Entertaining television challenges the idea that the BBC in the 1950s was elitist and ‘staid’, upholding Reithian values in a paternalistic, even patronising way. By focusing on a number of (often ...controversial) programme case studies – such as the soap opera, the quiz/game show, the ‘problem’ show and programmes dealing with celebrity culture – Su Holmes demonstrates how BBC television surprisingly explored popular interests and desires. She also uncovers a number of remarkable connections with programmes and topics at the forefront of television today, ranging from talk shows, 'Reality TV', even to our contemporary obsession with celebrity.The book is iconclastic, percipient and grounded in archival research, and will be of use to anyone studying television history.
During the Cold War, Chinese Americans struggled to gain political influence in the United States. Considered potentially sympathetic to communism, their communities attracted substantial public and ...government scrutiny, particularly in San Francisco and New York. Between Mao and McCarthy looks at the divergent ways that Chinese Americans in these two cities balanced domestic and international pressures during the tense Cold War era. On both coasts, Chinese Americans sought to gain political power and defend their civil rights, yet only the San Franciscans succeeded. Forging multiracial coalitions and encouraging voting and moderate activism, they avoided the deep divisions and factionalism that consumed their counterparts in New York. Drawing on extensive research in both Chinese- and English-language sources, Charlotte Brooks uncovers the complex, diverse, and surprisingly vibrant politics of an ethnic group trying to find its voice and flex its political muscle in Cold War America.
Essential for students of theatre studies, Methuen Drama's Decades of Modern British Playwriting series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1950s ...to 2009 in six volumes. Each volume features a critical analysis and reevaluation of the work of four key playwrights from that decade authored by a team of experts, together with an extensive commentary on the period. Modern British Playwriting: The 1950s provides an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of the theatre of the decade together with a detailed study of the work of T.S Eliot (by Sarah Bay- Cheng), Terence Rattigan (David Pattie), John Osborne (Luc Gilleman) and Arnold Wesker (John Bull). The volume sets the context by providing a chronological survey of the 1950s, a period when Britain was changing rapidly and the very fabric of an apparently stable society seemed to be under threat. It explores the crisis in the theatrical climate and activity in the first part of the decade and the shift as the theatre began to document the unease in society, before documenting the early life of the four principal playwrights studied in the volume. Four scholars provide detailed examinations of the playwrights' work during the decade, combining an analysis of their plays with a study of other material such as early play drafts, interviews and the critical receptions of the time. An Afterword reviews what the writers went on to do and provides a summary evaluation of their contribution to British theatre from the perspective of the twenty-first century.
With the outbreak of the Korean War, the poor, rural West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate became home to some of the largest American military installations outside the United States. In GIs and ...Fr auleins, Maria H ohn offers a rich social history of this German-American encounter and provides new insights into how West Germans negotiated their transition from National Socialism to a consumer democracy during the 1950s. Focusing on the conservative reaction to the American military presence, H ohn shows that Germany's Christian Democrats, though eager to be allied politically and militarily with the United States, were appalled by the apparent Americanization of daily life and the decline in morality that accompanied the troops to the provinces. Conservatives condemned the jazz clubs and striptease parlors that Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe opened to cater to the troops, and they expressed scorn toward the German women who eagerly pursued white and black American GIs. While most Germans rejected the conservative effort to punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs, they vilified the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. H ohn demonstrates that German anxieties over widespread Americanization were always debates about proper gender norms and racial boundaries, and that while the American military brought democracy with them to Germany, it also brought Jim Crow.
European intellectuals of the 1950s dismissed American culture as nothing more than cowboy movies and the A-bomb. In response, American cultural diplomats tried to show that the United States had ...something to offer beyond military might and commercial exploitation. Through literary magazines, traveling art exhibits, touring musical shows, radio programs, book translations, and conferences, they deployed the revolutionary aesthetics of modernism to prove—particularly to the leftists whose Cold War loyalties they hoped to secure—that American art and literature were aesthetically rich and culturally significant. Yet by repurposing modernism, American diplomats and cultural authorities turned the avant-garde into the establishment. They remade the once revolutionary movement into a content-free collection of artistic techniques and styles suitable for middlebrow consumption. Cold War Modernists documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War. Drawing on interviews, previously unknown archival materials, and the stories of such figures and institutions as William Faulkner, Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, James Laughlin, and Voice of America, Barnhisel reveals how the U.S. government reconfigured modernism as a trans-Atlantic movement, a joint endeavor between American and European artists, with profound implications for the art that followed and for the character of American identity.
