Title search results
Showing 1 - 20 of 2183 items
Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani
By Deborah Schultz, Edward Timms. 2009
This book investigates creative responses to the Nazi period in the work of three artists, Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and…
Arnold Daghani, focusing on their use of pictorial narrative. It analyses their contrasting aesthetic strategies and their innovative forms of artistic production. In contrast with the autonomous, modernist art object, their works were explicitly linked with the historical conditions under which they were produced – the pressures of persecution and exile. Conditions in the slave labour camps and ghettos in the Ukraine, which shaped the paintings and drawings of Daghani, are contrasted with the experiences of exile in Belgium and France, which inspired Nussbaum and Salomon. In defiance of conventional artistic practice, they produced word-image combinations that can be read as narrative sequences, incorporating specific references to political events. While there has been a wealth of literary, philosophical and historical studies relating to the Holocaust, aesthetic debate has developed less extensively. This is the first comparative study of three artists who are only belatedly achieving recognition and the recent reception of their work is evaluated. By identifying the aesthetic principles and narrative strategies underlying their work, the book reassesses their achievement in creating new forms of modernism with an unmistakable political momentum.This book was published as a special issue of Word & Image.Computer: A History of the Information Machine
By Martin Campbell-Kelly, William F. Aspray, Jeffrey R. Yost, Honghong Tinn, Gerardo Con Díaz. 2023
Computer: A History of the Information Machine traces the history of the computer and its unlimited, information-processing potential.Comprehensive and accessibly…
written, this fully updated fourth edition adds new chapters on the globalization of information technology, the rise of social media, fake news, and the gig economy, and the regulatory frameworks being put in place to tame the ubiquitous computer. Computer is an insightful look at the pace of technological advancement and the seamless way computers are integrated into the modern world. The authors examine the history of the computer, including the first steps taken by Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century, and how wartime needs and the development of electronics led to the giant ENIAC, the first electronic computer. For a generation IBM dominated the computer industry. In the 1980s, the desktop PC liberated people from room-sized mainframe computers. Next, laptops and smartphones made computers available to half of the world’s population, leading to the rise of Google and Facebook, and powerful apps that changed the way we work, consume, learn, and socialize.The volume is an essential resource for scholars and those studying computer history, technology history, and information and society, as well as a range of courses in the fields of computer science, communications, sociology, and management.Rethinking the Fall of the Planter Class
By Christer Petley. 2017
From the late eighteenth century, the planter class of the British Caribbean were faced with challenges stemming from revolutions, war,…
the rise of abolitionism and social change. By the nineteenth century, this once powerful group within the British Empire found itself struggling to influence an increasingly hostile government in London. By 1807, parliament had voted to abolish the slave trade: an early episode in a wider drama of decline for New World plantation economies. This book brings together chapters by a group of leading scholars to rethink the question of the ‘fall of the planter class’, offering a variety of new approaches to the topic, encompassing economic, political, cultural, and social history and providing a significant new contribution to our rapidly evolving understanding of the end of slavery in the British Atlantic empire. This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.Jews and Gentiles in Central and Eastern Europe during the Holocaust: History and memory
By Hana Kubátová and Jan Láníček. 2018
Providing diverse insights into Jewish–Gentile relations in East Central Europe from the outbreak of the Second World War until the…
