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Books > History > World history > From 1900 > General
This book discusses WWI-era music in a historical context,
explaining music's importance at home and abroad during WWI as well
as examining what music was being sung, played, and danced to
during the years prior to America's involvement in the Great War.
Why was music so important to soldiers abroad during World War I?
What role did music-ranging from classical to theater music, rags,
and early jazz-play on the American homefront? Music of the First
World War explores the tremendous importance of music during the
years of the Great War-when communication technologies were
extremely limited and music often took the place of connecting
directly with loved ones or reminiscing via recorded images. The
book's chapters cover music's contribution to the war effort; the
variety of war-related songs, popular hits, and top recording
artists of the war years; the music of Broadway shows and other
theater productions; and important composers and lyricists. The
author also explores the development of the fledgling recording
industry at this time. Provides an excellent resource for students
investigating music during the First World War as well as for
adults interested in WWI-era history or music of the pre-twenties
Documents the variety of reasons songs were sung by soldiers in
wartime-to cheer themselves up, boost courage, poke fun at or
stimulate hatred of their enemies, or express grievances or protest
against the war or against authority Covers stage music of the WWI
era, including music hall (British), vaudeville, revues, operettas,
and musicals
This book is situated at the cutting edge of the political-ethical
dimension of history writing. Henkes investigates various
responsibilities and loyalties towards family and nation, as well
as other major ethical obligations towards society and humanity
when historical subjects have to deal with a repressive political
regime. In the first section we follow pre-war German immigrants in
the Netherlands and their German affiliation during the era of
National Socialism. The second section explores the positions of
Dutch emigrants who settled after the Second World War in Apartheid
South Africa. The narratives of these transnational agents and
their relatives provide a lens through which changing constructions
of national identities, and the acceptance or rejection of a
nationalist policy on racial grounds, can be observed in everyday
practice.
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.
Born into poverty in Russian Poland in 1911, Zosa Szajkowski
(Shy-KOV-ski) was a self-made man who managed to make a life for
himself as an intellectual, first as a journalist in 1930s Paris,
and then, after a harrowing escape to New York in 1941, as a
scholar. Although he never taught at a university or even earned a
PhD, Szajkowski became one of the world's foremost experts on the
history of the Jews in modern France, publishing in Yiddish,
English, and Hebrew. His work opened up new ways of thinking about
Jewish emancipation, economic and social modernization, and the
rise of modern anti-Semitism. But beneath Szajkowski's scholarly
success lay a shameful secret. In the aftermath of the Holocaust,
the scholar stole tens of thousands of archival documents related
to French Jewish history from public archives and private synagogue
collections in France and moved them, illicitly, to New York.
There, he used them as the basis for his pathbreaking articles.
Eventually, he sold them, piecemeal, to American and Israeli
research libraries, where they still remain today. Why did this
respectable historian become an archive thief? And why did
librarians in the United States and Israel buy these materials from
him, turning a blind eye to the signs of ownership they bore? These
are the questions that motivate this gripping tale. Throughout, it
is clear that all involved-perpetrator, victims, and buyers-saw
what Szajkowski was doing through the prism of the Holocaust. The
buyers shared a desire to save these precious remnants of the
European Jewish past, left behind on a continent where six million
Jews had just been killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. The
scholars who read Szajkowski's studies, based largely on the
documents he had stolen, saw the treasures as offering an
unparalleled window into the history that led to that catastrophe.
And the Jewish caretakers of many of the institutions Szajkowski
robbed in France saw the losses as a sign of their difficulties
reconstructing their community after the Holocaust, when the
balance of power in the Jewish world was shifting away from Europe
to new centers in America and Israel. Based on painstaking
research, Lisa Leff reconstructs Szajkowski's story in all its
ambiguity by taking us backstage at the archives, revealing the
powerful ideological, economic and scientific forces that made
Holocaust-era Jewish scholars care more deeply than ever before
about preserving the remnants of their past.
George Pitt-Rivers began his career as one of Britain's most
promising young anthropologists, conducting research in the South
Pacific and publishing articles in the country's leading academic
journals. With a museum in Oxford bearing his family name,
Pitt-Rivers appeared to be on track for a sterling academic career
that might even have matched that of his grandfather, one of the
most prominent archaeologists of his day. By the early 1930s,
however, Pitt-Rivers had turned from his academic work to politics.
