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Books > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history
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.
From the late eighteenth century to the present day, public
exhibitions featuring displays of human anatomy have proven popular
with a wide range of audiences, successfully marketed as
educational facilities for medical professionals as well as
improving entertainments for the general public. Partly a product
of the public sanitation and health reform movements that began in
the eighteenth century, partly a form of popular spectacle, early
public anatomical exhibitions drew on two apparently distinct
cultural developments: firstly, the professionalisation of medicine
from the mid 1700s and the increasingly central role of practical
anatomy within it; secondly, the rise of a culture of public
spectacles such as world fairs, public museums, circuses and side
shows, and the use of new visual technologies these spaces
pioneered. Such spectacles often drew on medical discourses as a
way of lending legitimacy to their displays of human bodies, while
their popularity also helped make the then-contentious practice of
anatomy publicly acceptable.
This book examines the cultural work performed by such exhibitions
and their role in (re)producing new ways of seeing and knowing the
body over the modern era. While public anatomical exhibitions might
seem to occupy a marginal position in the history of popular
culture and that of medicine, their distinctive intermixing of the
medical and the spectacular has made them an influential and
intensely productive cultural space, an important site of emergence
for new ideas about bodily health and care. This book traces the
influential role of such exhibitions in popularising a distinctly
modern idea of the body as something requiring constant work and
careful self-cultivation-an idea which continues to play a central
role in the contemporary fascination with practices and
possibilities of self-improvement. Through a series of
representative case studies-including eighteenth-century
exhibitions of anatomical Venuses, nineteenth-century anatomical
museums "for men only" that served as quack clinics for sexual
disorders, traditional and contemporary freak shows, and the recent
public display of real human remains in Body Worlds and other such
exhibitions-Anatomy as Spectacle traces how these exhibitions
taught their spectators to see their bodies as something requiring
constant self-monitoring and management, constructing an embodied
modern subject who is always responsible, productive, temperate,
and focused on self-improvement.
Confronting Capital and Empire inquires into the relationship
between philosophy, politics and capitalism by rethinking Kyoto
School philosophy in relation to history. The Kyoto School was an
influential group of Japanese philosophers loosely related to Kyoto
Imperial University's philosophy department, including such diverse
thinkers as Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, Nakai Masakazu and
Tosaka Jun. Confronting Capital and Empire presents a new
perspective on the Kyoto School by bringing the school into
dialogue with Marx and the underlying questions of Marxist theory.
The volume brings together essays that analyse Kyoto School
thinkers through a Marxian and/or critical theoretical perspective,
asking: in what ways did Kyoto School thinkers engage with their
historical moment? What were the political possibilities immanent
in their thought? And how does Kyoto School philosophy speak to the
pressing historical and political questions of our own moment?
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 The first social and
cultural history of vagrancy between 1650 and 1750, this book
combines sources from across England and the Atlantic world to
describe the shifting and desperate experiences of the very poorest
and most marginalized of people in early modernity; the outcasts,
the wandering destitute, the disabled veteran, the aged labourer,
the solitary pregnant woman on the road and those referred to as
vagabonds and beggars are all explored in this comprehensive
account of the subject. Using a rich array of archival and literary
sources, Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650-1750 offers
a history not only of the experiences of vagrants themselves, but
also of how the settled 'better sort' perceived vagrancy, how it
was culturally represented in both popular and elite literature as
a shadowy underworld of dissembling rogues, gypsies, and pedlars,
and how these representations powerfully affected the lives of
vagrants themselves. Hitchcock's is an important study for all
scholars and students interested in the social and cultural history
of early modern England.
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
Celebrated novelist, biographer and critic Peter Ackroyd paints a
vivid picture of one of the world's greatest cities in this
brilliant and original work, exploring how the city's many hues
have come to shape its history and identity. Think of the colours
of London and what do you imagine? The reds of open-top buses and
terracotta bricks? The grey smog of Victorian industry, Portland
stone and pigeons in Trafalgar square? Or the gradations of
yellows, violets and blues that shimmer on the Thames at sunset -
reflecting the incandescent light of a city that never truly goes
dark? We associate green with royal parks and the District Line;
gold with royal carriages, the Golden Lane Estate, and the tops of
monuments and cathedrals. Colours of London shows us that colour is
everywhere in the city, and each one holds myriad links to its
past. The colours of London have inspired artists (Whistler, Van
Gogh, Turner, Monet), designers (Harry Beck) and social reformers
(Charles Booth). And from the city's first origins, Ackroyd shows
how colour is always to be found at the heart of London's history,
from the blazing reds of the Great Fire of London to the blackouts
of the Blitz to the bold colours of royal celebrations and vibrant
street life. This beautifully written book examines the city's
fascinating relationship with colour, alongside specially
commissioned colourized photographs from Dynamichrome, which bring
a lost London back to life. London has been the main character in
Ackroyd's work ever since his first novel, and he has won countless
prizes in both fiction and non-fiction for his truly remarkable
body of work. Here, he channels a lifetime of knowledge of the
great city, writing with clarity and passion about the hues and
shades which have shaped London's journey through history into the
present day. A truly invaluable book for lovers of art, history,
photography or urban geography, this beautifully illustrated title
tells a rich and fascinating story of the history of this great and
ever-changing city.
