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In France, the culture of secrecy continues to dominate access policies. The acceptance of or resistance to this culture by various social actors, including government officials, civil servants such as archivists, historians, independent scholars, and journalists, partly explains the historical tension between advocates of a more restrictive or liberal policy of access to government records deemed ‘sensitive’. Unlike the American case with its long-established right to access, in France, access to information is just starting to be considered a citizen’s right. Initial reactions to the first version of my book (1994) sparked a rather violent debate. In the controversy, most of the archivists and some influential historians either denied or justified the difficulty of accessing so-called ‘sensitive archives’. Indeed, thanks to the ‘invisibility’ of this question until then, a book dedicated to the ‘Vichy Syndrome’, which had been published some years before, did not even mention this problem as evidence of France’s difficulties in facing the past.
A growing international interest in history, often referred to as the "history boom", has been evident since the 1970s. This is reflected in a quantitative increase in the demand as well as the supply of a range of products communicating history, products aimed at a broad public and not at a limited readership with specialist training. The number of visitors to historical exhibits is increasing as new museums and memorials are opened and new monuments are dedicated. Historical movies – feature and documentary films as well as docudramas – are aired on prime-time television, and cinema is rediscovering historical themes. The number of scholarly historical publications is growing, alongside works for general readers as well as historical novels.
The study of organized sound is the business of musicology – yet this routine observation carries a wealth of complexities, especially in the context of interdisciplinary discourse. Although musicology’s pluridisciplinary foundations offer open access to such disciplines as history, literary studies, mathematics, or sociology, the field’s intradisciplinary discourses and methodologies have shaped musicology in ways that turn most interdisciplinary exchange into a challenge. The scholarly exploration of sound in the twentieth century presents a case in point. Meaningful research on, for example, the music of the contemporary avant-garde composer Kaija Saariaho demands highly sophisticated technical skills in the spheres of the analysis, aesthetics, and technologies of music. While one could imagine interdisciplinary research on Saariaho involving, for example, the humanities or social sciences – perhaps with respect to, say, cultural politics in the late twentieth century – the specialist areas of music research usually remain disciplinarily hermetic. My current work on music in the USA during World War II offers striking examples of the need for, yet problems of, squaring interdisciplinary engagement with intradisciplinarities. The following remarks will address some of those disciplinary intersections.
Debating Consumer Durables, Luxury and Social Inequality in Poland during the System Transition
(2017)
Debating Consumer Durables. Luxury and Social Inequality in Poland during the System Transition
(2015)
This essay aims to discuss how cultural meanings of modern consumer durables, such as colour TVs, stereos and automatic washing machines, were embedded in the public debate towards social equality before and after the change of 1989 in Poland. In state socialism, availability of affordable electric appliances was one of the agendas of the state politics of collective consumption. Along with the system transition, affordability of consumer durables became extensively discussed within the framework of emerging consumer capitalism. At that time purchases and ownership of consumer durables became an indicator of the emergence of a new consumption culture based upon individual lifestyles in a society where social diversification and income inequality were intrinsic elements of social order.
I first came across Harlan Lane’s work towards the end of my PhD, which I was undertaking at University College London, UK. My dissertation was on the construction of ›difference‹ in the British Empire, particularly the differences ascribed to race and gender. Using nineteenth-century medical missionaries as a way in, I had started to think about differences evoked by health, disability, and the body. In particular, I noted the way in which missionaries used the language of disability as a discourse of racialisation. The African and Indian colonial subjects they encountered were described throughout missionary literature as ›deaf to the Word‹, ›blind to the light‹ and ›too lame‹ to walk alone. I have two d/Deaf cousins, one of whom is the sign language sociolinguist Nick Palfreyman, and around about this time Nick had started to familiarise me with some of the issues surrounding Deaf politics. Becoming interested and wanting to know more, I began to learn British Sign Language (BSL) and contemplate the connections between the historical work I was doing and contemporary struggles of Deaf politics and disability politics (I was particularly interested in DPAC – Disabled People Against Cuts – given the contemporary climate of austerity in the UK). As I did so I became acquainted with the work of Harlan Lane. Here, although acutely aware of my own positionality as a white, British, hearing woman, I have taken up the challenge set by the editors of this special issue to re-read his work twelve years on from my initial encounter with it, using the insights into postcolonial study I have gained through my historical work.
