This open access book is about Mozambicans and Angolans who migrated in state-sponsored schemes to East Germany in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. They went to work and to be trained as a ...vanguard labor force for the intended African industrial revolutions. While they were there, they contributed their labor power to the East German economy. This book draws on more than 260 life history interviews and uncovers complex and contradictory experiences and transnational encounters. What emerges is a series of dualities that exist side by side in the memories of the former migrants: the state and the individual, work and consumption, integration and exclusion, loss and gain, and the past in the past and the past in the present and future. By uncovering these dualities, the book explores the lives of African migrants moving between the Third and Second worlds. Devoted to the memories of worker-trainees, this transnational study comes at a time when historians are uncovering the many varied, complicated, and important connections within the global socialist world.
Places and spaces are often considered to be static and immobile when compared with the dynamism of time. This volume challenges that notion, positing a theory of the mobility of places by tracing ...the changing localizations of the Old Fairground at the heart of the Serbian capital of Belgrade. This paints a multifaceted picture of the "journeys" that this contentious site of memory has embarked upon.
This open access book explores the organization and evolution of Finland’s Cold War cultural diplomacy (1945-1975) as the basis for a reflection on the country’s foreign relations, the link between ...culture and politics, small states’ autonomy during the Cold War, and the porosity of the East-West divide. The book offers a historical survey of the development of Finland’s cultural diplomacy as part of the Finnish state’s foreign activities. In its empirical parts, it focuses on archives drawn from the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education in order to explain Finland’s cultural diplomacy as the result of the country’s foreign policy orientations, interactions between domestic and foreign policy, and the expansion of state activities in the artistic, educational, and cultural sectors. Various reflections and reports on foreign cultural relations highlight the role of identity concerns, cultural relations, geopolitics and economic imperatives in the development of a specifically Finnish cultural diplomacy. Furthermore, the book focuses on specific aspects and events, considering for instance the organization and evolutions of Finland’s cultural relations with the USSR, the role of cultural treaties, academic exchanges and scientific cooperation, “cultural exports” and the marketization of culture, overlaps between cultural relations and high politics.
Rivers have always been a formative component of spaces. They serve as natural borders, mold the character of a landscape, shape how entire regions look, and often mark politically contested border ...areas. At the same time, river landscapes constitute spaces of contact and exchange, thereby helping spatial cultures and cultural spaces to grow. The aim of this volume is to outline the diversity of river landscapes.
This Open access book provides a survey of the economic, health, and somatic progress of Baltic countries during the period 1918–2018, framed by the outline of the historical-sociological theory of ...modern social restorations, as originally conceived by the Austrian-American comparative historian Robert A. Kann. The author reworks Kann's theory to analyse post-communist transformations in the Baltic region. The book argues that the purpose of modern social restorations is to make restoration societies safe against a recurrence of revolution. There were two waves of modern social restorations: post-Napoleonic and post-communist. Most post-Napoleonic restorations were brief, because they failed to economically and socially outperform the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary systems. It considers Baltic restorations as laboratory cases of second-wave modern social restorations, because they encompass a triple restoration of the nation-state, capitalism, and democracy. The book assesses the performance success of Baltic restorations by comparing economic and social progress of Baltic countries during the periods of original independence (1918–1940), foreign-imposed state socialism (1940–1990), and restored independence (since 1990). It then elaborates the criteria to assess the ultimate performance success of these restorations by 2040, when restored Baltic states may endure longer than their ancestors in 1918–1940 and the complete foreign occupations era (1940–1990). The author, an expert in historical sociology, uses extensive historical-statistical data in cross-time comparisons to develop his analysis and create future projections. This book is of wide interest to sociologists, social demographers, political scientists, and economists studying the Baltic region. This is an open access book.