Friendships between women and gay men captivated the American media
in the opening decade of the 21st century. John Portmann places
this curious phenomenon in its historical context, examining the
changing social attitudes towards gay men in the postwar period and
how their relationships with women have been portrayed in the
media. As women and gay men both struggled toward social equality
in the late 20th century, some women understood that defending gay
men - who were often accused of effeminacy - was in their best
interest. Joining forces carried both political and personal
implications. Straight women used their influence with men to
prevent bullying and combat homophobia. Beyond the bureaucratic
fray, women found themselves in transformed roles with respect to
gay men - as their mothers, sisters, daughters, caregivers,
spouses, voters, employers and best friends. In the midst of social
hostility to gay men during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s,
a significant number of gay women volunteered to comfort the
afflicted and fight reigning sexual values. Famous women such as
Elizabeth Taylor and Barbra Streisand threw their support behind a
detested minority, while countless ordinary women did the same
across America. Portmann celebrates not only women who made the
headlines but also those who did not. Looking at the links between
the women's liberation and gay rights movements, and filled with
concrete examples of personal and political relationships between
straight women and gay men, Women and Gay Men in the Postwar Period
is an engaging and accessible study which will be of interest to
students and scholars of 20th- and 21st century social and gender
history.
"Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan" examines how the
performing arts, and the performing body specifically, have shaped
and been shaped by the political and historical conditions
experienced in Japan during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods.
This study of original and secondary materials from the fields of
theatre, dance, performance art, film and poetry probes the
interrelationship that exists between the body and the
nation-state. Important artistic works, such as Ankoku Butoh (dance
of darkness) and its subsequent re-interpretation by a leading
political performance company Gekidan Kaitaisha (theatre of
deconstruction), are analysed using ethnographic, historical and
theoretical modes. This approach reveals the nuanced and prolonged
effects of military, cultural and political occupation in Japan
over a duration of dramatic change."Cultural Responses to
Occupation in Japan" explores issues of discrimination,
marginality, trauma, memory and the mediation of history in a
ground-breaking work that will be of great significance to anyone
interested in the symbiosis of culture and conflict.""
The Accademia Pontaniana: A Model of a Humanist Network is an
exploration of the vast intellectual networks which developed
around the fifteenth century humanist Pontano. It includes the
densely knit network which emerged in Naples, the Accademia
Pontaniana, as well as the loosely knit networks which developed
between the members of this academy and other humanists and
academies outside of Naples. Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi points to
the links between the Accademia Pontaniana and other sodalities in
Southern Italy, and to the lineage between fifteenth century
informal academies and sixteenth century institutional Academies.
In this study recent sociological theory is applied to understand
Renaissance academies and the vertical and horizontal links between
them.
Hospitality, in particular hospitality to strangers, was promoted
in the eighteenth century as a universal human virtue, but writing
of the period reveals many telling examples of its abuse. Through
analysis of encounters across cultural and sexual divides, Judith
Still revisits the current debate about the social, moral and
political values of the Enlightenment. Focussing on (in)hospitality
in relation to two kinds of exotic Other, Judith Still examines
representations of indigenous peoples of the New World, both as
hosts and as cannibals, and of the Moslem 'Oriental' in Persia and
Turkey, associated with both the caravanserai (where travellers
rest) and the harem. She also explores very different examples of
Europeans as hosts and the practice of 'adoption', particularly
that of young girls. The position of women in hospitality, hitherto
neglected in favour of questions of cultural difference, is central
to these analyses, and Still considers the work of women writers
alongside more canonical male-authored texts. In this
thought-provoking study, Judith Still uncovers how the
Enlightenment rhetoric of openness and hospitality is compromised
by self-interest; the questions it raises about attitudes to
difference and freedom are equally relevant today.
Occupy Wall Street did not come from nowhere. It was part of a long
history of riot, revolt, uprising, and sometimes even revolution
that has shaped New York City. From the earliest European
colonization to the present, New Yorkers have been revolting. Hard
hitting, revealing, and insightful, Revolting New York tells the
story of New York's evolution through revolution, a story of
near-continuous popular (and sometimes not-so-popular) uprising.