reestablishment of civic societies after the fall of Communism in the late 1980s, this volume brings together scholars from various disciplines – including history, sociology, political science, cultural studies, film studies and anthropology – to investigate the complexity of these relations, and their transformation, from perspectives beyond the traditional approach that deals purely with politics. This collection thus looks for interactions between the public and private, and what is more, it does so from a still rather rare comparative perspective, both chronological and geographic. It is this interdisciplinary and comparative perspective that enables us to scrutinize the interaction between the individual majority societies and the Jewish minorities in a longer time frame, and hence we are able to revisit complex and manifold encounters between Jews and Gentiles, including but not limited to propaganda, robbery, violence but also help and rescue. In doing so, this collection challenges the representation of these encounters in post-war literature, films, and the historical consciousness. This book was originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies.Radio Wars: Broadcasting During the Cold War
By Linda Risso. 2016
During the Cold War, radio broadcasting played an important role in the ideological confrontation between East and West. As archival…
documents gathered in this volume reveal, radio broadcasting was among the most pressing concerns of contemporary information agencies. These broadcasts could penetrate the Iron Curtain and directly address the ‘enemy’. Radio was equally important in keeping sustained levels of support among the home public and the public of friendly nations. In the early Cold War in particular, listeners in the West had to be persuaded of the need for higher defence spending levels and a policy of containment. Later, even if other media – and in particular television – had become more important, radio continued to be used widely.The chapters gathered here investigate both the institutional history of the radio broadcasting corporations in the East and in the West, and their relationship with other propaganda agencies of the time. They examine the ‘off-air’ politics of radio broadcasting, from the choice of theme to the selection of speakers, singers and music pieces. The key issue tackled by contributors is the problem of measuring the impact of, and qualifying the success of, information policies and propaganda programmes produced during the Cultural Cold War. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cold War History.Jewish Migration and the Archive
By James Jordan, Lisa Leff and Joachim Schlör. 2016
Migration is, and has always been, a disruptive experience. Freedom from oppression and hope for a better life are counter-balanced…
by feelings of loss – loss of family members, of a home, of personal belongings. Memories of the migration process itself often fade quickly away in view of the new challenges that await immigrants in their new homelands. This volume asks, and shows, how migration memories have been kept, stored, forgotten, and indeed retrieved in many different archives, in official institutions, in heritage centres, as well as in personal and family collections. Based on a variety of examples and conceptual approaches – from artistic approaches to the family archive via ‘smell and memory as archives’, to a cultural history of the suitcase – this volume offers a new and original way to write Jewish history and the history of Jewish migration in the context of personal and public memory. The documents reflect the transitory character of the migration experience, and they tell stories of longing and belonging. This book was originally published as a special issue of Jewish Culture and History.Everyday Harm: Domestic Violence, Court Rites, and Cultures of Reconciliation
By Mindie Lazarus-Black. 2007
Exposing the powerful contradictions between empowering rights and legal rites By investigating the harms routinely experienced by the victims and…
survivors of domestic violence, both inside and outside of law, Everyday Harm studies the limits of what domestic violence law can--and cannot--accomplish. Combining detailed ethnographic research and theoretical analysis, Mindie Lazarus-Black illustrates the ways persistent cultural norms and ingrained bureaucratic procedures work to unravel laws designed to protect the safety of society’s most vulnerable people. Lazarus-Black’s fieldwork in Trinidad traces a story with global implications about why and when people gain the right to ask the court for protection from violence, and what happens when they pursue those rights in court. Why is itthat, in spite of laws designed to empower subordinated people, so little results from that legislation? What happens in and around courts that makes it so difficult for people to obtain their legally available rights and protections? In the case of domestic violence law, what can such legislation mean for women’s empowerment, gender equity, and protection? How do cultural norms and practices intercept the law?Small Wars and Insurgencies in Theory and Practice, 1500-1850
By Beatrice Heuser. 2016
In early modern times, warfare in Europe took on many diverse and overlapping forms. Our modern notions of ‘regular’ and…
