Jay Winter's powerful 1998 study of the 'collective remembrance' of the Great War offers a major reassessment of one of the critical episodes in the cultural history of the twentieth century. Dr ...Winter looks anew at the culture of commemoration and the ways in which communities endeavoured to find collective solace after 1918. Taking issue with the prevailing 'modernist' interpretation of the European reaction to the appalling events of 1914–18, Dr Winter instead argues that what characterised that reaction was, rather, the attempt to interpret the Great War within traditional frames of reference. Tensions arose inevitably. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning is a profound and moving book of seminal importance for the attempt to understand the course of European history during the first half of the twentieth century.
This is a masterful volume on remembrance and war in the twentieth century. Jay Winter locates the fascination with the subject of memory within a long-term trajectory that focuses on the Great War. ...Images, languages, and practices that appeared during and after the two world wars focused on the need to acknowledge the victims of war and shaped the ways in which future conflicts were imagined and remembered. At the core of the memory boom is an array of collective meditations on war and the victims of war, Winter says.The book begins by tracing the origins of contemporary interest in memory, then describes practices of remembrance that have linked history and memory, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The author also considers theaters of memoryfilm, television, museums, and war crimes trials in which the past is seen through public representations of memories. The book concludes with reflections on the significance of these practices for the cultural history of the twentieth century as a whole.
In the wake of the monstrous projects of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others in the twentieth century, the idea of utopia has been discredited. Yet, historian Jay Winter suggests, alongside the "major ...utopians" who murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world were disparate groups of people trying in their own separate ways to imagine a radically better world. This original book focuses on some of the twentieth-century's "minor utopias" whose stories, overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag, suggest that the future need not be as catastrophic as the past.The book is organized around six key moments when utopian ideas and projects flourished in Europe: 1900 (the Paris World's Fair), 1919 (the Paris Peace Conference), 1937 (the Paris exhibition celebrating science and light), 1948 (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 1968 (moral indictments and student revolt), and 1992 (the emergence of visions of global citizenship). Winter considers the dreamers and the nature of their dreams as well as their connections to one another and to the history of utopian thought. By restoring minor utopias to their rightful place in the recent past, Winter fills an important gap in the history of social thought and action in the twentieth century.
Jay Winter's powerful study of the 'collective remembrance' of the Great War offers a major reassessment of one of the critical episodes in the cultural history of the twentieth century. Dr Winter ...looks anew at the culture of commemoration and the ways in which communities endeavoured to find collective solace after 1918. Taking issue with the prevailing 'modernist' interpretation of the European reaction to the appalling events of 1914–18, Dr Winter instead argues that what characterised that reaction was, rather, the attempt to interpret the Great War within traditional frames of reference. Tensions arose inevitably. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning is a profound and moving book of seminal importance for the attempt to understand the course of European history during the first half of the twentieth century.
Through the life of one extraordinary man, this biography reveals what the term human rights meant to the men and women who endured two world wars, and how this major political and intellectual ...movement ultimately inspired and enshrined the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. René Cassin was a man of his generation, committed to moving from war to peace through international law, and whose work won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968. His life crossed all the major events of the first seventy years of the twentieth century, and illustrates the hopes, aspirations, failures and achievements of an entire generation. It shows how today's human rights regimes emerged from the First World War as a pacifist response to that catastrophe and how, after 1945, human rights became a way to go beyond the dangers of absolute state sovereignty, helping to create today's European project.
What we know of war is always mediated knowledge and feeling. We need lenses to filter out some of its blinding, terrifying light. These lenses are not fixed; they change over time, and Jay Winter's ...panoramic history of war and memory offers an unprecedented study of transformations in our imaginings of war, from 1914 to the present. He reveals the ways in which different creative arts have framed our meditations on war, from painting and sculpture to photography, film and poetry, and ultimately to silence, as a language of memory in its own right. He shows how these highly mediated images of war, in turn, circulate through language to constitute our 'cultural memory' of war. This is a major contribution to our understanding of the diverse ways in which men and women have wrestled with the intractable task of conveying what twentieth-century wars meant to them and mean to us.
In this essay I claim that all sites of memory have both local and national meanings, since they say that something happened here or to the people who live here, in this country, which is worth ...remembering in public. Only some sites of memory are international, in that they are constructed not solely by locals or residents of a particular region or state, but by groups of people in different countries drawing attention to events they think significant. However, transnational sites are those which were constructed or designated as significant by people from different places or different states, who worked together to represent the past from a transnational perspective. Therefore, the central question of my research is what did memory agents, that is, the people who built or used these sites of memory, want to achieve through them? What were they for? The answers I present are based on war memorials and museums. Reflecting on these sites underscores the ways in which war memorials are palimpsests, in the sense that they have multiple levels of meaning attached to them, corresponding to the collective memory of local, regional, national, international and transnational communities about our violent age.
In this essay I claim that all sites of memory have both local and national meanings, since they say that something happened here or to the people who live here, in this country, which is worth ...remembering in public. Only some sites of memory are international, in that they are constructed not solely by locals or residents of a particular region or state, but by groups of people in different countries drawing attention to events they think significant. However, transnational sites are those which were constructed or designated as significant by people from different places or different states, who worked together to represent the past from a transnational perspective. Therefore, the central question of my research is what did memory agents, that is, the people who built or used these sites of memory, want to achieve through them? What were they for? The answers I present are based on war memorials and museums. Reflecting on these sites underscores the ways in which war memorials are palimpsests, in the sense that they have multiple levels of meaning attached to them, corresponding to the collective memory of local, regional, national, international and transnational communities about our violent age. Keywords: national, international, and transnational sites of memory, war memorials U ovom eseju tvrdim da sva mjesta sjecanja imaju i lokalno i nacionalno znacenje, jer govore da se nešto vrijedno javnoga sjecanja dogodilo ovdje ili ljudima koji žive ovdje, u ovoj zemlji. Samo su neka mjesta sjecanja medunarodna, jer ih ne grade samo mještani ili stanovnici odredene regije ili države nego skupine ljudi u raznim zemljama, skrecuci pozornost na dogadaje koje smatraju važnima. Medutim, transnacionalna su mjesta ona koja su izgradili ili oznacili kao važna ljudi iz raznih mjesta ili država, radeci zajedno na predstavljanju prošlosti iz transnacionalnoga vidokruga. Stoga je središnje pitanje mojeg istraživanja što su nositelji sjecanja, odnosno ljudi koji su izgradili ili rabili ta mjesta sjecanja, htjeli njima postici. Cemu su služila? Odgovori koje iznosim temelje se na ratnim spomenicima i muzejima. Razmišljanje o ovim mjestima naglašava nacine na koje se ratni spomenici mogu smatrati palimpsestima, u smislu da im se pridružuju višestruke razine znacenja koje odgovaraju kolektivnom sjecanju lokalnih, regionalnih, nacionalnih, medunarodnih i transnacionalnih zajednica o dobu nasilja u kojem živimo. Kljucne rijeci: nacionalna, medunarodna i transnacionalna mjesta sjecanja, ratni spomenici
The world's population has grown by five billion people over the past century, an astounding 300 percent increase. Yet it is actually the decline in family size and population growth that is the ...issue attracting greatest concern in many countries. This eye-opening book looks at demographic trends in Europe, North America, and Asia-areas that now have low fertility rates-and argues that there is an essential yet often neglectedpoliticaldimension to a full assessment of these trends. Political decisions that promote or discourage marriage and childbearing, facilitate or discourage contraception and abortion, and stimulate or restrain immigration all have played significant roles in recent trends.
