An unusual view of Early Twentieth Century Benghazi

1976 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 57-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Allan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
African City ◽  
Military Equipment ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Photo Mosaic ◽  
Air Photo ◽  
The City

Benghazi has been photographed many times from the air, but few are aware that the layout of the city was-recorded in air photographs taken very early in the twentieth century. (International Archiv für Photogrametrie 1914). These photographs provide an unusually detailed impression of the streets, public buildings and dwellings of the city, and also allow students of the Middle Eastern and North African city to observe the evolution of the city by studying later comparative photography. Libya is especially rich in such imagery at least for the recent past (Allan 1969). The purpose of this brief study is to draw attention to the rich source of evidence available in air photo records through an interpretation of an early twentieth century image along with just one of the more recent photographs taken in this area in 1965.The determination of the date of the old photo-mosaic is the first task of interpretation. The journal in which it was published appeared in 1914, which places the image earlier than the outbreak of World War I and possibly prior to the occupation of northern Libya by Italian forces in 1911. The photo shows no evidence of the buildings which were constructed by the Italian colonists. Nor has there been any significant transformation at the harbour. In the eastern extremity of the early twentieth century city there is an assemblage of military equipment, accommodation and transport. Whether this is evidence of Turkish or Italian occupation is difficult to determine, and so we must be satisfied at this stage to date the photographs between 1911 and 1913.

Englishness, Empire and Nostalgia: A Heterodox Religious Community's Appeal in the Inter-War Years

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Belief Networks ◽  
Healing Ministry ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
The Rich

This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.

Alexander Von Mörk and Poldi Fuhrich: The Conception of Heroes in Cave Exploration in the Early Twentieth Century

2013 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Mattes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Equipment ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Personality Cult ◽  
The Social ◽  
Iconic Status

The Austrians Alexander von Mörk (1887-1914) and Poldi Fuhrich (1898-1926) became two of the leading cave explorers in the early twentieth century. After qualifying as an academic painter, Alexander von Mörk fell as an officer in World War I. Poldi Fuhrich, who worked as a teacher, received international recognition during her lifetime as one of the very few female cave explorers. She died in a cave accident in Styria, Austria. Mörk and Fuhrich achieved iconic status as martyrs of cave science and became role models for speleologists. My research examines the parallels in the conception of these heroic figures and the ‘parameters’ of their memorial. How and to what end was their memory perpetuated and exploited by the following generation of explorers? Expedition diaries, protocols of caving clubs, and obituaries in newspapers are used as sources for analyses. The results show a strong correlation between the commemoration of the fallen soldiers of World War I and the conception of heroic figures in speleology. While the personality cult of Fuhrich declined in the mid-thirties due to the social exclusion of women from the scientific study of caves, Mörk was increasingly celebrated as a mythical and self-sacrificing founder and enthusiastic German nationalist. The commemoration of the deceased in cave science was related to the militarisation of club life during the twenties. This is reflected in the radicalisation of language, the usage of military equipment in cave exploration, and the nomination of military officers as club officials.

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.

The “Sticky Sediment” of Daily Life: Radical Domesticity, Revolutionary Christianity, and the Problem of Wealth in Britain from the 1880s to the 1930s

2012 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Koven
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Justice ◽  
Ethical Imperative ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

This essay examines an early twentieth-century Christian revolutionary habitus—a “technique of Christian living”—based on the conviction that everyday life was an essential site for reconciling the claims of individual and community, the material and the spiritual. The pacifist-feminist members of London’s first “people’s house,” Kingsley Hall, linked their vision of Jesus’s inclusive and unbounded love for humanity to their belief in the ethical imperative that all people take full moral responsibility for cleaning up their own dirt as part of their utopian program to bring social, economic, and political justice to the outcast in London, Britain, and its empire. In imagining what a reconstructed post-World War I Britain might become, Kingsley Hall’s cross-class band of workers used mundane practices to unmake and remake the late-Victorian and Edwardian philanthropic legacy they inherited.

scholarly journals PLAYING ON UNCLE SAM'S TEAM: AMERICAN CHILDHOODS DURING WORLD WAR I

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mischa Honeck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
World War I ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Childhood And Youth ◽  
Constructions Of Childhood

If World War I has interested historians of the United States considerably less than other major wars, it is also true that children rank among the most neglected actors in the literature that exists on the topic. This essay challenges this limited understanding of the roles children and adolescents played in this transformative period by highlighting their importance in three different realms. It shows how childhood emerged as a contested resource in prewar debates over militarist versus pacifist education; examines the affective power of images of children—American as well as foreign—in U.S. wartime propaganda; and maps various social arenas in which the young engaged with the war on their own account. While constructions of childhood and youth as universally valid physical and developmental categories gained greater currency in the early twentieth century, investigations of young people in wartime reveal how much the realities of childhood and youth differed according to gender, class, race, region, and age.

