group identity. The reconstruction of the town of Gernika is a particularly emblematic instance of destruction and a significant symbol within the Basque regions of Spain as well as internationally. By examining Gernika it is possible to identify some of the trends common to the reconstruction as a whole along with those aspects that pertain to its singular symbolic resonance. In order to achieve the second goal, the processes of selection, value change and exclusionary dynamics of reconstruction and the responses it elicits are examined. Exploring the possible impact of post-civil war reconstruction in the medium term is conducted in two time frames: the period of political transition that followed General Franco's death in 1975; and the period 20042008, when Rodriguez Zapatero's government undertook initiatives to 'recover the historic memory' of the war and dictatorship. Finally, the observations made of the Spanish reconstruction are analysed in terms of how they might reveal general trends in post-conflict reconstruction processes in relation to cultural heritage. These insights are pertinent to the situations in Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is an account of the occupiers extortio n, confiscation, and resulting hardships, as well as the act ions of those who resisted, is a timely reminder of the dram a being played out in Afghanistan today. '

The Emancipation led Italian Jews to redefine themselves in fundamental ways, beginning a debate about integration and assimilation that continued until the Racial Legislation Laws of 1938. This groundbreaking study examines the numerous youth movements, newspapers, and cultural societies that attempted to revitalize Italian Judaism and define the "essence" of Jewish identity during this period. Throughout, author Cristina M. Bettin demonstrates how Jews integrated rather than assimilated, which became a unique and defining feature of Italian Judaism.

Asa Briggs has been a prominent figure in post-war cultural life - as a pioneering historian, a far-sighted educational reformer, and a sensitive chronicler of the way in which broadcasting and communication more generally have shaped modern society. He has also been a devoted servant of the public good, involved in many inquiries, boards and trusts. Yet few accounts of public life in Britain since the Second World War include a discussion or appreciation of his influential role. This collection of essays provides the first critical assessment of Asa Briggs' career, using fresh research and new perspectives to analyse his contribution and impact on scholarship, the expansion of higher education at home and overseas, and his support and leadership for the arts and media more generally. The online bibliography of Asa Briggs' publications which accompanies the book is available on the The Institute of Historical Research website here.

Women's lives changed more in the twentieth century than in any previous century. It was a period of transformation, not only of the political realm, but also of the household, family and workplace. Innovations in military technology, the mass media, manufacturing, medicine, travel and communications shaped the lives of women. Ranging widely over the whole of Europe and the entirety of the long twentieth century, this fascinating account is the first comprehensive survey of women in twentieth-century Europe.

This fascinating study examines wartime Chinese-Soviet relations from a Moscow-based, Chinese perspective at the ambassadorial level. The book includes descriptions of everyday life in Moscow, of embassy business, of contemporary events and diplomacy, of intelligence operations, of meetings with Stalin, and of communications to and from Chongqing.

Leading sexuality scholars explore queer lives and cultures in the first full post-war decade through an array of sources and a range of perspectives. Drawing out the particularities of queer cultures from the Finland and New Zealand to the UK and the USA, this collection rethinks preconceptions of the 1950s and pinpoints some of its legacies.

This volume investigates places where old and new elites came together, where these groups met and interacted but also where the rules and conventions for new elites were forged. The book focusses arenas of encounter and (self)representation belonging to the world of leisure and embraces also the organizations and associations which established and ran these spaces and events.

This book is an important contribution to the history of religion in twentieth century Britain which focuses upon the importance of central religious narratives. These narratives are demonstrated to have changed significantly over time but also to have been invested with importance and meaning by religious individuals and organisations, as well as by secular ones. The book investigates narratives of pilgrimage and the good Samaritan, of conversion, of the idea of the 'just' and 'unjust' war, of the creation of post First World War Remembrance, of sickness and dying and of specific 'moments' and their power to make religion strong again at specific historical junctures. The last narrative investigated is narrative of religious decline itself and how this convinced the Anglican Church in England to seriously consider the prospect of its own demise. The strength and importance of these different emphases does not follow a pattern of religious decline or of secular triumph as these are regularly recast and renewed. As such this offers a qualification to conventional versions of the secularization thesis as well as suggesting a new paradigm for thinking about and writing religious history in Britain.

At the start of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents began to venture in increasing numbers to the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, drawn by the twin objectives of securing the route to India and finding adventure and spiritualism in an antique land. But these competing objectives created a dilemma: how were they to discreetly and patriotically gather facts in a region they were drawn to for its legendary inscrutability and promise of fame and escape from Britain? Spies in Arabia tracks the intelligence community's tactical grappling with this dilemma and its myriad cultural, institutional, and political consequences during and after the Great War. Arguing that violence and culture were more closely allied in imperial rule than has been recognized, it tells the story of an imperial state dependent on equivocal agents groping through a fog of cultural notions and an interfering mass democracy towards a new style of "covert empire" centered on a brutal aerial surveillance regime in Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources - from the fictional to the recently declassified - it explains how Britons reconciled genuine ethical scruples with the actual violence of their Middle Eastern empire - how imperialism was made fit for an increasingly democratic and anti-imperial world. In doing so, it offers the first cultural history of Britain's Middle Eastern empire, anchored in a radically new interpretation of the institutions and practices of intelligence-gathering and the state. The result is a new understanding of the military, cultural, and political legacies of the Great War and of the British empire in the twentieth century. Unpacking the romantic fascination with "Arabia" as the land of espionage, Spies in Arabia presents a start tale of poetic ambition, war, terror, and failed redemption - and the prehistory of our present discontents.

From 1896 to 1924, motivated by fears of an irresistible wave of Asianmigration and the possibility that whites might be ousted from their positionof global domination, British colonists and white Americans instituted stringentlegislative controls on Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian immigration.Historians of these efforts typically stress similarity and collaborationbetween these movements, but in this compelling study, David C. Atkinsonhighlights the differences in these campaigns and argues that the main factorunifying these otherwise distinctive drives was the constant tensions theycaused. Drawing on documentary evidence from the United States, GreatBritain, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand, Atkinson traceshow these exclusionary regimes drew inspiration from similar racial, economic,and strategic anxieties, but nevertheless developed idiosyncraticallyin the first decades of the twentieth century. Arguing that the so-called white man's burden was often white supremacyitself, Atkinson demonstrates how the tenets of absolute exclusion-meant to foster white racial, political, and economic supremacy-onlyinflamed dangerous tensions that threatened to undermine the BritishEmpire, American foreign relations, and the new framework of internationalcooperation that followed the First World War.

Rehabilitation and Probation in England and Wales, 1900-1950 draws on a wide range of archive material to describe the arrival of a modern probation service. Focusing on the first half of the twentieth century, it describes the debates, conflicts and compromises that resulted in the creation of a state sponsored, centrally controlled, professional, secular, social work and psychological based agency. Following a chronological structure, Ray Gard explores the arrival of the so-called period of 'penal optimism', showing how rehabilitation arrived in the courts of England and Wales. The book uses archive and original material to give voice to those devising and implementing policy, revealing an uneven path to a modern probation system.