Mortgages for machinery: credit and industrial investment in pre-World War I Brazil

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustavo S. Cortes ◽  
Renato L. Marcondes ◽  
Maria Dolores M. Diaz
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Credit Market ◽  
World War ◽  
Mortgage Loans ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Industrial Firms ◽  
Mortgage Credit ◽  
The City ◽  
Industrial Investment

How could a primitive credit market finance the early industrialisation of an underdeveloped economy? To answer this question, we use a hand-collected data set of mortgage loans raised by industrial firms in the city of São Paulo during the period 1866-1914. These mortgages were debt obligations collateralised by land, improvements, machinery and equipment. We argue that the mortgage credit market was a key source of funding for early industrial investments in Brazil. We find that industries were mainly funded by non-banking and domestic agents. The empirical evidence suggests that mortgages were an important proxy for industrial investment.

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.

The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsty Hooper
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Concert Halls ◽  
Material History ◽  
British People ◽  
Industrial Investment

What did the Edwardians know about Spain, and what was that knowledge worth? The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession draws on a vast store of largely unstudied primary source material to investigate Spain’s place in the turn-of-the-century British popular imagination. Set against a background of unprecedented emotional, economic and industrial investment in Spain, the book traces the extraordinary transformation that took place in British knowledge about the country and its diverse regions, languages and cultures between the tercentenary of the Spanish Armada in 1888 and the outbreak of World War I twenty-six years later. This empirically-grounded cultural and material history reveals how, for almost three decades, Anglo-Spanish connections, their history and culture were more visible, more colourfully represented, and more enthusiastically discussed in Britain’s newspapers, concert halls, council meetings and schoolrooms, than ever before. It shows how the expansion of education, travel, and publishing created unprecedented opportunities for ordinary British people not only to visit the country, but to see the work of Spanish and Spanish-inspired artists and performers in British galleries, theatres and exhibitions. It explores the work of novelists, travel writers, journalists, scholars, artists and performers to argue that the Edwardian knowledge of Spain was more extensive, more complex and more diverse than we have imagined.

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.

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.

Broadway Nights: John Reed and the City

Prospects ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 273-294
Author(s):  
Christopher P. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Big City ◽  
John Reed ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City ◽  
The Voice

Not so very long after John Butler Yeats prophesied that “fiddles” would be “tuning up” throughout American intellectual life in the years before World War I, the private musings of John Reed strike another, less hopeful set of notes. The lament emerges in an unpublished tale Reed wrote in 1913 entitled “Success,” about a poet named Alan Meredith, age twenty-two, who, like Reed, has just come from the country to New York to answer his vocation. “The whirling star of Literature revolves in the Big City,” Reed explains. “By force of gravitation the minor bards sooner or later fall within its orbit, and nine out of ten emit no sparks from that time forth.” Alan's project is an epic poem tentatively entitled New York, A Poem in Twelve Cantos-but he gets nowhere beyond his title. “You see,” Reed writes, “he was making the same mistake as you and I, when we heard the voice [of the city] for the first time and tried to translate it without knowing the language.” Reed elaborates:A poet writes about the things nearest to his heart-the things he does not actually know. As soon as he gains scientific knowledge of anything, the glamour is gone, and it is not mere stuff for the imagination. The bard of green fields and blossoms and running brooks is always a city man, and he who sings the Lobster Palaces and White Lights lives in Greenwich, Conn. Never do the stars seem so beautiful as to him who looks up between brownstone houses on a breathless night; all the magic of the city lies in the glow of lights on the sky seen thirty miles away.

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