A Coat of Many Colors investigates Israel’s first seven years as a sovereign state through the unusual prism of dress. Clothes worn by Israelis in the 1950s reflected political ideologies, economic ...conditions, military priorities, social distinctions, and cultural preferences, and all played a part in consolidating a new national identity. Based on a wide range of textual and visual historical documents, the book covers both what Israelis wore in various circumstances and what they said and wrote about clothing and fashion. Written in a clear and accessible style that will appeal to the general reader as well as to students and scholars, A Coat of Many Colors introduces the reader both to Israel’s history during its formative years and to the rich field of dress culture.
Unfinished Utopiais a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland's "first socialist city" by Communist propaganda of the 1950s. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the ...Vistula River just a few miles from the historic city of Kraków, in 1949. By contrast to its older neighbor, Nowa Huta was intended to model a new kind of socialist modernity and to be peopled with "new men," themselves both the builders and the beneficiaries of this project of socialist construction. Nowa Huta was the largest and politically most significant of the socialist cities built in East Central Europe after World War II; home to the massive Lenin Steelworks, it epitomized the Stalinist program of forced industrialization that opened the cities to rural migrants and sought fundamentally to transform the structures of Polish society.
Focusing on Nowa Huta's construction and steel workers, youth brigade volunteers, housewives, activists, and architects, Katherine Lebow explores their various encounters with the ideology and practice of Stalinist mobilization by seeking out their voices in memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, juxtaposing these against both the official and unofficial transcripts of Stalinism. Far from the gray and regimented landscape we imagine Stalinism to have been, the fledgling city was a colorful and anarchic place where the formerly disenfranchised (peasants, youth, women) hastened to assert their leading role in "building socialism"-but rarely in ways that authorities had anticipated.
Das Nordatlantische Bündnis war immer auch ein politischer und wirtschaftlicher Staatenverbund, der auf eine Kooperation angelegt war, die weit über den Bereich der eigentlichen Sicherheitspolitik ...hinausstrebte. Neben dem weltpolitischen Umfeld, dem Ost-West-Konflikt und den darin wirksamen Bedrohungsperzeptionen verdient daher die innere, atlantische Perspektive in der Formationsphase des Bündnisses besondere historische Beachtung. Diese interne Perspektive des Bündnisses kann als Verstrickung von europäischer und amerikanischer Politik unter Aufgabe nationaler Souveränitätsrechte definiert werden. In diese Perspektive muß der zur nordamerikanisch westeuropäischen Sicherheitsintegration parallel und nicht immer spannungsfrei verlaufende Prozeß der westeuropäischen Integration einbezogen werden. Diese breite historische Aufarbeitung der Formationsphase des Nordatlantischen Bündnisses erscheint nicht zuletzt aus aktuellen politischen Gründen bedeutsam. Mit Blick auf die dramatischen Umbrüche in den Staaten Mittel- und Osteuropas, die die internationale Nachkriegsordnung in Frage stellen, eröffnen sich Perspektiven für die Rückkehr dieser Staaten nach Europa.
The German patient Kapczynski, Jennifer M
2008., 20100211, 2008, c2008., 20080101
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The German Patient takes an original look at fascist constructions of health and illness, arguing that the idea of a healthy "national body"—propagated by the Nazis as justification for the brutal ...elimination of various unwanted populations—continued to shape post-1945 discussions about the state of national culture. Through an examination of literature, film, and popular media of the era, Jennifer M. Kapczynski demonstrates the ways in which postwar German thinkers inverted the illness metaphor, portraying fascism as a national malady and the nation as a body struggling to recover. Yet, in working to heal the German wounds of war and restore national vigor through the excising of "sick" elements, artists and writers often betrayed a troubling affinity for the very biopolitical rhetoric they were struggling against. Through its exploration of the discourse of collective illness, The German Patient tells a larger story about ideological continuities in pre- and post-1945 German culture.
Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War. By Benny Morris. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993. xvii + 428 pages. Biographical notes and ...bibliography to p.437. Index to p.451.
The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951. By Ilan Pappé. London, I.B. Tauris, 1992. xi + 273 pages. Notes and bibliography to p.311. Maps and index to p.324.
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