Planning the New Towns in Libya

1987 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 137-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. K. Kezeiri

AbstractThe recent history of Middle Eastern new town formation and the concepts which underlie it are briefly outlined. New town developments in Libya are reviewed, from the colonial experiments of Italy, through the oil industry expansion in the 1960s, to the recent government sponsored schemes. A number of case studies are provided to illustrate the specific environmental and social factors which planners need to take into account in Libya. Some preliminary comments are offered on the success and failure of twentieth century new towns in Libya.

Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Torma

This article deals with the history of underwater film and the role that increased mobility plays in the exploration of nature. Drawing on research on the exploration of the ocean, it analyzes the production of popular images of the sea. The entry of humans into the depths of the oceans in the twentieth century did not revitalize myths of mermaids but rather retold oceanic myths in a modern fashion. Three stages stand out in this evolution of diving mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s, scenes of divers walking under water were the dominant motif. From the 1940s to the 1960s, use of autonomous diving equipment led to a modern incarnation of the “mermen“ myth. From the 1950s to the 1970s, cinematic technology was able to create visions of entire oceanic ecosystems. Underwater films contributed to the period of machine-age exploration in a very particular way: they made virtual voyages of the ocean possible and thus helped to shape the current understanding of the oceans as part of Planet Earth.


2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29
Author(s):  
Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena

With a focus on art donations, this article explores several case studies of Jewish Italian patrons such as Sforni, Uzielli, Sarfatti, Castelfranco, Vitali, and others who supported artists of movements that were considered modern at their time: the Macchiaioli (1850-1870), the Futurists (1910s), the Metaphysical painters (1920s), the Novecento group (1920-1930s), and several post WWII cases. It reflects on differences in art donations by Jews in Italy and other European countries, modes of reception, taste, meanings and strategy of donations, thus contributing to the social history of Italian and European Jewry and the history of collections and donations to public museums.


Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of the British constitution in the twentieth century. The findings reveal that while there was widespread confidence in the virtues of the constitution at the beginning of the twentieth century, that confidence seemed to have evaporated. This loss of confidence coincided with a collapse of national self-confidence that had begun in the 1960s when British political and intellectual elites began to come to terms with the fact that Great Britain was falling economically behind her continental competitors.


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.


Author(s):  
Jake Johnson

Just as Mormons used musical theater to purchase whiteness in the early twentieth century, so too do Mormons begin in the 1960s to use musical theater to associate other racial minorities with white American values. By allowing certain groups the opportunity to voice whiteness through the conventions of musical theater, Mormons reimagined the genre as a tool to transform some minority members into exemplars of whiteness. This chapter first details the history of Mormonism in Hawaii and the musical theater productions at the Mormon-owned Polynesian Cultural Center that began there in 1963. Importantly, Mormons have long understood dark-skinned Polynesians, like themselves, to be a chosen people, rather than cursed--displaced Jews, in fact, whose origins are explained in The Book of Mormon. The chapter then analyzes the Mormon musical Life . . . More Sweet than Bitter, billed as a sequel to Fiddler on the Roof, for its narrative explicitly connecting Mormons to Judaism. The musical stage thus becomes for modern Mormons a reckoning device to demonstrate belonging and acceptance in exotic terms--“whitening” the dark-skinned Polynesians and demonstrating fluidity between Mormonism and Judaism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 582-585
Author(s):  
Leslie Hakim-Dowek

As in Marianne Hirsch’s (2008) notion of ‘devoir de memoire’, this poem-piece, from a new series, uses the role of creation and imagination to strive to ‘re-activate and re-embody’ distant family/historical transcultural spaces and memories within the perspective of a dispersed history of a Middle-Eastern minority, the Sephardi/Jewish community. There is little awareness that Sephardi/Jewish communities were an integral part of the Middle East and North Africa for many centuries before they were driven out of their homes in the second half of the twentieth century. Using a multi-modal approach combining photography and poetry, this photo-poem series has for focus my female lineage. This piece evokes in particular the memory of my grandmother, encapsulating many points in history where persecution and displacement occurred across many social, political and linguistic borders.