Market halls at the intersection of civic order and public health. Markets and market halls have always been more than about trade and nourishment. A detailed look at the histories of marketplaces ...provides evidence of the public health concerns they faced, as well as the social commotion, mobilization and, at times, unrest they hosted. This edited volume reappraises the market hall, examining both its architectural and its social and political significance. Focusing on how these buildings embodied transformations in architecture and urbanism from the mid-nineteenth century until the age of COVID-19, Mobs and Microbes situates market halls at the intersection of civic order and public health. Central to this are advances in sanitation and hygiene. These radical interventions also mediated conflicting interests. Through their rational designs, market halls intertwined government policies and regulations, which formalized, controlled and literally imposed order. Additionally, markets served as demonstration grounds for community-led mobilization efforts. With case studies spanning North America, Europe, Asia, India and Africa, this edited volume provides a global perspective on covered market halls across many disciplines, including architecture, history of art and architecture, landscape architecture, food studies and urban history.
Contributors: Samantha L. Martin (University College Dublin), Leila Marie Farah (Toronto Metropolitan University), Ashley Rose Young (Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History), Daniel Williamson (Savannah College of Art and Design), Zhengfeng Wang (University College Dublin), Nkatha Gichuyia (University of Nairobi), Xusheng Huang (Southeast University), Ruth Lo (Hamilton College), Emeline Houssard (Sorbonne Université), Henriette Steiner (University of Copenhagen), Andrea Borghini (Università degli Studi di Milano), Min Kyung Lee (Bryn Mawr College). Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
Steel City Readers makes available, and interprets in detail, a large body of new evidence about past cultures and communities of reading. Its distinctive method is to listen to readers' own voices, ...rather than theorising about them as an undifferentiated group. Its cogent and engaging structure traces reading journeys from childhood into education and adulthood, and attends to settings from home to school to library. It has a distinctive focus on reading for pleasure and its framework of argument situates that type of reading in relation to dimensions of gender and class. It is grounded in place, and particularly in the context of a specific industrial city: Sheffield. The men and women featured in the book, coming to adulthood in the 1930s and 1940s, rarely regarded reading as a means of self-improvement. It was more usually a compulsive and intensely pleasurable private activity.
Most people know little more than fragments of Dutch Jewish history: the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam; Jewish socialism; the devastating years of the Second World War. So where is the storyline? What ...happened to the Jews in the Netherlands from the moment they first settled there permanently? This book answers that question. It presents the central points of 700 years of Jewish history in the Netherlands briefly and succinctly. One hundred elements of the story have been chosen that taken as a whole create a balanced and representative picture. Each relates to a central event, place, person or object that helps to illuminate one important aspect of the history of the Jews in the Netherlands, and each is linked to a striking, iconic image. They are grouped by century around unifying themes that make them part of an ongoing story.
The purpose of the article is the introduction into the cultural discourse of analytically processed and summarized information on the genesis and evolution of chariot racing as the form of ...entertainment events in ancient Rome, their functional features, specific features of mass events of Antiquity in the context of entertainment culture of Rome. The methodological basis consisted of the methods of critical analysis of cultural, historical, and literary sources, specific and historical analysis, and interdisciplinary synthesis, induction, and deduction. The problematic and chronological, system and structural, comparative, descriptive methods and methods of social and phenomenological analysis were applied from specific and scientific methods. Scientific novelty. The article analyzes the genesis and evolution of chariot racing as a form of events in the context of entertainment culture in ancient Rome. Based on the ancient literary reflection, through the prism of works of culturologists, philosophers, historians, poets, writers of the ancient Rome Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, annals of Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Cassius Dio, ethic works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, letters of Gaius Pliny the Younger, poetry pages of Publius Ovidius Naso, epigrams of Marcus Valerius Martialis and others. The author revealed the essence and content of chariot racing as an entertainment form of events in ancient Rome, statistics, and specific features of entertainment events and instruments of ruling the Roman emperors. The author describes the moral aspects of chariot racing in the context of the entertainment culture of antiquity. Conclusions. The place of entertainment culture of Antiquity in the system of cultural knowledge and cultural tradition of their social universe is revealed. The transformations of chariot racing as a social and humanitarian experience of ancient society, the political instrument of government in Rome are explored. The role of entertainment of Antiquity for modern cultural practices is established.
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