As the biggest commercial city in Tanzania today, Dar es Salaam features a number of German colonial memory sites which range from buildings, statues to open spaces. Formerly existing as a small caravan town exclusively owned by the Arab Sultan of Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam was further developed by the Germans who used it as their capital (Hauptstadt) beginning in the late 19th century. After the WWI, the city continued to serve as the capital in British mandate period until it was inherited by the independent government of Tanzania in 1961.
A radical process of standardization of tourist destinations around the globe, particularly in urban contexts, has been described by numerous scholars during the last decades. Indeed, the reinvention of many cities as tourist destinations has made evident ‘an odd paradox: whereas the appeal of tourism is the opportunity to see something different, cities that are remade to attract tourists seem more and more alike’. In such a context, both scholars and practitioners point to abstract elements such as images, identities, flairs, and experiences, as the main elements defining destinations’ profiles. The American historian Catherine Cocks argued that the attribution of a ‘personality’ to the city was a key aspect in the transformation of American cities into tourist destinations. Urban personalities made the city easily available, readable and intelligible, transformed it into a salable commodity, and offered a compelling reason to visit it and to come back. Similarly, contemporary European cities can be seen as bearers of specific local urban identities that remain relatively fixed even when information, stereotypes and attributes may prove to be inaccurate or simply false. Wolfgang Kaschuba has in this sense described the production of urban identities as a cultural technique that is predominantly performed in certain societal spaces such as literature, tourism, mass media, pop culture, and history marketing. This article focuses on one of such spaces, tourism, and explores how tourist communication transforms Berlin into a distinct and unique destination. It asks how the city is enacted by tourism as a singular and bounded entity, to which multiple orderings of identity are attributed.
Version 2.0: In the Roman Republic, a dictatorship (dictatura in Latin) referred to an institution of constitutional law. In times of emergency the senate would temporarily grant a dictator extraordinary powers to defend and restore state order. This classic meaning was reshaped in various ways during the twentieth century. Dictatorship became an ambiguous term whose range of meanings could encompass positive expectations as well as moral condemnation. The modern concept of dictatorship has been used as both a self-descriptor as well as a label employed by others to describe communist, fascist and Nazi rule.
At the beginning of the 20th century population growth, urbanisation and housing shortage were challenges throughout Europe. Consequently, epidemics and even pandemics were common. However, during the same era, significant advances in medicine occurred, leading in more effective vaccines, antibiotics, and chemicals against vermin. Moreover, healthy lifestyle was promoted via campaigns, including educational posters. Simultaneously, the concept of the new, modern citizen evolved. In our research project, we analyse and compare Finnish, German and Soviet posters educating citizens in improving their everyday habits, living environments and, in the end, their health. Our aim is to find out, what were the methods and means of the visual health education of the 20th century, and what kind of ideals were pictured in health promotion posters.
Eigen-Sinn. This word – commonly rendered in English as "stubbornness" – has since become a key concept in German and even international scholarship for a specific approach referred to collectively as Alltagsgeschichte, the history of everyday life. Eigen-Sinn nowadays is a useful historiographic concept for understanding individual behaviors and actions that impact on the sphere of power and domination: submission and revolt, resistance and dropping-out. How this came about will be explained in this article by Thomas Lindenberger.
My main argument here is that the story seen from the perspective of the influential year of 1962 reveals a very different historical context, with a different set of actors and a different trajectory and causalities regarding the human rights breakthrough, from those stories focusing on Western agency in the 1940s and the 1970s. It repositions the history of human rights in significant ways and makes apartheid and racial discrimination more crucial to the human rights story than has hitherto been acknowledged. It is also important to emphasize that the positions and arguments presented by countries from the Global South in these UN debates were richly nuanced. These nuances are important if we are to fully appreciate the dynamics during these years. Tanzania differed significantly from, for instance, Senegal in the way it envisaged the scope and applicability of international human rights law and investigatory measures. Tanzania wanted a sole focus on Southern Africa and not beyond; Senegal had a wider perspective. This should remind us that when we are imagining Africa as a historical-political space, we need to allow for diversity, individual histories and agency, aspects that cannot be adequately captured by labels such as ›The Third World‹, ›Global South‹ or indeed even ›Africa‹.
