German Women and the Communist International: The Case of the Independent Social Democrats

1975 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert F. Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Important Variable ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Past Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Number Of Factors

At no time during the past century has European society been closer to major revolutionary upheaval than at the close of World War I. That in the end the Russian Revolution was contained and “world revolution” averted has been related by historians to any number of factors. Yet one of the most important reasons for the ebbing of the revolutionary tide has generally been overlooked or passed over lightly. This was the failure of the revolutionary movement, except in Russia, to secure really significant support from a particular segment of the working classes, namely women. A more classic case of the historian's tendency to accept sex as a constant, i.e., to operate in general as if only one sex—the male sex—exists, would be difficult to find. In fact an individual's sex can be an important variable in political behavior and like age, occupation, religion, and a variety of other social, economic, and cultural factors, something which needs to be considered much more carefully in order to arrive at a better understanding of the past.

Fudging the Boundaries between Concept(s) of Race, Class, and Religion

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 121-140
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Haddad
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Past Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Similar Nature ◽  
The Past

For some time in the past century, the issue of racism emphasized color or race. However, it included religion in many cases. This attitude, which has subsided for some time, is making a strong comeback in many countries, foremost among them the United States, the world’s principal superpower. This study comments on the current racial ideas and compares them with ideas of a similar nature that were prevalent in the early twentieth century. It focuses on comparing the thinking of US President Donald Trump today with that of Lothrop Stoddard, known for his interest in the Muslim world, around the time of World War I and immediately after it.

scholarly journals Morts pour la France: Things and memory in the ‘destroyed villages’ of Verdun

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-407
Author(s):  
Paola Filippucci
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Past Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Memorial Landscape ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Moment

This article considers the power of things to affect how the past is remembered in the aftermath of mass violence, through the case of the ‘destroyed villages’ ( villages détruits) of the battlefield of Verdun, theatre in 1916 of one of the most destructive battles of World War I. As well as causing mass military death, the battle also led to the ‘death’ of nine small villages, declared to have ‘died for France’ and incorporated into the post-war commemorative landscape of the battlefield. The article illustrates the 21st-century discourse and practices that surround the remains of these villages, from emplaced ruins to photographs and other documents. A century after the ‘death’ of the villages, people who identify as descendants of the original inhabitants gather at the sites and through these objects evoke their ancestors and the pre-war settlement, momentarily reconstituting a space that they can ‘inhabit’ physically, imaginatively and affectively. However, bids to restore a ‘village’ space and time are overwritten by the commemorative framework in which the sites and remains have been embedded for the past century, that identifies the ‘dead’ localities with the human Fallen and their history with the moment of their ‘death for France’. So, while the surviving traces of the former villages retain their power to affect and thus to evoke the pre-war, civilian past, their ability to produce a new memory for Verdun is limited by their incorporation into a memorial landscape dedicated to heroic military death for the nation. The physical expropriation of sites and vestiges during the post-war reconstruction of the battlefield and their preservation as tangible tokens of mass death has enduringly fixed and overdetermined their meaning, in a form of symbolic expropriation that limits their power to produce memory.

Behind the stage of a literary text. ‘Custom is despot among men’

2020 ◽  
pp. 63-83
Author(s):  
E. N. Tsimbaeva
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Skeletal System ◽  
World War ◽  
Internal Organs ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fiction Writers

The article analyzes physical and physiological problems caused by fashionable clothing in the mid-18th to early 20th cc. that shaped people’s appearances and lifestyles in the past. Affecting the skeletal system and the functioning of internal organs and brain in particular and causing various illnesses, these problems went largely unrecognized by contemporaries, including writers, but would inevitably surface in literary works as part and parcel of everyday life. Without understanding their role, one may struggle to comprehend not only plot twists and characters’ motivations but also the mentality of the bygone era as portrayed in fiction. Chronologically, the research covers the period from the mid-18th c. to World War I. The author only focuses on so-called respectable society (a very tentative term that covers members of the aristocracy and other classes with comparable lifestyles), since it was this group which drew the most attention from fiction writers of the period. The scholar chose to concentrate on the kind of daily realia of ‘noble society’ that permeate works by Russian, English, French and, to some extent, German authors, considered most prominent in Europe at the time.

scholarly journals Preface: The Historical Geography of the Hungarian Nation

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-376
Author(s):  
Andrew Ludanyi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
East European ◽  
The Past ◽  
French And English ◽  
The Subject

The fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe has been one of the most neglected subjects in the Western scholarly world. For the past fifty years the subject—at least prior to the late 1980s—was taboo in the successor states (except Yugoslavia), while in Hungary itself relatively few scholars dared to publish anything about this issue till the early 1980s. In the West, it was just not faddish, since most East European and Russian Area studies centers at American, French and English universities tended to think of the territorial status quo as “politically correct.” The Hungarian minorities, on the other hand, were a frustrating reminder that indeed the Entente after World War I, and the Allies after World War II, made major mistakes and significantly contributed to the pain and anguish of the peoples living in this region of the “shatter zone.”