Writing a series of books attacking international communism and
praising the ideas of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler,
Pitt-Rivers fell into the circles of the anti-Semitic far right. In
1937 he attended the Nuremberg Rally and personally met Adolf
Hitler and other leading Nazis. With the outbreak of war in 1940
Pitt-Rivers was arrested and interned by the British government on
the suspicion that he might harm the war effort by publicly sharing
his views, effectively ending his academic career. This book traces
the remarkable career of a man who might have been remembered as
one of Britain's leading 20th century anthropologists but instead
became involved in a far-right milieu that would result in his
professional ruin and the relegation of most of his research to
margins of scientific history. At the same time, his wider legacy
would persist far beyond the academic sphere and can be found to
the present day.
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.
Lisa Pine assembles an impressive array of influential scholars in
Life and Times in Nazi Germany to explore the variety and
complexity of life in Germany under Hitler's totalitarian regime.
The book is a thematic collection of essays that examine the extent
to which social and cultural life in Germany was permeated by Nazi
aims and ambitions. Each essay deals with a different theme of
daily German life in the Nazi era, with topics including food,
fashion, health, sport, art, tourism and religion all covered in
chapters based on original and expert scholarship. Life and Times
in Nazi Germany, which also includes 24 images and helpful
end-of-chapter select bibliographies, provides a new lens through
which to observe life in Nazi Germany - one that highlights the
everyday experience of Germans under Hitler's rule. It illuminates
aspects of life under Nazi control that are less well-known and
examines the contradictions and paradoxes that characterised daily
life in Nazi Germany in order to enhance and sophisticate our
understanding of this period in the nation's history. This is a
crucial volume for all students of Nazi Germany and the history of
Germany in the 20th century.
Czestochowa was the home of the eighth largest Jewish community in
Poland. After 1765, when there were 75 Jews in Czestochowa, the
community grew steadily. With emancipation in 1862, many Jews
migrated to Czestochowa and contributed to its industrial and
commercial growth. In 1935, there were 27,162 Jews out of a total
population of 127,504. When the Nazis deported Jews to Czestochowa
to work in its munition factories, the Jewish population exceeded
50,000. Almost all perished in Treblinka. Anti-Jewish feeling was
spurred on by the Church and Fascist groups that organized boycotts
of Jewish stores and incited pogroms intended to drive the Jews out
of the city. The Jewish labor movement fought unemployment and poor
working conditions. Impoverished families were aided by community
charitable funds. Jewish philanthropists established the
non-sectarian "Jewish Hospital," progressive schools, two gymnasia
and the "New Synagogue." During election seasons, the entire Jewish
political spectrum, from the socialist parties to the
ultra-Orthodox, competed in the self-governing body, and in the
Municipal Council. By 1901, stylishly dressed men and women mixed
in the streets with poor religious Jews in their traditional garb.
A popular press, libraries, theaters, cinema, sporting events and
youth movements gave Czestochowa Jews a variety of cultural choices
to suit their politics, artistic taste, and modes of leisure.
Public life transformed a dreary factory town into one of the most
colorful and celebrated Jewish communities in Poland before and
after the First World War.
Learning How to Feel explores the ways in which children and
adolescents learn not just how to express emotions that are thought
to be pre-existing, but actually how to feel. The volume assumes
that the embryonic ability to feel unfolds through a complex
dialogue with the social and cultural environment and specifically
through reading material. The fundamental formation takes place in
childhood and youth. A multi-authored historical monograph,
Learning How to Feel uses children's literature and advice manuals
to access the training practices and learning processes for a wide
range of emotions in the modern age, circa 1870-1970. The study
takes an international approach, covering a broad array of social,
cultural, and political milieus in Britain, Germany, India, Russia,
France, Canada, and the United States. Learning How to Feel places
multidirectional learning processes at the centre of the
discussion, through the concept of practical knowledge. The book
innovatively draws a framework for broad historical change during
the course of the period. Emotional interaction between adult and
child gave way to a focus on emotional interactions among children,
while gender categories became less distinct. Children were
increasingly taught to take responsibility for their own emotional
development, to find 'authenticity' for themselves. In the context
of changing social, political, cultural, and gender agendas, the
building of nations, subjects and citizens, and the forging of
moral and religious values, Learning How to Feel demonstrates how
children were provided with emotional learning tools through their
reading matter to navigate their emotional lives.
