scholarly journals Introduction: Physics, Technology, and Technics during the Interwar Period

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-261
Author(s):  
Shaul Katzir
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Government Funding ◽  
World War ◽  
The Core ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The University ◽  
University Industry

Historians, philosophers, and physicists portray the 1920s and 1930s as a period of major theoretical breakthrough in physics, quantum mechanics, which led to the expansion of physics into the core of the atom and the growth and strengthening of the discipline. These important developments in scientific inquiry into the micro-world and light have turned historical attention away from other significant historical processes and from other equally important causes for the expansion of physics. World War II, on the other hand, is often seen as the watershed moment when physics achieved new levels of social and technical engagement at a truly industrial scale. Historians have shown that military interests and government funding have shaped physics to unprecedented degree, and according to some, to the extent of discontinuity with earlier practices of research (Forman 1987; Kevles 1990; Kaiser 2002). In this vein, Stuart Leslie wrote, “Nothing in the prewar experience fully prepared academic scientists and their institutions for the scale and scope of a wartime mobilization that would transform the university, industry, and the federal government and their mutual interrelationships” (Leslie 1993, 6). While one can never befullyready for novelties, the contributors to this issue show that developments in interwar physics did prepare participants for their cold war interactions with industry and government.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE USES OF TRADITION: ROBERT REDFIELD AND ALTERNATIVE VISIONS OF MODERNIZATION DURING THE COLD WAR

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLE SACKLEY
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

The history of the rise and fall of “modernization theory” after World War II has been told as a story of Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, and other US social scientists who built a general theory in US universities and sought to influence US foreign policy. However, in the 1950s anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Comparative Civilizations project at the University of Chicago produced an alternative vision of modernization—one that emphasized intellectual conversation across borders, the interrelation of theory and fieldwork, and dialectical relations of tradition and modernity. In tracing the Redfield project and its legacies, this essay aims to broaden intellectual historians’ sense of the complexity, variation, and transnational currents within postwar American discourse about modernity and tradition.

Physics, Emotion, and the Scientific Self: Merle Tuve’s Cold War

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 341-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Wang
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
World War ◽  
American Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
Carnegie Institution Of Washington ◽  
Emotional Dimensions ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Scientific Identity

This essay brings together and builds upon histories of cold war American science and studies of objectivity, scientific personae, and the self by exploring the physicist Merle A. Tuve‘s career in the late 1940s and 1950s as a history of selfhood and the emotional dimensions of scientific identity. As director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington after World War II, Tuve followed a convoluted path through the institutions, politics, identities, and sensibilities of science in the cold war, and he struggled to preserve a sense of meaning and identity centered on the humanistic and aesthetic possibilities of scientific inquiry in an era of rapidly growing instrumentalism. His predicament highlights not just the political and institutional shifts within postwar science, but also the intricate entanglements between feeling, selfhood, and the cold war order.

The Poet and the Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miklós Radnóti
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
North Dakota ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
State University ◽  
World War ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
East European ◽  
North Dakota State University ◽  
The University

Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944) was a major Hungarian poet of the interwar period and Holocaust. Like his various volumes of poetry, the prose in this collection also combines traditional and modern themes and styles-and often produces unexpected results. Radnóti studied at what is today the University of Szeged and, in 1935, published his dissertation on the work of the novelist and poet Margit Kaffka (1880-1918). Born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Radnóti also spent time in France and Czechoslovakia before World War II. After periods of forced labor in Ukraine and Serbia, he was executed near Győr on one of the death marches in 1944.This set of pre-war prose pieces spans a wide variety of settings, from peasant huts in Hungary to a bohemian nightclub in Venice, and from a ceramics studio to airports and battleships. The forms of the stories range from fables to triptychs of naturalistic vignettes, from spare, conversational narratives to a silent drama. As always, Radnóti’s emphasis is on emotions and people, whether they are writers, grieving children, booksellers, prostitutes, porters, or apprentices. More than anything, these are stories of lovers and love, dogged, irrepressible, illusion-free, and content-or at least natural.John K. Cox, the translator, is a professor of East European History at North Dakota State University.

