How does a democracy deal with threats to its stability and continued existence when those threats come from political parties that play the democratic game? In Defending Democracy, political ...scientist Giovanni Capoccia studies key European nations between World Wars I and II which survived such democratic crises.
A comprehensive and thoughtful historical analysis of the democracies of interwar Europe, Defending Democracy provides a unique perspective on the many lessons to be learned from their successes and failures. With this exclusively empirical investigative approach, Capoccia develops a methodology for analyzing contemporary democracies—such as Algeria, Turkey, Israel, and others—where similar political conditions are present. Given the rise of terrorism and the persistence of extremism in both established and new democracies today, continued research and dialogue on the defense of democracy are necessary for its preservation.
In this classic study of the relationship between technology and culture, Miles Orvell demonstrates that the roots of contemporary popular culture reach back to the Victorian era, when mechanical ...replications of familiar objects reigned supreme and realism dominated artistic representation. Reacting against this genteel culture of imitation, a number of artists and intellectuals at the turn of the century were inspired by the machine to create more authentic works of art that were themselves "real things." The resulting tension between a culture of imitation and a culture of authenticity, argues Orvell, has become a defining category in our culture.The twenty-fifth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author, looking back on the late twentieth century and assessing tensions between imitation and authenticity in the context of our digital age. Considering material culture, photography, and literature, the book touches on influential figures such as writers Walt Whitman, Henry James, John Dos Passos, and James Agee; photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White; and architect-designers Gustav Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright.
During the Depression, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) dispatched scribes to sample the fare at group eating events like church dinners, political barbecues, and clambakes. Its America Eats ...project sought nothing less than to sample, and report upon, the tremendous range of foods eaten across the United States. Camille Bégin shapes a cultural and sensory history of New Deal-era eating from the FWP archives. From ravioli, the diminutive derbies of pastries, the crowns stuffed with a well-seasoned paste to barbeque seasoning that integrated salt, black pepper, dried red chili powder, garlic, oregano, cumin seed, and cayenne pepper while tomatoes, green chili peppers, onions, and olive oil made up the sauce , Bégin describes in mouth-watering detail how Americans tasted their food. They did so in ways that varied, and varied widely, depending on race, ethnicity, class, and region. Bégin explores how likes and dislikes, cravings and disgust operated within local sensory economies that she culls from the FWP’s vivid descriptions, visual cues, culinary expectations, recipes and accounts of restaurant meals. She illustrates how nostalgia, prescriptive gender ideals, and racial stereotypes shaped how the FWP was able to frame regional food cultures as "American."
In this fascinating volume, renowned historian Howard M. Sachar relates the tragedy of twentieth-century Europe through an innovative, riveting account of the continent's political assassinations ...between 1918 and 1939 and beyond. By tracing the violent deaths of key public figures during an exceptionally fraught time period—the aftermath of World War I—Sachar lays bare a much larger history: the gradual moral and political demise of European civilization and its descent into World War II.
In his famously arresting prose, Sachar traces the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg, Kurt Eisner, Matthias Erzberger, and Walther Rathenau in Germany—a lethal chain reaction that contributed to the Weimar Republic's eventual collapse and Hitler's rise to power. Sachar's exploration of political fragility in Italy, Austria, the successor states of Eastern Europe, and France completes a mordant yet intriguing exposure of the Old World's lethal vulnerability. The final chapter, which chronicles the deaths of Stefan and Lotte Zweig, serves as a thought-provoking metaphor for the assassination of the Old World itself.
During the 1970s, when doctrines like monetarism and new classical macroeconomics ushered in an era of neoliberal economic policymaking, Keynesian economics was pushed aside. It was almost forgotten ...that when Keynesian thinking had dominated economic policymaking in the middle decades of the twentieth century, it had underwritten postwar economic reconstruction in both Europe and Japan, and was largely responsible for the unprecedented prosperity and stable growth of the 1950s and 1960s. The global financial crisis and recession changed all that. Influential voices in progressive economics circles began to remind us how useful Keynesian ways of thinking could be again, especially in assisting us to come to terms with our economic predicaments. When politicians across the globe were confronted with economic crisis, almost by accident they introduced pragmatic and workable measures that bore all the hallmarks of Keynesianism. This book is about this fall and rise of Keynesian economics. Eatwell and Milgate range widely across the landscape that defines their subject matter. They consider how powerful Keynesian ideas can be when applied to our past and present economic problems. They show how helpful these ideas are in explaining why we came to find ourselves in the mess we are in. They examine where and how the analytical and methodological foundations of conventional macroeconomic wisdom went wrong. They set out a blueprint for an alternative that provides a clearer, more consistent, and more applicable approach to understanding how markets work. They also highlight the interpretive shortcomings that have come to characterize Keynes scholarship itself. They do all of this within the context of a provocative reconsideration of some of the most pressing economic problems that confront financial markets and the global economy today.