L’Internat en pharmacie des Hôpitaux de Paris a environ 200 ans. Chaque année de 20 à 50 internes étaient recrutés à la suite d’un difficile concours pour assurer un service hospitalier permanent ...pendant quatre ans. Leurs fonctions touchaient à la fois les médicaments (fabrication et distribution) et les analyses biologiques. Cette deuxième activité prit une importance croissante au XXe siècle pour répondre aux exigences de la médecine clinique et évolua avec les progrès techniques auxquels les internes participèrent sous la direction des pharmaciens des Hôpitaux et des chefs de laboratoire.
For about two centuries, the hospitals of Paris have had an internship program. Every year, 20 to 50 interns were recruited following a difficult competitive examination. Their duties covered both the production and the distribution of medicines, and biological testing. During the 20th century, biological testing meet the exigencies of clinical medicine and it evolved interns participated, under the guidance of the hospital pharmacists.
Rousselet François. Être interne en pharmacie des hôpitaux de Paris dans les années 1950. In: Revue d'histoire de la pharmacie, 98e année, N. 371, 2011. pp. 311-318.
Examining the 1950s debate over the media and juvenile delinquency, this study shows how the development of youth culture and the rise of a mass-media society became intertwined and confused.
ZERO apparaît le 24 avril 1958 à l’occasion de la septième « exposition d’un soir » qui a lieu à Düsseldorf, dans l’atelier d’Otto Piene et de Heinz Mack. La thématique de cette exposition, « Le ...tableau rouge », rejoint celle du premier numéro de cette nouvelle revue d’artistes, ZERO. S’ensuivent deux autres numéros, respectivement sortis en octobre 1958 (« Vibration ») et en juillet 1961 (« Dynamo »). Autour de la revue pilotée par Mack et Piene se nouent alors différents projets collaboratifs et expositions collectives, à partir desquels ZERO devient une sorte d’échangeur entre plusieurs tendances nées au tournant des années 1950-1960. Cette recherche monographique a pour ambition première de renouveler les perspectives sur une revue et une mouvance artistique peu étudiées en France, et ce à partir de la question de l’immatériel réfractée au prisme de la technique. L’optimisme technologique présumé de ZERO est réexaminé à l’aune du « discours autorisé », de la poïétique des œuvres, de l’expérience esthétique et de leur réception critique. Dès lors, les œuvres et les discours dévoilent une image bien moins nette du passé, tissée de contradictions, qui traduit d’une part la difficile négociation d’un tournant sociétal marqué par la mécanisation et l’automation, l’information, l’accélération et la menace nucléaire et, d’autre part, l’ambition pour l’art dynamique (vitaliste) et « idéaliste » de ZERO de jouer un rôle actif dans la définition de l’époque, en s’adressant aux imaginaires et en occupant les territoires de l’expérience sensible.
ZERO was created on the 24th of April 1958, on the occasion of the seventh « Night Exhibition », which took place in Otto Piene’s and Heinz Mack’s studio in Düsseldorf. The theme of this exhibition, « The Red Painting » was the same as the inaugural edition of ZERO, a new artist magazine. Following this initiative, two other issues were published, one dedicated to “Vibration” (October 1958), the other to “Dynamo” (July 1961). Various collaborative projects and collective exhibitions revolved around the magazine edited by Mack and Piene, from which ZERO became a platform between several tendencies which had come into being by the early 1960s. This study aims at renewing and enriching knowledge of both a magazine and a movement that have not been the subject of any extensive examination so far. For this purpose, this research focuses on the immaterial art of ZERO as refracted through the prism of technology. ZERO’s alleged technological optimism is explored by the light of the “authorized discourses”, the poietic of the works of art, their aesthetic experience and their critical reception. Therefore, the works of art and the discourses reveal a far less clear picture of the past, which is not free of discrepancies. On the one hand, this reflects the complex issue of dealing with societal shifts characterized by mechanization and automation, information, acceleration, nuclear threat; and, on the other hand, this demonstrates the ambition for ZERO’s both dynamic (vitalist) and “idealistic” art to play an active role in defining the spirit of the era by addressing imaginaries and by occupying territories of sensitive experience.
