Motherhood, morality and materiality: how material changes to wartime Cape Town affected discourses around women, racial health and the city, 1914–1919

Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Sarah-Jane Walton
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
South African ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
World War ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Female Behaviour ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The City

Abstract This article explores ways in which material changes engendered by World War I influenced ideas about Cape Town and its people. For the city's middle classes, these conditions – including a rise in the cost of living, increased urbanization, the growth of factory work for women and the notable presence of soldiers in the city – heightened the sense that Cape Town was a place of increased moral corruption. In particular, females were portrayed as pivotal to the upholding of the moral and racial integrity of the city, nation and empire. Yet the perceived race and class of different Capetonian women influenced the expectations (and accordant condemnations) of their behaviour. This linked to white middle-class anxieties about miscegenation and urban order. As such, discourses around female behaviour during the war represented a nexus between issues of health, race and morality within the South African urban context.

‘Messing with Coloured People’: The 1918 Police Strike in Cape Town, South Africa

1992 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Nasson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
South African ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
World War ◽  
Natural Justice ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Lower Ranking ◽  
The Government ◽  
South African Police ◽  
National Police

This article seeks to provide an interpretation of a strike by white policemen in Cape Town in 1918. It argues that this defensive dispute over wages and living conditions can best be understood not simply through an examination of service dissatisfaction in the urban police community, but by incorporating this episode into the larger picture of South African police development in the early decades of the present century. In this broader context, several factors seem general and influential: local social resentments over the terms of national police organization after Union; police practices and attitudes, especially in relation to the increasing recruitment of Afrikaners; the position of white working-class policemen in the ‘civilized labour’ stratification of Cape Town society; and, most visibly, the inflationary effect of the First World War on the living standards of poorly paid, disaffected and unorganized constables. It is argued that these converging pressures generated a severe crisis of work discipline in 1917 and 1918 which tipped the Cape Town police into a classical natural justice strike. While ordinary policemen were split between petitioners and younger, less hesitant radicals, there was considerable popular support for strikers’ claims, both within the Cape police body and the local white labour movement. The government used a strategy of provisional concessions to settle the dispute. In conclusion, it is suggested that the strike experience helped to strengthen associational bonds between lower-ranking policemen and that a commitment by the state to improved service conditions provided an anxious constabulary with a more secure ‘civilized labour’ identity in the post-World War I period.

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 An analysis of the intersections between race and class in representations of Black and white gay men in QueerLife

Image & Text ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kudzaiishe Peter Vanyoro
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Shape Representations ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Black And White ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Gay Identities

ABSTRACT This article seeks to critically analyse how intersections of race and class shape representations of Black and white gay men in QueerLife, a South African online magazine. It focuses on QueerLife's '4men' section and how its content represents classed and raced gay identities. My argument is that QueerLife forwards racialised and classed representations of the gay lifestyle, which reinforce homonormalisation within what is known as the "Pink Economy". Using Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) to read the underlying meanings in texts and images, the article concludes that QueerLife is complicit in the construction of gay identity categories that seek to appeal to urban, white, middle-class gay-identifying communities in South Africa. The article also demonstrates how, when Black bodies are represented in QueerLife, exceptionalism mediates their visibility in this online magazine. Overall, the findings demonstrate how Black and white gay bodies are mediated online and how their different racial visibilities are negotiated within the system of structural racism. Keywords: Class, gayness, Pink Economy, QueerLife, representation, racism.

Further Regional Studies

War Epidemics ◽  
2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Smallman-Raynor ◽  
Andrew Cliff
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
South African ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
South African War ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
Study Sites

In Chapters 7 to 11, we have examined a series of recurring themes in the geography of war and disease since 1850 through regional lenses. In this chapter, we conclude our regional–thematic survey by illustrating further prominent themes which, either because of their subject-matter or because of their geographical location, were beyond the immediate scope of the foregoing chapters. In selecting regional case studies for this chapter, we concentrate on wars which have not been examined in depth to this point (the South African War and the Cuban Insurrection) or which, on account of their magnitude and extent, merit examination beyond that afforded in previous sections (World War I and World War II). Four principal issues are addressed: (1) Africa: population reconcentration and disease (Section 12.2), illustrated with reference to civilian concentration camps in the South African War, 1899–1902; (2) Americas: peace, war, and epidemiological integration (Section 12.3), illustrated with reference to the civil settlement system of Cuba, 1888–1902; (3) Asia: prisoners of war, forced labour, and disease (Section 12.4), illustrated with reference to Allied prisoners on the line of the Burma–Thailand Railway, 1942–4; (4) Europe: civilian epidemics and the world wars (Section 12.5), illustrated with reference to the spread of a series of diseases in the civil population of Europe during, and after, the hostilities of 1914–18 and 1939–45. As before, the study sites in (1) to (4) span a broad range of epidemiological environments, from the cool temperate latitudes of northern Europe, through the tropical island and jungle environments of the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, to the warm temperate and subtropical savannah lands of the South African Veld. Diseases have been sampled to reflect this epidemiological range. The South African War (1899–1902) has been described as the last of the ‘typhoid campaigns’ (Curtin, 1998)—a closing chapter on the predominance of disease over battle as a cause of death among soldiers (Pakenham, 1979: 382). From the military perspective, typhoid was indeed the major health issue of the war, accounting for a reported 8,020 deaths in the British Army (Simpson, 1911: 57).

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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