The Modern City

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
DIANE E. DAVIS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Political Alliances ◽  
The Social ◽  
Shifting Balance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The City ◽  
Rich History

What constitutes modern Mexico? Is there a clear distinction between the historic and modern Mexico City? And if there are, does this distinctions hold up throughout the twentieth century, when what is apparent is a mix of legacies coexisting overtime? This chapter discusses the semiotics of history and modernity. It discusses the struggle of the Mexico City to find its own image including its struggle to preserve historic buildings amidst the differing political alliances that either promote change or preserve the past. However, past is not a single entity, hence if the preservation of the rich history of Mexico is pursued, the question arises as to what periods of history represented in the city are to be favoured in its future development. In this chapter, the focus is on the paradoxes of the Torre Bicentenario and on the pressures to preserve Mexico’s past, the ways they have been juxtaposed against the plans for its future and how the balance of these views has shifted over time. It determines the key actors and the institutions who have embraced history as opposed to progress, identifies the set of forces that dominated in the city’s twentieth-century history, and assesses the long-term implications of the shifting balance for the social, spatial and built environmental character of the city. The chapter ends with a discussion on the current role played by the cultural and historical authorities in determining the fate of the city.

“A Season in Hell”

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (4) ◽  
pp. 632-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Rees
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Women Travelers ◽  
The City ◽  
Travel Accounts

Australian women travelers in early twentieth-century New York often recoiled from the frenetic pace of the city, which surpassed anything encountered in either Britain or Australia. This article employs their travel accounts to lend support to the growing recognition that modernity took different forms throughout the world and to contribute to the project of mapping those differences. I argue that “hustle” was a defining feature of the New York modern, comparatively little evident in Australia, and I propose that the southern continent had developed a model of modern life that privileged pleasure-seeking above productivity. At a deeper level, this line of thinking suggests that modernization should not be conflated with the relentless acceleration of daily life; it thus complicates the ingrained assumption that speed and modernity go hand-in-hand.

An Imperfect Mahlerite

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-103
Author(s):  
Matthew Mugmon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Events ◽  
French Music ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
And Performance

As one of the chief representatives of French music in the early twentieth century, Nadia Boulanger is typically ignored in discussions of the reception of Gustav Mahler’s music, which—like most studies of reception—focus primarily on press accounts and public events. Moreover, Boulanger is usually considered in the context of a broader French aversion, in the first half of the twentieth century, to Mahler’s late-Romantic Austro-German idiom. But a range of documentary evidence concerning her attendance at the 1920 Mahler festival in Amsterdam, including previously unexamined correspondence as well as scores annotated in her hand, reveals that, motivated by a post-World War I spirit of internationalism, Boulanger contributed materially to the study and performance of Mahler. She encouraged audiences to consider his music’s emotional power and analyzed it in a way that drew attention to its orchestration and the horizontal aspects of its construction. She also introduced such figures as Aaron Copland to Mahler’s music, preparing him to approach it in a way that centered on the vocabulary of neo-classicism. Boulanger’s engagement with Mahler not only contributes to our picture of the composer’s reception, but also reveals the historiographical value of discourses that take place behind the scenes.

scholarly journals Disputing ‘market value’: the Bombay Improvement Trust and the reshaping of a speculative land market in early twentieth-century Bombay

Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Shabnum Tejani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Urban Expansion ◽  
Market Value ◽  
Land Values ◽  
Public Purpose ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Future Value ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Urban expansion in the early twentieth century had a profound impact on India's urban land economies. Historians argue that in this period, urban India went through an increasing marketization of land and that improvement trusts had a significant hand in accelerating land speculation. In the case of Bombay, we still understand little of the relationship between the activities of the Bombay Improvement Trust and rising land values. The article examines key legal disputes around compensation for land acquired by the Trust for public purpose before and after World War I. Such cases show how the Trust and the judiciary shaped changing expectations around what comprised ‘market value’ and consequently became deeply involved in Bombay's land economy. Where officials had earlier resisted valuations that they believed encouraged speculation, after the 1920s the resolution of disputes incorporated future value as a legitimate and necessary part of the economy.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document