Politically adrift, alienated from Weimar society, and fearful of competition from industrial elites and the working class alike, the independent artisans of interwar Germany were a particularly ...receptive audience for National Socialist ideology. As Hitler consolidated power, they emerged as an important Nazi constituency, drawn by the party's rejection of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Yet, in the years after 1945, the artisan class became one of the pillars of postwar stability, thoroughly integrated into German society.From Craftsmen to Capitalists gives the first account of this astonishing transformation, exploring how skilled tradesmen recast their historical traditions and forged alliances with former antagonists to help realize German democratization and recovery.
Frederick R. Dickinson illuminates a new, integrative history of interwar Japan that highlights the transformative effects of the Great War far from the Western Front. World War I and the Triumph of ...a New Japan, 1919–1930 reveals how Japan embarked upon a decade of national reconstruction following the Paris Peace Conference, rivalling the monumental rebuilding efforts in post-Versailles Europe. Taking World War I as his anchor, Dickinson examines the structural foundations of a new Japan, discussing the country's wholehearted participation in new post-war projects of democracy, internationalism, disarmament and peace. Dickinson proposes that Japan's renewed drive for military expansion in the 1930s marked less a failure of Japan's interwar culture than the start of a tumultuous domestic debate over the most desirable shape of Japan's twentieth-century world. This stimulating study will engage students and researchers alike, offering a unique, global perspective of interwar Japan.
The period spanning the two World Wars was unquestionably the most catastrophic in Europe’s history. Historians have been drawn to its exceptionally dramatic and harrowing events, as bookshops ...continue to stock new studies on Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, the Holocaust, and the battles of the two World Wars with monotonous regularity. There is a deeper need, however, to explain why Europe experienced so many conflicts, revolutions, coup d’états, and civil wars within such a short space of time? Why did much of Europe succumb to authoritarian rule and why did political violence become so endemic? Why was mass politics followed by mass murder? Why did Europe experience a ‘Thirty Years’ War’? Another challenge is to explain the diversity of experiences: why some European societies were not traumatized by war and invasion, why liberal democracy survived throughout north-western Europe, why general living standards continued to rise, and why the status of women continued to improve. The Oxford Handbook of European History 1914-1945 looks afresh at this troubled and complicated age. It does so by taking comparative and transnational approaches rather than merely focusing on individual national experiences. Its features a collection of distinguished historians who explain the patterns of change and continuity that applied generally, while at the same time accounting for various regional and local articulations. Among the themes covered are political economy, international relations, genocide, colonialism, gender, sexuality, human rights, welfare, rural politics, labour and youth, as well as the era’s more distinctive features, such as fascism, Stalinism, the Great Depression, trench warfare and the ethnic cleansing. The Handbook serves as a guide for revising the 1914-1945 era, and for how to write histories that take the whole Europe as their subject and not merely its constituent parts: histories of Europe rather than merely in Europe.
Wars and Betweenness Bojan Aleksov, Aliaksandr Piahanau / Bojan Aleksov, Aliaksandr Piahanau
2020, 20200915, 2020-09-15
eBook, Book
The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea was marked by a set of crises and conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s, demonstrating the diplomatic, military, economic or cultural engagement of France, ...Germany, Russia, Britain, Italy and Japan in this highly volatile region, and critically damaging the fragile post-Versailles political arrangement. The editors, in naming this region as "Middle Europe" seek to revive the symbolic geography of the time and accentuate its position, situated between Big Powers and two World Wars. The ten case studies in this book combine traditional diplomatic history with a broader emphasis on the geopolitical aspects of Big-Power rivalry to understand the interwar period. The essays claim that the European Big Powers played a key role in regional affairs by keeping the local conflicts and national movements under control and by exploiting the region's natural resources and military dependencies, while at the same time strengthening their prestige through cultural penetration and the cultivation of client networks. The authors, however, want to avoid the simplistic view that the Big Powers fully dominated the lesser players on the European stage. The relationship was indeed hierarchical, but the essays also reveal how the "small states" manipulated Big-Power disagreements, highlighting the limits of the latters' leverage throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.