Rosemary Wakeman's original survey text comprehensively explores
modern European urban history from 1815 to the present day. It
provides a journey to cities and towns across the continent, in
search of the patterns of development that have shaped the urban
landscape as indelibly European. The focus is on the built
environment, the social and cultural transformations that mark the
patterns of continuity and change, and the transition to modern
urban society. Including over 60 images that serve to illuminate
the analysis, the book examines whether there is a European city,
and if so, what are its characteristics? Wakeman offers an
interdisciplinary approach that incorporates concepts from cultural
and postcolonial studies, as well as urban geography, and provides
full coverage of urban society not only in western Europe, but also
in eastern and southern Europe, using various cities and city types
to inform the discussion. The book provides detailed coverage of
the often-neglected urbanization post-1945 which allows us to more
clearly understand the modernizing arc Europe has followed over the
last two centuries.
A prevailing belief among Russia's cultural elite in the early
twentieth century was that the music of composers such as Sergei
Rachmaninoff, Aleksandr Scriabin, and Nikolai Medtner could forge a
shared identity for the Russian people across social and economic
divides. In this illuminating study of competing artistic and
ideological visions at the close of Russia's "Silver Age," author
Rebecca Mitchell interweaves cultural history, music, and
philosophy to explore how "Nietzsche's orphans" strove to find in
music a means to overcome the disunity of modern life in the final
tumultuous years before World War I and the Communist Revolution.
What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the
killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into
a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people
defiantly flooded into the nation's streets, demanding an end to
police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black
people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests
appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence.
Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in
America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors-and any
attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with
the recent past. Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many
Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in
the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness
and equality. Hinton's sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether
different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in
1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart
the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary
consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical
corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope
applied to events that can only be properly understood as
rebellions-explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and
violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions
that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a
post-Jim Crow United States no longer holds. Black rebellion,
America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to
poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police
violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the "War on
Crime," sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black
neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality,
residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered
local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton
draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography
of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to
Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California. The central lesson from
these eruptions-that police violence invariably leads to community
violence-continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further
criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying
socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing
and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today.
Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation's enduring
strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely
continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the
consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until
an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice
and equality.
The truck system was a global phenomenon in the period 1865-1920,
where workers were paid through the company store. In Beyond Racism
and Poverty Karin Lurvink looks at how this system functioned on
plantations in Louisiana in comparison with peateries in the
Netherlands. In the United States, the system is often viewed as a
'second slavery' and strongly associated with racism. In the
Netherlands, however, not racism but poverty has been seen as the
main reason for its continued existence. By using a variety of
historical sources and by analyzing the perspectives of both
employers and workers, Lurvink provides new insights into how the
truck system worked and can be explained. She reveals how the
system was not only coercive but had advantages for the workers as
well, which should not be overlooked.
Numerous studies concerning transitional justice exist. However,
comparatively speaking, the effects actually achieved by measures
for coming to terms with dictatorships have seldom been
investigated. There is an even greater lack of transnational
analyses. This volume contributes to closing this gap in research.
To this end, it analyses processes of coming to terms with the past
in seven countries with different experiences of violence and
dictatorship. Experts have drawn up detailed studies on
transitional justice in Albania, Argentina, Ethiopia, Chile,
Rwanda, South Africa and Uruguay. Their analyses constitute the
empirical material for a comparative study of the impact of
measures introduced within the context of transitional justice. It
becomes clear that there is no sure formula for dealing with
dictatorships. Successes and deficits alike can be observed in
relation to the individual instruments of transitional justice -
from criminal prosecution to victim compensation. Nevertheless, the
South American states perform much better than those on the African
continent. This depends less on the instruments used than on
political and social factors. Consequently, strategies of
transitional justice should focus more closely on these contextual
factors.
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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