FEEDING THE CITY: THE BEIRUT MUNICIPALITY AND THE POLITICS OF FOOD DURING WORLD WAR I

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 737-758 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Schulze Tanielian
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
Provincial Capital ◽  
The City

AbstractWorld War I in the Ottoman Empire was a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented scale. By 1916 in the Greater Syrian provinces, men, women, and children were dyingen masseof a war-induced famine so devastating that popular memory still names this warḥarb al-majāʿa(the war of famine). Despite the civilian catastrophe, people's experiences on the Ottoman home front have been only marginally explored in the scholarship. Focusing on the city of Beirut, this article highlights the centrality of food provisioning in the competition for political legitimacy in the provincial capital. Through a detailed analysis of how the Beirut municipality was represented in the city's daily newspaperal-Ittihad al-ʿUthmani, I argue that for local reform-minded notables and intellectuals the war presented an opportunity to prove, both to the local population and to the Ottoman state, that issues related to the internal security and well-being of the Beirut province generally and the city specifically could be dealt with locally through existing governing bodies. The article thus traces the fierce political games played around the issue of food by various actors seeking to win the hearts of Beirutis through their stomachs.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

International Opera in Nineteenth-century New York

2020 ◽  
pp. 244-269
Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Considerable Extent ◽  
World War ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
The City

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

Commentary: ‘Just the tip of the iceberg’: Queensland’s experience of the influenza pandemic of 1918–20

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-165
Author(s):  
Patrick Hodgson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Influenza Pandemic ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
Coastal Shipping ◽  
The City

AbstractThis article provides a synopsis of the spread of epidemic influenza throughout Queensland in 1919–20.1 Statewide the story was, to a greater or lesser extent, the same – regardless of occupation or whether one was from the city or the bush, on the coast or in the far west, no one was immune; even being 300 kilometres from the nearest epicentre of the outbreak was no guarantee of safety. An examination of the state’s newspapers, particularly the Brisbane Courier, makes it evident that outbreaks of influenza erupted almost simultaneously throughout the state. Aided and abetted by Queensland’s network of railways and coastal shipping, together with the crowding of people at country shows, race meetings and celebrations of the formal conclusion of World War I, the disease was swiftly diffused throughout the state. This article hopes to give the reader a sense of how the sheer scale and urgency of the crisis at times overwhelmed authorities and communities.

scholarly journals Regular Monitoring of the Condition of Soils and Green Plants As a Direction for Assessing the Quality of the Urban Environment

2021 ◽  
pp. 5-13
Author(s):  
Anna Tikhonova ◽  
◽  
Anna Kholodenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Quality Index ◽  
Soil Cover ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The West ◽  
Regular Monitoring ◽  
Zone Of Influence ◽  
The City

This paper examines the existing in the Russian Federation approaches to assessing the quality of the urban environment, the concept of the quality index of the urban environment; the analysis of indicators for calculating the quality index of the urban environment and the factors that form the ecological well-being of the urban environment for the local population has been carried out. The territory of the northern industrial hub of Volgograd was chosen as the object of research, in particular, the zone of influence of the ferrous metallurgy enterprise AO “VMK ‘Krasny Oktyabr’”, which has a historically specific location relative to the functional zones of the city. The analysis of the results of monitoring the content of mobile forms of heavy metals in the soil cover, carried out by the method of atomic absorption spectrometry, and the assessment of the general life state of tree green plantations in the territory of the sanitary protection zone of the enterprise based on the enumeration of trees is presented. The identified zone of influence of the enterprise, taking into account the presence of additional sources of pollution of the soil cover and MPC of metals, instead of their background concentrations, extends for 3.5–3.7 km from the border of the enterprise in the form of elongated areas of increased concentrations. Cartographic visualization reveals the presence of two clearly pronounced foci of pollution located to the west of the existing SOC of the enterprise. When assessing the general condition of trees, it is also possible to recognize the worst territory of the test plots located to the west of the operating TWCs in accordance with the directions of the prevailing winds. The data obtained confirm the feasibility of organizing regular monitoring of the soil cover and the state of green forests in the city as one of the directions for assessing the quality of the environment and taking these indicators into account when calculating the quality index of the urban environment.

World War I and the Roaring Twenties, 1915–1929

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-171
Author(s):  
Robert G. Spinney
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War I ◽  
German Population ◽  
World War ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The World ◽  
Indirect Impact ◽  
The City

This chapter explores the effects and significant indirect impact of World War I on Chicago. It points out how America was only a combatant in the war for slightly longer than a year, which is a period of time insufficient for the nation to mobilize fully for the war. It also discusses how the World War unleashed anti-German sentiments that severely affected the Chicago's sizeable German population. The chapter analyzes how the war drove Chicago employers to hire large numbers of African American laborers, which triggered a historic migration of southern blacks to the city. It also specifies how the war convinced politicians for ethnic and national allegiances to remain strong among the city's numerous immigrants.

scholarly journals Rijeka and its surroundings in 1918-1919

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-133
Author(s):  
Robert Doričić ◽  
Toni Buterin ◽  
Igor Eterović ◽  
Amir Muzur
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Death Certificates ◽  
World War ◽  
City Center ◽  
Daily Newspapers ◽  
Specific Mortality ◽  
Spanish Flu ◽  
The City

The Spanish flu, one of the worst epidemics in history, appeared in 1918, on the eve of the end of the World War I. The characteristic of the epidemic on the territory of the city of Rijeka has been poorly studied. Certainly, the lack of primary sources, such as hospital registries, have made the understanding of the incidence and the course of the epidemic in the city more difficult. Therefore, the death certificates have emerged as the main primary source. The purpose of this paper is to explore and describe mortality caused by the (Spanish) flu during 1918 and at the beginning of 1919, using the death registers of those who lived in the area of the city center and the surrounding parishes. The results of the Spanish flu mortality research in the area of Rijeka are compared to the Spanish flu specific mortality on the territory of the three parishes situated in the wider area of Rijeka – Brseč, Mošćenice and Lovran. The elucidation of the characteristics of the Spanish flu epidemic and its impact on the quotidian life in the city of Rijeka is possible through the analysis of daily newspapers as well. In this paper, we have explored such articles in the La Bilancia, Rijeka’s newspaper published in Italian.

Borderlands Fortress

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-289
Author(s):  
Maxwell Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
World War I ◽  
American West ◽  
World War ◽  
Urban Identity ◽  
Los Angeles Times ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Focusing on the World War I era, this article examines Harry Chandler’s Los Angeles Times and William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner. It argues that these two rival newspapers urged a particular urban identity for Los Angeles during World War I. If Los Angeles was to become the capital of the American West, the papers demanded that real and rhetorical barriers be constructed to protect the city from a dual Japanese-Mexican menace. While federal officials viewed the border as a line to be maintained, Chandler and Hearst feared it. Los Angeles needed to be a borderlands fortress. After the war, the two newspapers ably transitioned into an editorial style that privileged progress over preparedness. This paper reveals that the contested narrative of progress, based in transnational concerns, was crucial to the city’s early and ultimate development.

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