Few European cities can boast a history as storied and tumultuous as that of Berlin. For more than 150 years it has been at the centre of revolutionary politics; of era-defining struggles between the ...Left and the Right. It has been bombed, rebuilt and carved in two.In Revolutionary Berlin, veteran tour guide Nathaniel Flakin invites you to stand in the places where this history was written, and to follow in the footsteps of those who helped write it. Through nine self-guided tours illustrated with maps and photographs, readers enter the heady world of 19th century anti-colonial struggles, the 1918 November Revolution and the 1987 May Day riots — encountering the city’s workers, queer community and radical women along the way.The first English-language guidebook to tell the story of Berlin’s radical history, this is a must-have for Berliners and visitors alike.
1980 was a turning point in American history. When the year began, it was still very much the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, a sluggish economy marked by high inflation, and the disco ...still riding the airwaves. When it ended, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide, inaugurating a rightward turn in American politics and culture. We still feel the effects of this tectonic shift today, as even subsequent Democratic administrations have offered neoliberal economic and social policies that owe more to Reagan than to FDR or LBJ. To understand what the American public was thinking during this pivotal year, we need to examine what they were reading, listening to, and watching.
1980: America's Pivotal Year puts the news events of the era—everything from the Iran hostage crisis to the rise of televangelism—into conversation with the year’s popular culture. Separate chapters focus on the movies, television shows, songs, and books that Americans were talking about that year, including both the biggest hits and some notable flops that failed to capture the shifting zeitgeist. As he looks at the events that had Americans glued to their screens, from the Miracle on Ice to the mystery of Who Shot J.R., cultural historian Jim Cullen garners surprising insights about how Americans’ attitudes were changing as they entered the 1980s.
Praise for Jim Cullen's previous Rutgers University Press books:
Informed and perceptive —Norman Lear on Those Were the Days: Why All in the Family Still Matters
Jim Cullen is one of the most acute cultural historians writing today. —Louis P. Masur, author of The Sum of Our Dreams on Martin Scorsese and the American Dream
This is a terrific book, fun and learned and provocative...Cullen provides an entertaining and thoughtful account of the ways that we remember and how this is influenced and directed by what we watch. —Jerome de Groot, author of Consuming History on From Memory to History
From Alexanderplatz, the bustling Berlin square, to Moabit, site of the city's most feared prison, this book illuminates the culture of criminal justice in late imperial Germany. Hett explores the ...individuals who inhabited this world and examines how the law reflected the broader urban culture and politics of a rapidly changing city.
Zwischen West- und Ost-Berlin gab es aufgrund der intersektoralen Freizügigkeit bis zum Mauerbau ein Pendeln von Arbeitnehmern. Dieses Phänomen der Grenzgänger, als Kategorie städtisch-regionaler ...Verflechtung per se integrativ, erwies sich unter den Bedingungen von Systemkonkurrenz und Kaltem Krieg jedoch als Potential von Konfrontation und Spaltung. Roggenbuchs politikgeschichtliche Analyse differenziert das Grenzgängerproblem unter Einbeziehung wirtschaftlicher und sozialer Aspekte erstmals umfassend aus. Untersucht wird, wie und mit welchen Zielen das Problem einschließlich seiner Konsequenzen durch die Politik geregelt sowie Instrumentalisiert wurde und wie es seinerseits oft unerwünscht auf sie zurückwirkte. Dieser Fokus liefert neue Erkenntnisse über Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Politik in der Konkurrenz der bis 1961 noch "offenen" Systeme im Verflechtungsraum Berlin. Pars pro toto zeichnet die Studie mithin den politischen und politisierten Alltag jener Zeit, das Leben der Berliner und ihre Verhaltensweisen im Spannungsfeld der Systeme nach. Nicht zuletzt führt die primär anhand unbekannten Archivmaterials erarbeitete Darstellung bisher nur fragmentarisch oder polemisch abgehandelte Gesichtspunkte zusammen und bewertet sie neu.
This book traces the ways Berlin has been narrated across three centuries by some 100 authors. It presents a composite landscape not only of the German capital, but of shifting subtexts in American ...society.
In 1962, an innovative documentary on a Berlin Wall tunnel escape brought condemnation from both sides of the Iron Curtain during one of the most volatile periods of the Cold War. The Tunnel, ...produced by NBC's Reuven Frank, clocked in at ninety minutes and prompted a range of strong reactions. While the television industry ultimately awarded the program three Emmys, the U.S. Department of State pressured NBC to cancel the program, and print journalists criticized the network for what they considered to be a blatant disregard of journalistic ethics. It was not just The Tunnel's subject matter that sparked controversy, but the medium itself. The surprisingly fast ascendance of television news as the country's top choice for information threatened the self-defined supremacy of print journalism and the de facto cooperation of government officials and reporters on Cold War issues. In Contested Ground, Mike Conway argues that the production and reception of television news and documentaries during this period reveals a major upheaval in American news communications.
Who owns the street? Interwar Berliners faced this question with great hope yet devastating consequences. In Germany, the First World War and 1918 Revolution transformed the city streets into the ...most important media for politics and commerce. There, partisans and entrepreneurs fought for the attention of crowds with posters, illuminated advertisements, parades, traffic jams, and violence. The Nazi Party relied on how people already experienced the city to stage aggressive political theater, including the April Boycott and Kristallnacht. Observers in Germany and abroad looked to Berlin's streets to predict the future. They saw dazzling window displays that radiated optimism. They also witnessed crime waves, antisemitic rioting, and failed policing that pointed toward societal collapse. Recognizing the power of urban space, officials pursued increasingly radical policies to 'revitalize' the city, culminating in Albert Speer's plan to eradicate the heart of Berlin and build Germania.
As sites of turbulence and transformation, cities are machines for forgetting. And yet archiving and exhibiting the presence of the past remains a key cultural, political and economic activity in ...many urban environments. This book takes the example of Berlin over the past four decades to chart how the memory culture of the city has responded to the challenges and transformations thrown up by the changing political, social and economic organization of the built environment. The book focuses on the visual culture of the city (architecture, memorials, photography and film). It argues that the recovery of the experience of time is central to the practices of an emergent memory culture in a contemporary 'overexposed' city, whose spatial and temporal boundaries have long since disintegrated.