‘irregular’ warfare, of ‘major war’ and ‘small war’, have their roots in much greater diversity than such binary notions allow for. While insurgencies go back to time immemorial, they have become conceptually fused with ‘small wars’. This is a term first used to denote special operations, often carried out by military companies formed from special ethnic groups and then recruited into larger armies. In its Spanish form, guerrilla, the term ‘small war’ came to stand for an ideologically-motivated insurgency against the state authorities or occupying forces of another power. There is much overlap between the phenomena of irregular warfare in the sense of special operations alongside regular operations, and irregular warfare of insurgents against the regular forces of a state. This book demonstrates how long the two phenomena were in flux and fed on each other, from the raiding operations of the 16th century to the ‘small wars’ or special operations conducted by special units in the 19th century, which existed alongside and could merge with a popular insurgency.This book is based on a special issue of the journal Small Wars & Insurgencies.Material Cultures of Slavery and Abolition in the British Caribbean
By Christer Petley and Stephan Lenik. 2017
Material things mattered immensely to those who engaged in daily struggles over the character and future of slavery and to…
those who subsequently contested the meanings of freedom in the post-emancipation Caribbean. Throughout the history of slavery, objects and places were significant to different groups of people, from the opulent master class to enslaved field hands as well as to other groups, including maroons, free people of colour and missionaries, all of who shared the lived environments of Caribbean plantation colonies. By exploring the rich material world inhabited by these people, this book offers new ways of seeing history from below, of linking localised experiences with global transformations and connecting deeply personal lived realities with larger epochal events that defined the history of slavery and its abolition in the British Caribbean.This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition.Allies at the End of Empire: Loyalists, Nationalists and the Cold War, 1945-76
By David M. Anderson and Daniel Branch. 2018
The wars of decolonization fought by European colonial powers after 1945 had their origins in the fraught history of imperial…
domination, but were framed and shaped by the emerging politics of the Cold War. In all the counter-insurgencies mounted against armed nationalist risings in this period, the European colonial powers employed locally recruited militias – styled as ‘loyalists’ – to fight their ‘dirty wars’. These loyalist histories have been neglected in the nationalist narratives that have dominated the post-decolonization landscape, and this book offers the first comparative assessment of the role played by these allies at the end of empire. Their experience illuminates the deeper ambiguities of the decolonization story: some loyalists were subjected to vengeful violence at liberation; others actually claimed the victory for themselves and seized control of the emergent state; while others still maintained a role as fighting units into the Cold War. The overlap between the history of decolonization and the emergence of the Cold War is a central theme in the studies presented here. The collection discusses the categorization of these ‘irregular auxiliary’ forces after 1945, and presents seven case studies from five European colonialisms, covering nine former colonies – Portugal (Angola), the Netherlands (Indonesia), France (Algeria), Belgium (Congo) and Britain (Cyprus, Kenya, Aden, South Yemen and Oman). This book was originally published as a special issue of the International History Review.Domestic Disturbances, Patriarchal Values: Violence, Family and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe, 1600-1900
By Marianna Muravyeva. 2016
This book offers an in-depth analysis of several national case studies on family violence between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries,…
using court records as their main source. It raises important questions for research on early modern Europe: the notion of absolute power; sovereignty and its applicability to familial power; the problem of violence and the possibility of its usage for conflict resolution both in public and private spaces; and the interconnection of gender and violence against women, reconsidered in the context of modern state formation as a public sphere and family building as a private sphere. Contributors bring together detailed studies of domestic violence and spousal murder in Romania, England, and Russia, abduction and forced marriage in Poland, infanticide and violence against parents in Finland, and rape and violence against women in Germany. These case studies serve as the basis for a comparative analysis of forms, models, and patterns of violence within the family in the context of debates on political power, absolutism, and violence. They highlight changes towards unlimited violence by family patriarchs in European countries, in the context of the changing relationship between the state and its citizens. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of the History of the Family.Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present
