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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history
When most people think about the Netherlands, images of tulips and
peaceful pot smoking residents spring to mind. Bring up soccer, and
most will think of Johan Cruyuff, the Dutch player thought to rival
Pele in preternatural skill, and Ajax, one of the most influential
soccer clubs in the world whose academy system for young athletes
has been replicated around the globe (and most notably by Barcelona
and the 2010 world champions, Spain).
But as international bestselling author Simon Kuper writes in
"Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Soccer in Europe During the Second World
War," the story of soccer in Holland cannot be understood without
investigating what really occurred in this country during WWII. For
decades, the Dutch have enjoyed the reputation of having a "good
war." The myth is even resonant in Israel where Ajax is celebrated.
The fact is, the Jews suffered shocking persecution at the hands of
Dutch collaborators. Holland had the second largest Nazi movement
in Europe outside Germany, and in no other country except Poland
was so high a percentage of Jews deported.
Kuper challenges Holland's historical amnesia and uses
soccer--particularly the experience of Ajax, a club long supported
by Amsterdam's Jews--as a window on wartime Holland and Europe.
Through interviews with Resistance fighters, survivors, wartime
soccer players and more, Kuper uncovers this history that has been
ignored, and also finds out why the Holocaust had a profound effect
on soccer in the country.
Ajax produced Cruyuff but was also built by members of the Dutch
resistance and Holocaust survivors. It became a surrogate family
for many who survived the war and its method for producing
unparalleled talent became the envy of clubs around the world. In
this passionate, haunting and moving work of forensic reporting,
Kuper tells the breathtaking story of how Dutch Jews survived the
unspeakable and came to play a strong role in the rise of the most
exciting and revolutionary style of soccer -- "Total Football" --
the world had ever seen.
Contemporary craft, art and design are inseparable from the flows
of production and consumption under global capitalism. The New
Politics of the Handmade features twenty-three voices who
critically rethink the handmade in this dramatically shifting
economy. The authors examine craft within the conditions of extreme
material and economic disparity; a renewed focus on labour and
materiality in contemporary art and museums; the political
dimensions of craftivism, neoliberalism, and state power; efforts
toward urban renewal and sustainability; the use of digital
technologies; and craft's connections to race, cultural identity
and sovereignty in texts that criss-cross five continents. They
claim contemporary craft as a dynamic critical position for
understanding the most immediate political and aesthetic issues of
our time.
This is a pioneering study that examines the sale of sex in
classical Athens from a commercial (rather than from a cultural or
moral) perspective. Following the author's earlier book on Athenian
banking, Athenian Prostitution analyzes erotic business at Athens
not anachronistically, but in the context of the Athenian economy.
For the Athenians, the social acceptability and moral standing of
human labor was largely determined by the conditions under which
work was performed. Pursued in a context characteristic of servile
endeavor, prostitution-like all forms of slave labor-was
contemptible. Pursued under conditions appropriate to non-servile
endeavor, prostitution-like all forms of free labor-was not
violative of Athenian work ethics. As a mercantile activity,
however, prostitution was not untouched by Athenian antagonism
toward commercial and manual pursuits; as the "business of sex,"
prostitution further evoked negativity from segments of Greek
opinion uncomfortable with any form of carnality. Yet ancient
sources also adumbrate another view, in which the sale of sex,
lawful and indeed pervasive at Athens, is presented alluringly. In
Athenian Prostitution, Edward E. Cohen explores the high
compensation earned by female sexual entrepreneurs who often
controlled prostitutional businesses that were perpetuated from
generation to generation on a matrilineal basis, and that
benefitted from legislative restrictions on pimping. The author
juxtaposes the widespread practice of "prostitution pursuant to
written contract" with legislation targeting male prostitutes
functioning as governmental leaders, and explores the seemingly
contradictory phenomena of extensive sexual exploitation of slave
prostitutes (male and female) coexisting with Athenian society's
pride in its legislative protection of slaves and minors against
sexual outrage.
While in the last twenty years perceptions of Europe have been
subjected to detailed historical scrutiny, American images of the
Old World have been almost wantonly neglected. As a response to
this scholarly desideratum, this pioneering study analyzes
neoconservative images of Europe since the 1970s on the basis of an
extensive collection of sources. With fresh insight into the
evolution of American images of Europe as well as into the history
of U.S. neoconservatism, the book appeals to readers familiar and
new to the subject matters alike. The study explores how, beginning
in the early 1970s, ideas of the United States as an anti-Europe
have permeated neoconservative writing and shaped their self-images
and political agitation. The choice of periodization and
investigated personnel enables the author to refute popular claims
that widespread Euro-critical sentiment in the United Studies
during the early 21st century - considerably ignited by
neoconservatives - was a distinct post-Cold War phenomenon.
Instead, the analysis reveals that the fiery rhetoric in the
context of the Iraq War debates was merely the climax of a
decade-old development.
This edited volume brings together ten compelling ethnographic case
studies from a range of global settings to explore how people build
metalinguistic communities defined not by use of a language, but
primarily by language ideologies and symbolic practices about the
language. The authors examine themes of agency, belonging,
negotiating hegemony, and combating cultural erasure and genocide
in cultivating meaningful metalinguistic communities. Case studies
include Spanish and Hebrew in the USA, Kurdish in Japan, Pataxo
Hahahae in Brazil, and Gallo in France. The afterword, by Wesley L.
