1840 research outputs found
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Bolshevik festivals, 1917-1920
No full textIn the early years of the USSR, socialist festivals - events entailing enormous expense and the deployment of thousands of people - were inaugurated by the Bolsheviks. Avant-garde canvases decorated the streets, workers marched, and elaborate mass spectacles were staged. Why, with a civil war raging and an economy in ruins, did the regime sponsor such spectacles?In this first comprehensive investigation of the way festivals helped build a new political culture, James von Geldern examines the mass spectacles that captured the Bolsheviks' historical vision. Spectacle directors borrowed from a tradition that included tsarist pomp, avant-garde theater, and popular celebrations. They transformed the ideology of revolution into a mythologized sequence of events that provided new foundations for the Bolsheviks' claim to power
Fulk Nerra, the neo-Roman consul, 987-1040: a political biography of the Angevin count
No full textThis is the first comprehensive biography of Fulk Nerra, an important medieval ruler, who came to power in his teens and rose to be master in the west of the French Kingdom. Descendant of warriors and administrators who served the French kings, Fulk in turn built the state that provided a foundation for the vast Angevin empire later constructed by his descendants.Bernard Bachrach finds the terms "constructed" and "built" more than metaphorical in relation to Fulk's career. He shows how Fulk and the Angevin counts who followed him based their long-term state building policy on Roman strategies and fortifications described by Vegetius. This creative adaptation of Roman ideas and tactics, according to Bachrach, was the key to Fulk's successful consolidation of political power. Students of medieval and military history will find here a colorful, impressively researched biography
Early modern Japan
No full textThis thoughtfully organized survey of Japan's early modern period (1568-1868) is a remarkable blend of political, economic, intellectual, literary, and cultural history. The only truly comprehensive study in English of the Tokugawa period, it also introduces a new ecological perspective, covering natural disasters, resource use, demographics, and river control
The flux of history and the flux of science
No full textDoes thinking have a history? If there are no necessarily changeless structures to be found in things and in our inquiry into them, then what knowledge of the world and ourselves is possible? In this boldly original and elegantly written study, Joseph Margolis argues for a radically historicized view of history that treats it as both a real process and a narrative account, each a product of continual change. Developing his argument through discussions of such influential philosophers of history and the natural sciences as Vico, Danto, Collingwood, Habermas, Hempel, Popper, Putnam, and Gadamer, he provides a coherent theory of flux and invariance that resolves several deep puzzles regarding human nature and understanding.While maintaining a thorough command of Anglo-American philosophy, Margolis challenges many of its most cherished assumptions and demonstrates the sense in which history and interpretation are one and the same. Exploring one of the master themes of this century, his book offers a novel theory of the human condition whose conclusions and concerns seem certain to inform philosophy in the next century as well
Authoritarian Argentina: the Nationalist movement, its history, and its impact
No full textDavid Rock has written the first comprehensive study of nationalism in Argentina, a fundamentalist movement pledged to violence and a dictatorship that came to a head with the notorious "disappearances" of the 1970s. This radical, right wing movement has had a profound impact on twentieth-century Argentina, leaving its mark on almost all aspects of Argentine life - art and literature, journalism, education, the church, and of course, politics
University of California Press eScholarship editions in process
No full textThis latest work from Japanese-born anthropologist Takie Sugiyama Lebra is the first ethnographic study of the modern Japanese aristocracy. Established as a class at the beginning of the Meiji period, the kazoku ranked directly below the emperor and his family. Officially dissolved in 1947, this group of social elites is still generally perceived as nobility. Lebra gained entry into this tightly knit circle and conducted more than one hundred interviews with its members. She has woven together a reconstructive ethnography from their life histories to create an intimate portrait of a remote and archaic world.As Lebra explores the culture of the kazoku , she places each subject in its historical context. She analyzes the evolution of status boundaries and the indispensable role played by outsiders.But this book is not simply about the elite. It is also about commoners and how each stratum mirrors the other. Revealing previously unobserved complexities in Japanese society, it also sheds light on the universal problem of social stratification
Survivors: an oral history of the Armenian genocide
No full textBetween 1915 and 1923, over one million Armenians died, victims of a genocidal campaign that is still denied by the Turkish government. Thousands of other Armenians suffered torture, brutality, deportation. Yet their story has received scant attention. Through interviews with a hundred elderly Armenians, Donald and Lorna Miller give the "forgotten genocide" the hearing it deserves. Survivors raise important issues about genocide and about how people cope with traumatic experience. Much here is wrenchingly painful, yet it also speaks to the strength of the human spirit
Seducing the French: the dilemma of Americanization
No full textWhen Coca-Cola was introduced in France in the late 1940s, the country's most prestigious newspaper warned that Coke threatened France's cultural landscape. This is one of the examples cited in Richard Kuisel's engaging exploration of France's response to American influence after World War II. In analyzing early French resistance and then the gradual adaptation to all things American that evolved by the mid-1980s, he offers an intriguing study of national identity and the protection of cultural boundaries.The French have historically struggled against Americanization in order to safeguard "Frenchness." What would happen to the French way of life if gaining American prosperity brought vulgar materialism and social conformity? A clash between American consumerism and French civilisation seemed inevitable.Cold War anti-Communism, the Marshall Plan, the Coca-Cola controversy, and de Gaulle's efforts to curb American investment illustrate ways that anti-Americanization was played out. Kuisel also raises issues that extend beyond France, including the economic, social, and cultural effects of the Americanized consumer society that have become a global phenomenon.Kuisel's lively account reaches across French society to include politicians, businessmen, trade unionists, Parisian intelligentsia, and ordinary citizens. The result reveals much about the French - and about Americans. As Euro Disney welcomes travellers to its Parisian fantasyland, and with French recently declared the official language of France (to defend it from the encroachments of English), Kuisel's book is especially relevant
The reign of the phallus: sexual politics in ancient Athens
No full textAt once daring and authoritative, this book offers a profusely illustrated history of sexual politics in ancient Athens.The phallus was pictured everywhere in ancient Athens: painted on vases, sculpted in marble, held aloft in gigantic form in public processions, and shown in stage comedies. This obsession with the phallus dominated almost every aspect of public life, influencing law, myth, and customs, affecting family life, the status of women, even foreign policy.This is the first book to draw together all the elements that made up the "reign of the phallus" - men's blatant claim to general dominance, the myths of rape and conquest of women, and the reduction of sex to a game of dominance and submission, both of women by men and of men by men.In her elegant and lucid text Eva Keuls not only examines the ideology and practices that underlay the reign of the phallus, but also uncovers an intense counter-movement - the earliest expressions of feminism and antimilitarism.Complementing the text are 345 reproductions of Athenian vase paintings. Some have been reproduced in a larger format and gathered in an appendix for easy reference and closer study. These revealing illustrations are a vivid demonstration that classical Athens was more sexually polarized and repressive of women than any other culture in Western history
The Magnificent Ambersons: a reconstruction
No full textOrson Welles considered The Magnificent Ambersons the crucial turning point in his career. He said, " They destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me." In 1942, while Welles was away, RKO Studios drastically recut the completed film. None of that deleted footage is known to survive.Now film scholar Robert Carringer has reconstructed Welles's own version of Ambersons , using all available surviving evidence including rare studio documents and the recollections of Welles himself and other original participants in the film.Carringer reaches startling conclusions about where the responsibility for the film's undoing ultimately lies. His spellbinding - and no doubt controversial - book will be eagerly welcomed by film historians and enthusiasts