Richly illustrated with more than ninety historical and
contemporary images, historical maps, and maps drawn especially for
the book, Revolting New York provides the first comprehensive
account of the historical geography of revolt in New York, from the
earliest uprisings of the Munsee against the Dutch occupation of
Manhattan in the seventeenth century to the Black Lives Matter
movement and the unrest of the Trump era. Through this rich
narrative, editors Neil Smith and Don Mitchell reveal a continuous,
if varied and punctuated, history of rebellion in New York that is
as vital as the more standard histories of formal politics,
planning, economic growth, and restructuring that largely define
our consciousness of New York's story.
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.
Winner of the 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award The
Later Han dynasty, also known as Eastern Han, ruled China for the
first two centuries of the Christian era. Comparable in extent and
power to the early Roman empire, it dominated east Asia from
present-day Vietnam to the Mongolian steppe. Rafe de Crespigny
presents here the first full account of this period in Chinese
history to be found in a Western language. Commencing with a
detailed account of the imperial capital, the history describes the
nature of government, the expansion of the Chinese people to the
south, the conflicts of scholars and officials with eunuchs at
court, and the final collapse which followed the rebellion of the
Yellow Turbans and the rise of regional warlords.
This collection on Byzantine culture in translation, edited by
Amelia Brown and Bronwen Neil, examines the practices and theories
of translation inside the Byzantine empire and beyond its horizons
to the east, north and west. The time span is from Late Antiquity
to the present day. Translations studied include hagiography,
history, philosophy, poetry, architecture and science, between
Greek, Latin, Arabic and other languages. These chapters build upon
presentations given at the 18th Biennial Conference of the
Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, convened by the
editors at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia on
28-30 November 2014. Contributors include: Eva
Anagnostou-Laoutides, Amelia Brown, Penelope Buckley, John Burke,
Michael Champion, John Duffy, Yvette Hunt, Maria Mavroudi, Ann
Moffatt, Bronwen Neil, Roger Scott, Michael Edward Stewart, Rene
Van Meeuwen, Alfred Vincent, and Nigel Westbrook.
This innovative edited collection brings together leading scholars
from the USA, the UK and mainland Europe to examine how European
identity and institutions have been fashioned though interactions
with the southern periphery since 1945. It highlights the role
played by North African actors in shaping European conceptions of
governance, culture and development, considering the construction
of Europe as an ideological and politico-economic entity in the
process. Split up into three sections that investigate the
influence of colonialism on the shaping of post-WWII Europe, the
nature of co-operation, dependence and interdependence in the
region, and the impact of the Arab Spring, North Africa and the
Making of Europe investigates the Mediterranean space using a
transnational, interdisciplinary approach. This, in turn, allows
for historical analysis to be fruitfully put into conversation with
contemporary politics. The book also discusses such timely issues
such as the development of European institutions, the evolution of
legal frameworks in the name of antiterrorism, the rise of
Islamophobia, immigration, and political co-operation. Students and
scholars focusing on the development of postwar Europe or the EU's
current relationship with North Africa will benefit immensely from
this invaluable new study.
This book challenges long-accepted historical orthodoxy about
relations between the Spanish and the Indians in the borderlands
separating what are now Mexico and the United States. While most
scholars describe the decades after 1790 as a period of relative
peace between the occupying Spaniards and the Apaches, Mark
Santiago sees in the Mescalero Apache attacks on the Spanish
beginning in 1795 a sustained, widespread, and bloody conflict. He
argues that Commandant General Pedro de Nava's coordinated
campaigns against the Mescaleros were the culmination of the
Spanish military's efforts to contain Apache aggression,
constituting one of its largest and most sustained operations in
northern New Spain. A Bad Peace and a Good War examines the
antecedents, tactics, and consequences of the fighting. This
conflict occurred immediately after the Spanish military had
succeeded in making an uneasy peace with portions of all Apache
groups. The Mescaleros were the first to break the peace,
annihilating two Spanish patrols in August 1795. Galvanized by the
loss, Commandant General Nava struggled to determine the extent to
which Mescaleros residing in ""peace establishments"" outside
Spanish settlements near El Paso, San Elizario, and Presidio del
Norte were involved. Santiago looks at the impact of conflicting
Spanish military strategies and increasing demands for fiscal
efficiency as a result of Spain's imperial entanglements. He
examines Nava's yearly invasions of Mescalero territory, his
divide-and-rule policy using other Apaches to attack the
Mescaleros, and his deportation of prisoners from the frontier,
preventing the Mescaleros from redeeming their kin. Santiago
concludes that the consequences of this war were overwhelmingly
negative for Mescaleros and ambiguous for Spaniards. The war's
legacy of bitterness lasted far beyond the end of Spanish rule, and
the continued independence of so many Mescaleros and other Apaches
in their homeland proved the limits of Spanish military authority.
In the words of Viceroy Bernardo de Galvez, the Spaniards had
technically won a ""good war"" against the Mescaleros and went on
to manage a ""bad peace.
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