scholarly journals Introduction

1988 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 391-394
Author(s):  
Jean Bazin
Keyword(s):  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Popular Discourse ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Intermediaries ◽  
History Department ◽  
The University ◽  
Universite Laval

This collection brings together six papers of the some seventy that were presented at the international symposium held at Université Laval in October, 1987 entitled “Mémoires, Histoires, Identités”. Organized jointly by the History Department of Université Laval, the Ecole des Hautes études en sciences sociales de Paris and the Laboratoire 363 “Tiers-Monde-Afrique” CNRS/Université Paris VII, the symposium aimed to stimulate reflection and research on the links between the construction of identities and the production of history as a discourse on the past, and thus on the links maintained by two modes of production of History-the academic and the popular. Achieving this objective required a broadening of the empirical field to avoid unduly singularizing African experiences.The papers here concentrate on the process of the production of history by historical actors or by cultural intermediaries who, educated or not, are not of the university milieu which imposes the western conception of historical discourse. The relationships between academic and popular discourse and between the norms of the dominant culture and the practices of dominated cultures are at the center of the analyses.Isaiah Berlin recently summarized the past century as follows:The other, without doubt, consists in the great ideological storms that have altered the lives of virtually all mankind: the Russian Revolution and its aftermath – totalitarian tyrannies of both right and left and the explosions of nationalism, racism, and, in places, of religious bigotry, which, interestingly enough, not one among the most perceptive social thinkers of the nineteenth century had ever predicted.

The Decline and Promise of American Camping

Heading Out ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terence Young
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
World War ◽  
Rapid Urbanization ◽  
The Past

This concluding chapter offers a review of the key notions developed in the earlier chapters and draws upon this enhanced understanding to offer an explanation for why camping's popularity has begun to waver. Despite camping's strong and pervasive popularity today, the zenith of its national appeal occurred in the past. It is impossible to precisely quantify such trends, but camping's cultural significance appears to have peaked with the explosion of auto campers who hit the motor-camping trail during the decade following World War I. This heightened and widespread popularity should be understood as a reflection of the continuing and rapid urbanization that was sweeping through America, transforming it from a largely rural country in 1910 to a distinctly urban one by 1930.

Persuasion and Propaganda in War and Terrorism

2019 ◽  
pp. 1048-1071
Author(s):  
Thomas Steinfatt ◽  
Dana Janbek
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Unrest ◽  
Actual Use ◽  
Time Part ◽  
Over Time

This chapter focuses on the use of propaganda during times of war, prejudice, and political unrest. Part one distinguishes between persuasion and one of its forms, propaganda. The meaning-in-use of the term ‘propaganda' is essential to understanding its use over time. Part two presents relevant examples of propaganda from the past several centuries in the United States and Europe. These examples include episodes from World War I and II, among others. Propaganda is not a new tool of persuasion, and learning about its use in the past provides a comparison that helps in understanding its use in the present and future. Part three looks at recent examples of how propaganda occurs in actual use in online terrorist mediums by Al-Qaeda and by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-214
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Identity ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War

The book closes with a short glimpse into the history of Jewish veterans after 1945, as the survivors of the camps returned to Germany, outlining ruptures and continuities in comparison with the pre-Nazi period. Jewish veterans imposed different narratives on their experiences under National Socialism. As the past receded into the distance, it became a concern for the survivors to engage with the past, which they variously looked back on with nostalgia, disillusionment, or bitter anger. Although National Socialism threatened to erase everything that Jewish veterans of World War I had achieved and sacrificed, sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the nation, as well as bonds with gentile Germans that had been forged under fire during the war, threatened to sever their connections to the status they had earned as soldiers of the Great War and defenders of the fatherland, their minds, their values and their character remained intact. Jewish veterans preserved their sense of German identity.

Did Mikhail Sholokhov Write The Quiet Don?

2020 ◽  
pp. 209-230
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Unpublished Manuscript ◽  
Nobel Committee ◽  
Magnum Opus

This chapter discusses the novel “The Quiet Don” and the controversy over its authorship. It briefly recounts some of the relevant events of World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Russian Civil War. The chapter focuses on Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov who was awarded by the Nobel Committee in 1945 for the literature prize on his magnum opus, the four-volume The Quiet Don. It also looks into the initial claim that Sholokhov stole the book manuscript for The Quiet Don in a map case that belonged to a White Guard who had been killed in battle. It talks about an anonymous author known as Irina Medvedeva-Tomashevskaia, who wrote several historical studies and claimed that Sholokhov had plagiarized an unpublished manuscript of Fedor Dmitrievich Kriukov.

Colors of the Past: Archive, Art, and Amnesia in a Digital Age

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1771-1781
Author(s):  
Santanu Das
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Gains And Losses

Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.

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