After a brief conceptual history of "energy," Rüdiger Graf shows how energy history emerged as a transdisciplinary scholarly project and outlines its main themes, questions, and narratives. He introduces the various energy histories and analyzes how they address energy production, the economic and political dimensions of energy, and the social and cultural history of energy consumption. He concludes by asking whether energy history is a subfield of historiography or whether it can rightly be considered an indispensable historiographical category that must be considered in any historiographical study.
Environmental history is the history of the changing mutual relationship between humankind and nature. The various, more or less concrete attempts to define this area of historical study can be reduced to this basic common denominator. Though the notion of man and nature's mutual dependence may sound pithy at first, it's a rather fuzzy one upon closer inspection. Melanie Arndt describes this field of research in all its facets – because the valuable contribution of environmental history as a „subdiscipline” deserves much greater recognition from the outside world and from scholars working in other disciplines.
Byron Metos is a Greek collector based in Thessaloniki, whose interest focuses on war photography and more specifically on the photography of the two World Wars in Greece. Part of his collection is titled Balkan und Griechenland (Balkans and Greece) and comprises photographs taken mostly by German soldiers and officers, though also including those by itinerant photographers, during the years of the Nazi Occupation in the Balkans, which have originated from photo albums of German soldiers. During the postwar era, these were acquired by an officer who had served in Greece as a member of the Health Service of the German army. Many years after the War, he decided to trace his own route through the war by adding the photographs of his fellow soldiers to his own photographic souvenirs. After his death, the collection passed to his daughter, who, a year later, sold the section relating to Greece, namely almost three thousand (3,000) photographs, to Byron Metos. The focus of the present paper will be on photos of the “tourist destination” Thessaloniki.
Marketization is a broad term with a wide range of meanings. It encompasses measures of deregulation and privatization as well as the perceived increase of an ›economic‹ logic in social relationships. For historical purposes, the term should not be narrowly defined, and nor should the concept of marketization be used in an ahistorical manner detached from contemporary usage. However, there are two questions which the historical analysis of marketization needs to address. First, what is the conceptual understanding of the market mechanism to which the term marketization is linked? Second, what is the relationship between marketization and economic theory?
It is said that William Brennan, the great US Supreme Court Justice, liked to greet his incoming law clerks with a bracingly simple definition of constitutional doctrine: five votes. ›You can’t do anything around here‹, Brennan would say, wiggling the fingers of his hand, ›without five votes.‹1 While memorable, Brennan’s definition was not entirely original. Seventy-five years before Brennan’s elevation to the high court, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously wrote: ›The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience [...]. The law […] cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.‹2 Some years later, Holmes returned to this idea, writing: ›The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.‹3 Statements such as Brennan’s and Holmes’ found elaboration in the American jurisprudential movement known as ›legal realism‹. One of its most influential and articulate exponents was the law professor Karl Llewellyn (1893–1962). Trained at Yale Law School, and on the faculty of Columbia, Llewellyn had a foot in the two institutions most prominently associated with the realist movement.
As a photographer, artist and expert in geopolitics, Emeric Lhuisset has a remarkable understanding of human tragedies and areas of conflict. Through his projects in various areas of conflict he opposes the abridged representation of these tragedies; shows hidden aspects of wars; and invites us to re-think war through art. The work of Lhuisset takes up historical and political narratives in their context. The following two projects by Emeric Lhuisset recall tragedies and intervene in spaces where drastic events have taken place.
This article will first examine the emergence of Italian Fascism and provide insight into Italian Fascists’ self-perception. Second, taking the contemporary conceptualizations of fascism developed by its Marxist, liberal, and conservative opponents as a starting point, this article reviews research on fascism during the Cold War. Third, the approaches taken by more recent research on fascism will be discussed and a survey of current fields of empirical work will be presented. A concluding section summarizes the usefulness of the concept of fascism.
The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was a landmark event, encoding the lessons learned from five years of total war on the European continent. The debates over the universality and inalienability of rights that dominated the writing of the document brought together statesmen and -women from across the world. But, one state was conspicuously left out of this discussion: Germany. The defeated state’s exclusion was understandable given the violence, destruction, death, and genocide the Nazi regime had unleashed on the European continent from 1939 to 1945. In many ways, it was Germany’s waging of the Second World War and their perpetration of genocide that created the urgency for a document that codified the most basic rights of men and women in the immediate postwar years.