By Cynthia Stokes Brown. 2007
&“This exciting saga crosses space and time to illustrate how humans, born of stardust, were shaped—and how they in turn…
shaped the world we know today.&” —Publishers Weekly This book offers &“world history on a grand scale&”—pulling back for a wider view and putting the relatively brief time span of human history in context. After all, our five thousand years of recorded civilization account for only about one millionth of the lifetime of our planet (Kirkus Reviews). Big History interweaves different disciplines of knowledge, drawing on both the natural sciences and the human sciences, to offer an all-encompassing account of history on Earth. This new edition is more relevant than ever before, as we increasingly grapple with accelerating rates of change and, ultimately, the legacy we will bequeath to future generations. Here is a path-breaking portrait of our world, from the birth of the universe from a single point the size of an atom to life on a twenty-first-century planet inhabited by seven billion people.The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm: A Thousand Days in London, 1938–1940
By Will Swift. 2008
“An admirably balanced assessment of an enormously complicated man who, wrongly but not ignobly, stood athwart history.” — Kirkus Reviews,…
starred“Elegantly written, delicately nuanced, this compelling account brings Joe Kennedy and his family to life.” — Bob Self, author of Neville Chamberlain: A Biography“A thoroughly revisionist but remarkably persuasive history of Joseph P. Kennedy’s years in London” — David Nasaw , author of Pulitzer Prize–nominee Andrew Carnegie“By wisely presenting pre-war London as a crucible in the [Kennedy] family history, [Swift] exposes the origin of many of the political, social, personal triumphs and tragedies that have cast the family—the father in particular—as a modern-day Lear.” — Lynne McTaggart , author of Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times, The Field and The Intention Experiment“Swift’s chronicle gives an impressive insight into the mechanics of government on both sides of the Atlantic.” — Anne De Courcy, author of 1939: The Last Season of Peace Anne De Courcy, author of 1939: The Last Season of Peace Anne De Courcy, author of 1939: The Last Season of Peace Anne De Courcy, author of 1939: The Last Season of Peace“Dr. Swift’s psychological insight into the Kennedy family members and their dynamics makes a major contribution to the Kennedy literature.” — Jane Vieth, professor of history, Michigan State UniversityTaken for a Ride: Cars, Crisis, And A Company Once Called
By Bill Vlasic, Bradley A. Stertz. 2001
In May 1998, a stunning $36 billion merger was announced by Chrysler, the all-American automaker, and Daimler-Benz, the German manufacturer…
of Mercedes-Benz luxury sedans. This corporate marriage promised to rock the global auto industry, but when the dust settled, Daimler had bought Chrysler, and an American icon had lost its independence. Taken for a Ride follows the twists and turns on the road to DaimlerChrysler and is a cautionary tale of the risks and rewards of going global. “A book in the manner of Barbarians at the Gate-a spellbinding tale, juicy gossip and all, of how business is really done among the world’s top companies…full of fresh facts and insights on one of the most heavily covered business stories of the 1990s…it is as fun to read as it is informative.”-New York Times Book ReviewDrawing both on historical accounts of the emotions and on contemporary affect theory, this book explores the intersection of social…
constructions of sex and gender with the development of norms for emotive speech in literary texts from the classical to the early modern periods. More specifically, the book argues that the influential Stoic theory of the prepassions (as distinct from the passions proper) resonates richly with recent work on affect, emphasizing in similar ways the role of embodied feelings that may exceed available linguistic norms as well as challenging gendered emotion scripts. From the tragic Stoicism of Virgil’s Aeneid to Chaucer’s Stoic-Petrarchan Griselda and the Stoic-inflected attitudes reflected in the work of seventeenth century poet Mary Carey, the Stoic view of the emotions as test-cases for a moralized conception of masculine coherence conflicts with a fluid affective model of feeling that challenges the ideal of emotional self-containment.The Lusitania Story: The Atrocity That Shocked The World
By Mitch Peeke. 2002
The Lusitania Story is the complete story of this most famous ocean liner, told for the first time in a…
