scholarly journals “Making people buy and eat differently”: lessons from the modernisation of small independent grocery stores in the early twentieth century

2017 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franck Cochoy

Abstract Food studies teach us much about foods and eaters, but despite their impressive coverage and richness, they pay little attention to what occurs between the two: they tend to neglect the many market professionals and “market-things” that act as a bridge between food products and consumers. This paper proposes to fill the gap by examining how the transformation of the grocery business and related techniques contributed to reshaping the food industry’s strategies, the content of foods and the identity of eaters. This investigation was conducted by studying the trade magazine Progressive Grocer over the period 1922–1959. It shows how the journal promoted a new art of “making people buy and eat”. Grocers were invited to modify their practices, hence the eaters’ experience, by implementing two different strategies: a movement of “betterment” of their previous service know-how and then a more radical movement of “replacement” of this know-how by the new “self-service” arrangement. By following these two movements, we understand how grocery professionals and techniques made us buy and eat, but made us do so differently, to the extent that the grocery business and related devices changed foods as well as consumers’ identities.

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-476
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.


2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIM ENDERSBY

AbstractBetween 1916 and 1927, botanists in several countries independently resolved three problems that had mystified earlier naturalists – including Charles Darwin: how did the many species of orchid that did not produce nectar persuade insects to pollinate them? Why did some orchid flowers seem to mimic insects? And why should a native British orchid suffer ‘attacks’ from a bee? Half a century after Darwin's death, these three mysteries were shown to be aspects of a phenomenon now known as pseudocopulation, whereby male insects are deceived into attempting to mate with the orchid's flowers, which mimic female insects; the males then carry the flower's pollen with them when they move on to try the next deceptive orchid. Early twentieth-century botanists were able to see what their predecessors had not because orchids (along with other plants) had undergone an imaginative re-creation: Darwin's science was appropriated by popular interpreters of science, including the novelist Grant Allen; then H.G. Wells imagined orchids as killers (inspiring a number of imitators), to produce a genre of orchid stories that reflected significant cultural shifts, not least in the presentation of female sexuality. It was only after these changes that scientists were able to see plants as equipped with agency, actively able to pursue their own, cunning reproductive strategies – and to outwit animals in the process. This paper traces the movement of a set of ideas that were created in a context that was recognizably scientific; they then became popular non-fiction, then popular fiction, and then inspired a new science, which in turn inspired a new generation of fiction writers. Long after clear barriers between elite and popular science had supposedly been established in the early twentieth century, they remained porous because a variety of imaginative writers kept destabilizing them. The fluidity of the boundaries between makers, interpreters and publics of scientific knowledge was a highly productive one; it helped biology become a vital part of public culture in the twentieth century and beyond.


Author(s):  
Angela Frattarola

The introduction begins with a close reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “Wireless” in order to clarify the influence of auditory technology on turn-of-the-century literature. While explaining the geographical scope and limitations of the project, the Introduction situates the modernist shift toward sound perception as one of the many breaks with tradition that characterized the period. It also surveys recent scholarship that begins to consider how the soundscape, auditory technologies, and music of the early twentieth century influenced modernist literature.


1997 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 95-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Christelow

When Caliph Attahiru of Sokoto chose flight over submission to the British in March 1903, it was left to the blind and aging Waziri, Muhammad al-Bukhari, to provide those who remained behind with an explanation of how they could remain good Muslims while accepting infidel rule. Citing a text of the caliphate's founder, Shehu ʿUthman Dan Fodio, he argued that one could befriend the British with the tongue, without befriending them with the heart. It remained for others to develop the vocabulary that their tongues would need for this task.A particularly intriguing item in the vocabulary that emerged during the turbulent first decade of colonial rule was a new usage of zaman(time, era) that occurs in the records of the Emir of Kano's judicial council in such terms as hukm al-zaman (rule of the era) and ʿumur al-zaman (things of the era). It is worth noting that the judicial council did not keep written records before being instructed to do so by British Resident C.L. Temple in 1909, so the records might be seen as preserving what was essentially oral discourse—expressions of the tongue. These terms occur uniquely in relation to legal matters in which the British had intervened. Understanding them can shed new light on the religious and political adaptation of northern Nigerian Muslim leaders to life under British rule. To explore their meaning requires a threefold process of examining various usages and understandings of zaman in non-legal sources; describing how the judicial council used the word; and then analyzing how this usage may have been related to any of a number of influences, ranging from British officials to West African Islamic scholars to Western-educated North Africans passing through the region.


2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 51-82
Author(s):  
Ben Winters

AbstractResponses to Korngold's 1920 opera Die tote Stadt have long been filtered through the lens of his later Hollywood career. To do so, however, not only risks misunderstanding the relationship between these two different spheres of the composer's output, but also ignores the opera's complex positioning within the gender discourses of early twentieth-century Vienna. This article offers a corrective to the clichéd view of Korngold the ‘pre-filmic’ opera composer by arguing that, in its treatment of the characters Marie and Marietta, Die tote Stadt draws on a tradition of ‘strangling blonde’ imagery from the nineteenth century in order to critique the gender theories of Otto Weininger (1880–1903), which were still current in the 1920s. As such, in its concern with the nature of femininity, Die tote Stadt also draws our attention to the modern woman who had just entered the composer's life, Luise (Luzi) von Sonnenthal.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Leonard Diepeveen

Beginning with the work of art critic Kenyon Cox and then turning to the many accusations of fraud levelled against modernism, Chapter 1 gives an account of fraud discourse’s dominance in early twentieth-century culture. Accusations of fraud were commonplace, and unleashed a set of rituals; fraud’s unveiling and fallout is highly stylized, and both narrative and social. These melodramatic moments of modern fraud, for all their lack of nuance, did a lot of work, and are part of a larger category that extends outward, taking on ideas such as insincerity, unclear intent, mimicry, and deception. After presenting a theory of fraud and its enabling conditions, the chapter argues that fraud discourse profoundly shaped the initial response to modernism, the modern canon, and its justifying principles.


1947 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 27-46
Author(s):  
F. Dvornik

The early history of Russia is still in many respects an unexplored field, and the place which the first Russian political organisation occupied in Europe from the tenth to the twelfth century is not yet appreciated as it deserves to be, even by Russian scholars themselves. The research carried out in this field in Russia at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century was cut short for almost three decades by political events. It is only recently that the history of Kievan Russia has aroused a keener interest among the historians of Soviet Russia, as witness the many studies published in Vestnik Drevnei Istorii and especially the work of B. D. Grekov.


Author(s):  
Phillip Drew

The fact that a number of aspects of maritime blockade law are not settled in customary law infers that any state that engages in blockade operations risks the possibility that its actions will be found to have been unlawful. Because the consequences of a blockade can be so deleterious to vulnerable civilian populations, it is necessary that a legal framework for maritime blockade be established. At the core of any such framework must be the requirement to address humanitarian issues and concerns. Without such initiatives, the law of blockade will remain mired in the early twentieth century, and states engaging in this method of warfare will do so under a cloud of legal ambiguity.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document