Leonard, provides theoretical and on-the-ground context as well as
a forward-looking focus on metalinguistic futurities. This book
will be of interest to interdisciplinary students and scholars in
applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology and migration studies.
Greening the Victorian Urban WorldWhether we consider the great
London Planes which are now the largest trees in many British urban
streets, the exotic ornamentals from across the globe flourishing
in numerous private gardens, the stately trees of public parks and
squares or the dense colourful foliage of suburbia, the impact of
trees and arboriculture upon modern towns and their ecosystems is
clear. From the formal walks and squares of the Georgian town to
Victorian tree-lined boulevards and commemorative oaks, trees are
the organic statuary of modern urban society, providing continuity
yet constantly changing through the day and over the seasons.
Interfacing between humans and nature, connecting the continents
and reaching back and forward through time to past and future
generations, they have come to define urbanity while simultaneously
evoking nature and the countryside. This book is the first major
study of British urban arboriculture between 1800 and 1914 and
draws upon fresh approaches in geographical, urban and
environmental history.It makes a major contribution to our
understanding of where, how and why trees grew in British towns in
the period, the social and cultural impact of these and the
attitudes taken towards them
The shift in temporal modalities of Romantic Theatre was the
consequence of internal as well as external developments:
internally, the playwright was liberated from the old imperative of
"Unity of Time" and the expectation that the events of the play
must not exceed the hours of a single day; externally, the new
social and cultural conformance to the time-keeping schedules of
labour and business that had become more urgent with the industrial
revolution. In reviewing the theatre of the Romantic era, this
monograph draws attention to the ways in which theatre reflected
the pervasive impact of increased temporal urgency in social and
cultural behaviour. The contribution this book makes to the study
of drama in the early nineteenth century is a renewed emphasis on
time as a prominent element in Romantic dramaturgy, and a
reappraisal of the extensive experimentation on how time
functioned.
The disastrous Buffalo Creek Treaty of 1838 called for the Senecas'
removal to Kansas (then part of the Indian Territory). From this
low point, the Seneca Nation of Indians, which today occupies three
reservations in western New York, sought to rebound. Beginning with
events leading to the Seneca Revolution in 1848, which transformed
the nation's government from a council of chiefs to an elected
system, Laurence M. Hauptman traces Seneca history through the New
Deal. Based on the author's nearly fifty years of archival
research, interviews, and applied work, Coming Full Circle shows
that Seneca leaders in these years learned valuable lessons and
adapted to change, thereby preparing the nation to meet the
challenges it would face in the post-World War II era, including
major land loss and threats of termination. Instead of emphasizing
American Indian decline, Hauptman stresses that the Senecas were
actors in their own history and demonstrated cultural and political
resilience. Both Native belief, in the form of the Good Message of
Handsome Lake, and Christianity were major forces in Seneca life;
women continued to play important social and economic roles despite
the demise of clan matrons' right to nominate the chiefs; and
Senecas became involved in national and international competition
in long-distance running and in lacrosse. The Seneca Nation also
achieved noteworthy political successes in this period. The Senecas
resisted allotment, and thus saved their reservations from breakup
and sale. They recruited powerful allies, including attorneys,
congressmen, journalists, and religious leaders. They saved their
Oil Spring Reservation, winning a U.S. Supreme Court case against
New York State on the issue of taxation and won remuneration in
their Kansas Claims case. These efforts laid the groundwork for the
Senecas' postwar endeavor to seek compensation before the Indian
Claims Commission and pursuit of a series of land claims and tax
lawsuits against New York State.
This volume aims to provide an interdisciplinary examination of
various facets of being alone in Greco-Roman antiquity. Its focus
is on solitude, social isolation and misanthropy, and the differing
perceptions and experiences of and varying meanings and
connotations attributed to them in the ancient world. Individual
chapters examine a range of ancient contexts in which problems of
solitude, loneliness, isolation and seclusion arose and were
discussed, and in doing so shed light on some of humankind's
fundamental needs, fears and values.
This one-volume reference work examines a broad range of topics
related to the establishment, maintenance, and eventual dismantling
of the discriminatory system known as Jim Crow. Many Americans
imagine that African Americans' struggle to achieve equal rights
has advanced in a linear fashion from the end of slavery until the
present. In reality, for more than six decades, African Americans
had their civil rights and basic human rights systematically denied
in much of the nation. Jim Crow: A Historical Encyclopedia of the
American Mosaic sheds new light on how the systematic denigration
of African Americans after slavery-known collectively as "Jim
Crow"-was established, maintained, and eventually dismantled.
Written in a manner appropriate for high school and junior high
students as well as undergraduate readers, this book examines the
period of Jim Crow after slavery that is often overlooked in
American history curricula. An introductory essay frames the work
and explains the significance and scope of this regrettable period
in American history. Written by experts in their fields, the
accessible entries will enable readers to understand the long hard
road before the inception of the Civil Rights Movement in the 20th
century while also gaining a better understanding of the
experiences of minorities in the United States-African Americans,
in particular. Provides a one-stop source of information for
students researching the period of American history dominated by
the discriminatory system of Jim Crow laws Puts phenomena such as
"Sundown towns" within a larger framework of official
discrimination Documents the methods used to create, maintain, and
dismantle Jim Crow
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