single volume. The Lusitania is today most remembered for controversy surrounding her loss by a German submarine attack in 1915, during the First World War. But this book also tells of her life before that cataclysmic event. It tells of the ground-breaking advances in maritime engineering that she represented, as well as a hitherto unheard of degree of opulence. This book also takes a close look at the disaster which befell her and, with the help of leading experts, the authors examine the circumstances of her loss and try to determine why this magnificent vessel was lost in a mere eighteen minutes.South Yorkshire Pits
By Warwick Taylor. 2001
The last 150 years has been the most tumultuous in the industrial history of South Yorkshire, and at the heart…
of this has always been mining and its allied industries. South Yorkshire Pits takes us from the beginnings of the industry, where land ownership brought wealth from what lay beneath it. Here, we have a concise record of the sinking, operating and eventual closure of the pits which, in January 1947, were taken over by the National Coal Board. There is also a clear record of the social and employment conditions under which the mines were operated, including child and female labour and the legislation abolishing them. This is an indispensable reference work for all interested in South Yorkshire's mining industry.Khomeini's Ghost: The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Militant Islam
By Con Coughlin. 2010
From the critically acclaimed author of Crazy '08 comes the thrilling true story of the most colorful and notorious law…
firm in American history. Scoundrels in Law offers an inside look at crime and punishment in the nineteenth century, and a whirlwind tour of the Gilded Age.Gangsters and con men. Spurned mistresses and wandering husbands. Strippers and Broadway royalty. Cat killers and spiritualists. These were the friends and clients of Howe & Hummel, the most famous (and famously rotten) law firm in nineteenth-century America.The partners gloried in their reputation and made a rich living from it. William Howe left London a step ahead of the law to find his destiny defending the perpetrators of murder and mayhem in post-Civil War New York, in an age of really good murders. A dramatic, diamond-encrusted presence, Howe was one of the great courtroom orators of his era, winning improbable acquittals time after time.Abraham Hummel enjoyed a quieter but perhaps more fearsome notoriety, shaking down high society so well and so often that receiving an envelope with the law firm's name on it became almost a rite of passage.The partners bestrode Gilded Age New York with wit and brio, and everyone from Theodore Roosevelt to Lola Montez had a part in their story. In Howe & Hummel's prime, it would not have been unusual to see a leading politician, a pickpocket, a Broadway star, a bank robber, and a socialite all crowded together into the waiting room of their offices, located conveniently across the street from the city jail. Howe and Hummel were not particularly good men. They were perfectly ready—even eager—to lie, cheat, and bribe on behalf of their clients. They did stop short of murder, though, a principle that played a critical role when the famous firm imploded in a truly spectacular web of deceit gone wrong.Through the windows of the dingy premises of Howe & Hummel, readers can glimpse the Gilded Age in all its grime and grandeur. Cait Murphy restores this once-famous duo to their rightful place in the pantheon of great American characters.Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths in Lewisham & Deptford (Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths)
By Jonathan Oates. 2007
The twin fascinations of death and villainy will always hold us in their grim but thrilling grip. In Foul Deeds…
and Suspicious Deaths in Lewisham and Deptford the chill is brought close to home as each chapter investigates the darker side of humanity in cases of murder, deceit and pure malice committed over the centuries in this area of London. From crimes of passion to opportunistic killings and coldly premeditated acts of murder, the full spectrum of criminality is recounted, bringing to life the more sinister history of Lewisham and Deptford from the sixteenth century onwards. For this journey into the bloody, neglected past, Jonathan Oates has selected over 20 notorious episodes that give a fascinating insight into criminal acts and the criminal mind. The story of one of the most famous unsolved murders in history, of the great playwright Christopher Marlowe in Deptford in 1593. is followed by a catalogue of heinous crimes of every description—political conspiracies, gang killings, murders of policemen, suicide pacts, multiple poisonings, a husband who killed his wife and four children, the suicide of a crooked councillor, a motiveless murder and two unsolved murders that are as intriguing today as they were 80 years ago. The human dramas Jonathan Oates describes are often played out in the most commonplace of circumstances, but others are so odd as to be stranger than fiction. His grisly chronicle of the hidden history of Lewisham and Deptford will be compelling reading for anyone who is interested in the dark side of human nature.