From Cannibalism to Political Murder

2019 ◽  
pp. 126-146
Author(s):  
Elissa Bemporad
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Political Power ◽  
World War ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Blood Libel ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City

Chapter 6 reveals the permutations of the blood libel and the emergence of a new notion of Jewish murder. Nazi propaganda exploited the blood libel theme in conjunction with the Judeo-Bolshevik myth. This link persisted also in the aftermath of World War II, but under a more secular vestige. In the midst of a postwar crisis of identity and political power, memories of blood libel could intersect with fears of cannibalism, as it happened in the city of Lvov. Reinforced by the Cold War context, the blood libel then shifted from cannibalism to political murder, and found its shell in the Doctors’ Plot. Not unlike the interwar period, blood libels that occurred in Lithuania, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, intensified in the midst of the anti-religious campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. The recrudescence of antisemitism in the postwar years made it difficult for Jews to rely upon authorities for protection in countering these accusations.

The Unassailable Self: Freud's Image Among Post-war American Intellectuals

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
External Force ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Human Being ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Way

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.

A war hero or a Hitler soldier?

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-57
Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Committee ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Third Reich

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.

Cultures in Contact

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Watson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Working At Home ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
Novel Of Manners ◽  
At Home

In this chapter I investigate the paradox that the writer who most vividly embodied the exchange between literature and anthropology during this period, Michel Leiris, worked hard to maintain separate identities and spaces for his life as an anthropologist (working at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris) and as a writer and memoirist (working at home). While Leiris came of age professionally and aesthetically during the fertile interwar period in France of “ethnographic surrealism,” his anthropological writings in the period after World War II show a surprising fidelity to disciplinary protocols. The chapter argues that Leiris’s ethnography of the Francophone Caribbean, Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe, tries to subvert those protocols, turning from a social science survey into something like a novel of manners by the end. Ultimately, however, this literary turn falls prey to tropes of imperial romance that Leiris ostensibly seeks to undercut.

Academia's Golden Age

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard M. Freeland
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
General Education ◽  
Graduate Education ◽  
World War ◽  
Boston College ◽  
Boston University ◽  
Close Study ◽  
University Of Massachusetts ◽  
National Trends ◽  
The University

This book examines the evolution of American universities during the years following World War II. Emphasizing the importance of change at the campus level, the book combines a general consideration of national trends with a close study of eight diverse universities in Massachusetts. The eight are Harvard, M.I.T., Tufts, Brandeis, Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern and the University of Massachusetts. Broad analytic chapters examine major developments like expansion, the rise of graduate education and research, the professionalization of the faculty, and the decline of general education. These chapters also review criticisms of academia that arose in the late 1960s and the fate of various reform proposals during the 1970s. Additional chapters focus on the eight campuses to illustrate the forces that drove different kinds of institutions--research universities, college-centered universities, urban private universities and public universities--in responding to the circumstances of the postwar years.

scholarly journals Professor George Archibald Grant Mitchell (1906–1993): his work with penicillin during World War II

2021 ◽  
pp. 096777202110121
Author(s):  
Peter D Mohr ◽  
Stephanie Seville
Keyword(s):  
Nervous System ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Autonomic Nervous System ◽  
Middle East ◽  
World War ◽  
Army Medical ◽  
Autonomic Nervous ◽  
Penicillin Therapy ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Manchester

George Archibald Grant Mitchell, OBE, TD, MB, ChB, ChM, MSc, DSc, FRCS (1906–1993) was a professor of anatomy at the University of Manchester from 1946 to 1973. He is mainly remembered for his research in neuroanatomy, especially of the autonomic nervous system. He studied medicine at the Aberdeen University, and after qualifying in 1929 he held posts in surgery and anatomy and worked as a surgeon in the Highlands. In 1939, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was based in Egypt and the Middle East, where he carried out trials of sulphonamides and penicillin on wounded soldiers; in 1943, he returned to England as Adviser in Penicillin Therapy for 21 Army Group, preparing for the invasion of Europe.

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