Urban History ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLIAM J. GLOVER

ABSTRACT:This article begins with an examination of how rural and urban society in India were conceptualized in relation to one another at different moments during the twentieth century, arguing that rapid urbanization during the middle decades forced important changes in those conceptualizations. If in an earlier period analysts saw the world of the village dweller as radically separate from that of the urban dweller, then rapid urbanization destabilized this idea and forced analysts to entertain the implications of there being a kind of ‘sliding scale’ between the two. This discursive shift helped produce a new object of concern in mid-century urban sociology – that of the ‘villager in the city’. While this sociological object formed the core of numerous mid-century (and later) studies of existing large cities, it played a more determinate role asa priorigrounds for planned new towns than it did for perhaps any other model of urban growth. The article argues that proponents of planned new towns favoured their conservative potential: namely, the new town promised to nurture ‘inherited tendencies and habits’ in first-generation urban migrants, rather than produce wholly new modes of urban subjectivity.


Author(s):  
Marc-Antoine Kaeser

In recent years, considerable attention has been dedicated to the involvement of archaeology (and most notably prehistory) with nationalism. The probable causes of this recent fashion need not concern us here, but the movement itself is certainly welcome, testifying to the reflection of archaeologists on their own practices and those of their predecessors. For historians, this trend is quite welcome in so far as it contributes to a general renaissance of interest in the past of the discipline. However, a more careful examination of this historiography leads us to some caution about its significance. First, the majority of these historical studies adopt an internalist perspective that, combined with their self-declared reflexiveness, confers on them a rather presentist character. The result belongs to some sort of ‘history of ideas’ that has been embellished with a few sociological insights of varying subtlety. In line with the old sociology of science, social factors are only invoked to explain the ‘errors’ of archaeology. Such errors, therefore, always seem to be accounted for by external and, by definition, pernicious influences. As a consequence our discipline always escapes unscathed: its ‘purity’ is not at stake, simply because it is always ‘society’ and ‘politics’ that abuse it. Moreover, most attention is given to the interpretations of the past, not to archaeological research as such. It is not the historical practice of the discipline that is then under consideration, but rather its thematic scope—which is quite a different matter. However, conceptions of identity based on the past are by no means the exclusive preserve of archaeology. No one has been waiting for the birth of our discipline in order to gloat over the ‘heroic deeds of our glorious ancestors’. As a matter of fact, in terms of nationalism, archaeology has entered quite late into the fray, on a terrain that was by then already demarcated. The wealth of historical case studies suggests that from its origins, archaeology, and more specifically prehistoric archaeology, has been strictly dependent on the emergence of national ideologies. The general impression is clear: were it not for the dynamics of modern nationalism, the argument goes, our discipline would never have emerged.


Kulturstudier ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Berit Guldmann Andersen ◽  
Allan Leth Frandsen

<p>I 2002 besluttede Den Gamle By at fortælle 1900-tallets Danmarkshistorie ved at udvide museet med to nye bykvarterer – et 1927-kvarter og et 1974-kvarter. Indtil da havde museet i al væsentlighed arbejdet med 16-, 17- og 1800-tallets historie, og der forestod (og forestår) derfor et stort arbejde med vidensopsamling og -generering i form af forskning og undersøgelser om den moderne bys udseende. Da detailhandelen er en meget synlig nyskabelse i den moderne by i forhold til de perioder, museet allerede præsenterer, var behovet for viden på ikke mindst dette område af stor betydning. I artiklen giver vi et overblik over 1900-tallets butiksudvikling i Danmark, og vi gør rede for de undersøgelser, der er gået forud for etableringen af butikkerne i Den Gamle Bys nye bykvarterer.</p><p><em><strong>Abstract</strong></em></p><p><em>In connection with the development of two new town districts – for 1927 and 1974 respectively – at the open-air museum, Den Gamle By (”The Old Town”)  in Århus, its staff undertook a number of studies, one of which concerned the history of  retail trade in Denmark.</em></p><p><em>Retail trade is an important factor in the formation of the modern urban streetscape. Urbanisation and industrialisation prompted an increase in shops from the mid-19<sup>th</sup> century onwards. By the end of World War 1, retailing had developed from merchant’s houses offering a wide assortment of goods, to strictly specialised shops.</em></p><p><em>In tandem with this development, the visual appearance of the shops in the streetscape changed: from being next to invisible, marked only by a discrete sign on the wall around 1850, to the almost obtrusively large window sections, glossy advertisements and rich illumination of the interwar shop fronts.</em></p><p><em>The retail trade continued to develop significantly in the 20<sup>th</sup> century: from relatively small establishments of independent grocers, greengrocers, butchers and bakers to large supermarkets offering all such goods under one roof. Consequently, food shops were largely replaced by service enterprises. From the 1960s onwards, the pedestrian streets in the city centres, as well as the assemblages of large supermarkets and other businesses on the outskirts, came to characterise the larger cities.</em></p>


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