A history of Black urban placemaking and politics in Philadelphia from the Great Migration to the era of Black Power In this book, author J.T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent modes of insurgent assembly-dark agoras-in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods. In acts that ranged from the mundane acts of refashioning intimate spaces to expressly confrontational and liberatory efforts to transform the city's social and ecological arrangement, these communities challenged the imposition of Progressive and post-Progressive visions for urban order seeking to enclose or displace them. Under the rubric of dark agoras Roane brings together two formulations of collectivity and belonging associated with working-class Black life. While on their surface diametrically opposed, the city's underground-its illicit markets, taverns, pool halls, unlicensed bars, as well as spaces housing illicit sex and informal sites like corners associated with the economically and socially disreputable--constituted a spatial and experiential continuum with the city's set apart-its house meetings, storefronts, temples, and masjid, as well as the extensive spiritually appropriated architectures of the interwar mass movements that included rural land experiments as well as urban housing, hotels, and recreational facilities. Together these sites incubated Black queer urbanism, or dissident visions for urban life challenging dominant urban reform efforts and their modes of producing race, gender, and ultimately the city itself. Roane shows how Black communities built a significant if underappreciated terrain of geographic struggle shaping Philadelphia between the Great Migration and Black Power. This fascinating book will help readers appreciate the importance of Black spatial imaginaries and worldmaking in shaping matters of urban place and politics.

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.

Socialist Women and the Great War: Protest, Revolution and Commemoration, an open access book, is the first transnational study of left-wing women and socialist revolution during the First World War and its aftermath. Through a discussion of the key themes related to women and revolution, such as anti-militarism and violence, democracy and citizenship, and experience and life-writing, this book sheds new and necessary light on the everyday lives of socialist women in the early 20th century. The participants of the 1918-1919 revolutions in Europe, and the accompanying outbreaks of social unrest elsewhere in the world, have typically been portrayed as war-weary soldiers and suited committee delegates-in other words, as men. Exceptions like Rosa Luxemburg exist, but ordinary women are often cast as passive recipients of the vote. This is not true; rather, women were pivotal actors in the making, imagining, and remembering of the social and political upheavals of this time. From wartime strikes, to revolutionary violence, to issues of suffrage, this book reveals how women constructed their own revolutionary selves in order to bring about lasting social change and provides a fresh comparative approach to women's socialist activism. As such, this is a vitally important resource for all postgraduates and advanced undergraduates interested in gender studies, international relations, and the history and legacy of World War I. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

This book explores the evolution of the role of the heirs to the throne of Italy between 1860 and 1900. It focuses on the future kings Umberto I (1844-1900) and Vittorio Emanuele III (1869-1947), and their respective spouses, Margherita of Savoia (1851-1926) and Elena of Montenegro (1873-1952). It sheds light on the soft power the Italian royals were attempting to generate, by identifying and examining four specific areas of monarchical activity: firstly, the heirs' public role and the manner in which they attempted to craft an Italian identity through a process of self-presentation; secondly, the national, royal, linguistic and military education of the heirs; thirdly, the promotion of a family-centred dynasty deploying both male and female elements in the public realm; and finally the readiness to embrace different modes of mobility in the construction of italianita. By analysing the growing importance of the royal heirs and their performance on the public stage in post-Risorgimento Italy, this study investigates the attempted construction of a cohesive national identity through the crown and, more specifically, the heirs to the throne.

In the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, historians have turned with renewed urgency to understanding the economic dimension of historical change. In this collection, nine scholars present original research into the historical development of money and credit during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and explore the social and cultural significance of financial phenomena from a global perspective. Together with an introduction by the editors, chapters emphasize themes of creditworthiness and access to credit, the role of the state in the loan market, modernization, colonialism, and global connections between markets. The first section of the volume, "Creditworthiness and Credit Risks," examines microfinancial markets in South India and Sri Lanka, Brazil, and the United States, in which access to credit depended largely on reputation, while larger investors showed a strong interest in policing economic behavior and encouraging thrift among market participants. The second section, "The Loan Market and the State," concerns attempts by national governments to regulate the lending activities of merchants and banks for social ends, from the liberal regime of nineteenth-century Switzerland to the far more statist policies of post-revolutionary Mexico, and U.S. legislation that strove to eliminate discrimination in lending. The third section, "Money, Commercial Exchange, and Global Connections," focuses on colonial and semicolonial societies in the Philippines, China, and Zimbabwe, where currency reform and the development of organized financial markets engendered conflict over competing models of economic development, often pitting the colony against the metropole. This volume offers a cultural history by considering money and credit as social relations, and explores how such relations were constructed and articulated by contemporaries. Chapters employ a variety of methodologies, including analyses of popular literature and the viewpoints of experts and professionals, investigations of policy measures and emerging social practices, and interpretations of quantitative data.

The book, based on memories of a native son and the research of a scholar, is an amalgam of descriptions and discussions, peppered with conversations, personal observations and an acute observer's reflections, focused on the fabric of life in the city of Lodz and its vicinity. The author describes the "court" of the Hasidic Rabbis of Alexander, with which his family was affiliated, the rival camps of Hasidim and Zionists, industrialists and laborers, struggles with the Polish authorities, and more. Detailed chapters are dedicated to a description of studies at a modern Jewish-Zionist high school (Gymnasium) - its exhilarating goals, directors and teachers, to the Lodz poet Yitzhak Katzenelson before and during the Holocaust, and to life in a small Polish shtetl. The concluding chapter "Return to Poland" examines the cities and towns described earlier in the book, as well as Breslau-Wroclaw, where the author had completed his rabbinic and university studies in 1933, as they appeared to him during his visit in 1982, nearly fifty years after his departure from Europe for Israel. The author's aim was to produce a portrait, sympathetic, intimate, but also knowledgeable and critical, of a generation that did not have the time to take stock of itself before its obliteration. He has thus rendered palpable the experiences and quandaries of many of his contemporaries.

The history of travel has long been constructed and described almost exclusively as a history of "European", male mobility, without, however, explicitly making the gender and whiteness of the travellers a topic. The anthology takes this as an occasion to focus on journeys to Europe that gave "non-Europeans" the opportunity to glance at "Europe" and to draw a picture of it by themselves. So far, little attention has been paid to the questions with which attributes these travellers endowed "Europe" and its people, which similarities and differences they observed and which idea(s) of "Europe" they produced. The focus is once again on "Europe", but not as the starting point for conquests or journeys. From a postcolonial and gender historical view, the anthology's contributions rather juxtapose (self-)representations of "Europe" with perspectives that move in a field of tension between agreement, contradiction and oscillation.

Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan offers a fresh perspective on gender politics by focusing on the Japanese housewife of the 1950s as a controversial representation of democracy, leisure, and domesticity. Examining the shifting personae of the housewife, especially in the appealing texts of women's magazines, reveals the diverse possibilities of postwar democracy as they were embedded in media directed toward Japanese women. Each chapter explores the contours of a single controversy, including debate over the royal wedding in 1959, the victory of Japan's first Miss Universe, and the unruly desires of postwar women. Jan Bardsley also takes a comparative look at the ways in which the Japanese housewife is measured against equally stereotyped notions of the modern housewife in the United States, asking how both function as narratives of Japan-U.S. relations and gender/class containment during the early Cold War.