scholarly journals Voices From Among the “Silent Masses”: Humble Petitions and Social Conflicts in Early Modern Central Europe

2001 ◽  
Vol 46 (S9) ◽  
pp. 11-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Würgler
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Socioeconomic Conditions ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
The People ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
The Masses

Social historians have quite frequently referred to the “silent masses” in history. They have thereby hinted at the problem that most preserved documents derive from a tiny elite. The great majority of the people, being illiterate, only very rarely left private letters, diaries, autobiographies and testaments, or official acts, charters, statistics, and reports. Besides the source problem, this view reflected concerns of structuralism and Marxism, both very fashionable among social historians up to the 1970s, who related the masses' interests to socioeconomic conditions. Ordinary people thus appeared rather as objects of economic structures than as subjects of historical processes. Though some German-speaking social historians integrated the anthropological category of “experience” into their studies in the 1980s, they assumed that ordinary people had interests in, and experiences of, but still no influence on historical processes. Merely local and reactive early modern social protest thus remained historically unimportant – in sharp contrast to the nineteenth-century working class movement. During the 1990s, studies of social conflict focused on the concept of agency and discussed the influence historical actors had on processes such as modernization.

Latin American Connections: Recent Work on German Interactions with Latin America

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Glenn Penny
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Mining Operations ◽  
Almost Everywhere ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
German Speaking

German interactions with Latin America have a long history. Indeed, early modern historians have demonstrated that people from German-speaking central Europe took part in all aspects of the European conquest of Central and South America. They have shown that these people were critical to mining operations and publishing in sixteenth-century Mexico; they have found them among Portuguese and Spanish sailors and soldiers almost everywhere; and they have located them playing important roles in a wide range of professions from Mexico to the south of Chile.

Secularization and the Jōruri Plays

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 76-97
Author(s):  
Koh Kawata
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Classical Concept ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Japanese People ◽  
Early Modern Japan ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Historical Processes

Abstract This paper aims to show, primarily through analysis of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century jōruri 浄瑠璃 plays, the radical changes in the vision of salvation shared among ordinary people, focusing especially on Jōruri monogatari 浄瑠璃物語, Sonezaki shinjū 曽根崎心中 and Kinpira jōruri 金平浄瑠璃, and highlights how such changes are related to contemporary social processes of secularization. José Casanova famously claimed that the classical concept of secularization as the decline of religious belief is not adequate for the task of understanding general historical processes. Nevertheless, an equivalent to this process of religious decline is an important phenomenon in early modern Japan. In this secularization process, Japanese people of the early modern period sought more secular visions of salvation. Strong, persistent attention to kokoro 心 (mind or spirit), regarded as the means of realizing secular values such as wealth or happiness, was an expression of these concerns. Analyzing jōruri plays reveals how the increasing power of the centralized state, defeating religious powers one by one, became the key to changing people’s visions of salvation and thus, of secularization processes.

Okinawa, 1952–1958: Solidarity under the Cover of Darkness

Alegal ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 65-87
Author(s):  
Annmaria M. Shimabuku
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Sex Industry ◽  
People's Party ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The U.S

This chapter charts the position of the sex industry amidst mass social protest known as the “all-island struggle” from 1952 to 1958. The U.S. military attempted to contain this resistance by issuing off-limits orders on base towns that paralyzed the Okinawan economy. As a result, base town workers were pitted against popular political protest. This chapter addresses the sex worker as a subject who could not be mobilized under a political platform before the state, i.e., the lumpenproletariat. Instead of dismissing the lumpenproletariat as non-political and therefore not useful, it repositions politics as the interplay between a radical heterogeneity (i.e., alegality) attuned to the immediate struggle for life and political representation oriented toward an idealistic goal by examining the activities of Kokuba Kōtarō in the underground communist party. It was under the cover of darkness that this chapter locates moments of solidarity between women involved with G.I.s and Okinawans resisting U.S. military repression. This solidarity, however, dissolved along with the introduction of ethno-nationalism of pro-reversion political forces such as the Okinawa People’s Party. Kokuba’s understanding of politics as the merely instrumental representation of the masses was replaced by the assumption of a spiritualistic communion between the people and Japanese state.

scholarly journals Ottoman Language Learning in Early Modern Germany

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Stefan Hanß
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Field Of Inquiry

AbstractThis article presents new evidence on the authorship and readership of the earliest printed Ottoman language materials that details the extent to which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire actively engaged in learning Ottoman. Such findings open up a new field of inquiry evaluating the Ottoman impact on the German-speaking lands reaching beyond the so-called “Turkish menace.” Presenting the variety of Ottoman language students, teachers, and materials in central Europe, as well as their connections with the oral world(s) of linguistic fieldwork in the Habsburg-Ottoman contact zone, this article argues that Ottoman language learning is an important but thus far neglected element in understanding the cultural and intellectual landscape of early modern central Europe. What may appear to be experiments with linguistic riddles on first glimpse was in fact grounded in deep enthusiasm and fascination for Ottoman language learning shared among a community of Protestant semi-scholarly aficionados.

Multiple-source Record Linkage in a Rural Industrial Community, 1680–1820

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve King
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Multiple Source ◽  
Demographic Analysis ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Broad Outline

Re-creating the social, economic and demographic life-cycles of ordinary people is one way in which historians might engage with the complex continuities and changes which underlay the development of early modern communities. Little, however, has been written on the ways in which historians might deploy computers, rather than card indexes, to the task of identifying such life cycles from the jumble of the sources generated by local and national administration. This article suggests that multiple-source linkage is central to historical and demographic analysis, and reviews, in broad outline, some of the procedures adopted in a study which aims at large scale life cycle reconstruction.

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